Vanderbilt Divinity School: Education, Contest, and Change.

Edited by Dale A. Johnson. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2001. Pp. [xii], 420. $49.95, ISBN 0-8265-1386-7.)

This collection of essays dealing with a specific divinity school faced two obstacles to its success. First, it would have to overcome the stumbling block that confronts any book of essays: the potential disparity of quality among the articles. Then it would have to avoid the temptation that has plagued so many histories of particular seminaries: the uncritical celebration of institutional accomplishments. Happily, this book clears both hurdles with space to spare. Although some of the essays are more interesting or better written than others, there is not a bad one in the bunch. And although the unmistakable achievements of Vanderbilt Divinity School are analyzed, so are the school's occasional failures, false starts, misguided decisions, and tribulations. Through thirteen articles and one forum dealing with the James M. Lawson racial affair of 1960, a mosaic emerges as the authors treat such matters as the key historical periods of the school, the presence and role of women and African Americans during those periods, changing theological perspectives on the part of the faculty, the lasting effects of the 1960s on both students and faculty, social and cultural implications of the changing courses of study, and the (sometimes strained) relations between the divinity school and the wider university. Some of the same events and persons are treated in different essays, but that usually results less in repetition than in diverse views of the same phenomenon. Editor Dale A. Johnson's brief, well-constructed introductions to each section clarify the intent of the articles that follow and help give unity to the whole.

Most of the essayists have their eyes trained on both the national and the regional setting of Vanderbilt Divinity School. As a consequence, they recognize that the school has been shaped simultaneously by national developments in theological education and by pressures from its location in the South. Especially after Vanderbilt University declared its independence from the Methodist Church and its bishops in the early twentieth century, its divinity school sought to emulate other nondenominational divinity schools, like those at Harvard, Yale, and Chicago. But in its curriculum, social outreach, and institutional aims, Vanderbilt Divinity School also sought to be a seminary for the South. Most of the authors in this collection would insist, therefore, that the school cannot be understood properly without attention to this duality of social and cultural context.

Students of the South have begun to recognize that if religion in the region is to be given its due, the kind of education (or lack thereof) that its leaders have received is altogether pertinent to understanding religious developments over time. Sound scholarly treatments of seminary education like this one contribute significantly to that understanding.

CONRAD CHERRY

Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis