Word: religion
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...University Preacher George A. Buttrick for refusing to allow a Jewish student to be married by a rabbi in Memorial Church. It took a month for the Corporation to reverse the ruling and end the debate that had sustained dinner table conversations for weeks. In the eight years since religion as dinnertime conversation has rarely lasted through the potatoes, and its campus representative, the United Ministry, has in that time had to get used to talking largely to itself...
Exciting things have happened to religion in those eight years. The ecumenical movement has arisen with Pope John and a number of articulate Protestant leaders producing tangible church reform and reunification. American churches haves for the first time become involved in politics. Religious architecture and education have embraced a thousand accouterments of the modern world, right down to Madison Avenue advertising. But aside from a few small scattered course and seminars, the only sustained discussion of these issues at Harvard has occurred once a week in a room at the Phillips Brooks House, where the Harvard-Radcliffe United Ministry...
University religion courses are designed not to defend one faith but to explain all. "We're not selling it; we're studying it," says Chairman John Hutchison of the Claremont College's religion department. Universities deliberately avoid hiring propagandizers for a faith. "It's completely irrelevant to us whether a man is a good Christian or a good Protestant or a good atheist just so long as he is a good and competent scholar," says Columbia's Joseph Blau. Western Michigan has had a Jesuit priest teaching Hinduism and Buddhism, while at Wisconsin a course...
...Marks for Piety. The objectivity of the religion courses sometimes startles students, who frequently sign up to have their faith reinforced, not scrutinized. At Michigan State Dr. Robert T. Anderson, a conservative Methodist theologian, begins Religion 220 by telling his students: "The Bible is the greatest collection of mythology in the history of Western civilization." Students who were fundamentalists in September frequently are demythologizers by January. Some students who have no faith take the courses because they fill a genuine lack in their experience. Seven of 14 who took one Dartmouth class on Kierkegaard billed themselves as agnostics. Students...
...Religion is expanding so fast as a study that most universities have a hard time finding competent teachers. Dr. Thomas O'Dea, head of Columbia's religion department, estimates that it will be five years before there are enough Ph.D.s "to fill a demand that is so large it's almost a vacuum." Yet O'Dea believes the vacuum will be filled, since colleges are realizing that "without a thorough knowledge of a culture's religion, it is often nearly impossible to understand that culture...