Higher education

Providence College is a Catholic, Dominican, liberal arts institution of higher education and a community committed to academic excellence in pursuit of the truth, growth in virtue, and service of God and neighbor.

FROM VOL. 69 Daniel Ritchie discusses why great books programs survive mainly in Christian institutions while declining in secular ones. (13 minutes)

FROM VOL. 39 Marion Montgomery (1934–2002) offers a deep critique of the relationship of the academy to its community in an effort to diagnose how higher education has lost its way. (13 minutes)

FROM VOL. 84 Harry L. Lewis discusses higher education’s amnesia about its purposes, and how that shortchanges students. (19 minutes)

FROM VOL. 61 Michael L. Peterson discusses how Christianity could inform society’s understandings of education and human nature. (8 minutes)

Co-authors Paul Spears and Steven Loomis argue that Christians should foster education that does justice to humans in our fullness of being. (23 minutes)

FROM VOL. 85 Professor C. John Sommerville describes the increasingly marginal influence of universities in our society, and why they seem to be of no substantive relevance to people outside the school. (13 minutes)

FROM VOL. 50 In tracing Christianity's relationship to the academy, Arthur F. Holmes points to Augustine as one of the first to embrace higher learning, believing God's ordered creation to be open to study by the rational mind of man. (9 minutes)

Robert Jenson on how the Christian understanding of Truth in a personal Word shaped the Western university

In interviews from 1999, literature professors Alvin Kernan and Marion Montgomery discuss how culture of the academy — its hyper-democratic posture and its loathing of limits — derails the pursuit of truth. (25 minutes)

Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb on the skeptical tendencies of the postmodern academy

Marion Montgomery on the precious gift of words

Marion Montgomery on cultivating “a deportment of intellect governed by a continuing concern for the truth of things”

Alvin Kernan on tectonic shifts in higher education since the 1960s

Paul Tyson on how the modern academy avoids engagement with Reality

In the late 1990s, George M. Marsden and James Tunstead Burtchaell both wrote books examining the claim that it was far-fetched even to imagine that scholarly work could be an expression of Christian claims about reality. (25 minutes)

Mark Noll on why Christian intellectual vitality requires a vision for the universality of Christian truth

Thomas Pfau asks why so many students in universities are regarded only as consumers, who expect a good return on their investment. He also muses on some strategies for "re-spiritualizing” education. (30 minutes)

Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann demonstrate that some form of humanism has always been central to the purposes of higher education, and insist that the recovery of a rich, Christocentric Christian humanism is the only way for the university to recover a coherent purpose. (39 minutes)

FEATURED GUESTS: Charles C. Camosy, O. Carter Snead, Matt Feeney, Margarita A. Mooney, Louis Markos, and Alan Jacobs