July 27 2024

The Dynamic Canon of the Purāṇas and the Ethnography of the Classroom

May 31, 2018

Elizabeth M. Rohlman, University of Calgary

A few years ago, there was a panel at the Annual Meeting of the AAR entitled “Teaching Eastern Religions in Western Classrooms.” The panelists included individuals whom I respect tremendously as scholars and gifted teachers, and whom I count as friends. But the commonality of the panelists was that they taught at undergraduate institutions in small “college towns” to student bodies that were, for the most part, racially and ethnically homogenous. I struggled to relate to the framing of this panel. In Calgary, my undergraduate classes are populated by roughly sixty-to-seventy percent South Asian students. These students range from fifth- or sixth-generation Canadians, descended from the Sikh labourers who built the Canada Pacific Railway in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to students who are, like me, “New Canadians,” the rather endearing term the Canadian government uses for immigrants. I wondered, while at this panel, should the students in my classes be considered “Western” or “Eastern”? Even more precisely, I wondered whether the Hinduism, Sikhism, and Islam my students practice in their Canadian homes should be considered “Eastern” or “Western” religions. Ultimately, I wondered: how should we define this distinction? The teaching reflections that follow represent the evolution of my own teaching since arriving in Calgary a decade ago; but more broadly, they represent an attempt to reframe our pedagogical assumptions so that we might move away from the highly racialized and unnecessarily exoticized assumption that professors of Hindu studies are necessarily teaching a homogenous group of white, largely Christian, students about the non-white, mysterious “other.”

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Teaching Hindu Stories as Ways of Fashioning Selves and Framing Lives

May 31, 2018

Shana Sippy, Centre College and Carleton College

When we introduce students to sacred texts, we often begin with what scholars and historians consider the canonized version of classics. While this approach has many virtues, especially when augmented by other tellings, it commonly fails to convey how people actually receive and engage with texts in lived religious contexts.

Growing up, children are rarely first introduced to religious narratives through the “official” versions of sacred text but, rather, they imbibe them through bedtime stories, comic books, and videos. Stories are recounted during pujas (worship services) and festival celebrations, encountered in visual representations, devotional songs, visits to temples, and as part of religious instruction. In all of these cases, the ways that narratives are transmitted involve tremendous amounts of distillation. Not only do retellings reflect regional, devotional, and other cultural differences, but they also reveal religious, moral, and ethical expectations, modes of subject formation, and processes of interpolation (as sacred narratives are seen to manifest within and/or help people to interpret their lives).

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Narrative Pedagogy and Transmedia Balancing

May 31, 2018

Caleb Simmons, University of Arizona

When I arrived at the University of Arizona as a new assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Classics, I was tasked with building the curriculum on South Asian religions. In fact, the only course that was on-the-books and related to my area of expertise—Hinduism—was an older holdover from the university’s “Department of Oriental Studies.” This course was titled “Hindu Mythology.” While the title seemed a bit outdated (and I worried if the title was “sexy” enough to draw in students), I was thrilled that I would be able to teach this course because it gave me a perfect opportunity to teach through narratives, and the old-fashioned title would serve to set the tone of the course in which we could problematize both the categories of “Hinduism” and “myth.” Indeed, structuring a course entirely around Hindu narratives proved to engage students and introduce them to the variety of traditions under the rubric of Hinduism, and it also helped them understand its history as it is embedded within the texts that we encounter. While the course proved to be successful with high enrollments—I guess the title was sexier than I thought—and I could see students engaging with the narratives in a way that they often don’t with textbooks, in many ways I felt like I was doing the tradition a disservice because, intentional or not, I was reifying a model of studying and teaching religion (largely based on Protestant Christian theology) that privileged textual sources over other sources of religious knowledge.

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Our Theological Schools are Running Ethical Deficits: Here’s How We Can Fix That

May 29, 2018

Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, Chicago Theological Seminary

protestors stand together outdoors with signs

James Baldwin said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

This is exactly the case in theological education today. There is a crisis that many schools are refusing to face, and in so doing they are closing the door to real possibilities to bring about positive change. This needs to be fixed.

The hidden crisis I want to invite us to face is the fact that increasing numbers of faculty are part-time and contingent. They often live at or near the poverty level, have no benefits or job security. Schools have often made the choice to reduce full-time faculty positions with benefits and replace them with part-time and contingent faculty to “balance the budget” and try to keep their endowment draws around the recommended six percent.

I believe, however, that in using this practice of increasing part-time and contingent faculty to close a financial deficit, these schools are now running what I have come to call an “Ethical Deficit.”

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AAR Presidents Remember Rev. Dr. James Cone

May 14, 2018

Rev. James H. Cone, author of Black Theology and Black Power, God of the Oppressed, and The Cross and the Lynching Tree; known as the founder of Black liberation theology; a central figure in racial and social justice movements; and dismantler of white supremacist assumptions in ministry and seminary education, died on April 28, 2018.

Obituaries celebrating the life and work of Cone appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and on the websites of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and of Union Theological Seminary, where Cone was the Bill & Judith Moyers Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology. Union has also posted the livestream of his funeral, which took place on May 7 at Riverside Church in New York City.

Cone was a longtime member of the American Academy of Religion. In 2009, he was awarded AAR’s Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion.

Below, four AAR presidents (Emilie M. Townes, Peter J. Paris, David P. Gushee, and Eddie S. Glaude Jr.) reflect on the legacy of Cone’s work in their scholarship, faith, and teaching.

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Rejecting US Christianity in Hopes of Saving the Soul of the Nation

April 18, 2018

by Miguel A. De La Torre, Iliff School of Theology

an image of an American flag sumperimposed on top of crecked, dried bed of clay

Christianity did not perish with the election of Donald Trump; it was stillborn upon first arriving to these shores. America was originally made great when Christian Pilgrims embraced their divine right to steal the winter provisions of indigenous people, thanking God for his merciful bounty. Only by stealing the land of others—justifying genocide as fulfilling God’s call to rid the Promised Land of modern-day Canaanites—could America ever have become great. Only by stealing the labor of others by capturing Black bodies—justifying slavery as God’s call to bring civilization and Christianity to lost primitive peoples whose only hope is to be servants to whites in this world and the next—could America ever have become great.

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Lena Salaymeh on Critiques and New Directions in Studying Islamic Legal Traditions

April 5, 2018
 
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2018 Humanities Advocacy Day: Building on Last Year’s Wins

February 27, 2018

by Beatrice Gurwitz, Deputy Director, National Humanities Alliance

Over the course of February and March, advocacy organizations of all stripes host “fly-in” days, where advocates from around the country come to Capitol Hill to make the case for federal funding priorities. These events are concentrated in February and March to align with the beginning of the congressional appropriations cycle. After the president submits a budget request in February, Congress begins its own budgeting and appropriations process: Members of Congress submit individual requests and sign on to collective letters that make the case for particular priorities. These letters and requests are then sent to the chairs of the Appropriations Committees, who take them under advisement when drafting their bills.

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Existentialism, Authenticity, and Asceticism with Noreen Khawaja

February 20, 2018

Noreen Khawaja talks to Religious Studies News about her book "The Religion of Existence: Asceticism in Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Sartre" (University of Chicago Press), which won the American Academy of Religion’s 2017 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in constructive-reflective studies.

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In Memoriam: Jonathan Z. Smith (1938–2017)

January 5, 2018

by Russell T. McCutcheon, University of Alabama

Jonathan Z Smith speaking at a podium with a blue curtain behind him

On the recent afternoon and early evening of New Year’s Eve many of us were shocked to learn the sad news that Jonathan Z. Smith, arguably the world’s most influential scholar of religion over the past fifty years, had died the previous day from complications due to lung cancer. He was 79 and had been undergoing treatments since his diagnosis last summer.

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