//features//
Fall 2020
Fall 2020
Religion and the University: An Interview with Dean Rottenberg
Maya Bickel
Most weeks of the semester, I spend two hours with 10–15 other students on the fifth floor of the Kraft Center exploring the intersection of Jewish texts and the Core Curriculum. These sessions of the Hillel fellowship Judaism and the Core Curriculum are invigorating; they bring the ideas and texts that I study out of the hallowed classrooms and into my life, values, and Jewish identity. We are guided each week by educators from a range of backgrounds on topics of their choosing. Reverend Dr. Ian Rottenberg has led particularly exciting, engaging, and intellectually rigorous sessions. In my favorite of his sessions, “The Poetics of Scripture,” we close-read a Rilke poem and used it as a lens to approach the fragmentary nature of the Christian and Hebrew Bibles.
Last year, Reverend Dr. Rottenberg was named Dean of Religious Life, the first such dean at Columbia. It is a curious position, raising all sorts of questions about the place of religion in our contemporary university context. Dean Rottenberg, as I have come to understand from his sessions, is always eager to engage in conversation about big questions. We met over Zoom to discuss his position as Dean of Religious Life, recent changes in the field of university chaplaincy, and the role of religion and spirituality in the lives of students.
Maya Bickel: I wanted to just start with your background. Could you tell me what you did before coming to work at Columbia, and when and in what capacity you started working at Columbia?
Dean Rottenberg: Great. So, prior to coming to Columbia, I was bi-vocational. So, I had done work in Christian churches on the one hand as an ordained Christian minister, and I also was a professor of philosophy. My Ph.D. is in philosophy of religion. And when the position opened up at Columbia—this is my fifth semester, so, in the summer of 2018, I guess that would be—I started at Columbia in a position that allowed me to combine what I see as my skills and training as a faith leader with my skills and training in the academic world.
MB: What was your position when you first came and what is it now?
DR: My position when I arrived at Columbia was Associate University Chaplain, and my position now is Dean of Religious Life.
MB: Can you explain what exactly is the Dean of Religious Life? What does that mean? What is that role?
DR: Yeah, absolutely. So, deans in a university are administrative positions who facilitate various aspects of university life and leadership. So, for a dean of religious life, the dean leads the Office of Religious Life, whose mission is to ensure that the diverse religious and spiritual needs of the university communities are met. Religious groups need particular things for their practices, whatever they may be: spaces for prayer, spaces for meditation, spaces to convene and gather. And so, whenever there are specific needs that go along with particular practices of groups on a campus, there are all kinds of administrative details: how to arrange for space, how to make sure that the spaces are kept well, how to communicate between groups who are sharing spaces. Our office facilitates that work in the Earl Hall Center, and my position as dean is to oversee the facilitating of that work.
MB: How is the position of Dean of Religious Life and the Office of Religious Life distinct from the position of a chaplain? What is the relationship between your office and the Office of the University Chaplain?
DR: Great question. So, the first thing I'll say is that our office works very closely with the Office of the University Chaplin and Chaplin Davis. The Office of the University Chaplain is part of the Office of the Provost, which in the administrative structure of the university is a different set of branches than University Life [The Office of Religious life is part of the Office of University Life]. There's so much work to be done in the fields of chaplaincy and religious administration, and so for us collectively to be connected to major parts of university administration is really helpful. Different schools have different ways of dividing administrative and chaplaincy work, and I think Columbia right now has a really healthy one, which is to have both of these offices.
One of the ways to understand how it's a great question that you're asking and that it’s not always clear to everyone is that there were two national organizations for college and university chaplaincy and religious affairs that just merged. They had separate national conferences, separate registrations. One is called NACUC, the National Association of College and University Chaplains, and the other is called ACURA, the Association of College and University Religious Affairs. And just last year, after a long process, those two national organizations merged into a single one. I still have to learn the new acronym. I think it's ACSLHE, the Association for Chaplaincy and Spiritual Life in Higher Education. The point, Maya, that I'm raising is that—you asked a question about chaplaincy and religious administration—some schools call them Deans of Religious Life; some schools call them chaplains. Some chaplains do administrative work; other chaplains do primarily counseling and programming work. There are different domains that often overlap.
MB: Am I correct in understanding that the Dean of Religious Life is a relatively new position that was created at Columbia?
DR: So, that title is new. The work that I do in directing the Earl Hall Center is work that's always happened at Columbia. The title is new because the Office of University Life is still relatively new. I forget if they're five or six years old, but the Office of University Life has been, in a very short period of time, incredibly helpful in reorganizing student affairs at the university in a way that's particularly helpful to meeting student needs. And as a part of those organizing processes sometimes administrative titles change.
MB: The Office of University Life, as you just said, responds to student needs, and having this position of Dean of Religious Life speaks to the perception by administrators that there is a need among students for this particular position. Can you speak to what that need is?
DR: I am a huge sports fan Maya—I don't know if I've told you that in the context of any of the meetings we've been a part of—but every teacher, every university employee, likes their own types of analogies. So, mine tend to be sports related. If physical health is a part of my life—and I'm a swimmer—it's great to be at a university that has a dedicated space for swimming, like a pool. Same for weightlifting or whatever my physical set of practices are. For many people coming to university communities, part of their wellness practices, part of what helps them to feel fulfilled as a human being, are not necessarily physical practices, but what we might call spiritual practices. And those spiritual practices, analogous to physical or athletic practices, require certain kinds of spaces, certain kinds of counseling services, a set of resources to allow people to feel well and whole as human beings, so that they can thrive in a university community.
MB: I liked that analogy. I'm also a swimmer!
DR: Ah, that's a nice coincidence. I don't know why I had swimming on my mind today, but it's a very specific type of environment for a specific type of practice. And that's why I connect them.
MB: Yeah, I see that. There are many students at Columbia, though, who do not identify as religious, and some who might define themselves as anti-religious or as avowed atheists. Do you and your office want to engage those students? How would the office do that? And then also, how would you, as a religious person, engage with students who may be skeptical of interacting with somebody from a religious background?
DR: I really appreciate the question. One of the things we say at the Earl Hall Center, where my office is, is that we are a center for people of all faiths and people of no faith. One of the important tasks that we have is overseeing the work of, and partnering with, a team of twenty religious life advisers. These are local faith leaders. They're not employees of the university, but we collaborate with them to make sure that all of the major religions are represented on campus, have advocacy, and have counseling resources for their faith. And one of the religious life advisors traditionally has advised Columbia's atheist and agnostic club. And she is a national leader and local leader for ethical humanism. Her name is Anne Klaeysen, and she's one of these twenty advisors who is not part of a theistic faith, who specifically is always eager to speak to people who don't identify with religion as you've described it, who may identify as highly skeptical and even consider certain aspects of religion to be problematic. We have a religious life advisor who serves the needs of those kinds of students and does it wonderfully and effectively and thoughtfully.
Intellectual engagement, relative to religion, has always been a central part of what the Earl Hall Center has done. My background, again, is in philosophy, and skepticism and critical analysis are not only welcomed, but encouraged and fostered. So, that's true for me, even though I come from a particular religious tradition, and it's certainly true of the office as a whole.
MB: Yeah, I'd like actually, on that note, for you to delve a little more into how your background in philosophy and in the Academy on the one hand and as a pastor on the other inform how you approach this position.
DR: My background as a pastor has, I think, equipped me well for the counseling functions of my role. Many times students will find us with questions, not necessarily specific to their faith tradition, but just broad questions about meaning in life and how it impacts their experiences as students at Columbia. And, because I have served young people in congregational faith settings, and because I've counseled people as a chaplain, that's something that I'm always very happy and interested in doing—talking about the struggles in our lives.
For me, my faith is very closely aligned with big questions about meaning in life and transcendence as a category. So, my pursuit of an academic degree really came about organically from the need to better articulate answers to those kinds of big questions. And one of the things I love about my position that straddles these worlds of the Academy on one side and faith practice on the other is getting to engage with students and faculty and staff and administrators about academic questions related to religion. And I think for most of our students and affiliates, faith practice and intellectual questioning aren't separate worlds, but they overlap, especially at a place like Columbia. And so, I really feel at home in a role that allows me to do both of those things.
MB: NYU is world renowned for its interfaith programming, and they have a different model for what they call their Office of Global and Spiritual Life. It's overseen by two administrators, and both of them, at the moment, are also faculty at the school of social work. I was wondering if you could speak to what it means to come from a religious background. It gives you certain advantages—your experience counseling as you mentioned—but it also limits you. How do you address those limitations?
DR: I'd be eager to hear more, Maya, about what you mean by the limitations, rather than me assume I know, just to hear you share what you feel the limitations would be.
MB: I think this hearkens back to my earlier questions about how you would relate to students who don't come from religious backgrounds, who are skeptical of religion, but also just coming from a deeply Christian background gives you a specific outlook on life. And I'm not sure how that interacts with being an administrator, where we're assuming that university administrators are not necessarily bringing their religious world-views into their work. Of course, everybody's always influenced by their backgrounds, but I just think it's a little bit different when religion is explicitly part of your job on the administrative side.
DR: That helps; now I understand the trajectory of the question. So, the first thing I'll say in terms of different universities setting up their religious and spiritual and chaplaincy offices in different ways is that everyone is figuring this out as they go along in the 21st century. The reality of universities in the 21st century is that things have changed so rapidly and become wonderfully pluralistic. This is a tremendous advantage, but it's also new, to a large extent, in the history of the world to genuinely have places of study like NYU and Columbia where every major religion is not just represented but accepted. This is a wonderfully new project and the infrastructure is such in American higher education that most really old institutions have roots to particular religious traditions rather than to all of them. But now we have all of them, and it's a great thing. And we're all trying to figure it out, similar to the mergers you see in the national setting of organizations and them coming together [The ACSLHE merger].
I love talking to the folks at NYU. Yael Shy just recently took a new position. Is she one of the people you had in mind as a leader there?
MB: No, I didn't see her on the website.
DR: They [NYU] are probably in a position of restructuring right now because their director left at some point earlier this semester, but Yael is someone that I really enjoy talking to as we all try to figure it out. Different people, even within a particular tradition, have different perspectives on pluralism: what it means to be a diverse religious group of people, or religious and non-religious groups of people coming together. My own view is that none of us has a view from nowhere and what I mean by that is all of us are historically, socially, and culturally situated. And that if we claim that we check our religious identities or any other aspect of our identities at the door and speak from, again, a view from nowhere, a sheerly objective point of view, I think we deceive ourselves. I think all of us have certain commitments that inform what we do. And that only becomes problematic as a weakness if those background assumptions lead us to privilege one set of ideas or one set of values, or one particular group, above another. And look, all of us are trying to navigate this regardless of what our background assumptions are.
MB: I appreciate that answer. Thank you. So, I want to turn now to thinking about not your particular religious tradition and background, but religion as it interacts with the university. I was going through the website of the Office of Religious Life and there's a page, the Welcome to the Earl Hall Center Website, that you wrote where you talk about the history of Earl Hall. It was given as a gift to Columbia University and dedicated in 1902 “for the students, that religion and learning may go hand in hand and character grow with knowledge.” I was really struck by this quote from the dedication and your decision to refer to it. First of all, it's from 1902, which feels distant. And it also speaks to a Western and Christian understanding of religion as linked to character development and de-linked/separate from knowledge. I was interested in what you think of the quote and its relevance. Do you relate it to the role of the Office of Religious Life today and, if so, how?
DR: This is a great question. I'd be happy to talk about it. So, in 1902 the building was given by the Dodge family, and I see it as a particularly profound and beautiful and forward-looking gift for the following reasons. All Ivy league schools at the time had a Christian Protestant chapel and identity. So, on one side of Low Library you have St. Paul's chapel. It's kind of a classic 19th century, early 20th century presence of a Protestant chapel on a university campus. What the Dodge family said was they wanted to make sure there was a dedicated space for people who did not necessarily fit into that traditional (at the time) American higher education mold of Protestant Christianity. And so, Earl was built for that purpose: that people of any tradition could have access to space and resources for however they might want to practice.
And so, even though it is an old quote, I think the purpose of the building that it's meant to capture was prescient in terms of what happened with American higher education that moved away from particular identities toward a beautifully pluralistic vision. And in terms of the particular language of character and knowledge, I'd actually challenge whether that's necessarily a Christian conception. It’s certainly Western language. I'm most familiar with it in an Aristotelian context, in terms of Greek philosophy, that knowing and having a particular set of virtues—one's character—are two separate things. One can know a whole lot yet have certain weaknesses when it comes to applying that knowledge, in a way which we might call character or linked to virtues. And so, I think really powerful quotes are ones that are general enough that they can apply to different contexts across time.
And so, Christianity certainly in its history picked up Greek thought. It didn't originate wholly in Greek thought, of course, but picked up certain concepts, and the character-knowledge distinction was one of those things that certain branches of the Christian family tree picked up. But it is certainly a Western and a Greek notion. And I think that it's helpful for us, even in our contemporary context, regardless of what tradition we all may come from, to remember that as we learn and grow in knowledge, it is essential to also ask the questions toward what am I applying my training? How am I using the things that I know to change the world (if I want to change the world)? Having some kind of ethical or moral compass, I think, is an essential ingredient for people, whether they identify as spiritual or religious or not. And the idea of buildings like Earl Hall on university campuses—yes they're for the organization of religious space, but they're also to hold space for questions of how we apply our knowledge, and toward what we are working, with all of the work that we do as ambitious Ivy-league students.
//MAYA BICKEL is a senior in Columbia College and Editor-in-Chief at The Current. She can be reached at [email protected].
Wurts Bros. (New York, N.Y.) Earl Hall. Ca 1905. Museum of the City of New York. X2010.7.1.622
Last year, Reverend Dr. Rottenberg was named Dean of Religious Life, the first such dean at Columbia. It is a curious position, raising all sorts of questions about the place of religion in our contemporary university context. Dean Rottenberg, as I have come to understand from his sessions, is always eager to engage in conversation about big questions. We met over Zoom to discuss his position as Dean of Religious Life, recent changes in the field of university chaplaincy, and the role of religion and spirituality in the lives of students.
Maya Bickel: I wanted to just start with your background. Could you tell me what you did before coming to work at Columbia, and when and in what capacity you started working at Columbia?
Dean Rottenberg: Great. So, prior to coming to Columbia, I was bi-vocational. So, I had done work in Christian churches on the one hand as an ordained Christian minister, and I also was a professor of philosophy. My Ph.D. is in philosophy of religion. And when the position opened up at Columbia—this is my fifth semester, so, in the summer of 2018, I guess that would be—I started at Columbia in a position that allowed me to combine what I see as my skills and training as a faith leader with my skills and training in the academic world.
MB: What was your position when you first came and what is it now?
DR: My position when I arrived at Columbia was Associate University Chaplain, and my position now is Dean of Religious Life.
MB: Can you explain what exactly is the Dean of Religious Life? What does that mean? What is that role?
DR: Yeah, absolutely. So, deans in a university are administrative positions who facilitate various aspects of university life and leadership. So, for a dean of religious life, the dean leads the Office of Religious Life, whose mission is to ensure that the diverse religious and spiritual needs of the university communities are met. Religious groups need particular things for their practices, whatever they may be: spaces for prayer, spaces for meditation, spaces to convene and gather. And so, whenever there are specific needs that go along with particular practices of groups on a campus, there are all kinds of administrative details: how to arrange for space, how to make sure that the spaces are kept well, how to communicate between groups who are sharing spaces. Our office facilitates that work in the Earl Hall Center, and my position as dean is to oversee the facilitating of that work.
MB: How is the position of Dean of Religious Life and the Office of Religious Life distinct from the position of a chaplain? What is the relationship between your office and the Office of the University Chaplain?
DR: Great question. So, the first thing I'll say is that our office works very closely with the Office of the University Chaplin and Chaplin Davis. The Office of the University Chaplain is part of the Office of the Provost, which in the administrative structure of the university is a different set of branches than University Life [The Office of Religious life is part of the Office of University Life]. There's so much work to be done in the fields of chaplaincy and religious administration, and so for us collectively to be connected to major parts of university administration is really helpful. Different schools have different ways of dividing administrative and chaplaincy work, and I think Columbia right now has a really healthy one, which is to have both of these offices.
One of the ways to understand how it's a great question that you're asking and that it’s not always clear to everyone is that there were two national organizations for college and university chaplaincy and religious affairs that just merged. They had separate national conferences, separate registrations. One is called NACUC, the National Association of College and University Chaplains, and the other is called ACURA, the Association of College and University Religious Affairs. And just last year, after a long process, those two national organizations merged into a single one. I still have to learn the new acronym. I think it's ACSLHE, the Association for Chaplaincy and Spiritual Life in Higher Education. The point, Maya, that I'm raising is that—you asked a question about chaplaincy and religious administration—some schools call them Deans of Religious Life; some schools call them chaplains. Some chaplains do administrative work; other chaplains do primarily counseling and programming work. There are different domains that often overlap.
MB: Am I correct in understanding that the Dean of Religious Life is a relatively new position that was created at Columbia?
DR: So, that title is new. The work that I do in directing the Earl Hall Center is work that's always happened at Columbia. The title is new because the Office of University Life is still relatively new. I forget if they're five or six years old, but the Office of University Life has been, in a very short period of time, incredibly helpful in reorganizing student affairs at the university in a way that's particularly helpful to meeting student needs. And as a part of those organizing processes sometimes administrative titles change.
MB: The Office of University Life, as you just said, responds to student needs, and having this position of Dean of Religious Life speaks to the perception by administrators that there is a need among students for this particular position. Can you speak to what that need is?
DR: I am a huge sports fan Maya—I don't know if I've told you that in the context of any of the meetings we've been a part of—but every teacher, every university employee, likes their own types of analogies. So, mine tend to be sports related. If physical health is a part of my life—and I'm a swimmer—it's great to be at a university that has a dedicated space for swimming, like a pool. Same for weightlifting or whatever my physical set of practices are. For many people coming to university communities, part of their wellness practices, part of what helps them to feel fulfilled as a human being, are not necessarily physical practices, but what we might call spiritual practices. And those spiritual practices, analogous to physical or athletic practices, require certain kinds of spaces, certain kinds of counseling services, a set of resources to allow people to feel well and whole as human beings, so that they can thrive in a university community.
MB: I liked that analogy. I'm also a swimmer!
DR: Ah, that's a nice coincidence. I don't know why I had swimming on my mind today, but it's a very specific type of environment for a specific type of practice. And that's why I connect them.
MB: Yeah, I see that. There are many students at Columbia, though, who do not identify as religious, and some who might define themselves as anti-religious or as avowed atheists. Do you and your office want to engage those students? How would the office do that? And then also, how would you, as a religious person, engage with students who may be skeptical of interacting with somebody from a religious background?
DR: I really appreciate the question. One of the things we say at the Earl Hall Center, where my office is, is that we are a center for people of all faiths and people of no faith. One of the important tasks that we have is overseeing the work of, and partnering with, a team of twenty religious life advisers. These are local faith leaders. They're not employees of the university, but we collaborate with them to make sure that all of the major religions are represented on campus, have advocacy, and have counseling resources for their faith. And one of the religious life advisors traditionally has advised Columbia's atheist and agnostic club. And she is a national leader and local leader for ethical humanism. Her name is Anne Klaeysen, and she's one of these twenty advisors who is not part of a theistic faith, who specifically is always eager to speak to people who don't identify with religion as you've described it, who may identify as highly skeptical and even consider certain aspects of religion to be problematic. We have a religious life advisor who serves the needs of those kinds of students and does it wonderfully and effectively and thoughtfully.
Intellectual engagement, relative to religion, has always been a central part of what the Earl Hall Center has done. My background, again, is in philosophy, and skepticism and critical analysis are not only welcomed, but encouraged and fostered. So, that's true for me, even though I come from a particular religious tradition, and it's certainly true of the office as a whole.
MB: Yeah, I'd like actually, on that note, for you to delve a little more into how your background in philosophy and in the Academy on the one hand and as a pastor on the other inform how you approach this position.
DR: My background as a pastor has, I think, equipped me well for the counseling functions of my role. Many times students will find us with questions, not necessarily specific to their faith tradition, but just broad questions about meaning in life and how it impacts their experiences as students at Columbia. And, because I have served young people in congregational faith settings, and because I've counseled people as a chaplain, that's something that I'm always very happy and interested in doing—talking about the struggles in our lives.
For me, my faith is very closely aligned with big questions about meaning in life and transcendence as a category. So, my pursuit of an academic degree really came about organically from the need to better articulate answers to those kinds of big questions. And one of the things I love about my position that straddles these worlds of the Academy on one side and faith practice on the other is getting to engage with students and faculty and staff and administrators about academic questions related to religion. And I think for most of our students and affiliates, faith practice and intellectual questioning aren't separate worlds, but they overlap, especially at a place like Columbia. And so, I really feel at home in a role that allows me to do both of those things.
MB: NYU is world renowned for its interfaith programming, and they have a different model for what they call their Office of Global and Spiritual Life. It's overseen by two administrators, and both of them, at the moment, are also faculty at the school of social work. I was wondering if you could speak to what it means to come from a religious background. It gives you certain advantages—your experience counseling as you mentioned—but it also limits you. How do you address those limitations?
DR: I'd be eager to hear more, Maya, about what you mean by the limitations, rather than me assume I know, just to hear you share what you feel the limitations would be.
MB: I think this hearkens back to my earlier questions about how you would relate to students who don't come from religious backgrounds, who are skeptical of religion, but also just coming from a deeply Christian background gives you a specific outlook on life. And I'm not sure how that interacts with being an administrator, where we're assuming that university administrators are not necessarily bringing their religious world-views into their work. Of course, everybody's always influenced by their backgrounds, but I just think it's a little bit different when religion is explicitly part of your job on the administrative side.
DR: That helps; now I understand the trajectory of the question. So, the first thing I'll say in terms of different universities setting up their religious and spiritual and chaplaincy offices in different ways is that everyone is figuring this out as they go along in the 21st century. The reality of universities in the 21st century is that things have changed so rapidly and become wonderfully pluralistic. This is a tremendous advantage, but it's also new, to a large extent, in the history of the world to genuinely have places of study like NYU and Columbia where every major religion is not just represented but accepted. This is a wonderfully new project and the infrastructure is such in American higher education that most really old institutions have roots to particular religious traditions rather than to all of them. But now we have all of them, and it's a great thing. And we're all trying to figure it out, similar to the mergers you see in the national setting of organizations and them coming together [The ACSLHE merger].
I love talking to the folks at NYU. Yael Shy just recently took a new position. Is she one of the people you had in mind as a leader there?
MB: No, I didn't see her on the website.
DR: They [NYU] are probably in a position of restructuring right now because their director left at some point earlier this semester, but Yael is someone that I really enjoy talking to as we all try to figure it out. Different people, even within a particular tradition, have different perspectives on pluralism: what it means to be a diverse religious group of people, or religious and non-religious groups of people coming together. My own view is that none of us has a view from nowhere and what I mean by that is all of us are historically, socially, and culturally situated. And that if we claim that we check our religious identities or any other aspect of our identities at the door and speak from, again, a view from nowhere, a sheerly objective point of view, I think we deceive ourselves. I think all of us have certain commitments that inform what we do. And that only becomes problematic as a weakness if those background assumptions lead us to privilege one set of ideas or one set of values, or one particular group, above another. And look, all of us are trying to navigate this regardless of what our background assumptions are.
MB: I appreciate that answer. Thank you. So, I want to turn now to thinking about not your particular religious tradition and background, but religion as it interacts with the university. I was going through the website of the Office of Religious Life and there's a page, the Welcome to the Earl Hall Center Website, that you wrote where you talk about the history of Earl Hall. It was given as a gift to Columbia University and dedicated in 1902 “for the students, that religion and learning may go hand in hand and character grow with knowledge.” I was really struck by this quote from the dedication and your decision to refer to it. First of all, it's from 1902, which feels distant. And it also speaks to a Western and Christian understanding of religion as linked to character development and de-linked/separate from knowledge. I was interested in what you think of the quote and its relevance. Do you relate it to the role of the Office of Religious Life today and, if so, how?
DR: This is a great question. I'd be happy to talk about it. So, in 1902 the building was given by the Dodge family, and I see it as a particularly profound and beautiful and forward-looking gift for the following reasons. All Ivy league schools at the time had a Christian Protestant chapel and identity. So, on one side of Low Library you have St. Paul's chapel. It's kind of a classic 19th century, early 20th century presence of a Protestant chapel on a university campus. What the Dodge family said was they wanted to make sure there was a dedicated space for people who did not necessarily fit into that traditional (at the time) American higher education mold of Protestant Christianity. And so, Earl was built for that purpose: that people of any tradition could have access to space and resources for however they might want to practice.
And so, even though it is an old quote, I think the purpose of the building that it's meant to capture was prescient in terms of what happened with American higher education that moved away from particular identities toward a beautifully pluralistic vision. And in terms of the particular language of character and knowledge, I'd actually challenge whether that's necessarily a Christian conception. It’s certainly Western language. I'm most familiar with it in an Aristotelian context, in terms of Greek philosophy, that knowing and having a particular set of virtues—one's character—are two separate things. One can know a whole lot yet have certain weaknesses when it comes to applying that knowledge, in a way which we might call character or linked to virtues. And so, I think really powerful quotes are ones that are general enough that they can apply to different contexts across time.
And so, Christianity certainly in its history picked up Greek thought. It didn't originate wholly in Greek thought, of course, but picked up certain concepts, and the character-knowledge distinction was one of those things that certain branches of the Christian family tree picked up. But it is certainly a Western and a Greek notion. And I think that it's helpful for us, even in our contemporary context, regardless of what tradition we all may come from, to remember that as we learn and grow in knowledge, it is essential to also ask the questions toward what am I applying my training? How am I using the things that I know to change the world (if I want to change the world)? Having some kind of ethical or moral compass, I think, is an essential ingredient for people, whether they identify as spiritual or religious or not. And the idea of buildings like Earl Hall on university campuses—yes they're for the organization of religious space, but they're also to hold space for questions of how we apply our knowledge, and toward what we are working, with all of the work that we do as ambitious Ivy-league students.
//MAYA BICKEL is a senior in Columbia College and Editor-in-Chief at The Current. She can be reached at [email protected].
Wurts Bros. (New York, N.Y.) Earl Hall. Ca 1905. Museum of the City of New York. X2010.7.1.622