Religion, the Public Good, and the Research University

Abstract

I am delighted to be with you today and to have this opportunity to share with you some thoughts about “Religion, the Public Good, and the Research University.” Of course it is important to acknowledge at the outset that any one of these terms probably merits at least the full thirty-five minutes of this speaker’s time and also the fifteen minutes allotted today for discussion. So I am not going to attempt to do justice to any one of the three. Rather I am interested in their intersection and what that might itself create. Is there a place where religion, the public good, and the research university intersect? I believe that there is; and I propose in what follows to try to describe that place for you. As an intellectual location, what I will be describing is a mental rather than a physical space. It is attitudinal. Nonetheless it most emphatically is a space. It is of interest itself, but it is also, to resort to metaphor, the “core” for what makes civil society possible. So this mental space has purely intellectual interest, and getting it right is in important ways a matter of thinking clearly and well – it is a fun puzzle to work out. But it also is absolutely vital to how we live together. Its magic is this dual character, and its existence is a matter of preserving both parts of that character. I need to note two qualifications about what follows. My frame of reference in this talk will explicitly concern the American experiment in civil society. I am aware that this is a limitation. I also fear that it could be a danger. It is a limitation that I am insufficiently versed in other versions of civil society. For that I can only acknowledge my ignorance and invite those who know more to contribute. It is a danger in that it provides an opening for misunderstanding. I hope I shall not risk this danger in what follows, but let me say here that none of what follows is meant to imply in any simple sense a commitment to the American model of democracy for the entire world community. I love American democracy and consider myself privileged to be a citizen under its governance. But the world is a complex place, and I am unwilling to operate on the assumption that the form of government I enjoy and deeply love is axiomatically the best for all peoples in all places ...