It doesn’t take a degree from Harvard to see that in today’s world, a person needs to know something about religion. The conflicts between the Israelis and the Palestinians; between Christians, Muslims, and animists in Africa; between religious conservatives and progressives at home over abortion and gay marriage””all these relate, if indirectly, to what rival groups believe about God and scripture. Any resolution of these conflicts will have to come from people who understand how religious belief and practice influence our world: why, in particular, believers see some things as worth fighting and dying for. On the Harvard campus””where the next generation of aspiring leaders is currently beginning the spring term””the importance of religion goes without saying. “Kids need to know the difference between a Sunni and a Shia,” is something you hear a lot.
But in practice, the Harvard faculty cannot cope with religion. It cannot agree on who should teach it, how it should be taught, and how much value to give it compared with economics, biology, literature, and all the other subjects considered vital to an undergraduate education. This question of how much religion to teach led to a bitter fight when the faculty last discussed curriculum reform, in 2006. Louis Menand, the Pulitzer Prize”“winning literary critic and English professor, together with a small group of colleagues tasked with revising Harvard’s core curriculum, made the case that undergraduate students should be required to take at least one course in a category called Reason and Faith. These would explore big issues in religion: intelligent design, debates within and around Islam, and a history of American faith, for example. Steven Pinker, the evolutionary psychologist, led the case against a religion requirement. He argued that the primary goal of a Harvard education is the pursuit of truth through rational inquiry, and that religion has no place in that.
In the end, Menand & Co. backed down, and the matter never made it to a vote. A more brutal fight was put off for another day. But that’s a pity””for Harvard, its students, and the rest of us who need leaders better informed about faith and the motivations of the faithful. Harvard may or may not be the pinnacle of higher learning in the world, but because it is Harvard, it reflects””for better or worse””the priorities of the nation’s intellectual set. To decline to grapple head-on with the role of religion in a liberal-arts education, even as debates over faith and reason rage on blogs, and as publishers churn out books defending and attacking religious belief, is at best timid and at worst self-defeating.
From wikipedia:
[blockquote] Harvard’s early motto was Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae “Truth for Christ and the Church.” In a directive to its students, it laid out the purpose of all education: “Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternall life, Joh. 17. 3. and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning.[14] [/blockquote]
Nevertheless, the article states that Harvard believes that there is only one correct worldview, some form of natural materialism. All else is reasonless superstition and false. From the article:
[blockquote] Pinker is a public intellectual, a celebrity on the Harvard campus, the kind of teacher who can draw 400 students into a lecture hall and who elicits star-struck stares in the Yard. His specialty is the evolution of language, but all his work, from The Language Instinct to The Blank Slate (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), coheres under the broad notion that a scientific, rational world view is the highest achievement of the human mind. As his wife, the novelist Rebecca Goldstein, put it to him on a day I visited them on Cape Cod, Mass., “All forms of irrationality irk you, but [religion] is the form of irrationality that irks you most.” In Pinker’s view, human progress is an evolution away from superstition, witchcraft, and idol worship—that is, religion—and toward something like a Scandinavian austerity and secularism. (Pinker is one of those intellectuals who speak frequently about how sensible things are in Europe; one suppresses the urge to remind him of the Muslim riots in the Paris and London suburbs.) A university education is our greatest weapon in the battle against our natural stupidity, he said in a recent speech. “We don’t kill virgins on an altar, because we know that it would not, in fact, propitiate an angry god and alleviate misfortune on earth.”[/blockquote]
It is arrogance like this that let people like Pinker both ignore the pre-suppositions in his own worldview and ignore it’s implications. Unfortunately the article does not set out Pinker’s worldview precisely so it is difficult to address without assuming what Pinker actually thinks and putting words in his mouth.
Paula Kane, who is the sole joint appointment in history and religious studies at the University of Pittsburgh, once told me that most of her history colleagues couldn’t begin to understand why she would want to address the question of religious motivation. When you consider the ebb and flow of American history, the mind boggles.
When you cite wikipedia, you’re citing such eminent scholars as:
Adorno rocks
CartoonDiablo
Foamycocoa97
NuclearWarfare
Heracles31
CinchBug
Aliceinlampyland
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Harvard_University&action=history
Not terribly compelling.
It was just a convenient source for the Harvard motto. The university has reduced it from [i]Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae[/i] to simply [i]Veritas[/i].
[blockquote] But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with them. They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over weak-willed women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, [b]always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth.[/b] [/blockquote]
And we are supposed to trust a comment from paradoxymoron ???
Not terribly compelling — everyone knows proper names are capitalized. It should be Paradoxymoron.
This was a brilliant article, from that vanishing species of journalists specializing in religion. The article mentions the ‘spectacular flame-out’ of Larry Summers. I remember reading about it at the time, and being astonished that at a world-class university new ideas, new perspectives (like that coming from Summers) could not be discussed, indeed seemed to be ruled out with arguments little better than how dare he … (he had wondered aloud whether the relative dearth of female scientists might come not from discrimination, but reflect an inherent female lack of interest). Universities in theory are places of blue sky thinking, open discourse, objectivity … (cue for stifled laughter). The reactions of Pinker in this article, alone, are enough to show us that we would be naive if we believed this. Religion has so many cultured despisers, yet the ship of faith sails on serenely.
Unfortunately the people of Harvard and the other elite schools, furnish the people who hold positions, in the State Department, CIA, banks, and they are considered to be the ideal people in which TEC wants to find candidates for ordination. From this article, you also notice a lack of empathy, or the ability to understand another person’s point of view. What we have is a university and all of it’s clones, think that they are better than the rest of the people in the world and if we of the uninformed masses, just stay out of their way, they(Harvard) will solve all of the world’s problems. Aren’t these the same people that gave us the Vietnam War and our present financial crisis? But hey, that will never be taught at Harvard as well as any course on or about religion.
In my experience, Harvard attracts a lot of people like…
Adorno rocks
CartoonDiablo
Foamycocoa97
NuclearWarfare
Heracles31
CinchBug
Aliceinlampyland
to its faculty and student body. Most of them would like us to leave the world for them to bustle in whatever the underlying veritas of the matter might be.