Word: christian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Religious questioning actually leads, as many ministers point out, to a type of humanism--Christian sentiment not necessarily entailing belief in God or organized religion. This feeling, most evident among those who attend church infrequently, results from the leaven of the pragmatic, liberal Harvard education intensifying pre-existent doubts. Doubting, for 55 per cent of Harvard Protestants, started in secondary school. Under the influence of the College atmosphere doubting grows into agnosticism or into humanism. "I personally feel this humanism is much better than drabby churchiosity," a very prominent minister commented...
...University community, the curriculum, and the teaching attitudes offer a distinctly Christian tradition. Rabbi Gold maintains, though, that the prevailing faith, not only in American universities, but in Western civilization, is not even Judeo-Christian, but Greco-Christian. How does the Jewish student, with only a poor knowledge of his own faith, fare when he meets such foreign and challenging philosophies for the first time...
Rabbi Gold sees the student in a quandry, suffering from two basic deficiencies: first, he has no fundamental understanding of himself as a Jew; and second, he has no exposure to varieties of thought. "The Jewish student begins to see his Judaism through Christian glasses. This is deplorable, since it distorts his understanding of himself as a Jew. One has to know who he is as a Jew before being exposed to the Christian views...
Another attitude the Jewish student may have toward Christian or agnostic ideas he meets for the first time in his reading or his philosophy course was noted by Harry A. Wolfson, Nathan Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy, Emeritus. "Because the Jew doesn't have the background, he is made curious. It is the impact of novelty...There is some disadvantage, but I look at it like taking a new course. The Jewish fellow has to learn something new, but he came to college to learn something...
...agnostic's view came in a close second; after it came the traditional Christian formulation and then the belief in "a vast, impersonal principle of order or natural uniformity working throughout the entire universe...which, though not conscious of mere human life, I choose to call 'God.'" And 33 people felt moved to sketch their own conceptions of the Deity since the poll hopelessly failed to offer them a satisfactory approximation...