Touchstone Published My Letter

One of my fave magazines published a letter I wrote in response to a a picture in an article dealing with relgious studies in academia. If you look in the November 2007 issue of Touchstone Magazine (Website is here. but I don't think they put the letters on the website.) you will find the letter. I expected them to only print one or two excerpts but am pleasantly surprised that they published the whole thing, giving me about 13 column inches. My subject was a bref history of the religion program at Stanford University. My favorite paragraphs arethe last two, reproduced for you here.

"Today Stanford's religion department is very meager: It only offers Ph.D.s in Buddhist studies, Judaism, and Modern Western Religious Thought and Practice (with much emphasis on post-Kantian German ethics, as though that has much to do with religion at all). The religion department at Stanford can not even compare to that of other universities in its rarified stratum, such as Harvard and Chicago, to say nothing of Christian universites such a Gerogetown and Biola, to which none of the previously mentioned schools can hold a candle.

"And therin is the main problem. There are no candles. If you visit Stanford's Memorial Church, you will see a building that is bult to look like a RomanCatholic church, full of breathtakingly beautiful icons of Jesus the Lord, his mother the Blessed Virgin Mary, and other saints. But there are no candles burning before those icons. There is no worship. And there are no relics in the altar. That is the heart of the problem with the study of religion as just one more academic subject. But you knew that when you selected the photograph for the article, didn't you?"

If you are not a subscriber to Touchstone Magazine you should become one. They regularly publish much better stuff than my letter.