Sherry Chandler

from this morning’s NYTimes:

GEORGETOWN, Ky. — The request seemed simple enough to the Rev. Hershael W. York, then the president of the Kentucky Baptist Convention. He asked Georgetown College, a small Baptist liberal arts institution here, to consider hiring for its religion department someone who would teach a literal interpretation of the Bible.

But to William H. Crouch Jr., the president of Georgetown, it was among the last straws in a struggle that had involved issues like who could be on the board of trustees and whether the college encouraged enough freedom of inquiry to qualify for a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

Dr. Crouch and his trustees decided it was time to end the college’s 63-year affiliation with the religious denomination. “From my point of view, it was about academic freedom,’’ Dr. Crouch said. “I sat for 25 years and watched my denomination become much more narrow and, in terms of education, much more interested in indoctrination.’’

Georgetown is among a half-dozen colleges and universities whose ties with state Baptist conventions have been severed in the last four years, part of a broad realignment in which more than a dozen Southern Baptist universities, including Wake Forest and Furman, have ended affiliations over the last two decades. Georgetown’s parting was ultimately amicable. But many have been tense, even bitter.

I got my undergraduate degree at Georgetown College, a decent liberal arts education including six hours of Bible history that, though I dreaded them, turned out to be among the most interesting courses I took there. These were classes in Bible scholarship in which I first learned how the phenomenon we call “the Bible” came to be written and by whom. It was in these classes that I first learned that Genesis tells at least two creation stories because it had a least two “authors” and it was in these classes that it was first pointed out to me that the New Testament Gospels don’t agree with one another.

The classes broadened my mind but they did not undermine my faith. Whether my faith has been undermined, how, and by whom is a question I’ll reserve for myself but it was not these Bible history classes that did it. They only made me eager for more knowledge. I love learning, especially about how humankind tells stories.

Georgetown has educated a lot of teachers in north central Kentucky — it is within commuting distance for many (as it was for me) and it also offers distance learning via internet. Its enrollment is not strictly Baptist and although their motto is “education in a Christian context,” they are not narrow in the way denominational schools can sometimes be. So I am proud of Georgetown College, proud that they are not going to yield to pressure to become narrow. They gave up a lot of guaranteed moneys for this decision.

The article continues like this:

…efforts to rein in what many Southern Baptists see as inappropriate departures from religious orthodoxy have looked to many professors and college administrators like efforts to limit academic freedom.

“The convention itself in its national and state organizations has moved so far to the right that previous diversity on the faculty and among the trustees is no longer possible,’’ said Bill Leonard, dean of the Divinity School at Wake Forest. “More theological control of the curriculum and the faculty has been the result.’’

David W. Key, director of Baptist Studies at the Candler School of Theology at Emory, put it more starkly. “The real underlying issue is that fundamentalism in the Southern Baptist form is incompatible with higher education,’’ Professor Key said. “In fundamentalism, you have all the truths. In education, you’re searching for truths.’’

The state conventions do not own the colleges, but in most cases they approve trustees and provide annual subsidies.

[Note: the article talks about Georgetown's efforts to become a Phi Beta Kappa affiliate. I would have dearly loved to have had that when I was there in the late sixties.]

Hummingbirds love these perfumed old-fashioned phlox that have persisted under our bedroom window in spite of drought, heat, and all manner of neglect since before I came to live here nearly a quarter century ago.

My mother’s phlox all bloom in neat round balls. They would not dare to do anything else. Mine are always a little frowsy.