Mark Taylor
Spent the last hour or so trying to stretch my interest in today's NYTimes op-ed by Professor Mark Taylor into a church-state issue for my other blog before giving up. Maybe I'm trying to keep the focus too narrow there but I just can't seem to make it work well enough to feel good about placing it there, so I'll see if I can get you to respond to it. I know Taylor as a philosopher--his book Altarity was a central text in my undergrad class in post-modernism (a course that taught me, among other things, to problematize phrases like "central text" but oh well...). I haven't kept up with his work since then so I didn't know he is a religion professor and theologian (now at Williams College).

His column presents this perspective as a professor: more students than ever are religious, and increasingly, religious students are much more interested in being religious than they are in being students. Here's a snip:

For years, I have begun my classes by telling students that if they are not more confused and uncertain at the end of the course than they were at the beginning, I will have failed. A growing number of religiously correct students consider this challenge a direct assault on their faith. Yet the task of thinking and teaching, especially in an age of emergent fundamentalisms, is to cultivate a faith in doubt that calls into question every certainty.

Any responsible curriculum for the study of religion in the 21st century must be guided by two basic principles: first, a clear distinction between the study and the practice of religion, and second, an expansive understanding of what religion is and of the manifold roles it plays in life. The aim of critical analysis is not to pass judgment on religious beliefs and practices — though some secular dogmatists wrongly cross that line — but to examine the conditions necessary for their formation and to consider the many functions they serve.
...
Until recently, many influential analysts argued that religion, a vestige of an earlier stage of human development, would wither away as people became more sophisticated and rational. Obviously, things have not turned out that way. Indeed, the 21st century will be dominated by religion in ways that were inconceivable just a few years ago. Religious conflict will be less a matter of struggles between belief and unbelief than of clashes between believers who make room for doubt and those who do not.

As much as I agree with his beliefs about education (and I do), the easiest thing in the world is for us to read that and agree and sit in judgment of those students we readily label as closed-minded. True, college students need to be held responsible for their own minds and attitudes, but we'd do well to also look around at the factors that have made them the way they are--parents, teachers, churches, culture, role-models.

Introducing "room for doubt" around things you've built your identity on is a difficult exercise for anyone of any age. In a classroom it requires a certain relationship of trust to let someone lead you down that path - trust in an instructor, in an institution and in the educational process itself, to name a few. I don't know just where I'm going with this. But when a class - or I guess any community based on conversation and knowledge and truth - goes just right it's a pretty amazing arena of trust and openness. If I had to point to the biggest difference between my classes today and my classes 10 years ago, honestly, it's that we just don't quite trust each other the way we used to. I'm not sure how to define or illustrate that, but it's true. And it seems to me that can lead to all kinds of educational failures, including the ones professor Taylor mentioned. But I guess what I'm getting around to is I'm not sure this is primarily a religion problem (maybe there it shows up with the most clarity). And that's worth thinking about before we go deciding it's just the religious folks leading the closed-minded brigade.

We get 18 years, give or take, with kids before they go to college. How do we prepare them to doubt properly? And not just doubt their teachers, their government, even their ministers (We've excelled at that sort of training haven't we?)...but themselves?