Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 27, 1990 TAG: 9005250385
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV14 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: FRANCES STEBBINS CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: RADFORD LENGTH: Long
That's not really surprising. After all, these two academic disciplines are among the least exact of the sciences - or would arts be a better word?
Charles Taylor, Glen Martin, Russell Gregory, Kay Jordan and Susan Kwilecki, all of whom hold doctorates and have been teaching at Radford from 2 to 22 years, give a lot of attention to ideas. Their goal is to make the great ideas of past and present relevant to Western Virginia students.
As Jordan said, "I hold up a set of models - not myself as a model, but the great personalities who have lived and sometimes died for their ideas. These people can become heroes."
When asked if students today are more in need of such heroes than when he began teaching at Radford in 1968, Taylor said he doesn't see that much change.
Some, he observed, are intensely interested by their late teens in delving into the meaning of life while others take the required class in philosophy or religious studies because they have to.
"The real thing that's changed at Radford is the greater diversity of students. There's definitely more openness to religious ideas other than those brought from the typical Protestant conservatism of Western Virginia."
Taylor is chairman of the department, which has recently expanded its program to allow students majoring in philosophy and religious studies to concentrate on one or the other. There remains one major, Taylor noted, but students may take more of one speciality than the other depending on their vocational goal.
"We want to meet the needs of more people. Those planning to enter a theological seminary will be more interested in the classes related to religious history and thought. The ones considering teaching philosophy on a graduate level will concentrate there."
Philosophy majors do not all enter the ivory tower of academia either, Taylor said. Their ability to think and get to the bottom of issues makes them valuable for many well-paid jobs, though "Nobody majors in philosophy to make a lot of money."
Gregory, who joined the faculty eight years ago and recently won the Dedmon Award for excellence in teaching, said the new program of permitting concentration on either religious studies or philosophy should help students who are considering a professional religion career. In the past, he said, some who felt called to religious careers rejected the highly abstract classes of philosophy.
Whichever concentration is chosen by the department's 15 students, they will learn religion as fact rather than from a faith perspective, Jordan said.
This does not mean, she and Martin emphasized, that Radford's young students reared in a conservative church background are going to "lose their faith" when they enter the big state university.
A Lutheran herself, Jordan said she is not about to impose her own views on those she exposes to the beliefs of many religions. Her own knowledge of religion, she said, has been expanded by exposure to young adults from Islamic and Buddhist backgrounds "and they can correct my understanding as well as my pronunciation."
Church schools, like the Lutheran Roanoke College, may more naturally be places to emphasize the faith development of a particular denomination, Jordan said.
But, she added, when students really learn what religions other than their families' teach, they can choose more intelligently where their own experience fits. The four other faculty members agreed that this is a goal that suits them all.
Trying to define religious studies, Kwilecki traced the development of the discipline over the past 25 years. Before the 1960s state-supported colleges usually felt no need to offer courses in religion, she said. That role was filled by the multitude of colleges affiliated with a church and assumed to teach and follow the moral guidelines of the parent religion.
All that has changed. Today religion is taught as an academic discipline at schools like Radford while religious organizations on campus are supported on a strictly voluntary basis. Educated at Stanford University, Kwilecki has developed a specialty in the sociology of religion, the way the church as an institution relates to the world in which people live.
Martin said religious studies implies more breadth than the old notion of religion as an indoctrination into a particular faith.
There's a connectedness about religion, philosophy and history, Martin observed. A student of the history of Christianity soon sees that after the time of Christ it is impossible to separate the three disciplines because the earliest followers of Jesus, such as Paul, were heavily influenced by the Greek and Roman culture in which they lived. Later political history is enmeshed with the church in Western Europe.
That was not necessarily true in parts of the world where Christianity became important only a few hundred years ago, Jordan noted.
Taylor, the department head, also is an ordained Southern Baptist who often serves as an interim minister. That gives him, he said, a chance to expose people older than most college students to religious ideas updated to today.
"I begin where individuals are in their religious thinking and use illustrative material. Sometimes old people will tell me they've figured out hard theological questions on their own."
Taylor finds students more exciting because they more readily challenge religious ideas that don't make sense to them. Many active church people are afraid to take issue with their minister or a Sunday school teacher, Taylor observed.
"Too many people in a church setting just want to be comfortably asleep."
by CNB