GOD ON THE QUAD: HOW RELIGIOUS COLLEGES AND THE MISSIONARY GENERATION ARE CHANGING AMERICA, by Naomi Schaefer Riley. St. Martin’s Press (New York, 2005). 274 pp.

Reviewed by Mary Frances McCarthy
Herald Staff Writer
(From the issue of 2/24/05)

There’s change afoot.

Admissions at religious institutes of higher learning are increasing at an incredible rate. New religious colleges and universities are opening while existing ones are expanding their campuses. Today there are more than 700 religious colleges training a new generation of thinkers and doers.

Not only are students attracted to these schools because of their ties to certain faiths, but also for their academic reputations and strong focus on ethics in every subject and field of study.

"The most important question about the recent growth of religious higher education for observers of American civic and political life is whether this movement tends to make religious communities more insular; whether this missionary generation, as its leaders hope, will transform the broader, secular culture from within; or whether those hopes are bound to be dashed by the influence of secularism on these young men and women," Naomi Schaeffer Riley said in her introduction to God on the Quad.

Although she does not claim to know the concrete answer to this question, her research can shed some light on the change that is possible by students at religious colleges.

These students who Schaeffer Riley has dubbed the "missionary generation" are only beginning to influence medicine, law, journalism, business and academia.

Schaefer Riley spent a year visiting 20 colleges and interviewing students, professors and administrators at religious schools across the spectrum — Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, Jewish and Buddhist.

Instead of focusing only on Catholic schools or evangelical protestant schools, Schaefer Riley visited them all, choosing the schools largely by word of mouth and reputation.

Schaeffer Riley chose schools that have a strong religious affiliation, based on the factors of the religiousness of the students, whether professors had to sign a statement of faith, whether they had to be of the same denomination as the school, whether students were required to attend religious services and the strictness of behavioral codes. After visiting the schools, the author realized that the religiousness of a school is a subjective quality, and some of the schools she said were "hardly religious at all."

Making her study even more credible, even within religions she visited a number of schools.

Among Catholic schools particularly there are some schools that are considered more "Catholic" than others. Perhaps because she is not a Catholic herself, Schaeffer Riley had no qualms about discussing the orthodoxy of schools and the recent problems with "secularization" at some Catholic schools, especially among those tied to the Jesuits.

While she could have chosen to visit only the conservatively Catholic Christendom College in Front Royal and Thomas Aquinas College in California, she also visited the more "liberal" University of Notre Dame in Indiana and the Jesuit-run Fordham University in New York.

With each of the school visits — six are discussed in-depth in the first chapters of the book — Schaeffer Riley address four questions: Why have students chosen the school, how is the curriculum different than that of secular schools, what is life like outside the classroom and how will these colleges affect students’ post-graduation choices.

One of the possibilities created by this missionary generation is that instead of having to pay for conferences to teach doctors about medical ethics, hospitals can now hire doctors with a bio-ethical background instilled in them during their education. The same is true for businesses and law firms.

Although Ave Maria School of Law is not fully accredited, simply because of its youth, its average LSAT scores make it the 25th ranked law school in the country and its graduates are highly sought after by leading law firms, justice departments and federal judges.

At a recent lecture on the book at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, Schaeffer Riley said these graduates of religious colleges bring "a sense of vocation" to their careers. They don’t only want to do a job; they want to make a difference.

And it is not only high profile jobs that attract these students. Many students from religious colleges devote a year or even two to volunteering.

Based on Schaeffer Riley’s extensive research, it is not only that the students of religious schools know right from wrong that makes them different from their peers at secular schools, it is that they know why something is right or why it is wrong, and they have been taught how to engage in dialogue on issues regarding faith and morals — issues that are often tiptoed around at public and non-religious private schools.