World Religions: The joys and frustrations of teaching.

I have recently accepted a faculty position at Iowa State University. Starting this Fall, I will be teaching in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. Most of my courses this fall term will be "Introduction To World Religions."

Teaching "World Religions" in the classroom is one of those tasks that religion scholars find endlessly frustrating on a variety of levels. At the most practical level, such one semester courses turn into less of an academic exercise, and more of a la carte sampler platter. It would be the intellectual equivalent of filling up on a series of appetizers that give you just flavor and substance to add up to a meal, without being a really satisfying meal in and of itself. Based on research conducted on behalf of the Wabash Center, students and professors seem to be frequently at odds from the moment class begins: professors want students to develop critical thinking and cultural literacy, while students are primarily focused on developing their "spirituality." But professors are not chaplains, even in a private sectarian school. Those are two different roles that require different sets of skills and demands.

On a deeper level, teaching 'World Religions' risks creating the impression that religions are fixed sets of entities, when that is simply not the case--religious elements of culture are inherently dynamic---constantly in flux, reinforcing and interfering with other impulses and other religions through contact points. It also risks indoctrinating students into the idea that only certain kinds of religion are important enough to study. For example, any 'World Religion' course worth its salt must teach Judaism. And rightly so. Jews have never constituted more than 5% of the world's population and even today it is only the 12th largest religion in the world, yet the contributions of Hebrew (earlier) and Jewish (later) culture to the world are almost incalculable---far out of proportion to its size. Yet, for reasons of space (and lack of training), "World Religion" courses almost never teach Chinese indigenous religion, even though it has almost 400 million adherents. Given the increased role that China may play in world economic and military affairs, as well as the gradual loosening of Maoist ideology on the country, this may have to change. As a legacy of European liberal education, 'world religions' courses give the impression that the forms of religion that have been of greatest concern to Europeans are indeed the most important ones. Which is, of course, a highly dubious assertion.

In the end, its often more like a poor compromise between a course that gets students to critically investigate religion (like an 'Introduction to Religious Studies' course) and a pastoral course that one might take at a church. Realizing all of the compromises necessary, nonetheless many professors hope to communicate something of the vibrancy of practice, as well as the necessity of appreciating (in the wide sense) the influence of religion on humans. 

Don't get the wrong impression. I enjoy teaching these courses, I really do. I get to indulge my inner dilettante, even as I bemoan it in students. It also serves as a means for faculty to investigate and perhaps indulge themselves in scholarly literature far from their home zone, and it keeps them on their toes, lest an enterprising student seek to "stump" the professor with a sly question about an unfamiliar area. As an intellectual packrat, I often find ways to acquire or obtain pictures, information, or other material just so I might be able to someday use it in a course or a project such as this. In fact, 2 years ago I had the opportunity to visit a Sikh gurdwara in Queensland Australia, and I took literally mountains of pictures and movies, as well as interviewing an old man who originally worked to found the gurdwara. Finally I'll have the chance to use those resources in class, for along with Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, I'll be teaching Sikhism, as there is a gurdwara in the local area.

Natural Disasters Produce Religious Echoes

It has been one week since the earthquake centered in the Chinese province of Sichuan, in Southcentral China. In that time, some have wondered just how religion is playing a part in people's lives at this time. The death toll is currently around 50,000 and still rising, not to mention that there are over 4 million people displaced at the present time. This presents a real challenge to those who are unfamiliar with the Chinese religious landscape in times of relative peace, much more so in times of upheaval and disaster. Chinese religion is a set of multilayered accretions and tends to be defined in terms of social locations and small common rituals. What this means in practice is that four different megaflavors of ritual and ideological systems are existentially available for most people to draw on: Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism and popular Polytheism. All of these have suffered under Chinese communism, but none of them have been eradicated by any means, and sub-varieties of each exist. Moreover, other missionary religions, such as Protestant Christianity and Islam, continue to make significant inroads into the Chinese population.

In the wake of the earthquake, one of the few reporters to take careful note of the religious activity in the area was NPR's Melissa Block. In particular she observed how parents of children, upon finding them dead, would build small altars, bring candles and incense, and burn paper money as they were wrapped up. In Chinese (and Japanese) indigenous religion, money is a regular element of sacrifice, not only because it represents the hard work and commitment of the earner, but also because capital is a form of power. The sacrifice of money is a transfer of power to the ancestral realm, as the children take their place in the spirit world. Just as in Confucian religion China is termed the 'Middle Kingdom,' responsible for carrying out the 'Mandate of Heaven,' so the otherworld in Chinese religion often resembles a mirror image of the sociopolitical world of China, complete with a 'Celestial Bureaucracy.'  Money and power grease the wheels of a Celestial Bureaucracy just as they do in the Middle Kingdom. A radical separation between this world and the Otherworld does not exist in Indigneous Chinese religion--differences between human persons and "Other-than-human" Persons (such as ancestors, nature spirits, and immortals) are ones of degree, rather than kind. Of course, the situation is different in non-indigenized missionary traditions of Christianity and Islam, although at least Protestant Christians, both pastors and laypersons, are facing theodicy questions of  their own.

This also helps to explain the massive anxiety being experienced by the Chinese government at this time,. In addition to the controversies over the Olympics and Tibet, for some the earthquake is a religious challenge to the legitimacy of the government. The "Mandate of Heaven," perhaps best thought of as a transcendental seal of political approval/legitimacy from the Celestial Bureaucracy, is a fickle gift at best, and tradition holds that natural disasters can be a sign that Heaven no longer favors the current regime. Thus, for this reason, as well as many others, it behooves the Chinese government to spare no expense in confronting the tragedy in both religious terms and purely humanistic ones. In this they may have succeeded, because the response of the Chinese people, if news reports are to be believed, has been an outpouring of nationalist fervor, not unlike that which the United States experienced after September 11th. Of course, some in the United States have also interpreted the occurrence of either human-made or natural catastrophes here in religious terms as well.

Welcome to the Religion, Culture, Power weblog!

Welcome! This is the inaugural post of my professional weblog. I'm glad you stopped by. I will be offering periodic analysis of issues involving religion, from education to practice to controversies and other items as well.  I hope you will visit often and offer your own insights through comments. I am committed to the idea that "religious literacy" is not optional in this day and age. Whatever one's own religious views and/or practice consists of (or avoids), there can be no reason to remain ignorant of how religious issues resonate along the tendrils of other cultural elements. The stakes are simply too high to be dismissive or isolationist.