Source: The Harvard Crimson
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=525683
It was a “Ben Franklin-inspired” protest.
A group of parents at Julie A. Duncan ’09’s all-girls Catholic school in Kentucky pushed for a ban on several English books containing objectionable material like child abuse and pre-marital sex. The books included “Red Tent,” “Flowers for Algernon,” and “House on Mango Street,” or “normal books that people read all the time,” as Duncan described them. “They wrote a 20-page questionnaire, and they took a bunch of quotes out of context, plopped them down, and said ‘would you want your kids reading this smut?’”
Under parental pressure, the bishop demanded that the school shelve the books. The school’s nuns refused, arguing that it was their academic right to teach the modern canons regardless of the content. In response, the bishop threatened to remove the school from the Catholic diocese—an act that would freeze the school’s funding.
“So I wrote an editorial, under a pseudonym. I insisted that there was one more book that needed to be added to the list. ‘Please read these quotes which I have taken out of context and placed here.’ And they were all quotes taken from the Bible,” Duncan says. “It was decided that if the bishop got a hold of it, it would have been a problem. I had to burn copies of the school newspaper in the basement incinerator.”
Today, the books are still banned at Duncan’s high school.
Now a self-proclaimed atheist in a more secular environment, Duncan says she is pleased to have people besides her agnostic father with whom to discuss her views on religion.
Harvard has long been portrayed—even caricatured—as a bastion for secularism, if not hostility toward faith. But for students struggling to define their personal religious beliefs, the questions of how Harvard affects students’ soul searches, and how students’ religious struggles in turn impact Harvard, are anything but settled.