Doonesbury Inspiration Scotty McLennan Speaks at Div. School

Reverend William "Scotty" L. McLennan engaged about 130 students, churchgoers and panel members in a conversation about religion and spirituality at the Divinity School yesterday evening.

In his new book, McLennan, one of the inspirations for Rev. Scott Sloan of the Doonesbury comic strip by Garry Trudeau, aims to help people discover religion by leading them through six stages of spiritual development.

McLennan, who is also the Tufts University Chaplain, sat for more than an hour after the panel meticulously signing over 70 copies of his book, Finding Your Religion: When the Faith You Grew Up With Lost Its Meaning, copies of which had quickly sold out. Some attendees spoke to the author as if he were their personal spiritual leader.

McLennan, with his bushy eyebrows, beard and fading red hair, resembles Trudeau's character, who is also modeled after William Sloane Coffin. Coffin was McLennan's mentor and the Yale chaplain while he and Trudeau were undergraduate suite-mates there.

"Gary has made me feel like a life-long walking joke," McLennan said to the audience.

McLennan himself entered college in the late 1960s as an atheist. It was Chaplain Coffin who helped him find religion, Unitarian Universalism.

Brent B. Coffin, executive director of the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life, introduced McLennan last night, remarking that Finding Your Religion had an important message in an increasingly chaotic time.

"The book reminds us that the world's great religions are not stops on the superhighway, but are paths within themselves," he said.

In his work as chaplain, McLennan said he has found that he has met more and more students and faculty who say they are spiritual, and not religious.

McLennan maintains that spirituality is not enough. To attain a disciplined life with ritual and a sense of community, he says, people need organized religion.

"The potpourri, grocery store, do-it-yourself method isn't going to work," he said.

But McLennan does not feel that spirituality is taking the place of religion--rather both have increased during his 15 years at Tufts.

"People have had it with the thinking that science and technology can succeed in saving the world alone," he said. "They need something human and deeper."

Thomas Professor of Divinity Harvey G. Cox Jr., one of four former chaplains on the five-person panel, pointed out that college students are at a stage when they analyze everything, including their own religion. He called the book "a real page-turner."

Panelist James Caroll, an author and former chaplain at Boston University, said he disagreed that spiritual people need religion to live a humane and fulfilling life. He used the example of his two children, both of whom had decided to stop attending church.

"But religion does provide access to a community that transcends space and time," he said.

Audience members came to see McLennan for a variety of reasons, but most felt that his ideas are particularly relevant today and to them personally.

"Eighty percent of the members of my church grew up Catholic," said Ken Mattsson of Cambridge, a member of the Arlington Street Unitarian Church. "But the institution where they grew up was too stifling."

"I'm 55 and most of the people my age are dealing with what he's talking about," said Kali P. Lightfoot, who added that she feels traditional religions do not support women.

Panelist Laura Nash, director of the Institute for Value-Centered Leadership, poked fun at the tiresome stories of individuals who had found religion, praising McLennan for having created an interesting narrative of the religious experience.

"There's a lot of searching out there, and unfortunately most of it has been put in print," she said.

At the reception and signing after the panel, an hors d'oeurves table featured papadamas and matzoh bread.

The panel had been publicized in the Boston Globe and Harvard Gazette, and the divinity school fielded over 80 calls asking about it in the last few days, according to Nancy E. Nienhuis, the school's program coordinator.

McLennan is a 1975 graduate of both the Divinity School and the Law School, having obtained both degrees simultaneously. And in 1994, McLennan won the Divinity School's Katzenstein Award, which honors alumni for bringing together the disciplines of law and ministry.

From 1975 to 1984 he did legal ministry with the poor in the Dorchester section of Boston, an experience which caused him to develop many of his ideas about religion.

McLennan has served as the Tufts University Chaplain since 1984 and also lectures at Harvard Business School.