The Rev. Kathleen Reed, a Lutheran chaplain at Harvard, says, “We’re presenting to the university a vision of how the world could work when diverse traditions focus on how to be good humans and neighbors.”
But Greg Epstein’s appointment confuses and concerns some people. Four centuries ago, Harvard was founded to educate ministers, and its motto, now shortened to “Truth,” originally was “Truth for Christ and the Church.”
As Samuel Goldman writes, naming an atheist chief chaplain is “dubious” because it “implies that there’s nothing special about theistic religion or appeals to transcendent authority that justify a distinctive status.” School founders, he notes, believed that truth is “important and worth pursuing” for a faith-based reason: “because it set man in the right relationship with God.”
