The sacred and the secular university Book

A compact study of secularization in American higher education during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on Christianity. The authors divide the book into discussions of secularization in the sciences and in the humanities. As scientists embraced naturalism and empirical evidence, appeals to God became less and less common in scientific discourse. As humanities embraced philology and began to view art as culturally conditioned, appeals to God and transcendent truth became less common, although talk of morality could be a cover for professors to keep Christian influences in the classroom. Naturally, people objected to secularization in both science and humanities classrooms. I found the authors' claim about the humanities driving secularization to be compelling. The book's focus on Christianity made me wonder what discussions of secularization were like among Jewish academics.