Winter is the time that many parents begin pondering whether to send their children to summer camp. In sorting through their options, they’ll see that one camp’s materials contain no descriptions of oaths, no church services, no sermons on Sunday mornings. Indeed, at this camp, kids are more likely to spend Sunday mornings identifying insects or testing hypotheses.
Camp Quest (which stands for Question, Understand, Explore, Search, and Test), an operation that holds summer camps in six states in the United States, one in Ontario, and, for the first time last summer, in the United Kingdom, swaps out a religious perspective for a scientific one, and has campers ponder their places in the universe using logic. “The whole thing is to show the virtues of evidence and inquiry and reason over visions and faith,” says Edwin Kagin, the Kentucky lawyer who started Camp Quest in 1996. Kagin, who is an ...
