Report on the Sixth Meeting of the

Lilly Seminar on Religion and Higher Education

Inn By The Sea, Cape Elizabeth, Maine
October 1-3, 1999

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Third Year Theme: The Place of Religion in Research

Lilly Seminar Members in Attendance:
Nancy Ammerman (Hartford Seminary)
Michael Beath (Baylor University)
Richard J. Bernstein (New School for Social Research)
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, S.M. (University of Dayton)
Monika Hellwig (Executive Director, Assoc. of Catholic Colleges & Universities)
Richard Hughes (Pepperdine University)
Jeanne Knoerle, S.P. (Lilly)
Eugene Y. Lowe, Jr. (Northwestern University)
Richard Mouw (Fuller Theological Seminary)
Mark Noll (Wheaton College)
Francis Oakley (Williams College)
Mark Schwehn (Valparaiso University)
Peter Steinfels (Religion Editor, New York Times)
Eleonore Stump (St. Louis University)
James Turner (University of Notre Dame)
Frank Turner (Yale University)
Diane Winston (Center for the Study of American Religion)
Alan Wolfe (Boston University)
Nicholas Wolterstorff (The Divinity School, Yale University)
Robert Wuthnow (Princeton University)

Seminar Members Unable to Attend:
Barbara DeConcini (Executive Director, American Academy of Religion)
Craig Dykstra (Lilly Endowment)
Nathan Hatch (University of Notre Dame)
David Hollinger (UC Berkeley)
Douglas Sloan (Teachers College, Columbia University)
Guests:
Kathleen Mahoney (Boston College)
George Marsden (The University of Notre Dame)

Lilly Seminar Staff:
Donna Ring
Andrea Sterk

 
 
 
 

SESSION I - SATURDAY MORNING

    Jim Turner opened the first session by introducing to the group Kathleen Mahoney, who had been asked by the Lilly Endowment to do an evaluation of their initiative on religion & higher education as a whole.

    Jim then explained that we would be departing from our normal pattern of a presentation followed by discussion.  Instead each Lilly Seminar member had been asked to make a very brief statement to kick off this final weekend.  Jim & Nick had two things in mind in planning this.  First, a number of people felt that at Pasadena we made progress toward identifying some of the key & really disputed issues with regard to religion & higher education, particularly the relation between religion & the intellectual life of higher education.  We pointed to some very serious issues where we are not of one mind as to the cognitive value of religious faith & religious traditions.  (To nudge us further along that line of thinking Frank Oakley had sent out to seminar members an essay of Hans Jonas.)  So Jim suggested that in making comments this morning seminar members should have the goal in mind of moving us a little farther down that path.  A second objective, since this was our last meeting, was to reflect on our 3 years of discussion & drawing from that wisdom to try to identify what seemed to be the most important issues that have been raised & some of the most important advice that we could give to people involved in higher education.  Following these introductory comments, each seminar member was asked to make his or her compact (2-3-minute) statement.

     Eleonore Stump began with an anecdote.  She was doing some Talmud study with a group of orthodox Jews for a week.  One day the issue was prayer.  There is a certain morning prayer that has to be said facing Jerusalem, and the question arose what happens if you’re on a trip or for some reason can’t determine which way is Jerusalem?  The answer was posed, incline your heart toward Jerusalem.  At this point the orthodox Jew who was leading the session said notice that from the rabbi’s point of view getting your spirit in the right frame is a second best alternative to getting your body parts in the right place.  Eleonore was struck by this & has been thinking about it ever since because, she explained, she is a practicing Protestant, an evangelical Christian, one of those who thinks it’s the thought that counts; the letter kills, the Spirit gives life.  Yet it seemed that there was something dead right, something objectively true about what this orthodox Jewish leader had said.  She found it an enormously significant corrective to her own tradition.
     Eleonore made 2 points stemming from this anecdote.  1) As she hoped the anecdote showed, Dick Bernstein speaks for her & probably for many of us when he recommends “engaged fallibilistic pluralism”.  She is in no danger of converting to orthodox Judaism, but she thinks her tradition is wrong about something that orthodox Judaism has right.  So her first point was that she thinks engaged fallibilistic pluralism is right.  2) However, you’ve got to have a tradition to have pluralism!  You can’t have pluralism without a tradition.  In order to get that nice lesson from a tradition other than her own Eleonore had to be in Jerusalem because no school she has ever taught at has an orthodox Jew teaching Talmud.  So a very important recommendation for the future is to think about how we get the basis for the pluralism in question.  If all of us are vaguely liberal, westernized sophisticated academics, we don’t have anything to be pluralistic about.

     Jim Heft said that the Lilly discussions had helped him to realize at one & the same time both how Catholic & how un-Catholic he is.  The major contributors to the general discussions are frequently those who are immersed in the literature with which Jim has had only a passing acquaintance.  That literature has most often been produced in this century, preoccupied with warrants, justification, clarification, & subject to “intersubjective testability”, to use David Hollinger’s term.  The literature with which Heft is most familiar generally accepts virtue-based epistemologies, preoccupied with retrieving, critiquing & developing a particular religious tradition, & then in its light engaging modern academic culture. This Seminar has put Jim in direct contact with some very articulate members & defenders of this other literature, which he has found both broadening & perplexing.  It’s clear that sustained conversations with persons quite different from himself cures parochialism.
    Second, if we enlarge the paradigm of knowledge, the legitimate ways of knowing, we might more quickly see limits of constructing logical warrants & appreciate more the importance of works of art, ritual, music & literature, all of which religious traditions find more epistemologically congenial & germane than the sole use of historical & philosophical reasoning.
    Third, in light of the second comment it might well be the case that our discussions would have been quite different had we had more diverse disciplinary voices in them, especially artists, literary critics & anthropologists.  Denis Donoghue’s contributions have provided a regular & valuable exception to many of our general discussions.  Fourth, nearly everyone seems to admit that we bring personal elements to our research, an inescapable set of questions & concerns that grow out of who we are.
    These predispositions, we also seem to agree, need not corrupt our scholarly work reducing it to a mere projection or a form of solipsism.  In view of this perhaps we should spend more time thinking about the relationship between how we live & what as a consequence we may be able to perceive & understand.  Jim quoted a Chinese saying: “I hear & I forget, I see & I remember, I do & I understand.”  In this light, he concluded, what practices, what forms of “doing” open up new ways of understanding?

     Mike Beaty explained that he would make his statement as if he were giving advice to his president.  He would suggest to him that you can’t rely merely on the peer review system that David Hollinger suggests.  Given the socialization of most academics they really don’t accept the kind of engaged fallibilistic pluralism which includes the legitimacy of religious warrant.  Beaty thought this was revealed when Mark Schwehn suggested as a thought experiment a certain kind of dissertation which included using radical evil as a part of the explanatory matrix, & David suggested that that wouldn’t count for very much at his institution.  At many religiously-identified universities it ought to count quite a bit, Mike said, but you can’t depend on having a faculty for whom it would count a great deal.  That means that the administration must be involved.  And that may mean that there ought to be certain kinds of religious tests in hiring & hindering.  However, Mike thought these kinds of things can actually preserve & promote a kind of healthy pluralism.

     Richard Hughes came into seminar with a set of questions with which he still struggles.  His questions really arise out of his own setting as a professor at a church-related institution.  The main question with which he came to the seminar was:  How is it possible to teach & work in the context of a church-related institution & honor the integrity of the academic enterprise on the one hand with a commitment to pluralism, diversity, etc. & at the very same time honor the integrity of the faith that informs the institution & in fact honor one’s own faith, & to do that in a way where they complement one another rather than thwart one another?  The seminar has been immensely enriching for him, though he still struggles with these questions.  Each time he has come to a Seminar meeting he has been stretched & pulled & pressed to think in new ways.

     Alan Wolfe wanted to add a reminder that there isn’t just one academic culture.  There are at least 3 in colleges of arts & sciences:  the scientific, the humanistic & the social scientific culture.  Wolfe thinks the answer to the question we’re all addressing will vary between the three.  One thing that this seminar hasn’t addressed at all is the issues that involve questions of faith & science, especially controversies around Darwin, and so on, which are very much going on around the country.  Alan was very glad that we didn’t address those issues.  But there are certain kinds of knowledge, he noted, at least in his opinion & in the opinion of many scientists, which are pretty impregnable.  And faith-based traditions only embarrass themselves by challenging those truths.  They’re best left outside the purview of a group like this.
    In the humanistic tradition Alan thinks that it’s the exact opposite.  The formal departments of the humanities, at least at most of our elite universities, have become so impressed by the culture of science & professionalism that they’ve lost the humanistic dimension of what they do.  And in this area faith-based ways of thinking can have an enormous revitalizing effect on the university.  There is an absolute vacuum that can be filled, & as he’s said in a lot of his writings, one of the personal factors that attracted him to an institution like Boston College & to the Lilly Seminar is that there is a way that the humanistic tradition in its glory is being kept alive.  The social sciences are much more complicated because they borrow from elements of both; and because they both have a scientific side & a humanistic side they most need some kind of pluralism that we don’t have.  But the challenge there in providing it is the greatest.  So, he has come away from the seminar with a set of issues that are still unresolved about how to do that.

     Phil Gleason said that in reading the summary of the last meeting he was struck by a comment that Frank Oakley made about feeling less clear about what we were talking about than he had been at the beginning.  This reminded Phil of a statement by John Courtney Murray that it’s a great achievement to raise issues from the level of a kind of generalized confusion to the point where disagreement is possible.  In this regard Phil thought that the five points that were listed at the end of the report from the last meeting were quite helpful at identifying not so much disagreement but areas where disagreement is possible.  As for his own reaction Phil reflected on something else that he’d heard a long time ago, something that David Riesman had written, that when he enters the public discussion or argument the purpose is not so much to persuade those with whom he disagrees as to encourage those with whom he agrees.  Phil thinks that the Seminar has done that very much for him.  He thinks it’s important for people concerned with issues of religion & higher education to know that there are other people working on this.

     Monika Hellwig found discussions very enriching over the course of seminar, particularly conversations over meals & in casual contact.  One of most precious things in human life, said Monika, is the ability to use one’s imagination to walk across bridges of empathy into other people’s experiences & other people’s perspectives & vision; & this seminar has given her the opportunity to do that with a number of people she wouldn’t normally meet.
     In terms of what Alan described as the 3 kinds of academic cultures, Monika felt we had had too heavy a bias on the social sciences.  She thought that what a religious grounding or perspective has to offer didn’t come out sufficiently because of the heavy bias to the social sciences.  If you look at the whole scholarly world with a longer history & a more humanistic weight, Monika suggested, it is clear that being participants in an intense spiritual experience within a tradition leaves you much better equipped to understand the products of the tradition.  And given this ability to cross on bridges of empathy, it makes you much better equipped to understand the products of other traditions that come out of intense spiritual experiences.  Finally, inasmuch as all religious traditions & their artifacts, habits, customs & so on are really expressions of human striving after the good, the true & the beautiful, they’re tremendously worth gathering up, quite apart from any debates about comparative truth claims.  It’s not even necessary to engage in such debates in order to enrich human society of the present & the future by gathering up all these precious things.  Hellwig thought that if we’d given a little more attention to the humanistic perspective we would have benefitted.  She also agreed with Alan that we had not even touched upon the confrontation of the perspectives of the natural sciences with religious consciousness.

     Eugene Lowe spoke not just about the context not of scholarship but of education more generally.  He was intrigued by the fact that many of us are at institutions which a century ago would have had the president of the university teaching a senior seminar on moral philosophy.  It would have aimed at gathering up the various intellectual or curricular & extra-curricular strands & bringing them together in some context, making the lads live the best possible life that they might live.  There were lots of things about that model that are time-bound & limited.  But one of the things that has been harder for us to do in this seminar is bear in mind the idea that there is a curricular & an extra curricular dimension to the challenge of education.
    So as he thinks about the wonderful things that have happened at this seminar, Gene wonders nevertheless whether it has taken on the model of that kind of post-research university discussion about religion & scholarship in such a way that we have given less attention to the relationship between religious values & educational values more broadly.  As one who is in a senior administrative post & spends a lot of time thinking about how you manage an overall university, an important question for Gene is how one thinks about some of the questions we’ve talked about not only within the curriculum but within the extra-curriculum, in the overall characteristics of the institution.  He gave an example from his days in the dean’s office at Princeton when a young woman came to him and said that as an Orthodox Jew she was being discriminated against by the university.  They had put some requirements on her if she was going to be able to eat kosher, & those requirements had a financial price tag.  She said to him, “I have no choice about where I eat.  It is not a choice.”  Those words still ring in his mind, Gene said, & he thought it is critically important for us to organize our educational communities so that those kinds of tensions are exposed & we have a chance to talk about them.

     Denis Donoghue summarized what he had learned over the past 3 years:  1. Not everybody believes what he believes, that is, that the Spirit killeth, the letter giveth life.  2.  What he believes is indeed related to being brought up as a cradle Catholic in Ireland, a cradle that he still lives in though it is gravely misshapen by his sins.  3. He doesn’t know what to make of these first 2 considerations.
     Higher education, Denis said, seemed to him to be a project of the domestication of outrage in the long run, a project compatible with the recognition, the cultivation, perhaps even the fostering of outrage in the short run.  Its object eventually, Denis continued, is to convert instinctual experience into socially acceptable or perhaps even genial or aesthetic experience.  Secondly, religious practices & beliefs he thinks of mainly as aberrations, scandals, minor outrages & bizarries.  These then are matters to be neutralized, it would appear, by being submitted to the disciplines, the pacifying disciplines, which are mainly history, psychology & anthropology.  Church-related universities & colleges do what they are designed to do, & he would have no advice to offer them except to say, when you fail, fail better!  The advice he would offer a dean of humanities in a secular university would be try to design courses in religion which are somehow & consciously ashamed of themselves, or which would be ashamed of themselves if they recognized that they have indeed the arrogance to propose to domesticate the several outrages & scandals embodied in such names as Simone Weil, Mother Theresa, William Blake & Søren Kierkegaard.

     Frank Turner said that one thing with which he had become increasingly impressed through the conversations of the seminar is the absence of any kind of pluralism in the research university today, whether toward religions or toward different methodologies.  They are not places that necessarily legitimize any kind of serious intellectual pluralism.  Frank has more or less concluded that the only way religion & higher education is going to be abused of the higher education is by a greater pluralism of institutions, not pluralism within institutions; and that’s going to mean that those institutions that wish to be faith-based or rooted in faith-based communities will pay a price for that choice within the larger culture.  One of the things religion has wanted is a free lunch, and Frank thought there would be cultural prices to pay.
     Turner also noted that as a result of the Lilly Seminar he is actually teaching a new course this year on Christianity in modern Europe.  But as these courses are taught we’re going to discover that the students who come to them, (though they’re not going to come in overwhelming numbers, at least not to begin with) are going to be far more religiously engaged than we’re prepared to expect.  Frank thought there would be topics that will cause trouble in those seminars.  As we start teaching those courses we’re going to walk very carefully as we hit certain “hot button” items--in history, for example, the 20th-century papacy.  This is something that we’re going to have to be as careful about as certain questions in the social sciences.
     Finally, Frank mentioned that at Pasadena Dick Mouw gave him a c.d. with music from the old-fashioned Bible hour on which he grew up.  One of those songs was about the old-time religion.  The group around this table, said Turner, all pertain in one way or another to the old time religion.  He thinks that the forces that are most likely to be challenging us are not necessarily the culture of science but the culture of New Age spirituality.  Frank was at another conference this year on science & religion where there were a few New Age types.  David Hollinger wasn’t there, but Frank thought he would have loved to have these fundamentalists instead of the New Age folks.  Quite seriously, Frank concluded,we’ve been discussing a religiosity that has roots in traditions, & what is actually out there in the Barnes & Noble religion section is a vast world that boggles the mind.  It’s very different from the kind of religiosity we’ve been talking about.

     Jeanne Knoerle came to the Seminar with a double purpose.  The personal reason was related to the question of what the role of religion is in higher education.  Secondly she came with the perspective of the Lilly Endowment, where she had been primarily responsible for the work on religion & higher education.  She hoped that out of this 3-year conversation she would gain a sense of where we ought to go in the future, indications of what we really ought to be doing.  She’s not sure either of these questions got answered.  But she has learned that one of the things that is most important about this whole issue is talking one-on-one to people in arenas where it’s not threatening to disagree & to really come to that place where you can get through all the mess to find out what the issue is all about.  Jeanne thought that in these 3 years this had really begun to happen.  Though she wasn’t at Pasadena, she read very carefully the notes from that meeting; and it did seem that particularly at that meeting some disagreements became more clear.  They may well have been there the whole time, but we hadn’t really talked about them before.  So Jeanne thought the talking together had probably been the greatest advantage of the seminar.  Her question was how & whether this is replicable.
     One other issue that had been mentioned several times interested Jeanne.  The intellectual content of religion is very important, she explained, but that’s only one piece of it.  And we haven’t talked much about the other pieces of it which keep coming at us, especially through New Age spirituality.  Religion is of a whole, not just our minds, thoughts, etc.  She frankly didn’t know how to get at that issue, but she thought it is one that we’re going to be faced with more & more as we come further into the 21st century.  We’re going to face questions about religion that we haven’t encountered before.

     Steve Haynes began by saying that personally he has been enriched a great deal by this seminar.  He has met & interacted with people that he probably wouldn’t have met otherwise. Something that has been percolating with him over the past 3 years is the crucial importance of institutional contexts in any discussion of religion & higher education.  The Lilly Seminar has elucidated this importance for him largely because he is perhaps the only person around the table from a residential liberal arts college that is church-related.  So he is very aware that most of the institutional contexts that are represented & taken for granted here are not his own.  That has made him think again about how specific we need to be when we’re talking about these issues.  Thirdly & more personally, the first couple times he attended the seminar meetings he felt out of place, like he didn’t belong.  He thought that it was probably because of his relative youth & inexperience,  but he now thinks it’s more than that.  What he thinks he felt was that the standard for thinking about higher education, as it has been most of this century, is the research university; that in our composition, in our comments, both formal & informal, we have continued this very long trend in American history of assuming a standard to which other people ought to conform.  The assumption for many people seems to be if you’re not in a research university you ought to be or you’re working toward getting there.  One of the things this seminar has helped him to realize is that he’s not working toward that.  He feels called to & thoroughly implicated in the context in which he works, which is a residential liberal arts college.  So he has realized that his take on things will be necessarily different than what is perhaps the standard take around the table, & that has been good to realize.

     George Marsden, though a guest rather than a regular member of the seminar, was asked to comment.  As an outsider he said he has been tremendously impressed by what the seminar appears to have done in bringing mutual understanding among people who don’t normally get together.  He thought that one good agenda would be to think about we replicate this.  Though some have mentioned doing this on a larger scale, George suggested doing something similar on smaller scales--regionally, locally at universities & within disciplines or sub-disciplines.

     Richard Mouw made three comments:
    1. The group has helped him see the need for this kind of broad-ranging conversation of people representing a variety of viewpoints.  For those of us who have spent a lot of time thinking about the role of religion & higher education from specific religious perspectives, Rich acknowledged, there has been a strong element of triumphalism & imperialism, as our critics are quick to point out.  This seminar has been a good taming & combing.  Mouw once gave a lecture on a Calvinist case for civility, and somebody stood up & said that he sounded like Abraham Kuyper on prozac!  Somehow that seems like an apt metaphor for this whole Lilly Seminar experience.  E.g., the ways in which many of us have talked about the role of our kind of religious convictions as it relates to the academic culture.  The point Alan Wolfe made earlier about the plurality of academic cultures has been impressed upon Rich throughout this seminar.  We aren’t just talking about a single, monolithic entity out there.
    2. The importance of non-guild & non-faculty meeting discussions of these issues.  Lilly has done a terrific job in a number of contexts, certainly in this one, of creating the possibility of a universe of discourse that explores things in a different way than can happen in guild discussions & even in faculty meetings.  It seemed to him that the dismal character of both of those settings as it addresses these kinds of issues points to the need for contexts of this sort in dealing with such issues.  Rich has been impressed too by the new possibilities for this, not only by having gatherings like this but, for example, the use of e-mail in helping to continue such discussions.
    3. He is just becoming aware even within a specific religious tradition of the value of addressing these issues from a variety of perspectives.  Religion is a lot bigger than the ways in which we normally treat it.

     Jim Turner briefly commented that he didn’t want us to forget David Hollinger’s voice (particularly in light of his absence from this meeting of the Seminar).  Jim thought that David would remind us that religion in general & Christianity in particular can be a dangerous thing.  He would also say that it has used up whatever cognitive force it had in the academic world, and we should be very careful about letting it into public space.

    Diane Winston described her experience in the Lilly Seminar as “like dying & going to heaven”.  As a junior colleague she considered it a privilege to be involved in this kind of conversation, a privilege not often permitted to someone at her level.  On her own project she found herself on a level with George Marsden in seeing the slippery slope in her own research.  It is market driven.  She wondered whether the answer is not more diversity within institutions, as opposed to what Frank Turner had suggested.  So much revolves around Christian or Christo-centric points of view, & the real challenge is phenomena like the New Age.  Diane thought that having groups like this is an uncomfortable but wonderful context for thinking about how to speak in a wider society.

     Frank Oakley had the sense, especially from the last meeting, that many view as unattractive any temptation on the part of scholars to view themselves as "victims".  The push to competitive liminality is already too strong.  On the other hand, there is something to people feeling marginalized.  Oakley described Jim Turner’s comments & the response they evoked at our last meeting as a genteel example of this.  It had a backhand, & it came from a modernist, secularist provinciality.  Frank has spent a lot of time thinking about the divine omnipotence & how that has intersected with & molded our intellectual tradition & that of Sunni Islam.  He would adduce that as another example.  One of the reactions to Jim’s comments was that you can detach useful things, but don’t burden them with religious baggage.  But how do you detach divine omnipotence?  Regarding an article he’d written 40 years ago Frank noted that the reaction to it was not to the content of the article but to the motivation.

     Mark Noll expressed gratitude to the Lilly Endowment and to everyone else who had made the Lilly Seminar possible.  He then made 3 comments:
    1. It is much more important to encourage specific religious perspectives than to encourage the study of religion in general. The general study of religion tends to be preoccupied with questions of method, with hermeneutics at the expense of actual interpretation, and with the need to convince the academy that standards of religion can be truly scientific.  By contrast, the encouragement of specific religious perspectives on academic matters allows for real human engagement with substantive human problems.
    2. Two strategies seem possible for promoting specific religious perspectives on academic matters: sectarian & free market.  He described the sectarian strategy as the encouragement of institutions, programs & publications with specific religious commitments while the free market approach encourages arenas, forums, etc. where those who hold different religious views (or none at all) can relate to each other.  Mark thought the Lilly Seminar has been a powerful advertisement for the enjoyment & the benefit of the free market strategy.
    3. The free market strategy for promoting religious engagement with academic issues works best when there is a specific focus for conversation & debate.  This seminar has in particular shown the value of a) discussing published works in which the authors’ arguments have been carefully prepared & presented; b) arguing over real disagreements among people who have successfully defined the disagreement & who are able to keep talking about it; and c) pursuing debate over religion & academic life in a climate of friendship & mutual respect.   In closing Noll emphasized the value of smaller-scale, multiple, dispersed versions of something like the Lilly Seminar.

     Dick Bernstein made 5 succinct points.
    1. At the first session of our seminar Jim Turner gave us an account of history of education & the significance of Christian education.  His own reaction to this was that it completely left out the dark side of Christianity.  Dick felt that everybody has an obligation to keep this in mind.  He started his education in an age of quotas.  His wife got her PhD in 1957 in an atmosphere where there was a tacit view that you really couldn’t teach English literature if you weren’t Christian.
    2. Against this background, Dick explained, he gets very nervous about any declension language, i.e. language about the good old days.  What Christian higher education has meant in America is very complex.
    3. It seemed to Dick that there were 2 different agendas operating in the Lilly Seminar.  One has been discussing in an open way a variety of issues related to religion & higher education.  The other agenda has been that of those at church-related institutions.  Dick pointed to Calvin College as a good example of an institution that didn’t waver on its faith commitment but that also wanted to be an excellent academic institution.
    4. Regarding stereotypes, Dick commented that if we’re honest, we all need them & we all use them.  We need to have an enemy we’re fighting.  But we also have to be very sensitive to the destructive role that they can play.  One stereotype is a certain perception of atheistic, unfeeling, cosmopolitan secularists who are bigots.  A second one is associating all religious people with the Christian right.  We need to be self-reflective about falling into these stereotypes.
    5. In conclusion Dick explained that he has reached the pinnacle of his career as a result of Lilly Seminar.  He grew up in a Jewish ghetto & was recently asked by an evangelical journal to write a response to the pope!

     Nancy Ammerman said that one thing she’s been reminded of is that there is a very pervasive set of cultural structures & demands at work in the modern academy that can’t be ignored; & they’re most evident in religious colleges.  The culture in which these institutions exist is one which is rife with openness to spiritual knowledge, to questions of meaning.  To realize that we’re in a situation of multi-vocality is to set all of this in precisely the larger issue that has come up over & over again in our conversation, & that is the basic issue of pluralism, the problem of difference, the way in which we are at this point in our human history struggling with ways to be both particular & universal, both tribal & global.  That seemed to Nancy to be the heart of the task that lies ahead, not just for the question of religion & higher education but for the human species.
     So what does she want?  (David Hollinger kept asking that question in Pasadena, Nancy noted.)  Her answer, she explained, was very much like Dick Bernstein’s engaged fallibilistic pluralism.  She wants the institutional pluralism that has been spoken of already, i.e. explicitly religious colleges that really are shaped by their distinctive traditions.  She wants persons to be able to acknowledge the religious motivations of their work.  She wants people to be able to draw on religious-intellectual sources alongside other sources.  Perhaps we would be in reasonable agreement so far on those things.  But Nancy said she would venture so far as to say that she would like, at least on occasion, for people to be able to use explicitly religious experience as a key to explanation & explicitly religious ideas as plausible explanation alongside other explanations.  (She referred here to the thought experiment that Mark Schwehn had asked us to engage in at the Pasadena meeting.)  Also, she wants this to take place in precisely the kind of environment that we have experienced here; and that requires sustained dialogue in relationship as well as practice.  One idea she has been struck by is that we are all like babes trying to learn to speak all over again when it comes to trying to figure out ways to talk about religion with our colleagues.  For most of this century the tactic has been simply to leave all of that in the private sphere & not to bring it into our public conversation.  As a result we are peculiarly inarticulate & need to practice our speaking as much as others need to practice their listening in order to be able to engage in this kind of conversation.  Finally, as Eleonore pointed out, this conversation can only take place if we really do have strong communities that bring distinctive voices into the conversation.

     Bob Wuthnow wanted to make 3 points, all of which were prompted by Jim’s question of what we might say by way of advice to administrators, deans, presidents & the like.  His first point, he explained, was only half facetious.  Anything that he would say out of the Lilly Seminar to an administrator should be taken with a grain of salt.  For a lot of the reasons that have already been mentioned we have not been diverse in terms of disciplines or even whole schools or types of thought, and for that matter he’s not sure that we’ve really had in mind through the 3 years that we were trying to come up with advice.
    Second, Bob has been struck over the course of our conversations by the enormous differences between church-related higher education & what he called “secular education” for want of a better term.  He was surprised by that.  He has had a lot of interaction with church-related institutions & has friends who teach at them, though he has never taught at one himself.  He is struck with the differences in institutional logic.  Over & over again he has had the sense, as others have already mentioned, that we’re talking about different things or making different assumptions, perhaps more from institutional contexts than from deeper assumptions.  As an example he referred to Mark Noll’s statement a moment ago about the advantages of studying specific religious traditions rather than religion in general.  Wuthnow couldn’t disagree more with that, but he thinks that’s because of different institutional locations.
     Thirdly, Bob has been very interested over the last 3 years in the question of how we institutionalize the study of religion in secular higher education.  Though Jim Turner did a nice job discussing this issue in the opening presentation 3 years ago, we haven’t focused much attention on it since then.  It seemed to Bob that there have been 2 challenges to doing this.  The first challenge was simply to get religious studies integrated into the curriculum at all, i.e. to carve out a space or an enclave which would make possible some kind of course on the Bible or on the history of Christianity.  He described what have been the obstacles to that but thought that to a large degree in the U.S. the first challenge has been resolved.  By way of example Bob noted that Princeton’s religion department was founded in 1946, it has become one of the best in the country, & there’s no question in anybody’s mind that it should be there.  The second challenge, he suggested, is the "mainstreaming" of the study of religion into the disciplines, especially across the humanities & the social sciences.  Religious studies can’t do this mainstreaming.  It can do certain things well, but it cannot do as well as what people in many other disciplines can do in this regard.  He has been impressed with what people in philosophy of religion, sociology of religion & English departments can do.  Academically & pedagogically it makes sense that we study religion throughout the disciplines.  At a conference at Princeton a couple years ago it turned out that what students & faculty wanted more of was instruction or opportunities to talk with people in their own disciplines about religion as opposed to having to go to a religious studies department.
     So, what needs to be done?  1. Recognize the strengths that are already out there.  E.g., in the American Political Science Association one of the largest sections is the religion section.  At Princeton as a result of developing the new center for the study of religion that was started a year ago one in six faculty in the humanities & social sciences at Princeton study religion in some way; and regularly there are more than 150 courses taught on religion.  And this is not a very big campus.  2. Provide resources for these people through competition, training, mentoring for younger scholars, teaching & so forth.  3. Promote interaction so that people recognize that there are a lot of people out there in different disciplines working on religion & so that they can learn from one another.

     Jean Elshtain wanted to respond to the specific question that had been put to the group about key changes the university should make, crucial points at which religious-based traditions interact with academic life.  Elshtain taught for 15 years at a big public institution that didn’t have any program of any kind in religious studies.  It didn’t have a department of religious studies & no place for religion to be studied as a legitimate subject matter of its own because a chancellor at one point had declared when a group of professors came to him with a proposal for instituting such a department that he wasn’t interested in instituting a department of "superstition" at the University of Massachusetts.  So people who were interested in religion were skulking about in windowless basements, corridors & rooms--kinds of academic versions of the catacombs.  Jean acknowledged that she was very much shaped by that experience & by the fact that there was simply no space within which to engage in this kind of subject matter.
     At one of our early meetings Monika Hellwig used the word "resourcement”, the notion of going back to wellsprings of tradition.  Jean thought that was a powerful word & a powerful idea.  It embodies the notion is that there is great vibrancy left which can be released & displayed that will help us to think in a wiser & more canny way about the situation in which we find ourselves.  That, it seemed to Jean, should be an essential part of student formation if you’re talking about an authentic liberal education, liberal education broadly construed.  With Frank Oakley’s letter in mind Elshtain started to think about that issue in relation to her own subject matter of political theory.  Most of the powerful terms of political discourse that we all routinely use, she would argue, are not fully intelligible absent a recognition of the religious & theological backdrop of many of these concepts.  She gave a few examples.  If you go to the OED you’ll find that the way in which we talk about “power” is characterized as a later usage.  Power was originally a concept attached to a divinity, a divine being.  Similarly, Jean explained, words like freedom, order & sovereignty all have specific religious connections or connotations in their original meanings.  Jean would say that the warrant for teaching about religion is that it helps us to really be liberal in the broad sense of liberal education, to understand better our own concepts, terms & constitutive ideas.
     Jean also mentioned a new legal scholarship that’s emerging associated with such people as John Witte, Michael Perry, Mary Ann Glendon & Michael McConnell.  They have argued that the entire human rights armamentarium of modernity is unintelligible absent a commitment to the sacral standing of the human person.  One of the questions that they’re putting is something like this:  If you promote a kind of secularly-sanctioned ignorance on a whole range of questions, including the backdrop of our commitment to human rights, won’t the wellsprings at one point run dry?  In other words, could a thorough-going secular culture & society (which we don’t have yet) really sustain certain commitments over time if it promotes ignorance on what some of our most cherished institutions & commitments are based?
     So one piece of advice Elshtain would give is don’t just teach about religion; teach religion, teach the tradition.  Students don’t know this.  Aim to create wiser hermeneuts (i.e. people who are able to interpret better the world of which they’re a part), & aim to create citizens who are capable of the kind of criticism that we want citizens to be capable of.  Elshtain’s final point was that you can’t promote the robust tolerance & pluralism we’re talking about in a society or a culture that insists that religious belief is your own private thing. This radical privatization of religious belief leads to subjectivism, which means we can’t have the kinds of debates about religion that we can & ought to have in the university.

 Peter Steinfels explained that the 3 years of the Lilly Seminar for him had intersected with 2 other experiences.  One was really his first experience as a full-time faculty member, & the second was his service on a task force at Georgetown University on the Catholic & Jesuit identity of the university which was to make concrete proposals to the president.  Of the 3 experiences maybe the Lilly Seminar was the best.  The special concern he had in all these experiences was the pluralism of institutions.  He came here & followed the discussions always with an eye to the question of how religiously-affiliated or religiously-founded institutions can maintain some identity & mission.  And he continues to be convinced that the key to that question is whether a religious factor, whether a commitment or interest in scholarly research & teaching can be weighed into the process of recruitment & hiring of faculty members.  There are other important issues, but this has remained in his mind the key.  Steinfels said he has continued to see enormous confusion, uncertainty, anxiety, outright fear, anger, etc. around that question whenever it is raised in many settings, & certainly in the settings of church-related or religiously-based universities that are aspiring to national or regional status.  Frank Turner mentioned that schools like that have to pay a price & be willing to pay a price.  Peter’s concern is whether the price that they’re asked to pay is actually one that is self-defeating, a price that undermines some of the basic things that they’re engaged in.  With all that in mind, parenthetically he noted that at Pasadena we voted not to break down into smaller discussion groups.  Peter thought that expressed a feeling that has run through our 3 years which he regrets.  Because we’re an interesting & exciting group to be together, we haven’t wanted to break down into more specific sub-groups addressing some of the differences that have been pointed out around the table.  In this regard Peter thought we’d missed some opportunities to make concrete progress.
     What does he want?  What are his particular concerns?  Many good things have been said already around the table, Steinfels commented, but he described his own “idee fixe”.  He thought of not as advice to a dean but as advice to Lilly.  He is convinced that a blue ribbon commission of highest order composed of academics with the most unquestionable credentials in terms of academic freedom could study & report officially on the question of how the religious factor can be legitimately weighed in the process of recruitment & hiring, maybe not in terms of one model but in terms of several models.  Such a venture would make a major contribution to the kinds of discussions & anxieties that exist on a lot of campuses.  So, he concluded, traditionally the way to end any grant supported project is with a new grant proposal.  That's what he proposes.
 

Discussion

 Following the individual statements from Lilly Seminar members Jim Turner introduced the main subject for the morning discussion, the question of institutional pluralism or pluralism among institutions.  Some people had called for institutional pluralism during the course of our meetings, and the question Jim posed is:  what would that mean?  What are the boundaries?

     Dick Bernstein thought the answer was simple & that there wouldn't be much discussion.  Major research institutions are not going to change.  The issue then becomes the kind of thing that Alan has been much concerned with, namely that there shouldn’t be a failure of nerve.  What we've witnessed from Dick’s perspective on the outside in the last 30-40 years is that many church-related institutions have gone through a certain anxiety & failure of nerve.  Sometimes now there's a kind of reaction against it.  But if there is really going to be pluralism that is in some sense church-related, it's only going to come from institutions that still have some sense of their identity.

     Turner intervened to sharpen the question a bit.  Alluding to Gleason's comments earlier, Jim asked, how much space is there within our notions of academic legitimacy for institutional pluralism?

     Wolfe commented on the distinction Frank Turner had made between pluralism within institutions & pluralism of institutions and the argument for the latter as a second-best solution.  If there were no possibilities of pluralism within institutions Alan would clearly go for the second option; but he also thinks it’s a form of resignation & would be almost a confession of failure.  Personally he would be unhappy with it.  Though it's a difficult struggle, it's nonetheless a necessary struggle to open up the major research universities & what we're calling, for lack of a better term, "secular universities" to currents of thought to which they're currently not hospitable.  He almost thinks that there's an enormous obligation to do so & simply not let them get away with their lack of pluralism.  Also, he thinks that going for a pluralism among different kinds of institutions fails to recognize that some institutions are very hard to classify in that sense already, e.g. Boston College, University of Notre Dame, etc.  These institutions are research universities & are more pluralistic, and they should be classified that way as opposed to being universities that have in any sense withdrawn from those kinds of research commitments in favor of some other kinds of commitments called religious communities.  They clearly haven't given up on the former.  It seemed to Alan that we ought not to be so quick to classify.

     Hughes pointed out that we do have pluralism of institutions already, and we will continue to have them.  But he gets nervous when he hears people advocate for this.  If we begin to advocate  this we open the door for some of these institutions to offer an excuse for avoiding pluralism within the institutions.

     Monika Hellwig felt that academic legitimacy is much wider than we've generally been designating it.  She referred to the AAR & the interesting kinds of exchanges that happen there of the most secularized study of religious phenomena in dialogue with distinctly committed positions.  Hellwig was at first taken with Frank Turner’s point that if there is to be plurality it has to be plurality of institutions, not plurality within institutions.  On further reflection she thinks that both are needed.  But pluralism within might not happen if there is not some pluralism among institutions which keep specific traditions alive.  She has found the academic realm much more congenial in terms of conversation across differences in basic assumptions than we seem to be assuming.  She’s inclined to agree with Dick Bernstein's observation about a failure of nerve at church-related institutions much more than she is inclined to agree with the suggestion that people of religious perspective are in some academic way persecuted.  She hasn't really seen that happening. She has found conversations with colleagues from state universities with a definite secular bias to be very congenial & very sensible, and she has been able to say what she wanted to say.  So she wonders whether we aren’t exaggerating this.

    Rich Mouw said that he'd just come away from a consultation of presidents & chief executive officers of theological schools.  He was there as a member of the executive committee of the ATS [Association of Theological Schools], there was a common concern about the ways in which accrediting standards tend to homogenize theological education.  About 40 years ago all these schools gave something like a bachelor of divinity degree, but there was no consistency on what went into that BD degree.  E.g., a BD from a Jesuit school would be very different from a BD from a Southern Baptist school.  But the emergence of a culture of accreditation has had a tremendous homogenizing effect so that now curricula tend to look very similar across the field.  Also there are 20 schools that do 99% of the PhD production for the 235 accredited theological schools.  So a lot of these chief executive officers were complaining about the fact that the combination of accrediting standards, the AAR/SBL culture & the graduate school culture all conspire to make it very difficult to maintain the uniqueness that we associate with pluralism.  The point of this example, Mouw explained, is that if we are going to have mutual accountability among schools with regard to accrediting standards & if there's going to be a graduate school culture producing the people that teach at those schools, unless we also look at pluralism in this larger culture of the academy his guess is that the resultant pluralism among institutions is going to be fairly superficial because of all of the other forces that are at work.  You can’t have a plurality of liberal arts colleges when there’s a homogenization of the research universities that are producing the PhDs who are going to teach in those colleges.  To promote real pluralism in such conditions those colleges would have a tremendous re-socialization & re-education challenge at the gatekeeping point.

     Stump said she thinks it’s crucial that we have both types of pluralism--across institutions & within institutions--but that there is precious little of either.  As an example she noted that she spent the summer at Grand Rapids & went with excitement to the Calvin College bookstore to see what good thing she could find there that she couldn't find somewhere else, and there was absolutely nothing.  The store was rich on self-help & “psycho-babble” books but there was really nothing there from the Christian tradition.  So she decided to try the college bookstore at the interesting Dominican school in the same town, & it was featuring "chicken soup for the soul".  If you look at the wonderful richness of the Christian tradition, e.g. the letters of Chrysostom & Olympias, the wonderful treatise of Ambrose on Naboth in which he talks about social justice & duties to the poor & so on, & ask yourself in what school in the country these things can be taught or in what school in there is a fervently committed Christian who knows they exist, the answer is practically nowhere.  We cannot have pluralism unless we've got some kind of tradition to be part of that we can bring to a pluralistic conversation.  If we're all reading chicken soup for the soul, we haven't got anything to be pluralistic about.  Eleonore thinks this is an important thing for this group to be considering, that is, how we re connect ourselves to a tradition we don't know anything about & how we pass this tradition on to others so we can have some of this engaged fallibilistic pluralism.

     Gene Lowe associated himself with those who found the notion that we would settle for pluralism among institutions as much less than what is worth striving for.  On another issue, Gene reviewed his experience over a couple years at the Mellon Foundation doing a study about diversity in academic institutions.  In connection with that work he was invited to attend a faculty seminar at Berkeley on the American cultures program.  Faculty members came together to talk about how they would teach to fulfill Berkeley's new requirement on American cultures.  They brought their syllabi along for mutual examination.  This seminar culminated in a decision that there would not be a single required course on diversity but a range of courses offered within the university that addressed problems or developments in American culture & literature taking as a kind of vantage point a number of different ethnic experiences.  What Berkeley did was to set up a 2- or 3-week summer session for which faculty were given a month of summer salary.  They worked together trying to think through how the university could address this new challenge posed by the cultural & racial diversity of the state.  Gene sat in on one day & followed the interesting comments people made about this experience.  In a number of cases faculty actually thought about not just how they were going to teach a certain course but how they were going to think about the construction of their own scholarly project.  Thinking primarily of more secular institutions, though not necessarily restricting it to that context, Gene wondered to what extent we could imagine organizing to try to help people teach about the diversity of religious experience.  Would it be possible, for example, to bring a group of faculty together in a large enough place (either within an institution or across institutions) to address the question of teaching in a deep way about the many different sorts of religious traditions that increasingly inform & shape American culture?  This could be the sort of thing that a foundation like Lilly would be interested in.  If you bring a group of faculty together to work on their teaching, you create a situation that has some family resemblances to what we have experienced around this table.  But it has the practical output of helping faculty to develop a syllabus that engages a wider kind of religious pluralism than he thinks many people feel comfortable doing on their own.  (Turner noted that that's the second grant proposal that had been recommended.)

     Echoing the sentiments of the both/and camp, Jean Elshtain felt that robust pluralism in higher education requires both pluralism of institutions & pluralism within institutions.  One of glories of American higher education historically, she noted, is the fact that it has been characterized by a pluralism of institutions.  However, pluralism within institutions is a big challenge given the variety of kinds of institutions we're talking about.  Referring to Monika's remarks earlier, Jean commented that the issue is not so much an active persecution of those of religious perspectives but more the notion that these perspectives are somehow suspect or illegitimate, not quite up to par or even worth considering.  She gave an example of what she saw as a failure of pluralism.  An internal conference last year at the University of Chicago sponsored by the Newman Center was looking at the question of contrasting understandings of culture and economy.  Jean was asked to respond to the question, “Is there a Christian view of the economy?”  She took her assignment seriously.  She decided that she would not only bring forward Catholic social thought but also the sort of scriptural idea of God's economy by contrast to a kind of triumphant notion of a market economy.  But she realized that if she was going to be in a discussion with a fellow from the U of C economics department, she'd better know his perspective as well.  She already had some familiarity with this, but she refreshed herself on the anthropological presuppositions, the nature of persons they believe is the dominant metaphor, the commitment to utilitarianism, the commitment to a certain notion of human good, etc. so that she could present the alternative.  What she found interesting was that her interlocutor from the economics department felt himself under no obligation of any kind to inform himself about the presuppositions that she might be bring to the inquiry.  He was in possession of the hegemonic discourse.  He knows what economy is all about, and he simply didn't consider himself under any obligation to understand what a notion of a gift economy might be or an understanding of the self such that in giving one is not depleted but potentially enriched.  Jean thinks that this is very common.  One is obliged to understand all these other perspectives, but people from those sides consider themselves under no similar obligation.  This does not promote pluralism at all.  Rather it promotes the view that there are some perspectives that have warrant & legitimacy & others that are so suspect or have so little utility that we are not obliged to know anything about them.  She thinks it's a huge challenge to promote robust pluralism within certain institutions not due to active persecution but rather due to this notion that it's really not worth bothering ourselves with a certain idea because we already know where the truth of this or that issue lies.

     Jim Heft returned to the notion of pluralism between institutions being every bit as important as pluralism within them.  He agreed with the both/and point, but he thought that the task is different in different kinds of institutions.  E.g., as Wuthnow noted earlier, in some major research universities to create a space for a religious studies department would be a beginning of that kind of pluralism, & that could be very important.  Within a religiously-based institution such as his own the pluralism might look different.  Jim wanted to see intellectuals who really mine their tradition, but he also wanted others from other traditions to enter into that discussion.  This kind of interaction, which Jim called the "open circle", is a very demanding & difficult thing to do well because it requires a faith-based tradition to engage the questions with others within that institution on an ongoing basis.  He thought that this was another kind of pluralism that is also important.

     Nick Wolterstorff dissented from what he saw as a fairly common view among seminar members, namely the monolithic character of the secular research university vis-à-vis religion.  He could only be anecdotal, he explained, and conceded that it’s probably different in different disciplines or different universities, but at Yale he simply doesn’t feel silenced in any regard whatsoever.  He teaches what he wishes.  E.g., he'll give a seminar next semester on the doctrine of divine impassability.  There will probably be 40 students from all different parts of the university who show up.  The course will be given in the philosophy department and held in the philosophy department building.  He can't take 40 students so he'll winnow it down to 20-22 students.  Half of them will know Latin.  Nobody tells him he shouldn't do this.
 At this point someone interjected with the question whether a junior person in his department could do the same thing.  Again Nick noted that his comments were purely anecdotal, but he thought a junior professor could do it as well at Yale.  He simply wasn't persuaded that these generalizations are true.  He didn’t say that there's nothing to them, but he thought we were exaggerating the situation.

     Responding to Elshtain's example Nick commented that until there are some Christian or Jewish economists showing how certain religious perspectives are fruitful for economics, at his best an economics prof. is going to say, "Really interesting stuff, but I just don't see what it has to do with my profession of economics."  Putting it another way, Nick supposed that he were to come to Jean and ask her to recommend a really good Christian economist that he ought to be reading.  There is no answer to that question, said Nick.  Jean commented that there are plenty of great texts by Christian economists that are not read or are treated either as historic curiosities or anomalies.  Jean thought that Nick was underestimating the ways in which people within particular (though admittedly not all) professions are able to insulate themselves from any systematic alternatives because of the epistemological presuppositions they bring to bear that deny the legitimacy of alternatives to their own perspectives.
 Jim Turner wondered to what degree this was a question of religion noting that he has felt marginalized in his research for many other reasons.  Jean repeated the point that economists don't listen to anybody else, and you can't have pluralism in that kind of situation.  She didn't think we should underestimate the challenge of bringing alternative perspectives to bear, whether they're religiously-based or not.  Nick responded that if there were a substantial body of gifted economic thought from a religious perspective that the standard economists were neglecting, the situation would be different.  Eleonore Stump asked why it's not there echoing Jean's remarks about how the profession socializes the younger generation to read certain things out of the discipline.

     Marsden seconded this view.  He pointed out that Notre Dame attempted to make economics a moral discipline in their program in the '70s, and this failed because economists felt marginalized.  People said this isn't really economics.
 Regarding the same situation Gleason added that as far as he knew there was division within the department about the whole matter, but it was the administration’s decision that if you want to get anywhere in this discipline you've got to do something different from what you're doing.  This relates to the phrase “failure of nerve” that has been used a couple times.  Phil thought this situation represented a "failure of nerve" on the part of a religiously-based institution.  Why?  Because we cannot make “the big time” unless we act the way the big time people do.  That means at least temporarily putting in abeyance our distinctly religious take on all this.  The failure of nerve reflects a perception that there is an overarching academic culture.  As has been noted, there is a plurality of academic cultures, but there is also a generalized sense of what is required to be taken seriously academically.  You can't ignore that.  That’s why Phil thinks this failure of nerve is such an obvious reality and why it is difficult to maintain a genuine pluralism of institutions when all the institutions are trying to "make it" by a standard that makes it difficult for them to be distinctive.

     Steve Haynes offered a word of caution about an assumption that within institutions secular forces move us toward pluralism & religious forces move us away from pluralism.  Speaking about Rhodes College as an example, he explained that the forces that work against pluralism on this campus are things that others have mentioned--faculty socialization, accreditation, market forces, and particularly the job market, i.e. the fact that the job market is so bad that schools like Rhodes can hire some of the best people & keep them, people who at other times might go to a research university.  Also significant is the need for media recognition, e.g. that of U.S. News & World Report or Christian Review, and the factor of selectivity in admissions which all the magazines weigh heavily in judging the national ranking of a college.  Schools like Rhodes with traditionally regional reputations need these bits of recognition like flowers need rain in order to succeed.  But those are all forces that move the institution away from pluralism & tend to produce a more homogeneous student body.  On the contrary, the church tradition is one of the chief forces toward pluralism at Rhodes.  The only official document that treats diversity as a positive good in itself is the covenant of the Presbyterian Church USA.  It obligates the school to do something that it fails miserably to do, namely to recruit racial/ethnic persons (a Presbyterian term Steve doesn't like) in every aspect of the college’s life.  We ignore that, he added, but in fact it's the only official document the college has which treats pluralism as if it were a positive good.  At his institution, Haynes concluded, it's almost counter-intuitive.  The religious tradition could & does work toward internal pluralism, & a lot of the secular forces move toward homogeneity.
     There is always a certain kind of corporate culture in the university that can be hegemonic & destructive & can prevent the kind of pluralism that people would like to see, Bob Wuthnow remarked speaking as a social scientist.  But his own experience has been much like Nick’s.  He can do pretty much what he wants, & so can junior faculty.  He referred to Peter Singer as an example.  The interesting thing about Peter Singer, who in Wuthnow's mind is somebody who stands outside of the usual round of pluralism that we're comfortable with in the university, is that his appointment would not have been possible at Princeton 10 years ago, certainly not in the philosophy department.  His appointment was possible because of the human values center that was started to provide the pluralism that was seen lacking in the Princeton philosophy department. Yet there are also faculty who have been actively opposed to Peter Singer, in particular conservative Catholic faculty in the politics department.  The fact that there was pluralism there provides a kind of counter-balance to somebody like Singer.  It seemed to Bob that what we're talking about is institutional niches that provide for pluralism within the university.  What he wonders about, and this connects with what Steve Haynes was just saying, is whether the same kind of niches exist in church-related institutions.  He knows they do at some.  But he works with a fair number of graduate students who have grown up evangelical & still consider themselves evangelical Christians.  They look at jobs at Baylor or Gordon College or Calvin College, and they're too nervous even to consider them very seriously because they don't imagine that there will be pluralism for them, let alone for someone who has grown up Catholic or Jewish or Russian Orthodox.  That is what Bob wonders about church-related colleges.

     Frank Turner suggested that we're talking about a model of the university that doesn't bear any resemblance to reality.  We're talking as if the faculty & courses are important.  He added that he didn't mean this cynically but quite seriously  Going back to Wuthnow's earlier point about mainstreaming in religion, Frank suggested that Lilly & Pew, two of the large foundations that major secular institutions deal with all the time, could make a difference in this regard.  They could say we would like to see the curriculum change so that there are courses in the literature of the wisdom traditions, for example; or, we would like to see courses in history of religions, in sociology of religion, and so on.  These are courses that are very short in many major institutions because they're on the margins of recruitment, for good or bad reasons.  Turner thinks there's no doubt that both graduate institutions & liberal arts colleges could & would respond to that kind of open-ended initiative.  The devil is in the details, Frank added, and money has a great deal to do with it.  He also noted that that's not a bad thing.  There's a limited amount of it, & what has driven it mostly is science money.  But if the major foundations that are interested in religious issues were to approach universities with such a proposal, there would be some difficulty & some would say no; but there would be other colleges & universities that would respond positively.  So there are ways in existing structures to mainline or to create centers.  In other words, we know colleges & universities are not just faculty, students & administrations; there are all sorts of other entities.  And lots of good things (as well as some kooky things) have come in through those other entities.  There's a lot of softness along the margins to introduce those sorts of things, and then courses & the like grow out of them.
     A second point on which Turner commented is the failure of nerve, which he described as people wanting a free lunch.  There is a price to paid in the larger secular culture.  After all, most religious traditions see themselves as opposing the larger secular culture in some way.  Then when they have institutions that educate people in that way they want the culture to embrace them.  Frank didn’t think that could be done if one wants to get into “the big time", to use Gleason's phrase.  There are institutions that have chosen otherwise.  They have chosen to send students to major graduate schools & bring them back.  One of the most interesting institutions in this country in this regard is Brigham Young.  It’s the largest private university in the U.S.  At Yale, and he's sure the case is similar elsewhere, there are Latter Day Saints graduate students. They send out students & then bring them back.  It’s not as if this can’t be done.  We all come from a fairly homogenous academic tradition.  There are ways of penetrating that tradition, but the process is very slow, & it tends to relate to money.  Frank repeated that he doesn't think that's a bad thing.  You may not like it, but once you recognize it you can begin to see how around the edges in most institutions there is space for introducing change.  Changing colleges & universities involves lacework & clipping around the edges; an appointment here, a fellowship there; & over the course of 5 or 6 years you have something.

     Gene Lowe’s earlier remarks prompted Dick Bernstein to comment on something he described as both a virtue & a negative aspect of our professional education, namely the gimmick, the quest for a new solution.  Personally he thought the whole diversity approach has been a miserable washout.  Agreeing with Eleonore, Dick explained that we’ve come up with the most abstract idea of what a real tradition is:  “the other”.  The Berkeley system is a mockery as far as Dick is concerned:  3 weeks on the Indians, 4 weeks on the blacks, 3 weeks on this, that & the other.  This is a mockery of what a real tradition is, almost the antithesis.  What a real tradition is in terms of language & study, etc. is something distinctive & something in which one must be immersed to understand.  Dick doesn't believe the Berkeley system is morally educating anybody.  If anything this idea of 4 weeks on this, 3 weeks on another group is teaching people what it is not to immerse themselves in a tradition.  In that sense he endorsed the word to watch out for our quick fixes & gimmickry because it really denigrates the seriousness of what it is to be involved, to respect, to live in & learn from a different tradition.
     Gene briefly responded that his conversations with faculty who had been involved in this program suggest to him that the work has many deeper qualities.  Also, Monika mentioned earlier what has happened at the AAR over the last period of time, which corresponds with Gene's sense as well.  These things that start with something that feels a little gimmicky can have quite serious & sustaining consequences--not only for teaching but for the way in which people conceive problems they take up in the future.  One is always vulnerable to the critique of superficiality that Bernstein described, said Gene, but his sense is that it is not inevitable, & with the right sort of stewardship & intentionality one can get some deeper results.  Dick maintained a note of skepticism.

     Diane Winston asked Bernstein whether he had any suggestions about how one can meaningfully engage with diversity.  Dick replied that here he is very conventional.  In terms of his own life experience he has learned most when he has encountered those people who are deeply immersed in a tradition.  His deepest knowledge of what it really is to be a living Calvinist has come through people he has met from Calvin College, people who have lived that life, and not from reading books or teaching it in the course of a semester.  There's nothing flashy about this.  What does he know about native Americans?  Almost nothing.  He wants to bring in new voices, but not for 3 weeks in a syllabus.  That's not taking it seriously.  That's giving someone the gratification that you've done the hard work when you really haven't.  A tradition is a language, it's a feeling, a ritual, a set of impulses, it's a live thing; and Dick is very disturbed by the way that this has become a media phenomenon appropriated by the universities.  He doesn't believe for a minute that it's turning our students into far more humane, open, understanding people.  He thinks it's feeding a kind of arrogance that they know something that they don't really know.

     Frank Oakley returned to the subject of the failure of nerve that several people had addressed.  He has never taught at a religiously-affiliated institution, but he has the feeling that if people were rebuking him for loss of nerve he’d get a little nervous.  If it were coming from administrators he'd wonder what price tag was going to be attached to it in the sense of loss of some of the freedom of manoeuver or freedom of space within.  If it were coming from outsiders he’d wonder what they had in mind & how schematic a position he was then going to have to represent.  Most of our religious traditions are themselves extraordinarily plural & complicated, & there has to be room for manoeuvre within.  He first encountered the Catholic educational establishment here in the '50s, & it struck him as a ghetto structure, intellectually largely undistinguished & producing very little scholarship.  There are some reasons for that, & they were not all economic.  So, he wanted to signal a little nervousness about loss of nerve talk.  He was interested that Phil & Monika endorsed it from the inside.
     Bernstein asked whether it wasn’t the case that the internal discussion at many Catholic institutions is how can we become like the rest, that is like secular institutions, rather than how to affirm our strong identity & nevertheless also be on the national scene.  Monika noted that she spends her life doing this in her present situation, that is fostering reflection in colleges on what they have uniquely to contribute.

     Hellwig also wanted to go back to the example Jean Elshtain had posed.  Though she almost always finds herself agreeing with Jean, she disagreed with her in this case.  She saw Jean’s experience as normalcy.  It isn't only in religious matters, but it's the whole human situation that we try to interpret reality & to impose our picture of reality on others.  So there will always be dominant groups.  This is true not only in relation to religion but also in relation to the disciplines & the criteria that the disciplines propose.  Despite all the talk about postmodernism, Monika said, she thinks we’re still in an Enlightenment stage where the dominant understanding is that if you appeal to tradition or cumulative wisdom of the human community from the past you’re understood to be less close in your search for truth than if you appeal to pure reason.  And it's easiest to do that when you're dealing with a field that lends itself to quantitative analysis.  So she thinks economics is bound to be one of the most difficult fields.  But she saw Jean’s situation in this discussion in perfect continuity with the 2nd century Greek apologists.  There is a dominant understanding of how you argue & what the rules are, and it's a challenge to do things differently, to penetrate the dominant understanding & try to argue a new position by their rules.  This is always going to be the case.  Probably Jean’s situation was difficult because not enough other people have done this before, that is, challenge the economists' hegemony.  Perhaps it is as much an art as a science to find ways of sparking insights, imaginative changes of horizon & perspective.  She wouldn't expect it to be easy.

     Jean wanted to respond to Monika later.  At this point she commented on the distinction between what might be called thin or trendy diversity & real, robust pluralism, which does require some depth to the perspectives that are being brought to bear.  What’s fascinating is that there are some people committed to that process within our institutions of higher learning, especially at the big research universities, & some who simply aren’t.  Some may give lip service to the notion of pluralism but they are not themselves actually committed to it because it would require that they do more work than they want to do to familiarize themselves sufficiently with perspectives that run contrary to their own.  Jean saw this as a real problem.  Returning to one of Nick's questions, Elshtain noted that there are in economics people who are working from alternative perspectives to the dominant perspective, but they’re seen as somewhat marginal figures or considered economic historians or some other sort of thing but not real economists because of the way that has been defined.  Jean thinks we should never underestimate how difficult it is to penetrate some of these epistemologies--in the interest of pluralism, not in opposition to it.

     Jim Heft made several observations related to the idea of the failure of nerve.  First, Jim thought this could happen with administrators in Catholic universities where they don't have a sense of the depth of the tradition.  They wouldn't see the tradition as important for two things:  for hiring practices, but especially for providing or getting money for people so that they can do good work.  That's been very difficult.  Another thing that he thinks has been very difficult if you look at Catholic institutions, particularly from the '50s as Oakley described the situation, with few exceptions they were undistinguished intellectually.  After Vatican II, the '60s, Vietnam, the GI bill, swelling numbers, etc., there was a huge swirl.  We talk about failure of nerve, but at that time for these institutions it was a matter of survival, trying to keep focused, and so on.  Finally, people on the right who speak of failure of nerve have a very distinct idea of Catholicism they want to impose.  People on the left, and there aren't too many who are organized, would push social justice type issues & not really do hard intellectual work.  So, it's a complicated thing to hold together & to focus for what Heft called the open circle.
 

SESSION II:  SATURDAY AFTERNOON

 The first part of the afternoon session was spent in 2 smaller group discussions of a set of questions issuing from the last Lilly Seminar meeting in Pasadena as well as from our conversation during this morning's session.  Turner & Wolterstorff posed 4 questions or issues for discussion:

 1. There was a sense that the issue that David Hollinger raised at the last meeting had not been adequately addressed.
    The specific question raised was whether in the secular academy not simply a dominant set of epistemic practices
    have emerged over the years but an actual consensus that rightly gives little place to religion.  Is there a consensus
    in the academy that the intellectual power of Christianity has been exhausted and for that reason religiously based
    learning should receive no more attention than it is already getting, and perhaps less?
 2. Dick Bernstein in his statement had raised the issue of the “dark side” of Christian hegemony in the academy.
    What is the proper response to this phenomenon, and how do we safeguard against it in the future?
 3. The relation of academic freedom to hiring practices at church-related institutions.
 4. How can we replicate the Lilly Seminar conversation?  What other contexts or models might serve this purpose?
 

Plenary Discussion

     Before formally taking up the discussion questions in our plenary session, Mark Schwehn, who had been unable to arrive in time for our morning session, was asked whether he wanted to make a statement as other seminar members had earlier.  Schwehn commented on a theme that had arisen in the course of the smaller discussion group that had just met.  He noted that his experience over the course of the past 2+ years was that the way some of the initial issues were framed & the way some of the various lines of disagreement were understood seemed to him to be progressively less cogent than they seemed at the beginning.  As an example Mark mentioned the notion that there were profound cleavages between something like the secular academy & something like church-related higher education & that that was the proper place to locate an argument & an exploration.  As people began to nuance their views & to talk with one another from their various vantage points about their experiences as scholars & teachers in the academy, it seemed instead that we often found ourselves in all kinds of interesting alliances with others who cared deeply for what he thinks was not so much a golden age as a certain ideal of what the university at it's best could be & sometimes in certain particular places- sometimes in the secular academy & sometimes in church-related schools--has actually approximated.
     So, what has struck Mark about this whole Lilly Seminar experience & what he will take from it as one of the enduring legacies of this conversation is the sense in which people are like-minded about a sense that the university according to some kind of shared ideal is in serious difficulty.  There are all kinds of diagnoses for the sources & the character of that problematic shared all the way across the spectrum--from Alisdair MacIntyre to David Hollinger.  Even though they wouldn’t agree about much, they are both concerned about the state of the modern research university.  So what Schwehn saw as more & more interesting is the conversation that seeks to explore that problematic more deeply: its nature, its roots & its origin; and also how one can go about joining hands with other serious minded people, religious & non-religious, to try to restore to that university or at least to some institutions what folks think are the essentials of that kind of common life.  Mark thought those essentials of common life, if not fast-disappearing, were at least under a whole set of very different kinds of threats from all kinds of sources--large socio-economic forces, largely market forces, etc., & probably least of all from religious people.  What seems to be happening in our contemporary culture is that old lines of argument & disagreement, such as the one between a kind of secularity & a kind of church-relatedness in the academy, simply aren’t the lines where the most interesting conversation now has to be drawn & joined when it comes to teaching, learning & scholarship.

     Jim Heft then summarized the content of his small group's discussion of the 4 questions.  The first question, Heft noted, really had to do with a whole set of epistemic questions & whether David Hollinger’s estimation of the almost monolithic agreement or consensus within the academy about the possibility of seriously engaging religious scholarship is really acceptable or accurate.  In his group people tended to think that it's not quite as monolithic as this.  There is some degree of diversity in terms warrants.  There will probably be a continual debate about exactly what could or wouldn't be acceptable, but it's more diverse than David presented it.
      Regarding the "dark side", i.e. the question of Protestant hegemony & the safeguards against such situations, one of the helpful comments made was that so-called questions of epistemology are interlaced inevitably with questions of power.  Peer review alone is not always fair by any means.  In particular, church-related institutions might want to engage a rather serious discussion along the lines of what the criteria might be in relationship to the mission of the institution.  The problem is that too many religious institutions have not given serious thought to what their mission is, particularly in relation to intellectual traditions.
     On the question of academic freedom & hiring processes the group discussed several issues: some of the debates at Notre Dame, some of the possibilities of Catholic studies not as a department but as a kind of movement within Catholic colleges & universities that allows hires in different disciplines that would be more explicitly related to the mission, etc.  They also talked about the possibility of the administration, when enlightened, & departments themselves engaging in a discussion that would shape criteria that would allow for some affirmative action within hiring.  But this is a double-edged sword & a difficult thing to do really well.  There is no substitute for good judgment, and good judgment often requires something that transcends a set of criteria; but how to do that & whose in on that judgment & so on is not an easy thing to determine.
     Finally the group discussed the question of models.  People thought that the Lilly Seminar was one.  They thought it was quite important for institutions that have been able to put together a kind of pluralism that respects the religious traditions & nurtures them, a pluralism of thought & so on, to be lifted up & talked about.

     Nick Wolterstorff said that the second group basically said the same things, though it addressed the questions in a different order.  Andrea's notes indicate that this group spent a significant amount of time attempting to understand or interpret some of David Hollinger's concerns.  In general the group seemed to feel that David's view was too simplistic, but there was also something quite right in the concerns he expressed.  On the question of hiring policies the group was much more articulate about the fears that different parties had regarding faculty hiring (e.g. the feeling among some that if we bring in religious concerns we're going to be redefining excellence) than about possible solutions to the problem.  Although no single theme emerged in discussion of the "dark side" & possible safeguards to hegemony, at least one seminar member expressed the wish that people would talk more specifically about their backgrounds & experiences and pointed to Dick Bernstein's helpful comments about Jewish quotas at Yale by way of example.

     Much of the large group discussion focused on the final question which neither of the smaller groups had discussed in any depth.
     Nancy Ammerman said that in her group she had pushed people to tell success stories as well as horror stories about the academy.  One of the good things about what we’ve done together is that we’ve worked at figuring out some ground rules, some practices; we’ve built a community.  Part of what we're talking about here is not just guidelines, structures, rules & whatever that need to be put in place but rather a culture-building process.  The replication of this may not be in the form of getting together another group like this in another setting, though this too is important, i.e. pulling us out of our normal institutional environments & creating a new space in which a new kind of community can be built which then influences how we think about building community in our normal spaces.  But we can also have replication in the sense of providing models that allow us to try to build these kinds of communities within our own institutions.  So Nancy saw the replication question primarily in terms of the kind of culture-building or community-building process that has gone on within the Lilly Seminar that can be translated into other situations.
     Nick asked for which groups of people she would like to see this type of discussion with this type of community basis to it continued.  Nancy said that she imagined within a university putting together a multi-disciplinary group of people whom we know at the outset are going to bring very different points of view into the discussion.  Such a group of people might be given the same sort of amorphous questions with which we began & might be given the time & space to engage in conversation about these issues.  One could also imagine something like this happening within various professional guilds.  People from within those professional associations, who don’t necessarily normally work on the same things, might be drawn together into a similar type of conversation.
     Eleonore has found her own participation in the Seminar valuable precisely because it has brought her into contact with a lot of people she otherwise wouldn’t encounter.  They don’t share a religion, an academic discipline, a geographical location or an ethnicity.  This, she thought, is what has made the Lilly Seminar a learning exercise in how to do the kind of engaged fallibilistic pluralism that many people around the table think is the right way to proceed with these issues.  Stump is involved in 3 groups that in a sense are trying to build community around some one thing.  Although they have very different purposes, all three groups succeed in doing what the Lilly Seminar has done in terms of developing community among people who otherwise would not form a community.  They do this by picking a time of the year when it’s reasonably easy for people to move & keeping that time of year constant, finding some way to provide a minimal amount of help with expenses & providing a minimal amount of structure.  In each of these 3 cases the communities are ongoing & self-perpetuating, & they build something that really makes a difference to the projects that the group means to put forward.

     Rich Mouw commented on some practical strategies for continuation or replication.  Reflecting back on his experience at Calvin College, Mouw noted that a lot of change came because a few people were thinking about the mission of the larger institution.  His own sense as an administrator now is that there is probably some predictable number in any given institution, probably not more than 10%, of people who walk the halls & think about the overall situation of the school; most of the rest probably never think about those issues.  Rich wonders how we can strengthen the hand of those who instinctively think about these things but have no larger community in which to carry on the conversation.  And how do we at least educate the rest of the faculty to believe that these are important issues to talk about?  One of the big difficulties in getting faculty involved in discussions of this sort is simply that there is no reward system for it.  (It doesn’t count when you’re up for tenure, it’s not a publication or book review, it’s not a course you’ve taught, and so on.)  As a person who is obligated to think a lot about overall faculty development Rich noted the need to find spaces in faculty meetings & retreats where we can do some of this “big picture” kind of thing.  What might be helpful for administrators who are looking for ways to fill a 2-hour segment of a faculty retreat or a faculty meeting devoted to thinking about bigger issues is to have several 50-minute videos available.  These videos would involve people engaging in a conversation about subjects like religion & the study & teaching of history; or, for example, having Alan Wolfe moderate a discussion on Catholic higher education; or the kinds of things Bernstein & Wolterstorff have talked about.  Videos of panel discussions of people who know how to talk to each other could be very helpful.  The audience would be surprised that, e.g., Alan Wolfe knows how to talk to George Marsden about the so-called secularization of the university.  Rich thinks this could be an interesting product of this Seminar & that it could be done quite easily.
     What Monika missed was the opportunity to talk at considerable length with a small group of people so that we could follow through.  We seldom got to the heart of an issue in continuous conversation, though it happened once in awhile at table conversations.  Her suggestion for any similar projects was to plan beforehand how to mix groups of not more than 5-6 people who definitely come from different perspectives & to present them with very clearly focused questions.  Groups would then be small enough for everybody not only to get in a quick word but really to lay out a position and respond to the positions of others.
     George Marsden noted one example of the kind of thing that can be done on campuses.  He recently attended a meeting sponsored by the Erasmus Institute at Notre Dame at which a fellow was leading a discussion of an essay of Richard Rorty on religion.  8-12 people from across the university came together for this discussion.  George thought this was the kind of thing that might be done not only at Catholic universities but at other sorts of universities as well, perhaps on an ad hoc basis.

     Alan Wolfe added a footnote to what Mark Schwehn had said about his surprise that over the past few years what might have begun as a debate between so-called secularists on the one side and so called religious people on the other side didn’t really cut that way.  Alan thought this was something the group could contribute.  Wolfe’s primary conversation is with those outside the religious camp.  He clarifies for people who see themselves as secular what religiously?oriented institutions are doing.  He admitted that this is difficult.  The view of simply stamping out religion is one that prevails at some universities, & Alan tries to disabuse his colleagues of such perceptions.  He’d like to see more of this on the other side from religiously-oriented people.  Rather than a victimization & persecutorial attitude prevailing in the religious camp he’d like to see people change the conversation to a much more positive & upbeat one.  When religiously-oriented people meet with others who share certain complaints about the modern research university or modern American culture as being antithetical to religion they could take it upon themselves to put forth a positive agenda rather than reinforcing negative stereotypes.  It seemed to Alan that an explicit attempt to address this in some way would be a good thing, a positive outcome of the seminar.  Perhaps the videos Mouw suggested could be useful in this regard.

     Several Seminar members described programs that were presently in place at their own or other institutions.  Jean Elshtain spoke of an initiative at the University of Chicago Divinity School that is trying to promote conversation across disciplines in a way that tries to press the edges of inquiry in political theory.  They’ve had some major political theorists like Charles Taylor & Michael Waltzer participate in this initiative.  These scholars decide what they would like people to read in advance of their appearance.  For the people who come the conversation is completely different from what they normally experience.  They find it more challenging than other conversations.  These kinds of engagements are really rare, & of course they require some funding.  It is not a big conference but an effort to promote the kind of thing we all say we want but see so little of.  The scholars are being challenged, but students are being challenged in a certain direction as well.  The more such engagements we can promote at our institutions the better, Jean thought, because it’s a way of bringing an outsider in that hopefully does something to their work over time but certainly changes the conversation internally.  It brings together students from the Div. School, political science & other disciplines who listen to a kind of engagement they wouldn’t find in a building just across the street.
     Oakley noted that there is a whole network now in place of humanities centers & institutes around the country which belong to an organization for such things as Jean suggested.  The wiring for such programs strikes him as easy.  The kind of mechanism he has in mind would probably be good for mainstream research universities, but it probably wouldn’t help the smaller places too much.
     Heft described something being done at University of Dayton, though he acknowledged that it requires a lot of funding.  They run an interdisciplinary seminar based on an issue that has to do with the religious mission of the institution but that respects the constitution of the disciplines.  It meets 2 hours a week over 4 months, and then there is summer research support & a publishable paper at the outcome.  One of the great benefits of such a program is that a certain respect begins to develop among people one might not normally listen to.  Jim described some of the topics they’d covered.  Right now they’re dealing with religion & science.  It was also noted that they fund release time for people who participate.
 

SESSION III:  SUNDAY MORNING

Frank Oakley, Williams College, President Emeritus

Rather than try to summarize Frank’s pithy & engaging presentation, it has been included in full:
 

CONCLUDING REMARKS

 

The ensuing plenary discussion of Franks’s presentation follows.
 

Plenary Discussion

     Eleonore Stump opened the discussion with a word of gratitude to the Lilly foundation & to everyone in the group.  She found the group unusual in the way in which everyone was willing to talk.  She thought this was of great profit.  Eleonore wanted to express one note of  disappointment with Frank Oakley’s talk.  All the rest of it exceeded expectations, and her expectations were quite high.  One thing she felt from the beginning of the Lilly Seminar to the end that should have been talked about more & didn’t get talked about much (except inasmuch as she kept raising it) is what it is for people to reappropriate their traditions.  The general worry & concern seemed to be something more like this:  Given that the common culture, which tends to be quite secular at least in some of its parts, is a kind of great train, can religion fit on it as a caboose?  And if so where, how & in what way?  But another thing to think about is that different religious traditions are trains in their own right, and you can’t fit them on as a caboose to anything, any more than you can fit that whole Chinese tradition of history, literature & philosophy as a caboose onto the train of Maoist versions of Marxism.  Eleonore thought we’d never really discussed this, i.e. the way that each of these traditions is a kind of train in its own right, a train that gets sidetracked or sidelined in the contemporary academy.  She would have liked to have seen more discussion of this.

     Bob Wuthnow picked up on a point that Oakley had made toward the very end of his talk suggesting, if he understood correctly, that there might be a kind of paradigm shift in the works as popular belief is changing; New Age beliefs were mentioned as a possible symptom of this.  Bob wanted to suggest some evidence that may indicate that that’s right & maybe even worse than we think.  There’s a new word that has entered the dictionary of American slang in the last few years, "Sheilaism", which comes out of Habits of the Heart.  It is based on a woman named Sheila who invents a religion of her own that she calls “Sheilaism”.  Wuthnow explained that he’s always been rather sympathetic to Sheila because she comes in for so much criticism in the book, and she seems like a rather nice lady.  As Bob has done interviews with people of all different stripes about spirituality he finds that she’s there a lot among people who seem not to be connected to a religious tradition at all & people who also seem distrustful of the cognitive & especially the rational credal aspects of religious tradition.  In a national survey earlier this year, Bob continued, he threw in a Sheila question.  The question read something like this:  "We can only know God by emptying our minds & looking inside ourselves."  More than half of the public agreed with that statement, which actually didn’t surprise him as much as the fact that half of all evangelicals agreed with it.  Bob asked historians whether there would have ever been at other times anything like this, or is this new?  He suspected it may not be quite as new as we think, but he also suspected that there may be evidence of a kind of paradigm shift here.  It isn’t the most educated who are likely to say this, Bob noted, but it is baby boomers, younger people & even lots of people who are educated.  It seemed to him that what’s going on here is that these people are saying I’ve been there, i.e. I’ve been exposed to rational thought (maybe not very deeply but at least to some extent in college), & I don’t believe it; so all I’m going to do is retreat into myself.  If that’s the case, it’s way beyond the few people who may be channeling or looking at angels every night.  It may be fairly pervasive.
     Nick commented that what Bob said may explain what happened in his philosophy of religion class last week.  He was trying to communicate to his class what he called the classical western understanding of God which was shared by Jews, Christians, Muslims, and the like.  A woman in the back who was looking very agitated raised her hand & said something like this:  “I just don’t think that we can think about God like that.  We can’t apply concepts to God.  God transcends.  I like to think of God as ‘cosmic energy.’"  When Nick pointed out that “cosmic energy” is a concept she was applying to God, she didn’t see this as dealing with the point.
     Dick Bernstein added that we had discussed the fact several times in our meetings that the real trouble with the Lilly Seminar is that we might all be those who have some foot in the past while something quite different is going on.  All over we see people who feel they can freely pick & choose what they believe; they take a symbol from here or there, create their own kinds of structures.  Our natural reaction is to say this is mush, there’s no integrity in it, and so forth, but there is certainly something happening.  Dick didn’t think this was simply temporary.  It’s some type of significant change which has certain external aspects.  The big word is "spirituality", but it can almost take on any content.  However, it’s a very meaningful word & we can’t simply mock it; but Dick acknowledged he didn’t quite know how to come to grips with it.   Dick also referred to Harold Bloom’s book The American Religion, which is very controversial & disliked by most religionists.  But Bernstein thought that Bloom did something very interesting.  He was trying to capture the mood that is emerging now in America that is so different from what is traditionally known as Christianity, but in the name of Christianity.

     Jim Turner said that the point that interested Frank Oakley most in the Seminar’s discussion was the one that interested him the most as well, and this is the question of Christian scholarship or what’s called Christian scholarship.  He started from a point that Frank made about the difference he came to perceive, & which Jim himself has come to perceive more sharply, between what might be loosely be called evangelicals on the one hand & Catholics on the other in the self-identification or explicitness with which they claim some affiliation between their scholarship & their religious faith.  Like Frank, as a Catholic Jim has never identified his scholarship as Christian or Catholic; it’s simply historical scholarship.  But at least in retrospect & sometimes even as he’s doing it he sees ways in which his being Catholic has influenced that scholarship in terms of the kinds of subjects he’s chosen to work on & the perspectives he’s taken on them.  He thinks people like Mark & George might have the same kinds of experiences with regard to their scholarship.  But they talk about those experiences in different ways.  They make more explicit & forthright the connection with their faith & call it faith based scholarship or Christian scholarship.  But Jim is not sure how much substantive difference there is in the doing of the scholarship as distinct from the theorizing of the doing of the scholarship.
      This links to a second puzzle he has had in listening to his colleagues, and that is the difference over the sense of marginalization or discrimination.  Jim said he has never felt in his academic career that he was marginalized or discriminated against because he is a Christian.  He has sometimes felt discriminated against because he was doing an unfashionable form of scholarship or a topic that was out of fashion, but never on the grounds of his Christianity.  In fact the one book he did that got the most positive attention, & probably will remain the one thing that people think highly of about his work, is a book that was about religion; and it was often praised precisely because a number of historians thought that it dragged religion & religious issues more into the center of historical scholarship in his field of intellectual history.  So Jim wondered about these differences of experience.  It may be a difference of field or discipline.  It may be difference in explicit identification, that is to say that if you explicitly claim that your scholarship has some kind of religious basis it may be something that academics are not willing to hear.  It may be that religious identification, unlike an ethnic or gender identification, is still a kind of self-identification that is not seen as appropriately linked to scholarship.

     Jim Turner suggested that a third point he wanted to make may be in the end the most substantive difference among those of us who think there could be some connection between one’s religious formation or tradition or faith & one’s scholarship, and he thought that might include everyone who was at the table.  It seems that there is a difference between people who will talk about a religious or Christian perspective on scholarship & people who will talk about a connection between scholarship & the intellectual traditions of Christianity or Judaism or whatever.  Jim doesn’t think of his own scholarship as perspectival in terms of his Christianity, but rather as substantively related in terms of intellectual traditions or something like that.
     Nick asked for clarification.  Why isn’t scholarship shaped by the Catholic tradition a perspective?  What worried Jim about the perspectival term, he explained, is the sense that this gives some epistemic gravity or privilege to his faith commitments which would be different for him as a scholar than for a non-Christian or a non-Catholic.  In other words, Jim’s concern is to keep his scholarship in the middle of the scholarly mainstream so to speak, not necessarily topically or methodologically, but rather to make it publicly available on the same basis for everyone.  He commented that the sort of work that Oakley talked about doing are topics that Frank may work on or be interested in because of his Catholic formation, but at least as far as Jim has read his work any historian of ideas would deal with this on the same basis.
     Dick Bernstein said he would have thought that there is a clear difference between Jim & Mark Noll on this attitude, but he’s not at all convinced that there is a clear difference in reading their works.  The end-product is not so different.  Jim clarified that that was what he was worrying about at the beginning.  He didn’t know whether the difference is a substantive difference or whether it’s a difference in theorizing; meta-history not history.
 Listening to Frank Oakley & Jim Turner, and having read almost everything Jim has written, Mark Noll thought this was a good way of putting things.  For himself, Mark said, the payoff in identifying self-consciously as a Christian scholar has a lot more to do with questions of spiritual identification & efforts at spiritual integrity than anything with regard to the market of scholarship.  In his case, because his own sense of Christianity is strongly influenced by the past, one of the benefits in identifying as a Christian scholar is to pursue the sort of agenda that Eleonore wants to pursue.  Mark feels marginalized as a Christian scholar not in the world of scholarship but in the world of Christianity.  That’s where the problem is.  The second payoff for him in identifying as a Christian scholar, Mark continued, is the sheer delight in doing what he does with some kind of sense that this is part of a vocation, that this is a divine calling.  Although he doesn’t do it very well at times & there may be all sorts of problems with it, when he gets to the library he has a consciousness of doing something important.   A third payoff has very much to do with the simultaneous belief in the power of original sin & the need for the work of Holy Spirit.  For Mark Christian scholarship means always having some awareness of the kind of trajectory that Frank outlined for us, i.e. an awareness of the abuse of Christian reasoning.  So to be Christian & triumphalist seems to him to be a simple contradiction in terms.  To be Christian & always aware of the possibility of needing to repent for intellectual attitudes as well as personal sins, always needing to listen to the other as the possible voice of God, these things are part & parcel of what it means to be a Christian.  So making an explicit identification as a Christian scholar means, in the best of all possible worlds, that he is able to draw on resources of Christianity that are both self-critical as well as affirmative in the external marketplace.  Other truly religious people, whether Christian or Muslim or Jewish, are going to do this in different ways.  But Mark would urge anyone who has a sincere religious conviction & a real interest in the life of the mind to try to bring them together & do it better than he & others have done.  He thinks it’s a great thing to try to do.
     To expand on what Mark had said, Rich Mouw took as an example scholars raised in a fundamentalist environment of the 1950s.  As Mark pointed out, they grew up being told that you shouldn’t think much because that was a dangerous thing to do.  The idea of the “Christian scholar” was completely off the map.  In the ‘60s in that anti-intellectual environment the one option that was open to them were those voices--rather lonely ones, some of them out of the Dutch Calvinist community, the Kuyperian tradition, people like Cornelius Van Til, etc.--who were saying yes, evangelicals should think & when they think they’ve got to think differently than anybody else; i.e. there’s a uniquely evangelical perspective on things because of your presuppositions.  It was an anti Enlightenment kind of line.  Presuppositionalism was the one thing on the margins of evangelicalism that allowed them to consider the possibility of becoming scholars.  At the same time in graduate school in the radical ‘60s there was a whole critique of the military-industrial complex & the ways in which the subtext of the claim to neutrality & rationality in the university was really serving that military-industrial complex.  So there was a massive quasi-popular critique of the presuppositions that had governed the whole thing.  And it was exciting all of a sudden to realize that the kinds of things they were hearing from within the evangelical community, e.g., that your presuppositions have a lot to say about all this, fit the cultural mood.  There was every reason in the world to say that we do have presuppositions & they do guide scholarship, and that became very exciting.  Now among Roman Catholics at this same time there was a breakdown of the Thomistic grip on Catholic scholarship.  Prior to this breakdown there were certain kinds of Thomists who sounded a lot like Van Til in some ways, that is in suggesting that there was a uniquely Catholic scholarship.  Then there were others who talked about faith & reason & that there was a common rationality.  As the post-Vatican II deterioration of the Thomistic consensus (with various options allowed within it for pursuing it) broke down, Catholics became suspicious of uniquely Catholic scholarship.  So there were 2 different social contexts at that time.  It seemed to Mouw that we’re still playing with the residue of that.  Many of us came into the academic world when it was exciting to admit that presuppositions guided scholarship & that Christians could have their own presuppositions guiding their scholarship at the same time that Catholics were saying we’ve got to join this larger world & reject the way in which this common mind has been a very oppressive thing.  We can’t ignore these social conditions, Mouw concluded.  So some of us would support a Christian perspective on things while others would suggest a kind of scholarship that’s connected to the Catholic tradition in some sense.  Rich thought this difference was very understandable in light of the history he just outlined.  He thought a lot of this should be dealt with autobiographically.

     George affirmed what both Mark & Rich had said.  He said he sees himself as simply asserting the fairly uncontroversial thesis that everybody has a perspective & that that shapes one’s scholarship; also, what seems to be more controversial, that Christians & other people who have a religious perspective should be self-consciously thinking about the relationship of their perspective to their scholarship.  That can be connected with or detached form a third thing, i.e. that you would actually identify that that’s what you’re doing.  At least the first two seemed to George to be fairly easily defended.  He considered getting people to be more conscious about what their perspective is & what the relationship is of their perspective to their scholarship as a worthwhile thing to do; i.e. getting people to think hard about it rather than just doing it willy-nilly.  He saw this as analogous to the consciousness-raising with respect to gender.  Gender was a factor in scholarship in the 1950s, but not until some time after that did many people begin thinking hard about what this.  And though sometimes there are abuses, on the whole that seemed to him to be a useful development.  George has never thought of himself as asserting epistemic privilege in the way that Oakley seemed to suggest drawing from his Postscript to The Soul of the American University (which he thinks more & more was probably a mistake, though that may reflect the state of American academic culture more than anything else).  People assumed he was saying something that he doesn’t think he said (if you look closely) & he certainly doesn’t think.  And what he says in The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship is what he has thought for quite a few years before that & doesn’t differ from what Nick, Rich or Mark think in general.
     So the epistemic privilege question gets off the main point that we all have perspectives.  The crucial question is whether we are going to think about them or not.  George thought that Jim’s book Without God, Without Creed is an identifiably Catholic book.  Jim interjected that most reviewers of the book thought that he was neo-Calvinist or an atheist or agnostic.  Jim Heft agreed with George saying that he read the book before he knew Jim & thought, “This guy’s a Catholic”.  In any case, George thought the book is identifiably Catholic & that it’s simply helpful to reflect on that & whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing.  Of course it has to be done in the context of a certain kind of detachment that one exercises in historical investigation & judgment.  You don’t want to be warping your judgments by your biases.  So you think about it as a way of taking these biases into account as well as questioning whether you’re misstating something because of your religious commitments.

     So much of this sounds like people simply saying be reflective about what you’re really doing, Bernstein said.  But, he asked Marsden, suppose we took a work of Jim Turner, David Hollinger, Mark Noll & Frank Oakley.  Reading these works we might have hypotheses about where they came from, but does that really enter very substantially into the evaluation of the work as a piece of scholarship.  George responded that it does for him.  Dick referred to the comment that Jim Turner’s book is identifiably Catholic.  But suppose it turned out that he was a Calvinist, Dick asked.  How would it change his view of the book?  George responded that then he would probably see things in it that he had not seen them before.  If he realized while reading a book in a graduate seminar that the author is a Marxist, then all of a sudden all sorts of things will fall into place.  He’d say, ah, I see, so that’s were he’s coming from.  So that identification of perspectives is always a major task he sees as a critical historian.  Where is the author coming from, why is he or she making the kinds of judgments that he or she makes & highlighting or problematizing certain issues?  This seemed to him to be a very important kind of thing to do so that biography is very much a part of viewing.  Alan Wolfe thought this was enormously unfair to someone who is self-consciously trying not to follow a particular tradition--not to be a Marxist or to re-think Marxism or something like that.  George would simply say he sese Marxism, so a, b, c follows, said Alan.  Not necessarily, George explained, because you could find that out as well, i.e. that this is a person who used to be a Marxist.  E.g. Eugene Genovese used to be a Marxist & you can see traces of this, & if you know that you see things about his work that you wouldn’t know otherwise.
     Stump said she thought it makes a difference that the people who were most engaged in this last part of the discussion were historians.  She affirmed that what George said is right about perspectives, but how much you feel the force of George’s point depends on the way in which that perspective has an influence on what you’re doing.  That’s going to vary from discipline to discipline, and even within a discipline it’s going to vary depending on what kind of work you’re doing in that discipline.  E.g., in the last year Eleonore has worked on Occam’s contribution to the late 13th-century fight over intuitive cognition, & she doesn’t think her Christianity came into it at all.  But she also wrote a paper about the distinction between orthodoxy & heresy, and that’s not a paper that an ordinary philosophy journal would publish at all in the first place; and in the second place, though it’s a philosophy paper & not a theology paper, i.e. it’s working philosophically using philosophical tools, one of the premises in the paper is that God would not allow his church to be massively confused on an issue crucial to salvation for well over a millennium only to let someone in the late 20th century finally for the first time get it straight.  That is not a premise that you could use in a paper in the secular discipline.  So again Eleonore said she thought that George is right, but how much you feel the force of his point depends upon what discipline you’re in & what you’re working on within that discipline. The extent to which perspectives shape what you do is a matter of what you do.
     Jim Turner briefly pointed out that he agreed with George that one should be aware of one’s presuppositions & perspectives in order to guard against them warping your scholarship.  He agreed with Alan, however, that it’s very important not to approach the work of others you read or yourself through the lens of those perspectives because it’s unfair to the individual & it’s unfair to the public character of scholarship.  George questioned why this is unfair.  Bernstein responded that it’s unfair because you make certain presumptions about what a Marxist must say.  As far as he’s concerned, the Marxists he’s known will vary as much as Calvinists, Catholics & others.  George agreed but said that he takes that factor into account.  Nonetheless he thinks that it’s fair to relate the person to the words of the person.  Bernstein said he would make an even stronger claim, namely that there is no such thing as knowledge if it not perspectival.  George agreed again.  But if that is the case, Dick continued, then all scholarship is going to be perspectival.  So the task is, said George, to find out in what way it’s perspectival.  Dick suggested that that would be as true in terms of reading a document that has something to do with religion as it would of a document in physics. Yes, said George, though as Eleonore pointed out, the perspective makes a lot less difference in physics & a lot less difference in certain quantifiable kinds of things that you do in economics or other disciplines.

     Oakley returned to the distinction Jim Turner had made that had started off the past segment of the conversation, i.e. the distinction between the actual doing & theorizing about it.  Frank thought this may actually open up a difference.  He referred to Mark Noll’s comment in evocation of the nobility of the calling of the Christian scholar.  This was very familiar to him from Catholic circles when he was young, & it was enormously appealing & invigorating.  Then Rich Mouw talked about the differences he saw in a certain period between what was going on in the Catholic scene & what was going on in the evangelical scene.
     Frank didn’t see eye to eye with Mouw’s description of what was happening in Catholic scholarship in the ‘60s.  Maybe because Catholics were so familiar with the evocation of the calling of a Christian scholar, rooted in pretty rich intellectual tradition, it was not something that they scratched away at so much or focused on so intently.  It was more taken for granted.  As Frank has been trying to get into the modern centuries (post-15th century) he senses from the 17th century onward a cleavage opening up between the paleo-scholastics & the neo-scholastics on the one hand & those of historically-informed sensibilities on the other.  It’s already clear in somebody like a bishop Bossuet, the great Gallican in the late 17th century who is deeply saturated with patristic knowledge & so on.  This is a different cast of mind all together.  And it seems to sharpen dramatically in the 19th century in the run in to the first Vatican Council.  Frank said he thinks this still goes on.  Within Catholic circles the subversive discipline is history.  He doesn’t think there’s any question about this.  That’s where the trouble lies, and that means that there’s a considerable suppression of the historical or the historian’s take on things.  It’s messy, it’s threatening, there’s bad stuff back there that has to be dealt with.  And it’s easier to manage it all if you’re of scholastic disposition.  This is actually articulated precisely in 19th century, usually by Italian scholastics, pre-Thomists.  This is an area that he thinks helps illuminate some of the developments within Catholic intellectual life later on.  So to be hearing the great evocations of the Christian scholar & then to see the breaks put on with depressing frequency in the name of the most noble what not is inducive of a certain skepticism, distance, hermeneutic of suspicion.  When you hear these great & noble statements there’s an undertow of doubt that goes with it.  But somewhere in there is this tension.  This historical-scholastic tension is fundamental, Frank was convinced.  He wished he knew the material better, but it has hit him again & again in the 19th century in particular.

     Phil Gleason went back to the difference between Catholics & evangelicals in self consciousness & "upfrontness".  He agreed very much with what Dick was saying earlier.  But he suspects that there may be something more about the strictly religious traditions.  Catholics do not have much experience in testifying, Phil explained.  It simply isn’t something Catholics do to get up & make professions of faith.  It just doesn’t come naturally as part of one’s religious temperament.  Also, in the U.S. Catholics were institutionally marginalized.  He mentioned Oakley’s comment about coming to the U.S. in the 1950s & finding Catholic institutions in a "ghetto", and that is what Catholics themselves were saying.  Catholic intellectuals were very critical of the ghetto spirit, the siege mentality & so on.  Part of that ghetto was that Catholic positions or identifying oneself as a Catholic or being from a Catholic institution & writing on something that had a clearly relevant resonance in religious matters was already discounted.  Everybody knew that this was going to be what the Catholic position is.  And as Frank pointed out, the Catholic position was hardly distinguishable in much of this historical work from apologetics.  So there was a party line, & there was what was understood to be the truth about the Reformation, about Philip II, etc.  But everyone in the larger academic arena automatically discounted this.  All of this didn’t encourage people to stand up and say "I’m a Catholic, by God, & when I think about it, my faith is shaping my scholarship."  To say it was in disrepute is a gross understatement.  Such a position was despised, rejected & held to be embarrassing by Catholics themselves.  It takes awhile to come back out of that.  As one example Gleason referred to Eric Cochrane, a fine historian whose presidential address as president of the Catholic Historical Association (probably in the early ‘70s) was called “Catholic Historiography.”  It was a kind of public whipping, said Phil.  Catholics had been in an apologetic mode far too long, and the thing to do was to be historians like all other historians.  That was the message.  This was not a climate that made it inviting for Catholics to be self-consciously proclaiming where they’re coming from, Phil pointed out.  He thought Rich Mouw’s comments were extremely suggestive about why it happens in the case of evangelicals.  Also, Phil surmised, since evangelicals represent a form of Protestantism they were never out of the picture in the same way that Catholic institutions were.  Catholic institutions were institutionally a parallel track.  Within the last 10-12 years he read a recommendation from a distinguished scholar for a very fine new graduate student essentially saying that this young person went to a number of Catholic institutions, but not to worry.  This was at a time when if that had been said about a black or a woman it would have raised the roof.  But the notion was still there that you cannot count on unbiased work by Catholics.
     Mouw added a footnote to Gleason’s comments.  He recently read a piece in America in which the author railed against evangelicals as promoting a “me & Jesus” sort of thing.  But if you look at Theresa of Lisieux & Mother Theresa, said Rich, they are about as "me & Jesus" as you can get.  Mother Theresa was about as vocal as any fundamentalist has ever been about her relationship to Jesus.  In a broad sense there’s a kind of Franciscan strain within Catholicism that emphasizes testifying.  The problem is that this hasn’t been wedded to the intellectual tradition.  Others noted that this is not true only of the Franciscans.

     Alan Wolfe returned to Wuthnow’s reminder of the state of religion in America.  Alan thought that this has a great deal to do a) with the issues we’ve been addressing, and b) with the Catholic Protestant distinction.  Being reminded about the popularity of a kind of vague New Age spiritualism helps explain the point that Mark Schwehn made yesterday about why we didn’t have the great divide between a kind of secular outlook & a religious outlook in this Seminar.  The reason of course is that while the secular & religious outlook would be antagonistic in the age of Voltaire, in the age of spiritualism we’re both old-fashioned fogies.  We’re both minority groups in the general culture, and in fact we’re united by far more than we’re divided by because we believe in the humanities or we believe in reason or rationality, however we interpret it.  So the rest of the world, the spiritualists, would look at this room & see no difference; whereas we in the room because we’re rooted in the 18th century Age of Enlightenment would exaggerate the differences.  Alan thought it was important to be reminded of why we’re more similar than we sometimes think.  But that in turn, he continued, raises the question of this argument that has essentially been going on between Protestants & Catholics, which he’s been delighted to hear.  This has to do with the question of how we respond to being a minority in the culture.  If both the secular humanists & the Christians in the academy are a minority in the general culture the response that both would tend to want to give is to call attention to their minority status & to lament the golden age saying we used to be much more in charge than we are now.  We’ve heard warnings against that frequently, and Alan considered those warnings extremely appropriate.  He thinks on both sides we need to resist that kind of language.  But if that’s the case, then at least what he is hearing is that the Catholic tradition is better equipped to resist that kind of language than is the Protestant tradition because there are certain aspects of the New Age culture that resonate more with the evangelical culture than with the Catholic culture:  testimonies, the emphasis on the individual, and so on.  So, while Jim Turner can say from a Catholic perspective that he doesn’t publicly manifest in a confessional sense what his religious beliefs are, Alan suggested it was more incumbent upon people in the Protestant tradition to meet that if they want to resist the general culture.  Alan explained why when he read Marsden’s book he felt that this was the wrong kind of language in the Postscript.  It was not because the language was “Christian” but because the language seemed to border on the Oprah Winfrey world where George Marsden or Warren Nord or anyone else can get up & say “here’s how I’ve been hurt by the culture” or “here’s how my scholarship has been abused”.
     Nancy found Alan’s comments very interesting about the way in which the older traditions have something to say at this moment.  She added that she thinks there are elements in the Catholic tradition that have a unique resonance that may make it possible for some bridges to be built as well.  One of the interesting points that Peter Berger made long ago about secularization is the way in which a Catholic universe is much more full of the Spirit, more full of an immanent presence than the Protestant universe.  She clarified that she was talking about a sacramental view of reality that has more resonance with New Age spirituality.  She made this connection, she explained, to make the larger point that we are in fact at a point of some very critical turns.  It’s not only a turning to the New Age but a turning to the recognition of a spiritual source of wisdom that is to be recognized alongside other sources of wisdom.  That’s a critical turn in the culture.  Another critical turn in the culture, Nancy thought, is recognizing the extent to which all of us are in our own selves multi-vocal because of the kind of mobility & mixing up of the culture that is present.  All of this sounds to many of us as insensible & anti-intellectual; it sounds to us as if people are merely subjective & are casually choosing & putting together what some have called a pastiche religion.  But if we take that stance, said Nancy, if we say that this is by definition anti-intellectual & to be dismissed, we risk losing the opportunity for bringing those sensibilities into fruitful dialogue & conversation with the communities that we represent.  Nancy thought that these are not necessarily anti-intellectual impulses but rather differently-intellectual impulses.  They come out of a paradigm shift.  And if we push these impulses into a kind of opposition or over againstness, we lose the opportunity to engage them, perhaps enrich them & in fact to be enriched by them.
     She said all that, she explained, in the context of wanting to come back to another point from earlier today.  All of what we’ve been talking about has to be nuanced by the institutional context in which education is taking place.  We would do well to recognize the extent to which education is taking place not just in thousands of different institutions that fit into one of Carnegie’s 10 categories but outside the walls of those institutions.   E.g., we need to think about the effects of electronic culture & internet exchange, about how the FBI is going to revise its curriculum for training agents on how they deal with millennial groups.  All this is to say that there is an enormous amount of education going on out there in the culture that in many ways does seek to draw on sources of traditional scholarship.  They are going to people who are recognized as experts, but they’re piecing together those experts with all sorts of other sources that some of us would not recognize as expert sources.  If we’re not prepared to engage the different sources of authority in the culture, the different institutions in which education is taking place & the turn that is taking place in our culture toward recognition of the spiritual as a source of authority; & if we’re not recognizing that we are all in a kind of multi-vocal context in putting together what it means to be religious, Nancy thought that the kinds of conversations we’ve had won’t necessarily get us very far in terms of where we go in the future.

     Jim Heft reiterated that we hadn’t dealt with a number of issues that Oakley raised, e.g., the enormous cleavage between administrators & faculty.  Jim pointed out that administrators are more in touch with parents, more in touch with the actual consequence of words & actions of professors, more in touch with overwrought trustees, some of whom should be listened to & others who should not.  It’s a very complex thing, but there’s a kind of larger sensibility.  Jim didn’t think this was unrelated to another issue we’ve been discussing, that is, the formation of students.  We’ve talked a great deal again about our own scholarship, but we haven’t talked so much about what the consequences are for the students.  While we’re talking about New Age or movements of spirituality within the culture, if we do really listen to the students (not necessarily agree with them but really listen carefully to them), it seemed to Jim that that greater awareness or consciousness would result.  We need to demonstrate a certain sensitivity to not just go up & teach but to ask what they’re learning & where they’re coming from.  Then the question that we’re all dealing with is what might religious traditions & the study of them have to say for people in these situations, and how do we really fructify that dialogue?

     Returning to Marsden’s comments, Wolterstorff said that George seemed to put it as a factual, descriptive issue, i.e. whether it is the case or not that perspectives of one kind or another shape scholarship.  George says to that, of course; it seems obvious, & why shouldn’t we recognize that?  As a reader of books & certainly as a historian you want to identify that.  That all seems right, Nick thought, but it also seemed to him that it is more an issue of legitimacy.  Though he doesn’t like the stereotype, Nick suggested that a defender of the Enlightenment picture of the academy is going to say, of course that happens, but we need to our best to eliminate the influence of personal perspectives & use the methodology of the discipline.  We always fail so there will always be this shaping of perspectives.  It seemed to Nick that the crucial issue is really an epistemological one.  And what Frank identified as one of the things that we broached but never really dealt with is epistemology.  What Hollinger has been putting on the table repeatedly, Nick explained, is an epistemological issue.  What are the criteria for justified claims in the academy?  Nick’s own view was that we need a far more sophisticated & subtle understanding of justification than most people have worked with.  So though Marsden’s use of the descriptive is okay, Nick doubts that the real issue lies there.  It is the legitimacy of particular perspectives that is in question.
     George said he saw the issue as more of a methodological issue: How do we deal with perspectives that we inevitably have & participate responsibly within the standards of our discipline?  As he said in Pasadena, he sees us connected with multiple communities.  As scholars one of the most important one is a discipline that has standards & demands, and there are certain standards of detachment that one needs to maintain in scholarship.  But that seems to him a methodological question of degree of detachment.  Do we all pretend that we’re neutral?  Teachers often seem to think that’s the best stance to have.  Just pretend we don’t have a perspective, & if the students figure it out, fine.  George was more inclined to say we should reveal the perspective to some extent.  But he thought the rigor of his scholarship is pretty much the same as that of people who pretend not to have any perspective.  This is where he sees a certain strategic question, not an epistemological one.  Nick rejoined that he thought the defender of the traditional understanding of the academy would say in response to that, sure, we all have perspectives, & the point of getting together in the academy is that we point them out to each other & we do our best, always failing, to eliminate them.

     Frank Turner noted that this was a very nice conversation among faculty, but it didn’t have anything to do with colleges & universities--the business of administration & money. Where the new age spirituality is going to influence is in terms of student life.  He referred to Frank Oakley’s report at our first Lilly Seminar meeting in Key Largo, where Frank spoke of how many student-led Bible study groups there were at Williams.  Lord knows how they’re reading or what they’re thinking, but they’re out there.  But with regard to changes in curricula & in faculty appointments, there’s a nexus between resources, administrators, in some cases trustees, & fund-raising.  New subjects will be introduced in different ways.  Sometimes departments or a chair will say we must move in a different direction, sometimes there will be donors, or it may be a research fund.  E.g., you start a research fund in new spirituality.  Most faculty will not object to the research fund, & some will even begin to change their scholarship because they want that summer grant.  (It’s an evil world, Frank noted.)  Or there may be trustees who say we really want this moved in a certain way, and the president & provost may resist for a time, but they will begin to move or there will be a new president & provost.  It’s going to be an incremental sort of thing.  The change that Phil was talking about from Catholic scholarship being equated with apologetics to being something else didn’t happen overnight.  It happened slowly.
     His point, Frank continued, was that there has been a real hole in our discussions in terms of administration.  He came here from a meeting at a liberal arts college where he’s a trustee & where they were working on a budget.  In no institution is instruction the largest part of the budget in any way, manner or form.  If you look at how much of it has to do with student life or with electronic technology that leads students right outside of the institution into the Internet & so forth, it’s all well for us to talk about our books, but what Oakley pointed to is not a minor issue.  God & the devil are in details.  And in terms of the shaping of religion & higher education, it’s not going to happen much in department meetings.  It’s going to happen in other ways that then will spill over into department meetings, curriculum and so forth.  It will come when people create funds for non-departmental instructors who offer one-time courses.  There’s far less review of those in all of our institutions.  This is part of the glory of higher education, but most of us as faculty just want to pretend that it doesn’t happen.  But it does, and it changes our lives & our students’ lives.  Along the same line Gene Lowe quickly added that we have talked about this seminar variously as religion & scholarship or religion & higher education.  He thought this was an illustration of the extent to which in some sense religion & higher education has not been our agenda, but religion & scholarship has.  And there is a fundamental difference there.

     Jim Heft noted a very striking comment of Charles Taylor that the real problem today is not epistemological but has to do with the moral & spiritual dimensions.  He gives the illustration that you can do an extended analysis of how we know what is good, but the real issue is whether we have the discipline to pursue the good.  It struck Jim that when we talk about issues of formation or about other ramifications of the structure of the college or the university we begin to touch on a number of these factors.  He thinks they’re vitally important, & in general they escape the purview of the faculty.  Dick Bernstein disagreed saying that some of us take seriously our mission as moral educators, but Frank Turner and others affirmed what Heft had said.  Jim also felt that when some people began to say that the real issue is epistemology, he almost felt like we were going back down a dark whole.  He knows it’s significant, but he doesn’t think that epistemology is the starting point for the discussion that will be most fruitful.
     Rich Mouw chimed in that administration is a big topic.  He wanted to make the point, however, that if he had to choose between sitting with this group & talking about religion & scholarship & sitting with a group of administrators to talk about religion & higher education, he would much prefer to be with this group.  The problem is that groups like this don’t talk about the kinds of issues Lowe was raising, & there’s nothing more deadly than sitting around with the people who do talk about those issues.  If only we could find a new conversation, Mouw thinks it’s desperately needed.

     Denis Donoghue returned to the earlier part of our discussion which eventually led to some of George’s interventions.  Increasingly Denis felt that the level at which these recognitions & discriminations were made was the wrong level, or rather these discriminations were entered at the wrong point.  There were several available points.  One was the notion of the personal perspective, which is fundamentally, he supposed, a biographical issue or a witnessing issue.  Another possible level which was mentioned is the resort to the methodology of the discipline, and again there was the emphasis on epistemology.  None of these seemed to Denis to be the right point at which the recognitions are made.  His own prejudice is to say, "By their words ye shall know them".  The real point of entry, Denis thought, is at the level of style.  For example, if he were reading Burke’s reflections on the revolution in France he would not be concerned with the point of trying to divine how much or to what extent Burke is somehow a leftover Irish Catholic or comes from leftover Irish Catholic sympathies.  He would be far more concerned with the ways in which he uses the crucial words; the way in which he uses the word “nature”, the way in which he uses the words “prejudice” or “heart” or “affections”.  That, Denis thought, would be far more intimately revealing of Burke than any general comments we might make, however well-informed, about his background & his family affiliations, and so on.  So, what bothered him a bit when we talk about Christian scholarship is that he thinks we’re entering the debate prematurely.  We’re settling down into what would eventually simply be yet other stereotypes.  E.g., he was a little disturbed when Jim Heft said that he recognized that Jim Turner was a Catholic upon reading his book before he had ever met him at all.  That seemed to Denis to be the wrong kind of recognition; it seemed to him to be neither here nor there.  And to the extent to which Heft or such a reader might settle down upon the security of that recognition it would seem to Denis an example of bad reading or premature reading.  He would want to make these distinctions, if at all, at the level of vocabulary, at the level of style & syntax rather than at the vocabulary of labeling someone an Episcopalian or a Catholic or an atheist or an agnostic.
     Mark Schwehn continued with one of Denis’s reflections as a way of pointing out that they exemplified one of Oakley’s points.  Mark noted that some of the remarks made earlier today invited us to see that a clearcut distinction between a context of discovery & a context of justification is much too over simplified.  Indeed if we draw lines through disciplines, not just between them, we find much richer difficulties out there in terms of what intersubjective testability looks like.  In addition to the context of discovery & the context of appraisal or justification, we had the context of understanding.  What kinds of things need to be brought to bear simply to understand what Jim Turner wrote, never mind trying to appraise it?  And certain literary critics would want us to see that it’s difficult even to draw a sharp line between identifying what kind of thing something is & whether it has merit or worth or value.  What he was suggesting, Mark explained, is that a lot of these interventions & exchanges simply go to vindicate Frank’s point that we didn’t get as far down the line as we should have in really thinking about the differences within & among disciplines on the whole matter of intersubjective testability & how useful it is beyond the kind of framework in which Hollinger was casting the example.

     In closing Frank Oakley returned to the epistemological issue.  He said it still grips him a bit.  He suspected that this is what will come to bear in teasing apart different subjects or disciplines or sub-disciplines operating in terms of rather different forms of warranting.  For Frank the hard thing is finding the precise line between a statement that you could say is a warranted theological statement & a statement you could say is a warranted historical statement.  He doesn’t find that easy, he acknowledged, and he has awful intuitions of fallibility when he takes a hard line saying “this isn’t history”.  It’s not easy, & it presumably cuts across, informs & stirs up many of our worries, disagreements & wrangles about this.  He acknowledged that this was not very helpful but he’d already admitted that in this whole area he’s ended up more puzzled at the end than at the beginning.  That’s not necessarily an insulting thing to say to so distinguished & eloquent a group of people, Frank concluded.  It presumably suggests that he has listened a bit.

     Nick Wolterstorff ended our final session with the comment that it had been an extraordinarily rich, vivid three years of discussion & extending gratitude & farewells to all.

MAJOR RECURRING THEMES
 

1. “Failure of nerve.”  First used by Dick Bernstein, this phrase was repeated by others to describe a hesitancy on the part of church-related colleges & universities to affirm their religious identity or mission.  Phil Gleason attributed this failure of nerve to their efforts to make “the big time” & consequent need to act the way the “big time” research universities do.  Frank Turner described religious traditions as wanting a “free lunch”, i.e. acceptance of their educational insitutions by the broader academic culture while at the same time opposing the larger secular culture in some way.  Peter Steinfels, however, wondered whether the price of trying to make “the big time” was actually self defeating for many religiously-based schools since it undermined some of their basic goals.  Frank Oakley expressed uneasiness about the connotations of the phrase “failure of nerve.”

2. Old-fashioned religion vs. New Age & other forms of modern“spirituality”.  There was substantial agreement among seminar members that most of the people present & most of our consideration of “religion” in the Lilly Seminar represented an old-fashioned notion of religion which had very little to do with the religious trends in our culture as a whole.  There was some discussion of what the significance of this new spirituality might be for issues of higher education.  While a number of participants agreed with Wuthnow that a paradigm shift was taking place, most expressed uncertainty about its implications or possible ways of responding to this development.

3. Recognition of new alliances & different lines of divisions.  Mark Schwehn first articulated this idea, and others in the group expressed agreement.  When it came to a certain kind of concern about higher education, the cleavages or lines of division in the group were not between so-called “secularists” & so called religious people, as might have been expected at the start of the Seminar.  In light of this recognition of commonalities, Wolfe made the plea for the religious side to take a more positive, upbeat attitude toward “secular”colleagues with whom they agree on many issues concerning the university.

4. Exaggeration of the persecution or victimization motif.  Several people voiced a concern about the assumption that Christian scholars were victimized.  Some (Wolterstorff, Wuthnow & Hellwig) felt that Christian academics had considerable freedom to teach & do research as they chose.  Others (Elshtain, Stump, F. Turner) suggested that the issue was not outright persecution but rather marginalization or trivialization of religious (as well as other) approaches within some disciplines.  Certain texts or approaches were simply not taken seriously or were “read out” of the discipline in graduate training.

5. The need for strong traditions & understanding of traditions if we want to have real pluralism.  This theme, frequently raised by Eleonore over the course of the past 3 years, was taken up by a number of other participants at this meeting.  Bernstein expressed concern that traditions (whether racial, ethnic or religious) were being trivialized by gimmicks & cursory treatment (e.g., 3 or 4-week segments in a syllabus).  Others echoed Stump’s concern that people simply did not know their own traditions & so had very little to be pluralistic about.

6. Catholic-evangelical divide regarding “Christian scholarship”.  A number of participants observed a general distinction between Catholics & evangelicals on this issue.  Evangelicals tend to be much more forthright about identifying their scholarship as “Christian” while Catholics might more readily associate their work with Catholic intellectual traditions.  Various seminar members offered insights into what lies behind these differences (Mouw, Gleason, Oakley).  Jim Turner wondered whether the difference between the 2 groups was less in the doing of the scholarship than in the theorizing about it.

7. Failure to deal with issues of administration & the broader context of higher education.  From the opening statements of Mouw & Lowe to Oakley’s concluding presentation, there was a widely-felt sense of neglect of this area over the course of the Seminar.  We were reminded by Frank Turner among others that the university is much more than faculty & students, and those other dimensions must be reckoned with in any serious consideration of issues like student formation, faculty hiring & promotion, & curriculum development.

      Respectfully submitted,
        Andrea Sterk
        February, 2000