American Religion and the Academy in the Early Twentieth Century: The Chicago Years of William Warren Sweet

1981 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 450-464
Author(s):  
James L. Ash

An enormous change in the academic study of religion has occurred in the United States during the last half-century as the center of the enterprise has moved from the church-supported college and the seminary to the secular university and the graduate school. Some of this change has been caused by the rise of state-supported higher education, some by the secularizing trend that has shaped all modern American universities, both public and private. The change clearly has resulted in a discipline (if the term may be loosely used) in which not only has the number of practicing religion scholars greatly multiplied, but the scholarship itself also has grown in academic stature, becoming less eulogistic, more critical, and more methodologically congruent with other humanities disciplines.1

Author(s):  
Philip Gleason

A great many Catholic colleges existed in the United States at the opening of the twentieth century. Exactly how many it is impossible to say with certainty because any answer presupposes agreement on the answer to a prior question: “What should be counted as a college?” The Catholic Directory for 1900 listed 10 universities, 178 “colleges for boys,” 109 seminaries, and 662 “academies for girls.” According to this count, there were no Catholic women’s colleges at that time, although the College of Notre Dame of Maryland graduated its first baccalaureate class in 1899 and is included among the 128 colleges for women listed in U.S. Commissioner of Education’s Report for 1899-1900. The same Report, however, listed only 62 Catholic institutions among the 480 included under the heading: “Universities and colleges for men and for both sexes.” No doubt some Catholic colleges simply failed to provide the information necessary to appear in the Commissioner’s Report. But their failure to do so is in itself significant; and even assuming that is what happened, it still leaves an enormous gap between the Commissioner’s figures and the 188 colleges and universities reported in the Catholic Directory. Moreover, many of the “colleges for boys” could, with equal justice, have been called academies, since elementary- and secondary-level students made up the majority of their student bodies. As the case of Notre Dame of Maryland indicates, Catholic “academies for girls” were beginning to upgrade themselves to collegiate status. Had the word college been more freely applied to non-Catholic institutions for women at an earlier date, a good many of these academies would probably have called themselves colleges long before, for they did not differ all that much from the “colleges for boys” in terms of curricular offerings and age-range of students. While the situation of Catholic institutions was particularly murky, the question “What makes a college a college?” engaged the attention of practically everyone involved in secondary and collegiate education at the turn of the century.


Author(s):  
David S. Guthrie ◽  
R. Tyler Derreth

This chapter explores Presbyterian influences and involvement in higher education. It begins by using Princeton as an historic lens to examine the “Presbyterian ideals” of reason and education, liberty, and differentiation. The Presbyterian regard for freedom of thought and intellectual edification produced denominational schools throughout the history of higher education, especially in the United States, that differed substantially in their overarching philosophies, approaches to learning, curricula, and emphases on Christian piety. The second part of the chapter identifies the proliferating diversity at the intersection of Presbyterianism and the higher education landscape in the twentieth century. It describes differentiation by theology, denominations, geography, and culture. The chapter ends with brief ruminations on the future roles and stability of Presbyterian higher education.


1993 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 514-527 ◽  
Author(s):  
John P. Ferré

Protestant churches in the early twentieth century were vexed by dwindling attendance, a clear sign of their declining social authority. The Reverend William C. Skeath complained about “the masses of the passively religious who have closed their ears to the sermon subject and their doors to pastoral visitation.” Likewise, inHow to Fill the Pews, Ernest Eugene Elliott said that because no more than two-fifths of church members went to church on any given Sunday, the church had ceased to be the chief forum in American public life.


2008 ◽  
pp. 31-38
Author(s):  
K.I. Shvalagina

Secularization theory is one of those intellectual products that determine the understanding of religion, its status in society, and the changes that take place between faith and unbelief, between church and state, for quite some time. Constituted in the United States in the mid-twentieth century, this theory has found many followers both in America and in Europe, even in the USSR. Its validity and integrity, evidentiality and obviousness did not cause any doubt either to scholars or to religious and statesmen. It was clear that society is liberated from the influence of religion and the church, is rapidly secularized, which will inevitably lead to the transformation of religion into a marginal phenomenon, and eventually - to its extinction. But the predictions that were made with unqualified certainty did not come true, as the development of the religious environment at the end of the XX and the beginning of the XXI century showed. Not only has religion not lost its significance for the modern man, but he is also actively returning to the public sphere. In line with such objective changes, secularization theory undergoes significant transformations, evolving from a monopoly that it has had for almost half a century, to a crisis, and eventually to its antipode, a theory of desecularization.


Author(s):  
Jack Hayward

This volume deals with the intellectual response of academics in Britain to the political challenges of the twentieth century. The distinctive identity of the British approach to the modern study of politics was formed during the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at a time when the fledgling social sciences were differentiating into separate disciplines. Part of this book traces some of the vicissitudes of this process by which the specifically academic study of politics parted company from its subject matter and from other disciplines. If the syndrome of approaches that coexisted within nascent British political science is to acquire some semblance of cultural coherence, this chapter contrasts it with others – notably those of the United States and France – because ‘on the recognition of difference depends the significance of the assertion of identity’.


The Oxford Handbook of Religion and American Education brings together preeminent scholars to craft a comprehensive survey and assessment of the study of religion and education in the United States. Religion has been inextricably entwined with education in the United States since the days of colonial British America. Beginning with mothers schooling their children at home from the Bible, to the first establishment of Harvard College in 1636 with the principal mission to prepare clergy, the place of religion—and more to the point, whose religion and for what purpose—has been vigorously contested for nearly 400 years. This handbook aims to examine the current state of religion and American education from homeschooling to private religious schools to public schools to religious institutions and on through the range of public and private higher education. The book is organized into five sections: Frameworks; Lifespan Faith Development; Faith-Based K-12 education; Religion and Public Schools; and Religion and Higher Education. Within these sections forty leading scholars in the field of religion and education review these topics in thirty chapters. The contributors offer an in-depth synthesis of major issues within the field, while contributing to lively debates about the links between landmark research contributions and contemporary research agendas. Designed for an interdisciplinary audience, the Oxford handbook serves as a legacy project for leading scholars who are critically shaping the future direction of the field of religion and American education.


1952 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 470-485 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claude E. Hawley ◽  
Lewis A. Dexter

This report is based upon a survey of research in progress in political science departments of American universities in the spring of 1950. Undertaken jointly by the Committee on Research of the American Political Science Association and the Division of Higher Education of the United States Office of Education, the survey was essentially an analysis of questionnaires sent to the chairmen of 112 departments of political science believed to be in a position that would enable them particularly to emphasize research. Seventy-five of the 112 chairmen replied to the questionnaire, fourteen merely to state that no research was being conducted in their departments. Although several leading institutions did not reply, it is a fair guess that at least seventy-five per cent of the research being conducted by or in departments of political science was reported and subsequently analyzed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 573 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yong-Ming He ◽  
Yu-Long Pei ◽  
Bin Ran ◽  
Jia Kang ◽  
Yu-Ting Song

To find and solve the problems existing in the development of higher education in China, the input–output, scale of higher education, students’ tuition and teachers’ income of Chinese and American universities are compared. The results show that the investment in top universities in China is similar to that in the United States, but the average student budget is much less, and the output is not comparable to that of American universities. The scale of higher education is much larger than that of the United States, and the growth rate is far more than demand. College tuition should be increased, with the absolute tuition only 5.93% of income, and relative tuition is 20.21% of that in the United States. College teachers are underpaid, earning only approximately 20% of what their peers earn in the United States. Therefore, for higher education sustainability, the paper puts forward the development direction of higher education in China, which is to control the expansion scale of colleges and universities, and to increase students’ tuition and teachers’ salary.


2015 ◽  
pp. 10-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Altbach

Research by Dongbin Kim, Charles A. S. Bankart, and Laura Isdell ("International doctorates: Trends analysis on their decision to stay in US," Higher Education 62 (August 2011) shows that the large majority of international doctoral recipients from American universities remain in the United States after graduation. Even more surprisingly, the proportion of those choosing to stay in the United States has in- creased over the past three decades, seemingly regardless of growth and academic expansion. There is strong evidence that we live in a worldwide era of global mobility of highly skilled talent in general and of the academic profession in particular, but this mobility flows largely in one direction— from developing and emerging economies to the wealthier nations, especially to the English-speaking countries.


Author(s):  
Patrick W. Carey

This chapter demonstrates how a few Catholic seminary professors in the first two decades of the twentieth century began to reconsider and critique the nineteenth-century Catholic understanding of the history of confession in light of Henry Charles Lea’s history of auricular confession and John Henry Newman’s theory of the development of doctrine. That re-examination of the early church’s history of penance met strong resistance from Pope Pius X’s anti-modernist campaign because the new approach clashed with Trent’s understanding of the divine origin of the early church’s practice of auricular confession. The pope, however, also promoted a liturgical revival in the Church that focused on active participation in the Eucharist that had consequences for American Catholic emphases on frequent confession for children as well as adults in preparation for communion. By 1920 that Pian revival in the United States reinforced the nineteenth-century promotion of frequent and devotional confessions.


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