Religion and Belief in University Practices

Abstract

This chapter assesses religion and belief in university practices. In many ways, universities continue to reflect their Christian medieval roots (directly or by pastiche), hanging on to the gowns and hoods, titles, and roles of a Christian age. This legacy is deep in the contemporary higher education landscape. A crucial challenge is how to work out a place for education — in universities, as for schools — which emerges out of a Christian past, and to some extent present, while at the same time taking fully and authentically on board the contemporary religion and belief landscape, which is Christian, secular, plural, and non-religious all at once. The problem is that universities tend to pick up where schools leave off, continuing the confusion with a subtextual replaying in both teaching and operations of old binaries and tropes about science versus religion, secular versus sacred, private versus public, and resource versus risk. These are all built deeply into the epistemologies of disciplines, as well as reflected in the day-to-day operations of institutions.