A Harvard University curriculum review committee has recommended making religion part of the the core curriculum required for graduation. We will have to wait and see what happens, but inclusion of a course labeled “Reason and Faith” may give students a bit of the founding philosophy of Western civilization to counter-balance the socialistic atheism that has been the exclusive ethos of our secular universities since the late 19th century.
In an article appearing in the October 4, 2006, edition of the Wall Street Journal, reporter Zachary M. Seward writes:
A Harvard University committee charged with revising curriculum proposed that undergraduates be compelled to take a course in religion as part of a new set of course requirements that breaks sharply from the school’s peer institutions.
A preliminary report distributed to faculty today recommends scrapping much of the current curriculum in favor of new “general education” requirements spanning the humanities and sciences. The most striking proposals address criticism that Harvard’s liberal education fails to adequately prepare students for lives after graduation.
The proposed requirement in religion, dubbed “Reason and Faith,” has little parallel in higher education, authors of the report said. It would address topics from personal beliefs to foreign policy to the interplay between science and religion. The report, which calls traditional academics “profoundly secular,” seeks to place Harvard’s students and faculty in the center of contemporary religious debates.
“I think 30 years ago,” when the school’s curriculum was last overhauled, “people would have said that religion is not something that everyone needs to know,” said Louis Menand, a Harvard professor and co-chairman of the committee that drafted the report. “But today, few would disagree that religion is supremely important to modern life.”
Harvard’s faculty of arts and sciences will now consider the report, and significant changes could be made before voting on the proposals.
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