Campus Keepers of the Faith

What might moral renaissance in America look like? That’s a question that seems to be going unasked these days. Admittedly, there’s a reason: signs of cultural decline continue to abound, from cratering birth rates to children and adolescents awash in pornography to the sewage of violence and antisemitism on the internet. Yet the tantalizing question remains: Might familiarity bias toward signs of what’s wrong out there obscure just a little of what’s right?

Begin that thought experiment by considering some of what I saw during a visit to Cornell University last spring. In April 2025, I returned to my alma mater at the invitation of Chesterton House, the Evangelical residential study center, and another relative newcomer to campus, the COLLIS Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture.

Initially, their overtures made me a little queasy. Such were my memories of a resolutely secularist Cornell in the early 1980s that I recall asking my family one night, when weighing the invitations, “Do you think anyone will throw rocks?” Expectations, you could say, were low.

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