Monday, April 09, 2007

Separate that Church and State, Baby

SMU appears to be riven by the whole Bush Library prospect. Per the Chicago Tribune, the library has:

.. split the [Southern Methodist University] faculty, feeding a debate that simmers beneath the serenity of the leafy campus. At an institution dedicated to scholarly achievement and academic freedom, many fear the work of the Bush Institute would forever associate SMU with a right-wing political agenda.

The vision of a Bush-backed think tank at a campus owned by the United Methodist Church has exposed emotional rifts within a church already divided over the war in Iraq. Bishops and other clergy critical of the pre-emptive war and the administration's treatment of enemy combatants are protesting what they view as a memorial to Bush, a Methodist whose policies they say are 'antithetical' to their teachings.

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