"My hope in the Christian faith did not disappoint. But what did disappoint was the world of Christian higher education. What I found in that world, with notable exceptions to be sure, was a commitment to various orthodoxies--racial, religious, cultural, and political orthodoxies whose net effect was to shackle the search for truth, throttle wonder, stifle the creative impulse, and divide the community of scholars into those who embraced the constraints and those who did not."- from the book
"Who will unmask the system that confuses dominance with order? Who will summon Christian institutions and leaders to repentance? This book is at least a gigantic step in that direction. It refuses silence. It rejects the politics of fear and insists that the future of Christian higher education in the United States depends on its fidelity to the teachings of Jesus and its refusal to collaborate, however subtly or implicitly, with the empire of white Christian America." -Dr. Jerry Andrew Taylor, from the Foreword
Many Christian colleges and universities--especially those schools that locate themselves in the evangelical orbit--have rejected any full-orbed embrace of diversity, implicitly pledging their allegiance instead to whiteness, to Americanism, and to the values of one political party--despite the ideas the ideals they claim to serve.
For Christian schools to become authentically Christian, their leaders and faculty must forge change through gospel-rooted principle, in listening with extraordinary care to the voices of oppressed and marginalized people, for those are the voices to which Jesus gave special regard.
