What We Believe

Here in the Yale bubble, two hours on a train and a world away from the real world concerns of New York, students are outraged. The Yankee Doodle — a dozen stools and one grill that served up pigs in a blanket — has been closed. Students mourned the closing. Some raised money to bail out the shop. Rick Beckwith, Doodle owner, campaigned against his former landlord — the copy shop next door — and asked the university for new digs. The old landlords reconsidered then re-reconsidered. The Yale equivalent of pundocracy weighed in on the weighty issue.

The Doodle’s ultimate defeat was the news of the hour at the installation of the new campus chaplain, Sharon Kugler, who takes a position established with the abolition of compulsory chapel in 1920. It’s always been my sense that the job of the chaplain is to make us feel bad for not going to church. If it is, Chaplain Kugler has a tough job ahead. Students may be up in arms about the closing of a diner, but they are decidedly nervous about religion. From my vantage point, college students avoid larger questions not because we are selfish, but because we don't feel qualified. "Religion?” we ask. “The world's problems? I am just an 18-year-old with every privilege in the world. I don’t know anything about my grandparents’ religious traditions. Who am I to judge all this stuff? Let me take care of what is mine."

And so we replace religion with what we do know: What comes up in our day-to-day lives. We find meaning not in the pews but in pigs in a blanket.

By Michael Pomeranz  |  March 18, 2008; 9:54 PM ET  | Category:  Lox et Veritas
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Posted by: Ida | March 20, 2008 11:56 AM
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