Talking to people at the Divinity School is like watching Sir Lancelot zoom by on a motorcycle: you get the feeling that time-honored traditions have been catapulted into the twentieth century.

Father Joseph H. Fichter is an example of this sometimes disconcerting blend of past and present. Fichter was appointed to the Divinity School faculty this fall as Chauncy Stillman Professor of Catholic Studies. But unlike his predecessors, who lectured in medieval history, Fichter holds a Harvard Ph.D. in sociology. Although he is a Jesuit, he admits he "can't remember the last time I read Thomas Aquinas."

Fichter is typical of the Divinity School's activist-theologians who are leading a religious revolution aimed at what another professor called "getting the church back into the pain and hope and excitement of the real world."

According to Harvey G. Cox, who joined the School's faculty this fall as associate professor of church and society, it is a revolt against "spectator religion, against the idea that the religious community is a ghetto somehow separated from the rest of society."

Cox says Divinity School unrest about "sterile, Sunday-morning Christianity" simmered until the civil rights issue exploded in the mid-1930's. "That gave us a chance to speak out, a chance to show people we were interested." Pope John's support of ecumenism also helped shape a brand of world-conscious religion that has not been seen in America since the abolitionist movement of the 1850's, Cox explains.

Not Just Good Ministers

The world-conscious religion, as practiced by the Divinity School, has prompted major revisions in the school's Field Work Program, part of the core curriculum. The program originally was an attempt to teach the practical side of the parochial ministry by giving students apprenticeships in local churches. "But we decided in 1961 that it is just as important to train good theologians as it is to train good ministers," Tjord G. Hommes, the program's director, says.

Under the revised program, only about one-third of the student teams--each with a faculty advisor--are placed in churches. This year, the rest will work in the Negro ghettos of the South End and Roxbury and in the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. Teams have been assigned to the state attorney general's office to study birth control legislation, juvenile delinquency, censorship, and property rights.

New Projects for the Surplus

The School was so hard put to find new projects that last summer it hired a student, Robert M. Veatch, to map out an effective program of participation in race relations. Veatch consulted community action groups like the Congress of Racial Equality and the American Friends Service Committee to determine specific jobs which would be suitable for students. He expects that the School will institute a complete program based on some of his proposals.

Veatch recommends, in his still unfinished report, that the School's civil rights activity be centered in one geographical area, probably the South End. He particularly emphasizes that participating students should move into neighborhoods, so they can be more than academic spectators.

Many of the men responsible for the School's new attitude joined the faculty this fall. One of the newcomers is Max L. Stackhouse, who lectures on ethics but is also an associate of the Harvard-M.I.T. Joint Center for Urban Studies. Stackhouse sees the union of sociology and theology as the birth of a new academic discipline, Christian Social Ethics, which focuses on "the relation between the church and all the problems of American culture."

New, But Not All That New

Stackhouse stresses that the new discipline is a modification, not a rejection, of traditional religious values. "You can't take medieval thinkers and transport them to the twentieth century," he says. He and his colleagues, in undertaking sociological studies for the Divinity School, have sought the advice of specialists in other fields. They have met with representatives of the Business School to consider questions of business ethics and will hold forums with the Education School on religion in public schools.

Two other men who came to the Divinity School this fall are Arthur J. Dyck and Ralph B. Potter J.r, assistant professors of social ethics, who split their time between teaching at the Divinity School! and research at the Harvard Center for Population Studies. The year-old Center coordinates work on world health problems, medical care, and the development and circulation of new birth control devices.