Good Thoughts on the University of Illinois' Catholic Problem

Kenneth Howell is the Catholic theologian who was fired (and the rehired) by the University of Illinois for teaching (and apparently advocating for) Catholic theology in a course entitled "Introduction to Catholicism and Modern Catholic Thought." It turns out that Howell had written an e-mail to his class arguing that natural law could be used to oppose same-sex marriage.

I have found the most thoughtful voice on this whole affair to be Janine Giordano Drake, a Ph.D candidate in History at Illinois who is writing a dissertation on the working class religious left in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America.

In two excellent essays--one at Religion Dispatches and the other at Religion in American History (aptly titled "The Costs of Secularism")--Drake argues for the validity of theology courses in public universities.

In her Religion Dispatches essay, she concludes:

Our public university’s mission is now, and arguably always was, quite modern. Today we aim to provide students with “the freedom to consider conflicting views and to make their own evaluation of data, evidence, and doctrines.” A liberal arts education aims to put students in the driver’s seat among various ideas, and ask them to evaluate these ideas with the tools of scholarly interpretation developed in the most current scholarship. But which categories of the most current scholarship? Does the university’s mission to achieve pluralism foreclose the possibility of highly biased instruction?

The university’s statement asserts that, “Faculty members have a responsibility to maintain an atmosphere conducive to intellectual inquiry and rational discussion.” Buried in this statement is the vicious knot challenging the next generation of scholars and teachers of religion. We are tasked to research, teach and write about believers in an irrational world, but arm ourselves only with the modern tools of rationality.

We need more writers like Drake. Intelligent voices and public intellectuals who expose the inconsistencies between the postmodern language of academics and the modernist "mission" that still seems to define life in the public research university.