Mission to Blue America

INTERVIEW: Naomi Schaefer Riley on the growing importance of religious colleges | Marvin Olasky

Naomi Schaefer Riley, an adjunct fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., visited 20 religious institutions in the course of writing her new book, God on the Quad: How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America (St. Martin's, 2005). Among them were seven Catholic, two Mormon, two Jewish, one Buddhist, and eight Protestant schools (Baylor, Bob Jones, Calvin, Gordon, Patrick Henry, Regent, Westmont, and Wheaton).

WORLD: Sociologist James Davison Hunter has argued that "contemporary Christian higher education produces individual Christians who are either less certain of their attachments to the traditions of their faith or altogether disaffected from them." What did you find in your campus visits?