Some divinity professors feared that the ultimate aim was to pave the way for a department of religious studies on the Yard, a move that would dim the divinity school’s candle still further by drawing a bright line between professors who did serious scholarship and those who trained ministers. A stand-alone department, that is, would dismantle the divinity school’s central conceit: that theology and religious studies—faith and reason—depended on and reinforced each other. “If they ceded religious studies as a discipline over to the Yard, the struggle for intellectual respectability would be
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