There’s another conflict brewing on the Mountain, this one swirling around the move by several faculty at College of Arts and Sciences’ to remove the reference “enlightened by the Christian faith in the Anglican tradition” from the university’s statement of purpose. Brad Drell has already posted on this and one of his commenters, Jill Woodliff, left this great quote:

William Porcher Dubose, one of the most creative theologians produced by the American Episcopal Church, was a professor at Sewanee. This is an excerpt of a sermon preached in the University Chapel on the Feast of the Transfiguration, 1911:

“… What can we put, not only into shape, but into motion here at Sewanee, for Sewanee, for the Church, for our country and our time? No doubt such questions have come to many of us in the form: What new thing can we devise, what new interest arouse, what new movement inaugurate? I suggest in anticipation what is probably a better form of the query: How can we acquire the secret of making the old ever new, and keeping it so? . . .What is the moral already? We do not forever want new things; we want the art of keeping things forever new.”