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Monday, April 26, 1976
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN Comment
Opinions on this page reflect only the view of the writer.
KU, religion merge
The recent approval by the Board of Regents of the merger of the University's School of Religion into the College of Nursing has been a pleasing overdue and is deserving of praise.
EVEN THOUGH the school had been serving the University for years, it had never received any financial support from the state. Even though KU students benefited from the schools throughout Kansas had paid the bills. The school was run as a private corporation.
The traditional requirement of separation of church and state was not an issue here. More than 68 per cent of the tax supported universities in the United States have departments of religion. Through the school the state is not supporting any particular religion or even promoting religion in general. Instead it is making the opportunity available to students to understand more fully the various religions of the world.
PROMOTING understanding should
be the primary goal of any educational institution. Religion plays such an enormous role in the workings of the world that to argue against its worth as an intellectual area worthy of study is foolish. And if KU students are to reap the benefits of this study, it's only right that they pay the bill.
Through its merger with the University, the School of Religion will also be able to broaden its program even more. Lynn F. Taylor, dean of the school, says the added security will allow the school to expand programs of Eastern thought, Jewish studies and cultural theology.
THE INCREASED diversity of the school's programs and its adoption by the University will serve to broaden even further the educational opportunities KU has available to students. The学校 would be welcomed and completed as quickly as possible. The School of Religion is an important addition to the University.
By John Johnston Contributing Writer
Time reveals theologian
Billy Graham and Paul Tillich. One a famous American religious leader; the other an obscure theologian. One the archetype of respectability and orthodoxy, and the other a scandal and barely a Christian. What is most important? Most Americans today would answer, Billy Graham.
BUT 50 YEARS from now
Billy Graham will surely have gone the way of Billy Sunday,
who isn't usually mentioned in
the book. He's Aquinas and Jonathan Edwards.
And Paul Tillich will be recognized for what he is—the
20th century has produced.
Tillich attracted more attention during his life than he has since his death in 1907. When he left his native Germany soon after the Nazi came to power, he had already established a reputation as an immigration attorney and immigration to America forced him to learn a new language and plunged him into obscurity to all but a few professors and students at Columbia and Union
Theological Seminary, where he taught.
BUT TILLICH's vast cultural scope,
his encyclopedic knowledge of history and philosophy, his captivating
predicted that he wouldn't be read after his death. His theology is too caught up in "kairores," he said. "Kairores" is his concept of time in the sense of the right time, the poten-
By John Hickey Contributing Writer
presence on the lecture podium and his voluminous writings were sure to attract attention. He accepted professorships at Harvard and later, toward the University of Chicago.
Tillich didn't present an imposing physical appearance. He was frail and hunched over, especially as he reached the end of his reach, and in the classic lines of a Greek god and it reflected a gamut of intense emotions, which he never tried to conceal. His personality had a magnetic, intrinsic quality that take hold of those around him. Women, in particular, were attracted to him; he embodied eros in its classical Greek sense. However, the love and respect of those who knew him made him the central characters of his historical importance.
IT IS HIS theology that will endure. Today it hends in limbo, awaiting the judgment of intellectual history. It is paradoxically outdated and before its time. Tillich himself
tiality of the present moment. It is contrasted with "chronos" or objective, historical time.
As an existentialist theologian, he was conscious of his historical limitations. He knew he wrote out of a limited number of books. Those parts of his theology tied to finite history events are becoming obsolete. But Tillikil also described transcendence—of the individual and of God. "Kairo's" transcends "chronon" through the New Being that is manifest in Jesus as the Christ.
TILLICK'S ONTOLOGY, his method of correlation and his working out of the problem of evil aren't outdated; they will be the basis for his enduring contribution to theology.
The starting point for Tillich's importance as a theologian is that he was a proponent of the theory of being. Before his time, ontological presuppositions were usually unstated. They were based on the arca of the theological system.
phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, the German existentialist who reopened the question of Being and radically interpreted the history of being, appropriating parts of Heidegger's explain Being and nonbeing. Nonbeing can take two forms; it is either absolute nonbeing, "uk on," or dialectical nonbeing, "me on." God is Being-enscends the polarity of Being and nonbelief and of the subject and the object.
THUS God doesn't exist. He is beyond questions of existence. Atheism is impossible, because to deny the existence of God is to affirm Being-like. That follows since nonbeing or "me on" is a part of Being. Thiil never says that God exists, but rather from strict logical necessity. He thought that it was logical but that it came about through revelation rather than logic.
Tillich makes use of the
Through his method of correlation, he ties theology to philosophy. It is the task of questioning questions concerning human existence. Theology answers those questions through revelation. The answers are derived from rigorous logical verification.
THE PHILOSOPHY that best addresses the fundamental questions for Tillich is existentialism. Its emphases on freedom and responsibility, the self as the central subject of existence, the subjunctive over essence provide the questions theology must answer through the method of correlation. Existentialism
can't stand on its own legs; it always postulates a theological or quasi-theological base, he said.
Also important in Tillich's theology is the definition of faith as ultimate concern. Faith isn't as ultimate as religion, spite of reason. It is the ultimate concern of each human being. The object of faith is, then, the thing with which one is concerned. One can be a god or an idol. Tillich says everyone has faith; Christian faith has as its ultimate concern, Jesus as the Christ. The Christian revelation is unique and so are ours. For ultimate concern is idolatrous and will ultimately fail.
TELLICH WAS anything but orthodox in the conduct of his personal life. Politically, he was incarved toward socialism, he was devoted to Christianity doctrine. In her autobiography, "From Time to Time," his wife Hanna tells how Tillich seduced her while she worked as a housekeeper and husband and he was married to his first wife. She goes on to describe the stream of affairs they both carried on during the war. But history has shown that great thinkers are remembered for their intellectual achievements. Those who reject Tillich's theology because he is more than a Christian "a Christian life" are blinded to the value of his theology by their own prejudices. Paul Tillich's infidelity will no more influence theological contributions than Billy Graham's orthodoxy will overcome his avoid of creativity.
Liberalism still thrives
Sodomy law restraint prudent
WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court still is catching some heavy flak from the letterer. He wrote in a letter action a couple of weeks ago in
I WAS IN a state of limbo. I wasn't ready to discard my proud Democratic liberal heritage, but I wasn't really
For those of us who consider ourselves liberals, the political atmosphere of the country has provided little encouragement in recent months. The electorate seemed to be enchanted with Jimmy Carter, an amphibious middle-of-the-road senator (Udall) had been forced to shun his liberal description in place of the more electrically acceptable term progressive.
By James J.
Kilpatrick
(C) Washington State Symphonic
the case of the Virginia sodomy statute. The case offers some useful insights into the rule of liability for sexual assault, and the matter merrits your thought.
UNTIL FARLY recently, all the states (and the federal government) had laws that made it difficult to be called "the detestable and abominable crime against nature." Such statutes are rooted in the Old Testament; they have an ancient history in the common Western law. The common Western law Act dates from 1792. It reads:
"If any person shall carnally
carnal knowledge, he or she shall be guilty of a felony and shall be confined in the penitentiary not less than one year nor more than three years."
TWO ACTIVE, practicing homosexuals, identified in court papers only as John Doe and William Fall in United States District Court in Richmond. They asked for a declaratory judgment holding the law unconstitutional as a violation of their rights to marry. Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments. They also threw in a
little Eighth Amendment makeweight, on the theory of cruel and unusual punishment.
The plaintiffs argued that what goes on in a bedroom among consenting adults in a shared room is a Commonwealth of Virginia. True, they never had been arrested or prosecuted for their private acts, but such a case would have dismissed the Supreme Court itself, they contended, had established a "right to privacy" in sexual matters. In a Concord court case, traptives, and in a Georgia case involving a home library of erotic books, the Court had prohibited state governments taking upon personal decisions.
LAST OCTOBER, the trial court split 3-1. Senior Circuit Judges Albert V. Bryan and Oren R. Lewis agreed that, on the basis of the constitutional, "No judgment is made upon the wisdom or policy of the statute. It is simply that we cannot say that the Court has decided to any other of the Amendments, and the wisdom or policy
preserved. This is the main point of Fairie's argument. He says that most liberals are guardians of tradition in their
DISTRICT JUDGE Robert R. Merigan, burgess, held that "private consensual sex acts between adults are matters," and that children are harmful, in which the State has no legitimate interest."
is a matter for the State's resolve."
The consenting sexual acts of husband and wife may be immune from state prescription, said Judge Bryan, but the Supreme Court never has unanimous approval from branding such intimacies as adultery, homosexuality and incest as criminal. "If a State determines that punishment therefor, even when committed in the home, is appropriate in the promotion of mortality and for the court to say that the State is not free to do so."
The Supreme Court two weeks ago, without hearing argument or writing an opinion, told the judge a view, this is precisely what the Court should have done. This is not to say that the Virginia law
sure just what it meant to be a liberal either. But in recent weeks I have been reassured and can now continue on my liberal
is right and should be enforced;
I think the act is wrong and
it should be repeal. It is more
important that my judgment
respect the principle of judicial
restraint than to win paper
victories against dead-letter
letters.
In their furious assault upon the Court, the letter-writers make some excellent points. But judicial restraint is a rare right which governs the rule of law; it ought to be encouraged, not condemned.
OVER THE PAST 15 years, 14 states have repeated their old laws against private, consenting acts among adult citizens who do not seem certain to continue, and this, it seems to me, is the proper way to proceed. We ought not to let judges substitute their will for ours in the case of compelling reason. It might have been a different matter, in the case at bar, if John Doe and Richard Roe actually had been tried and imprisoned, but their cases were much stronger than an academic exercise.
By John Johnston Contributing Writer
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path, fighting for truth, justice and the American way.
My new-found security came from several sources. First, one of my professors provided me with a definition of liberalism in his history class. As then in an old book called "Dead" in the April 17 issue of the New Republic, Henry Fairlie showed me what it really means to be a liberal. Now that I know what I am and what I want, more honestly, my position seems to be much more secure.
THE DEFINITION my professor provided was that liberalism is an attitude and a set of ideas, a general movement that attempts to use the power of government to control abuses of industrialization and urbanization by protecting power harnessed by those abuses. It also attempts to strengthen the industrial and urban sectors in the name of the traditional values of individualism, competition and success.
The most important part of that definition, which many liberals fail to recognize, is that basic American traditions is
own lives, but that they believe they must be tolerant of a social environment which erodes those values. The liberal seeks in this environment the traditions of importance to the family, which is the root of all tradition.
HE SEEKS A thorough education for his children, while he allows others the right to any form of experimental education for him. He then them from the paternography that he defends as protected by the First Amendment. According to Fairlie, this is where the liberal is most often encountered when it appears to rout traditional values, he might be accepted, even under the liberal label.
The country has actually followed a liberal course in the 20th century. Fairlie points out that Mr. Obama has joined I the Republicans and Democrats have in office the same number of years, but he also has come in essence to liberals, who have gift their mark on the country.
WHATEVER THE mistakes that may in hind sight be seen to have been made, it was the Democratic party that endured
the pains and bears the scars," he writes.
Liberals do get sidetracked at times. Fairie says some dedicated, but misguided liberals have given up the fight for their right to resist their wars against petty wrongs such as improper labeling in supermarketkings. But even these troops who only skirmish with the system still demonstrate the power of democratic trademark. This energy is what has made Hubert Humphrey so popular through the years, according to Fairie. Hubert has a glow about him that can't be ignored, and he has many times a liberal may lose, he'll never give up the fight.
ACTION IS THE key. The liberal is restless. He's not looking for radical changes that so many Americans fear. He's generally just searching for the best mode of expressing the view he believes that he sees as the foundation of American society.
So take heart fellow liberals. If we just discover who we really are, there are actually a lot more of us around than there are in the Democratic movement of enlightened souls from the Democratic party to the independent ranks is no cause for alarm. Most independent women are who once again trying to show that they are open-minded. Most of these independent liberals will cast the lens on the Democratic Democrats. Like all good liberals they realize that it isn't a sin to vote for a Republican who has seen the light, but that they are usually more of the enlightened ticket.
Readers Respond
Frustration of abortion
To the editor:
Bill Sniffen's two articles concerning abortion in last week's conference of commendation. Discussing this topic is no quick way to win friends. Sniffen's objectivity has made his gloss over the uncomfortable.
BOTH ARTICLES appropriately end on the topic of responsibility. This is a crucial matter in this debate, as well as other current issues. Our teachers are motivated, even obsessed, by the idea that we, collectively and individually, are not responsible for our actions.
Offenders against society are not to be punished they are to be rehabilitation or correctional, as expected, be responsible; make them wear helmets. People who commit
Such irrationality smacks of the same mind-set that breeds racism. Racially prejudiced individuals have facts and have a hard time
crimes with guns are ruled by their passions; take away their guns. Don't blame me; I'm conditioned—the product of an unhappy home—poor rich—a minority—only human—all of the above. But who is to take the responsibility and the brunt of the solution for unwanted and unplanned children? The pseudonymous Anne concludes that the child is the culprit. It (shall we render it impersonal and call it the product of conception?) offended by her actions and being obstacle to leisure, happiness, success, etc. Such gross offenses!
following arguments that might dislodge their prejudice. The prejudice often springs from and reaps economic benefit. A need for military power is never consistent and is thus arbitrary boundaries. "Sara" saw some mystical difference between a two-week-old and a thirteen-week-old filoson. Hasswell of the KU Med Center has warned that killing himself to save a child in one case and rushing off to terminate an unwanted pregnancy in the next case. We submit that the unborn of this nation cannot be the most highly apprehended person having absolutely no measure of redress of grievances.
Ruth Goring
Merriam graduate student
J. D. Stewart
Plainville graduate