Evans's monograph chronicles more than twentieth-century Catholic efforts to supply pastoral care and religious education at non-Catholic colleges and universities. It is an intricate history of changing perceptions about Catholic students and Catholic responsibilities in higher education. He depicts the Newman movement in three stages roughly corresponding to seasons of change on secular campuses and in the Roman church. He portrays halting efforts of students and professors to found clubs as protection against religious indifference and of bishops to establish chaplaincies and Catholic halls in the period around the turn of the century. These efforts met with the effective opposition of "collegemen" who warned the bishops against a movement that could undermine Catholic colleges. A "domino theory" marked the second quarter of the century. If the Catholic college failed, so would the parochial school. The Newman movement threatened those favoring "the kind of security a ghettoized Catholicism sought" (p. 83). In 1940 the hierarchy finally recognized the Newman movement, but only as part of the Youth Department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference. The bishops only affirmed its educational mission in 1962, which was too late since traditional campus life and church practice were both unraveling. In the last period from the 1960s, old opponents became new partners. Once Catholic educators no longer aimed to school all Catholics from nursery to graduate school and came to see merit in chaplaincies and religious studies programs on secular campuses, they viewed the Newman movement as a great resource. Failing as a national organization, the movement returned to a diocesan-based but expanded ministry of priests and lay brothers and sisters.
The Society of Biblical Literature sponsored this fine study of a neglected topic for its series on the Bible in American culture. American historians, both of the cultural and church history varieties, and educators who teach biblical studies will find much of value in this collection, particularly on the theme keynoted in Clark Gilpin's essay on colonial education. While the Bible and education have been sources for renewal in church and society, they also have provided the foundations for the standing order. Controversy necessarily has followed and will follow as church and society invoke, face, or resist change. Gilpin marks a second unifying theme. Civility tended to take precedence over biblical piety as a social value and to drive the focus of religious teaching back to Jewish and Christian bodies. John Westerhoff demonstrates this continuing saga through the McGuffey readers of the nineteenth century. William Sachs notes how the interdenominational Sunday School movement came to cater to particular denominations. Virginia Brereton traces the biblical traditions and debates which have both plagued and enriched Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish communities committed to private education. Essays by Thomas Olbricht, Charles Kniker, Boardman Kathan, and Peter Bracher and David Barr indicate that the debates over hermeneutical issues continue to reveal the nature of social and religious life in America.
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