Page 66 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 93, No. 3 Spring 2013

FACETIME
New York Rabbi Irwin Kula, who has
twice visited St. Paul’s, including as a
member of the 2013 Chapel Review
Team, spoke to Alumni Horae Editor
Jana Brown about how a school like
St. Paul’s can meet the needs of the
current generation with regard to
their own spiritual journeys. Rabbi
Kula currently serves as president
of the National Jewish Center for
Learning and Leadership.
A school like St. Paul’s captures exactly
the challenge of building citizens. One
good thing about the Episcopal tradition
is that it does not imagine itself having
everybody becoming Episcopalian, but
instead uses religion to create citizens.
What does it mean to teach religion
with integrity to this culture?
St. Paul’s starts with some sort of
civic commonality. It can produce the
next generation of healthy, religiously
identified people, including people who
are not religiously identified. You have
to understand how religion functions to
be a leader, and that’s one of the most
important global problems.
The biggest change in context for
church schools today is that we live in
a multicultural and pluralist society.
We are the most religiously diverse country
in the world, so what it means to be reli-
gious in America has shifted. When you
have diversity and devoutness, the chal-
lenge is how to create social capital. How
do people preserve their particularity so
it is not diluted in the diversity? How do
you use the diversity to actually build
social capital? Those are the questions
religious schools are always asking.
What it means to be a religious insti-
tution in the 21st century includes
recognizing people who are not
religious, especially in America, where
the fastest-growing religious identity
is none. We are producing strongs and
nones at a very significant rate. How to
hold together a democracy, to build a
citizenry where you have people with
multiple religious identities, is a brand-
new concept.
The role of St. Paul’s is to be fearless
about religious diversity, entering into
different communities, experiencing and
understanding religions and practices
to bridge social capital. St. Paul’s is like
a village – you have to build social cap-
ital for the village of St. Paul’s to con-
tinue. It’s a tremendous little laboratory
for religious diversity and religious
devoutness.
Nobody has yet developed a post-
religious religious language. A school
like St. Paul’s needs to develop that
language. There needs to be a recovery
of the experience behind the language.
The challenge is producing citizens who
can do this. You can’t just study a his-
toric community, you have to use its
practices. You can learn about Judaism,
but not what it’s like to be a Jew. You
may learn prayer X, but what is the
experience that prayer was designed
to reveal?
We teach Shakespeare at a much
higher level than we teach religion.
The relationship between wisdom and the
practice of religion and human flourish-
ing needs to be explored, and we don’t do
that. We have to start; otherwise we don’t
understand the power of people’s reli-
gious commitments. We need to create
spaces for people to share their deepest
doubts and uncertainties. What do they
actually believe? That’s what a place like
St. Paul’s can do – create very safe spaces
for this generation to reveal what they
believe in and what they doubt.
One cannot separate ethics from
knowledge, and character and virtue
from success. That is a fundamentally
religious posture. St. Paul’s is interested
in creating global citizens, but you can’t
be one without being able to understand
religion and religious experience and how
that connects to building ethics, virtue,
and community. If you teach science only
so students can go to MIT, St. Paul’s is not
doing its job.
Rabbi Irwin Kula
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