God And Kids At Yale
These are real pic.twitter.com/qL55aBJCDS
— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) December 31, 2019
They sure are. Here’s the Yale Chaplain’s Office web page where you can find out more information about these activities. Screenshot:
Spend some time on the site, and you’ll see that the Yale Chaplain’s Office serves the spiritual needs of America’s young ruling elites by offering them interfaith dialogue, cookies and coloring, community service, coffee, hands-on local tourism, queers at prayer, and a bounce house.
Did somebody let New Atheists program the Yale chaplaincy to make religion look stupid, childish, and completely irrelevant? It’s like a pack of wily dogs deciding to greenlight that Cats movie to make everybody despise felines.
Leaving aside religion, I genuinely do not understand this. Why have a chaplaincy at all if this is all you can do? If you were Yale University, wouldn’t you be embarrassed that your undergraduates felt the need to go color, and eat cookies, and get in the bounce house? Imagine James Jesus Angleton going back for alumni weekend, and seeing that. I’m not kidding. I’m thinking of something a foreign friend of mine who did graduate study at Harvard last year told me about his Ivy League experience: that it was bizarre seeing how freakishly fragile the American students were. He said they were totally neurotic, and the professors treated them like … well, though my friend didn’t put it this way, they treated them like the kind of juveniles who would need to relax from the rigors of studying at one of the world’s most elite universities by going to eat snickerdoodles and color pictures of LGBT unicorns.
Nearly seven decades after Yale undergrad William F. Buckley published God And Man At Yale, decrying the institutional feebleness on the matter of Christianity, even though conceding its secularism, one doesn’t expect the Yale chaplaincy to be a hotbed of Bible studies and Eucharistic adoration, or rigorous devotional practices or intellectual inquiry of any religious tradition. But this?
What am I missing?
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