The September 2023 issue of Harper's carries a letter from Kathryn Lofton, identified as a professor of religious studies and American studies at Yale (she's also dean of humanities in Yale's faculty of arts and sciences). She writes:
Many religious communities around the world include an injunction to acknowledge wrongdoing through expiation. Within Protestant sects, confession is a ritual that occurs in some but not all churches, and not always for the same reasons. Christianity is a term that summarizes thousands of different sectarian movements unified by little other than interest in the Jesus story.
But facts don't matter when prejudice is being stirred up, and Buruma here leans hard on the last acceptable prejudice—that against religious people—to compare cancellers to fundamentalists. Unable to comprehend religion or its diversity, Buruma offers myopia and misinformation in its place...
Among the signs of a religious resurgence on American college campuses, a letter to the editor from a Yale dean decrying prejudice against religious people isn't one that I had on my list of expected developments. I think the author of God and Man at Yale would be pleased to see it.
