daisylu
Junior Associate
Enter your message here...
Joined: Dec 27, 2010 6:04:42 GMT -5
Posts: 6,720
Member is Online
|
Post by daisylu on Aug 30, 2021 14:03:31 GMT -5
I wish I had someone like this in my life. The Puritan colonists who settled in New England in the 1630s had a nagging concern about the churches they were building: How would they ensure that the clergymen would be literate? Their answer was Harvard University, a school that was established to educate the ministry and adopted the motto “Truth for Christ and the Church.” It was named after a pastor, John Harvard, and it would be more than 70 years before the school had a president who was not a clergyman.
Nearly four centuries later, Harvard’s organization of chaplains has elected as its next president an atheist named Greg Epstein, who takes on the job this week.
Epstein, 44, author of the book “Good Without God,” is a seemingly unusual choice for the role. He will coordinate the activities of more than 40 university chaplains, who lead the Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist and other religious communities on campus. Yet many Harvard students — some raised in families of faith, others never quite certain how to label their religious identities — attest to the influence that Epstein has had on their spiritual lives.
“Maybe in a more conservative university climate there might be a question like ‘What the heck are they doing at Harvard, having a humanist be the president of the chaplains?’” said Margit Hammerstrom, the Christian Science chaplain at Harvard. “But in this environment it works. Greg is known for wanting to keep lines of communication open between different faiths.”
The dozens of students whom Epstein mentors have found a source of meaning in the school’s organization of humanists, atheists and agnostics, reflecting a broader trend of young people across the United States who increasingly identify as spiritual but religiously nonaffiliated. That trend might be especially salient at Harvard; a Harvard Crimson survey of the class of 2019 found that those students were two times more likely to identify as atheist or agnostic than 18-year-olds in the general population.
“Greg’s leadership isn’t about theology,” said Charlotte Nickerson, 20, an electrical engineering student. “It’s about cooperation between people of different faiths and bringing together people who wouldn’t normally consider themselves religious.” link
|
|
Tiny
Senior Associate
Joined: Dec 29, 2010 21:22:34 GMT -5
Posts: 13,357
|
Post by Tiny on Aug 30, 2021 14:49:09 GMT -5
I heard an interview with Greg Epstein on NPR yesterday. It made me smile. When given a choice I identify as a Humanist (usually that doesn't show up in the choices.) A couple of weeks ago - I went down a rabbit hole of finding out where the most "religious" people live... and while the question changed as I went down the hole... the gist of it was that the Northern States along the coast like Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, etc had populations where between 52 and 55% of the population said they strongly believed in a Divine Being (aka God). Southern States had the highest numbers 70% to 73% said they strongly believed. That led me to another question which I didn't go down a rabbit hole as I didn't have time... I have to wonder how much "peer pressure" or "social expectations" influence the answers (on both sides) of belief.
|
|