In pleading for universities to give religious teachings the same respect they give feminist and multicultural perspectives, Marsden (History/Notre Dame, The Secularization of the Academy, etc.) cogently argues that major American universities, founded essentially as religious institutions, are now so hostile to religion that they largely exclude religious viewpoints. Marsden reminds the reader that in the 19th century, while ``the United States was formally pluralistic, its cultural centers had never seen a time when Protestantism was not dominant.'' Indeed, most late 19th-century colleges and universities actively promoted evangelical Christianity. Strikingly, by 1920, evangelical Protestantism had largely disappeared from the leading universities, as establishment Protestants used values of secular humanism and buzzwords like ``tolerance'' and ``liberalism'' to marginalize both fundamentalist Protestantism and Catholicism. This ``disestablishmentarism'' of religious perspectives, together with the ``universalism'' of the mainstream Protestantism that identified itself with secular culture and forced other religious positions to the periphery, ironically contributed to the establishment of nonbelief as the only valid viewpoint. The same arguments and attitudes used by liberal Protestants to exclude other religious perspectives were used to exclude normative religious teaching of any kind. Marsden argues that while the disestablishment of a universal religious culture is probably a positive development, the prevailing secularism actually constrains the free exercise of religion. The academy should make room for traditional religious viewpoints, he says, just as it has done for other perspectives that go against the grain of mainstream scholarship. First-rate historical analysis, joined with a compelling argument for giving God a voice on campus, although Marsden, limiting his discussion to ``great universities,'' does gloss over relevant areas: influential Jewish or Catholic institutions, most Southern and African-American colleges, and conservative Protestant colleges.
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-507046-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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