Connecting Learning to Tradition

There is an interesting article on how various people find themselves studying religion in the NY Times today. In the article, they talk about how attaching religious conversation and shared language to a tradition helps create a place to build community and that it is keeping these things connected that is one of the gifts and challenges of education today:

Within higher education, divinity programs often stand apart from the cult of relativism in the liberal arts and the utilitarian emphasis in professional schools focusing on business and law, for example.

“If you were simply looking for the skills, you might go to the Kennedy School of Government,” said the Rev. Dudley C. Rose, the associate dean for ministry studies at Harvard. “And philosophy and liberal-arts fields have given up on the project of finding a moral language, an articulation of values. That language isn’t found in many places. And when you find it, it’s not easy to abstract it. You have to connect it to a tradition.”

Source: Secular, but Feeling a Call to Divinity School

What Rose is suggesting has been given up at other institutions, I see as taking place at a school like Guilford College, where I now work. I think the tension is being held between these differing fields at Guilford. There is a diversity of religion and non-religious expressions, but students come together in various ways, learning how to articulate moral language and values or working out in deeper ways what they already come with, that are connected to the Quaker tradition (or challenge it). Of course, not every class does this explicitly, but my sense so far is that the campus as a whole tries to embody this grounding in tradition in ways that make the school rather unique within the landscape of offerings.