No Longer Invisible: Religion in University Education

by Douglas Jacobsen, Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen

Winner of a 2013 American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Award

Drawing on conversations with hundreds of professors, co-curricular educators, administrators, and students from institutions spanning the entire spectrum of American colleges and universities, the Jacobsens illustrate how religion is constructively intertwined with the work of higher education in the twenty-first century. No Longer Invisible documents how, after decades when religion was marginalized, colleges and universities are re-engaging matters of faith-an educational development that is both positive and necessary.

Religion in contemporary American life is now incredibly complex, with religious pluralism on the rise and the categories of "religious" and "secular" often blending together in a dizzying array of lifestyles and beliefs. Using the categories of historic religion, public religion, and personal religion, No Longer Invisible offers a new framework for understanding this emerging religious terrain, a framework that can help colleges and universities-and the students who attend them-interact with religion more effectively. The stakes are high: Faced with escalating pressures to focus solely on job training, American higher education may find that paying more careful and nuanced attention to religion is a prerequisite for preserving American higher education's longstanding commitment to personal, social, and civic learning.

Genres: Nonfiction, Education

208 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Douglas Jacobsen (PhD, University of Chicago) is distinguished professor of church history and theology at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.

Reviews

[Laura Engelken]

An excellent review of the history of religion in higher education and how today's religious (or rather broadly spiritual) landscape on campuses can no longer be ignored.

[Pchu]

This book was extremely thoughtfully written and is a very good jumping-off point for discussions of "religion", in the broadest and most inclusive sense, in American universities.

[Jocelyn]

According to the Jacobsens, religion in higher education has recently emerged from the shadows of individual spirituality. Colleges and universities are now bringing together people from many different backgrounds, focusing instruction on what students want to learn. They can't sideline religion any more.

So what's a professor to do? It seems safe to keep religious commitments out of the classroom, except that they are there whether you want them or not. We could reveal our biases by putting our religious commitments on the table, only they wouldn't stay there. Maybe we should reveal them and then take them in hand to advocate for social justice, informed faith, atheism, or whatever. But then what would happen to critical thinking?

There are no easy answers. But at least we have the Jacobsens to delineate the questions and to propose a new kind of academic conversation about religion. "The religio-secular realities of life in America today," they say, "are much more about questing and questioning than they are about defending or imposing the ideas and ideals of any particular religion on anyone else. It is this new mode of religion that colleges and universities are re-engaging today, and it is this new mode of religion that may allow the academy to recapture a nearly lost conversation about 'things that really matter' and how these deeper concerns of life relate to the more practical skills and knowledge that colleges and universities also convey to students" (p. 156).

[Lynne]

Amazing book. A must-read for anyone working in Higher Ed, whether faculty, Student Affairs staff, or administration.

[Mills College Library]

378.071 J175 2012