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In an incisive critique, Charles Habib Malik, philosopher and diplomat, laid bare the bankruptcy of the contemporary university: an institution once focused in Jesus Christ but which has now decisively "swerved" from that grounding. The great centers of learning in the Western world have generally abandoned the transcendent basis of their intellectual life. And in our own generation, their significance for the culture has become all-encompassing. The university is the centerpoint of the modern world, the crossroads of our troubled age.

So readers ofBOOKS &CULTURE will need no persuading that the survival of those modest postsecondary institutions that retain a conservative Protestant confessional heritage, the "Christian colleges and universities," is in fact something other than one of the many oddities of our collapsing culture. Their tenuous presence in the educational-cultural complex offers a haunting memory of all our yesterdays as well as a little, hand-sized cloud of promise for the future. As Thomas Cahill's seminal volume How the Irish Saved Civilization has lately reminded us, it is was in little, countercultural learning communities that the last great cultural collapse in Western history was mediated into the glories of the high Middle Ages.

Yet our schools face the most serious of questions as they seek the narrow passage between Scylla and Charybdis, with chapel-veneer secularism on the one hand and fundamentalism redivivus on the other. If our projects in higher education are finally to count for the kingdom in the third millennium, they must be wholly Christian, but they must be equally informed by a passion for cultural engagement. Mere islands of orthodox piety will simply embody the caricature of monastic withdrawal, which, as Cahill has reminded us, even the monks managed to transcend. Yet the answer, as well we know, lies not in the rhetoric of mission statements (we are all postfundamentalists now!), but in the character of our institution building.

And so the question of law. The avalanche of lawyer jokes well testifies to the conflicted status this once-esteemed group has attained, since the immense power that is exercised by those trained in the law lies in every seeming quarter of our society—in the White House and the Congress, quite apart from on the bench, all three branches of our government; and in the great corporations; aside altogether from the trial lawyers who oil the wheels of every engagement of persons one with another. While the corporate leaders and legislators who are also JDs may have left legal practice far behind, it was law schools that trained them how to think, how to argue, how to win. The fabric of our public culture is being decisively shaped by this pre-eminent grouping, and—pace the jokes—while these women and men are good and bad and wise and foolish like the rest of us, they hold in common an uncommon skill in using ideas and arguments, and in their hands are keys to the future of the culture.

So where are we? The Christian Legal Society offers a focus for believing judges and attorneys, and its Law Student Ministries networks Christian students nationwide. We have public-interest law firms that defend religious liberty and human life. And where are our Christian law schools? There are, of course, distinguished Roman Catholic institutions, and it is a thousand pities that conservative Protestants have not managed to preserve their equivalent of the major intellectual centers that are still Catholic in name, and in varying degrees in nature; and they include some leading law schools.

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