One of my readers just sent me a link to this, and though I’m not at all surprised, shocked, or taken back by it, it’s a perfect example of the caricature of their former selves that our nation’s Ivy League institutions have become. Harvard University, once the shining jewel of American academia, now stands as a mausoleum of bamboozled intellect, hosting events so baffling that they almost seem satirical.

The latest nadir in their academic escapades? An evening titled “Reading Taylor Swift as a Sacred Text.”

Imagine, if you will, a gathering in a solemn church setting where scholars—who presumably once revered texts like the Bible—now pore over pop lyrics with the gravity of monks studying Scripture. Taylor Swift, the bard of breakups and boyfriends, elevated to the realm of the sacred?

You can’t make this stuff up.

And the method chosen for this pop theology? Lectio Divina, a practice with a history rooted in ancient mysticism, which has been awkwardly co-opted by Catholic monasticism over the centuries and has infected the realms of the seeker-sensitive “Emergent Church” charade.

Though it’s been dressed up in the garb of Christian piety, this practice isn’t biblical. It belongs more in the pantheon of mystical rituals than in the hands of believers seeking the authoritative voice of God.

And using such a practice on Scripture is dubious enough, but turning it on secular music … from the pulpit of a “church”? Now we’re hurtling headlong into a spiritual farce, where cultural trendiness masquerades as profundity.

But why should we be surprised? The Ivy League, those once-proud titans of Western thought, have become nothing more than playgrounds for the philosophically addled. Harvard, in particular, clings to its tattered reputation for intellectual brilliance while offering courses and events that would make a medieval theologian sob into his ink-stained hands.

How did we fall this far?

When did wisdom become so interchangeable with whatever pop culture throws at us?

It’s as though these institutions are dead set on proving their own irrelevance, one bizarre event after another—or just dead.

Picture it, dwell on it for just a second, because these are the people who will be chosen to lead our nation. A grand hall filled with spiritual tourists, not in search of the divine revelations of Scripture, but sniffing around for spiritual nuggets in songs like “Blank Space.”

Instead of reverent study, we have the intellectual equivalent of a game of Duck Duck Goose—frantically chasing spiritual fulfillment where none exists. In a world already drowning in the shallow waters of spiritual confusion, this was like offering seawater, or worse, sewage, to a thirsty soul. You can almost hear the heavenly hosts sighing in dismay.

Given the modern church’s intellectual intelligentsia—men like John Piper and Tim Keller—their dalliances with contemplative practices, are precisely the kind of flirtation that opens the door to mystical experiences untethered from biblical anchors. Yet any Christian worth his salt knows that true spiritual practices spring from the life-giving Word of God, not from the latest pop culture fad masquerading as divine insight.

So here we stand. Harvard and the Ivy League, once the cerebral giants of our nation, now reduced to buffoonish caricatures of their former glory. They’ve swapped the pursuit of truth for cultural relativism, hoping that a dash of pseudo-mysticism sprinkled on pop idolatry might pass for genuine wisdom.

But here’s the blunt truth. These universities have become as useless to society as a compass that only points south—misleading and completely out of touch. When you enshrine the trivial as sacred and trade substance for show, you deserve every ounce of your irrelevance.

And if this is the height of their intellectual offering, perhaps it’s time they pack up the pretense and admit the game is over.