Interesting post a few weeks ago from The Atlantic: why Theology (and not just Religious Studies) should have a core place in the Humanities at major Universities. Here is a good bit of it:
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When I first told my mother—a liberal, secular New Yorker—that I
wanted to cross an ocean to study for a bachelor’s degree in theology,
she was equal parts aghast and concerned. Was I going to become a nun,
she asked in horror, or else one of “those” wingnuts who picketed
outside abortion clinics? Was I going to spend hours in the Bodleian
Library agonizing over the number of angels that could fit on the head
of a pin? Theology, she insisted, was a subject by the devout, for the
devout; it had no place in a typical liberal arts education.
Her view of the study of theology is far from uncommon. While elite
universities like Harvard and Yale offer vocational courses at their
divinity schools, and nearly all universities offer undergraduate majors
in the comparative study of religions, few schools (with the exceptions
of historically Catholic institutions like Georgetown and Boston
College) offer theology as a major, let alone mandate courses in
theology alongside other “core” liberal arts subjects like English or
history. Indeed, the study of theology has often run afoul of the legal
separation of church and state. Thirty-seven U.S. states have laws
limiting the spending of public funds on religious training. In 2006,
the Supreme Court case Locke v. Davey
upheld the decision of a Washington State scholarship program to
withhold promised funding from an otherwise qualified student after
learning that he had decided to major in theology at a local Bible
College.
Even in the United Kingdom, where secular bachelor's programs in
theology are more common, prominent New Atheists like Richard Dawkins
have questioned their validity in the university sphere. In a 2007 letter to the editor of The Independent, Dawkins
argues for the abolishment of theology in academia, insisting that “a
positive case now needs to be made that [theology] has any real content
at all, or that it has any place whatsoever in today's university
culture.”
Such a shift, of course, is relatively recent in the history
of secondary education. Several of the great Medieval universities,
among them Oxford, Bologna, and Paris, developed in large part as
training grounds for men of the Church. Theology, far from being
anathema to the academic life, was indeed its central purpose: It was
the “Queen of the Sciences” the field of inquiry which gave meaning to
all others. So, too, several of the great American universities.
Harvard, Yale, and Princeton alike were founded with the express purpose
of teaching theology—one early anonymous account of Harvard's founding
speaks of John Harvard's “dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to
the Churches”, and his dream of creating an institution to train future
clergymen to “read the original of the Old and New Testament into the
Latin tongue, and resolve them logically.”
Universities like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton no longer exist, in
part or in whole, to train future clergymen. Their purpose now is far
broader. But the dwindling role of theology among the liberal arts is a
paradigmatic example of dispensing with the baby along with the
bathwater.
Richard Dawkins would do well to look at the skills imparted by the
Theology department of his own alma mater, Oxford (also my own)....
Read the whole story here.
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