The American university has embraced a thorough secularism that makes it increasingly marginal in a society that is characterized by high levels of religious belief. The very secularization that was supposed to be a liberating influence has resulted in the university's failure to provide leadership in political, cultural, social, and even scientific arenas.
In The Decline of the Secular University, C. John Sommerville explores several different ways in which the secular university fails in its mission through its trivialization of religion. He notes how little attention is being given to defining the human, so crucial in all aspects of professional education. He alerts us to problems associated with the prevailing secular distinction between "facts" and "values." He reviews how the elimination of religion hampers the university from understanding our post-Cold War world. Sommerville then shows how a greater awareness of the intellectual resources of religion might stimulate more forthright attention to important matters like our loss of a sense of history, how to problematize secularism, the issue of judging religions, the oddity of academic moralizing, and the strangeness of science at the frontiers.
Finally, he invites the reader to imagine a university where religion is not ruled out but rather welcomed as a legitimate voice among others. Sommerville's bracing and provocative arguments are sure to provoke controversy and stimulate discussion both inside and outside the academy.

We who live at the end of the twentieth century are better informed--and more quickly informed--than any people in history. So why do we also seem more confused, divided and foolish than ever before? Some pundits criticize the news media for political bias. Other analysts worry that up-to-the-minute news reports on radio and television oversimplify complex realities. Still more critics point out that today's reporters can't possibly be experts on the wide variety of subjects they cover. Historian C. John Sommerville thinks the problem with news is more basic. Focusing his critique on the news at its best, he concludes that even at its best it is beyond repair. Sommerville argues that news began to make us dumber when we insisted on having it daily. Now millions of column inches and airtime hours must be filled with information--every day, every hour, every minute. The news, Sommerville says, becomes the driving force for much of our public culture. News schedules turn politics into a perpetual campaign. News packaging influences the timing, content and perception of government initiatives. News frenzies make a superstition out of scientific and medical research. News polls and statistics create opinion as much as they gauge it. Lost in the tidal wave of information is our ability to discern truly significant news--and our ability to recognize and participate in true community. This eye-opening book is for everyone dissatisfied with the state of the news media, but especially for those who think the news really informs them about and connects them with the real world. Read it and you may never again know the tyranny of the daily newspaper or the nightly news broadcast.

Secularization is a subject of daunting size and is filled with ambiguity. Through the use of insights gained from anthropology and sociology, and by studying an earlier period than is usually considered, this provocative work overcomes the usual obstacles to exploring and explaining why various aspects of life--art, language, work, play, technology, and power--became divorced from religious values in early modern England. Sommerville helps modern readers understand what life was like in an age in which society was suffused with religion and was as basic to thought as the structure of language. Concentrating not only on a decline of religious belief, which is the last aspect of secularization, he shows that a transformation of England's cultural grammar preceded the loosening of belief, and that this was largely accomplished between 1500 and 1700, much earlier than commonly believed. Sommerville asserts that only when definitions of space and time changed, and language and technology were transformed (as well as art and play) could a secular world view be sustained. Demonstrating that the process was more political and theological than economic or social, Sommerville shows that as aspects of daily life became divorced from religious values and controls, religious culture was supplanted by religious faith--a reasoned, rather than an unquestioned, belief in the supernatural. The first large-scale treatment of the history of secularization, The Secularization of Early Modern England will greatly interest students of history, religion, sociology, anthropology, and literature.

This is the first book to analyse the essential feature of periodical media, which is their periodicity. Having to sell the next issue as well as the present one alters the relation between authors and readers--or customers--and subtly shapes the way that everything is reported. The story of the first century of periodical production in England shows how soon the public acquired a news consciousness which was at odds with the "print consciousness" which Marshal McLuhan described.

During the last century American students and scholars have found it increasingly difficult to discuss the relation of religion to the mission of self-consciously secular colleges and universities. Respected scholar C. John Sommerville here offers thought-provoking reflections on this subject in a conversational style. Sommerville explores the crisis of the secular university, argues that religions and secular universities need each other, and examines how Christianity shows up on both sides of our "culture wars." The astute reflections in Religious Ideas for Secular Universities point the way to a dialogue that would do justice both to religious insights and to the neutrality that is the goal of secular education.

In this highly provocative investigation, C. John Sommerville examines common linguistic uses of the terms ""religion,"" ""religious,"" ""spiritual,"" and ""secular"" in order to discern understandings of these words in contemporary American culture. For example, he finds that, in English, ""religion"" is our word for a certain kind of response to a certain kind of power (the power and the response both being beyond anything else in our experience). Sommerville then uses these definitions to examine the ways that institutions in the fields of education, science, law, politics and religion are affected--often in unexpected ways--by a shared set of assumptions about what these words mean.