Lisa Miller, author of the upcoming book Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife, wrote an article in Newsweek last week called, Harvard’s Crisis of Faith. In this article Miller tries to make sense of why Harvard stopped making religion a requirement for their students. Here are some excerpts:

“My colleagues fear that taking religion seriously would undermine everything a great university stands for,” the Rev. Peter Gomes, Harvard’s chaplain and a professor of Christian history, told me. “I think that’s ungrounded, but there it is.”

“Steven Pinker says his main objection to the 2006 proposal that students be required to take a course in a Reason and Faith category was that it seemed to make reason and faith equal paths to truth. “I very, very, very much do not want to go on the record as suggesting that people should not know about religion,” he told me. “But reason and faith are not yin and yang. Faith is a phenomenon. Reason is what the university should be in the business of fostering.” … “Faith,” he said, “is believing in something without good reasons to do so. It has no place in anything but a religious institution, and our society has no shortage of these.”

“This year’s freshmen, the class of 2013, are the first to benefit from the new General Education requirements that passed, finally, in 2007. During their tenure at Harvard, undergraduates now have to take one course in each of eight categories, including two in science and one in math. They have to take one course in a loose category called Culture and Belief, which includes religion courses but also classes in photography, mythology, and the literature of the quest. A student, in other words, can graduate from Harvard without having to grapple directly with questions about a world in which people define themselves and their histories according to their views of God.”

In the January issue of New Blackfriars from this year, Alasdair MacIntyre has a good article on “The Very Idea of a University.” MacIntyre critiques contemporary universities for the very kind of thing that Harvard is undergoing. My friend Marika has a good summary of this article on her post entitled: How to stop clever people being stupid.

My wife, April is helping Stephen Sykes with typing up his autobiography. In the section she was working on last night, Bishop Sykes talks about his experience at Harvard during the Cuban missile crisis. The two things that struck me from April’s reading it to me was that 1) it wasn’t until he went to Harvard that he realised not everyone reads the same theology books and 2) he and his wife Joy decided to go to a park if the atomic bomb sirens alerted them to take shelter.

I think Bishop Sykes’ observations were fitting to include in light of Lisa Miller’s article. Also, keep an eye out for her book because, if I’m not mistaken, N.T. Wright makes an appearance or two.