God, money, and power

Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, at Killing the Buddha:

Every Christian college is part school and part Bible camp; its purpose falls somewhere between education and indoctrination. Even the most well-intentioned ones exist, to some extent, to impart certain religious values to their students. Ideally, there is no conflict between good scholarship and the doctrines professed by Christians, but in practice that isn’t always the case. Of course, this tension is seen to a certain degree in all institutions of higher learning—education is never completely free of bias.

There are some Christian schools that do reach toward impartiality, allowing students “freedom within a framework of faith”—as a popular tagline of Gordon College, my alma mater, has it. At the other end of the spectrum, however, are those that aspire to turn out a certain kind of student, with certain political leanings and a mission to remake the world according to a certain conception of Christianity. The King’s College is among the most flagrant among them. I know because I taught there, at its “campus” spread across a few floors—mainly in the basement—of the Empire State Building.

Read the entire article here.

Charles Gelman is a contributing editor of The Immanent Frame and an associate editor of Frequencies. A former program assistant at the Social Science Research Council, he is currently a doctoral student in comparative literature at New York University. He earned his B.A. from the Gallatin School, NYU, in 2009.

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