Word: religion
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Some, however, were not so sanguine, and in the person of Johnstone Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker they found an advocate to express their anxiety about the role of religion, particularly under the category of “Faith and Reason” in a required undergraduate curriculum. Old hostilities to religion as a legitimate area of inquiry were aroused, as was the specter of sinister creationists and out-of-the-closet Jesuits. It was bad enough to have a large and visible chapel here, but to give faith and reason a place in a curriculum long ceded to scientism...
...religion can never really be “put to rest” at Harvard, for it is in our institutional DNA and, with very few exceptions, all of our presidents before 1869 were clergymen. Our senior governing board, the Overseers, still has as one of its honorifics, “The Reverend,” and our most solemn assemblies are usually opened and closed with prayer. When I teach my Harvard history course, many are surprised by the large role that religion played in the foundation of the University, and shocked to learn that Henry Dunster, our first...
...vestigial religious minority, Protestant and Christian, continues to defend itself in the face of a rampant and pluralistic secularism. As a result of Harvard’s own changed admissions policies over the last thirty years, more religiously varied students than ever before now choose to practice their religions here; and many, the products of a secular generation of parents, actually discover religion here for the first time. They are either introduced to the traditions of their ancestors, or they discover a practice that makes sense to them. The varieties of religious experience, as William James once wrote, are alive...
While the professional bashers of religion, such as C. Richard Dawkins, Chrisopher E. Hitchens, and Sam Harris may look with surprise and even alarm at the persistence of religious belief at such a place as Harvard, it is probably fair to say that the will to believe will outlast their critique and that religion at Harvard, both debated and affirmed, will always be at the center of our institutional identity. We may not be a godly place but we are anything but godless, and that is what makes the place so interesting. It is no accident that our most significant...
...rationalists did themselves no favor by scuttling the “Reason and Faith” idea. Forget religion: More Americans believe in astrology than in evolution. The way to combat unreason is to have students engage the dissonance between faith and reason—not avoid it. Instead, faith seems now to have been renamed “belief” and paired with “culture,” where it will ruffle no feathers...