Light at B.U.

It was a big day for Methodist Boston University. To celebrate the dedication of its new $2,000,000 School of Theology and its $1,000,000 chapel, the ninth largest university in the U.S. last week held a two-day "MidCentury Institute on Religion in a World of Tensions." On hand to make addresses and receive honorary degrees were eleven big names in assorted walks of life, ranging from United Auto Workers' President Walter P. Reuther, who got an LL.D., to Professor Georges Florovsky of St. Vladimir's Orthodox

Theological Seminary in Manhattan, who was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Sacred Theology.

"A conference of this kind would have been impossible 30 years ago," noted one B.U. professor. In those days, he said, it was not fashionable in educational circles to talk about religion. The speeches at the institute amply demonstrated the change in the times. Some of the addresses were out of theology's top drawer, e.g., laymen were left to struggle along as best they could through Roman Catholic Philosopher Jacques Maritain's expert juggling of "essence" and "complexus," and Professor Florovsky's description of theology as "apophatic." In stressing a plea for a new social welfare system of economics somewhere between laissez faire capitalism and Communism, Unionist Reuther made his bow to religion by calling upon it to "provide man with a positive, fighting faith that will enable him to translate moral and ethical values into basic economic and political decisions." President Louis Finkelstein of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America appealed for a permanent commission to inculcate "moral and spiritual values" into the U.S. public school system. But Boston University's President, black-browed, white-haired Methodist Minister Daniel L. Marsh, resplendent in a self-designed scarlet mortarboard and scarlet robe with ermine epaulets, dramatized the new temper of the times in terms any freshman could understand. In his address he called attention to the fact that the new limestone chapel, which bears his name, adjoins the new theology school on one side, and the colleges of Liberal Arts and Business Administration on the other. Not only that, but in planning the lighting for the buildings, it had been found that a floodlight on the Liberal Arts building was needed to light the Theology building turret and a floodlight on the Theology building was needed to light the Liberal Arts turret.

"It's a wonderful way of saying," he concluded, "that theological education is incomplete unless it receives light from secular education, as well as the other way round--there's a dark spot in the liberal arts unless light from religion is thrown upon them."

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