Fundamentalist U: keeping the faith in American higher education

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 co...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Laats, Adam (Author)
Format: Print Book
Language:English
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Fernleihe:Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste
Published: New York, NY Oxford University Press [2018]
In:Year: 2018
Reviews:[Rezension von: Laats, Adam, Fundamentalist U] (2020) (Straub, Jeffrey P.)
Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains:B USA / Institute of higher learning / College student / Value education / Evangelical movement / History 1920-2000
B USA / Church college / Social network / Conservatism / Evangelical movement / History 1920-2000
B USA / Theory of science / Controversy / Secularism / Evangelical movement / History 1920-2000
Further subjects:B Fundamentalism (United States)
B Christian universities and colleges
B Religious Education Political aspects (United States)
B Christian universities and colleges (United States)
B Evangelicalism (United States)
B RELIGION / Education
B Evangelicalism United States
B EDUCATION / Higher
B Christian universities and colleges United States
B Religious Education Political aspects United States
B Christian Education / RELIGION / Children & Youth
B Fundamentalism United States
B Evangelicalism
Description
Summary: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
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
Item Description:Includes bibliographical references (pages 285-337) and index
ISBN:0190665629