Wednesday, April 23, 2008

The "Secular" Campus and Religion

As a follow-up to our recent posting on Sex and the Soul, we point to the article in Inside Higher Ed on a recent attempt of some colleges to address how being "secular" affects their addressing "big questions" on their campuses.

We suggest slogging through the article with the following SWINDism in mind: "secular" colleges indulge and even endorse their faculty's abdicating responsibility to gain even a rudimentary grasp of the religious and philosophical issues that their various academic disciplines touch. That is nowhere better reflected than in the quotation that ends the article:

When religious content comes up, “Every classroom has very different rules and those rules aren’t written down anywhere,” [Bucknell chaplain] Reverend Oliver says. “What I describe it as is approaching a boundary or a limit and as you get closer you begin to feel like you’re treading into more and more difficult territory because people don’t know what kinds of responses they’re going to get.”

“Those are moments,” he says, “when people pay attention.”

Indeed they are, because no one really cares about the little questions, only the big ones. But putting up boundaries of various kinds is exactly what the "secular" classroom does, and in contrast to the "religious" classroom, the boundaries "aren't written down" or even publicly acknowledged.

That's why Donna Freitas can marvel at the integration and community of the evangelical campus and find it utterly lacking on the secular campus.

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