August Comte Clapping from His Grave

Harvard has a humanist chaplaincy for atheist and agnostic students.

He's retiring, hence this story, but we're more interested in the mental machinations of Ivy League types that hire a chaplain for atheists.

Ah heck, why not? And while we're at it, we'll get combs for bald people and a flat screen TV for the Amish.

Link. Excerpts:

A presence on campus for more than 30 years, the humanist chaplaincy sponsors, among other things, the Harvard Secular Society, a group with about 20 active undergraduates who meet to discuss philosophical matters. Humanists bow before reason and science rather than the shrine of a deity; their prophets are rationalist thinkers such as Erich Fromm and Bertrand Russell.

Harvard humanists are preparing for a milestone this summer, the retirement of the man who started it all, chaplain Thomas Ferrick. A former priest, Ferrick lost his parents to tuberculosis as a child and found refuge from the loneliness of foster care in the idea of a loving God. But as an adult, he left Catholicism and the clergy after several disagreements. (His I'm-out-of-here moment came with the church's rejection of birth control.) Today, he says, he is one of only 10 or so humanist chaplains on American campuses.

Harvard's chaplaincy is in particularly good shape, having been endowed both financially, by a wealthy alumnus 10 years ago, and communally, by what campus humanists call the warm embrace of the school's religious chaplains and students.

Thanks, Zorak.