OLD GOLD AND BLACK REPORTER
With the Year of the Arts already half over, it is time to start thinking about next year's theme. The 1997-98 academic year will be the Year of Religion in American Life.
The goal of the project is to introduce the community to various religious issues and aspects that impact and are affected by the American way of life. The project intends to examine religion along with popular culture, politics, the arts and ethics. A primary goal is to create occasions that all of the university staff and students can partake in and encounter a diversity of religions.
The committee has been divided into three groups in order to reach this goal. The Religious Experience Committee will feature a "religionist in residence" program that will invite various religious practitioners to campus for small discussions and lectures for a period of two to four days. This committee is headed by Mary Gerardy, the assistant vice-president for Student Life, and junior Al-Husein Madhany.
"My goal as a member of the Religious Experience Committee is to provide students the chance to interact with practitioners of some religious tradition which is foreign to (them)," Madhany said. "I hope that after all that is done, the Wake Forest students will have learned a little bit more about another faith and perhaps used that knowledge to increase their understanding of their faith."
The Religion and Public Life Committee, headed by Charles Kimball, the chairman of the department of Religion, and student co-chairwoman junior Jessica Kent, will schedule speakers of a religious nature for Fall Convocation, Founder's Day and Graduation. Service projects for the university community will be coordinated, and both new and existing programs will become involved. There will also be a link between the worlds of the arts and religious themes.
Madhany said, "what I really would love to see is students being actively involved in discussions of faith in spirituality outside the classroom."
The Religion and Higher Education Committee will explore the role religion should play in the classrooms across the nation. A grant program has also been established to fund projects dealing with religion. This committee is headed by Jill McMillan, an associate professor of communications, and sophmore Carey King, a student co-chairman.
"There will be some classes which actually integrate next year's theme with the course work," Madhany said. "Religion itself is not as important as a student's intellectual and spiritual journey. Religion, I would hope, is what we all practice in some way or another through the way we live in our own daily lives."