"Old School" Scholars and the Contemporary American University: Oil and Water

In the 2000s, I had the honor of studying under Patrick Riley, a scholar of historical moral, religious, and political thought. Even though I had had "old-school" professors in the course of my degreed studies at Indiana University and Yale, Riley's approach can be said to be medieval. After four years of auditing his courses and those of many of other professors at Riley's request at a large Midwestern university, I received not a degree nor even many academic credits, but. rather, a hand-written letter in which he let his colleagues know that I could teach graduate-school level political theory. It is no accident that he periodically visited the University of Bologna, which, aside from hosting the huge project of publishing Leibniz's correspondence, was as the first university in Europe, founded in 1066. Back then, I bet letters of recommendation were the principal way in which scholars got hired; a scholar became recognized as one when the scholar he studied under realized that the budding scholar knew enough of the field, which is more than merely doing well in some classes. How technocratic and artificial contemporary universities would seem to ancient and medieval scholars. I think they would be startled at how many pedestrian scholars there are, who relish making narrow distinctions based on technicalities. In contrast, Patrick Riley a product of Harvard, where he continued to work and live even during the many years in which he took weekly flights during the semesters out to a Midwestern university, viewed European intellectual history in the great book tradition and was thus able to see intellectual inheritances well beyond Augustine's in Plato and Aquinas' in Aristotle. Riley traced how the theory of justice as love and benevolence came together from strands of thought in Plato and Augustine in the thought of Leibniz, and how the social contract school of political thought changed in going from Hobbes to Kant. Moreover, I admired Riley's relating of historical theological and moral thought to the political thought. How technocratic or pedestrian so many other twentieth-century scholars were, but not Patrick Riley. 

The full essay is at "Old-School Scholars"

Behind the Prejudice Against Educated Clergy

Among Quakers (many congregations of which refuse to record ministers), some evangelical congregations, and other faiths such as Baha'i (which does not have a clergy), there seems to be an underlying anti-intellectual bias regarding ministers educated in theology and ministry. I think the prejudice is out of anger, whose root is the errant assumption that knowledge, even in faith seeking understanding, causes the educated person to think he or she is better than others. Relatedly, expertise is assumed, falsely again, to bring with it a more general elitism. These flawed assumptions give rise to the prejudice that being educated in theology and ministry are not of much value, as being uneducated or self-educated in the field are actually preferred qualities in cases in which ministers are used (e.g., many evangelical congregations). All this is a slap on the face to those of faith who have spent years of their lives in seminary or university, and such passive aggression goes against Jesus's message on how to treat others.

The full essay is at "An Intellectual Bias against Educated Ministers."

Religion as an Academic Area of Study

What is religion? What does the domain of religion cover? What is excluded? Does opinion eclipse knowledge in marking the boundaries? Should we allow empirical self-identification claims from self-proclaimed religionists to veto any offending established knowledge of what the religion is? I contend that an atheist who claims he is nonetheless a practitioner of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam does not alter the fact that the three Abrahamic religions are monotheist. Atheist Judaism, for instance, is an oxymoron born of an arrogant subjectivity that offends reason itself and therefore cannot be valid.

The full essay is at "Religion as an Academic Area of Study." 

The Coronation of King Charles III: A Case of Elitist Leadership

 Is elitism ethical when it seeks to portray itself as favoring racial diversity after having been accused from within of being racist against black people—and even a multiracial member of the leadership cadre? Moreover, can elitism itself be ethical? Furthermore, can it be Christian? By elitist, I have in mind the motive to exclude. In attending Yale University, I was surprised when I discovered that exclusion was practiced within the university among and by the students. It was not enough to have been selected to attend the highly-selective university; some students felt the instinctual urge once within to exclude other students. I discovered this when the chairman of the political party in the Yale Political Union that I had joined lied to me that if I would come to a Friday night party held in the Yale clock tower that I would be tapped to join the secret society owned by the party. That chairman and his surrounding inner cadre misled party members into coming. After all, what good is tapping friends if there are not other people watching and thus to be excluded? Regarding the coronation of King Charles (Winsor) in Britain in 2023, I contend that at the very least, the royal planners can be charted with multiple levels of exclusion in Westminster Abbey. Furthermore, I strongly believe that “the Palace” employed a public relations firm, a significant part of whose strategy it was to combat Prince Harry’s charges of racism. This can be inferred from extent of “photo ops” highlighting good “product placement.” Specifically, people of the “Black” race were, intentionally, I submit, situated around the royal family both in the coronation itself and at the related concert in the royal box. This tactic played off the commonly mistaken inference that if someone is seen next to people of a given group, he or she could not possibly harbor ill-feelings toward that group. Although beyond the argument covered here, I suspect that this cognitive fallacy is commonly taken advantage of by public-relations firms the world over.  As applied to leadership, the tactic is geared to softening the hard corners of elitism as evinced in leadership roles. I turn first to the blatant, yet strangely unspoken layers of exclusion permitted and exasperated in the coronation itself, then I shall turn to the matter of ideological product placement, which, by the way, can be distinguished from the ethic of diversity in terms of participation. Claims of encouraging diversity can easily be used as a subterfuge to cover the real motive—that of product placement used to redress any hits to a person’s or institution’s reputation (i.e., reputational capital). I come to the conclusion beyond the ethical dimension that the passive aggression of exclusion is antithetical to Christian leadership, such as could be expected from the titular head of the Anglican Church.

The full essay is at "Elitist Leadership."