For our New School Histories vertical I've been struggling with writing a piece about religious studies at the New School. That's for two reasons, at least. First, there's more than fits into a short piece - and it's not a unified story. The other reason has to do with the fact that religious studies at the New School is me. It's bound to look self-aggrandizing or aggrieved - or both! What to do?Currently my draft has four parts (after a clever opening remarking that our centennial festival fell between the Jewish New Year and the Day of Atonement, and naming the "Religion - Why?" lecture series held on Friday nights in 1933). The first part considers what "religion" meant to our founders. It includes a cameo of Herbert Croly, who seems to have subscribed to a Comtean religion of humanity, seeing social research as a kind of theology for a new day. James Harvey Robinson thought the social sciences were the belated application of scientific method to the study of the human, which had been held back by medieval theological ideas about human uniqueness. And then must of course come Horace Kallen, who taught about religion from 1920 on, rejecting (while still studying) the world religions but defending the particular understanding of the importance of religious freedom he eventually called "secularism as the will of God."
Kallen shaped the pluralistic ethos of the New School, one which did not just embrace the social scientific of study of religion but welcomed dialogue with public theologians. In the 50s we gave honorary degrees to religious luminaries Reinhold Niebuhr (1951), James H. Robinson (1953), Paul Tillich (1955), Martin Buber (1957) and Jacques Maritain (1959)! Niebuhr, Tillich and Maritain each were significant presences over the years at the New School, too, as was the Union Theological Seminary theologian and sociologist of religion Arthur Swift, whose quarter century at the New School began with the "Religion - Why?" course of 1933 and ended with his being Vice President for Planning and Dean of the School of Politics and Social Studies. Our longest serving president, Jack Everett, also studied (and was ordained) at Union, and was introduced to the New School as a specialist in philosophy and religion. If the University of Chicago is one overlooked peer of the New School for Social Research as it worked out its mission in the world, Union Theological Seminary may be another.
That wants to be the second part, mainly for reasons of chronology. Public theology is as forgotten now as messianic hopes for the social sciences. The third part celebrates New School as a place where important academic thinking on secularism has happened, mainly in the sociology of religion. (Philosophy has also long engaged theology in a way few other programs do, notably in the work of Hans Jonas and Reiner Schürman.) It's quite astonishing really that so small a place should have been the site for the writing of Peter Berger's Sacred Canopy, Jose Casanova's Public Religions in the Modern World, Talal Asad's Genealogies of Religion and, if a little indirectly, Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. There's something in the mix here which leads people to see beyond the limitations of facile theories of secularization... the result, I think, more of the intersection of continental social science and American religious rambunctiousness than of Kallenian pluralistic liberalism.
The final part is the hardest, as it has somehow to tie these together, if only as disparate threads. But better if I could render them all moments or elements of some central thing! What I'd like to get at is what I called the "faith(s) of the New School" at the Festival of New - to suggest that this religious/secular efflorescence wasn't accidental but reveals something essential about the project of the New School. (This is where I need to try not to sound aggrieved...) I'd like to build off a letter Kallen wrote to one of the Protestant presidents explaining that the New School was a sort of "free religious society," its supporters a "church." For Kallen the church language wasn't metaphorical. The New School was a temple to Adult Education, its ultimate concern - a Tillichian idea Kallen happily coopted - freedom in all its dimensions. Curious! And still true? Are we a church still, and, if so, what do we revere? In the end I'd like to find a way gently to suggest that our talismanic invocations of "the new" border on idolatry!
So there you have it, six characters in search of an author. And still I'm leaving so much out! Where is the Jewish New School, which produced wonders like the course "The Bible: A Human Document," taught by a Reform rabbi in 1971 and featured as one of ten representative courses in a TV series? (NS030107_001676)? For that matter, what about all the zany brainy courses offered in the Adult Division over the years, or Krishnamurti's New School lectures? Some of the earliest courses in feminist and gay theology? But my argument needs not to be about religion or its study as narrowly conceived; the folks I've mentioned all saw it more broadly.
