No Longer Invisible: Religion in University Education

Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen · Douglas Jacobsen

Aug 2012 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

Winner of a 2013 American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Award Drawing on conversations with hundreds of professors, co-curricular educators, administrators, and students from institutions spanning the entire spectrum of American colleges and universities, the Jacobsens illustrate how religion is constructively intertwined with the work of higher education in the twenty-first century. No Longer Invisible documents how, after decades when religion was marginalized, colleges and universities are re-engaging matters of faith-an educational development that is both positive and necessary. Religion in contemporary American life is now incredibly complex, with religious pluralism on the rise and the categories of "religious" and "secular" often blending together in a dizzying array of lifestyles and beliefs. Using the categories of historic religion, public religion, and personal religion, No Longer Invisible offers a new framework for understanding this emerging religious terrain, a framework that can help colleges and universities-and the students who attend them-interact with religion more effectively. The stakes are high: Faced with escalating pressures to focus solely on job training, American higher education may find that paying more careful and nuanced attention to religion is a prerequisite for preserving American higher education's longstanding commitment to personal, social, and civic learning.

About the author

Douglas ?Jake? Jacobsen (Ph.D., University of Chicago), Professor of Religion, and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen (Ed.D., Temple University), Professor of Psychology, jointly direct the Religion in the Academy Project. Their previous publications include Scholarship and Christian Faith: Enlarging the Conversation (OUP, 2004) and the award-winning edited volume The American University in a Postsecular Age (OUP, 2008).