Book Note: God's Century

A forthcoming book titled God's Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics is due out this month. A must read by the sounds of it at the Mirror of Justice blog.

On CAUT and Academic Freedom

As you may know, I've been busy these past few weeks - along with a growing number of Canadian faculty - fending off the Canadian Association of University Teachers or CAUT. Our efforts are catalogued here, in a statement of petition requesting CAUT to cease and desist in its investigations and castigations of Christian colleges and universities which require faith statements as a condition of employment.

As I have mentioned before here, the CAUT investigation into Canadian Mennonite University concluded with a report that recommends, among other things, that institutions which "do protect academic freedom" develop policies in regards to those institions which "don't." Which of course means that CAUT wants to drive a wedge between public universities (and their supposedly ideology-free understanding of academic feedom) and private universities which have faith statements that are deemed so dangerous to academic freedom. The implications of such a wedge abound.

With this recommendation and other charges in the air, I daresay CAUT has already met its objective of tarnishing the reputation of Christian colleges and universities among those who may not have even known about these institutions' existence. (Though, I note that in the press, it has also received some very negative publicity, including from its own "members.")

But the comedown of the other day is a bit mealy-mouthed. On Wednesday, CAUT told the National Post that it will stop its practice of establishing formal investigations into institutions which require faith statements.

This is a meaningless gesture for two reasons: 1) CAUT will continue to develop its list of institutions that require a faith statement with the obvious intent of besmirching reputations. It is a contemporary version of the Index of Forbidden Books (a la Inquisition). 2) It is now clear, since Redeemer University College announced recently that they will not cooperate with any CAUT formal investigation, that the launching of formal investigations would go nowhere anyway. Another factor in all this is: CAUT may not have any other institutions to complain about - for the moment. We don't know.

The point is, of course: the Christian academies with no CAUT members are none of CAUT's business. If an institution is Christian and seeks to foster that religious identity through the sharing of a common statement of faith, than, ipso facto, in a free country, it is free to do so. And that institution should not be branded as acting contrary to the fostering of liberty for doing so. Signatures appended to faith statements are voluntary acts.

I personally do not think that faith statements are the best instrument for fostering a Christian identity in an academic setting. But, again, the point is: what do I know? Perhaps an evagelical or Mennonite (Or dare I say it, Catholic) college president and Board of Governors knows better. It's a prudential judgment, not properly subject to second guessing from national bodies that obviously do not share the aims of said institution.

And, a final point for now: one of the impressive aspects to this exercise of drawing up a statement of petition against CAUT's actions has been receiving and acknowledging the many (hundreds) of emails from faculty with PhD's conferred at secular institutions (some among them are from the world's leading universities) who now work at Canadian Christian colleges and institutions.  There are scholarly credentials worth protecting from the likes of CAUT.

And, as Alasdair McIntyre has reportedly argued in a lecture in Oxford in 2009 (during the Q&A perhaps) but published in New Blackfriars, it is probably the case in North America that academic freedom thrives to a significantly greater degree in Christian colleges and universities than it does in public universities. And CAUT and all of us who work in Canadian universities should think about that - just the very scandalous possibility!
 

The Deactivated Bible

Adam Kotsko has a rather brilliant yet brief take on our problem with the contemporary guild known as biblical studies. Here is a snippet from one of Adam's responses to the comments after the blog entry:

The practical effect of “disqualifying” all historical/traditional uses of the Bible does, however, seem to me to be following a basically “Protestant” impulse of seeking to assess theological claims based on their groundedness in scripture — but it then radicalizes this principle by essentially ruling that no theological claims whatsoever can be legitimately grounded in scripture.
The notion that a basically Protestant view would be lurking in the background shouldn’t be surprising, given that critical biblical studies was for so long an exclusively Protestant endeavor.

Kant and the Deactivated Bible: A Must Read....

Snippets: Latest Reading

1. Insightful critique of Stanley Fish and the "ideal" of the universities' Enlightenment quest for knowledge.
2.Chris Wilson, at Slate, on "Jesus of Wikipedia" OR why you should never rely on wikipedia. Note the verb I use here: 'rely'.
3. Marilynne Robinson on theology, culture and writing.

This is not just a British crisis

Grade inflation ...  it's everywhere.

Pre-Christmas Reading

Here are some things I've been looking at recently:

1) David Brooks intuits communitarianism in a Jewish paradigm - very good - here
2) One and a half cheers for "Two Cheers for Nature" an article by David Barash - here (He makes a number of category mistakes himself; for instance by confusing the Catholic natural law view as equivealent to the nature is good claim...)
3) A mistitled but nonetheless decently argued piece about Downs Syndrome persons - here
4) Regarding gnosticism: is it the same thing under different historical forms? A review of the multi-volume series of works by Cyril O'Regan broaches the question - here
5) John Milbank: on the unjustly maligned Big Society, statism, toryism, distributism, welfare, charity, socialism, third ways, etc. etc. - broad strokes - in the inimitable Milbank style - here.

Enjoy. Merry Christmas

Academic Freedom Turns to Religious Persecution

It's quite the op-ed title (by Peter Stockland of the Cardus Centre, printed in the Vancouver Sun, copied here) but it's pretty accurate insofar as the campaign launched by the Canadian Association of University Teachers is concerned. This organization is a faculty union that is known for its griping and whinging more than anything else.

In recent months, it has moved against small religiously affiliated colleges in Canada, targeting those which attach a 'faith test' as a condition of employment for faculty members. The 'faith tests' spoken about in its campign are likely diverse, but the one that got attention last year if memory serves me correctly was the requirement by Trinity Western University in B.C., where faculty are required to sign some sort of creedal statement upon (or shortly after) hiring.

Well, the latest target is the Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg, as detailed here in this article from the CAUT house organ. There is also a link from this article to the actual report conducted by two faculty on behalf of CAUT into the situation of academic freedom at CMU. From that report, on can glean that the CMU actually wants to retain or (hold your breath) strengthen its Christian identity as an educational institution. Just imagine, those uppity Mennonites actually succeeding in this diabolical plot.

Well, you can see for yourself, but the bottom line is that CAUT is pushing a militant secularism on academia, particularly by calling into question (discussed in the article) agreements between colleges like CMU and larger secular universities. You see where this is heading, don't you...

From the article:

The report also recommended that CAUT formulate a policy statement to deal with protecting academic freedom for instances where an institution that does guarantee academic freedom has, or plans to have, joint academic programs or other academic relations with an institution that does not. 

 So, in other words, CAUT wants to deliberately isolate Christian colleges, and slowly squeeze them out, deny those insitutions the accreditation and affiliation credentials that those colleges need to promote their own programmes for the many thousands of students who attend those colleges and who then want to move on to other programmes elsewhere later with their college degree in hand. (Maybe CAUT sees Christian colleges attracting all these good students and enviously wants to find a way to get them into the universities instead, or is that tooooo machiavellian. I digress..)

Will those college degrees be recognized under conditions in which universities are relinquishing association with those colleges - on the limp excuse of protecting academic freedom? It is now a question.

Will universities be bullied by CAUT into shoving these colleges aside? Odds are, yes, sadly, in some cases.

Now, I don't think faith statements are a good way to promote the Christian identity of an educational institution. But, I do think that institutions who believe otherwise should be free to do so without being bullied into the sidelines by a bunch of elitist secularist faculty bureaucrats who think they know better.
 
Insidious, that's what this CAUT campiagn is. It should be stopped.

As I said, Peter Stockland of the Cardus Centre has put the issue into perspective here. Let's see where this goes.

Universities and Liberal Education

Universities really are coming up for more discussion in the media for all sorts of reasons, not so much in Canada, but especially in the U.K. because of governement funding cutbacks which will have an impact that will affect most members of a generation.

The recent decision by SUNY Albany to chop some of its humanities programmes, notably in the languages, has also made waves. It strikes many as the latest alarm bell over what is wrong in both universities that want to ape corporations and in a culture that strives for utility and mammon over the good life, including the good of intellectual fulfilment.

But there has yet to take place a more wide-ranging discussion as to what universities are for. This is in fact the issue that needs to be addressed. And as part of that discussion, albeit in the context of a faculty colloquium on religious pluralism and diversity, held at the Université de Montréal, I presented a paper, the abstract of which appears below...

But also, and in that very light, I also noticed a recent post by James K.Smith, philosopher and emergent church-er from Calvin College, who has a post on Secular or Secularist Liberal Arts education here. 

This post from Smith is a very valuable contribution to the theme of what a liberal arts education in a post-secularist context would look like. In other words, how does a liberal arts college provide a secular education without being secular-ist? But, Smith has smelled a rat in this cauldron of otherwise fresh thinking and he summarizes it thus:

"while I would applaud the move to this sort of "secular" liberal arts education, such a model still refuses to think about education as formation.... even the new "secular" liberal arts college will remain committed to a persistent aspect of liberal Enlightenment orthodoxy: an allergy to paideia, to the thick task of formation that constitutes inculcation in a tradition..."

  Ah-ha! Yes, because if the students are not clients, after all, then they are persons who by their very presence seek to be formed in some intellectual richness - that will be for them good, true and beautiful. 

Well, I have a proposal for Smith that might suit his interests here: how about programmes and departments in theology that complement Religious Studies departments, since Theology is a humanities discipline par excellence, and Religious Studies nowadays is deeply influenced by the heuristics of the sociology of religion. Now admittedly, this is an idea that would not survive the legal jurisprudence in American contexts, because American laws prohibit public money from reaching theology programmes in any publicly funded college or university. 

But for all the rest, it would be another nail in the coffin of secularism and a hand up to the beleaguered liberal arts tradition in colleges and universities because theology would allow colleges to handle the God question in a much more open and conceptually clear way than is the case in many Religious Studies programmes.

So anyway, here's that proposal - that I mentioned off the top of this post:

 Curricular Heresy: God and the University Amidst the Triumph of Reason

Public policy debates involving religion in the public sphere have thus far ignored the critical role religion and especially theology play in the academy and society, beyond being sources of commentary and analysis. This paper draws on an informal survey of theology and religious studies in Canada, with some comparative remarks regarding the U.S.A.,Germany, Scandinavia and the U.K., in order to introduce the claim that the retention of theological programmes in universities is not merely a remnant of historic affiliations with Christian churches. Rather, theological curricula consist of being a proactive, dissenting heresy to the consensus triumph of empirical reason with benefits for science and the liberal arts. With reference to MacIntyre and in nuanced sympathy with Gavin D’Costa’s diagnosis of theology's Babylonian captivity in public universities, this paper advocates theological education as a counterpoint to hardening empiricist orthodoxies in the university and society.     

A Few Good Articles

1) Starting With One about Alastair MacIntyre in Prospect magazine
2) Continuing with a Patrick Deneen article on the Humanities, Science and the Universities.
3) And a good rendition of some of the themes present in Charles Taylor's A Secular Age by the man himself

Here yea: Secularism versus Demography

Who Will Win? Not the secularists, according to recent research as described in this fascinating thinkpiece...

Milbank, Hauerwas and Bretherington

All together via mp3 podcast, from London, here. HT: FT!

The Media on the Pope

It never ends.

Mollie does Pope who does Spain. c/o getreligion

Spotty Reading in a busy term

My blogging has slowed to a crawl, due to teaching, administration and the rest of it...

But, here are some things I've spotted lately - of possible interest:

1. Conservatives should fear climate change.

2. William Carroll, who has taught at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, comments on Stephen Hawking's rambling speculations from several weeks ago - on creation and Big Bang cosmology, and the confusion that ensued.

3. Why Schleiermacher and Karl Barth overlap a wee bit more than you would have imagined. "On Theology as the Science of the Divine Word" from Matthew Bruce with a response by Matthias Gockel. The focus is on method, a topic which is tied tightly to the name of Schleiermacher and resisted by Barth, who held that methodological questions are a distraction from proper theologizing about God.

On Wendell Berry

Here - a perspective by Russell A. Fox on one of the great environmentalists of our time. Berry is indispensable; I used one of his shorter books - Life is A Miracle once in a course. The book is essentially a response to Edward Wilson's Consilience, an empiricist attempt to claim that ethics is a branch of human biology. The students (at least those who did the reading) really caught on to the radically different way of being an environmentalist that Berry promotes.

Cross and Context: Douglas Hall

Just noticed this piece from several weeks ago in Christian Century from Douglas John Hall, one of Canada's premiere Protestant theologians, now retired from McGill University. Nothing controversial from this doyen of liberal protestantism, yet there is a nod to theology as a counter-cultural force. Instance this:

What then is the mission of a church that can no longer count on its favored status in Western civilization to ensure its meaning and its continued existence?

I believed that the very first responsibility of Christian communities in such a situation was a) to begin at last to recognize the radical incompatibility of Christian establishment with the biblical and best traditional conceptions of the Christian movement, and b) to explore the possibilities of Christian witness and service from a position outside or on the edge of the dominant culture.

I remember a conversation early in the 1970s in which a small group of clergy in the city where I lived were discussing the question, "On the pattern of Revelation chapters 2 and 3, what do you think ought to be the 'message of the Spirit' to the churches of this city?" I found myself answering this question almost without knowing what I said: "The Spirit writes to the churches of North America: Disestablish yourselves!"

To which one might heartily agree, except that one is also hard pressed nowadays to name a church or church figures whom we might call established! Of course, there are vestiges of the old order, such as official chaplains to sundry offices of state carrying out various public functions. Then again, as in Quebec curently, efforts are fully under way to rid hospitals of their official, denominationally affiliated chaplains. Now there's disestablishement - with a vengeance.