“The counterargument to that is that it would just mean that institution will become secularized, and it will just become, you've heard the story about the universities that used to be religious, and now they're just big, you know, institutions offering no particular distinctive basis for their education. But I've also seen a place like SETI's, which is not a faith-based institution, but it's committed to certain values. And one of those is spirituality.
I had conversations with the president about what does that mean? He's a devout Catholic, and he was having trouble defining that for that institution, but they were having the conversations. But I've also seen institutions like the University of San Francisco that is dedicated to values, Jesuit Catholic values, which are serving the needy, social justice, those kinds of key values that are a central part of being a Jesuit.
And I've seen them be able to take that and impart those values to a large number of students that are there not because they're Catholic or because they believe in Jesuits. It's even a daughter of ours, like Heather, who went to law school. And those values are imbued throughout the institution.
And[…]”And so I've said to myself, what if Adventists were less particular about their distinctive doctrines and their distinctive way of doing things and were more general, let's say more Christian in their approach, but had some of those distinctive elements that were included, similar to what Adventist Health does with its institutions. So SETI's helped me change that perspective. I don't view humanism as a religion, but it gave me an idea of how you could take the values, those core values, and teach them, core values of a Catholic institution, core values of an Evangelical institution, like Azusa Pacific, which I have worked with, or I'm on the board of Los Angeles Pacific University, an institution that in just the four or five years has got 3,000 students doing online education, and they try to imbue their values through that particular way of imparting their mission and their values.
So, yes, I just think there are a lot of opportunities, like what you heard me talk about from Cedes, to have a broader mission than just this very narrow mission that we serve at this. I know many of our Adventist colleges are already doing that, especially the[…]”
From Adventist Voices by Spectrum: The Journal of the Adventist Forum: Richard Osborn: A Credit to Education, Apr 8, 2021
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