Dr. Larycia Hawkins, an associate professor of political science at Wheaton College, a small Christian college in the Chicago suburbs, has been suspended for professing support of Muslims.
Now I’m just a Jewish agnostic; what do I know? but it seems awfully, oh, wrong to suspend (and, I’m guessing commence termination proceedings) a political science professor who is herself a practicing Christian for supporting another People of the Book. AM I missing something?
And I am curious to see whether it will fly under Federal and Illinois employment laws. As we have all seen recently, religiously based organizations have been given what I consider to be a terrifying amount of latitude to make decisions about people’s employment that have nothing to do with their professional competence, and everything to do with stamping out dissent. So much for academic freedom.
When people claim Muslims and Christians “worship the same God,” I have to ask…so they’re claiming Muslims worship a God who considered the Jews to be the chosen people?
Yes. Your characterization of her actions as merely “supporting” Muslims is grossly inaccurate. She made a specific theological claim.
Had she simply said, “I support our Muslim brothers and sisters,” I would agree it was wrong to suspend or fire her.
But she said that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. This is theologically problematic – as is pointed out above, the Christian God is the God that enter into a covenant with Abraham, and thus chose the Jews as His people, and then became flesh and dwelt among us as the Messiah.
That’s not the description of Allah that Islam generally offers, especially with respect to Jews being God’s Chosen.
A religious college does not have to valorize “academic freedom,” over adherence to their dogma. That’s the point of having a private religious college: to adopt and promulgate their understanding of divine truth, not to empower their faculty to expand on their dogma.
They don’t claim to, they don’t have to, and they don’t – which makes your mention of it a strawman argument.
Not remotely correct. If there are two tribes, Green and Blue, and each worships a God which they believe to be green or blue respectively, then how can you possibly claim they are worshiping the same God?
I should note, by the way, that my personal view is that the professor’s statement is theologically correct. But I am not an evangelical Christian: I am a Roman Catholic Christian.
Christians - typically seem to think Christian and Jews worship the same God, but not Muslims.
Jews - Orthodox Jews at least typically follow Maimonides and think Muslims and Jews worship the same God, but not Christians ( due to the problem of Trinitarianism which Maimonides considered a theological bridge too far vis-a-vis a unitary God ).
Muslims - generally think all three worship the same God. It’s actually an article of faith, hence the phrase ‘Peoples of the Book’. It explicitly places Muhammed as the terminal link in a chain starting with Abraham and including Jesus. Muslims just think Christians and Jews are doing it wrong and have garbled the messages of earlier Prophets.
The Qur’an does in fact explicitly acknowledge the one time special status of Jews. But that special status was bound up with maintaining a covenant with God and well…rejecting Muhammed in the Islamic view is not exactly in line with maintaining said covenant.
Wheaton’s statement makes no reference to the actual words to which they object. Most media has focused on the statement that Christians and Muslims are both “people of the book,” but having seen her complete statement, I wonder if Wheaton was actually more outraged by a preceding paragraph:
If Wheaton holds to a specific view of the Creation narrative, that paragraph would seem to be more upsetting to them.
It will be interesting to see whether Wheaton further explains what prompted their action.
I think Wheaton is being silly and probably overreacting in response to some outraged alumni or potential Evangelical donors, but in fairness we ought to find out the actual point they thought they were making.
I didn’t feel like quoting the article verbatim, which would be against board policy anyway, or even paraphrasing the whole thing.
Funny, apparently the Pope pretty much agrees with her. He’s not a Christian, then?
I never claimed they had to. I simply claimed that in my opinion, it was wrong of Wheaton College to take adverse employment action against a tenured faculty member for expressing her own opinion about how she, as a Christian, should behave toward people who are not Christian. In fact, from what I’ve seen in similar cases (including someone who is now a co-worker of mine because she was forced out of her previous job at a religiously based nonprofit for refusing to abide by a similar statement of faith that was imposed on her agency years after she started working there, an agency that served refugees no less, many of whom were persecuted based on their religion and most of those were not Christian), Wheaton College may well get away with this.
I have talked with my co-worker about how she was forced out of her previous job, as well as with my boss (who is also an employment lawyer) about this and other similar incidents. He tells me that religiously based institutions have wide latitude to behave in ways that would violate employment law if any other entity did so. (He told me the same when my aunt was laid off from her pre-K teaching job at a synagogue-based school at the age of 64, after more than 30 years of employment with a stellar record.) I am not disputing that Wheaton College may well be within their legal rights to do what they did; I simply believe that what they are doing is morally wrong and violates academic freedom.
I am not a Christian of any flavor, or religiously observant at all. That doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to have an opinion about matters that touch on religion. Incidents like this are among the many, many reasons why I am not a follower of any organized religion. JMHO.
The Pope is playing a different edition of D&D–er, scratch that, operating according to a different set of theological principles from those of this college.
From the perspective of an atheist, the question is meaningless: it’s like asking whether people who believe in aliens and people who believe in fairies believe in the same creature. The superficial answer is that they describe their creature of choice as possessing slightly different characteristics, so they’re different creatures. More in-depth answers necessarily presuppose the existence of the creature in question.
So for me, it seems simple: if you don’t think you worship the same God as someone else, you don’t. That God you worship has, as one of its characteristics, that it’s different in some way from the God that other dude worships. Believing that they’re the same requires believing they have some characters that exist outside of the heads of their believers.
But then it gets tricky: if you believe your God is the same as the one that Billie worships, no matter that Billie thinks her God is different from yours, is it the same? I say no: your God has as a characteristic its identical nature to Billie’s God, whereas Billie’s God has as a characteristic its non-identical nature. Clearly they have different and mutually incompatible characteristics. They ain’t the same, no matter your belief.
Short of mystical P and Not P logical permutations, I come down with the godsplitters and not the godlumpers.
As I’m sure religious folk everywhere are so happy to find out :).
OK, I’m outraged but that statement since Sterkfontein does not contain the fossils of any generally accepted human ancestors. This prof needs to get her anthropology correct! Mainly, that site is famous as the location of the famous Taung child fossil-- a member of A. africanus. Some other species, too, but none that are clearly our ancestors.
But, as far as her wearing hijab… well, I can’t get behind someone adopting the symbol of gender discrimination by a religion just because that religion happens to be demonized recently. We hear a lot about women choosing to wear hijab, but in too many places it’s not choice, but a way to keep women in line.
If that ends up being the reason, I’m not sure which would be more ridiculous. But this is why I didn’t even consider attending a religiously based university.
Mainly, that site is famous as the location of the famous Taung child fossil-- a member of A. africanus. Some other species, too, but none that are clearly our ancestors.