Religion is often perceived as an intrusive presence in the academy. Since neutrality and objectivity are values alien to the community of the faithful, religion is frequently thought to inhibit intellectual inquiries. Students are informed that they must join Galileo outside the religious sanctuary if they are to acquire the fruits of a modern education. Indeed, the dominant voices in American education over the last century have insisted that textbooks be purged of religious content, that theological questions be banished from classrooms, and that faith be identified as a private affair that has no recognizable place in the life of the school.

Most of us are well aware of the dangers and excesses that emerge when religion enters the classroom. We are less aware of the negative consequences that arise when religion is pushed to the margins. According to Doug Sloan, a central obstacle in understanding the place of religion is derived from a worldview shaped by a "two-realm theory of truth." On the one hand, there is knowledge that emerges from scientific methods of inquiry, from the discursive, empirical exercise of reason. This knowledge is open to the public. It is discovered within a quantitative, mechanical, and instrumental domain ac-cessible to all rational investigators. In contrast to this realm of knowledge stand the truths of faith, religious experience, morality, meaning, and value. This domain is hopelessly sub-jective, being bound to the passions and the imagination. And only the initiated have access to the truths and the mysteries of faith. This dichotomy between the realms of knowledge and faith frames much of our thinking.

I have found three books particularly helpful in exploring the difficulties that result from this conceptual division. All three volumes are written by Christians, but the issues they raise and the sensitivities they express transcend denominational allegiances. Each maintains that to inhabit a world that has been so dramatically split in two we must pay a very high cost. Schools, after all, cannot disseminate information with-out the support of virtues that undergird the educational endeavor. What learning can take place without honesty, without humility, without compassion, without trust? How do students come to know and own these virtues? What is the relation between religion and public morality? Are there realms of knowledge that are excluded when religion is expelled from the academy? How can teachers open these domains without simultaneously indoctrinating those who must live under their charge? Can religion find its way into the academy without treading on the toes of minorities?

Warren A. Nord's Religion and American Education (The University of North Carolina Press, 1995), Douglas Sloan's Faith and Knowledge (Westminster John Knox Press, 1994) and Mark R. Schwehn's Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America (Oxford University Press, 1993) sharpen the edges of these questions, cutting open the prevailing assumptions about the nature of education in contemporary America. While these volumes are not breezy reads for the beach, they provide a fresh angle from which to ponder the character of the modern academy.

Dr. Rosann M. Catalano, ICJS Roman Catholic Scholar, recommends three authors who speak eloquently about the experience of grave illness and the particular wisdom that emerged out of their suffering: Intoxicated by My Illness (Faw-cett Press, 1993), by the late literary critic Anatole Broyard; A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing (Atheneum, 1994), by the novelist Reynolds Price; and Cancer and Faith: Reflections on Living with a Terminal Illness (Twenty-Third Publ., 1994), by the Roman Catholic theologian John Carmody. On a com-pletely different, yet equally compelling, note are two volumes by African-American feminist theologians: A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil & Suffering (Orbis, 1993), edited by Emilie M. Townes; and Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Orbis, 1993), by Delores S. Williams.