December (Web-only) 2003

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Los Angeles Times cribs Alan Wolfe's notes
A week after running a 5,000-word essay on changes at Fuller Seminary, the Los Angeles Times has published a much shorter article on Christian undergraduate schools, which it says "are gaining broader acceptance and moving closer to the academic mainstream."

Reporters Stuart Silverstein and Andy Olsen (no relation) list the evidence:

Enrollments are surging, especially in Southern California, home to two of the largest schools. The percentage of students heading to graduate school is rising and some of the institutions have edged up in college rankings. Evangelical scholars, meanwhile, are having a bigger effect in academic circles, occasionally attracting job offers from Ivy League schools.

All of this should be largely familiar to Christianity Today readers. It should also be very familiar to Atlantic Monthly readers, since the Los Angeles Times piece is essentially a much shorter version of Alan Wolfe's October 2000 cover story, "The Opening of the Evangelical Mind" (see responses to that article from Weblog, Books & Culture's John Wilson, and Wheaton College's Mark Noll). It's all here: references to Mark Noll and George Marsden (with updates and the important additions of Miroslav Volf and John Hare, both now at Yale), misdirected complaints about required adherence to statements of faith, and a theme of how the mainstream academy, including the Ivy Leagues, has become less hostile to evangelical scholarship in recent years.

There's one odd section where Phil Shahbaz, director of student activities and orientation at Azusa Pacific University, tells a classroom that the Holocaust "is a huge thing to talk about, because it happened to one of the most important people groups in the ...