December 22 2024

Critical Thinking and Teaching the Religious Traditions of Others

October 28, 2015

by Steven Benko, Meredith College

 

 

Introduction

Has an instructor ever said that they were not teaching critical thinking? What is an alternative, but still acceptable, answer to the question, “Are you teaching your students to be critical thinkers?” It would not be acceptable to say that we want nothing more from our students than to be passive receptacles of information that they will then repeat on a test. It would not be acceptable to kick the critical-thinking can down the road and say that the responsibility of teaching critical thinking is spread out among multiple classes and faculty and that students graduate from our programs and colleges as critical thinkers. The only acceptable answer to the question of whether instructors are teaching their students to be critical thinkers is “yes, of course we are.”

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Wider Moral Communities: A Framework for Teaching Comparative Religious Ethics

October 28, 2015

by Mark Larrimore, Eugene Lang College

 

 

Introduction

I was once part of a discussion of the applicability of the category of “religion” in Japan. After a while, my host, a Tendai priest, said that nothing we’d been discussing fit the largely funerary ritual of the temple he inherited from his father. Rather than “religion” (shukyo), it might be better described as “ethics for the dead” (shisha ni tai suru rinri). This observation hit me like a thunderbolt. What he proposed as a way of interpreting a particular practice, for me raised general questions. “Ethics for the dead” has shaped my understanding of religion ever since. And also of “ethics,” whose default secularity it threw into dramatic question.

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The Personal is Pedagogical: Embracing Moral Debate in the Religious Studies Classroom

October 28, 2015

by Elizabeth Barre, Rice University

 

 

Classic Challenges

In some ways, the questions we are asking in this issue of Spotlight on Teaching are not new. Anyone who has taught an introductory course in religion, or even read about the teaching of such courses, is already well aware that the task of teaching a “tradition” is fraught with difficulties. It’s never quite clear what we’re supposed to be teaching when we’re assigned this task, and if we do manage to settle on a responsible answer to that question, it’s not long before the time constraints of a semester-long course make us wonder whether responsibility is simply a luxury we can’t afford.

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Resources: Teaching the Moral Traditions of Others

October 28, 2015

 

 

Ali, Kecia. 2014. The Lives of Muhammad. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ambrose, Susan A. 2010. How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching. The Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Association of American Colleges and Universities. 2007. College Learning for the New Global Century: A Report from the National Leadership Council for Liberal Education and America’s Promise. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Bain, Ken. 2004. What the Best College Teachers Do. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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What Does the AAR-Teagle Foundation Survey of Religious Studies Majors Tell Us?

October 22, 2015

by Charles Mathewes, University of Virginia*

The bare fact that this survey was produced at all is perhaps the most important thing about it. It suggests a greater degree of seriousness about confronting the many challenges we face as teachers in the liberal arts, and in religious studies more specifically. We should all be grateful for that. But we have to be honest: the second most interesting thing about this survey is how little it tells us, and how much more we might want to know.

1. Two Problems: Curious Demographics and Lack of Context

Begin with a couple sampling problems that the survey seems to face. First, the population studied strikes me as remarkably white, with 89.5% of the participants at least partially identifying as white (and only 2.6% of them (at most) identified another ethnicity or race). Also, 55.8% were female. The latter seems to me more statistically similar with my department’s experience, but the former seems a bit off. Does this skew the findings of the survey? It’s a genuine question.

Second, we don’t really have any way to measure these findings against other majors, and so we don’t know how much of this is common to higher education graduates in general, and how much is specific to religious studies majors in particular. There’s nothing to do about this, except to note it, and recognize that this means any judgment we make is very obscure. In the future, it could be useful for the AAR to coordinate with other scholarly associations to produce a larger survey that procures findings for majors across a number of disciplines. That would help us with this problem, at least a bit.

2. A Concern: Subjectivity of assessment of religious studies major overall

Alongside those obstacles, it is also quite difficult to discern what exactly is demonstrated by the questions about how the interviewees think they improved, apart from their own current subjective self-assessment. But what does that tell us about their improvements? It is hard to know what these questions measure apart from interviewees’ current conception of their past, and they are hardly without incentive to tell a certain narrative. A skeptic might suggest that these questions demonstrate simply our ability, as teachers, to convince the students of a narrative. But we don’t need to be very cynical to admit that they do not speak directly to any objective assessment of actual learning.

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“What are you going to do with that?"

October 20, 2015

by Melissa M. Wilcox, Whitman College

by Melissa M. Wilcox, Whitman College | Thousands of undergraduates are currently majoring in religious studies in North America, yet most religious studies programs have only limited and anecdotal knowledge of what happens to students after their final classes. As one religious studies faculty member writes, at present “it’s really more a matter of students keeping track of us than our keeping track of them.” The AAR would like to reverse this dynamic. 

The AAR, with support from the Teagle Foundation, conducted a national survey of religious studies majors in 2014 and the spring of 2015, asking graduates what fields they currently work in, what graduate programs they attended, and how the religious studies major impacted their values and career choices. The Survey Report aggregates the results of 1,675 respondents from 35 participating colleges and universities. The survey is designed to answer via empirical evidence a central question that is asked—often with growing suspicion—by various stakeholders: “What can I do with a major in religious studies?” Learn more about the survey and how your institution can participate by visiting AAR’s website.

Over the coming days, RSN is happy to present analysis on the Survey Report from Melissa Wilcox and Charles Mathewes. E-mail rsn@aarweb.org if you have thoughts on the data you'd like to share with readers.

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On Breaking through Doors and Flipping Tables

October 15, 2015

by Kirk VanGilder, Gallaudet University

"Southern secessionists raise flag at Yale College." Illus. in: Frank Leslie's illustrated newspaper, v. 11, no. 271 (1861 February 2), p. 173.

I recently found myself able to identify with the American bobsledder, Johnny Quinn, as he punched his way through a stuck bathroom door in a Sochi hotel during the recent winter Olympic games. I identified with his story because I’ve often been a “door breaker” in my professional life.

I was born hard of hearing into a mostly hearing family. In high school, my hearing became progressively worse. During my undergraduate years at Ball State University I began my transition from being a “kid with ears that don’t work right” to a participant in a vibrant Deaf culture and community.

And I’ve been breaking down doors ever since.

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Wendy Doniger's 2015 Haskins Prize Lecture

October 1, 2015
Wendy Doniger delivering her 2015 Haskins Prize Lecture on May 8, 2015, in Philadelphia, PA

This year, longtime member and former president of the AAR, Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago, was awarded the 2015 Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lectureship by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Named for the first chairman of ACLS (1920–26), the Haskins Prize Lecture series is entitled “A Life of Learning” and celebrates scholarly careers of distinctive importance.

Doniger presented her lecture at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the ACLS on May 8 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The ACLS has posted the video of her lecture and the accompanying text.

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Natural Disaster and Divine Agency: Brian Pennington on Hindu Responses to Climate Change

September 30, 2015

Brian Pennington with Krisitan Petersen

Photo of destroyed businesses and homes along the Bhagirathi river, which were flooded in June 2013.

Brian Pennington, director of the Center for the Study of Religion, Culture, and Society and professor of religious studies at Elon University, was awarded an AAR Individual Research Grant in 2014. He talks to RSN about his project Natural Disaster and Divine Agency: Hindu Theodicies of Climate Change.

 

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A (Second) Conversation with AAR President, Thomas Tweed

September 28, 2015
Thomas Tweed

Thomas A. Tweed is the 2015 president of the American Academy of Religion and a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame where he also holds the Harold and Martha Welch Endowed Chair in American Studies. Tweed’s historical, ethnographic, and theoretical research has been supported by grants and fellowships, including three from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and his diverse professional service includes work as external reviewer, expert witness, blog contributor, and media consultant. He edited Retelling U.S. Religious History (University of California Press, 1997) and coedited Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History (with Stephen Prothero, Oxford University Press, 1998). He is the author of The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844–1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent (Indiana University Press, 1992) and Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Harvard University Press, 2006).

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