THE PRESIDENT of one of America's best-known Catholic places of learning came this week to his alma mater, Oxford University, and with some fanfare delivered a lecture on the future of higher education. His hosts included Chris Patten, the eminent Conservative politician who is now Chancellor of Oxford University and happens to be a fellow Catholic.
So did the visitor, whose academic interests include medieval theology, deliver a lament over the weakening Christian connections of places like Oxford, which emerged in a 12th-century world where learning and public activity of any kind were almost inseparable from religion? Did he deplore the fact that Oxford had incubated the "new atheist" movement? No, Father John Jenkins, the president of Notre Dame University (pictured), did nothing of the kind. Instead, he emphasised the spirit of inquiry, dispute and interrogation that characterised Oxford from its earliest days and argued that the same spirit could and should guarantee the future of universities as physical places, as opposed...Continue reading
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