Do religious perspectives have any place within the activities of the secular university today? Trevor Cairney and Greg Clarke suggest they do, and that a genuine intellectual pluralism would welcome them.

Specific Worldviews in Tertiary Education: a way forward

Pluralism and specific religious belief (Greg Clarke)

In a recent article in The Australian newspaper’s Higher Education supplement, Professor Elspeth Probyn of the Department of Gender Studies at the University of Sydney discussed the place of religious values on contemporary university campuses. She wrote:

Becoming an ethical person in our world does not have to mean jettisoning religious values. It does, however, require hard work on the part of teachers and students to think seriously about how one combines different value systems. And that means—thankfully—that no one gets to have sole ownership of God on their side.

In this paper, we want to first acknowledge and affirm Professor Probyn’s attitude of acceptance. We encourage the notion of critical accountability that is inherent in her words to both educators and students. Teachers must enable their students to critique, to interrogate, even perhaps to deconstruct the religious and ethical values they study ought also to develop higher level critical skills which enable the criticism of methodologies and paradigms and worldviews.

However, we wish to push the argument one step further to suggest that by allowing no one to have God solely on their side, and by suggesting that the task of teachers and students is to combine value systems, we run the risk of doing violence to most religious traditions as they would construct their own discourses.

Faith and scholarship: my personal reappraisal (Trevor Cairney)

In the twentieth century we have witnessed the gradual removal of studies of religion from the core of inquiry to the periphery, and then eventually to separate religious institutions. A basic premise of CASE is that matters of Christian faith can inform scholarship, and should shape the engagement of Christian intellectuals with their world. Bodies like New College that are located on university campuses and that exist tserve the institution, have an added responsibility to at least remind members of university communities that faith has a significant relationship to what we think we know and how we apply this knowledge to life.

A modest proposal (Greg Clarke)

This paper is not background for an argument to establish a School of Religious Studies at the University of New South Wales. It is, rather, background for rethinking the importance and validity of offering religious perspectives within the mainstream of secular university education: Christian perspectives on social work, on the history of English literature, on metaphysics and ethics, on law. There may be an argument for a Christian perspective within concrete technology that we haven’t yet thought of, but it is probably true that not all areas of scholarship and research benefit to the same degree from religious perspectives.

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