Wheaton College

Sometimes it seems that this is John Rawls’ world, we’re just living in it: conducting our political and social debates as though we were behind a veil of ignorance, as though we can only trust the judgments made in perfect abstraction from any actual lived contexts. The debate about the future of Larycia Hawkins at Wheaton College is a classic example, where a complex, embodied, richly personal situation gets translated into the terms of disembodied theological debate.

Wheaton College is getting beat up pretty badly over its decision to fire tenured professor Larycia Hawkins for having stated that Muslims and Christians worship the same god. Here is Hawkins’s public statement about the matter. Excerpt:

Wheaton College cannot hold me to a different standard, a higher standard, than they hold every other employees to.

Wheaton College cannot scare me into walking away from the truth that all humans, Muslims, the vulnerable, the oppressed, are all my sisters and brothers.