{"id":6844,"date":"2006-07-10T09:07:50","date_gmt":"2006-07-10T09:07:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/07\/secularism-did-it.html"},"modified":"2006-07-10T09:07:50","modified_gmt":"2006-07-10T09:07:50","slug":"secularism-did-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/07\/secularism-did-it.html","title":{"rendered":"Secularism did it"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Steinfels, in last Saturday’s NYTimes, on a book arguing that secularism has marginalized the university:<\/a><\/p>\n

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A century ago, American universities aspired to be the wellsprings of political, social and cultural leadership, Mr. Sommerville, a professor emeritus, argues in "The Decline of the Secular University," a slim volume published by Oxford in May and excerpted last month in The Chronicle of Higher Education. <\/p>\n

But today, he maintains, "the secular university is increasingly marginal to American society," ceding influence to popular culture, talk show pundits, "populist bloggers" and political research organizations, even hiring out university laboratories to business and government in hopes of revenues from patents. <\/p>\n

A major reason, he contends more controversially, is the secularism that in his judgment has come to dominate academic life the way that religion previously did. What "looked vital and self-sufficient in 1900," Professor Sommerville writes, has proved unable to provide "wisdom and leadership to American life." <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Steinfels, in last Saturday’s NYTimes, on a book arguing that secularism has marginalized the university: A century ago, American universities aspired to be the wellsprings of political, social and cultural leadership, Mr. Sommerville, a professor emeritus, argues in "The Decline of the Secular University," a slim volume published by Oxford in May and excerpted…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nSecularism did it - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/07\/secularism-did-it.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Secularism did it - 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6844\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}