503 - Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America

Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America
By Mark R. Schwehn
New York, Oxford, 1993. 143 pp. $19.95.

Like many thoughtful critiques of contemporary culture, this book is thoroughly convincing in its analysis of our malaise, but lacks proportionate force and credibility in its suggested solutions.

Our crisis consists in the erosion of those community-supported spiritual virtues (humility, self-denial, charity, friendship) that are "indispensable to learning" and should be nutured by the academy. These virtues are still alive on campus, but their vitality is ephemeral, that of flowers cut from their roots in the religious garden and brought into the secular classroom. The university is thus living off a "borrowed fund of moral capital," its faculty socialized (by modern secular epistemologies of objectivism, individualism, and relativism) to be oblivious of-nay, opposed to-the crucial

504 - Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America

role of spiritual virtues in the educational process.

The solution Schwehn suggests seems strangely individualistic, inadequate to this systemic cultural problem. "I do not ... recommend any great restructuring of the academy.... [T]he place to begin to counter the objectivist epistemology ...is in individual classrooms where teachers, disciplining themselves first, create spaces 'where obedience to truth is practiced.' "

William H. Becker
Bucknell University
Lewisburg, PA.