The Soul of the American University Revisited: From Protestant to Postsecular, Marsden George M.

Far from a lament for a lost golden age, Marsden offers a penetrating analysis of the changing ways in which Protestantism intersected with collegiate life, intellectual inquiry, and broader cultural developments. He tells the stories of many of the nations pace-setting universities at defining
moments in their histories. By the late nineteenth-century when modern universities emerged, debates over Darwinism and higher criticism of the Bible were reshaping conceptions of Protestantism; in the twentieth century important concerns regarding diversity and inclusion were leading toward
ever-broader conceptions of Christianity; then followed attacks on the traditional WASP establishment which brought dramatic disestablishment of earlier religious privilege. By the late twentieth century, exclusive secular viewpoints had become the gold standard in higher education, while our
current era is arguably post-secular. The Soul of the American University Revisited deftly examines American higher education as it exists in the twenty-first century.