[asa] Teaching religion in state schools

Today's Boston Globe ran a story about a book by BU prof Stephen Prothero called "Religious Illiteracy" http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2007/03/04/holy_book_learning/?page=1

He shows how little Americans know about the Bible and Christian faith and argues that the school system should teach religion, in a non-devotional sense. The article ends with this paragraph:

"And it's not only church-state watchdogs and atheists who are skeptical about whether teachers can pull off the non-devotional tightrope walk. "My own sense," says Mark Noll, an acclaimed historian at Notre Dame who is an evangelical Christian, "is that the Bible is a pretty explosive book. If students read it carefully, they'd be changed in a way that public schools couldn't handle -- and appropriately so."

We seem to have both low scientific literacy and low religious literacy in this country, if his statistics are right. No wonder we're having trouble communication the integration of the two.

In the same issue (it's rare enough for the Globe to have one good article, but two in one day??) Jeff Jacoby argues for the separation of school and state. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/03/04/a_call_for_separation_of_school_and_state/ Now that would put science education in an very different situation! No more court cases. But the battles wouldn't cease, I'm sure.

And completing an even more rare hat trick, the Globe ran this piece on the new book "The Human Touch" by Michael Frayn. http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2007/03/04/complex_reflections_on_cosmos_and_consciousness/?page=1 You may recall his play "Copenhagen." One paragraph in this article is:

"All this said, there are moments when the artist breaks free. We get a lovely claim for fiction rather than fact as our paradigm. Would Darwin's evolution have produced its revolution in our sense of the world, without Genesis to precede it? And, this amiably shrewd unbeliever writes: "We have to know that God made man before we can understand that man made God.""

Randy

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Received on Sun Mar 4 20:41:44 2007