CHESTERTON HOUSE:

A CENTER FOR CHRISTIAN STUDIES

"daring to discuss the important and the amusing"

NEWSLETTER #34

FALL 2009

Time was when goodness, beauty, and truth held together. Back in the fourth century, Augustine held that the Good, Beautiful, and True are united as one because they are established in the reality of the one, triune God. At Chesterton House, that is our view as well.

The Christian conviction that all truth is God's truth characterized much of higher education from the Middle Ages up through the founding of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Harvard's original motto, for example, was "Veritas in Christi Gloriam" (Truth for the glory of Christ). In the middle of the 19th century, however, educational reformers attempted to ground moral and religious knowledge in science rather than revelation (see Julie Reuben's The Making of the Modern University). Harvard changed its motto to "Veritas," and new research universities such as Cornell were founded on the German model that emphasized human reason over against revelation.

In many respects, the modern university has been an extraordinary success. Scientific research in particular has generated both new knowledge and a significant degree of consensus across worldviews. By the 1920s, however, the project of grounding moral and religious knowledge in science had failed. As a result, scientists became content to pursue more specialized research, and the big questions of life were left to the humanities, thereby institutionalizing the fact/value dichotomy espoused by Enlightenment philosophers such as Hume. Simply put, truth and beauty were rent asunder by secularization.

Faith did not fare well amidst these changes. Conservative Protestants voted with their feet and largely withdrew from American universities to start their own Bible colleges. Meanwhile, back on the quad, literary theorists began critiquing the cult of objectivity in science, asserting that truth was relative to one's story or narrative. Hence the era of diversity and multiculturalism, with its emphasis on race, class, and gender. Religious knowledge claims that aspired to objectivity and universality were largely jettisoned from respectable academic society. In less than a century, the suggestion that God was dead went from the radical writings of Nietzsche (1882) to the cover of Time Magazine (1966).

God, however, has a habit of coming back from the dead, and sociologists are now talking about the "de-secularization" of society. In 1999, Peter Berger published a little book entitled The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. "The world today is as furiously religious as it ever was," Berger wrote. The secularization thesis--the idea that modernization inevitably leads to the withering away of religious faith--"is essentially mistaken." Rodney Stark published an article the same year entitled "Secularization, R.I.P."

Although nobody seemed to care about these observations at the time, that changed quickly on 9/11. Most obviously, religion has "returned" to politics and diplomacy. "Like many other foreign policy professionals," former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright wrote a few years ago, "I have had to adjust the lens through which I view the world." "God is winning in global politics," concludes an article in Foreign Policy magazine. "And modernization, democratization and globalization have only made him stronger." (See also "Why God is Winning" and "Kicking the Secularist Habit".) Even the New Atheism may be understood as a reaction to the pesky persistence of faith in the modern world.

Although universities are behind the curve--highly educated Westerners remain a highly secularized subculture--change is in the air on college campuses as well. A UCLA study recently found that increasing numbers of students are practicing both traditional forms of religion and newer, alternative forms of spirituality. According to Elaine Howard Ecklund, young faculty members in the sciences are more religious than their older colleagues, and more religious than those colleagues were when they were young. Although "the secularization of the university remains a dominant storyline," write sociologist John Schmalzbauer and coauthor Kathleen Mahoney, "strong evidence indicates a new story needs to be told about religion in the academy." Timothy Shaw, coauthor of the above-mentioned Foreign Policy article, refers to this story as "the desecularization of the academy."

The desecularization of the academy entails much more than a mere uptick in student religiosity; it in fact points toward "a new settlement between faith and knowledge." "American universities," says Alan Wolfe, yet another sociologist of religion, "increasingly are finding that a century-old truce between the forces of faith and the demands of knowledge is no longer holding." Contrary to popular opinion, he adds, faith traditions are not a threat to liberal discourse. They are rather resources needed to sustain true dialogue and diversity. In her recent review of Christian Smith's Souls in Transition, Naomi Schaefer Riley similarly observes that many professors find religious students refreshing because they "have been made to think seriously and speak publicly about Big Questions from a young age."

Few people have considered these developments more thoroughly than historian John Sommerville who, in The Decline of the Secular University, argued that "the secular university is increasingly marginal to American society and this is a result of its secularism." Although I once lamented that Sommerville didn't say how administrators should respond to these observations, his recent Chronicle of Higher Education piece addresses this very question. Administrators, he says, don't need to do much of anything, other than to "ensure that the rules of debate, of tenure, of recruitment, and of promotion are not tainted by an antireligious agenda. The burden is not on the universities to bring religion into the picture; it is on religious spokespersons to show where such ideas are relevant." What should "religious spokespersons" do? That is the topic of Sommerville's recent lecture "How Can We Change the University?"

These are important questions not just for persons of faith, but for everyone. And they are the questions we'll be asking at our next roundtable, when we host historian and Houghton College president Shirley Mullen. As Mullen asks in her abstract: "To what extent do current discussions about spirituality and values reflect a reaction to the modern Western separation of 'knowledge' from the categories of faith and values? To what extent are these discussions welcome to those who long for a return to the classical ideal of the academy as home to all Truth, Beauty and Goodness?"

Augustine's view, and our view, is that the unity of Goodness, Beauty, and Truth is aided by faith in that other Trinity--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Augustine described his massive work on the Trinity in its opening sentence as "written in order to guard against the sophistries of those who disdain to begin with faith, and are deceived by a crude and perverse love of reason." Perhaps the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord after all.

Help us at Chesterton House to keep the conversation going. Please pray for us, and prayerfully consider giving to sustain the work that we are doing. In addition to upcoming events and other announcements, please don't miss the announcement below about the opportunity for your giving to be multiplied by a new matching gift!

Karl E. Johnson

Director

MATCHING GRANT

As most of you know, we have been running a deficit for two years now, a situation that is not sustainable. We are very pleased to announce another very generous matching gift opportunity made possible by one of our supporters who would like to encourage giving that will bring us back into the black. For the six month period from October 1, 2009 to March 31, 2010, the following gifts will be matched one-to-one up to a total of $25,000: 1) all gifts from new donors; 2) all gifts from donors who have not given since the beginning of last fiscal year (April 1, 2008); and 3) new levels of giving by current donors above and beyond what was given last fiscal year--e.g., if a donor gave $500 last year, any amount over $500 will be matched. Please see our three easy ways to give.

BOB FAY TO SPEAK IN BOSTON

Bob Fay, professor emeritus of chemistry and chemical biology at Cornell and a founding board member of Chesterton House, will speak in Boston on Friday evening, December 4th. The talk is sponsored by Park Street Church, and entitled "Science and Religion: Conflict or Complement?" Bob is an outstanding scientist who is also very well read in the history of science. This lecture will be well worth hearing, and I encourage all those in the Boston area to attend. Some Cornell alumni may be taking the occasion for a little Boston-area alumni get together over the weekend, so do let us know if you're interested in joining us. Bob's article by the same title can be found here. See also the Park Street Church website for more details.

MORE & MORE AUDIO

I am always impressed that people far and wide seem to be aware of Chesterton House. They know us, in turns out, by our audio. Little did we know when we first flipped a mic on for theologian and Chesterton House advisory board member D.A. Carson back in 2002 that online audio would become such a phenomenon. At last count, the number of audio lectures downloaded from our website was north of 250,000, including over 25,000 downloads of Carson's wonderful lectures on the book of John! I hear from people literally all over the world who appreciate these resources--and the fact that we offer them for free (did I mention donations are welcome?) Check out our most recent audio lectures by Dr. Lou Markos on G.K. Chesterton, and Dick Keyes (also a Chesterton House advisory board member) on sentimentality and cynicism, which is the topic of his recent book, Seeing Through Cynicism.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Wednesday, November 4, 12:15pm

"Evangelical Does Not Equal Republican or Democrat"

Lisa Sharon Harper, New York Faith & Justice

Sage Chapel

Saturday, November 7, 7:00pm

"The New Quest for Meaning: Values and Spirituality in the 21st Academy"

Dr. Shirley Mullen, President, Houghton College

Graduate Christian Fellowship Roundtable

Lewis Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall

Friday, December 4, 7:30pm

"Science and Religion: Conflict or Complement?"