Word: bartleys
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...three major points which Mr. Bartley's article raises have been persuasively discussed by other writers. Mr. Morison and Pres. Pusey have ably shown the bases for disagreement concerning the use of Memorial Church. The place of the Church is surely a question about which men may honestly differ. Mr. Bartley has done all a service by laying bare the problem...
Prof. Wild's letter has clarified his own position and, hence, freed it from the misunderstanding which easily results from too quick a reading of Mr. Bartley's skillful but too subtly constructed article. Prof. Wilder has with consummate skill defended the idea of commitment, an idea which comes only with the experience of constrasting the quality of education received from committed and non-committed men. I suspect that, from a religious standpoint, Harvard students will have gained a far deeper insight into the significance of Protestant thought from Dr. Buttrick's courses than from all the objective lectures...
...second Pusey position with which Bartley takes issue is that religion should be "a unifying force in the curriculum." Christianity is certainly unfitted to play this role, Bartley contends. "There are too many different Christianities-even at Harvard Divinity School-for Christianity to act as a system on which Western men might practically agree today, whatever its unifying power half a millennium ago . . . The greatest of those who are 'trying to bring it up to date,' Paul Tillich, is regarded as a heretic by many others who wish to return it to fundamentalism or Thomism...
...Wind Bag? Bartley would return to President Eliot's "minimum" faith of "love and service to one's neighbor" and war against "the evils which afflict humanity." These tenets he would buttress with President Emeritus James B. Conant's basic answer to the challenge of the Soviet or fascist view of life-a faith in a "wide diversity of beliefs and the tolerance of this diversity...
President Eliot's cautious humanism was not so unrealistic, says Bartley, as the "latterday optimism" of President Pusey, which expects help "from only one kind of contemporary thinker: the flashy existentialist or teutonic theologian who ministers to the 'Big Questions' with big answers and bigger 'systems.' " Harvard is in a worse way, says Bartley, since "it has become forward to look backward and to call perverse those dry and analytical philosophers who deflate the wind bags of our time instead of blowing up more themselves...