October 07 2024

by Richard Newton, University of Alabama

Recently I had a front row seat at my oldest son’s kindergarten graduation. Before receiving their diplomas, the children performed a montage of lessons they had learned during the school year—reading, writing, arithmetic…and world cultures. They conveyed the lessons with a cursory description of major holidays that took place within the semesters.

I don’t object to using holidays as a touchstone, but I surely failed at hiding my disappointment in the execution of the lesson. One child told us about the whimsy of Christmas—a winter holiday celebrated by most families present, even those not identifying as Christian. “Jewish people,” another child said, celebrate Hanukkah, and preceded to describe the function of a menorah which was depicted on a poster he had colored. Then a child approached the mic to explain how “Some people celebrate Kwanzaa,” all the while holding a different candleholder scribbled on a poster.

by Martha Smith Roberts, Denison University

Difficult topics are par for the course in the religious studies classroom. Our object of study, the myriad human behaviors categorized as religion, often spark impassioned debate and disagreement. However, the main pedagogical issues I face in the classroom tend to emerge from the absence, not the abundance, of debate and dialogue. This became even more palpable after the most recent presidential election, as students became reticent to speak about issues like race and religion or any of the contemporary political examples that I wanted to use for class discussion. Candidate Trump’s proposed Muslim Ban, and the later executive orders meant to instantiate it, are excellent examples of the issues we should be talking about in religious studies courses. However, my students had difficulty engaging with these issues, both in class discussions and in response papers.

by Rima Vesely-Flad, Warren Wilson College

Students at Warren Wilson College, where I have taught full-time over the past five years, have often told me in office hours that they do not feel “safe” discussing race in the classroom. They are eager and motivated to learn scholarly content and to analyze their experiences, but they are very reluctant to articulate their thoughts out loud. The college is politically liberal and predominantly white (about eight percent of the students are students of color, including international attendees); it is small (about 500 students) and rural. Most students live on the campus. Thus it is a place where students know each other and reputation matters a great deal. To “say the wrong thing” is to potentially be called out, or even labeled a racist.

Adams, Maurianne and Lee Anne Bell, et. al, eds. Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice, 3rd edition. New York: Routledge, 2016.

Adams, Maurianne, and Warren J. Blumenfeld, et. al, eds. Readings for Diversity and Social Justice, 3rd edition. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Baldwin, James. “On Being White and Other Lies (1984).” In Black on White: Black Writers on What it Means to be White, edited by David Roediger, 177–180. New York: Schocken Books, 1998.

Coates, Ta-Nehesi. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015.

Collins, Patricia Hill. On Intellectual Activism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013.

Dei, George S. Sefa, and Mairi McDermott, eds. The Politics of Anti-Racism Education: In Search of Strategies for Transformative Learning. New York: Springer, 2014.

by Jonathan Herman

Ursula Le Guin speaks at a podium in 2013. Photo by Jack Liu.

When the beloved author Ursula Le Guin died earlier this year at the age of 88, print and online tributes rightly celebrated her legacy of wonderful fantasy and science-fiction literature, as well as her place as a feminist literary icon, her facility with both trenchant satire and gentle children’s fables, her incisive social and political commentary, her generous support for aspiring young authors, and her abundant personal magnetism. But they generally made little mention of much having to do with religion, beyond noting how Le Guin had proudly received the “Emperor Has No Clothes Award” from the Freedom from Religion Foundation a decade ago. “Let the tailors of the garments of God sit in their tailor shops and stitch away,” she declared at the award ceremony, “but let them stay there in their temples, out of government, out of the schools.”

Susan E. Hill, Chair, AAR Academic Relations Committee

people sitting in a circle, some with pens and notebooks in their laps

The Academic Relations Committee (ARC) promotes attention to and develops resources for enhancing members’ professional development and the institutional forms in which the study of religion takes place. This year, the ARC is sponsoring or cosponsoring a number of sessions at the Annual Meeting, all under the theme, “The Current State of Religious Studies.” There are sessions on how religious studies departments can help prepare future K-12 educators to teach religion, how we can help our students leverage their religious studies majors in their careers after college, and how we can best support our contingent faculty. In addition, sessions explore the how religious studies departments are positioned in institutions of higher education, and the role of philanthropy in creating positions in religious studies departments. Please join us!

by Kevin Singer

woman working on a laptop faces the window inside a coffee shop

I am among the ranks of those in religious studies, who, at least for a time, seriously doubted that our discipline could be successfully imported into an online learning environment. Surely, I thought, interactions between students and professor would be trivial, discussions would be sanitized, and the depth of learning would prove inconsequential. Admittedly, for a time, I was influenced by the narrative that online education is a sorry excuse for the treasures that await those in traditional, face-to-face learning environments. Even more, I questioned the commitment and mettle of students who preferred online courses. If they were truly serious about the profundity of their learning, I thought, they wouldn't have taken the online path of least resistance.

Emilie M. Townes

Katie G. Cannon

Katie G. Cannon was and remains one of the most incisive, creative, and rigorous minds we have in contemporary Christian ethics. She was the first person in the religious disciplines to use the term “womanist” in print in her 1985 article, “The Emergence of Black Feminist Consciousness.”1 In this essay, she explored the shift from the use of “Black feminist consciousness” to “Black womanist consciousness” as an interpretive principle that addresses oppression. In Katie’s Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community (1995), she gathered a collection of her essays to offer womanist norms for emancipatory praxis—a systemic analysis of race, sex, and class from the perspective of Black women in the academy and the church. Her Teaching Preaching: Isaac Rufus Clark and Black Sacred Rhetoric (2007) explored Black homiletics professor Issac Rufus Clark’s pedagogical strategies, providing a resource for those who seek to give sound, biblically informed, and socially relevant sermons. Her co-edited books are landmark texts: God’s Fierce Whimsy: Christian Feminism and Theological Education (1985); Inheriting Our Mothers’ Gardens: Feminist Theology in Third World Perspective (1988); Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader (2011); and Oxford Handbook of African American Theology (2014).

by SherAli Tareen

A car drives through a crowd of people waving the red and green flags of Pakistan's PTI political party. Then-PTI leader Imran Khan waves to the crowd from the car.

The American mainstream media boasts a voracious appetite for caricaturing, simplifying, and neatly categorizing non-Western people and life, especially when it comes to Muslim people and life. The most recent example of such sensationalist dehumanization came in the wake of the recently concluded elections in Pakistan that saw philanthropist-cum-politician Imran Khan sweep to victory. The outcome of these elections presented the Western media with a vexing conceptual difficulty: the man Pakistanis had elected as their Prime Minister, Imran Khan, does not neatly fit the predetermined categories that Muslims are supposed to fit into: liberal, conservative, fundamentalist, radical, moderate, etc.

Raj Balkaran, University of Toronto, editor

Teaching a religion’s favorite stories is an excellent way of teaching what that religion most values. In understanding a religious tradition’s most cherished stories, we come to intimately understand that tradition even when the stories appear ancillary to the heart of the matter. For example, the story of the king relayed at the outset of this article serves merely a framing device to the acts of the Goddess themselves, a device dismissed outright over the past 150 years of scholarship on the Devī Māhātmya as a flimsy means of latching the Goddess’s glories into the larger mythological fabric of the Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa in which the text is couched. However, my research demonstrates the rich utility of taking seriously the frame narrative for grappling with the Goddess’s glories. These findings are forthcoming in a book to be published fall 2018, in Routledge’s Hindu Studies Series and entitled The Goddess and the King in Indian Myth. Suffice is to say that framing stories is crucial for understanding an Indian text, even when that text is received as more philosophical than mythological in nature. An excellent example is to be found in the Upaniṣads.

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