
It all started in 1990 with a conference at Duke on secularization and the academy. (At the time I was a first year divinity school student. The internet did not exist yet and I had no idea that this conference was happening and even if I did hear about I probably would not have cared). The conference proceedings were edited by George Marsden and Bradley Longfield and published in 1992 as The Secularization of the Academy.
Then, in 1994, came Marsden’s magisterial The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Unbelief. Three years later Marsden expanded the postscript of this book and published it as The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship.
Now, twenty-five years later, Books & Culture is running a symposium on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the conference that started it all. Marsden, Longfield, James Turner, Darryl Hart, and David Bebbington have written reflections. Mark Noll introduces the symposium here,
Here is a taste of Turner’s response:
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