Buy This Book

"It's a chilly March morning in the mountain of southern California when I wake up in the guest hacienda at Thomas Aquinas College. I switch off the eletric blanket - embarrassed to have needed it in what I expected to be a tropical clime. Impatiently, I flip throught the radio stations on the digital alarm clock, unable to find a news broadcast. the room has no television either, so CNN is out. I am not waiting to hear about anything in particular - the terrorist attacks of september are beginning to feel distant and I don't have much money in the stock market - just trying to quell this felling of isolation that has come over me suddenly.

"I saw a newspapper yesterday, but that was in New York, before I flew non-stop to Los Angeles, before I drove three hours - the last in pitch darkness - throught the Los Padres National Forest to rual Santa Paula. It was before my cell phone lost its signal, before the twelve-lane highways turned to two, before a student wearing a tweed jacket and carrying an old-fashioned lantern (did I dream that part?) came to meet me at the gate of the college. It was before I arrived in this strange room, with the brown shag carpeting and the crucifix over the bed and the cross on the dresser with canles on either side.

"As I think to plug in my computer and reconnect with the outside world, David Shaneyfelt, a tall man comfortably dressed in kakis and a short sleeved polo shirt, comes to the door. ... "How did you sleep?" he asks, adding immediately, "You know Mother Teresa stayes in that bed."

That is the introduction to TAC given in God and the Quad. The author, I am sure most of you rember when she was on campus, is a fellow at The Ethics and Public Policy Center, so I got an e-mail about the book being published and I whent out a picked it up. It is well worth the read, especially for those whom wish to go and get PhD's. In fact the chapter on TAC is the least interesting. I mean I know all about the school, the social life, the lone jew on campus, and the drinking at the pit. What is most interesting is that we are not alone. There are over a score of relgious colleges that are growing faster than they can hire faculty. That means there could be jobs for us. Further that means we are not alone. We are not the only people standing up to the culture and trying to save what came before. Although we where told many times we are. In other words, there is more reason to hope than we ever knew.