I guess I'm the kind of professor The Daily Princetonian Editorial Board called for in "Requiring Religion?" since I "integrate religious topics" into my courses instead of "ghettoizing" them. Students sometimes object, though, and many professors lack the interest or qualifications to even try. Interest and qualifications don't always coincide; some woefully uninformed books on religion have been written by world-famous intellectuals. Not at Princeton, of course. But at least we should aim to avoid graduating people who will only add to that misbegotten bibliography.
The study of religion can be partly justified as the comparative analysis of worldviews. So many controversies today are rooted in deeply felt but often unexamined beliefs about the world we inhabit: is it just or unjust? Is autonomy or community more important? Apocalyptic prophecies of ecological disaster, arguments about war-making or the definition of family, the quadrennial sequence of rituals we use to elect the president: everyone has beliefs about such matters, and to study them is to study religion, among other things. Religion scholars often investigate phenomena that other folks might consider nonreligious, irreligious or even anti-religious, such as "new age" human potential movements and the celebrities who promote them, practices that "unchurched" people invent for themselves, atheistic worldviews that see the universe as the product of chance or impersonal forces or secularist viewpoints that see religion as a negative force to be kept out of the public sphere. Such stances are as worthy of critical examination as blind adherence to a tax-exempt denomination.
A German saying of Albert Einstein, a nonpracticing Jew, is still engraved in the old Mathematics Professors Room, now 202 Jones: "Subtle is the Lord God, but malicious he is not." Edit out the theistic, mythological language, and it remains a scientist's creed: the universe is complex but rational, a place where the numbers always add up. Without that belief, there could be no science, for we cannot disprove the possibility that the universe only seems rational. In that sense, all science is based on a leap of faith — faith that the world can be understood and humans can understand it. The temptation to believe that two plus two can equal anything we want has ensnared many a crooked accountant and politician, but such enticements only lead to Hell, where no equation will ever be solved, though we stand at the chalkboard writing figures for all eternity.
Resistance to religion in the classroom often comes from misperceptions, like the notion that religion consists mainly of doctrines or philosophical propositions, which in our culture tend to be shaped by Christian claims. Does God exist? Does life after death? Actually, not every belief system regards these questions as central. Anyway, there is a lot more to religion than syllogisms. More significant, for many people, are behaviors and experiences, ranging from the extreme and paranormal to the ordinary and everyday. Songs and stories, images and silence, movement and stillness, conflict and creativity and self-giving — all can be ways of expressing what we somehow know is truly important. The searching, systematizing, ethically principled human spirit cannot be of merely extracurricular interest. There is a time for every purpose under heaven and a place in the academy to contemplate every aspect of the human project.
Some people overlook the distinction between religion and religious studies. Inculturation into traditional religious thought, law and lore is already available in seminary or yeshivah, madrassah or monastery. But the humanistic study of religion today aims for agnostic objectivity through critical methodologies. Even Cardinal Newman, whose "Idea of a University" would reserve a central place for (Catholic) theology, recognized that humans cannot perceive the full panorama of Truth all at once. "Unless [the researcher] is at liberty to investigate on the basis ... of his science, he cannot investigate at all ... There are no short cuts to knowledge."
What makes us human? Some animals make tools. Some have complex social behaviors, incorporating both altruism and group violence. A few animals have self-awareness, even the intelligence for language. Perhaps animals lack our planet-threatening hubris, or maybe pythons, fleas and bacteria have their own opinions on who rules the earth. So here's a hypothesis: what if our most defining human trait is our willingness to interpret our universe, encoding our questions and answers in craft and culture, dream and drama, architecture and archetype — organizing our conclusions into vast, complex representations that we practice, debate, refute and reform? What if the true mark of our species is religion? Peter Jeffery is the Scheide Professor of Music History and a member of Princeton's Council on the Study of Religion. He may be reached at jeffery@princeton.edu.
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The Trump administration’s attacks on research and higher education as well as a blind reliance on AI chatbots are reflective of a societal backslide: a commodification of knowledge that prioritizes “efficiency” over the messy process of getting to an answer, where nuances are flattened and the truth is fungible.
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It wasn’t revolutionary. It was homework. But it was homework that asked: how do we build schools that work for all kids? Inclusion, after all, is the “I” in DEI. That’s what we’re thinking about together. And caring about each other’s experiences and opportunities, it turns out, isn’t something you can outlaw.