Studies God’s Place in Worldly 20th Century : Catholic’s Flippant Book Drives Point Home

The University of Rochester’s glib president, George Dennis O’Brien, suspects that the Irish Christian Brothers who educated him just might cuff him were they to read his sassy new book.

Its title alone might do it: “God and the New Haven Railroad.” Or, why neither of them is doing so well.

O’Brien’s book asks whether God and religion have a place in the life of the college-educated, worldly person of the 20th Century, dashing here and there, swearing when things go wrong.

Indeed, O’Brien concludes, they do. Despite chapters titled “Jehovah Meets Smokey Bear,” “Mafia and Godfather” and “Saints and Sexpots,” the book is a rather orthodox affirmation of Christianity.

O’Brien discusses and dismisses various historical concepts of deity and concludes that humans must ground themselves, affirm the values of a limited life in something or someone limitless. That person is Christ, he believes.

“This book,” he writes, “attempts to give the Bible equal time with Steven Spielberg.” And later: “Perhaps this book should be viewed as spiritual Amtrak--an attempt to keep religion running.”

O’Brien, a practicing Catholic, is frequently called upon to lecture and to give sermons at various churches, both Protestant and Catholic. He gave one sermon at a synagogue in Rochester.

Though he is a Roman Catholic, he does not support all of his church’s positions. He says flat out in the book, which was published in late October, that he does not believe in the infallibility of the Pope.

The Bible’s main problem, he believes, is that it is basically humorless and “too full of sheep and figs.” O’Brien’s book is far from humorless. He even suggests that the Bible has a much healthier and more optimistic message about sex than Playboy or Penthouse, despite all those injunctions about fornication, adultery and more.

“The Bible says to mankind, ‘You are your body.’ Penthouse says, ‘You are Kodachrome.’ ”

O’Brien, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale University who earned his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Chicago, taught at Princeton University and was president of Bucknell University for eight years before becoming president here two years ago. A tall and lanky man of 55, O’Brien is married and the father of three daughters.

He loves to teach and spends every Wednesday afternoon teaching a course called “Existentialism and Rock ‘n’ Roll.” His students are required to write an existential biography of Elvis Presley to complete the course, a clearly untouched angle that even the National Enquirer has not thought of yet.

His interest in rock ‘n’ roll was evidenced by the talk he gave at one college titled “Philosophy of Education According to the Pink Floyd.”

On a recent Wednesday, at the fraternity house where the class is held, O’Brien asked the students how Jean-Paul Sartre would have explained the recent rush party in which there was, in O’Brien’s words, “a ruckus.”

That meant verboten beer came in and somehow that prompted a chair going out a window. Other furniture was damaged less dramatically. Sartre, the philosophy professor reminded his charges, believed there were no excuses for anything.

It was a provocative class, with original interpretations--conducted, ironically, as the new furniture was being delivered.

O’Brien, who affirms that he has no qualms about using his presidency as a “bully pulpit,” says part of his motivation in writing the book was to promote the University of Rochester.

His other reason, he says, is that most college-educated Americans have about a sixth-grade sense of what religion is and is not.

Universities, he believes, have made entirely too little of religion. He recalls a debate as to whether a course on religion should be added to the curriculum. One of those objecting said, “If you add religion, the next thing you know we will be offering courses on witchcraft.”

At which point, O’Brien recalls, the head of the anthropology department stuck up her hand and said, “We already are.”

He talks derisively about religious checkers, by which he means those who debate the fine points to such a degree that they lose the overall message.

“Anyone who goes to a spiritual instruction that begins by asking the question whether Christ would have still been our savior had he died in bed is wasting his time,” he said.

O’Brien sent the early galleys of his book to trusted friends. They talked him into taking out some of his more flippant cracks. But even the more cautious editors liked one description in the chapter titled “A Good Word for Sin.”

“There were moments in my education from the Irish Christian Brothers when I had the distinct impression that the entire point of the creation of the sun, the moon, and stars, the journeys of the patriarchs, the flight out of Egypt, the proclamations of the Prophets, the New Testament, and the pageants of the popes was to stamp out smooching,” O’Brien writes. “Never has so much earnestness been devoted to so little effect.”