This article recounts a real-life conversation relating to beliefs, opinions, and attitudes. It asserts the country's democracy needs intellectual debate, but increasingly lacks the inclination and skills to have it. Like students within their homogeneous peer groups, American citizens increasingly inhabit intellectually gated communities.…

The task of general education should be to provide a broad framework for understanding, an intellectual context within which factual information can meaningfully be comprehended. Each framework should have at least three qualities in common: an historical dimension, an intellectual dimension, and an analytical dimension. (MLW)

Criticism of church-related colleges as ignoring or fighting the academic revolution is seen as too severe. Suggestions are made for closing the gap between the academic revolution and traditional institutional religious identity: intellectual pursuits must be affirmed, intellectual pluralism sought, theory critiqued, and the role as a valuing…