Larycia Hawkins, who teaches political science at private Wheaton College in IL, was placed on administrative leave on Tuesday after she posted photos of herself in a purple headscarf on social media, writing “Professor & student in solidarity w/ hijab”, on wrote on Twitter.
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Albert Herring/via Wikipedia Creative Commons Wheaton College administrators said they objected to hear statement that Muslims and Christians worship the “same god”.
The post in question came last Thursday when Hawkins, who has taught at the Wheaton, Illinois institution since 2007, announced on her Facebook page that she was going to wear a hijab throughout the Advent to show solidarity with Muslims.
More recently, in 2012, the conservative Christian college also filed a lawsuit in opposition to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ mandate, under the Affordable Care Act, that the school must provide access to contraceptives in its health care plan or be subject to fines.
But it was that explanation of her gesture that concerned some evangelical Christians, who read her statement as a conflation of Christian and Muslim theology.
She also said Muslims, like Christians, are people of the book.
She is a political science professor at the Chicago area school.
The professor stated that her wish for the season would be to see a “large-scale movement” of women wearing hijabs in solidarity with Muslims, noting that she even obtained approval from the Council on American-Islamic relations.
In a Monday interview with CP, Hawkins clarified that she didn’t intend to liken Jesus Christ with the Prophet Muhammad.
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The action was in potential violation of the college’s statement of faith, the officials added. “We will be in dialogue with our faculty, staff and students in the days ahead to ensure that we articulate our love for our Muslim neighbors in ways that are consistent with our distinctive theological convictions”. The waiver allows the school to mandate that faculty and staff adhere to the college’s religious doctrines, though it’s not clear that the school’s statement of faith explicitly says anything about the relationship between the God worshiped by Muslims and Christians. In 2013, Brian C. Houston, the evangelical Christian leader of one of the world’s largest Christian churches, stoked controversy for delivering a sermon in which he posited that Christianity and Islam have a shared deity.
