Education: Religion on the Campus

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State universities are more concerned today about religion than they have been at any other time during the present century.

So reported the No. 1 authority on campus religion, Yale Divinity School's Professor Clarence Prouty Shedd, fresh from a tour of 30 State colleges and universities, in the November Journal of Higher Education. Other reports last week indicated that interest in religion was growing in private as well as State universities throughout the U.S.

At free-thinking Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia, undergraduate church attendance has nearly doubled in five years. Most significant religious development at Virginia is a series of Sunday-night lectures on theology which this autumn began its seventh successful year.

Started by the University Christian Association and Virginia's faculty, who conceived the idea of pursuing theology "as an intellectual discipline," the lectures so stirred Virginia that similar courses were started at Yale, St. John's College, Drake University (Iowa). Virginia has had as lecturers Philosophers Jacques Maritain and Mortimer J. Adler; Dr. Henry St. George Tucker, Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church; a cross section of Virginia's faculty, from philosophers to biologists.

Theme of this year's lectures: "God's Relation to Man and Human History." One of their purposes: "To point out that our immediate human problems, of which the present crisis continues to make us painfully aware . . . can be [solved] only when seen in the light of their theological significance. . . ."

Although even at Virginia formal religion still appeals to only a sixth of the student body, undergraduates, like many graduates, have decided that theology is again intellectually respectable. At University of Chicago there has been an undergraduate swing to Catholicism during the last two years, credited to lectures by Professor Mortimer Adler and President Robert M. Hutchins on St. Thomas Aquinas. The university has a full-time Catholic chaplain, the first in its history.

Barnard College (for women) this fall launched a new course called "Religion and Life." At Ohio State, students took a poll on chapel, voted to have religious services. At University of Iowa the Daily lowan this year startled the faculty with an editorial appeal to "Take Us Back to Solid Ground" (i.e., a spiritual faith).

In churchmen's view, the collegiate religious revival, no war-born affair, is rooted in profound undergraduate disillusionment in the ideals of the '20s. Said Dr.

Shedd: "I think the war has had a sober ing effect on students. [But] this is a movement that has been gaining momentum for the past ten years."