TROY, Alabama - There are many clues that life at the newest residence hall at Troy University here is not centered on parties and beer. In the lobby, students with Bibles gather to offer Christian testimony. On a dorm-room door, a chalkboard holds a passage from Psalms. And in the 200-square-meter Catholic-run ministry center, evenings are given over to clergy-led discussions.

Citing reports from students who say they are hungry for more faith-based options on campus, officials at Troy, Alabama's third-largest public university, opened the Newman Center hall this semester. The dormitory caters to students who want a residential experience infused with religion.

Kosher dorms, Christian fraternity houses and specialized housing based on values have become part of modern college life. But the dorm on this campus of 7,000 students is among a new wave of religious-themed housing that constitutional scholars and others say is pushing the boundaries of how much a public university can back religion.

"It is not about proselytizing, but about bringing a values-based opportunity to this campus," said Troy's chancellor, Jack Hawkins Jr.

Others are less convinced.

"This is too cozy," said Annie Laurie Gaylor, president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. "We are very concerned about this idea of religious-based dorms. This is very insidious."

This year, the Newman Student Housing Fund, a private Catholic development company, helped open two residence halls at public universities, the one at Troy and one at the Texas A&M University campus in Kingsville. They are modeled on the Newman Hall at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which opened in 1926 and houses 586 students, most of them Catholic.

The company, which also opened a dorm at the private Florida Institute of Technology this semester, has plans to expand to a public university in Florida next year and to keep rolling out a dorm or two each year over the next decade, said Matt Zerrusen, the president of the fund.

The South, with its large population of churchgoers, is particularly ripe. "It's definitely an evangelization opportunity, which is why we went down there," he said.

Troy University's private foundation financed the $11.8 million facility with help from a local bank and leased the land from the university for $1. The Archdiocese of Mobile rents space inside to run a chapel and the ministry center.

"It is faith-based housing, but faith can be anything from atheism to Catholicism," said Dom Godwin, a 19-year-old Catholic. Less than 3 percent of Alabama's population is Catholic.

But some constitutional scholars disagree.

"If you set it up as a faith-based dorm and you expand it to include all faiths, you are still making a constitutional mistake," said Charles C. Haynes of the First Amendment Center in Washington. "Two constitutional wrongs don't make a constitutional right.

"A university really can't take sides in religion, especially in a way that gives certain benefits to people of faith," he said.

The New York Times

A dorm in Alabama caters to students' religious needs. Cary Norton For The New York Times

(China Daily 10/27/2013 page10)