Like Crozer itself, Aubrey was something of a theological anachronism, a bulwark of classical liberalism on increasingly conservative terrain. Religious liberals, having won control of most of the nation’s institutions of higher learning twenty-five years earlier, after the Scopes and Fosdick trials, could no longer sustain both academic excellence and mass appeal. Religious thought was becoming vaguer and more secular, no longer commanding the intense public interest that had once put Fosdick on the front page of the Times. Religious conservatives, mean-while, had established their own
...more
