When I first saw the gothic chapel at Princeton University many years ago, I was quite taken aback. It was large, beautiful inside and out with a spectacular stained glass window over the altar, and seemed surprisingly Catholic for a university that I had always taken to be professionally secular, neutral and mainly disinterested in religious matters. Margaret Grubiak’s book offers a great deal of enlightenment on the unusual circumstances and controversies over chapel construction and gives intriguing thoughts on the reasons for their decline. When finished with the book, I actually wished for an extension of it into current times to see what has since been the fate of the “white elephants.” But presumably that will have to wait.
Grubiak restricts herself in two ways to make the material manageable. The first restriction is that of the time period of great chapel building, or non-building in the case of Johns Hopkins, to 1920-1960; the second is her limitation to several chapels of the great private universities. The book covers principally the chapels at Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Pittsburgh and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with an epilogue about the controversy concerning the cross in the Wren chapel at William & Mary. There is no discussion of the situation of chapels at Catholic or other presently confessional universities, though the Catholic reader will recognize some of the arguments and will find some of the controversies surprisingly familiar.
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