Does the English Department Have a Jewish Problem?

Inside Higher Ed’s Scott Jaschik has written another fine article, this one reporting on a panel discussion at the Modern Language Association on the relative paucity of experts teaching Jewish literature. The panel was entitled “Does the English Department Have a Jewish Problem?”

The underlying premise of the panel was that English departments that would never allow themselves to be without experts in the literatures of many racial and ethnic groups in the United States don’t think twice about failing to have a knowledge base in American Jewish literature. Further, the view of many here is that discussions about multicultural literature that ought to include Jewish writers simply don’t.

Jaschik’s detailed overview of the panel discussion could well serve as the starting point for a faculty conversation on how different religious and ethnic traditions are treated in today’s literature, history, and cultural studies departments.

Washington University establishes John C. Danforth Center on Religion & Politics

With a $30 million gift, the Danforth foundation has created the John C. Danforth Center on Religion & Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. On 16 December Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton announced the new center at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.:

“The establishment of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion & Politics reflects the legacy of Jack Danforth and his belief in the importance of a civil discourse that treats differences with respect,” Wrighton said in making the announcement Dec. 16 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

“The center will serve as an ideologically neutral place that will foster rigorous, unbiased scholarship and encourage conversations between diverse and even conflicting points of view,” Wrighton said.

“Knowing that religious values and beliefs can either encourage or undermine civility, the center and its educational programs and scholarly research can provide a bridge between religious and political communities and will inform new kinds of academic explorations focusing on the relationships between the two. We think that’s a worthy goal.”

The gift also creates five new endowed professorships. The new center is scheduled to open in January 2010.

Specialists in Religious History Lead in Topic Categories, American Historical Association Finds

In a survey taken spring, 2009, the American Historical Association (AHA) found that 7.7 percent of its membership chose “religion” as one of their three areas of interest. For the first time, “religion” exceed “cultural history,” the most popular subject category in recent years, which was selected by 7.5 percent.

Demographically, the composition of the members who selected the topic is modestly different from the general membership in ways that may reinforce the recent growth of interest in religion, as the average age of those selecting the history of religion is slightly younger than the membership as a whole (more than half had received their highest degrees since 2000). Given that, it is not surprising that the members selecting the subject were more likely to be at an early stage in their careers—either doctoral students or employed at the assistant and associate professor level. Almost 40 percent of the religion specialists were in one of those categories, as compared to 32.6 percent of the membership as a whole.

The topic was slightly more prevalent among members studying early European and recent U.S. history, but the subject was taken up by at least a few members specializing in every continent and time period.

Robert Townsend, the AHA’s assistant director for research and publication, does the informative analysis of the findings, and cites several historians’ interpretation of this upswing in interest. Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed offers a fine summary of the findings and adds some additional perspective.

These findings should make for stimulating faculty conversation.

[Perspectives on History, News via Inside Higher Ed]

Teaching Sankara and St. Gregory of Nyssa at Harvard

I have mentioned in earlier posts the splendid blog by Francis X. Clooney, S.J., which frequently deals with the experience of teaching comparative theology—in Clooney’s case, Hinduism and Christianity. The latest post replies to comments on an earlier post on his course on Hindu goddesses and the Virgin Mary and explains how in another course he and his students are reading Sankara on the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad and comparing Sankara’s interpretive attempts with Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses.

In the classroom: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary

My Harvard Divinity School colleague Francis X. Clooney, S. J., has another wonderful post in the online edition of America: The National Catholic Weekly. Clooney describes one of his current lecture courses—“Hindu Goddesses and the Blessed Virgin Mary”—and explains why and how he engages his students in comparative theology.

The comments to the post are worth reading and pondering as well.

Yale University Press criticized for removing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in forthcoming book

One of the best aggregators for religious news is The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. It recently picked up a report from the Associated Press on the reactions to the Yale’s decision to remove twelve caricatures of the Prophet from the book The Cartoons That Shook the Word by the Brandeis University professor Jytte Klausen.

The AP story offers background details that could form the basis for a faculty discussion on how a decision on such a fraught topic might best be made.

Recommended Reading: The Soul of the American University

George M. Marsden is one of the foremost contemporary historians of American Evangelical Christianity. In his The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (Oxford, 1994), Marsden offers an intellectual history of America’s leading universities intended to answer the question,

How was it that distinctively Christian teaching could be displaced so easily from the central and substantive role that it had held in American higher education for over two centuries and in the universities of Christendom for many centuries before that? [p. 31]

Marsden’s  detailed and magisterial account of the intellectual transition from “Protestant Establishment” to “Established Nonbelief” rewards careful study. Interestingly, however, it is not his impressive historical account that has gained the most attention but rather his “Concluding Unscientific Postscript” in which, given the history that he has recounted, Marsden argues against perpetuating the “strong prejudices against traditional religious viewpoints” found in today’s academy.

Recommended reading: Higher Ed and Religion between the American Civil War and World War I

The modern American college and university system has its origins in the period between the end of the Civil War and the outbreak of World War I. This period saw the growth of new institutions—especially the research university—and the transformation of old institutions such as the antebellum college.

This time period also saw a new, subdivided, and secular curriculum replace the unified, Protestant (or even Deist) arrangement of learning that was designed to form students in Christian morality and inform them about the harmony between nature and nature’s God. One of the best books on this transformation is Jon H. Roberts and James Turner, The Sacred and the Secular University (Princeton, 2000). I can sketch only some of its contours.