A Liberal, Gay Cleric Defends Campus Crusade

It seems that the late Peter Gomes stared down the administration at Harvard University when they tried to oust an evangelical campus group. Gomes won.

Now, Vanderbilt is attempting to do something similar to Cru (the new name for Campus Crusade), and Cru’s defenders are invoking Gomes’s memory in their defense.

From Bob Smietana at the Tennessean:

When Vanderbilt wanted its freshmen students to learn about ethics, the school turned to the late Rev. Peter Gomes to teach them. Gomes’ book, The Good Life, was required reading for the Vanderbilt class of 2015.

Now some critics of Vanderbilt’s nondiscrimination policy hope the school will turn to Gomes, a Harvard professor who died last year, once again.

In 2003, a Christian group at Harvard called the Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship ran afoul of that school’s nondiscrimination policy because it required its leaders to hold specific beliefs.

Harvard’s administration told the group to change its ways or leave campus. But Gomes, a professor and minister of the Memorial Church at Harvard, defended the student group, saying the university was discriminating against it.

“How can a profession of faith be irrelevant in the leadership of a faith-based group?” he wrote in a 2003 letter to the Harvard Crimson, the university’s student newspaper.

Read the rest: Foes of Vanderbilt’s nondiscrimination policy point to Harvard | The Tennessean | tennessean.com.