June 12 2025

photo of Luis Leon posing with student Elaine Penagos in December 2016

Luis León, scholar of American Latinx religions, passed away last year. Colleagues and friends have organized a panel session to honor León's contributions to the field during the 2019 AAR Annual Meeting in San Diego.

by Sarah Jacoby, Northwestern University

a small tower of rocks built on an enbankment in front of a forest

The 21st-century has seen a rapid expansion of interest in contemplative pedagogy across institutions of higher education, not to mention K-12 education. Even as contemplative pedagogy can be found everywhere from courses on law to language, it has a more complex relationship with religious studies. Although the fiction of pure objectivity has receded in intellectual inquiry more broadly, many religious studies departments defend themselves from critics on all sides by presenting themselves as engaged in the “scientific study of religion” (religionswissenschaft). Promoting contemplative practice in the classroom can risk crossing the line into proselytizing, as well as into the culturally imperialist decontextualization and appropriation of others’ traditions, leaving some religious studies scholars wary of first-person approaches to learning that are based on practices associated with particular religions.

by Candy Gunther Brown, Indiana University

a small tower of rocks built on an enbankment in front of a forest

Contemplative pedagogy is a broad field. When I use the term, I am thinking particularly of approaches to teaching and learning that encourage participation in “critical first-person,” “experiential,” “introspective” exercises, many of which are derived from religious or spiritual traditions, though they are sometimes reframed as secular.

I teach in a religious studies department at a public university that serves students from diverse cultural and religious backgrounds. I regularly teach students about contemplative practices—including mindfulness meditation and yoga as well as prayer and devotional Bible reading—but I do not ask students to perform religious or “secularized” versions of any of these practices.

This essay articulates ethical and legal reasons for preserving the distinction between teaching about and encouraging performance of contemplative practices.

by Kathleen M. Fisher, Assumption College

“I don’t understand why we have to read these old stories,” the student said. By old, he meant the book of Genesis. He went on: “They don’t make a whole lot of sense and besides, science has proven they’re wrong.” My students regularly struggle with biblical stories, reading them as factually true or false; to them, “myth” means “false.” Such a literalist reading is quite understandable – the Bible is a confounding set of texts! In the past I would try to explain the concepts of metaphors and analogies, or give an overview of the Babylonian Exile as the context for composing the Book of Genesis. I would provide information that I felt sure would reveal the purpose of the text. But my approach was intellectually incomplete; I needed to engage their minds more broadly to teach them about myths.

by Daniel A. Hirshberg, University of Mary Washington

Since the first iPhone was introduced in 2007, smartphones have become not only ubiquitous, but a near constant in our waking environment. Even when we are not on our own device, several people around us usually are, which often compels us to check our own. This is sufficient to demonstrate that their effect on us as individuals, whether attentional, psychological, or physiological, is determined not only by our own device and usage but by that of others around us as well.

by Karolyn Kinane, University of Virginia

a small tower of rocks built on an enbankment in front of a forest

“I no longer read for fun.” “I can’t enjoy movies anymore.” “Reading a menu at a restaurant, I start analyzing its rhetoric and can’t think about what to order.” These and similar comments from students across the humanities got me thinking: Students are—even unintentionally—applying critical-reading skills that we practice within courses to life beyond class. But are those skills enough? Are they helping students to flourish as humans? In order to complement critical thinking, about a decade ago, I started incorporating a different set of practices into my courses, drawn from contemplative traditions and the then-emerging field of contemplative pedagogy.

by Anne Carolyn Klein, Rice University

Me and My Background

I teach undergraduate and graduate students in the area of Buddhism. I also teach Buddhist practice outside the academy. Buddhist literature and philosophy is in many ways a natural context in which to take advantage of the current interest and growing refinement of contemplative studies in higher education. Yet, because of the academy’s interestingly complex relationship with religion, especially in a Department of Religion, I have also often felt reluctant to teach meditation in courses precisely because they do focus on Buddhist traditions.

by Harold D. Roth, Brown University

a small tower of rocks built on an enbankment in front of a forest

I understand “contemplative pedagogy” within the practical and philosophical contexts we have developed at Brown in our novel undergraduate concentration (major) in contemplative studies, which began in 2014 and has graduated twenty-seven students. Nonetheless, even if you don’t have a program like that at your home institution, we think the methods we have developed are broadly applicable. I will begin by setting up our context.

by Michael Sheehy, University of Virginia

a small tower of rocks built on an enbankment in front of a forest

Contemplation is a dense term with a diverse range of meanings that have shifted semantically across different times, cultures, and languages. For instance, the terms “contemplation” and “meditation,” from early Christianity up through Early Modern European usage, have ironically evolved to mean the opposite of what they mean in contemporary English parlance. Contemplation now typically has the connotation of cognitively engaging a topic, thinking it over; meditation has come to mean a quiescent concentration. In the classroom, and across contemporary secular settings, the term “contemplation” has been adapted and expanded to include a broader scope of meaning.

by Judith Simmer-Brown, Naropa University

a small tower of rocks built on an enbankment in front of a forest

Contemplative Reading Exercise

Introducing the sacred texts of various religious traditions has been a staple in my undergraduate courses over the years. The purpose of the exercise is to encourage students to animate their personal encounter with the text as part of the learning process. It is also encouragement to study the cultural and religious context of a text with the quality of direct encounter as the ground.

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