Harvard Elects Jewish Atheist as Chaplain

 https://www.yahoo.com/news/chief-chaplain-harvard-atheist-152603005.html

The Puritan colonists who settled in New England in the 1630s had a nagging concern about the churches they were building: How would they ensure that the clergymen would be literate? Their answer was Harvard University, a school that was established to educate the ministry and adopted the motto “Truth for Christ and the Church.” It was named after a pastor, John Harvard, and it would be more than 70 years before the school had a president who was not a clergyman. 

Harvard’s organization of chaplains has elected as its next president an atheist named Greg Epstein, who takes on the job this week.

Epstein, 44, author of the book “Good Without God,” is a seemingly unusual choice for the role. He will coordinate the activities of more than 40 university chaplains, who lead the Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist and other religious communities on campus. Yet many Harvard students — some raised in families of faith, others never quite certain how to label their religious identities — attest to the influence that Epstein has had on their spiritual lives.

“There is a rising group of people who no longer identify with any religious tradition but still experience a real need for conversation and support around what it means to be a good human and live an ethical life,” said Epstein, who was raised in a Jewish household and has been Harvard’s humanist chaplain since 2005, teaching students about the progressive movement that centers people’s relationships with one another instead of with God.

To Epstein’s fellow campus chaplains, at least, the notion of being led by an atheist is not as counterintuitive as it might sound; his election was unanimous.

“Maybe in a more conservative university climate there might be a question like ‘What the heck are they doing at Harvard, having a humanist be the president of the chaplains?’” said Margit Hammerstrom, the Christian Science chaplain at Harvard. “But in this environment it works. Greg is known for wanting to keep lines of communication open between different faiths.” 

To Epstein, becoming the organization’s head, especially as it gains more recognition from the university, comes as affirmation of a yearslong effort, started by his predecessor, to teach a campus with traditional religious roots about humanism.

“We don’t look to a god for answers,” Epstein said. “We are each other’s answers.” 

Some of the students drawn to Epstein’s secular community are religious refugees, people raised in observant households who arrive at college seeking spiritual meaning in a less rigid form. 

This article is published in the New York Times (owned by Jews: Sulzberger), written by a Jewish journalist (Goldberg) about an atheist Jew (Epstein) who is now chief chaplain at one of America's most prestigious universities, that was ironically founded by Christians to ensure that their clergymen were literate, under the motto: "Truth for Christ and the Church"

And guess what? If you have anything negative to say about it, you'll be silenced as an anti-semite. That's the privilege you get when your tribe not only subverts the power structure within systemic institutions, but also controls the narrative, which therefore establishes social norms.

A wise man once said: if you want to know who has the power, find out who you can't criticize.