Requiring religion?

Recently, Harvard's Task Force on General Education — charged with revising that university's core curriculum — proposed the establishment of a "Reason and Faith" distribution requirement for all undergraduates. According to the task force, if the proposal is implemented, the courses that fulfill this requirement will focus on "the interplay between religious and secular institutions, practices and ideas."

Our administration should follow Harvard's lead in promoting the study of religion, but it should not do so by ghettoizing the study of religion and creating more requirements for student to fulfill as Harvard's plan will do. Instead, Princeton should encourage the integration of religious topics into preexisting requirements and departments. The anthropology department, for example, already stands out for its commitment to seriously engaging — and making its students engage with — the question of religion.

Without question, religion has played an essential role in the development of human society throughout history and continues to do so today. In many disciplines, courses which ignore religious themes leave out many of the most important intellectual trends in human history. Indeed, even students who are not religious benefit from being exposed to topics like religious-based ethical systems in philosophy courses and religious social movements in politics courses. While introductory science classes are not the proper place to deal with religious topics like creationism, new courses like REL 210: Religion and Evolution which examine the intersection between religion and other disciplines are particularly laudable. Even science and engineering majors would gain much by understanding how their disciplines have interacted with and been shaped by religion.

Princeton should also focus on supplementing the teaching of purely religious topics so that aspects of religious history that are currently ignored receive greater attention. Zoroastrianism and Persian religion, for example, come up frequently in classes on Judaism, Christianity, Islam and late antiquity in general, and it would serve Princeton well to hire faculty in this area. In addition, there are many students who enter Princeton with a desire to take classes in church history but find that, relative to our peer institutions, there are very few opportunities in this area.

Princeton is a university which prides itself on the commitment of its professors and students to its critical approach to knowledge. It is for this very reason that we need to ratify our commitment to breaking down the artificial barriers that sometimes separate religion and other disciplines. This is a task that needs to be taken up by professors and students in nearly all courses — not merely those meant to fulfill a distribution requirement.