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.

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.

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!

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).