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Zusatztext At its worst, scholarship on religion and American higher education has a tendency to diverge into a diatribe against secularization and the waning influence of Christianity in 20th and 21st century colleges and universities. At its best, scholarship on religion and American higher education produces fascinating studies about the ways in which religion engages in a unique and complex network of educational institutions that, in many ways, is unparalleled in any other country. Adam Laats's book, Fundamentalist U: Keeping Faith in American Higher Education, falls within the latter category ... Laats presents scholars with an important study in an area of religion and American higher education that brings evangelical and fundamentalist institutions into the field of study. Informationen zum Autor Adam Laats is Professor of Education and History at Binghamton University. He is the author of several books, including The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education (2015), winner of the History of Education Society's Outstanding Book Award, 2016. Klappentext Colleges, universities, and seminaries do more than just transfer knowledge to students. They sell themselves as "experiences" that transform young people in unique ways. The conservative evangelical Protestant network of higher education has been no different. In the twentieth century, when higher education sometimes seemed to focus on sports, science, and social excess, conservative evangelical schools offered a compelling alternative. On their campuses, evangelicals debated what it meant to be a creationist, a Christian, a proper American, all within the bounds of Biblical revelation. Instead of encouraging greater personal freedom and deeper pluralist values, conservative evangelical schools thrived by imposing stricter rules on their students and faculty. In Fundamentalist U, Adam Laats shows that these colleges have always been more than just schools; they have been vital intellectual citadels in America's culture wars. These unique institutions have defined what it has meant to be an evangelical and have reshaped the landscape of American higher education. Students at these schools have been expected to learn what it means to be an educated evangelical in a secularizing society. This book asks new questions about that formative process. How have conservative evangelicals hoped to use higher education to instill a uniquely evangelical identity? How has this identity supported the continuing influence of a dissenting body of knowledge? In what ways has it been tied to cultural notions of proper race relations and proper relations between the sexes? And perhaps most important, how have students responded to schools' attempts to cultivate these vital notions about their selves? In order to understand either American higher education or American evangelicalism, we need to appreciate the role of this influential network of dissenting institutions. Only by making sense of these schools can we make sense of America's continuing culture wars. Zusammenfassung Adam Laats offers a provocative and definitive new history of conservative evangelical colleges and universities, institutions that have played a decisive role in American politics, culture, and religion. This book looks unflinchingly at the issues that have defined these schools, including their complicated legacy of conservative theology and social activism. Inhaltsverzeichnis Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Higher (Power) Education Chapter One: College and Christ Chapter Two: In the Beginning Chapter Three: A Mote in the Eye Chapter Four: I Came to Be Went With Chapter Five: Billy Graham Was a Transfer Student Chapter Six: What Is College For? Chapter Seven: Nightmare on College Avenue Chapter Eight: Is the Bible Racist? Chapter Nine: Learn One for the Gipper Epilogue: Sandals o...
