Forever is a Long Time: Reconsidering Universities' Perpetual Endowment Policies in the Twenty - First Century

College and university officials in the United States have long invoked a combination of Anglo-Saxon legal precedents, plus the obligations of responsible philanthropic stewardship, to justify policies of perpetual endowments. Closely related to this general principle has been the practice of not spending more than the annual earnings (in other words, interest and dividends) from an endowment. Our historical analysis provides a counter to this contemporary conventional wisdom that has been accepted with little critical consideration in American higher education. Rediscovery of philosophical arguments, and actual cases of foundations and philanthropists who placed limits on the life span of gifts, demonstrates how historical research can provide an informed base for reconsideration of government and institutional policies and practices that shape giving and spending at colleges and universities in the twenty-first century.The grounding in economics for our study is Howard Bowen's 1980 "revenue theory" of college costs. The historical precedent for our policy analysis comes from eighteenth-century France, as advanced by A.J. Turgot, to shape national economic development. Its implications for higher education in the United States is illustrated by philanthropist John D. Rockefeller's reservations about a perpetual endowment for an educational project: "Forever is a long time . . ." Our historical research addresses the consequences -- pro and con -- of government policies requiring colleges to spend endowments at more than a marginal annual rate and in a fixed period of time; and, secondly, are there good reasons for donors to colleges to voluntarily opt to increase spending and place time limits on gifts

The Bible and Creationism

Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) marked a significant challenge to traditional understandings of the Bible and Christian theology. Darwin’s theory of organic evolution stood in sharp contrast with the Genesis account of creation, with its six days, separate creations of life forms, and special creation of human beings. More than this, Darwin’s ideas raised enormous theological questions about God’s role in creation (e.g., is there a role for God in organic evolution?) and about the nature of human beings (e.g., what does it mean to talk about original sin without a historic Adam and Eve?) Of course, what really made Darwin so challenging was that by the late nineteenth century his theory of organic evolution was the scientific consensus. That is to say, American Protestants had no choice but to reckon with Darwinism. For many Protestant intellectuals, clergy, and laypersons, this was not an enormous obstacle. That is, and in keeping with previous Christian responses to scientific developments, many Protestants adjusted their understanding of the Bible and their theology to accommodate Darwin’s ideas

Righting America at the Creation Museum

On May 28, 2007, the Creation Museum opened in Petersburg, Kentucky. Aimed at scientifically demonstrating that the universe was created less than ten thousand years ago by a Judeo-Christian god, the museum is hugely popular, attracting millions of visitors over the past eight years. Surrounded by themed topiary gardens and a petting zoo with camel rides, the site conjures up images of a religious Disneyland. Inside, visitors are met by dinosaurs at every turn and by a replica of the Garden of Eden that features the Tree of Life, the serpent, and Adam and Eve. In Righting America at the Creation Museum, Susan L. Trollinger and William Vance Trollinger, Jr., take readers on a fascinating tour of the museum. The Trollingers vividly describe and analyze its vast array of exhibits, placards, dioramas, and videos, from the Culture in Crisis Room, where videos depict sinful characters watching pornography or considering abortion, to the Natural Selection Room, where placards argue that natural selection doesn’t lead to evolution. The book also traces the rise of creationism and the history of fundamentalism in America. This compelling book reveals that the Creation Museum is a remarkably complex phenomenon, at once a “natural history” museum at odds with contemporary science, an extended brief for the Bible as the literally true and errorless word of God, and a powerful and unflinching argument on behalf of the Christian right

Time Is Of The Essence: Foundations And The Policies Of Limited Life And Endowment Spend-Down

In contrast to congressional hearings and proposed punitive legislation, we consider the present and past proposition that institutions, especially nonprofit foundations, opt voluntarily and by decision to spend down endowments. And, by extension, for many cases, it includes consideration that boards and donors may wish to plan for deliberate dissolution of funds or foundations to coincide with a fixed, finite target date for addressing solutions to specific foundation programs and agenda items

The Juvenile Curfew: Unconstitutional Imprisonment

Faced with rising crime rates, many municipalities in recent years have enacted juvenile curfews. Professor Tona Trollinger uses an ordinance enacted in Dallas, Texas, as a framework for analyzing juvenile curfews. The author discusses various prudential and constitutional objections to these curfews, including both substantive and procedural due process challenges. The author concludes that the admittedly valid governmental objectives underlying such curfews do not override their constitutional infirmities

The Aporetic Witness

The opportunity that this shift from modernity to postmodernity may have opened for faith to speak to reason has not gone unnoticed by theologians. Indeed a number of what we might call poshnodern theologians have advocated various ways that Christians ought to wihless in their contemporary context. However, because these theologians have tended to mistake our postmodern world for a pluralistic world, they also have tended to write theologies that promote cultural security over faithful witness

Faith, History, and the Conference on Faith and History

The author notes of this paper, given as a keynote address: The talk that I give tonight is not the talk that I was originally planning to deliver at this conference. When I was asked to give the keynote address, I assumed that I would simply present an elongated version of the paper that I was going to give in this morning\u27s session on Peace, Justice, and Evangelicals ; my paper was to be on the strengths and weaknesses and omissions in the recent literature written by evangelicals on the notion of a Christian approach to history. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I needed to do more than this. Presidential addresses have not been a custom in this organization — and after tonight you may conclude that not having presidents speak was a very good tradition indeed — and it gradually became apparent to me that I really needed to take this opportunity to say something about the past, present, and future of this organization. While the original title, \u27The Whole Gospel for a Broken World\u27: Evangelicals and the Writing of History, would in some sense still work — I have a fair amount to say about Christian perspectives in the writing of history — the better title is, indeed, Faith, History, and the Conference on Faith and History

Review: \u27God Hates: Westboro Baptist Church, American Nationalism, and the Religious Right\u27

America is Doomed. God Hates Obama. Fags Doom Nations. Thank God for Dead Soldiers. All these are signs held up at military funerals by members of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas. In God Hates sociologist Rebecca Barrett-Fox gives us the first full-scale examination of Westboro, and it makes for fascinating and horrifying reading. She begins her study with an ethnography of the church, including a biography of founding pastor Fred Phelps, that makes use of interviews with church members to delineate Westboro’s hyper-Calvinist theology and its understanding of the connection between individual sin (particularly, homosexuality) and national tragedy (particularly, the death of soldiers), a point that the church seeks to bring home with its picketing. ... God Hates is a disturbing book, more for what it says about the Religious Right than for it what it says about Westboro Baptist. It is worth reading

Review: \u27Religion in America Since 1945: A History\u27

Anyone who has taught a course in U.S. religious history knows the daunting challenge of adequately dealing with the riotous diversity of religion in America. This challenge moves from daunting to nearly overwhelming when one gets to the years after World War II. But now comes along Patrick Allitt, professor of history at Emory University, who, in Religion in America Since 1945, has managed to create out of this apparent chaos a lucid, compelling narrative of recent U.S. religious history. Of course, and as Allitt observes in his introduction, in order to “prevent the book from taking the form of a mere list or set of encyclopedia entries” he is forced to give only passing attention to “vast areas of American religious history” (p. xiii). Readers will be thankful that the author chose to be selective, as the result is a coherent, graceful account. It thus may be the worst sort of academic quibbling to suggest that the book could have benefited from more attention to mainline Protestantism (how the writing of American religious history has changed!), peace churches, and Native religion. But it is not quibbling to lament that there is almost nothing here on Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement (the latter does not even appear in the index), given that, as Grant Wacker and others have made clear, this may be the most important religious movement of the twentieth century

Fundamentalism

In America fundamentalism is a movement within Protestantism that was organized immediately after World War I in opposition to modernism, which included liberal theology primarily, and also Darwinism and secularism. A subgroup of evangelicalism, fundamentalism staunchly affirmed with evangelicals fundamentals of the faith, including the deity of Christ, his virgin birth, his bodily resurrection, and his substitutionary atonement. What distinguishes fundamentalists from other evangelicals is their strident opposition to modernism. They are, to quote George Marsden, militant anti-modernist evangelicals