Categories, while necessary, can be troubling things.One place to see this clearly is in academia, which is itself a category.In the long history of deciding what counts as a legitimate job (you can make a living now being a YouTuber!) somewhere in the Middle Ages, based on the idea of the monastery, the university arose.This required some justification—people are to be paid for researching topics and teaching others to do the same?Not quite back-breaking labor, but it can lead to lumbago nevertheless.Topics had to be worthy to permit this excused absence.Law and theology were the earliest majors available.Hobbes’ two swords.Church and state.This makes sense since monasteries were all about obeying rules and obeying God.Theology was the queen of the sciences.
Perhaps unbelievable in today’s world, it was thought that other topics than theology—called humanities so as to distinguish them from divine discussions—should be added to the curriculum.These were topics that the educated were expected to have mastered, and they included things like history and, yes, mathematics.In the early days the building blocks of science (such as math) were considered humanities.Theology wasn’t.The Reformation complicated things because now there were lots of theologies.And this thing called the Enlightenment was suggesting that they were all just a bit naive.Still, universities grew up around theological training grounds, including places like Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.Slowly, however, theology began losing relevance and became more and more a humanities subject.Call it a strange form of incarnation.
By the time I became aware of theological study, it was firmly, and deeply a humanities subject.Often called “religious studies,” other academics often considered it a throw-away major, but if you dug deep enough you found yourself learning dead languages that even a scientist couldn’t comprehend.When I began attending a Christian liberal arts college, it was clear the engineers and others of what would come to be called STEM topics were given preferences.Science, Technology, Engineering, and yes, Math.Some of the subjects that had started out as mere humanities, now received the praise (and cash) while theology—religious studies—had become a purely dispensable humanities topic.These days humanities majors are dropping like theologians, and going to university means preparing for either business or science-based careers.Subjects in which you make more mere money.And one of the founding subjects of this entire enterprise will earn you a starting salary position at Walmart. And that’s a category worth avoiding at any cost.
Photo credit: Ben Schumin, Wikimedia Commons
