New start for troubled Christian college (Patrick Henry College)

[deadparrot]

LOUDOUN, Va., Sept. 4 (UPI) -- A Christian college in Virginia begins a new school year after losing half of its faculty last semester due to a dispute over the Bible's role in academics.

Five of Patrick Henry College's 16 full-time faculty members, concerned about academic freedom, left the Loudoun County school after an incident involving a former government instructor, The Washington Times reports.

Instructor Erik Root had his contract temporarily pulled after he published a paper in a campus magazine about the political philosophy of a Christian saint and a parent complained about a philosophical example Root had used in one of his classes.

"The crucial issues had to do with the college's commitment to liberal arts and academic freedom, due process (and) how you treat your faculty," says Kevin Culberson, a former history and literature teacher at the college. "It has to do with a fundamentalist narrowing of the education."

http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/view.php?StoryID=20060904-024956-9958r

[mike_c]

1. how could anyone have reasonably expected fundamentalist...

...christians to respect academic freedom? Religious extremism is all about restricting debate and intellectual exchange, not encouraging it!

[FARAFIELD]

2. I just about died

I heard an interview on Fresh Air some time ago with the founder of the college and the answers he gave were truly shocking, Terri was doing her best not to beat up on him, but when he said that he "encouraged" academic freedom I just about died. what a bunch of losers.

[Charlie Brown]

3. "Give me liberty or give me death"

I doubt the real Patrick Henry would care for this theocratic institution.

[PassingFair]

4. The "real" Patrick Henry was all about "Jesus"

he was all for his inclusion in our government.
It took the arguments of good men like Jefferson,
Madison and Adams to keep Henry's "Jesus" OUT of
our Articles of Confederation and Constitution.

[Charlie Brown]

5. It's my understanding that PH championed the Bill of Rights

and that he was the single most stalwart supporter of limiting the powers of the Federal Government. I don't think the ACLU or any number of Free Speech organizations would be around today if it weren't for his foresight.

I'm aware he was religious, but he seemed to support religion in a different context than modern-day fundies. Can you honestly read these and call him a theocrat?

http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch14s39.html

http://www.lva.lib.va.us/whatwedo/k12/psd/nation/henry1788.htm

[PassingFair]

6. He championed religion whenever he got a chance...

In 1784 a new bill was introduced which finally broke the stalemate. This time it was a bill strongly supported by Patrick Henry. Patrick Henry supported legislation known as a "bill establishing a provision for teachers of the Christian religion." This bill, Henry's bill, was a tax bill, a bill which would provide tax money--coerced, forced tax money--for teachers of the Christian religion. This was a bill which levied taxes for support of Christian education in Virginia, and it allowed every taxpayer the right to designate to which church or religion society he wanted his share of the taxes to go. Patrick Henry's version of the so-called "voucher" plan--1784.

In that year, 1784, Jefferson was in France, as a minister from the states, to succeed the retiring Benjamin Franklin. The person, then, in Virginia, who took up the struggle, against Patrick Henry and his voucher plan, was James Madison. Madison got the politicians to postpone a decision until the next session. In the meantime, in the summer of 1785, Madison drafted and had distributed his famous "Memorial and Remonstrance," a memorial and remonstrance against religion assessments. A memorial is a statement. A remonstrance is a protest. An assessment is a tax. Madison's statement and protest was a protest against use of tax money for support of religion and of religions, plural, all of them. That is precisely the essence of Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance" against religion taxes. Madison's protest was persuasive. When the Virginia legislators reconvened in October 1785, Patrick Henry's bill establishing a provision for teachers of the Christian religion, soon died in committee. A good place for a bill like that to die--in committee.

James Madison's memorial and remonstrance against religion taxes is one of the finest statements ever written on the subject of religion freedom. If you have not read it, you should. It ought to be priority reading for every American. Madison said of it, in Virginia, his remonstrance gained the approval "of the Baptists, the Presbyterians, the Quakers, and the few Roman Catholics, universally; of the Methodists in part; and even ... a few of the sect formally established by law," the Episcopalians. Those are Madison¹s words.

[Charlie Brown]

7. well, none of the founders were perfect

Let's not forget that Madison and Jefferson were also slave-owners, and did not recognize women as the equals of men.

[PassingFair]

10. I'm not saying that ANY of the "fathers" were perfect!

I'm just saying that some of them, shall we say,
"identified" more as Christians than did others.

That's all I'm sayin.

O8) O8)

[sofa king]

8. He also kept his wife chained up in the basement.

And buried her in an unmarked grave. How very--no, I'm not going to say it.

http://www.virginiaplaces.org/places/henry.html

Here's Madison's remonstrance:

http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_religions43.html

[yellowcanine]

9. Check this out from their website........

Because we believe that the preservation of our financial independence is a critical component of our mission, U.S. Department of Education funding is not available to PHC students and their families. But we're confident that our wide range of financial aid options brings one of the nation's finest classical, Christian liberal arts educations within the reach of families from all financial backgrounds.

Several paragraphs down on the SAME PAGE.......

The United States Department of Education recently granted Patrick Henry College approval to participate in DOE programs. Its listing in the DOE's Directory of Postsecondary Institutions (OPE ID # 03951300) qualifies interested students to participate in a number of new opportunities for financing their education at Patrick Henry College.

So the reason why DOE funding was not available to PHC students had nothing to do with their desire to preserve their financial independence - it was because they had not gotton the approval from the DOE. Apperently someone forgot to remove the first paragraph from the webpage. Oh well. Can't get everything right.
Is it ok to lie if you are doing it for Jesus?