The God Quad. "America's 700-plus religiously affiliated colleges and universities are enjoying an unprecedented surge of growth and a revival of interest," reports Charlotte Allen in a Wall Street Journal review of "God on The Quad," a new book by the Journal's own Naomi Schaefer Riley. According to the book, "the number of students attending the 100 schools of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities ... rose 60 percent between 1990 and 2002," during which time "attendance at nonreligious public and private schools stayed essentially flat." That's an interesting development for schools that, for the most part, have not been particularly well-known for academic excellence. So what's the attraction? Ms. Riley, who based her book on visits to "20 strongly confessional campuses across the country," says the soaring enrollments are evidence of what she calls "a missionary generation" intent on changing "today's spiritually empty culture."

Of the students, Ms. Riley writes: "Most dress modestly and don't drink, use drugs or smoke ... They study hard, leaving little time for sitting in or walking out. Most vote, and a good number join the army. They are also becoming lawyers, doctors, politicians, college professors, businessmen, psychologists, accountants, and philanthropists in the cultural and political centers of the country." The schools, meanwhile, "foster a student culture that rejects the intellectual and moral relativism of most college campuses," although they employ "widely varying strategies" to get there. Baylor, for instance, puts heavy emphasis on "sports teams, fraternities and sororities," while others "have strict dress codes and a required liberal-arts curriculum." Nearly all of them do "forbid or discourage premarital" anything other than maybe holding hands, which is allowed at Brigham Young, for example.

However, Magdalen College bans not only dating, but also "televisions in students' rooms ... hanging pictures on dorm-room walls and sitting with one's friends during meals." Major tensions do tend to develop -- not between students, but between students and professors. Most of these schools have indeed upgraded the quality of their academic offerings, but this has required hiring professors "for their scholarly excellence," not their spiritual grounding, necessarily. So, many of the profs "either have no interest in their university's religious identity or actively disdain it." But they seem to be outnumbered, as Ms. Riley pegs the number of "missionary generation" graduates at 1.3 million. And, according to Charlotte Allen, the author "more than proves her case" that "the widely held notion that the members of strongly religious communities in America are somehow intellectually backward is a myth."

Immaculate Sushi. Lunch or dinner there will cost you $350, and you don't get to choose what you consume, but an eatery called Masa is "the first Japanese restaurant to receive four stars from The New York Times since ... 1983" (12/29/04). This time the rating comes courtesy of Frank Bruni, who explains his enthusiasm by describing the look on the face of his maki-eating dining partner: "His eyes grew instantly bigger as his lips twitched into a coyly restrained grin," Frank writes. "Then the full taste of the toro, which is the buttery belly of a bluefin tuna, took visible hold. Forget restraint: he was suddenly smiling as widely as a person with a mouthful of food and a modicum of manners can. His eyes even rolled slightly backward."

A meal at the 26-seat Masa is a three-hour affair, with all items selected and served in a "sequence ... and rhythm" determined by Masayoshi Takayama, its chef and owner. The sushi-priest:disciple ratio typically is 1:2. If you are seated "in one of the 10 seats at the hinkoki wood bar, sanded so frequently that you catch its faint scent," you watch your sushi being prepared by black-robed, short-haired (or shaven headed) chefs "from just inches away." As Frank Bruni relays it: "A chef makes your sushi a piece at a time, reaching for a pristine slab of fluke or Spanish mackerel and using a bone-handled knife to carve a sliver. He presses wasabi or maybe shiso flakes onto a bed of warm rice, lays the fish atop it and then anoints this jewel with soy sauce, yuzu or sudachi, a limelike Japanese fruit." The effect, says Frank is "an immediacy and intimacy unlike anything at more conventional restaurants or for that matter at other upscale sushi bars ..."

That intimacy apparently is a key part of what makes Masa so spectacular: "Masa deals not in wide-angle splendor and broad-canvas fireworks, but in tight-close-ups and miniaturist flares," Frank writes. "It prizes simplicity not only in its cuisine but also in its uncluttered environment ... a minimalist temple, all neutral colors and reverential hush ... The servers," writes Frank, "...seem to have been hired for their genetic inability to speak above a whisper." Masa, he continues "is very much a restaurant of this time and place. Of a dining culture in which linens and petit fours are no longer nonnegotiable badges of class. In which a blockbuster main course often cedes its eminence to a subtler succession of small plates." So, at $350 a head, is it worth it? According to Frank Bruni, "the silky, melting quality of Masa's toro and uni and sea bream, coupled with the serenity of its ambiance, does not exist in New York at a lower price." Masa, by the way, is located in a mall (!) at the Time Warner Center, Columbus Circle, Manhattan: (212) 823-9800.


Tim Manners, editor