Vox Clamantis: In Defense of Stonehill
By Alex Cushman
Published on Tuesday, February 12, 2008
To the Editor:
In response to Lucy Stonehill's article ("See You in Hell," Feb. 6) and the ensuing discussion on this page ("I'd Rather Not See You In Hell," Feb. 11; "Mirror, Mirror, In The Classroom," Feb. 11), I would like to stress that Ms. Stonehill should not be targeted for any supposed "irreligious zeal." Rather, she should be commended for fostering a valuable discussion about the role of religion in academic settings.
Labeling Ms. Stonehill as guilty of subjectivity misses the broader and more significant point of her article: rigid acceptance of any subject matter -- let alone one as controversial as religion -- is inimical to the goals of higher education.
Those students who actually did approach the class material with inquisitive minds were led off topic by one student's remarks, making it difficult to continue an analytical discussion. While indeed the said student's comments were and are important to "fostering an open, more self-aware exchange of ideas," as Lydia Chammas '09 argues, his comments were perhaps less germane to the discussion on the assigned reading.
Stonehill is not anti-religious; she is concerned about certain narrow-minded practices of religion and those practices' negative effects on intellectual study and society at large. Furthermore, religion and its intellectual study are by no means mutually exclusive. Religion can and should be discussed in academic settings where the arguments of all sides can be debated and discussed in the open.