Windowless University

Jacob Taubes ( The Political Theology of Paul (Cultural Memory in the Present) ) says that theology departments should install some windows so they can see across the hall and the quad to other departments. He knows the complaint goes both ways: “in Berlin you can just feel it, the ignorance that comes about because the departments are closed units.”

He is an advocate to permeability: “I think it is a disaster that my students grow up in sheer ignorance of the Bible. I received a dissertation about Benjamin in which twenty percent of the associations were mistaken, for the reason that they were biblical associations. So the student comes to me with the finished product. I read some of it and I say: Listen, you need to go to Sunday school and read the Bible! And with the delicacy of the Benjaminites he says to me: In what translation? I say: For you, any one will do” (p. 4).