Over at First Things’ blog, R.R. Reno, an associate professor of theology at Creighton University, decides to do his own US News style rankings of theology programs at American institutions of higher education. He puts Duke, Notre Dame, Princeton, and Boston College as one through four in his evaluation. About Marquette he says this:
The Catholic world has it own set of difficulties. Historically, the Jesuits have dominated graduate study in the United States, and I don’t think I am revealing any secrets when I tell you that the Society of Jesus has committed itself and its institutions to a liberal-revisionist agenda. In the 1970s and 1980s, this may have seemed cutting-edge, but these days it’s pretty tired, and tiresome.
This complacent liberalism has hurt Jesuit graduate programs even at Boston College, and it has badly injured places like Marquette, Fordham, and St. Louis University. Rahnerians, feminists, liberationists—these places carry some serious ballast. In my experience, intellectual life is too easily perverted into postures of protest and a quixotic quest against the long dead Catholic ghetto. Again, some excellent faculty teach at these places: Ralph Del Colle, Michel Barnes, and Susan Wood, for example, are at Marquette. But because it is a Jesuit program, the 1970s is still going strong.
My experience of Marquette theology, limited to a trio of classes required for the core, was largely satisfactory. Not particularly engaging or enriching, but good enough. Obviously, decent teachers are not the same as cutting-edge researchers and thinkers, but I wouldn’t complain about my experience.
One thing I would note, though, and this is not something Dr. Reno himself says, is how theology departments are strengthened by other departments thinking theologically.
Look at Reno’s top four schools – Duke, Princeton, Notre Dame and Boston College. I am not as familiar with Duke, but for instance Princeton’s James Madison Program, which is more about political science, is home to Prof. Robert George, who is very theologically astute – for instance FT’s recent discussion of resurrection.
Notre Dame, though, has lots of people outside theology thinking theologically. Look at ND’s Law School. I would put Prof. Charles Rice up against almost any theologian on natural law, and Prof. Gerald Bradley is another top natural law expert. Prof. Richard Garnett is a leading author on Church-State questions. Prof. O. Carter Snead applied theology to stem cells as counsel to the President’s Council on Bioethics. The White Center on Law and Government exists to “examine public policy questions within the framework of Judeo-Christian values” and the Center publishes the Journal of Law, Ethics and Public Policy, which “strengthens the Law School’s moral and religious commitment by translating traditional Judeo-Christian principles into imaginative, yet workable, proposals for legislative and judicial reform.”
Do people at Marquette feel that a sense of theological questions, and experts on the interaction of theology with their own discipline, pervades MU in the same way?
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[...] at the beginning of this school year, in August of 2006, I did a post here on GOP3.com referencing a post on First Things by R.R. Reno, a professor of theology at our Jesuit sister [...]