Out of the closet & into the classroom, the Yard, & the dining halls: notes on religion at Harvard. (Featured Topic).

* A FEW YEARS AGO a student in my course on the English Bible began turning up at lecture wearing a yarmulke. He asked me to be his tutor in English literature the following year, partly, as he said, because he knew that I took religion seriously. He explained that he came from a non-observant Jewish family, but that after studying the Bible, he began going to Hillel and taking instructions from an Orthodox rabbi. His parents, especially his mother, thought he had lost his mind. Nonetheless, he cheerfully persisted in his religious search, and when I invited him to a faculty dinner in the Adams House dining hall, he brought his own kosher food.

* When Buddhist students asked for the use of a common room once a week when I was Master of Adams House, I gladly signed over the room to them and provided meditation cushions. Any Master would have done the same. The sessions were open to all. One of the regulars was a Jewish professor of philosophy.

* When I was invited to dinner at their House (dormitory) dining hall last year, a young student couple blessed themselves and said grace before the meal at a table crowded with other students who were already eating and talking. The same students and their friends had attended prayer services in memory of Dorothy Day and Archbishop Romero in the Harvard Yard on the anniversaries of their deaths.

* The largest Protestant groups on campus, Christian Impact and Christian Fellowship, sponsor Jesus Week every year, with posters, meetings, discussion panels, and large ecumenical prayer sessions in the Science Center. One of my Catholic students whom I see at mass regularly on Sundays attends Bible study with his Protestant friends from these groups and goes to retreats organized by them once or twice a year.

None of these events is especially earthshaking in itself, but at Harvard they would have been quite rare twenty-five years ago. Today, they are commonplace. Whereas in the not-too-distant past, religion was regarded as a private matter not to be displayed in public (and, in many cases, not even to be acknowledged), it is now very much out in the open. There was a time when the old formalities--baccalaureate service, a prayer at commencement, morning chapel--maintained a dignified, reserved, and modest distance from the rough and tumble intellectual world of the laboratory, the classroom, and the noisy dining halls. To be unobtrusively religious once a year or on Sundays was okay (though a little pathetic), but to be zealous, searching, or--God forbid--orthodox anything, was to risk being regarded as odd and anti-intellectual.

The study of religion

Though Harvard has a divinity school with a long and distinguished history, in the twentieth century the College did not have a major open to undergraduates until the 1970s when a department of religious studies was created. Gradually and steadily, interest in the field grew, but beyond what it could give to specialists, the department provided courses open to students at large. By the 1980s and '90s, Harvey Cox's lecture course on Jesus, Diana Eck's on Hinduism, and James Kugel's Hebrew Bible became some of the largest and most popular classes at the college, attended as electives by students in the hundreds.

For many years the Harvard English department had a vexed relationship with what it called "The Bible Requirement." Most colleagues thought that students of English and American literature ought to be familiar with the Bible because it figures so prominently in what we study. In the good years, we were lucky enough to have a learned medievalist and observant Jew offer the class. But when the professor was on leave, we simply added a "Bible Question" to the general exam and hoped that students would be scared enough to read some scripture on their own. After the medievalist's retirement, I agreed to teach the class with a colleague from the divinity school. Since my field is the novel, I did this with some trepidation. But the experience has been so satisfying that I have continued every other year for the past fifteen years.

Teaching the Bible

The pleasure in teaching this course can be explained in many ways. Since it is no longer a requirement, students take the class because they want to. Many are tired of not knowing who Absalom was, what really happened to Jonah, or who said, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Nearly all the English majors have read Paradise Lost, but not Genesis. They are astonished at the economy of the story of Adam and Eve and by the fact that the word "fall" never occurs.

Most of the students have never read more than a few patches of scripture, and many have read none at all. More and more of them are from Hindu, Moslem, and Buddhist backgrounds, but even the nominal Christians and Jews--with a few exceptions--are ignorant of all but the broadest outlines. In section discussions, teaching fellows consistently witness a kind of surprised intellectual awakening--a conversion, not necessarily to belief, but to a discovery of the literary sophistication, ethical complexity, and religious power of the texts. Christian students often gain a new appreciation of the Hebrew Bible. Jewish students from secular families read their own ancient history for the first time and recognize, to their astonishment, how Jewish Jesus was. And those from neither background come to the book with an open-mindedness, curiosity, and lack of self-consciousness that enables them to ask the most basic (and often the most important) questions.

When I visit sections, I love listening in as students quote chapter and verse as they debate interpretations of passages like a room full of rabbis or scholastics. Most impressive of all, since they are not assigned background reading, is how often they press on the very same problems that provoked Maimonedes or Augustine or Kierkegaard as they ponder why Yahweh hardened Pharoah's heart, why Abraham was asked to sacrifice Isaac, and whether Judas was a pawn or a free agent. The point is that the Bible enters into the intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic lives of these students and is no longer "another unnecessary requirement," a text for the superstitious, a random collection of memorable but meaningless quotes.

Given the enthusiastic response to the various courses on the Bible and other religious topics, I decided five years ago to offer a class on Classics of Christian Literature. I had long felt that, though Augustine, Luther, and Calvin were occasionally assigned in history and government courses, students usually missed out on the literary and religious qualities of these and other Christian writers. I compiled a syllabus of autobiographical writings by Augustine, Teresa of Avila, Luther; letters by Gregory of Nyssa, Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena, Diet-rich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King; sermons by Clement of Rome, Aelred of Rievaulx, Calvin, John Donne; poems by George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot; and some miscellaneous favorites: The Rule of Saint Benedict and The Little Flowers of Saint Francis, essays by Kierkegaard and Thomas Merton.

Three hundred students showed up. A few yarmulkes were sighted, but as the term advanced, I realized that the majority of the students were active Catholics and Protestants. Among my teaching fellows was an Orthodox Jew, a woman preparing for the Episcopal priesthood, an Irish Catholic (from Ireland), an Indian Christian (from India), and two agnostics. Obviously, we did not advertise the religious attitudes of our staff or ask about those of the students, but background (though hopefully not bias) did tend to show eventually.

I was happy that students did not have to feel they were being fed a party line. I was even happier that views of every sort were freely aired, and that religious faith was taken as seriously as the doubts that are taken for granted in so many other classes. In lectures I tried to give a fair reading of each author, though I found it impossible to disguise my dislike of Calvin and my love of Augustine, Francis, Donne, and Hopkins. It helped to know that students felt perfectly free to disagree.

There is no question that the students and teaching staff and lecturer learned a great deal from reading and discussing these great texts as amateurs. Because of my literary training, my emphasis was on personal witness and voice rather than systematic theology. This freed the students to tangle directly with persons as they represented themselves and their experience of God in their own words. We saw that efforts at reform did not wait for the Reformation and that concepts of "church" rarely corresponded neatly with the gospel teachings. We saw the incredible diversity of beliefs and the influence of time, place, culture, gender, and class. Yet we also saw Christians who were hundreds of years and thousands of miles apart coming back to certain central concerns, hopes, beliefs. Stereotypes and prejudices seemed to fall apart each week. Some of my most ardent Protestant Evangelicals fell in love with Teresa of Avila; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor, was a favorite among the Catholics.

Search for tradition

I wish that there had been more non-Christians in my course. I have heard that it is the impression (and I stress "impression" since no accurate counts are taken) of my colleagues who teach classes in Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism that the preponderance of students in their classes come from the tradition being studied. In many ways, this is to be expected. Many of these students know their own traditions very slightly or not at all. They themselves joke about the fact that they have to come to Harvard to learn what it means to be a Hindu or a Jew or a Catholic. My active Protestant students usually know scripture well, but virtually nothing about the great treasure of Christian thought and practice over the centuries. My Catholic students know the sacraments and what the Pope thinks about divorce, abortion, women, and homosexuality (without necessarily agreeing with him), but though they have heard of Benedict and Francis, they typically don't know any more about them than their Protestant friends.

As churches and families are less and less likely to provide young people with an experience and knowledge of religion, it is a good thing for colleges and universities to fill the gap. Even secular institutions like Harvard now are filling that gap with a greater and greater variety of classes and activities. As many religious institutions weaken or occupy themselves with internal politics, students turn away from them but not necessarily from faith or from intellectual curiosity about their origin and destiny. They therefore do what comes naturally to bright people: They organize their own prayer groups and Bible studies and interfaith gatherings. And in larger and larger numbers they take classes in religious subjects.

For now, it may be necessary for students to gravitate to their own traditions out of sheer curiosity about their roots. But crossover is happening little by little. I never refuse an invitation to pray at Hillel or with Christian Impact, and I am always aware of a certain amount of mixing around the edges.

But perhaps most important of all in a truly free society is that students take it for granted that they can keep kosher or fast during Ramadan or Lent, wear a yarmulke or bless themselves in public, without flaunting their piety or apologizing for their faith in a place of "higher learning."

RELATED ARTICLE: Hindu Students Council at Texas A&M University

From Constitutions

PURPOSE AND GOALS

The purpose of Hindu Students Council shall be to spread awareness of the Hindu religion and culture while promoting individual, spiritual growth.

The major goals shall be

1. Promotion of Hindu culture and values.

2. Live a better life according to Hindu Dharma [religion].

3. Education of the history of Hinduism. Membership shall be open to all individuals interested in the goals of the organization.

History

Hindu Students Council at Texas A&M University is a chapter of an international forum promoting the understanding of Hindu culture and heritage. Through many different activities and projects, HSC provides opportunities for the growth of individual and betterment of society. The chapter organizes lectures, debates, and presentations on Hindu religion and philosophy and celebrates major festivals. Hindu Students Council at Texas A&M University was founded on Dasherra of October 1994. See http://stuact.tamu.edu/stuorgs/hindu/constitution.html

Published with permission.

MIT Muslim Students' Association 

Excerpts from the MIT MSA Constitution

The MIT Muslim Students' Association is a close-knit and friendly community which serves to assist MIT's Muslims in their practice of Islam and endeavors to promote understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims on campus.

PURPOSE

Goals. The purposes of the organization shall be to:

1. bring the Muslims of MIT together and to help them in their practice of Islam.

2. make Islam better understood by the MIT Community and to promote understanding between the Muslims and non-Muslims.

Means: In order to reach its goals, the activities of the organization include, but are not limited to:

1. arranging religious activities including prayers, celebration of Islamic occasions, meetings, and discussions.

2. organizing educational, social, and athletic activities involving both Muslims and non-Muslims.

3. extending help to Muslim students in pursuit of their educational and spiritual endeavors.

4. making a library of books, periodicals, and audiovisual material accessible to all members.

5. issuing publications and statements on Islam or regarding issues of concern to Muslims.

DEFINITIONS:

The following terms are used in this constitution and pertain to the organization.

Allah--the Arabic name for the One God, Creator and Sustainer of the Universe.

Islam--the way of life, embodying peace and willing submission to Allah, which enjoined on us by Allah.

Muslim--one who follows Islam.

Muhammad--the last prophet of Allah, after a line of prophets including Adam, Abraham, Moses, David, and Jesus, peace and blessings of Allah be upon them all.

Qur'an--the final revelation of God to mankind, after the Torah and the Gospel.

Published with permission of the MIT MSA.

See http://web.mit.edu/mitmsa/www/New Site/mitmsa.html

ROBERT KIELY is Loker Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard and faculty adviser to the Harvard Catholic Student Association.