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As I always tell the prospective professors who come my way—and they’re not a few, given how much I obviously enjoy my own work in the college classroom—graduate studies in religion involve a difficult, demanding, and sometimes dangerous gamble.
Going to one of the most highly ranked schools is all but essential if you’re to have much hope of landing an academic position later on. But like virtually every other institution of higher learning in the land, these schools are dominated by liberals, with their tired and rather tiresome penchant for critiquing the traditions they purport to be experts in while at the same time castigating, if not simply dismissing, all criticisms of their own post-modernist agendas. It’s an incredibly sad state of affairs, to be sure.
Basically, you’ve got two choices: you can put your brain and your convictions on hold for a few years and go to the school with the highest ranking possible in hopes that the “name” will be a ticket to a job, which will then in turn—God willing—provide you with an opportunity to help future students like yourself, intellectually and spiritually. This was my strategy. I knew very well that Harvard was in thrall to the Zeitgeist and that the theology faculty would teach me very little worth knowing, but I also knew that the mystique of the Harvard brand would likely lead to a tenure-track job. My undergraduate classics mentor, the great Crossett, whom I have praised on this weblog before and who himself had a Harvard Ph.D., told me I would hate the experience, and he was largely right.
On the other hand, you can try to find a school, regardless of its reputation or potential name-recognition, which has at least one faculty member whose work you respect and whom you would like to apprentice yourself to. This would obviously be much better for your soul in the short term, though—as I’ve said—it’s a gamble: there just aren’t that many academic positions for religionists and philosophers, and the less well-known your Ph.D.-granting institution the greater the odds are against your finding a job. And of course by the same reasoning the less well-known your M.A.- or M.T.S.-granting school the greater the odds are against your getting into a top-notch Ph.D. program.
You could always just be a monk. I’m perfectly serious. This is what one of my current masters students plans to do: get the degree and run, moving directly onto something having a clearly intellective, if not intellectual, significance!