Professor Nelson has produced an engaging and provocative exploration of how religious influences have shaped the core values of American higher education. He traces an arc from the founding of Harvard College to the realities of the modern university, arguing that the fundamentals have long endured. For presidents, trustees, and other higher education leaders navigating today’s cross-cutting political pressures, the book is a worthy read that offers a powerful case for importance of remaining faithful to those fundamentals.
— Robert Iuliano, Gettysburg College
With Searching the Soul of the College and University in America, Stephen J. Nelson caps his career-long scholarly examination of the nation’s higher education institutions and their leadership with a comprehensive assessment of the complex role religion has played in nurturing our unique academic traditions. The crucial aspect of that role, he argues, has not been the maintenance of particular confessional identities that informed so many early American colleges, but rather a lasting commitment to a much broader “religion of the Republic,” whose transcendent moral principles of fairness, equality, rights, and reason have defined America’s colleges and universities since colonial times. He presents this interpretation through an historical tour-de-force that engages virtually every major American educational leader as well as a host of modern theorists of religion in American culture. And his message for our own troubled times in the university is clear: stay the course—we have faced worse challenges than today’s, and will continue to meet them only by holding fast to our national faith in seeking truth e pluribus unum.
— Stephen A. Marini, Wellesley College
In this volume Stephen Nelson provides a wide ranging survey of the development of the intertwining of religion, democracy, and enlightenment ideals in America through the lens of higher education institutions in preserving and promoting those values. At the heart of this book is an impassioned case for a generous democratic pluralism as the foundation of American society, with roots reaching back to the Reformation era and beyond. Moving well beyond the usual cast of institutional characters, Nelson's sprawling analysis includes representative universities and colleges from all regions of the country to show the shifts and responses to historical events like the Civil War as well as wider cultural currents in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Rather than a narrative of secularization, Nelson's nuanced retelling depicts an educational world of religious and democratic pluralism, tracing a through-line of core values and ideals from the Reformation to our own modern era. This poses important questions not just about the past, but also about our own present, and who we as Americans can and should be.
— Linford Fisher, Brown University
Professor Stephen Nelson’s latest work, Searching the Soul of the College and University in America: Religious and Democratic Covenants and Controversies, is an important book for anyone looking to understand the evolution and intersectionality of religion, political covenants and higher education in America. Beginning with the founding of the first college in the American colonies and continuing up through the present day, Professor Nelson examines and critiques the academic approaches and beliefs of some of our nation’s most influential college and university presidents, as well as some of the leading religious historians. Dr. Nelson also raises some interesting and controversial academic and philosophical questions that all modern leaders in the academy must confront if their institutions are going to not only carry out their missions, but also thrive. Some of these more recent leaders have echoed Professor Nelson’s call for the need to have far greater diversity in American higher education. Indeed, there needs to be a clarion call among all leaders in the academy to work towards creating more inclusive, equitable and accessible cultures on all of our campuses.
— Johnetta Cole, President Emeritus, Spelman College