They love to do their homework

One of the largest Southern Baptist seminaries, Southwestern draws students from around the world to its 200-acre campus, fringed by trees that set it apart from a rundown neighborhood in south Fort Worth. Nearly three-quarters of the 3,000 students at this campus are men, and many are older, having felt a call to ministry in midlife. The seminary caters to their families, with shaded sidewalks for strollers and a duck pond much beloved by toddlers.

In the undergraduate college -- which opened two years ago -- every student must take Greek or Latin, plus seminars that explore works by Sophocles and Shakespeare, Machiavelli and Marx, Darwin and Dostoyevsky.

The other day, Sarah Babler, an 18-year-old freshman enrolled in the homemaking program, was writing a paper on the Trojan War for one class. For another, she was parsing Proverbs 31 -- on the attributes of a godly woman.

She and others in the homemaking program devote about 20% of their classroom time over four years to courses such as "Clothing Construction," "Meal Preparation," and "Value of a Child."

Such classes went out of style at most secular colleges half a century ago, but undergraduate Quincy A. Jones said he considered them essential in a world where too many families are fractured and unhappy. Jones, who is married with five children, said he would encourage his teenage daughter to study homemaking.

"It's not limiting at all," said Jones, 35. "It prepares women for a variety of roles."

Paige Patterson agrees. His goal is to nurture well-rounded women who can do more than press a perfect crease: "We're equipping them to do home-schooling."

An avid hunter who wears cowboy boots to chapel, Patterson, 64, is a powerful -- and polarizing -- figure within the Southern Baptist Convention.

During his tenure as convention president in the late 1990s, Southern Baptists banned women from becoming pastors and called on every wife "to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband." Last year, Patterson fired a female professor of biblical languages; he interprets the Bible as prohibiting women from teaching men theology.

Many moderates have left the Southern Baptist convention in recent years -- including President Carter -- but it remains the largest Protestant denomination, claiming more than 16 million believers and 42,000 churches in the United States.