The Dying of the Light [Paperback]

James Tunstead Burtchaell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1998

James Tunstead Burtchaell, who has extensive experience in American higher education as both a teacher and an administrator, provides case studies of seventeen prominent colleges and universities with diverse ecclesial origins - Congregational, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran, Catholic, and Evangelical. Using published and archival sources as well as firsthand interaction with each institution he covers, Burtchaell narrates how each school's religious identity eventually became first uncomfortable and then expendable, and he analyzes the processes that eroded the bonds between school and church.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from Their Christian Churches, by James Tunstead Burtchaell, charts the history of 17 American colleges and universities that were founded by Christian denominations. Burtchaell's history shows that each school abandoned its religious roots for remarkably similar reasons. The modern conflict between Christ and culture, he argues, resulted in widespread capitulation by Christians to prevailing secular standards of knowledge. The Dying of the Light offers no advice for contemporary Christians who seek to do faith-based scholarship. "The failures of the past, so clearly patterned, so foolishly ignored, and so lethally repeated, emerge pretty clearly from these stories," he writes. "Anyone who requires further imagination to recognize and remedy them is not up to the task of trying again, and better." Burtchaell's book is lively, readable, and long (more than 800 pages). The author has done his homework so well that when he lays down his gauntlet, the reader's natural response is to rise to his challenge. --Michael Joseph Gross

Product Details

• Paperback: 888 pages
• Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company (June 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802844812
• ISBN-13: 978-0802844811
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #654,687 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Encyclopedic Micro-History of College Secularization, June 7, 2000

By 

John P. Rooney "John" (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Dying of the Light (Paperback)

"The Dying of the Light" by Fr. James Tunstead Burtchaell. This is an enormous book, some 868 pages long. Fr. Burtchaell deals with the secularization of the Christian colleges, which, as with Harvard and Yale, changed from a church-started, church-supported institution into secular, non-sectarian schools. His method is to pick one, two or three institutions in the particular denomination and deal with the history of the changes from a religious school into a secular institution. Fr. Burtchaell has a chapter for the Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans, Catholics and Evangelicals. The author's irony borders on humor once in awhile, as when he wonders why the Presbyterians found it so difficult to report the number of attending Presbyterians to church boards, but now find it so easy to report to the Federal government the racial make-up of the student body, down to the last Samoan. In the preface, Fr. Burtchaell notes that the reader will probably go directly to the section dealing with his/her religious affiliation. I did, but mainly because I was working on an MA thesis on Catholic colleges in the United States. I would recommend this encyclopaedia work to any one truly interested in the recent wave of secularization of church-related colleges in the US. Many details and stories from around the nation make this an interesting micro-history....

24 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Continuing disengagement threatens Churches' influence., April 30, 1999

By 

william g. condon - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Dying of the Light (Paperback)

Antidisestablishmentarianism in contemporary Catholic religious-community sponsored colleges might well be a subliminal message in Fr. James Burtchaell's incisive disection of the historical disengagement of colleges and universities from their Christian Churhes. The biting humor and irony in Burtchaell's style counterpoints the euphemistic rationale vaunting past and current disengagement from the specific founding church's credo and etholgy. The present widespread disengagement by many Catholic colleges and uni-versities is the legacy of the historic, passive, submission of church related schools beneath whelming financial and enrollment pressures.

The Vatican might well use "The Dying of the Light" as its primer to argue the case for rescuing Catholic institutions from modern-day disengagement by means of episcopal appropriation.

In his asessment of the disengagement of seven-teen representative colleges and univer-sities, the author delved deeply into their ar-chival and historical references and posits a commonality of purpose, basically driven by economic necessity.

Is "greed" the dysphoric, but correct, syn-onym for what Burtchaell records? Is "naivete" an, assuaging, palliative for moral incom-petence? Is "hierarchic megalomania" being masked by ecclesiastical dogmatism? The answers to these questions are interpretable from Burtchaell's data. The answers are not easy. The information is complex, but the pattern is quite simple, money requires compromise. The issue becomes: is the loss worth the cost? Is the price of freedom too high? Is skewed pedantry inevitable with church involvement in education? Can academic excellence be acheived without academic freedom?

Issues seem to have been ignored during the evolution of the disengagement by the churches. Questions were left unasked, because the answers were too painful. The basic rationale, seems to have been that financial support became increas-ingly limited as ecclesiastical strictures re-duced enrollments.

The ultimate emergent question becomes, can there be intellectual probity in a religious insti-tution which limits the parameters of discussion and exploration according to a predetermined schema of dogma and morals?

Burtchaell's comprehensive, paradigmatic, exposition of the disengagement process by religious schools bodes ill for any continuance of a moral or spiritual underpinning for edu-cation in our contemporary society. An argument, inferable from "The Dying of the Light", is that State and Federal governments are restricting freedom of religion and ideas and relegating morality and knowledge to a moral and intellectual relativism under the guise of monetary benignity towards education.

Wm.G.Condon, csc e-mail [e-mail]