Report on the Fourth Meeting of the
Lilly Seminar on Religion and Higher Education

The Bishop's Lodge, Santa Fe, New Mexico
September 11-13, 1998

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Second Year Theme: Teaching of Religion and the Role of Religion in Teaching

Lilly Seminar Members in Attendance:
Nancy Ammerman (Hartford Seminary)
Michael Beaty (Baylor University)
Richard Bernstein (New School for Social Research)
Barbara DeConcini (American Academy of Religion)
Denis Donoghue (New York University)
Jean Bethke Elshtain (The Divinity School, University of Chicago)
Philip Gleason (University of Notre Dame)
Stephen Haynes (Rhodes College)
James L. Heft (University of Dayton)
Monika Hellwig (Association of Catholic Colleges & Universities)
David Hollinger (University of California-Berkeley)
Richard Hughes (Pepperdine University)
Jeanne Knoerle (Lilly Endowment)
Eugene Y. Lowe, Jr. (Northwestern University)
Richard Mouw (Fuller Theological Seminary)
Mark Noll (Wheaton College)
Francis Oakley (Williams College)
Mark Schwehn (Valparaiso University)
Douglas Sloan (Teachers College, Columbia University)
Peter Steinfels (Georgetown University, New York Times)
Eleonore Stump (St. Louis University)
James Turner * (University of Notre Dame)
Diane Winston (Center for the Study of American Religion, Princeton University)
Alan Wolfe (Boston University)
Nicholas Wolterstorff* (The Divinity School, Yale University)
Robert Wuthnow (Princeton University)

*Co-directors

Seminar Members Unable to Attend:
Alan Boesak
Craig Dykstra (Lilly Endowment)
Nathan Hatch (University of Notre Dame)
Frank Turner (Yale University)

Lilly Seminar Staff:
Donna Ring
Andrea Sterk
 
 

RECURRING THEMES

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SESSION I - SATURDAY MORNING

 Jim Turner opened the seminar with a reminder that the present meeting is the second half of our year on the theme of religion and teaching.  Our last meeting was primarily concerned with how the subject of religion is and ought to be taught.  This time we will focus on the relevance of religious commitments in teaching: should they be relevant, and if so, how?
 Jim also introduced the morning session on the so-called "declension hypothesis", a session deriving from some of the issues raised during our last meeting.  In light of our specific concern with religion and higher education, the broad question is whether the distancing of the academy from religion represents declension or advance.  At one end of the spectrum would be the view that the de-Christianization of universities in the late 19th century was a very bad thing that has led to all kinds of evil effects and that we should try to correct it by re-connecting universities with religion.  At the other end of the spectrum would be the view that de-Christianization of universities was a very good thing that has produced all kinds of beneficial effects and that we should endorse and maintain it.  In between are a host of complex positions which don't fit easily under either what might be called the nostalgic or the progressive views.  Turner described his own view by way of example.  He sees the de-Christianization of the academy in the late 19th century was on the whole a positive phenomenon with quite a few beneficial results, and it is a development that should be celebrated, not deplored.  But the simple division of religion from the academy is not something that we ought to insist on as a general rule.  Institutional pluralism among different kinds of colleges and universities--ranging from strong religious commitment to a completely secular point of view--is a very good thing given the nature of American society and the imperatives of the quest for knowledge.  Furthermore, in the de-Christianization of the academy there was a kind of severing of academic knowledge from the intellectual resources associated not only with the Christian tradition but also with Judaism, and that represented some intellectual losses.  Jim thinks that the intellectual life of the academy, whether religious or secular universities, could be enriched by attempts to recover those intellectual resources.  In short, his view on declension is that this is the wrong way to phrase the question or theory.
 In preparation for this session, sections of three books had been distributed to:  David Hollinger, "Jewish Intellectuals and the De-Christianization  of American Public Culture in the Twentieth Century," chapter 2 of his book Science, Jews and Secular Culture; George Marsden, The Soul of the American University, chapters 15, 22 and the postscript; and Mark Schwehn, Exiles from Eden, chapters 2 and 3.  Hollinger and Schwehn gave presentations followed by the short responses of Alan Wolfe and Richard Mouw.  The session concluded with discussion.
 

David Hollinger, University of California, Berkeley

 David Hollinger first gave some background on the origins of his own piece and its connection to the concerns of the seminar.  He noted that there is a relationship between his work and George Marsden's analysis of religion and higher education, and presumably it was on that basis that Turner and Wolterstorff included in the reading for the morning's discussion certain sections of Marsden's The Soul of the American University.   Hollinger and Marsden are both part of a cohort of specialists in U.S. history who have been interested in religion as a component of American history.  Several other Lilly Seminar members have attended other conferences and seminars where these interests have been engaged.  For a number of years, Hollinger explained, he would go to these conferences and people would speak about how important it is that we get more religion in the teaching and writing of American intellectual and social history.  Hollinger himself would often make a comparison with the failure of socialism.  We have a vast literature on the failure of socialism in the U.S., and it seemed to him that the big question about religion in 20th-century America was the failure of secularization.  Hollinger has also argued that "religion is much too important to be left in the hands of people who believe in it."  It was in the context of making these kinds of speeches that he would meet George Marsden and other people interested in American religion.  David was increasingly distressed by the approach that Marsden was taking to some of these issues, and he wrote the present essay partly as a way to add some other elements to the conversation that he felt George and others in this group were not engaging specifically.
 Hollinger spoke of his reservations about Marsden's book.  He finds it a needlessly parochial perspective on the topic it addresses.  It is a declension narrative.  He referred to the suggestion in his own piece (on p.21) that  a lot of people see this story in terms of a nation-specific narrative of declension rather than looking at the narrative in the context of the intellectual history of the North-Atlantic West.  If you look at it from this latter perspective, then what you find is a narrative of persistence, not a narrative of declension.  It seems to him that this is something more people ought to be talking about, i.e. the persistence of religion, particularly of Christianity.
 His chief concern about Marsden's account as history is that it tells us very little about the reasons that intelligent, educated people in the American academic world might have had for withdrawing some of their spiritual capital from Christianity or for making religious commitment a less prominent part of their work as scholars, scientists and teachers.  He feels that George does not tell us enough about standard parts of the intellectual history of the North-Atlantic West.  It is not that George is unaware of these facts.  It is a matter of emphasis.  There is very little in his account about biblical scholarship, the Darwinian controversy, the development of materialist perspectives on many aspects of life, and the development of social-scientific perspectives on religious experience as such.  David believes it's possible to read The Soul of the American University and come away without an understanding that Durkheim, Weber, Malinovsky, Russell, Freud, Marx and Feuerbach were engaged in a vast discourse about religion which affected the way American academics thought about it.  This part of the story is not foregrounded enough, at least from his point of view as an historian of the twentieth-century U.S.  As a result, we get a picture of a lot of pusillanimous Protestant leaders that somehow didn't have the courage of their convictions.  They were unable to defend their faith and caved in to the enthusiasms of the counter-culture.  If we want to confront this seriously as a historical proposition, Hollinger affirmed, there are a lot of other things going on that affect the story that George does not say enough about.
 Hollinger also finds Marsden's account of Jews in the academy inadequate.  There is a little section on this in the chapter entitled "Outsiders", but Hollinger thinks it is weak and doesn't come to grips with the extent to which anti-semitism was an integral part of the program of Christian education in the U.S.  George cites a bit of the evidence here and there, but David doesn't think he comes to grips with it.  Moreover, Marsden doesn't convey any feeling for the sense of liberation and triumph manifest in the American academy between around 1946/7 and the mid-1960s when the anti-semitic barriers collapsed; when you could go into some academic departments in 1961 or '63, and 50-60% of the people being hired were Jews.  This is a big transformation in the ethno-religious demography of American academia, and he doesn't think George's book confronts this sufficiently for us to have a balanced account of the whole story.  He would have also liked to see Marsden develop more fully the comparisons and contrasts between anti-semitism in the academy and anti-Catholicism in the academy.  Hollinger thinks it is interesting and relevant to this seminar's concerns that the exclusion of Jews from the university and the efforts to keep them out were predicated to a very large extent on the notion of the university as a character-building enterprise, as an enterprise of "formation", as an effort to establish and transfer a culture.  The exclusion of Jews was not predicated on an academic ethos very often.  When we get to the critique of Catholicism in the academy, which becomes very strong in the late '30s and especially in the '40s & early '50s, the argument is that Catholics are a threat to free inquiry, to the democratic values that are consistent with the scientific inquiry.  One can find all sorts of examples during that period of treatment of Catholics that we might today consider prejudicial.  (In this regard Hollinger mentioned an interesting piece by Daniel Callahan in Commonweal about his experience at Harvard in the '50s.)  It is important to note that with the end of anti-semitism and the intensification of anti-Catholicism, the doctrinal basis changes.  Catholics are criticized as threats to free inquiry and the standard academic ethos.  This was not the case in the exclusion of Jews.
 After describing concerns about Marsden's work as history, Hollinger commented on the polemic at the end.  He has difficulty with the proposition embedded in this piece, if not fully articulated, that Christians are a kind of beleaguered cadre surrounded by a triumphant secularism; and that they might even need "affirmative action".  We're in a society where in the 1990 census 90% of the people polled claimed to be religious, and 93% of those claimed to be Christian.  The academy is one of the very few spaces in the U.S. where ideas presented as "Christian" are not uncritically accepted.  Yet he seems to hear George saying, "We Christians will not rest until we achieve control of the English department."  This is an exaggeration of Marsden's position in the postscript, Hollinger admitted; nevertheless there is an effort to seize more and more space, to claim back space which gradually, over centuries, has been gained for a more secular kind of inquiry.
 What David finds more engaging and a much more hopeful basis for continued dialogue than the Marsden book is the contribution to today's discussion made by Mark Schwehn.  He sees at the center of this piece certain generic spiritual virtues that Mark identifies--humility, charity, self-denial, and so forth.  At issue seem to be three factors:  1) their significance for the academic community;  2) their status as a kind of cultural capital inherited from religious communities; and 3) our capacity to perpetuate these virtues in the absence of the specific religious communities that once advanced them as Schwehn suggests.  He'd like to hear Mark say more about what we get by using the word "spiritual" to describe these virtues since Hollinger thinks they are quite standard virtues.  David said he likes to fantasize that a person who is a really good scholar should also be a Mensch, a fine person who has the right values about everything.  He wishes that were the case; and sometimes it is.  However, he thinks the academy would be less capacious than it is and less able to advance knowledge, and perhaps even less able to teach as well as it does if we were too strict about this.  So, Hollinger explained, he certainly supports these virtues but it's a matter of what we do with them.  He thinks a great deal depends on context.  While Schwehn very sensibly says that virtues like charity and humility can enliven and enrich the academic life, David asked whether we couldn't think of cases in which charity impoverishes and deadens as well as enriches and enlivens.  The same might be said of humility.  Sometimes academic communities are much too humble in relation to the status quo in society, in relation to institutionalized authority.  We want to be humble toward some things, but we don't want to be humble toward others.  How do we sort that out?  Again, a lot depends on the particular setting.
 Mark uses the phrase "a community of friends" suggesting that it would be nice if we could recover the value of some of these old virtues and make the academic community a little more of a community of friends.  Again, Hollinger likes this idea.  He thinks that mutual trust and respect is a very important part of academic communities.  Yet at the same time we have procedures that check this in ways that he finds appropriate, e.g., our peer review procedures.  We want to make sure that not all the letters of recommendation are written by somebody's friends.  So it depends a little bit on what we mean by friends, what defines friendship.  Reverting to an earlier part of his comments, Hollinger explained that Morris Cohen was not hired at Yale University in 1931 because the faculty did not want him as a "friend".  They thought that Jewish philosophers were okay, but only up to a point.  This is one sense of friendship.  Clearly this is not what Schwehn means by friendship, but we have a heritage in which the notion of friendship and this kind of warmer Gemeinschaft emphasis has a downside; and it's against this that Weber spoke.  It's against this that a lot of twentieth-century academics have spoken when they have said that we need a community which operates not on the basis of friendship but on the basis of Wissenschaft, on the basis of testable propositions, evidence and reasoning.
 When we talk about the academic ethos generated for us by Weber, Hollinger suggested, it might be helpful to supplement it with consideration of some other prophets or savants who talked about the academic ethos.  Charles Peirce, for example, presents a version of the academic ethos that does not have the sharp distinction that Weber makes between knowledge and love.  A lot of American academic history can be construed in terms of the Peircian community of inquiry rather than in terms of the Weberian concept of science as a vocation.  David sees much of the American academic establishment in the middle and late years of the twentieth century as being less keyed by instrumental rationality and by distinctly Weberian formulations than Mark does.
 Hollinger is always a little nervous when virtues like humility and charity are said to have a special relation with religion.  It's true that the religious communities that Mark alludes to were carriers of these virtues.  But those communities were also carriers of a lot of other things that many of us today are not too eager to reinforce.   In any case, insofar as these are virtues that we want to keep going in the academy, Mark challenges us to figure out what the mechanisms are for transferring them.  Hollinger is less worried about this because he sees more of these virtues around him in the academy than Mark appears to see around himself.  In closing, however, David presented a defense of what he described as a much-maligned and precipitously declining institution: the faculty dinner party!  This seems to him to be something that used to do a rather good job of transferring the culture of the academy from generation to generation.  If we were to single out something that was in place thirty years ago that is no longer in place and that is highly relevant to Schwehn's concerns, this seems to be an interesting case.  The dinner party established a framework in which people who had a knowledge relation and professional relations on campus could also develop personal relationships in non-pressured ways that sometimes served as a context for articulating and reinforcing wissenschaftlich values.  He doesn't believe we've replaced the now-defunct faculty dinner party with any comparable institutions.
 

Mark Schwehn, Valparaiso University

 Mark Schwehn divided his comments into three parts.  He first commented on the larger context of his book; then said a few things about Marsden; and lastly tried to address some of the questions and issues that Hollinger raised.
 Mark explained that his book is an effort to come to grips with contemporary understandings of the academic vocation as a way to get into larger issues of higher education.  The question of the nature and character of the academic vocation arose for him initially in his first teaching position at the University of Chicago.  Over the course of his eight years there he found himself to be intellectually exhilarated and at the same time profoundly uneasy about a number of recurrent practices and ways of speaking.  To illustrate his uneasiness Mark described an episode that took place during a gathering of faculty there.  In an idle moment as people were straggling into a meeting, the convener came up with the idea that they should go around the room and indicate what each person had put on his or her income-tax form under the blank "what you do" or "occupation".  Schwehn was last to speak and also the most junior member there, and he had written "college teacher".  Everyone else had put down "historian", "anthropologist", "sociologist", etc.  He began to realize that there was a deep sense of how one identifies and thinks of oneself within the academic community, and it was very clear that his colleagues at Chicago automatically thought of themselves primarily in terms of their disciplines.  Schwehn obviously did not.  This episode led him to raise more questions and to be more attentive to other items of discourse in the community.  For example,  Mark described the standard interchange when one passes a colleague on the sidewalk and asks how things are going.  He responds, "Pretty well, but I just don't have much time these days to do my own work."  This began to occur to him as a peculiar locution.  So he began to ask, "Well, whose work are you doing--when you're attending committees, preparing syllabi, and so on?"  As one would expect, colleagues would quickly clarify that what they really meant by "their own work" was writing articles, composing or whatever.   In any case, Exiles from Eden  can be seen as an investigation of the significance of that remark.  How can it be so glibly put forward while everyone knowingly nods?  Does it mean,  Mark asked himself, that somehow over the course of the last century or so the concept of "my own work" has come to mean not dominantly one's research and scholarship but exclusively that?
  Schwehn thinks that what he was feeling in Chicago was in some sense an inner conflict between the ethos that he had imbibed in graduate school, which was in many ways a good thing, and at the same time some deeper sense of calling which had impelled him to go to graduate school and to want to be a college teacher in the first place.  So the first chapter of his book is really an effort to analyze and in part to critique Weber's outline of the academic calling (as set forth in his great essay "Wissenschaft als Beruf"), and to suggest that it is deeply imbedded in the modern research university.  As evidence he mentioned not only his own experiences but habitual ways of speaking, a certain kind of award system that is very much in place, and various other factors that tend to reinforce a kind of Weberian ethos in the academy.  In response to Hollinger's remark about Pierce, Schwehn admitted that his own account is probably skewed a little bit in favor of Weber by virtue of the fact that he was at Chicago.  As Hollinger intimated, had Mark been at a different institution, such as Berkeley, there would have been more of a Peircian and less of a Weberian kind of ethos.
 The chapters of Exiles from Eden that Lilly seminar members received were a kind of critique of Weber's essay.  Summarizing these chapters, Mark emphasized Weber's notion of Wissenschaft as "making knowledge" exclusively; his belief that ultimate questions and values have no proper place in academic discourse; and finally his banishment in principle of friendship from the realm of academic life.  Following his critique of Weber, Schwhen explained, he turned to a somewhat more constructive project.   He noted that things have changed a lot since 1918 and that in effect there are all kinds of things happening and all kinds of questions being raised--from secular and religious thinkers alike--about the adequacy of the epistemological framework that Weber set out.  Chapter 2 treats discourse coming from a variety of quarters about communitarian epistemology, and Schwehn talks at length about thinkers who are quite different from one another in almost every respect--Palmer & Rorty--who nonetheless converge from a very different vantage point on that one issue. Chapter 3 draws on what Schwehn calls "spiritual virtues" to present a different, more positive construction of what he thinks the ethos of the academy really ought to be.

 How does all this relate to Marsden's work?  Schwehn views his own sense of calling as a scholar who happens to be a Christian as twofold.  First, his own gifts are more actively engaged in creating an institution that presents a somewhat different model of academic community than the dominant one.  So the part of Marsden's book he most agrees with is his call for institutional pluralism.  He thinks that Christians, Jews and other religious groups ought to be working to build alternative institutions.  Then, they should not just retreat into enclaves but engage the larger intellectual public with the fruits of the research and teaching that goes on there and the way in which they order their common lives.  This relates to the second aspect of Mark's sense of calling as a Christian scholar.  He thinks that Christians, drawing on what intellectual resources they have at their disposal, ought to engage larger publics who don't share their assumptions but who share with Christian scholars the struggle of coming to grips with the meaning of their own work.
 Schwehn said he agreed with much of what David had said concerning Marsden, though he wouldn't be as harsh.  He doesn't believe that Marsden is after "re-taking the English department", and he acknowledged that David meant that as hyperbole and polemic.  However, there are things that trouble Mark about George's strategies.  While he sympathizes with the arguments for institutional pluralism, he regrets that George thinks Christian perspectives need to ride back into the academy on the coattails of a kind of post-modern perspectivalist view of truth.  What Marsden does, in a sense, is argue that the academy has now embraced a post-modern understanding of knowledge and truth.  Schwehn thinks this is false.  It may be the case in certain precincts, but it has by no means overtaken the academy.  Moreover, even if it were true, he thinks it's a confession of weakness of will or a lack of intellectual confidence to make that the point of entree for Christian views to be expressed in the academy.  So he has trouble with Marsden's recommendation in this regard.  He shares some of Hollinger's and Turner's ambivalence about declension models.  He thinks the whole development of higher learning is very mixed in the way Turner earlier articulated, and on balance it's probably a good thing rather than a bad thing is that we have a genuine plurality of institutions in this country.
 Finally, he offered a few quick responses to some of Hollinger's queries.  First he talked about what he meant by "spiritual".  For most of the book he used the term in a historical sense, i.e., to say that these virtues and practices arose originally within religious community.  Newman even argued in The Idea of the University that a virtue like humility is so embedded within a particular religious formation that outside of it becomes something altogether different.  Mark disagrees with Newman on that point.  However, regarding Hollinger's question about whether there were some settings in which a virtue doesn't advance but may actually inhibit learning, Schwehn suggested that the virtuous person is one who knows the right degree of humility at the right time, in the right places & for the right purposes.  In closing he turned to Hollinger's remarks about "the faculty dinner party".  Mark explained that he would reflect on the dinner party in a slightly different manner from the way that David did, but that this was exactly the kind of response he wanted to elicit from the book.  He hoped to get academics to focus on those practices by which they want to transmit the best that is in them and their peers for the next generation.
 

Response #1:  Alan Wolfe

 Alan Wolfe pointed out that what we're talking about here with respect to the university is one of many, many examples of declension hypotheses.  We hear about how people don't read books anymore, how the mass media and television have destroyed our intelligence, how there are no great works of art, etc.  It's a genre, and it's one that runs across all the disciplines--even physics.  Everyone is attracted to one version or another of a theory of decline.
 Wolfe proposed 3 rules for treating this genre that he thinks apply to all declension theories including the one we're addressing.  1) Decline, if not abolished completely from our vocabulary, should always be put at the end of the analysis rather than at the beginning.  In our study of any problem we need to be agnostic about decline as opposed to taking the very common position that assumes decline which simply needs to be traced.  This approach automatically privileges a normative perspective on the issue over an empirical one.  It assumes away what really needs to be answered.  It's not to say that things don't decline, but we should approach these subjects with openness as to whether decline is really evident.  Alan senses that we don't really do that.   2) We ought to approach these subjects with the notion that what we're finding is in some ways trivial because there is always change.  In fact, the idea that there wouldn't be change in any institution seems philosophically incoherent.  So we should eliminate from our studies of decline any element of surprise or lost innocence about these things, as if, "aha, I've discovered some radically different world and how much better it used to be."  3) We should bear in mind that when change comes, it always comes in mixed packages.  To speak about decline as if something has declined rather than certain aspects of something have declined while others have not is probably inaccurate.  Wolfe referred to Turner's own mixed account of how he views the university, which Alan very much appreciated.  He added that he has not read a work by any declension theorist whatsoever that doesn't in fact convey a mixed message--whether it's Marsden himself who has all kinds of acknowledgments about how bad anti-semitism was in the old university; or Alasdair MacIntyre, who has all kinds of qualifications of his own version of decline; or even recent natural law theorists who want to reintroduce conceptions of natural law back into discussion of contemporary issues of how we legislate morality.  (They invariably say, just because we have this wonderful tradition with Aquinas, it doesn't mean we want to reproduce the world in which Aquinas wrote those things.)  It's almost impossible to take a position that the world we think we have lost is one that we really want to go back to as it was.
 Finally Wolfe finds it interesting to explore why that's the case--even with the most serious theorists of decline.  It may be because they face a very difficult choice in their analysis.  He noted, for example, that Marsden's book is about a choice that was made.  What he finds puzzling is that despite a "blame everyone else" tone to the book, Marsden is also quite up front about the fact that there was a choice that all universities had to face between marginalization and ambition.  Choosing the path of ambition, of wanting a university which had a Christian mission and a Christian tradition to be a national or research university, meant foregoing some things that might have been important.  These choices were not coerced.  Wolfe finds no examples of a university that was somehow forced to drop its Christian focus for the sake of national greatness.  In fact, in every single example university administrators made this choice consciously and for good reasons.  Once this choice is admitted, it seems to undermine the idea that the world we left was somehow superior to the world that we've now entered, which is necessarily in decline.  How could so many college presidents & administrators facing the same situation make the same choice?
 Wolfe compared the situation to a comment he'd recently heard on the subject of affirmative action.  Not a single private university in the U.S. was forced into affirmative action!  Every president of every private college or university has voluntarily and for good reasons chosen to be concerned about this issue.  If you're going to produce an analysis of declension that implies that the university was better before affirmative action because the standards were higher, you will inevitably face the same problem that Marsden faces in his book.  Most of the changes that we tend to lament were in fact deliberately, consciously  and voluntarily chosen for very good reasons.  So if we're going to apply ideas of declension to the modern university, they should always be done in the perspective that what David Riesman & Christopher Jencks call the "academic revolution"--the dramatic expansion of public universities in the U.S., the role of merit in hiring faculty which eliminated the anti-semitism of the previous university, and pressures toward universalism which resulted in the Marsden-choice problem--was primarily unstoppable and was probably a good thing.  In closing Wolfe spoke about former women's colleges that in recent decades became co-educational or absorbed themselves into the university which sponsored them like Radcliffe did.  You can lament it, but he thinks you'll find the exact same pattern.  No one really forced it.  There were good reasons for it, and those good reasons are most likely historically irreversible.
 

Response #2: Richard Mouw

 Richard Mouw began with the admission that his instincts are declensionist but that he can't identify any "good ole days" from which we've declined.  In fact, from the point of view of an evangelical Protestant scholar, in many ways things are a lot better.  Mouw gave several examples.  He had recently read the latest issue of Faith and Philosophy, the journal published by the Society of Christian Philosophers.  The society is around 20 years old, and this was an anniversary issue reflecting on the origins of the group.  It began by calling together people like Wolterstorff, Stump and others who were interested in being explicit about their Christian commitment in their philosophical projects.  At a meeting of the American Philosophical Association 70 people showed up in a room that was designed for 40, and now there are a thousand members of that organization and it's flourishing.  So, that cause is much better off now than it was 20 years ago.  Mark Noll just finished his stint as the first occupant of an evangelical chair at Harvard Divinity School.  In this regard too evangelicals are better off than they were 20 years ago.  Richard finds very positive signs just from the point of view of causes and interests to which he is personally committed.   Mouw worries, however, about what some have referred to as the epistemological obsession with fragments.  This seems to be connected with the kind of Weberian scenario that Mark presented.  Fragmentation shows up in theological education as well, and Mouw noted several examples.   As an administrator one of the things he misses in a lot of discussions of higher education is the role of fragmentation in higher education administration.  When he was being trained by his mentor and predecessor, he was told that he had to be "tri-lingual" as the president of Fuller Seminary:  1) The language of the traditional academy is the language of the faculty.  2) The language of the board is the language of the marketplace.  3) The language of the student body is a communitarian language; they really want the seminary to be a church.  The president had constantly to be translating between those three areas of discourse.  The kind of communitarian emphasis that Schwehn and others have talked about as a critique of the present fragmentation in the university is an attempt to bring the language of community and the academic vocation back together in an integral way.  But, said Mouw, that's never going to happen unless we also deal with the language of the market and the way in which academic administrators are themselves sometimes struggling against and in some cases celebrating the chaos of a fragmented view of what the university is.  We have people dealing with budgets who don't know anything about the academic enterprise.  Richard thinks we need to deal with this administrative parallel to Weberian fragmentation in academic community and academic vocation.  Moreover, we're not going to deal with academic community apart from dealing with leadership, especially administrative leadership.
 Mouw concluded with some observations on the subject of friendship.  A few years ago he sat in on a meeting of evangelical historians associated with the new evangelical historiography--people like Noll, Hatch,  Marsden, Grant Wacker, Edith Blumhofer and others.  When they started getting together 20 years ago they were all lonely people without much support and were having a hard time getting their work published.  Then suddenly, they were all very busy and began wondering whether they needed to keep meeting together.  At this point one of them said, "I need this group because I love this group."  It struck Mouw at the time that he hadn't heard too many people talk about being part of academic communities that they loved.  A lot of people felt something similar in the philosophy department at Calvin College.  Mouw thinks that with groups like the Society of Christian Philosophers, various sub-groups of the AAR/SBL, a lot of e-mail list groups that are constantly in discussion about specific topics, we're seeing new forms of academic friendship emerging.  They're not necessarily tied in with campuses, and in many ways they comprise people who are lonely on their own campuses.  Richard didn't restrict such interaction to religious believers who are scholars, though they are certainly a big contingent.  Feminist scholars and people with other kinds of interests are also forming trans-academic, trans-institutional friendships.  So, the declensionist thesis needs to take account of very new and, he thinks, exciting forms.  He included a group like the Lilly Seminar, in which academic friendships emerge and we have a sense or an initial hint of a community of scholars across lines of confession & conviction.
 

Discussion of Presentations

 Steven Haynes opened the discussion with a note of thanks to Hollinger for his thoughtful article.  The perception of Christians as victims that David referred to in his presentation troubles Steve.  He hears it a lot from students, often from white male Christian students who are southerners.  What he finds interesting is the perception itself and the fact that it's so widespread.  In addition to pointing out that this is troublesome and there is a lot of evidence that weighs against it, we also ought to ask why it is that Marsden is articulating something very widespread in certain segments of our population.  Why do people we identify as part of the majority culture feel victimized or marginalized?  Is there a grain of truth there, and even if there's not, what does it tell us when our students articulate this perception?  It seems counter-intuitive.  But they really do feel like victims of the culture, and people who feel victimized by culture can do things that become pernicious.  So instead of dismissing this attitude as unbelievable, Haynes is interested in asking how it is that so many people can feel this way and what it tells us about our culture.

 Eugene Lowe followed up on Richard Mouw's reference to tri-linguality as a necessity for university administrators.  He likes that formulation and thinks that part of our earlier conversation, particularly the differences between what David and Mark are trying to get across, may be related to it.  In a recent issue of U.S. News and Report on best college values, he noted, in several institutions the budget break between academic and administrative items was close to 50%.  Lowe feels that our model of thinking about religion in higher education needs to take account of what is going on outside the dean of the faculty's budget, which is where the academic part of the budget falls.  If we want to have a full sense of what is happening, particularly on the formational agenda, we must not just consider religion as an academic thing.  We need to find a way to look at it as an institutional entity and operate with a model that takes into consideration factors other than the academic work of the faculty.  Otherwise we're in danger of limiting our focus in a way that doesn't get at the full range of questions we're trying to examine.

 Returning to Haynes' question about the prominence of declension mentality among Christian students, Richard Hughes thought it is important to recognize that declension theory is at the heart of the whole Protestant tradition beginning with the Reformation.  The sense on the part of early Lutherans, Reformed, Anabaptists and Puritans was that something had gone terribly wrong and now they were recovering what once was.  Also, when you think about some significant religious movements in the 19th century, declension theory is at the heart of these traditions.   That's not to praise or demean it.  It's simply to say that it's so powerful partly because notions of primitivism, restoration and the whole idea of declension are riveted in Protestantism in the U.S.

 Jean Elshtain suggested a general problem with the strong version of the decline hypothesis, and that is it's alternative, which is a kind of progressivist teleology.  Either everything is getting better or everything is really bad and getting worse.  Elshtain detects in Hollinger's work a kind of progressivist telos.  We have to account for changes, she affirmed, and we're going to evaluate those changes for the better or for the worse.  It's impossible simply to stand around and be neutral.  So, the question becomes, what are our standards in evaluating whether something is on the whole a change for the better or actually not so great?  Cultures make changes or go through upheavals, and then it takes some generations to assess the end result of them.  What we're struggling with is how you nuance these issues and deal with the complex problems of social learning.  In that sense, each thesis (the decline & the progressivist) is subject to a highly ideological and rigid fixation that is not too useful.
 Regarding victimization mentality on the part of students, Jean thought it would be altogether surprising if they didn't see themselves as victims because that is your entree into the conversation nowadays.  We're in a culture that valorizes victimization; it's part of the ethos.  You step forward as a victim, and you immediately gain a hearing.  Some very complex cultural changes help to account for that, but it is very widespread.  Elshtain finds it very troubling that people see this approach as their ticket or entry point into a debate or conversation or the way that their voice can be heard.
 Jean also commented on the problem of declining literacy among students.  Undergraduates may have memorized every episode of the Brady Bunch or some other television series, but the literary backdrop seems somewhat wanting.  Jean thinks we have to be on the alert to new forms of anti-intellectualism.  David wrote about a kind of religious anti-intellectualism, but she thinks there are also other forms of anti-intellectualism that secular culture promotes.

 Eleonore Stump made two remarks, one in response to Wolfe and another in response to Hollinger.  Alan was talking about what he called "Marsden's choice", which he said virtually all the major universities made.  He said that they weren't coerced into that choice but made it for good reasons.  Eleonore commented that Alan had more faith in college administrators than she does.  She thinks the fact that all college administrators in a certain period went a certain way means nothing about the goodness of their reasons for doing so.  It is, after all, the same group, i.e., college administrators, that were part of the anti-semitism in major universities that he deplores in an earlier period.  So, Stump thought Wolfe's inference was invalid.
 In response to David's paper Stump spoke in defense of Marsden.  What various people here had remarked on is that Marsden is not the only one saying that Christians are victims.  Eleonore admits that there is something infuriating or funny about that way of presenting the problem.  But, given the fact that so many students and faculty are saying it, we might consider whether or not it's true.  She is inclined to think that there is something true about it.  It is not true across the board.  She doesn't think Christians are victimized in electrical engineering departments, for example.  But she does think they have a very hard time in certain areas of the humanities.  Part of what David seemed to be saying was, "...and don't they deserve it!"  However, the fact that a particular group has been guilty of monumental injustices in the past doesn't mean that it's acceptable to subject them to injustices now.  From her own experience on review boards of journals, on panels for the NEH and in the ordinary give and take of academic life, Eleonore thinks it's quite clear that if you're a Christian in some areas of the humanities you can expect to have difficulty getting your papers published or getting a grant, and maybe even problems about the courses you want to teach.  So, insofar as we think that that sort of behavior towards any given group is an example of an injustice, it is an injustice in this case as well.

 Frank Oakley made three points.  First he addressed the issue of victimization.   Speaking from his own "reasonably benign" institutional setting, Oakley observed that certain types of students, e.g. evangelicals or traditional Catholics, feel somewhat victimized because they are victimized, often unwittingly, by faculty who condescend to them intellectually.  He has no doubt that this is true; he's heard enough witness to it over the years, sometimes by students whom he has taught.  It stems from the ignorance of faculty about the direction students are coming from.  So, this is an explanation of why they might feel that way.  They probably should feel that way.
 Second, Oakley returned to Mark Schwehn's initial comments about his experience at Chicago, in particular his use of "college teacher" vs. "historian" and the idea of "my own work" vs. all the rest of it.  Oakley had a mirror-image experience of that when he moved from a university to a liberal arts college.  The reverse he described was when people talk about "your own work" as something you're supposed to deal with yourself on your own time without any support.  An oppressive amount of talk about teaching--mind-numbing, anecdotal stuff about students from 20 years earlier--became standard discourse, and it was very hard to talk about intellectual things.  He mentioned this simply as a reminder that there are two sides.
 Finally, Frank commented on "the faculty dinner party" as one who had spent enormous amounts of time plying faculty colleagues with food and drink, something he actually liked doing and considered very important.  Oakley referred to a piece by Lynn Hunt in the volume What Happened to the Humanities?, where for the first time he saw this issue being addressed in scholarly fashion.  Hunt talks about the loss of communication within the University of Pennsylvania; the difficulty colleagues have working together on committees; the fact that they often don't know each other.  She thought this was a bigger challenge and a bigger debilitating division than the difficulties posed by gender issues.   In Oakley's experience the change, the collapse of a certain mode of socialization or acculturation, occurred before most people were embedded in dual career family situations, and it was ideologically based.  By the late '60s to early '70s he could remember senior colleagues speaking wistfully about how nobody ever returned their invitations.  A statement was being made to them, and Frank thinks the price paid institutionally has been enormous in the effort to stitch an institution together.  Regarding Mouw's point about trans-institutional friendships, Oakley commented that they don't substitute for what is needed in our institutions and on our campuses to make them function even in rather basic ways, never mind the more noble ways we're envisaging.  Administrators have to step in and pinch hit, but that has a funny official side to it that doesn't carry all the rich things that were present under the "ancien regime".  He hates declension talk, he concluded, but something has changed of great significance and a price is being paid.

 Monika Hellwig offered a somewhat different testimony of what she sees among the Catholic schools and Catholic scholars working on secular campuses.  What she sees is great exhilaration because they're in the conversation, because they are on secular campuses, because their schools are being recognized, because they're getting Rhodes scholarships for their students, and so on.  She thinks the real issues that Catholic schools are dealing with in terms of their identity and religious heritage is more along the lines that  Richard Mouw was describing, i.e., the sense of dissipation, of fragmentation in academic study, academic discourse, and in the teaching of the disciplines.  Their real issue has nothing to do with feeling victimized by secularization in the academy.  It has to do with some very searching questions about whether we have not been drawing enough on our religious tradition to integrate the education and give it a focus.

 Before closing the discussion, Nick allowed Hollinger and Schwehn to respond.  Hollinger found the points made about victimization very interesting.  He noted that at Berkeley the most articulate and prominent Christian presence on campus is the Asian-American ethnic students.  These people do not speak the language of victimization or declension.  They speak triumph.  He thinks we need to break this question down ethnically.  Korean-American Presbyterians are not victims, and they know it.  There is, however, an element of victimization involved, which is widely discussed now on at Berkeley.  One woman recently told him that she as a Chinese student cannot walk across parts of campus without being assaulted by Chinese evangelical groups.  She has to go around the back way because she doesn't want to run the gauntlet.  Chinese evangelicals will not go after an Anglos, Japanese or Filipinos, but they will go after Chinese ethnic.  So religious intensity and triumphalism need to be considered in these kinds of contexts.
 David was also struck by Richard Hughes' comment about Christianity and victimization long-term.  One might add to that the matter of undergraduates in America confronting criticisms of the culture that they inherit from their parents and their peer group. They don't like this.  A little bit of the victimization talk, David thinks, is part of provincialism for the first time encountering cosmopolitanism.  The faculty is telling them about all these things that threaten their ideas.
 On the fragmented episteme, one of Mouw's points, Hollinger thinks that that moment has really gone in a lot of academic space.  He recently had occasion to give the same speech at several different campuses--at Notre Dame, Stanford, Cornell & UCLA.  He'd made a series of sardonic, ironic comments about post-modernism, and when he gave the talk at Stanford everybody laughed; nobody thought there was anything odd about this.  But at Notre Dame there was a young, junior faculty who stood up and took umbrage.  Hollinger suggested that at places like Notre Dame, where post-modernist faculty feel surrounded by a conservative Christian culture, those people hear something very different from him than what they hear at places where they've been through the post-modern routine.  A comparative sociology of the campuses could be helpful on this.
 Regarding the either/or issue that Jean Elshtain raised, David really doesn't see himself as participating in an either/or discourse at all.  It seems to him that there are some things that get better and some things that get a lot worse.  He would be interested in hearing a non-triumphalist narrative of the entry of Jews into the academy.
 Responding to Eleonore's suggestion that he was saying that Christian academics more or less deserve the treatment they're getting, David thinks we need to break this into two parts.  If they're not getting grants because of retribution--e.g., the view that all these Christians have run the world for such a long time and so poorly that it's time that somebody else took over--then there's no defending it.  Maybe that happens more often than it should.  But something else occasionally happens in those committees.  Sometimes someone make a presentation that does not meet contemporary standards for plausibility; i.e., the analysis, the sense of what counts as evidence & reason, does not pass peer review.  This is very different than retribution.
 Hollinger's last point was on the dinner party.  He hoped we all knew this, but it was a loaded example; and he could not have asked for a better response than he got immediately on cue.  The idea, of course, is that there are many things about it that we want, but we don't want to re-create the institution because of the gender politics of it just as we do not want to re-create religion.

 Mark Schwehn made two final comments.  First he responded to Alan Wolfe on behalf of George.  Mark thinks that one of the book's virtues, like any good history, is that it not only addresses what happened but how it happened, why it happened in the way that it happened, and so on.  Moreover, along the way he thinks there are junctures where it's very hard to say that things weren't coerced, like the Carnegie story on TIAA-Cref.  Of course people could have said they really didn't want that money.  They were free to make that choice.  But he thinks George is quite good at showing certain junctures where choices were tightly constrained.
 Regarding what Hollinger had just said about the dinner party, Schwehn took it that the dinner party he had in mind wasn't one that would conform to the old ways.  But Mark thinks that the possibility exists of still having such an institution under new auspices.
 

SESSION II: SATURDAY AFTERNOON
Topic:  Should teaching reflect the religious perspective of the teacher?

Mark Noll, Wheaton College (History)

 For the purpose of his presentation Mark Noll re-worded the general question posed for the session into a more specific question--"Should teaching the history of Christianity reflect my religious perspective?"  Mark's immediate answer to this question was "yes" for two reasons:  1) because the religion he professes supports major aspects of the historical task as usually practiced in the modern university; and 2) because that religion, as he understands it, urges him to respect the integrity of students as intellectual agents ultimately responsible for their own learning.
 Mark illustrated the complexity of the issue that has been raised and the wide spectrum of religious and non-religious answers to the question.  The author's or teacher's voice in the study of history is for some present and celebrated, for others present and regretted, for still others either absent and unmissed, or absent and missed.  Making sense of this clash of practices in such a way as to say something general and compelling is an overwhelming task.  Noll has found, however, that his participation in various conferences and panels addressing the question of the author's voice has helped him to clarify his own conception of his vocation as a Christian who writes about particular episodes, regions and problems in the history of Christianity.  It has strengthened the connection in his mind between what as a Christian he believes and what as an historian he does.  So, though he doesn't often think about questions like this, and he doesn't think reflections on his own activities as an historian constitute an argument about the practice of other teachers, he proposed to say something about his self-understanding as a Christian historian.
 Noll first talked about how increased confidence in the truthfulness of historic Christianity has influenced his perspective on the historian's task.  The creedal affirmations that define his faith have also given him an implicit confidence that because of how God has configured the world, historical research may potentially uncover the truth--or, at least some of the truth some of the time in some circumstances.  He explained that the same creedal Christianity that banishes historical skepticism also administers a powerful check to blithe overconfidence in the capacities of historical knowledge, for the creeds testify eloquently to human finitude, human fallenness, and human situatedness in particular cultures.  Each of these fundamental Christian beliefs reinforces a post-modern sense that history-writing must reflect local circumstances, can never be absolute or complete, and can never offer any human the sort of factual or moral knowledge possessed by God alone.  In short, historic Christianity offers a hopeful framework in which to pursue the truth about past situations but also an entirely realistic expectation about the partial character of the truth that can emerge from historical investigation.  Such statements might cause one to wonder whether creedal Christianity is at heart confused about the possibility of historical knowledge, but Mark maintained that if the heart of Christianity is the incarnation of God the Son, so the heart of historical knowledge is its duality between universal certainties and culturally-specific particularities.  The incarnation is a very particular event, circumscribed everywhere by its particular cultural circumstances, yet this very particular event has, for Christians, the most grandly universal meaning.  So, it need not be surprising for a Christian if historical work offers the most intimate combination of solidly-grounded truth and completely contextualized construction.
 Noll's point, he explained, was to show why, as a Christian, he stands with intellectual traditionalists who contend for the security of knowledge but is able at the same time to go all but to the finish line with post-modernists who contend for the plasticity of knowledge.  The result has been to put himself at ease about the position from which he gives voice as an author or teacher, though he might be labeled a pernicious relativist by some and a naive objectivist by others.  He is a little troubled that the nature of his faith makes him something of an intellectual imperialist, for he believes that all effective history-writing is carried out under something like Christian cosmological assumptions, even by believers in other religions or nonbelievers.  At the same time, the traditional Christian belief that the redeemed are rescued by God through grace and not because they are smarter than other people means (among other things) that Christians should realize they need to learn things about the past that can be taught only by those standing outside the believing community.  As an example Mark noted that specifically post-modern thinking helps a Christian see how often Christians have attempted to exert political or ideological hegemony in ways that contradict the message of the cross standing at the heart of creedal Christianity.
 On the specific question of the author's or teacher's voice, Noll remained somewhat ambiguous explaining that part of that ambiguity comes from disciplinary location.  If one were to compare historian as pure type with religionist as pure type, he would be considerably closer to the historian's pole than to the religionist's pole.  For the question of authorial voice, the difference between studying something as a historian or as a religionist seems important, because the desire of religionists to explain persistent human patterns seems naturally to require more self-disclosure than does the effort to explain the particular connections involved in a particular situation.  At the same time, historians need to be honest with themselves and their readers as do religionists.  Therefore, he fully supports the practice of teachers telling students something about where they're coming from.
 Also important to consider, however, is the kind of writing or teaching attempted.  Sometimes believing academics write more for their faith communities than for the academy as a whole, and sometimes they write more to change values, perceptions, assumptions or commitments than to illuminate some features of the physical or human worlds.  This kind of writing demands a different set of evaluative criteria than academic writing.  It seems only appropriate for the authorial voice to be more prominent than in more strictly academic writing.  Drawing from personal experience, Noll explained that he felt it appropriate to speak forthrightly in the first person in a book admonishing his fellow evangelical Protestants to do a better job with intellectual life.  Even in writing a general history of Christianity in North America he felt it necessary to say something about his convictions and intentions so that his readers would know what kind of book they were getting into.  For his monograph on Princeton College in the early republic, however, he assumed that readers would recognize some of the convictions with which he wrote, but he was more interested in drawing attention to a neglected group of influential Princetonians than he was in promoting any particular view of his own.
 In summary, Noll does not believe that authors or teachers should muffle their voices.  Rather they should be as forthright and as openly self-critical as possible about defining that voice.  However, he added, we should recognize that the question of the teacher's voice is itself framed by larger questions about teachers, voices, and the things about which teachers teach.  When a person teaching holds strong beliefs--whether Christians or those practicing another religious or secular point of view that provides a similar structure for viewing the self and the world--one should expect to receive some sense from the teacher about how that voice relates to what is taught in class or written on the page.  But students and readers should also expect, because of what the teacher believes, not to find that voice as interesting as what the voice is taking about.
 

Denis Donoghue, New York University (Literature)

 Denis Donoghue began with several disclaimers.  First, despite being a Roman Catholic, he has never taught in a Roman Catholic University.  The three universities at which he has taught in chronological order are University College Dublin, Cambridge University and New York University.  His second disclaimer was that he teaches English, Irish and American literature, mostly of the late eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  The contexts to which he would be responsive in teaching those literatures would tend to be historical, political, religious in some cases, economic, and also literary.  By literary context he means the sense in which one sonnet is affiliated with another sonnet or one pastoral elegy is part of the family of other pastoral elegies.  Of course he is aware, as is everybody, that English departments all over the world and especially in the U.S. have now become the place for differentiated and miscellaneous interests.  There was a time when English departments were the place where literature and the English language were directly taught, Donoghue remarked, but this is no longer quite the case.  English departments are now the place where anything is taught that is not palpably taught elsewhere.  They're often the place for theoretical, social and ideological interests and their diverse rhetorics.  This makes a particular prejudice that he has more and more difficult to maintain, and that is a prejudice according to which "literature exists".  What Denis means by this, he explained, is that literature exists in a sense in which it is not nearly the same as spilled religion, diffused economics, dispersed sociology, and so on.  A work of literature is in some sense, perhaps difficult to define, autonomous.  In keeping with his prejudice, he does not think that a poem is a container of sentiments.  He tends to think that it is a formal construction or an achievement of formal affection.  His prejudices would be formal and aesthetic, and he supposes that to some extent these prejudices are reactions against the tendency to reduce a work of literature to its marginalia.  Another long-inherited prejudice he described is one picked up from Kenneth Burke's book Counter-Statement.  The memorable model near the beginning of the book is the statement that the law of the imagination is "When in Rome, do as the Greeks."  To some extent Donoghue continues to hold to this notion, that there is almost a formal prejudice in a work of literature by which it tends to exert an antithetical or antinomian pressure against the society to which it is in some sense addressed.
 After these opening comments, Donoghue distributed and read aloud to the group a poem of William Empson called "This Last Pain".   He wanted to address the question of how he goes about reading, interpreting and teaching this poem.  Increasingly he finds that he is interested as a teacher and as a writer in the practice of reading.  What does reading entail, and how might one go about reading as a kind of categorical act?  In connection with this poem he explained that if it were to be considered as a statement or a series of statements, he virtually doesn't agree with a single line of the entire poem.  That is, if the poem were to be taken as a series of interestingly related discursive statements, he doesn't agree with the poem, he doesn't approve of its dominant attitude, insofar as such a thing can be elicited.  William Empson has written many other things apart from poems, and Denis can't help but be aware that he is notoriously a great hater of Christianity, and even more particularly a hater of Catholicism.  He has justified this hatred by claiming that it is a body of belief infatuated with blood and sacrifice and predicated on the crucifixion; that it has a lust for blood, and that the archetypal event is the pleasure that God the Father took in the sacrifice and crucifixion of his son.  So the question is, how does he teach or read this poem?
 In a certain sense the quandaries involved in teaching this poem are not all that difficult.  There are a number of plausible axioms upon which modern teachers of literature proceed.  One is that the words on the page are not transcribed from the voice and the specific speech of the author.  We don't identify the author with the implied speaker.  In some cases it's more difficult to avoid such an identification, Denis admitted, but by and large as a technical device we work on the assumption that the words on the page are not in fact transcribed from the words of the author.  The simple way of saying this is that we take a poem as if it were a dramatic monologue, as if it were a speech written for a character in a play or written to be spoken by someone in an implied context.  That achieves a kind of saving distance between the author and the poem, so that we would strictly say here that this is not a transcription of William Empson speaking in his own voice.  We appeal to the theory of the imagination as that extraordinary human capacity by which we are enabled somehow to conceive of being other than we are.  (One example among others that Denis mentioned was that Shakespeare, before he could write Macbeth, had to imagine what it would be like to want to be the king.)   If we invoke the use of the imagination in this sense, he would have no great difficulty since clearly the words of this poem are words which have at least the merit of being serious, obviously thoughtful, and not viciously intended.  So, he would have no difficulty at all in trying to enter into it, to imagine, even sympathetically, the life of the voice of someone who spoke in precisely those terms.
 Obviously the weak part in any theory of the imagination from Coleridge on is that you have very little defense against the notion that anything goes, that if you open that gate, you have to be prepared to pretty well take anything that comes.  Again, what he would be concerned with in reading or teaching this poem is Empson's engagement with certain possibilities of the English language.  He did not want to enter into a formalist analysis of the entire poem, but as an example he pointed out that at the first stanza it's not at all arbitrary that there is a strong monosyllabic rhyme between "found" and "crowned", because that is one of Empson's ways in the first stanza of introducing the motif of distance, unavailability.  Similarly he attributes a certain malice to the fathers.  "This Last Pain", Denis explained, as if all the other pains were much more readily available and they wanted to provide a more extreme agony for the damned, "this last pain for the damned the fathers found", and then the ending of the couplet, "they knew the bliss with which they were not crowned."  So the motif, right from the beginning of the poem, is one of categorical unavailability and maliciously intended severance.  As a teacher he would be concerned to go through the poem, to engage with it as an imaginative act, and to try to consider the poem as a discovery among the words, an additional possibility within the English language, within the possibilities of form.  If one were to write or talk about the poem in a larger context, it seems to him that it would be talked about in terms of creating a space around the poem which the teacher proceeds to fill either with his or her own authority or with the authority of kindred spirits, i.e. to resort to what he might call the rhetoric of the footnote.
 So, on the question, "Should teaching reflect the religious perspective of the teacher?", Donoghue felt he had two obligations.  First, to create a very large space indeed for the imagining of difference, and to keep that space as large as is conceivably possible.  If there is an outer limit of possibility, that is, if there is a text  like "American Psyche", which he finds so alien and so repellent in its sentiments and so uninteresting in its formal achievements, then since it's still a free country, he is at liberty not to mention it at all or include it in his courses.  His short answer (and here he would disagree with Mark Noll) to the question should teaching reflect the religious perspective of the teacher, is "only insofar as it must", that is, only insofar as it can't with integrity be avoided.  He doesn't think it should be proffered up front, as if he were to say, which he could with conviction, that he is an Irish nationalist, an old-fashioned, defeated Irish nationalist.  If he were talking about Ireland, he would have to say, let that emerge.  He certainly wouldn't advance it with pomp and circumstance right from the start.  He would let such convictions issue as belatedly as possible; he would let them seep through what he would otherwise want to say.  And of course, as demonstrated in his brief comments on the first stanza of Empson's poem, one can say a great deal about literature before one finds it necessary to bring up big ideological or religious struggles.
 In closing Denis explained that one of the things that makes the teaching of literature relatively easy is that it is not concerned with fact, with truth, with getting it right.  We're concerned with establishing interesting and cogent relations between ourselves and what we read, or rather between what we read and ourselves.  We're not as troubled as a historian would be about the morality of getting it right.  So again, all he would want to do is to make as big a space as possible for the sheer otherness of such a poem as this, not one line of which he approves; but he admires the poem as a formal, and in that sense as a human and achieved intervention in the elaborate dialogue having to do with life and death and salvation.  It's something worth listening to and worth engaging with as a human gesture.  So the difficulties that he would find would be very far removed and at the outer limit.  They would not be difficulties felt for the most part in his normal, journeyman activities as a teacher.
 

Discussion of Presentations

 David Hollinger opened the discussion by asking Mark Noll to elaborate on the significance of the adjective "Christian" as applied to those cosmological assumptions that he seemed to say were necessary for effective historical writing.  He questioned how it is that the historical writing of people like Gibbon, Thucydides, Perry Miller, etc., display Christian assumptions, or whether Mark doesn't think that their writing is effective.  Noll replied that he thinks they display Christian assumptions about the knowability of the world, the capacity of human intelligence to grasp something true about the world.  David asked why these are "Christian" assumptions.  Some people might say that those presuppositions are trans-Christian or prior to Christianity.  Mark commented that there is no prior to Christianity in his way of looking at the world.

 Jean Elshtain wondered whether the difference that emerged between the two presentations wasn't in fact a disciplinary difference.  Working, as Mark does, on American religious history, religion, including one's own confession, enters into the material directly and perhaps helps to constitute the subject matter more directly than it would for someone who teaches literature.  She thought it would be helpful for each of the presenters to reflect briefly on this difference.
 Donoghue referred to the phrase "declare allegiances" that Noll had used at one point in his presentation.  Denis said that that is not a phrase that he would find himself virtually ever using either as a teacher or as a literary critic.  Even the word "faith", he explained, is very much a mixture of belief and doubt .  It's a word we give to a certain way of life or a certain concatenation of convictions, but it also approves & must make an uncomfortable place for doubt and confusion.  So the notion that teachers should "declare their allegiances" is much too bold for anything he would either want or find necessary as a teacher of literature.  It may be a difference of discipline, as Jean suggested, but Donoghue would not find himself being in the position of using that phrase.
  Elshtain also noted the difference between evangelical Protestant and Catholic.  She wondered how much that entered into the differences in their approaches.  There is both the disciplinary difference and the confessional one.
 Noll did not think the way Donoghue described literature was a contradiction to what he was saying because the object of Denis's inquiry is different than the object of a historian's inquiry.  Regarding Elshtain's initial question about disciplines, Mark doesn't think we have very good models of religious people writing the religious history of their own group.  Having studied a little of the history of Christian history writing, Mark observed that the temptation is overwhelming by believers and those who have left a particular form of belief to introduce theological factors that cannot be researched or openly debated.  What he was trying to argue for in his presentation was what in his mind is a very clearly Christian affirmation and confidence about the knowability of the world, but a knowability that actually works out with fewer problems if you're working on a non-religious subject.  He's come to believe that strong contingency is imperative for good history writing, and it's clear to him that contingency is mandated by the Christian faith.
 Diane Winston commented that, at the risk of sounding overly self-congratulatory, she thinks that is precisely why as a Jew her work on the Salvation Army is of great interest here.  When she began working as an historian of American religion, she was convinced that nobody should be allowed to work on their own traditions for precisely the reasons Noll outlined.  It always surprises her when people try to do it because they seem to be coming to it with baggage that almost prevents them from being able to tell an effective story.  What Mark said makes her wonder about her own enterprise.  Would she be writing a different kind of history if she were approaching it as a Christian rather than as a Jew?  She can't imagine how it would look any different.  If that's the case, she wonders how authorial voice make a difference one way or the other?  Mark thought that in the case Diane described it may not.  He went on to explain that he thinks that by and large those in a religious tradition writing the history of the tradition don't write very good history; nor do those who have left that tradition with some kind of animus about the tradition.  The exception is when there is a fundamental ambiguity in the author about the development of that tradition.  Once there is ambiguity--e.g., people who are de-converted yet still drawn in somehow to what they have left, or people who remain in the fold but yet are deeply disquieted about some elements of that tradition--Noll thinks there is a chance for self-awareness and the possibility of self-critical use of sources.  This is why he is glad for the end of Protestant hegemony in American intellectual life.

 Mark Schwehn thought he was probably even more troubled than David Hollinger about the earlier exchange on whether certain historians shared Christian cosmological assumptions.  He asked why Noll wouldn't want to say that the historians in question share a certain commitment to different versions of epistemological realism or a realist epistemology.  It seemed to him that the only advantage of using "Christian" here is if one were to argue that of the several ways that those people could have grounded a commitment to epistemological realism, the only one that you find persuasive and convincing is to ground it in a Christian world view.  Surely if Noll were to come across the statement "Thucydides wrote from Christian cosmological assumptions," he would say as a historian that that's false.  Noll agreed, but added that as an observer of the historical process he thinks it's true.  (Someone noted that that's a belief statement, and Noll agreed that it was.)  Hollinger then asked about the distinction between being an historian and being an observer of the historical process, a subject to which he would return toward the end of the discussion.
 In an exchange with Dick Bernstein, who was puzzled by some of Noll's comments, Mark said thinks he has a reason within the context of his convictions for discriminating between good and bad history.  Good history is history that opens itself to the testimony of sources, he explained.  He also thinks he has an answer for why that way of doing history is good.  Bernstein felt this was shifting it to a different kind of level, to the meta-level.  Noll agreed.  Dick also argued that if Noll's view was that Hollinger is a good historian because, whether David recognizes it or not, he really accepts Christian cosmological views, it seems irrelevant to the actual judgment of his discussions of American intellectual history.  In other words, it's second intentional and doesn't really make a difference.  It might give Noll the satisfaction of understanding why Hollinger is such a good historian despite his self-deception and confusion, but it didn't seem to him qua history to make much of a difference.  If Dick himself were to come as a third party, the questions he would ask about their history are, does it give a good argument in terms of evidence, does it show good knowledge of the subject, is it an inferential kind of argument, etc.  But he didn't see these issues in any first intentional sense as having to do with Christianity.
 Nick Wolterstorff asked whether the test for good history didn't have to at some crucial junctures be extra-historical.  Noll said he thinks that that is what he is trying to say.
 Along the same line Richard Mouw offered MacIntyre's argument that if you have two different competing theories, the test of the accuracy of one of them will be not only how that theory can explain the data that each of them is attempting to explain but also how it can explain the other theory, i.e., why people find the other theory plausible.  For example, Mouw continued, a Marxist and Mark Noll have different world views that generate different ways of describing what good history is.  The Marxist would have a rather elaborate account of why it is that a Christian, in spite of being confused, can still produce a good account of the French Revolution.  Similarly, Christians might talk about the image of God or natural revelation, as in the Thucydides example mentioned earlier,  Mouw thought the imago dei was probably a powerful point to appeal to here.  But that is, in a sense, meta-historical.  So, the job of the Christian historian is not only to show how Christian assumptions can provide historical explanations, but also how that same theory generates an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of other theories.

   Turning to Donoghue's presentation, Mouw felt that Denis had avoided Mark's question by saying from the start that he wasn't going to speak to all the other competing views.  Rather, he showed in a marvelous way how from his assumptions he would teach a certain text.  But, Mouw asked, suppose Denis accepted the challenge of teaching alongside people who hold different views, e.g. with someone who considered "American Psyche" a fine piece of literature.
 Denis replied that one would have to do the kind of close critical analysis that goes some distance to refute that.  Moreover it seemed to him that Mark was using the word "Christian" as if its historical emergence were of no account, as if its mission were of total universal bearing, and as if the fact that Jesus was born on a particular day is neither here nor there because it's all anticipated.  In such usage even paganism is pre-Christianity, or Christianity that didn't know itself to be Christian.  This seemed to Denis to be pretty close to sophistry.  He could see why there would be an initial historical advantage in saying that, but it could be very quickly pulled out of context and accused of having no definitional or communicative value.  What it does, Noll responded, is to provide insight on the question what is good history and what is not.  That seemed to Donoghue a very trivial issue in the context of the vast grove of life and death issues we were discussing.  Crucial to Noll's rhetoric, Denis thought, was in effect saying that every vision, every epiphany, every act of wisdom is in fact Christian.  Whether it took place thousands of years ago or not makes no difference whatsoever because Christian is a term not just of global but of infinite and eternal value.  Denis couldn't see how his saying that would gain any advantage at all.
 Mouw pointed out that one could answer the question of why there are positive signs of morality among pagans by saying that the law is written on their hearts.  There is an explanatory value there, and it's not to say that the pagans are anonymous Christians or anything like that.  But it is to say that the same sources that inform Christians in very explicit ways are at work in other ways in the larger human community.  Mouw didn't think this was a trivial thing to say.  Donoghue reiterated that he didn't see the slightest advantage in Noll's usage of the word Christianity as a kind of mega-term.  He saw a trivial initial rhetorical benefit in doing so, but he didn't see any work it would do on any particular occasion.  Once you've declared that particular conviction,  Denis explained, it puts the matter beyond the reach of syntax, beyond the reach of discourse altogether.
 Stump tried to restate Noll's position in the following terms.  Among the things held to be central to Christian faith there are some things that disguise historical events and some propositions that don't.  Among those that don't are some propositions which entail epistemological realism.  Those propositions don't have anything to do with what happened at a particular point in history; they transcend history.  The question is whether there is something in Christian metaphysics that explains epistemological realism better than anything else.  If so--and Eleonore found Al Plantinga's argument to that effect particularly interesting--then it's appropriate, sensible and entirely suitable to think of epistemological realism as somehow Christian; and insofar as someone holds such a view, to think that in one sense that person upholds a Christian doctrine, although of course he doesn't describe it as Christian.  Stump thought that was what Mark was trying to say.  It's a big question whether this is right, but she didn't think it was outrageous.

 Eleonore also had a question for Donoghue.  Denis had put forth his position so sensibly that it looked as if there were no alternative to it.  But in fact his position is highly contentious, and she thought this needed to be brought out.  For example, she explained, Chinua Achebe said that Heart of Darkness is not a great work of art,  and in fact ought to be stricken off the list of great works of art, because it is racist.  Achebe's position is that without first having a moral position, without first having a philosophical and perhaps theological perspective on what's good, you can't tell which are the good works of art or not.  This is a position that is very active in Donoghue's field today.  In fact, she thought it was probably the dominant position.  And in keeping with this position, you can't engage in literary criticism without first making clear what your world view is.  So Donoghue's position, which looked so sensible, which looked as if it had no alternative to it, is in fact a highly controversial position within his own field.  Donoghue responded that it doesn't make any workable or useful sense to say that Lucretius's poem is somehow prefiguratively Christian in a sense in which you might say that Dante's Divine Comedy is Christian or that Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" is Christian.  It's not prefiguratively Christian in the sense in which we usually talk about prefigurative, Eleonore rejoined.  It would be stupid to think of it as prefiguratively Christian.  But an interesting question that Plantinga has raised in a provocative way for philosophers is: If you commit yourselves to some of the things that, e.g., Thucydides commits himself to, if you follow those thoughts out to the end, in the end can you hold onto those thoughts without contradiction without also accepting Christianity?  Plantinga's answer to this question is fundamentally "no".  And if he's right, and Stump admitted that's a very big "if", then it's right in some sense to call those positions "Christian".  That is what she took Mark Noll to be saying, and she thought it was a perfectly interesting view.  Whether it's right or not is another question.
 Donoghue then returned to the Achebe issue that Stump had raised. He argued that the Achebe reading of Heart of Darkness can be shown to be defective.  It's as if he looked at part of the picture but did not look at what was in the top right hand segment of it.  If you re-read Heart of Darkness in light of Achebe's denunciation of Conrad, said Denis, you'll see that Achebe's interpretation of the book is strikingly partial.  But, Eleonore interjected, the interesting question is not whether Achebe is right about Conrad, but whether Achebe is right in his theory of art.  His theory of art says that you cannot engage in literary criticism in a meaningful way, you cannot so much as say whether a work is a great work of art, without first having a world view and a morality and then evaluating the work with regard to that world view.  That's what is interesting in this context.  Donoghue continued to argue that Achebe's view of Conrad was erroneous.  He also discussed Achebe's polemical use of the word "racist".  At this point in the discussion someone expressed frustration because he sensed that Eleonore was making a particular point, and Denis was responding to a different point.  Stump agreed and wanted to make it clear to Denis that he was speaking to a different question than the one she was asking.

 Shifting back to Noll's presentation, Hollinger said he found Denis's construction of what Mark was trying to do quite convincing.  However, he wanted to try a slightly different way of putting it to see whether Mark found it coherent and whether it made sense to the rest of the group.  The key distinction, David suggested, appears to be between the role of the "historian" and the role of "an observer of the historical process", if he heard Mark correctly.  As an observer of the historical process, Mark seemed to be saying that he is in a position to claim that Thucydides wrote on the basis of Christian cosmological assumptions, even though Thucydides was not a Christian and wrote prior to the historical moment that Christianity entered into history.  He wrote from Christian presuppositions even though he didn't know it because the world is constructed in such a way that anybody who buys into the truth has bought into a Christian presupposition.  So, if we're leaving the realm of history and going over to the realm of observers of the historical process, which some might call the metaphysical or ontological realm, we're saying that the claims that are asserted there are not subject to testing by the same rules by which we test claims that are asserted in the realm of historical discourse.  Then we need to know what are the rules by which we assess claims in that other realm?  If you say that this is something that comes out of revealed religion or particular religious tradition, Hollinger thinks it makes a very compelling case for the privatization of religion.  And, Nancy Ammerman chimed in, why it can't happen in the classroom.
 Eugene Lowe was struck by a seeming convergence between what Denis and Mark presented.  Donoghue said at the beginning is that "literature exists"; it is something apart from all of the other things that might contextualize it.  He said at the end of his discussion of the poem that what he admires about it is that it is a "human intervention," a wrestling with issues of life and death.  One thing that Noll said, Lowe continued, is that he believes on the basis of a creedal affirmation that there is history outside of himself that is knowable and that one of the important things to be known and understood as one approaches it is the fact of contingency or finitude.  Those two sets of observations seemed to converge.  What Denis admires is the engagement with life and death.  One could say that's an aspect of contingency.  Noll argued that what one learns from Christianity is that there is something out there that is not us, that is, as it were, the work of God, and that we are contingent creatures.  Lowe thought there was a relationship between these propositions, and he was interested to know what they thought about this.
 Noll responded that he didn't think Denis saw the value that he saw in trying to explain within a broader world and life view why a person might be justified in saying "literature exists" as something that is outside myself.
 While Donoghue affirmed that he respected Noll's position, it seemed to him that Mark was in danger of entering into the language by way of a kind of "specious sublimity"; that precisely to the degree to which he was using the term "Christian" in the sense that has been articulated, he is rendering the term vain, emptying it of its tangible and formative meaning, making it less useful than it may be.  Reflecting back on what Elshtain had said earlier, Denis thought that one real difference between them, perhaps the difference between a historian and a literary critic, is that if he were to ask the question, to whom is a writer responsible, Noll might say a writer or historian is responsible to the truth.  Donoghue wouldn't say that; he couldn't say that and be engaged as he is with literature.  He would say instead that a writer is responsible to the language--to the character, the etymology, the values which are operative within a particular language.  He would find himself very rarely using the distinction between true and false.
 

SESSION III: SUNDAY MORNING
 The first session Sunday morning continued the theme addressed Saturday afternoon: Should teaching reflect the religious perspective of the teacher?  Bob Wuthnow and Jean Elshtain gave presentations followed by a general discussion.

Bob Wuthnow, Princeton University (Sociology)

 Wuthnow opened with a few prefatory comments about his approach to the topic.  First, he would be speaking from personal experience using anecdotal examples to prompt reflection from others who had had similar experiences.  Second, teaching means many different things to him, and he wanted to deal with various aspects of the teaching task.  Third, he wanted to talk more about "religion" than "religious perspective" since he wasn't quite sure what was meant by "religious perspective" while he was convinced that "religion" is part of his being.  Finally, he explained that he had to start with a prior question to the "should" question posed, namely, "Does religion affect my teaching?"  He would then reflect on whether that is a good or bad thing.

 A. Working with Graduate Students.  Wuthnow's first example came from a meeting with a student who had recently graduated and was considering whether to go to graduate school in sociology or in politics.  She was especially interested in religion as a result of research for her undergraduate thesis on the role of the religious left in the Spanish Civil War.  Neither she nor he said anything about their respective religious backgrounds or beliefs.   This woman was from Princeton, and he occasionally sees her parents at a particular Catholic church in Princeton, so he's fairly sure that she was raised Catholic.  But this only occurred to him later.  It didn't seem to be relevant to the conversation.  In fact, what struck him most about the conversation was its ordinariness.  Yet this is a big part of what he does as a teacher, especially in his capacity as director of graduate studies in the sociology department.   When he asks himself whether his religion influenced how he related to this student, the answer, he hopes, is yes.  He didn't question her sanity about being interested in religion; on the other hand, he was fairly straightforward with her about the possible job market in this area as opposed to others.
 Wuthnow gave two other examples from his work with current graduate students.  In the past year he'd spent a great deal of time with a graduate student from Japan.  She had basically been disowned by her family, had no scholarship support, and as a result was not eating or functioning very well.  While this student was taking an exam she was found her unconscious on the floor.  In the aftermath Bob spent a considerable amount of time creating a support network to make sure that she survived, e.g., calling the dean's office repeatedly, talking to people at the infirmary and the hospital, talking with other faculty who knew her well, trying to arrange for some other Japanese women in the community to meet with her.  Did religion affect that encounter?  He'd like to think that compassion was part of it.  But he also suspects that any reasonable person would have responded much the way he did.
 Another graduate student  came to Wuthnow one day in tears because it appeared that his wife had suddenly contracted an illness and they weren't sure how serious it was.  He told Bob he was scared and was coming to him because he had nobody else to talk to.  Bob's relationship with this graduate student was much more on a religious basis.  (They went to the same kind of church and had talked a lot about church activities.)  The student asked Bob if he would pray for him and his wife.  He did, but he also encouraged him to talk frankly with his wife because he had been afraid to say anything to her for fear that his own fears would make her feel worse.  He later told Bob that the ensuing conversation with his wife had made a big difference.
 For Wuthnow, all three encounters are part of the teaching experience at the graduate level.

 B. Working with Undergraduates.  Bob also works with undergraduates involved in various independent projects.  At Princeton all seniors write senior theses, and all juniors write junior independent papers.  For Wuthnow this is a very important part of teaching because it usually provides the opportunity to get acquainted with a student on a deeper level.  One works with a student over a period of months, and quite often this becomes a meaningful relationship that is remembered on both sides over the course of years.  A case that intrigued Bob all of last year concerned a junior, African-American woman who was interested in writing about revivalism.  She said that her interest in revivals stemmed from the fact that she lived in Pensacola, Florida and attended the church there that has had so much revival activity in recent years.  They did not discuss her personal religious experience, but he gave her a number of historical books and articles that dealt with sociological theories on the subject.  They met throughout the year, and Bob got to know her a bit better.  It wasn't the kind of relationship where he disclosed anything very explicit about his own religious views except to encourage her that she had had a legitimate experience and that she was working on a legitimate topic for her junior paper.
 During the course of the year she started raising questions about what would be appropriate to include in her final sociological paper, specifically whether it would be alright to put in some of her personal experiences.  Wuthnow encouraged her not to focus exclusively on these because she hadn't done any kind of systematic observation, but he also affirmed that this was a piece of evidence, a form of data.  When the first draft of the paper was submitted, about 20 pages in length, it was all from the Bible--biblical passages about revival.  Reflecting back on this, Bob commented that there certainly would have been a time in his department when she would have been "read the riot act" for this.  It would have been completely inappropriate.  But Bob thought, why not?  She was treating this as evidence and wasn't being purely subjective about it as far as he could tell.  She seemed quite systematic in reviewing what the Bible said about revivals.  When the second draft came in there was another long section about her personal experiences.  At this point Bob insisted that she include some sociology, and she eventually did.  The final version included about a third of each of these elements--Bible, observations about what was going on at the church in Pensacola, and a summary of relevant sociological and historical literature.  It wasn't remarkably well put together.  Bob thinks she got a B on the final product.  But she had been given permission by him to include things that were meaningful to her from her own personal background.
 At first Wuthnow thought it was probably just because of who he is that he had permitted her to do this.  But all of these papers have a second reader.  In this case the second reader was a faculty member with quite different religious views from his own, and this other faculty member independently came to exactly the same conclusion about the paper.  So, when he asked himself, how much his religion affected that encounter, he came up with a kind of mixed view.  The principles governing this encounter were twofold.  First, he respected what this student was bringing to the subject matter and what she wanted to do.  Second, he was attempting to respect the discipline recognizing that the student needed to be stretched, to learn some things and to think in some new ways.  So he felt it was legitimate from his own personal view, whether religious or otherwise, to push her more into doing sociology than she might have done on her own.

 C. The Classroom Setting.  Other examples Bob discussed were from classroom teaching.  If he is teaching a course in statistics his religious views don't make much of a difference at all .  Religion simply doesn't  come up very much.  Sometimes he teaches a course on civil society.  In a context like this often the way religion comes up is simply as a factor, a variable.   Generally in this course it isn't a particularly big factor, and often it comes up more from students themselves.  Knowing that Wuthnow studies religion, they may ask what the relevance of religion is here.
 Bob then focused on the undergraduate sociology of religion course he occasionally teaches.  A number of years ago he decided that one of his goals for the course would be to show that religion is a serious dimension of human behavior and worth taking seriously.  After teaching undergraduates for some time he realized that at a personal level that is often the question with which they're really wrestling.  (If they've been raised in a religious tradition, is it something important enough to continue thinking about; if they haven't, is it something they've missed or ought to be thinking about?)  It is certainly not a matter of teaching from a particular tradition or encouraging students to pursue a particular tradition, but simply taking the subject matter of religion seriously.  For the most part Wuthnow does that by treating it with respect.  For example, he talks with students about reductionism and the differences between trying to "explain" something sociologically and "explaining it away".  He often has them read Robert Bellah's essay on symbolic realism as a kind of springboard for discussion because it makes more complex some of the relationships between religious belief and social science.  Some students are critical of the inclusion of such material while other students find it valuable.
 Wuthnow always includes Marx in this course as well.  One way in which his teaching of Marx may differ from that of others is that although he emphasizes religion as the "opium of the people", he also gives equal time to the preceding phrase, "religion is the heart of the heartless world".  He tries to give a more complex view of Marx's thinking, especially his early thinking, including some of his almost tender passages about the role of religion.  He then tries to put these passages in the broader framework of Marxist thought.  When he teaches Weber in this course he talks a lot about Weber's interest in the theodicy question, and probably emphasizes this much more than one of his colleagues who teaches Weber in a theory course.  For undergraduates Weber's discussions of theodicy are a bit abstract, so Wuthnow deliberately reaches outside the sociological literature often using Annie Dillard's book Holy the Firm as a way to prompt their thought.  The book reflects on Dillard's struggle to understand why a little girl gets badly burned in an airplane accident, and theodicy questions come up very vividly.  It's certainly not a sociological treatise, but Bob has no qualms about including it.  When he does a section on fundamentalism, he often uses part of Jim Ault's film "Born Again".  Ault's presentation is more subtle than that of Randy Balmer's, yet it is possible for students simply to see the characters.  Bob described some moving scenes in the film by way of example.  This film itself prompts virtually all the discussion, and he simply lets the students run with it.
 In the smaller discussion sections associated with this course Bob usually encourages students to introduce themselves by including some information about their religious background.  On more than one occasion he has been the only Protestant in the room.  He usually says something to the class sooner or later about the fact that he grew up as a Protestant and that he knows more about that tradition than other traditions.  So in a classroom context, Bob summarized, his religion certainly makes a difference, but in different ways in different contexts and in different ways from week to week.

 In conclusion, Wuthnow outlined 4 general factors that influence his approach to teaching:

 1. Context is extremely important.  He works in a social science department within a religiously diverse institution.  Those are choices that reflect a lot of previous choices about training, investment of energy and so forth.  Wuthnow is comfortable with his context recognizing that it provides freedom to do a lot of things while it restricts doing other things.  He is conscious of the fact that he does not teach at a church-related college or a divinity school, and he is not a professor of Christian studies.  Yet if asked to speak at a seminary or to write something for a particular denomination, he happily recognizes the opportunities of being in a different context.
 2. Identity.  If you work in a given field long enough you leave traces of yourself; you have a reputation.  People who know Wuthnow's work can fairly quickly see that he's interested in churches and religious beliefs.  He's worked mostly on things that aren't especially sexy in the field of sociology, and those are choices he has been willing to make.  But he is also aware that he has a complex identity, and he wants to keep it that way.  For example, he doesn't present himself from within one particular branch of Christianity.
 3. Upbringing.  By upbringing he means the self, or the deep self, as opposed to the professional roles one plays.   Bob described his own "heavy duty religious upbringing", which continues to influence his fears and anxieties and has shaped his ability (or lack of ability) to trust people, his view of life in general, even why he's here today and the examples he posed in this presentation.
 4. Reflection.  It is one thing to be shaped by childhood religion; it is another to reflect on that experience.  One does this by reading hundreds of books in many fields, but also by engaging in an ongoing process of self-interpretation, by thinking about the meaning of one's days.

 This is why Wuthnow finds it difficult to be prescriptive about the question, "Should  a teacher's teaching reflect the teacher's religion?"  It does.  There is no way we can escape it.  It's like asking the question "Should the grass be green?"  Unlike grass, however, we are self-reflective individuals.  We choose.  "Should one's ideas be shaped by living in the United States?"  They simply are.  That doesn't mean you just affirm your xenophobia; nor does it mean you somehow transcend all cultural influences.  In closing Bob said he has trouble with generalizations on this subject and was not trying to suggest that his way is the best or the only way.  His religious upbringing taught him a lot about vanity. So, if anything, he struggles to avoid vanity while at the same time remembering that the greatest vanity is to imagine oneself being free of vanity.
 

Jean Bethke Elshtain, University of Chicago Divinity School (Political Science)

 Jean Elshtain explained that she too would be addressing the question "Does" rather than "should" teaching reflect the religious perspective of the teacher.  She began by describing what graduate training in political science is like.  One is trained in a rigid orthodoxy with regard to methodological and epistemological issues.  By way of illustration Elshtain spoke about her own experience in graduate school at Brandeis starting in 1967.  Obviously this was not a calm period.  All hell was about to break loose around a series of complex moral questions and political dilemmas, most notably Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement.  Despite Martin Luther King's explicitly biblical rhetoric and the impossibility of understanding what he was up to without appreciating the biblical cadences and faith commitments of his enterprise, political scientists managed to do just that.  Amazingly, they managed to avoid all kinds of religious issues.  The only professors who talked about religion expressed their militant unbelief.
 Graduate students were trained in an approach to scholarship that systematically expunged moral and ethical questions from any real consideration save insofar as they entered as biases on the part of the researcher or as subjective values that had no strong cognitive content and about which you could make no strong truth claims.  At the time this method was called "behaviorism" or "behavioralism".  It was designed to sanitize the study of politics from the smudginess, the messiness, the ambiguity of political life, from any taint of "values".  In keeping with the goal of behaviorism, to be a professional you had to be inducted into this epistemology and this methodology.  Everything was designed to make sure that those who got their degrees "knew how to do this right".  When Elshtain was a junior assistant professor, two years out of graduate school, she wrote a long piece critiquing this whole enterprise (despite the cautions of colleagues).  The article was called "Methodological Sophistication and Conceptual Confusion", and Jean read to the group some passages from this text.  She explained that in the approach political scientists were supposed to adopt, all kinds of deep, resonant issues surrounding questions of political justice are either expunged from view before you actually begin your work or can be somehow added on later--like icing on the cake, i.e., as values to which you yourself are committed but which are not central to the investigation that you undertake.   The view was that to describe and to evaluate are entirely separable activities, and those who mix the two are "fuzzy-minded", impressionistic, incapable of rigorous analysis, and so forth.
 There were some early critiques of this approach, and in this regard Charles Taylor was critical for Jean.  However, the basic approach to scholarship she described seeped into every course.  In order to escape it you had to take some courses outside of political science.  Elshtain herself did this as much as possible.  You might think that political theory would avoid some of this, and indeed it did, but there are ways in which the political theory enterprise was and still is a beleaguered enterprise in political science.  It has survived, and there are many students interested in political theory.   But now that behaviorism has come under some very withering critique, political science researchers have run en masse toward rational choice theory, and that now dominates the way political science students are trained.  Econometrics has spread to the social sciences and has been taken up with the greatest alacrity by political scientists, so much so that political theory positions now are often being redefined as formal theory.  As a result, we're weeding out the people who do the great tradition of Western political thought and those who are more likely to raise certain moral and ethical questions.
 Elshtain then explained that the way she was taught political theory, there was a canon of political thinkers:  Plato and Aristotle; Book 19 of Augustine's City of God (only as a prelude to the tradition of realism where Machiavelli is really the great figure; that Augustine himself was a theologian of some note is not terribly important); Aquinas (primarily because he had the good sense to incorporate Aristotle & in a sense to lift up once again the good of the earthly domain); and that was it on religious thinkers.  None of the Reformers were in the canon.  In fact, Elshtain noted, when she finally decided to include Luther in a course on modern political philosophy at the University of Massachusetts she felt it was extremely daring.  After Aquinas you would normally go to Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, maybe a little Kant, a smidgen of Hegel, then Marx, then time's up!  That's the course that dominates political philosophy.  Elshtain started to play with this course during her years at U. Mass. in the 1970s.  She got daring enough to include some "losers", e.g. she had the students read Pope John XXIII's encyclical "Pace in terris", and actually got a few complaints.  At the same time she was working on a book that came to be called Public Man, Private Woman.  In that book she included a discussion of Augustine, Luther and so on, because it seemed to her that if you were concerned with the relationship historically between the household and the polis or family and polity, to leave out the Reformers or the "religious thinkers" would be to do absolute violence to the subject matter.  When she was writing this book she did not think she was including these thinkers for her own religious reasons but rather for intellectual reasons, to do justice to the subject matter.  But when she looks back at her treatment of these thinkers, she realizes that the particular way in which she treated them was not to set them up simply as representatives in the rogue gallery (i.e. men intent on keeping women down) but in a more complex and a far more sympathetic way.
 Sometimes, she noted, your readers alert you to some of your commitments when you don't even quite know you have them.  It happened that when she published this book she was accused by a reviewer of promoting a religious perspective that sounded suspiciously Lutheran.  She wondered where that had come from, and realized that a passing reference to what she had learned in Lutheran confirmation class gave it away.  In any case, she learned over time from her critics who accused her of being "too religious" or said there's too much religion coming through in her writing.  She began to realize that she was in fact the heir of a tradition, a complex tradition, even though at the time she was very much questioning her religious commitment; and that her own thought makes no sense if it is framed outside the horizon of the tradition in which she was raised and with which she has struggled.  Part of this involves finding ways to release the vibrancy of a tradition; showing ways it might still be brought to bear to help us to think well on a whole range of questions.  As Elshtain looks at the work she's done on women and war, a lot of it stemming from the just war tradition, and more recently work on international politics struggling with the question of whether there can be forgiveness, i.e., the politics of forgiveness in the international realm, she realizes that these are questions that would not occur to someone in the way in which they now occur to her, outside a certain set of religious concerns and commitments.

 Finally, how does all this relate to teaching?  Jean already mentioned that she played around with a required course in modern political philosophy to include "religious thinkers".  But, she noted, it is important to keep in mind that in many places people are obliged to teach required courses, so it is not as if you can be very inventive in the kinds of courses that you offer.  This was certainly true at U. Mass, but it was also true at Vanderbilt where there was an extraordinary censoriousness about anything that fell outside the purview of a very rigid view of political science.  (E.g., she was told once by a colleague that he tells his graduate students, if they want to study political science they can study with him; if they want to study political fiction they can study with Elshtain.)  There are very powerful forces at work that make it very difficult for people with strong ethical commitments, moral concerns, etc., to engage such dimensions in their teaching.
 By going to the University of Chicago Divinity School Elshtain has been "released" and now has freedom to teach courses that include significant Christian thinkers and content.  For example, she teaches a course on political realism that includes a whole section on Christian realism, a course on Augustine or Rousseau, a course on ethics and autobiography where students read Dorothy Day among others, a course called "Politics, Ethics and Terror" where they look at the response of three great 20th-century religious thinkers to totalitarianism, a course on ethics and embodiment, a course on the moral life of institutions.  Now, she concluded, her teaching certainly reflects her religious convictions.  But there is a way in which it always did.  The question is how it comes through, in what form.  She thinks it inevitably plays a role in how you shape your subject matter, what thinkers you choose to focus on and how you interpret these thinkers.
 

Discussion of Presentations

 Prior to the general discussion Monika Hellwig asked for an opportunity to speak in response to yesterday's discussion.  She felt that David Hollinger's question to Mark Noll was extremely important and warranted a lot more discussion than the group gave it.   Mark's statement about seeing Christianity in pre-Christian times was not new.  It was made explicit in the 2nd-century apologists and has cropped up in Christian thinking ever since, and not only in Christian thinking but in other religious traditions.  She thought that David was posing the question:  If you believe this as you say you do, what does it do to the integrity of the historical inquiry?  Can you separate this out as a different kind of discourse and do historical inquiry in conversation with secular participants so we can have an intelligible conversation and assume we're doing something sensible that really comes up with answers, with interpretations of history?  Monika thinks there is a corresponding question that Jean brought out in her talk, the question a religious person might pose to the secular scholar:  But are you leaving out of consideration what for most people in most of history seems to have been the most motivating consideration, the consideration that shaped their perception of what was going on around them and their perception of what we should do and why we should do it?  It seems to her that this is an issue we need to disentangle very carefully.
 Monika distinguished two different kinds of truth and correspondingly different criteria for assessing truth claims.  On the one hand there is the kind of truth we pursue in a scholarly way.  On the other hand, personally she stakes her life on the wager that Jesus of Nazareth really holds the key to the meaning of everything; besides that, she stakes her life on a much more difficult proposition, that the Catholic tradition is the way to get at this.  This is a truth claim, but it's a truth claim of another kind.  It's not empirical truth, it's not logically necessary, it's not even a combination of the empirical and the logically necessary.  But it is livable, and the question is, if you live by this vision does it make more and more sense?  This is the criterion for assessment.
 Hellwig feels that we're giving students less than the truth and less than honest teaching if we don't admit some kind of distinction between the two kinds criteria:  a faith that you can live by or a fact that you can demonstrate (e.g., a fact in mathematics or scientific facts that are based on a combination of empirical observation or logical necessity).  One of the problems of post-Enlightenment life, schooling and scholarship, which was reflected in Jean's presentation,  is a strong bias to limit all truth to what is empirically verifiable and what is logically necessary.  It is therefore also a strong bias to exclude what motivates most people most of the time.

 Dick Bernstein was disturbed by a subtext that repeatedly emerged.  He described it as a slide from a deep critical concern about moral & ethical issues, issues of compassion, justice, care, sensitivity, and so on, to the religious.  He saw this as a gross distortion.  Historically no one wants to deny the role of religion as a conveyor of these values, but there is the image that such things are being excluded from the academy.  One of the terms we keep using in the most uncritical way, Dick thought, is "secular", as if we all knew what it meant.  The subtext is that the secularist is either a reductionist or a materialist, insensitive to the dimensions of human life, a behaviorist, or a radical choice theorist, etc.  He wanted the group to face up to this more forthrightly.  Dick said he defines himself as a person who has always been concerned with moral issues, but he has never thought of them explicitly as issues which emanate from a certain type of religious tradition.  What he finds disturbing is the next step:  put crudely, if there is going to be the "salvation" of American higher education, it has to come from those who are somehow institutionally identified with a certain religious tradition.  He thinks this is an injustice to the problematic.
 Elshtain responded to Bernstein's observation by pointing out first of all that she did not use the word "secularist" once in her presentation.  Her concern with political science training was that it expunged ethical & moral questions, period.  It didn't matter whether they were religiously founded or not.  All of them were reduced to subjective preferences.  She agreed with Dick that it is deeply problematic to reduce things merely to the "secular",  but she didn't think she was hearing too much of that.  Dick argued, however, that this was implicit even in what Jean had presented.  It had to do with the way she told the history of political science training, particularly what he thought Jean left out.  What he thought she left out was the question of where the initial protests came from in the '60s.  It was really out of the student movement, out of radicalism,  in the name of Marcuse, Marx, etc., that the issues Jean is now identifying as the moral and ethical issues were being raised.  Whatever judgments we may want to make about its misguidedness, this is where the passion came from.  Dick felt that what is frequently overlooked with regard to the student movement is its discontent about the lack of concern with moral issues.  This goes back to his earlier point, he explained, that it is not only through religion that deep concerns with moral, political and evaluative issues, issues of justice, even spiritual issues, arise.  Jean agreed and thought Dick was actually underscoring precisely her points about what was happening.
 Rich Mouw said that during the "dismal time" that Elshtain was describing he was at the University of Chicago, and to him as an evangelical Christian studying political thought in the philosophy department, it was a very exciting time.  In fact, as a Christian he found the university discussions very rich and thick.  As he attempted to connect this with issues of his religious tradition, he found almost no resources available to him from his own community of faith.  They were available, but if people weren't reading Augustine in political theory classes, it was largely because they weren't reading him in seminaries and in Christian colleges & universities either.  So, Mouw felt that Christians needed to repent of their own sins in this regard and also acknowledge at least some of the "righteousness" that was present in the universities at the time.
 David Hollinger strongly supported Bernstein's intervention on the importance of driving a very strong wedge between religion, on the one hand, and moral & political concerns on the whole range of things that Jean surveyed, on the other.  He particularly wanted to underscore the historical point that he thought Dick was making.  Those who initially bore witness against the merits of the tradition that Jean outlined did so in a context very different from what we're talking about at this meeting with regard to the resources that religion can contribute.  Hollinger was at Berkeley and in the movement during those years, and this was not a movement with religious sources in its wake.  When King came to Berkeley in '67 his religiosity was regarded as an embarrassment.  Hollinger didn't know anyone during all his years in the movement who would have been caught dead anywhere near a church.  These people were making the case against the behaviorists, against the narrowness of the political science tradition, not on the basis of religious texts or Charles Taylor.  David thought we needed to take account of what was really a radically secular emphasis.
 Elshtain didn't think that anything she said contradicted this.  She had talked about the fact that a whole range of issues emerge from ethical, moral and  religious concerns that were simply expunged from view if you were moving down this particular methodological track; and that was a tremendous frustration.  When she used the word "justice" it was certainly not narrowly a religious term.  Jean wasn't sure exactly what the issue was that Dick and David were raising because she thought the view she was taking was capacious enough to include these kinds of concerns that arise from a variety of sources and to argue that this particular approach expunged all of them.
 In an effort to clarify, Stump commented that what Jean described was a tale of intellectual tyranny, and Dick and David wanted to make it clear for the record that it wasn't atheism per se that was guilty of intellectual tyranny.  Eleonore thought this point ought to be extended.  Intellectual tyranny, she explained, is something that senior academics are prone to, and it isn't always intellectual tyranny against the religious.  Sometimes it's intellectual tyranny of the religious against those who don't hold precisely their religious views.  Sometimes it has nothing to do with religion one way or the other.  She thinks the lesson here is that you have to examine yourself and watch what is happening around you.  Intellectual tyranny is deplorable however and wherever it arises, and no side has a monopoly on it.
 Fearing we were missing Bernstein's point, Wolterstorff took at stab at interpreting him.  He thought Dick was noting that there is a tendency for religious people to try to co-opt the ethical; and he rightly resists that--in the name of the ethical & in the name of religion.  Bernstein agreed. He also added a final comment giving credence to Elshtain's story.  He was in Mississippi in 1964 and at the time considered himself a kind of Marxist radical.  But the most moving experience he has ever had in his life in public discourse was in a black church in Hattiesburg.  It became absolutely clear to him that if you didn't understand the role of the black church in the South, you didn't have a deep understanding of the Civil Rights Movement.  The meeting he attended there was the exemplar of the ethical, the political and the religious merging.  Anyone who would say you could understand that in political & social terms without the religious dimension was blind.

 Changing topics, Steve Haynes asked Bob Wuthnow for further comment on an episode that he had discussed in which a graduate student whose wife was ill came to him asking for prayer.  Steve explained that many students know that he's an ordained minister, and he gets opportunity to be pastoral with students from time to time.  But he has never had students ask him to pray for them in his office.  If they did, he's afraid he might feel this was inappropriate behavior in academic space, thought he thought Wuthnow did the right thing at the time.  He wondered if Bob had had any feelings of that nature, and if so, how he resolved this.  Bob said that he has qualms too.  He clarified, however, that in this particular case the student did not ask him to pray with him there in the office, though other students have asked for prayer in that setting.  Wuthnow commented that language and roles are tricky, and he stressed the importance of understanding what the students want.  Is this ministry, is it being a good mentor, or something else?
 

Final Discussion
 Following discussion of the morning presentations the seminar considered one final issue in the large group forum.  The question posed for discussion was:  Should religion be taught from within or without the tradition?  In fact, however, the final discussion was more wide-ranging.
 By way of introduction Jim Turner proposed a taxonomy that he thought might help clarify some frameworks for discussion.  In listening to the very different presentations and ensuing discussions, he distinguished at least four distinct positions being articulated:  1) Those who are religious or who have been raised in a religious environment have a religious dimension as part of their persona, and that inevitably shapes the way they relate to other people in the world including their students.  As Wuthnow explained, it is also something that one reflects on and to which one brings a level of self-consciousness.  2)  An explicitly Christian world view can shape your self-understanding of what you're doing when you're teaching; it can enter explicitly into your teaching in some substantive ways, and it can even form the framework for how you teach.  3) Religious traditions can provide intellectual resources which, at least in certain disciplines, can form some of the substance of what one teaches to students.  4) It is important to understand that spiritual and ethical concerns are not inevitably connected with theistic belief, and such concerns of a secular type ought not to be neglected in teaching.
 Gene Lowe proposed another possible position.  He mentioned Hellwig's comments at the beginning of the session about different views of what truth is and how that is evaluated, analyzed and criticized.  Lowe thought Jim's four positions might be seen as variations on a predominant kind of naturalistic rationalism.  Monika, on the other hand, was upholding a kind of theological view.  He thought this helped to crystallize concerns that have permeated the seminar.  Mouw added that underlying the various approaches Jim listed is an important discussion about whether the primary contribution of religion is ethical or epistemological.  He thinks that a lot of divisions in the group fall along those lines.  Some of us think that Christian belief entails a certain way of viewing the process of knowing and being that has a clear impact on the ways in which we formulate presuppositions in a variety of fields.  If, on the other hand, religion is primarily a set of values or ethical commitments or sensitivities, then it's easier to dislodge those from an explicit relationship with religious belief.
 Turner thought this represented an important line of division within the membership of the Lilly Seminar, a line that does not necessarily correspond with the line of division between believers and non-believers.  Most people seemed to agree.  Elshtain later noted that this was not even exclusively a divide between one camp and another.  There can also be a divide within an individual scholar.  If you keep pressing the ethical question it will almost inevitably force you to epistemological and methodological questions.
 Doug Sloan also addressed some of the issues that Monika had raised about epistemology.  This led to a longer discussion about religious knowledge and religious language.  In response to Sloan Wolterstorff said that some people, himself included, don't think religious language is just symbolic.  There's an issue of what a philosopher would call realism, the cognitive status of religious knowledge.   Monika wanted to clarify that she would never use the phrase "just symbolic" because her understanding is that we mediate or collaborate in relationship to what is transcendent by symbolism.  So, to say that something is constructed symbolically is not to say that it isn't real.  It is to say that reality is bigger than what you can assess by empirical verification or by logical necessity.

 Bernstein felt there was a confusion of two different levels in this discussion and wanted to return to what he thought was the main problematic, that is teaching and religious discourse.  He thought that the "Should" question posed for the presentations was badly-formed.  The question ought to have been: "May" the teacher's religious perspective influence his or her teaching?   There are limits to tolerance.  For example, if someone is simply going to advocate and proselytize and not be prepared in any sense to enter into discourse, it is simply unacceptable.  But the issue must be, can one conceive of university space in which these issues can be seriously represented, discussed & argued out without mechanisms designed to marginalize and denigrate?  We're not going to resolve symbolism vs. epistemology here, but the university ought to be a place where one can address such issues.
 Monika had called attention to tyranny within religious institutions, and Stump commented that  in the discussion about religion and teaching the group hadn't really differentiated one kind of institution from another.  There are different issues involved for people who are in religious as over against non-religious institutions.  Regarding Dick's comment that the question ought to be "may" you let your religious perspective influence your teaching, Eleonore felt this was a question for public institutions.  For religious institutions the question posed was perhaps on target.

 On another topic, Elshtain described her rather depressing experience giving a series of lectures at Lutheran seminaries and colleges.  There was one institution, Wartburg, where she thought there was still some fairly strong theological work being done, but in general she lamented a lack of theological seriousness.  She had expected that the kinds of questions she was raising, many of them on epistemological and metaphysical issues, would provoke good discussion or debate precisely at seminaries and colleges where people are being trained to teach or go into the pastorate.  She objected to many of the questions being raised at her lectures not because they were critical of what she was saying but because they were "simple-minded".  She wondered what was being taught at these places, what issues people were really grappling with.  It occurred to her that perhaps a strong engagement with religious traditions has a better chance of thriving at this point in time outside some of these explicitly religious institutions.  Jean admitted that she was only at four institutions and didn't want to generalize too much.  However, the kinds of questions she was hearing were "quasi-therapeutic".  In short, the places where one would expect robust engagement with particular traditions may not be the places where it's happening.
 Jean's comments helped Wolterstorff to identify a feeling of discomfort he has had.  It's easy for religious people to bash the secular universities, he commented, but he's come to the conclusion that serious Christian theology thrives more at Yale University than at any denominational seminary that he knows.   Diane Winston wanted to know what Nick meant by "robust engagement with Christian theology" at Yale.  She asked who was doing it and what was being done.  Nick gave some examples mentioning David Kelsey, Serene Jones and Miroslav Volf, among others.  He thought there was no seminary, denominational or interdenominational, that could match this.  So, one should give very cautious critiques of the university.  Jean would find more engagement with what she was saying at Yale than she would at Lutheran seminaries.

 Mouw re-emphasized the importance of context.   With regard to the question we've been discussing here--should your religious perspective influence the way you teach?--Mouw said that he was beginning to forget that he spends most of his time at a theological seminary where that's a bizarre question to ask.  So, even some of the seemingly innocuous ways in which we formulate questions don't really apply across the academy.  However, for those in situations where it's unthinkable that you would not allow your religious perspective to influence what you're teaching, the challenge is to avoid the kind of tyranny that several seminar members have talked about.  There is nothing more boring than being in a situation where people uncritically teach from a certain religious point of view.  The larger question, he thinks, is how does any of us, religious or non-religious, maintain strong convictions and nonetheless promote an atmosphere of learning in which critical perspectives and critical self-awareness are present.  Richard appreciated Wuthnow's final words in this regard.

 Barbara DeConcini described a conference she had attended a few years ago on the topic of advocacy in the classroom.  The idea of the conference had been generated among ACLS members, and it comprised legal scholars and representatives of all the disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.  What was striking to her throughout the conference was a rather clear consensus that emerged that you can't absolutely keep advocacy out of the classroom; that you shouldn't, and that there are certain kinds of teaching that are inherently advocative.  What demoralized Barbara, however, was that in every lecture or discussion in which she participated, when the speaker wanted to cite a case of the kind of advocacy one could not do in the classroom, it was always religious.  There was a strong, unchallenged presupposition that any kind of advocacy of a religious point of view could never be allowed.  So, she explained, when she saw the question posed for this session of the seminar, her heart fell, because she felt as if she'd been sitting around that conversation for many years.  She thinks it's the wrong question and wonders why in this post-foundationalist, post-structuralist intellectual world we still have to make an argument for doing religion from within traditions.  Intellectually she thinks the argument is a "no-brainer".    There is a right answer to this question, Barbara concluded, namely that religion ought to be taught both from within and from outside traditions of belief and practice.
 Dick Bernstein agreed but asked why so many people in the field of religion think this is such a vital question  DeConcini said she didn't know why, but both she and Dick acknowledged that scholars divide on the issue.   Barbara sees the division at Emory University, for example, and argued that  every field in the humanities divides on the question.  Dick didn't think so.  What really concerned her, however, was why it is that we're still struggling with this--intellectually, politically, socially, and so on.

 Jim Heft commented on the great diversity of colleges & universities that call themselves "Catholic", which are at different states of intellectual rigor and confessionalism and which make it very difficult to generalize.  There are a few fairly well-known Catholic universities, and in those places the two traditions that are really arguing or wrestling might be generically called the Enlightenment tradition & the confessional tradition.  If Catholic universities really follow their mission inheriting two traditions, the confessional one and the notion of the university itself, which is very much affected by the Enlightenment, there can be a very positive dialogue that is too often not carried on with the vibrancy that it ought to be.  Heft also said that as a theologian he finds himself carrying several traditions within him all the time, not just one.  He affirmed Wuthnow's comments about the importance of reflection on one's early life.  So, he sees two major challenges for theologians within Catholic universities.  One is hard work at appropriating the tradition's rigor; the other is making sure that there is the potential for self-criticism.  He thinks that's harder to do within religiously-affiliated institutions than within others.  One of the major breakthroughs in religious dialogue, Heft pointed out, is when people can talk about the weak sides of their own positions.  Self-critique needs to be brought to the table in order for dialogue to go forward.  Finally, Jim distinguished the task of a seminary from the task of a Catholic university.  He thought an institution should be able to make sure that there are a number of intellectuals with a real concern for the religious tradition of that institution.  However, people of other faiths and no faith, but who are interested in sustaining that dialogue, need to be welcomed on equal terms.

 Returning to DeConcini's question about why some people remain very skeptical about teaching from a religious perspective or even teaching religion from within a tradition, Mike Beaty re-emphasized the epistemological issue.  There is still the notion that if a religious perspective has intellectual content it has to be warranted in a certain way, and a lot of people still hold the view that specifically religious content doesn't measure up.  This is something with which we have to contend.  Mike also commented on the assumption that people who are committed to teaching from a religious perspective, especially if they represent traditions, are going to be inevitably imperialistic or hegemonic.  He thought this emerged in some of the responses to Mark Noll's presentation.  Perhaps we need to ask what's underneath that.  On the one hand he thinks that it's fairly obvious, namely the sins of the religious, his own denomination being among the guilty.  But he also wonders whether there might be the idea, which Monika discussed, that religion is more than the intellect.  It has something to do with passions, affections, even intensity.  Is there the notion or the fear that we're somehow unleashing something that can't be stopped; that religious intensity can't be stopped until it runs the full course of encompassing everything?

 David Hollinger expressed appreciation for the intellectual clarity and moral force of Monika's earlier intervention in this discussion.  One thing David thought might be particularly helpful was her use of the phrase "a faith to live by".  It seemed to him that focusing on this might enable us to avoid the more frustrating aspects of the religious-secular dichotomy.  If we're talking about a faith to live by as something that is an important part of an individual's self, and if this self is in the business of teaching, one might treat that faith to live by as simply another element of the personal as opposed to the professional.   One could then operate on a personal-professional dichotomy, a different dichotomy than the one we've been using.  By "professional" here he meant simply the value of knowledge and skill, the content of the discipline, of the particular sub-field that we happen to be teaching at a given time.  We have an obligation to teach what the professional consensus is.  E.g., when he finishes his course at Berkeley on intellectual history in the U.S., he would like to think that Schwehn from Valparaiso, Turner from Notre Dame or Noll from Wheaton could come in and examine his students in the field, and that his students would be able to answer their questions because all of them are part of the professional community of those doing American intellectual history.  Where the personal comes into that, David thought, we should de-escalate the matter of religion and treat it as simply a subset of the personal, like political values, aesthetics and so on, so that it's not such a heavy thing.  He thought Wuthnow's down-to-earth approach was very helpful in this regard.  Accordingly David proposed that we be mostly concerned with meeting our professional obligations and more or less ad hoc it on the personal.  Then, if someone has really got something that they want to say about the faith that they live by, we trust that they will find a way to express this that's consistent with their professional obligations.  It seems to him that this is not such a matter for angst.

 Steve Haynes responded to DeConcini's question referring to a recent study on the religious backgrounds of graduate students in religious and theological studies programs.  Statistics show that 82%  of these students participate regularly in worshipping communities or lead them, and religious and spiritual factors are a close second to intellectual interests in their decision to go to graduate school.  Haynes thinks that emotionally many people in graduate school for whom these statistics apply feel that this religious factor is both a professional liability and a personal embarrassment.  He himself often feels that way, and he teaches at a church-related college.  The remarks he made earlier about his discomfort with religious activity in academic space, he thinks, are a reflection of this.  It has taken him awhile to get over the idea that his loyalty to a denomination somehow mitigates against his being an effective scholar.  He doesn't have any hard data to back it up, but he senses that there are many people in the field of religion who feel that their own commitments and involvements are to be bracketed, to be downplayed, because they get in the way of doing what your supposed to be doing or of being recognized as a real scholar, as part of a real discipline.

 Mark Schwehn tried to synthesize some of the things the seminar had been hearing and discussing.  We've learned that there's a lot of wonderful activity going on involving the study of and about religion in this country, he noted, but it is very oddly deployed.  For example, at our last meeting we heard that there was increasingly thin rationale for religious studies departments, though there was an abundance of very interesting and vital work going on in the study of religion within all the academic disciplines.  We learned that divinity schools, whatever virtues they may have, were doing little for the various churches with which they were tenuously connected or increasingly uninterested.  Wolterstorff emphasized that the best theological scholarship is now going on in the university rather than in the seminaries, which are facing the lack of any sense of real vocation among faculty who are committed to the well-being of those institutions.  So there are all kinds of things going on that we recognize as worthwhile and even quite distinguished, but it's deployed in ways that don't seem to make much sense.  Mark asked Nick whether that was one of the conclusions one could tentatively draw from his comments and from much of what the group had heard at the last meeting.  Nick thought his was true.  But the main burden of his remark, he explained, was that the intellectuals of the Christian church have responsibility for what has happened in the universities.  In other words, it's not the universities who are the "bad boys" in this situation.  If seminaries and denominations don't maintain any intellectual integrity and depth themselves, then what's one to expect out of the university?  Nick thinks what is happening at Yale is remarkable.  When he goes to seminaries, on the other hand, he finds that the intellectual tradition is dead there.  If they can't keep the Christian intellectual tradition alive, then they ought not to criticize the universities for not doing so.  Scwehn's concern was as with the deployment of all of this intellectual activity.  It's not linking up to the constituency that it was once designed to serve in any direct or interesting way.  There's a misfit of the activity from the constituency.
 Jean Elshtain noted that one of the brightest, young scholars at the Lutheran Seminary in Chicago recently offered a seminar on Luther--specifically on sin, grace & redemption.  The seminar had to be canceled because there were so few students who signed up.  But if you offer seminars on "niceness", i.e., the sublimation of all faith questions into marks of social goodness, you have crowds who want to participate.  Elshtain thinks this problem goes back to powerful forces in American history, specifically a kind of sublimation of Protestant Christianity into social movements.  A lot of basic theological issues tend to be get submerged, and people who are still trying to raise these questions sometimes can't find takers for their courses.  Bernstein offered an amusing "footnote" that supported Nick's point.  One of the places in which Luther is taught as an independent seminar has been in the philosophy department of the New School; and it has not been canceled for lack of students.

 Heft returned to Hollinger's point on the obligation of anyone teaching a certain subject matter to make sure that the professional consensus is covered.  Referring to one of David's early comments that people doing intellectual history need to take more serious consideration of some of the religious dimensions of that history, Jim noted that the professional consensus would have to be a little elastic and able to be challenged.  One way in which the consensus could be altered, he suggested, would be first-rate scholarship by people who are studying their religious traditions.

RECURRING THEMES

1. Inadequacies of the "declension hypothesis".  Starting with the presentations and discussion Saturday morning, seminar participants expressed dissatisfaction with the view that the de-Christianization of universities represented a general decline.   Even those who argued for decline in some areas tended to acknowledge that the distancing of religion from the academy entailed some benefits as well as some losses.

2. "Victimization" of Christians in higher education.  Many people observed that significant numbers of Christian students--even white, male, southern Christian students--perceived themselves as victimized or marginalized by the dominant academic culture.  This feeling is shared by at least some Christian faculty in the secular academy.  There was considerable discussion of whether or not there was actually some truth behind this perception, and if not, why the feeling of being victimized was so widespread.

3. The role of community and communitarian epistemology in the academy.  Schwehn's ideal of the university as a "community of friends" and frequent reference to the decline of "the faculty dinner party" (despite common recognition of the gender politics involved in the old style dinner party) suggested the positive potential of such an emphasis.  Questions remained, however, as to precisely what is meant by words like "community" and "friendship" in the academic context, whether this was always an appropriate goal, and whether communitarian values have a special relation with religion.  Some also questioned whether the language of community could have any significant impact in the university if we neglect the realm of administration.

4. The importance of context with respect to the expression of religious perspectives in teaching and scholarship.  The type of writing a scholar is doing, the audience one is addressing, the institution and department in which one teaches, and the particular course being taught within one's discipline must all be taken into account when reflecting on the questions posed for this meeting.  Several people spoke about how their particular context influenced the extent to which their teaching or writing reflected their religious perspective.

5. Two kinds of truth.  The distinction between two kinds of truth and correspondingly different criteria for assessing truth claims--initially described by Hellwig as the difference between a fact that can be demonstrated and a faith to live by--provoked a variety of responses.  Several people reflected on broader issues of epistemology in response to this distinction, and others emphasized the need for there to be space in the university where such issues could be honestly and respectfully addressed and debated.  It was also used to support the notion of a professional-personal dichotomy as a framework for discussing the place of religion in higher education.

6. The problem of the secular-religious dichotomy.  People expressed both explicit and implicit frustration with this divide.  One problem with the dichotomy is a concomitant assumption that the university or "secular" scholars are unconcerned about moral, ethical and spiritual issues.  A possible alternative for dealing with questions of religion and higher education would be a "professional-personal" dichotomy.  Within such a framework religious views of academics would be treated as an element or a subset of the personal, like political values, aesthetics, and so forth.

7. Most serious and creative theology is presently being done in the university as opposed to denominational seminaries.  This was a general observation on the part of some, and a lament on the part of others.  Several seminar members described the deadness of the Christian intellectual life in seminaries and denounced the tendency of certain Christian intellectuals to criticize the university.

        Andrea Sterk
        February, 1999

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