GOD AND (WO)MAN ON CAMPUS: Harvard University:
Kiely, Robert
GOD AND (WO)MAN ON CAMPUS Robert Kiely HARVARD UNIVERSITY RELIGION and Harvard have been entwined since the beginning, but Harvard has never been happy about God. The Pur-itans who established...
...In the aftermath of hurt feelings and anger, charges and countercharges, Harvard Catholics have become acutely aware of their need for charity and genuine communion...
...But that was in the 1950s and Nathan Pusey, a practicing Episcopalian, had recently become president of Harvard and awakened old fears and prejudices...
...Nine or ten years ago undergraduates became increasingly distressed by their inability to understand large portions of Dante, Milton, Joyce, Faulkner and even Ernest Hemingway because of their ignorance of the Classics, including those of the Judeo-Christian tradition which had inspired the institution in which they were studying as well as the writers they couldn't understand...
...Still, the actual practice of religion among students and faculty at Harvard tends to be an extra-curricular activity...
...Richard Griffin, S.J., Sister Ann Kelley and Carol Bohn was greeted by a storm of protest from those members of the student body and faculty who felt that the Archbishop of Boston had acted without sufficient consultation and sensitivity to those involved...
...In many ways, the Catholic students are the worst off...
...The typical undergraduate on his or her way to law school no longer wonders, as John Adams did, whether or not to enter the ministry...
...I remember as a graduate student hearing an elderly, Harvard-educated librarian respond with fierce self-satisfaction to a student's inquiry: "If it has to do with the Bible, I don't know anything about it...
...The majority had no strong feelings either way and approved the proposal...
...So after decades of being a near non-subject, religion rejoined the Harvard College curriculum...
...Within the American, and especially the local situation, this suspicion has had some foundation (though the move of Weston Seminary into Cambridge and the presence of young Jesuits in the University has done much to dispel it...
...The first Anglican minister of Cambridge was driven from his parish and home by Harvard Calvinists who were suspicious of him on political as well as religious grounds...
...But they are not all content with the economic definition of "future Happiness" and they do still wonder whether there is "any prospect of doing good to their fellow men...
...to approach their subject while the "know-nothings" supposed that "religious studies" meant giving academic credit to flower children for sitting on a hillside thinking about nothing in particular...
...In recent years, few have seriously expected an official revival of Congregationalist or Unitarian Harvard, but so long as the faculty, administration and student body were heavily populated by liberated descendants of Protestant Harvard families, the demons of former orthodoxies were alive in the memory...
...The residue of mutual prejudice and suspicion has been surprisingly difficult to eliminate...
...In another mood, he saw the ministry as the perfect opportunity both "to do...
...If Harvard could canonize, he would be one of her rugged, virtuous, sensible saints...
...A Catholic undergraduate trying to find guidance, encouragement, or instruction as sophisticated as that provided by the University may well have found it from individual priests, nuns, laypersons and small groups, but if his idea of Ecclesia ranged beyond the remnant, he would have witnessed a local institution torn by clerical uncertainty and mistrust of itself as well as of Harvard...
...The thought of him preaching to birds or being roasted on a spit is inconceivable...
...Religion at Harvard has rarely, if ever, involved agony and certainly not ecstasy...
...For nearly one hundred years, except as it pertained to courses in history, ethics, literature or philosophy, religion rarely reared its head in the College curriculum...
...The scholars, though generally favoring the proposal, expressed reservations about whether undergraduates could master enough Sanskrit, Hebrew, Greek, etc...
...Rabbis, priests, laywomen and laymen regularly deliver the morning address and the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Boston, for the first time in Harvard's history, preached the sermon on Passion Sunday this year...
...At the same time, despite centuries of scholarly and artistic achievement, the Church continues to be viewed by many academics as a bastion of anti-intellectualism...
...The minister to the University's Memorial Church is a Baptist and daily services follow a broad-church Protestant format, but the spirit is open and ecumenical...
...Neither the University nor the institutional Church has provided much help beyond the rudimentary level...
...It was as though they expected their great-grandfathers in long black coats to jump out of the stalls and take over Massachusetts Hall again...
...When the number making these petitions increased to the point where continuation on an ad hoc basis meant budgetary and bureaucratic complications, a proposal for a formal A.B.-granting Committee on Religious Studies came before the faculty...
...Many generations have passed since Harvard was a WASP stronghold, yet for a heavily Irish clergy, humiliations visited on parents and grandparents have been hard to forget...
...John Adams, as everyone knows, chose law instead of theology, and he did go on to do much good for his fellow men...
...The change brought about in 1974 was largely the result of student initiative...
...However much it has changed over the centuries, Harvard continues to teach its students to expect a great deal from themselves and from the communities and institutions to which they commit their lives...
...The dominance of religion in the life and curriculum of the College for more than two centturies resulted in a secularization nearly as narrow and dogmatic in spirit as that which it replaced...
...One or two professors warned that the program was a front for a Protestant takeover, but since it was comparativist in nature and supported by Islamic and Buddhist scholars as well as Judaic and Christian ones, that objection did not catch fire...
...good to his fellow men and make . . . provision for his own future Happiness"-which sounds like the familiar justification offered by contemporary Harvard undergraduates for swarming into law and medicine-though their definitions of "future Happiness" is fiscal not metaphysical...
...When young John Adams (Harvard class of 1755) pondered his future, he naturally considered the ministry...
...The English Department resurrected a course in the King James Bible and, little by little, students with sufficient determination found that by cross-registering in graduate courses at the Divinity School they could petition the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to allow them to major in what amounted to "religious studies...
...Meanwhile the religious life-both spiritual and intellectual-of most undergraduates at Harvard is very much in their own hands...
...Evangelical Protestantism, with its stress on the Bible and a membership accustomed to fending for itself, has shown spiritual vitality in the student-run Christian Fellowship...
...For them, of course, the building of a school was also a religious act, a sign of faith in the Word and in the necessity of learning for those who would understand, follow and preach it...
...But the God of the Mathers was jealous, and though their ancestors had suffered persecution in England, their own conception of veritas was not much leavened with charity, even toward fellow Christians...
...The termination this year of the chaplaincy of Rev...
...What some referred to as "the Puseyfication of Harvard" did not, in that sense, take place...
...The real debate took place between scholars accustomed, because of the moratorium on religious studies in the College, to deal with this subject on the graduate level only and mid-20th century "know-nothings" whose ignorance of religion was so broad and deep as to make them suppose that it was a subject with no history, no systematic thought, no literature or scholarship of its own...
...To anyone who knows the history of Harvard and Boston, this is no small achievement...
...Between 1903, when "majoring" was first introduced, and 1974, despite the presence on the faculty of great Biblical and Church scholars like Harry Wolfson and Arthur Darby Nock, no Harvard undergraduate was permitted to take a degree in theological or religious studies...
...Catholicism has survived in fragments- small prayer groups, informal liturgies, parish loyalists- but there has been no real spiritual center in the past 10 years...
...In one mood it seemed to him "that the study of Theology and the pursuit of it as a Profession would involve him in endless Altercations and make his life miserable, without any prospect of doing any good to his fellow Men...
...How God or religion pertain to those questions is not clear to most of them.r to most of them...
...But despite his efforts and achievements in improving the Divinity School, there was no notable revival of religion or religious study at the undergraduate level in the College...
...When religion was rooted out of the undergraduate curriculum in the 19th century, it was rooted out with a vengeance...
...Portraits show a face of determination, firm intelligence and sobriety, a pious but not flamboyantly religious man...
...Its development (or decline) from Calvinism through Unitarianism to Non-sectarian Secularism has always stressed rationality and ethical earnestness, as those terms have been understood by different generations...
...Judaism, with its ancient scholarly tradition and its capacity to survive in adversity, has maintained a lively center of scriptural, language and ethical studies at Hillel House under the guidance of a learned rabbi...
...The Pur-itans who established this college at the edge of the wilderness in 1636 did a noble and humane thing...
Vol. 102 • March 1975 • No. 1
