Religious News - Interest in religion rising on campus

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Interest in religion rising on campus

NASHVILLE May 10 -- Chaplains and professors at college campuses across the nation, including Harvard and Berkeley, say student interest in religion and spirituality is higher than ever, according to a report in The New York Times quoted by Baptist Press on Wednesday.

"My theory is that the baby boomers decided they weren't going to impose their religious life on their children the way their parents imposed it on them. The idea was to let them come to it themselves," Lloyd Steffen, a chaplain at Lehigh University, told The Times May 2.

At the University of California, Berkeley, once known for its defiance of religious tradition, there now are 50 to 60 Christian organizations. Randy Bare, a Presbyterian pastor at Berkeley, said student attendance at churches near the campus has increased significantly.

A large number of students at Berkeley are Asian-American, and many come from observant Christian homes. "That's new, and it's a remarkable shift," Bare said.

More U.S. students are enrolling in religion classes and majoring in religion, and more discussion groups are focusing on spiritual questions, observers say. "University officials explained the surge of interest in religion as partly a result of the rise of the religious right in politics, which they said has made questions of faith more talked about generally," The Times said. "In addition, they said, the attacks of Sept. 11 underscored for many the influence of religion on world affairs."

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said the late Yale President Timothy Dwight "would rejoice in the signs of a Great Awakening akin to what he sparked across campus in the early 1800s. ... At a time when hope is in rare supply, let's continue to pray that God seizes the hearts of these students for His purpose and raises them up to defend the values we hold dear," Perkins said.

Copyright 2007 by United Press International.

This news arrived on: 05/10/2007

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