I receive an email each week from Focus on the Family that highlights news they think will be of interest to their readers (in this case pastors). One recent news bite made me go searching for more. As many of you know, I'm good friends with Dr. Peter Jones and serve on the board of CWiPP the ministry that employs Dr. Jones. Over the last 10 years I've been highly influenced by Dr. Jones and his insightful work on the ongoing reemergence of pagan spirituality in America and across the developed world. With this background perhaps now you can understand why this article makes perfect sense to me. Go read it and tell me your reaction. Okay, did you read it? What was your reaction? I suspect something along the lines of being horrified. But to me - with Dr. Jones insights in the back of my mind - this makes perfect sense. The school is ELCA affiliated. The ELCA long ago abandoned Christian orthodoxy for radical Liberalism. Back in the 1920's J. Gresham Machen in his classic Christianity and Liberalism (which you ought to immediately go buy and read if you've not) pointed out that Liberal Christianity was not just an aberrant form of Christianity but rather it was paganism. Okay fast forward to St. Olaf hiring a Hindu to run their Religion Department. For a moment think of a beautiful cherry pie. Paganism teaches all religions are actually unified at their center. All the wedges of a cherry pie unite at the middle. Paganism realizes that all religious are not duplicate thus the reason that wedges of pie have some differences at the edge of the pie plate. But at their core - according to paganism - all religious are one. This is the kind of theology that St. Olaf has bought into. If all religions are one, then who cares whether an adherent to a religion other than Christianity heads up the religion department of a historically Christian school? Though - to an ELCA pagan - their version of Christianity and Hinduism have minor differences they are united at their core. This is the reason why this hire makes perfect sense.

BTW - this is also the reason why multiculturalism and diversity training are so big at colleges and universities these days. Cultures flows from worldviews which in themselves are inherently religious (I know that's a packed statement, see the articles at this link for background on that statement. Thus if all religions are one and none are thus superior then no worldview and thus no culture can be superior. Instead all distinctions must disappear and absolute leveling of cultures and religions must be forced upon people as the most basic tenet of pagan faith.