John B. Cary Memorial Department of Religion

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John B. Cary Memorial Department of Religion

Straight from the website: While biology and English sprang from roots at least a century old, and therefore may have bulged a bit uncomfortably during the period of the 1960s, religious studies stands as one of the newest departments on grounds. Until 1967, the department, officially called the John B. Cary Memorial Department of Religion, did not have what might be considered a regular faculty. The pre-1960s existence of religion courses at all, in fact, stems from an interesting and little-known peculiarity of U.Va.'s turn-of-the-century history. The man for whom the department is named, John B. Cary--"an eminent business man of Richmond, Virginia"--was a member of the Disciples of Christ who in 1897 provided an endowed lectureship (managed by the Indianapolis-based Christian Woman's Board of Missions, an arm of the Disciples of Christ) for religiously oriented lectures to be offered weekly in the newly erected University Chapel.37 Since Jefferson's vision for the University of Virginia did not include mandatory religious training, the Chapel lectures were given by outside speakers and were taken for no credit.

From 1903 to 1939, a man by the name of William M. Forrest, also know as Dr. W. M. Forrest, began to offer regular lectures on biblical literature at the University. By the early 1900s, the fledgling "school" of religion and its faculty member received a critical boost: T. Archibald Cary, son of John Cary, gave an additional $20,000 to the Christian Woman's Board of Missions, which by then had acquired a reputation for establishing schools of religion in public universities such as the University of Michigan, Texas and Kansas.38 Public universities worried at the time that publicly-funded departments of religious study might cross the line between church and state; private organizations, such as the Christian Woman's Board of Missions, jumped in to fund religion professors' salaries and departmental needs instead. The Trust Agreement between U.Va.'s Board of Visitors and the Christian Woman's Board of Missions, dated December 17, 1908, outlines the appropriation of the $20,000 donation, calling for an endowed professorship called the John B. Cary Chair of Biblical History and Literature and the establishment of an academic school that "shall never, in any wise, be sectarian or denominational in character.

The University of Virginia was fortunate to be creating its Religious Studies Department at a time when the academic study of religion throughout the country was opening up. Throughout the United States until the 1960s, fuzziness about the legal ramifications of publicly-funded religious studies stifled departments' growth in state universities. The Supreme Court case of Schempp v. Abdington [sic], however, clarified differences between the teaching of religion and the preaching of religious tenets, and declared in 1963 that religious studies could be taught and still be distinct from the role of the church.[1][2]


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