As Harvard goes . . . .
Well . . . if Harvard U proposes requiring a course integrating issues of faith and reason for all students, then what shall the rest of us do?
I’m referring to a Harvard curriculum committee proposal noted in The Dallas Morning News 27OCT06, article by Rev. John I. Jenkins (Notre Dame president) and their provost Thomas Burish.
Also: http://www.pluralism.org/news/index.php#headline13793 for more details.
Students on Tiger Mountain take religion courses. Of course the Harvard thing is only surprising because it’s an all-university requirement, and because it is meant to tackle the “profoundly secular” intellectual and campus culture there. After 370 years that’s not so shocking, or it might be.
In the background: John Harvard, baptized into the Church of England at Southwark, London, lived only 13 months in Massachusetts Bay Colony before he died, perhaps from the plague that had killed much of his family in England. Before dying he bequeathed his small library (320 volumes) and 779 Pounds to endow the tiny college started chiefly to educate ministers — but other colonists, and even Indians — in “knowledge and godlynes” as he put it. Actually it was a pretty generous bequest. In gratitude the colonists renamed Newtown after Harvard’s university at Cambridge in England (where he studied to be a clergyman) and, of course, the new college after him. Harvard University has wider interests now; it was so within a generation or two from the founding. But the idea that now there is some more consideration, though from more divergent viewpoints (!), of “knowledge and godlynes” causes me to keep Harvard’s renewed focus in mind.
Well, if Harvard does this, why should it not be considered a positive move? Why not for any university committed to freedom of inquiry? It’s the kind of move that will also motivate profs and students to delve more deeply into the historical and philosophical foundations of our multi-culture. The thirsty should slake their thirst; the hungry be sated.
While on the themes of “ad fontes,” why, even the technoratic Chinese helmsmen have been urging the Chinese Communist Party rank-and-file to study up on their Confucian heritage (check:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/record/archives/vol20/vol20_iss12/record2012.31.html).
Too, “cultural Christianity” is a growing favorite among Chinese bureaucrats and businessmen. They must feel and recognize the need for a return to something basic and reliable. That, too, for Harvard, and so for the rest of us.