Out of the closet & into the classroom, the Yard, & the dining halls: notes on religion at Harvard

Liberal Education, Fall, 2001 by Robert Kiely

* A FEW YEARS AGO a student in my course on the English Bible began turning up at lecture wearing a yarmulke. He asked me to be his tutor in English literature the following year, partly, as he said, because he knew that I took religion seriously. He explained that he came from a non-observant Jewish family, but that after studying the Bible, he began going to Hillel and taking instructions from an Orthodox rabbi. His parents, especially his mother, thought he had lost his mind. Nonetheless, he cheerfully persisted in his religious search, and when I invited him to a faculty dinner in the Adams House dining hall, he brought his own kosher food.

* When Buddhist students asked for the use of a common room once a week when I was Master of Adams House, I gladly signed over the room to them and provided meditation cushions. Any Master would have done the same. The sessions were open to all. One of the regulars was a Jewish professor of philosophy.

* When I was invited to dinner at their House (dormitory) dining hall last year, a young student couple blessed themselves and said grace before the meal at a table crowded with other students who were already eating and talking. The same students and their friends had attended prayer services in memory of Dorothy Day and Archbishop Romero in the Harvard Yard on the anniversaries of their deaths.

* The largest Protestant groups on campus, Christian Impact and Christian Fellowship, sponsor Jesus Week every year, with posters, meetings, discussion panels, and large ecumenical prayer sessions in the Science Center. One of my Catholic students whom I see at mass regularly on Sundays attends Bible study with his Protestant friends from these groups and goes to retreats organized by them once or twice a year.

None of these events is especially earthshaking in itself, but at Harvard they would have been quite rare twenty-five years ago. Today, they are commonplace. Whereas in the not-too-distant past, religion was regarded as a private matter not to be displayed in public (and, in many cases, not even to be acknowledged), it is now very much out in the open. There was a time when the old formalities--baccalaureate service, a prayer at commencement, morning chapel--maintained a dignified, reserved, and modest distance from the rough and tumble intellectual world of the laboratory, the classroom, and the noisy dining halls. To be unobtrusively religious once a year or on Sundays was okay (though a little pathetic), but to be zealous, searching, or--God forbid--orthodox anything, was to risk being regarded as odd and anti-intellectual.

The study of religion

Though Harvard has a divinity school with a long and distinguished history, in the twentieth century the College did not have a major open to undergraduates until the 1970s when a department of religious studies was created. Gradually and steadily, interest in the field grew, but beyond what it could give to specialists, the department provided courses open to students at large. By the 1980s and '90s, Harvey Cox's lecture course on Jesus, Diana Eck's on Hinduism, and James Kugel's Hebrew Bible became some of the largest and most popular classes at the college, attended as electives by students in the hundreds.

For many years the Harvard English department had a vexed relationship with what it called "The Bible Requirement." Most colleagues thought that students of English and American literature ought to be familiar with the Bible because it figures so prominently in what we study. In the good years, we were lucky enough to have a learned medievalist and observant Jew offer the class. But when the professor was on leave, we simply added a "Bible Question" to the general exam and hoped that students would be scared enough to read some scripture on their own. After the medievalist's retirement, I agreed to teach the class with a colleague from the divinity school. Since my field is the novel, I did this with some trepidation. But the experience has been so satisfying that I have continued every other year for the past fifteen years.

Teaching the Bible

The pleasure in teaching this course can be explained in many ways. Since it is no longer a requirement, students take the class because they want to. Many are tired of not knowing who Absalom was, what really happened to Jonah, or who said, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Nearly all the English majors have read Paradise Lost, but not Genesis. They are astonished at the economy of the story of Adam and Eve and by the fact that the word "fall" never occurs.

Most of the students have never read more than a few patches of scripture, and many have read none at all. More and more of them are from Hindu, Moslem, and Buddhist backgrounds, but even the nominal Christians and Jews--with a few exceptions--are ignorant of all but the broadest outlines. In section discussions, teaching fellows consistently witness a kind of surprised intellectual awakening--a conversion, not necessarily to belief, but to a discovery of the literary sophistication, ethical complexity, and religious power of the texts. Christian students often gain a new appreciation of the Hebrew Bible. Jewish students from secular families read their own ancient history for the first time and recognize, to their astonishment, how Jewish Jesus was. And those from neither background come to the book with an open-mindedness, curiosity, and lack of self-consciousness that enables them to ask the most basic (and often the most important) questions.