Mike Higton's A Theology of Higher Education is a truly laudable and impressive book which seeks to provide a fair description of the modern university and then to make a case for employing a Christian sense of moral grammar and spiritual insight in order to nudge universities in positive directions. Within that frame, Higton is relentlessly positive in his understanding of both Christianity and the academy. At no point in the book is there any hint of the church versus the world, or of the faithful versus the faithless, or of religious truth versus rationality. The assumption is that the contemporary academy is religiously and secularly diverse and that this is something Christians can and should celebrate. Higton's optimistic and gracious rendering of educational history and ideals emerges from his own experience in the Anglican tradition, but his call for universities to become better places does not require submission to any specific rule of faith.

The volume itself is divided into two parts. In part I, Higton identifies three ideals – virtue, sociality and the common good – which are foundational to the university and then proceeds to survey past and present Christian attitudes about them. His history recounts the twelfth-century University of Paris and its attempts to use reason in the service of faith, moves on to Berlin and the establishment of the modern research university which implicitly embraces a Christian sense of the sociality of knowledge even while explicitly rejecting the truth claims of faith, and then concludes with a detailed analysis of John Henry Newman's model of the Catholic university. Higton's survey of contemporary attitudes focuses on theological perceptions of the academy, ranging from those of Americans Nicholas Wolterstorff and Stanley Hauerwas to Cambridge's David Ford and a stable of other British theologians. In part II, Higton develops his own distinctive understanding of the university, articulating an explicitly Anglican theology of learning and then refracting it through the lenses of his three ideals (virtue, sociability, the public good) situated within the empirical messiness of what he calls the ‘negotiable university’.

Careful and elegant writing abounds in this volume, especially in the book's first section. For example, Higton describes Newman's ‘contrast between viewing and viewiness, where a well-formed mind is a mind with views, and the ill-formed alternative can possess only an ersatz and insubstantial viewiness’ (p. 87), and he then includes a clever yet helpful footnote that Newman's ‘viewiness’ predated the comic Stephen Colbert's similarly intentioned coining of the term ‘truthiness’. The chapter on ‘an Anglican Theology of Learning’ is arguably the volume's most important, and the most lyrical. Taking the liturgy as a ritual précis of Christian faith and life in its entirety, Higton argues that the distinctive contribution of an Anglican theology of learning is its sense of ‘learning understood as the reception of a gift’. He explains that education enhanced by the Anglican tradition will be ‘a form of learning that inherently involves participation in a certain kind of gracious and open community’ (p. 150), a community that serves the world through wisdom, repair, delight and lament (pp. 164–5).

In the final chapters of the book, Higton looks for – and finds – evidence that the values and ideals of Anglican worship are already present in the contemporary university, which he describes as a complex web of overlapping moral economies. In this section, Higton also tries to connect his lofty idealism to the ‘ambiguous and unfinished muddle’ (p. 256) of actual practices which define the university today. Whether Christian or not, scholars who find themselves caught in the limen between the ideals and realities of academic life will find both pragmatic insights and spiritual/intellectual hope in this book.