Pusey Claims Religious Life Needed with Study

In his first public statement on the place of religion within the college, President Pusey last night said that "living and practicing religion must supplement the mere studying and reading about it."

Speaking to a packed student audience at the Congregational Church, the president emphasized practicing religion through avoiding stagnation and freely discussing it, in addition to reinterpreting New Testament miracles on a figurative basis.

Pusey claimed a great upsurge of interest in religion--partly due to the war--since his student days. He talked about his own apathy to religion while a student, when he thought "religion was a kind of ancient superstition no longer needed and holding back progress."

He compared it to the present situation," where religious questions, which once would have been laughed at, are seriously discussed in "bull sessions."

"There is a happy cynicism among Harvard students today wherein religious topics are freely discussed," he said to the assembled member groups of the United States Religious Council.

To illustrate this he drew particular attention to the New Testament parable of Jesus' changing water to wine at Cana at the beginning of his ministry. "We must not laugh at this as a silly myth in the light of our modern knowledge, but must realize its meaning," Pusey stated.

According to the president, the writer of the Gospel was showing how Jesus meant to put new life, symbolized by the wine, into the formalized and static religion of his time, symbolized by the water.

Poor Home Background

Defining education's purpose as "to produce a finer, richer, more perfectly developed person in a more meaningful and transformed community," Pusey claimed that we would get no such result "by remaining indifferent to all religious issues."

Harvard and all other colleges are places to learn facts, he said. "You should all try to get into Group I every time, but facts alone won't make you a very valuable person in society. There is something more to life than knowledge. This is where an immersion in religion, as well as in all the arts and humanities, comes in."

Pusey blamed a large part of religious confusion among college students on poor religious background in the home. "Most students come from backgrounds where religion has no significance as a major part of life. They don't lose religion in college; they have not been well grounded in it to start with, being neither psychologically nor intellectually prepared."