This is related, K-Lo: I’m reading Naomi Schaefer Riley’s God on the Quad, which takes a look at how religiously oriented colleges are doing their

thing these days. (Actually, you interviewed her a few days back about it, didn’t you?) Last night, I read the chapter about Thomas Aquinas College, the orthodox Roman Catholic “Great

Books” school in southern California. I was pleased to learn from Naomi’s

book that the school’s applications jumped bigtime after they started

advertising in National Review.

Anyway, perhaps the most startling thing I learned from this chapter was

that of the TAC undergrads, nearly every one of them orthodox Catholics, who

went to religious high schools and grammar schools, a large percentage of

them studied at Protestant “Bible-based” schools — not Catholic parochial

schools. Isn’t that something? I’ve got to be honest here and admit that my

five-year-old son is part of a small Catholic population at a wonderful Reformed

school in our neighborhood, which operates as a hybrid homeschooling program

(that is, the kids get half a day of classroom instruction, and the parents

take over at home later). At least two other orthodox Catholic parents have

their kids in our son’s kindergarten class there. I can’t speak for the

other parents, of course, but one big reason Julie and I chose to put our

son there is because we have total confidence in the seriousness with which

this school takes Christianity. And frankly, we believe it will be easier to

raise our son as a faithful orthodox Catholic as an outsider in this

Reformed school than to put him in a Catholic school that doesn’t take

either Christian or Catholic identity all that seriously. I was amazed to

read in God on the Quad that quite a few TAC parents felt the same way.