As a convert to Catholicism with a sister who is a Wheaton College grad and a mom who is a Wheaton College prof, I've been troubled by the Joshua Hochschild story since the news broke a while back. The WSJ article tries to situate Hochschild's firing within the broader higher ed trend of schools recapturing their Christian identities. It's an awkward fit, for two reasons.
First, Wheaton College is not recapturing anything; a convert to Catholicism would have been fired from the faculty twenty years ago, fifty years ago, or one hundred years ago. This is a case of the institution trying to enforce previously unquestioned boundaries on its engagement with other faith traditions. (And yes, Catholicism would be viewed as another faith tradition.)
Second and more significantly, Hochschild's firing has nothing to do with a school like Notre Dame trying to hire more Catholics. Notre Dame wants to maintain a critical mass of Catholics in order to ensure a distinctively Catholic identity. Wheaton wants to exclude any non-evangelicals in order to ensure an exclusively evangelical identity. For higher education, that's a key difference.
My discomfort with Wheaton's stance is exacerbated by the fact that we're not talking about the Amish seeking to maintain a fortress mentality against the outside world. Wheaton College is no inward-looking bunch of folks -- in fact, the school prides itself on its prominent academic ranking and achievements. Shielding themselves from intellectual or spiritual pollution through unhelpful and outdated categorical Catholic-Protestant distinctions compromises Wheaton's mission. But railing against religious discrimination in general does not facilitate a productive conversation on this issue, for I fully support institutions that take religious identity seriously. A more prudent course is continued evangelical-Catholic engagement in an effort to show that for a school devoted to shaping followers of Christ in an academically rigorous environment, Joshua Hochschild is an asset, not a threat.
Rob
UPDATE: Open Book has an extensive conversation going about the WSJ article. From the comments, here's an interesting perspective from a Wheaton grad / Catholic convert on why a path beginning in Wheaton often leads to Rome:
I am another whose journey to Rome began as a student at Wheaton (BA '79, MA '85) Why so many of us? Wheaton's emphasis on integration of faith and learning is really very Catholic in its understanding of reason and revelation. Catholic schools could learn from them how to implement the perspective of Fides et Ratio across the curriculum. Also, there was a strong emphasis on history -- I was required to take both the history of philosophy and theology (one year of each) as an undergraduate religion major. My encounter with the Church fathers in historical theology planted the seed that would eventually lead me to Rome. There was an emphasis on serving the "Christ and his kingdom" in both evangelistic and social outreach that is quite consonant with Catholic teaching. The way I was taught to do historical critical study of scripture from the perspective of faith is quite consistent with Dei Verbum and other Catholic magisterial teaching (I encourage my Catholic seminary students to read Evangelical biblical scholarship). The pervasive attention to Lewis, Tolkien and others at Wheaton formed my imagination in sacramental directions. A popular slogan at Wheaton was "all truth is God's truth" and the goal of Christian higher education was presented as the integration of all truth into a coherent Christian worldview. By this concern for fullness of truth centered in Christ, Wheaton invariably starts many (I'm not sure how many) on a road leading to that fullness of truth found within the Roman Catholic Church.
So if they're really worried about the school losing its evangelical identity, instead of firing the Catholic, maybe Wheaton would be better advised to stop teaching Aquinas . . .
Friday, January 6, 2006
Robert George defends academic freedom against those who ask, "Doesn’t the defense of academic freedom collapse into the self-stultifying denial of the possibility of truth? Doesn’t it make freedom, rather than truth, the ultimate academic value?" George invokes the Second Vatican Council in countering that we must "respect freedom even where truth is known securely" because:
[F]reedom—freedom to inquire, freedom to assent or withhold assent as one’s best judgment dictates—is a condition of the personal appropriation of the truth by the human subject—the human person—for the sake of whom—for the flourishing of whom, for the liberation of whom—knowledge of truth is intrinsically valuable. And it is intrinsically valuable not in some free floating or abstract sense, but precisely as an aspect of the well-being and fulfillment of human beings—rational creatures whose flourishing consists in part in intellectual inquiry, understanding, and judgment and in the practice of the virtues which make possible excellence in the intellectual question.
Rob
Thursday, January 5, 2006
Peter Singer has weighed in on the scandal surrounding Korean scientist Woo-Suk Hwang's flawed stem cell research (HT: CT), arguing that the ethical implications of the research strike a mortal blow to the pro-life movement:
[T]he ethical significance of such research goes far beyond the undoubted importance of saving critically ill patients. Proving the possibility of cloning from the nucleus of an ordinary human cell would transform the debate about the value of potential human life, for we would find that potential human life was all around us, in every cell of our bodies.
For example, when President George W. Bush announced in 2001 that the US would not fund research into new stem-cell lines that are created from human embryos, he offered the following reason: Like a snowflake, each of these embryos is unique, with the unique genetic potential of an individual human being.
But it is precisely this reasoning that is threatened by what Hwang and his team claimed to have achieved. If it is the uniqueness of human embryos that makes it wrong to destroy them, then there is no compelling reason not to take one cell from an embryo and destroy the remainder of it to obtain stem cells, for the embryo's unique genetic potential would be preserved.
This possibility highlights the weakness of the argument that abortion, too, is wrong because it destroys a genetically unique human being. By this reasoning, a woman who finds herself pregnant at an inconvenient time could have an abortion, as long as she preserves a single cell from the fetus to ensure that its unique genetic potential is preserved.
Maybe I'm not privy to the conversations where these arguments are being made, but the thrust of the pro-life argument as I understand it is not that fetuses should be protected because they are genetically unique, but because they are human beings. (On this front, of course, Singer retreats to his longstanding claim that human life is valuable not as human life but only to the extent that it exhibits certain functions -- functions conveniently not exhibited by embryos, fetuses, or even infants.)
Rob
Wednesday, January 4, 2006
In the wake of the Asian tsunami, we explored the intellectual quandary that suffering poses for those who believe in God. In the wake of the awful turn of events in West Virginia, a slightly different question arises: to what extent should Christians attribute the mining accident to God, and how should that inform our response? Here's an excerpt from the news coverage of the mining accident:
[A local resident] said the tragedy has shaken the faith of some in the community, who "don't even know if there is a Lord anymore," she said. "We had a miracle, and it was taken away from us."
John Casto was at a church where families had gathered when the false report arrived, and later when the terrible news was announced. After the first report, "they were praising God," he said. After the second, "they were cursing."
Let me make clear that I would likely have shared the reactions of the family members, praising God at the seeming miracle, cursing as it was snatched away. But nevertheless the sequence makes me wince: if God is responsible for the miners' rescue, is God not also responsible for their deaths? And if God is responsible for both, should not Christians praise God for his sovereignty regardless of the outcome? But if the miners' deaths flow from the fallen state of the world and were not specifically brought about by God's design, does God deserve praise when rescuers' heroics overcome nature's operation?
It seems that there are three potential responses in this context: praising God for his sovereignty regardless of whether the miners happen to be rescued, leaving to the realm of mystery whether God intervened in the created (and fallen) order in any particular context; attributing the fate of the miners to human and natural forces and leaving God out of the equation; or praising God when the results comport with our understanding of how God should exercise his sovereignty and cursing when the results conflict with that understanding, implicitly assuming that the preferred results are evidence of God's specific intervention.
My inclination is that the first option most clearly reflects humanity's relationship with God (though I can't claim to have successfully followed it in the midst of my own suffering), as beautifully expressed by the classic hymn:
When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
when sorrows like sea billows roll;
whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul.
Note that this sentiment does not preclude us from working to alleviate suffering, but simply establishes God's sovereignty in the midst of that suffering. Other thoughts?
Rob
Tuesday, January 3, 2006
Howard Friedman reports on a bizarre case in Italy that seems to hinge on the defendant's ability to prove that Jesus Christ existed.
Rob
Saturday, December 31, 2005
I'm not sure whether a private school in California will be held liable under state discrimination laws for kicking out two girls who confessed having "lesbian" feelings for each other (HT: ACS), but I'm fairly confident that the following argument offered by the girls' attorney is not going to carry the day:
"There's a lot of hypocrisy going on here," [the attorney] said. "The school is claiming the girls were expelled because their conduct wasn't within the Christian code. But at the same time, (the school) has students who aren't Christians and are even Jewish."
Rob
The New York Times often gives the impression that seriously religious folks, especially evangelical Christians, are three-horned creatures that just dropped in from outer space. I initially wondered why the paper was giving such prominent coverage yesterday to a new study's fairly ho-hum findings that four percent of American teenagers attend youth group at a church different than the one their families attend. The significance of the study, I soon learned, is that it gave the Times a chance to talk about just how creepy those youth group activities are. The thesis is evident in the article's conclusion:
The band played a simple rock song, and everybody shouted the lyrics over and over: "Bless the Lord with all that's in me. Bless the Lord. May kingdoms fall and rulers crawl before your throne."
Emily threw her head back and sang and sang. Then she fell to her knees. Bent forward at the waist, rocking, she sang into her curled body what others shouted to the rafters: "I want to give you all of me. I'm giving you all of me."
The conclusion has nothing to do with the study or its findings, of course. But readers are now on notice that the three-horned creatures are targeting our teenagers.
Rob
