Secularism gains interest as field of study

By Michelle Boorstein,
WashPost
Friday, December 16, 8:35 PM

For some students at Georgetown University, news that the school had assigned them to an intensive seminar in secularism elicited more than a little unease.

To Jeff Caso, a conservative Catholic from Long Island, N.Y., the word meant unreligious — not what the freshman was expecting from a Jesuit school. Taylor Griffith, a churchgoing evangelical from Albuquerque, feared the same thing. “I was worried about being in a class that was against my religion,” she said

Then they met professor Jacques Berlinerblau.

A hyperactive beanpole with two doctorates, he runs his class like a stand-up act — if there were a standup act about Thomas Jefferson or Supreme Court religion rulings. The punchline would be about the Jewish atheist who teaches secularism at a Catholic school.

That would be Berlinerblau.

(More here.)