When Harvard stopped requiring freshmen to learn Biblical Hebrew, several members of the faculty left Massachusetts for Connecticut to found a new school. For a long time the intense focus on the literal meaning of God's words did not leave New Haven, the city that built a green from which Christ would lead the elect to heaven. Yale was meant to prepare young men for their leadership roles in the church, as well as in the republic, the law, and business. Her leaders understood that a thorough and correct relationship with the divine was a prerequisite to profound leadership.
Their students quickly disappointed the Harvard men who founded Yale as a haven for Congregationalist orthodoxy: theological arguments drove intellectual discussion. Yale quickly became a place where differing religious and moral ideas, discussed in fraternity and pursued in profundity, held sway. We believe, as we must believe, that we can listen to multiple arguments and conclude that one is right. We believe, as we must believe, that a university can entertain contradictory ideas and pursue them as if one and only one were true.
Today, we seek to continue the tradition of heterodox Yalies able to debate religion, agreeing at frst only that the debate is worth having. Far be it from us to demand a return to Jonathan Edwards' college. Our magazine is limited in denomination only by the knowledge of its contributors. Though Yale's founders dedicated our university to Lux et Veritas, subsequent generations of Yalies have ignored the divine light. The Yale seal quotes the Bible to remind us that without the possibility of revelation, all the logic in this world isn't enough. Our college of prophets depends on her sons' and daughters' familiarity with traditional moral arguments for its success. Put simply, we don't believe that Yale's project works without a study of theology. The public conversation among educated people has strayed a little too far from foundational and essential questions of the Creator and the created. It's time for a frankly intellectual journal that can examine the groundwork of a religious society. What any of that means we expect to examine.
In our inaugural issue of Fiat Lux, we publish a personal essay of Andrew Chan, M.D., in which he argues, on the authority of the Bible, of the need for missions. We review Acts of Faith by Dr. Eboo Patel, founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, a Muslim who relies on a variety of religious traditions and sociological realities to argue for a religiously plural 21st century. Kevin Brook Alexander discusses whether the great Jewish thinker Maimonides was more Aristotilean than we thought he was. Our articles differ on the authorities they accept and on the subjects they consider religious. In the future, we look forward to articles on the deepest questions from our atheist and agnostic friends, and even to the airing of intra-denominational laundry in public; if we are all brothers and sisters, then we can stand to hear and maybe stand to learn a thing or two from our siblings' communal and religious struggles.
These questions plague us, but we are blessed to have them. Our pursuit of truth makes us humans. Hence the university; hence Yale. Our journal will not be limited to those who assume a revealed truth. Fiat Lux, will, however, provide a sort of home from which students of Jerusalem can write their theology. Even those of us who argue not from human reason but from revelation disagree. Let them disagree here. Old, old, old Blue traditions and the very nature of religious man demand that there be light, but so do the events of the last few decades. Educated men had thought that religion was dead, or comatose, that traditional monotheism, like the cult of Dionysus, could no longer act on geopolitics. Leaders and peoples all over the world have turned back toward the faith. This worldwide return, especially to fundamentalist religion, has been well advertised but, at least on campus, only superfcially analyzed and little investigated. Perhaps there was no turn at all, but the so-called chattering classes have just begun to notice. We welcome religious fundamentalists and their critics. Present your case, but prepare your textual citations and your religious assumptions; this congregation examines the sermon. Any progress in the status of individuals and cultures under the governance of supposedly religious systems will come by enlightened argument in a religious framework. And so we, made in God's image, say Fiat Lux. Let there be light.
We can no longer ignore the whispers about God echoing in Yale's hallowed halls. Students lead religious lives. Until now, they have had medium either to examine those religious lives or to debate their effects on Yale. Some have resolved, and others will debate, that Yale is a Protestant college or a Judeo-Christian college. Some highlight our ethnic diversity, while others emphasize the university's common traditions. The questions imply more questions about how centralized the university ought to be, whether Yale ought to teach one thing, and whether that thing ought to be moral. Does Yale teach to prepare for ecclesiastical, national, global service, or does the academic mission have neither practical nor spiritual import? Professor Anthony Kronman recently argued in Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life that Yale and other institutions of higher education no longer teach answers to the great questions and ought to, with recourse to great thinkers but not to religions. The winner of our inaugural essay contest, Meredith Williams, argues in this issue that religion can, in fact, play an essential role in teaching of this spiritual seriousness. This issue also features an interview with new Yale University Chaplain Sharon Kugler and her ideas about religion at Yale. And Jacob Albert refects on what Professor Jim Sleeper's lecture at the Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale about religion and the civil sphere says about pluralism in New Haven and in America.
Our name plays on God's dictum, related in St. Jerome's Vulgate. "DIXITQUE DEUS, FIAT LUX, ET FACTA EST LUX." And God said, let there be light, and there was light. It plays on Yale's motto, Lux et Veritas. This is not the beginning of theological discussion at Yale. From Reverend Abraham Pierson to Reverend William Sloane Coffn, Yale men and women have dealt with their responsibility for God, for Country, and for Yale by, like Abraham, questioning what it is exactly that God wants. We have always read and talked about the stories of creation again and again, and we hope that, this time, you'll begin again with us as we try to create something not quite new that hasn't quite been done before.
Fiat Lux,
Michael Leo Pomeranz, SM '09 Editor-in-Chief