{"id":2786,"date":"2009-09-26T12:47:24","date_gmt":"2009-09-26T20:47:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=2786"},"modified":"2009-09-26T20:09:11","modified_gmt":"2009-09-27T04:09:11","slug":"religion-and-the-humanities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/religion-and-the-humanities\/","title":{"rendered":"Religion and the humanities"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently attended an interesting lecture on the decline of the humanities by Georgetown political science professor Patrick Deneen<\/a>.\u00a0 Deneen\u2019s overarching point echoed that of Allan Bloom\u2019s in The Closing of the American Mind<\/em>: The rise of the research university in the 19th century, with its emphasis on science, created an inferiority complex in the humanities.\u00a0 The humanities felt compelled to ape the sciences in the pursuit of new knowledge, thus casting aside their proper function as conservators of the accumulated wisdom of the past.\u00a0 Throughout his lecture, Deneen rued the disappearance of \u201crevealed truth\u201d from the curriculum and discourse of the university, which got me to thinking: What exactly is \u201crevealed truth\u201d?\u00a0 It\u2019s certainly not revealed to me.\u00a0 If it\u2019s truth, why does it need revelation?<\/p>\n

Deneen\u2019s use of the term reminded me of a feature of some conservative public discourse that I find disconcerting: the unself-conscious invocation of Christian doctrine as if it were universally accepted.\u00a0 It is not uncommon in some general interest magazines to come across references to \u201cOur Savior\u201d or other specifically Christian assumptions.\u00a0\u00a0 I am clearly overly sensitive on such matters and not a good bellwether, but I always wonder: Are such things properly\u00a0 mentioned in mixed company?\u00a0 Doesn\u2019t it matter that not all of your audience believes that Christ was the Messiah?\u00a0 Deneen and other thinkers are far more worldly and sophisticated than I, but such references carry just a slight hint of parochialism in my mind.\u00a0 This is probably just an illusion on my part.\u00a0 If Jewish readers of conservative publications don\u2019t mind references to Christian doctrine as common truth, who am I to feel that a certain public etiquette is being breached.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As for the respective roles of the humanities and the sciences in the university, the sciences came to dominate through the sheer grandeur of their accomplishments.\u00a0 It is very hard to argue with their success.\u00a0 Deneen is right to stress the urgent value of humanistic study, but a religious sensibility is in no way a prerequisite to a just reverence for Mozart, Keats, Milton, Aeschylus, Palladio, and the thousands of other creators who crush us with their beauty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently attended an interesting lecture on the decline of the humanities by Georgetown political science professor Patrick Deneen.\u00a0 Deneen\u2019s overarching point echoed that of Allan Bloom\u2019s in The Closing of the American Mind: The rise of the research university … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[348,349],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2786"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2786"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2786\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2799,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2786\/revisions\/2799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}