TRANSFORMING INTRODUCTORY COURSES IN RELIGION

From World Religions to Interreligious Studies

Kevin Minister

As we bumped along a rural Himalayan road in the back of a jeep a few years ago, my university president asked me, “Why do we still teach World Religions?” This casual but incisive question struck at a tension in my own feelings about one of our discipline’s foundational courses, a course I taught every semester. The importance of educating undergraduates about how different religious traditions are shaping society in an interconnected world has never been clearer, but I understood my president’s question to interrogate whether the model of world religions was relevant and effective in accomplishing this objective in the academy today. Indeed, when I took a world religions course as an undergraduate, it was boring, outdated, and mostly irrelevant to the students’ lives. As I worked with colleagues with similar concerns about the world religions model, I found that interreligious studies offers an alternative model for introductory undergraduate education in religious studies that is more relevant and effective in preparing students to understand, work, and live in a religiously diverse world.

Interreligious studies, however, is not just a niche academic field; it transforms the very foundations of religious studies curricula. This chapter examines why and how interreligious studies is transforming the introductory world religions model that still functions as the foundation of many undergraduate religious studies curricula. By focusing on both why and how interreligious studies is transforming introductory religion courses, this chapter seeks to persuade readers of the theoretical justification for focusing on interreligious engagement in introductory courses as well as provide concrete steps and practical examples for making this transition. As I have worked to transform my own introductory approach to teaching about religion from a world religions model to an interreligious studies model, I have become convinced that focusing on interreligious engagement helps students develop the knowledge and skills for navigating religious diversity.

THE “WHY”: DECOLONIZING WORLD RELIGIONS WITH MORE THEORETICALLY COHERENT ALTERNATIVES

The world religions course I inherited fits the classic model of an introductory survey course in the origins, beliefs, and practices of “major” religious traditions, serving as both the gateway to upper-level religion courses and as a general education course. In the world religions model, a series of religious traditions are taken up as singular, global phenomena to be comprehended and then compared to other religious traditions. The structure of the world religions model is undergirded by assumptions that reflect its colonial origins that have been critiqued, most notably by Tomoko Masuzawa. In this section, I argue that teaching interreligious engagement addresses Masuzawa’s critiques of the world religions model, offering a more theoretically coherent model for education about religious diversity in the twenty-first century.

As Masuzawa recognizes at the outset of her book The Invention of World Religions, we all have a general idea of what we mean when we say “world religions”—even “college students with no previous instruction on the subject seem to understand what it is when they decide to enroll in a course by that name.”¹ But this consensus understanding reflects problematic assumptions about the nature of religion that ground the course I inherited and most world religions textbooks. These assumptions include, first, the ability to identify, extract, and prioritize religious beliefs and practices from other social and cultural ways of being and, second, the ability to essentialize universal forms of religion that can be compared and contrasted. On the basis of these assumptions, Masuzawa argues that the field of world religions has been from its origins “a discourse of secularization; at the same time, it was clearly a discourse of othering.”² Through a genealogical critique of the field, she argues that these two generative assumptions of the nature of world religions “conjointly enable this discourse to do the vital work of churning the stuff of Europe’s ever-expanding epistemic domain, and of forging from that ferment an enormous apparition: the essential identity of the West.”³

Seeing the justification of these critiques in my own attempts to teach world religions, I have spent the last few years working to transform the way I teach the class. Throughout this ongoing process, two alternative theoretical commitments have developed in the structure of my course. The first is a focus on the “glocal” interaction of religions. “Glocal” is a telescoping of the words “global” and “local” that names the complex interrelation of the ways we experience global realities locally and the ways we locally shape global realities.⁴ In terms of teaching world religions, this means religions are networked, interrelated phenomena embedded in local communities and cultures. World religions are not “somewhere out there,” they are right here in Winchester, Virginia, where I teach.⁵ Students cannot understand religion in Winchester, though, without a global understanding of religion, because how religious traditions are lived out in Winchester is shaped by global religious realities. Likewise, how religious communities interact locally has global implications. This means that the classroom cannot be an objective space for the study of world religions. Instead, the classroom, teacher, and students are all located in communities with global implications, and our approach to studying religious traditions, even at the introductory level, should reflect this.

The second alternative commitment, which follows from the first, is a focus on religions as lived realities, inherently relevant to students’ lives. This is to say that the goal of an introductory, undergraduate course in religious studies is not primarily conceptual understanding of religions, much less an opportunity for students’ self-discovery through the “exploration” of others’ religious ideas. Instead, my classroom has become focused on the ways religious communities interact with the lives of the students and the knowledge, skills, and ethical awareness necessary to engage in these interactions well.⁶

These two alternative commitments, a glocal approach to religious interactions and a focus on religions as lived realities, have reoriented my world religions classroom around interreligious engagement. I do not intend to suggest that this is the only way to teach an introductory, undergraduate course in religious studies today. But I contend that transforming world religions courses in the model of interreligious studies provides a more theoretically coherent approach to introductory, undergraduate education. This interreligious studies model takes responsibility for addressing the colonial legacy of religious studies still present in its curricular structures and more accurately reflects the global interactions of religious traditions today.

THE “HOW”: PRACTICAL WAYS INTERRELIGIOUS STUDIES TRANSFORMS THE INTRODUCTORY CLASSROOM

Having established the theoretical coherence of the interreligious studies model for introductory, undergraduate education, I want to build on this argument with practical examples of how shifting from a world religions model to an interreligious studies model has practically transformed the way I teach. I hope that these examples will serve both to clarify the difference between the world religions and interreligious studies models and to inspire the concrete transformation of introductory, undergraduate classes in the interreligious studies model. This section identifies how teaching interreligious engagement transforms introductory religious studies courses in four practical ways, drawing on examples from my own teaching as well as from other faculty teaching interreligious engagement at an introductory, undergraduate level.

First, I replaced the previous learning outcome—that students would be able to “display familiarity with the central concepts and practices of the major religions of the world”—with the learning outcome that students will be able to “demonstrate the knowledge and skills to navigate a religiously diverse world.” The new learning outcome directly reflects the shifts from the classic assumptions of the field of world religions to my alternative theoretical commitments. It organizes the course around the students’ lived interactions with different religious traditions, not diminishing the importance of knowledge about religious traditions but grounding that knowledge in lived interactions and pairing knowledge with interpersonal skills and ethical awareness. Moreover, this new learning outcome gives the course an interreligious orientation throughout the semester because I introduce it on the first day as the guiding question for the class: “How do we live well in a religiously diverse world?” This question serves throughout the semester to orient students to the practical, ethical nature of our inquiry.

Second, I added a unit that invites students into the ongoing process of theorizing religious interaction during the opening week of the course. As a class we analyze and critique four existing models of religious interaction (“Different Paths up the Same Mountain,” “Different Paths up Different Mountains,” “Religious Houses,” and “Sheilaism”), before developing our own model.⁷ I am upfront with the students that, as a discipline, we don’t have a model of religious interaction with which I am fully satisfied and that we need a model that better accounts for how interreligious interactions shape lived religion. With that in mind, each student is responsible for identifying and describing an interreligious interaction from one’s own life as a case study to test the models in class. With each model, we ask, first, “What does this model help explain about your case?” and then “What does this model miss, hide, or get wrong about your case?” I will briefly introduce these four models for religious interaction that we analyze in the class before giving a more detailed description of a model we have developed as a class, because the development of these models is key to differentiating an interreligious model from a world religions model in the class.

The first two models that we analyze, Different Paths up the Same Mountain and Different Paths up Different Mountains, provide frameworks for conceptualizing religious difference. The Different Paths up the Same Mountain model suggests that, while the present differences of religion are undeniably clear, ultimately all religions are headed toward a single, common goal in which their differences are reconciled.⁸ The Different Paths up Different Mountains model suggests that religions share a common starting point, recognizing that something is wrong in the world, but their diagnosis of the problem and corresponding identification of a solution actually leads them on divergent paths toward different goals.⁹ While these two models help students reflect on their own assumptions about the nature of religious difference, both of these models remain within what I have termed the world religions model because they tend to extract religions from other cultural ways of being and universalize religious traditions into a singular phenomenon. As a result, both models oversimplify and essentialize the nature of religious interactions.

The third and fourth models that we examine as a class, Religious Houses and Sheilaism, provide frameworks that explicitly aim to explain interreligious interaction. The Religious Houses model depicts distinct religions as different buildings, not unlike a mosque, church, synagogue, and temple standing side by side on a city street. Within this model, religious interactions tend to be envisioned as voluntary encounters on clearly demarcated sacred ground belonging to a single tradition or as consensual encounters in a secular, third space (conceptualized as a community center) where religious persons can meet on neutral ground.¹⁰ The Sheilaism model arises from an interview in which Sheila named her religion after herself because she did not participate in institutional religions but believed in a God who wanted her to love herself and take care of others.¹¹ Sheilaism functions as an archetype of a model for privatized religious pluralism that focuses on the acceptance and interrelation of individuals and their unique religious identities instead of models that focus on the institutional or public interrelation of religious traditions. While these models clearly fall within what I have termed an interreligious studies model, the privatized sense of the houses model and the individualized sense of Sheilaism do not account for, as one of my students recently said, the unavoidable public interactions that we have with religious persons and traditions in our everyday lives and professional activities.

The limits of these four models have given rise to a fifth model that my introductory course continues to critique and revise every semester. The model that we have worked on developing together has been alternately termed the “Gravitational Model,” “Atomic Model,” and “Nuclear Model” by different classes. This model expresses lives as tracing paths that are pulled by centers of religious gravity, along with other centers of social gravity.¹² Religious traditions are identified by the many paths that individuals trace around the religious centers. Religious traditions may have multiple centers that are proximate to one another, but they are not identical, and they are only identifiable as centers because of their relationship to those who trace the paths of their lives around them. But the life of every individual pulled by a distinct religious center is also pulled by other social centers of gravity, including those of work, class, gender, sexuality, family, race, ethnicity, and nationality. How individuals trace their paths around these common pulls of social gravity is deeply shaped by how they trace their path around their religious centers of gravity. As individuals trace their distinct paths around these shared centers of social gravity, they unavoidably come into interaction with persons from different religious traditions. These interactions may be constructive or conflictual, but it is these interactions to which the course intends to attend. Much to my surprise, students have gotten palpably excited during the construction of a common theoretical model for the course because they are able to shape a model for religious interaction that reflects their experience. Among the elements of this model that students find most helpful are that it accounts for the interrelation of religion and other elements of cultural identities, the diversity of paths traced by followers of the “same” tradition, the potential for religious conflict and cooperation, the existence of persons shaped by multiple religious identities, and the presence of “nones” in relation to religions. Students also express critiques of the model as we continue to develop it, including that it does not account for the journey motif in which some of them figure their interreligious experience and that the messiness of the model complicates its application. This is certainly not the only model we could develop as a class, but the process of collaboratively critiquing and designing models provides an alternative understanding of the nature of religion from what the students arrive at the class assuming and orients the course of study to how religions interact and why students are invested in navigating these interactions.

Representing a third way that teaching interreligious studies can transform introductory religious studies courses, I changed the organization of the course schedule from a series of units on individual religions to units organized around case studies of interreligious conflict. Each of the case studies engaged introduces a key question for navigating religious diversity. For example: How do we disagree well in a religiously diverse world? How do we cooperate in a religiously diverse world? The case studies create concrete avenues into exploring the glocal interactions of different religious traditions.¹³ This change has shifted the meta-structure of the course to acknowledge religious interaction as the site for learning the knowledge and skills for living in a religiously diverse world, while still providing the requisite knowledge of major religious traditions required by the department. For each case study, we spend a class period practicing ethical reasoning skills for analyzing religious conflict, collaboratively developing concrete plans of action in response, and articulating ethical justification for such responses. Throughout this process, it tends to become clear to the students that they need to know more about the traditions involved to respond ethically to a conflict. So we use the questions about religious traditions raised by the interreligious conflict to orient our study of the relevant religious traditions. Subsequently, the class reads short essays from My Neighbor’s Faith, written by scholars coming out of the traditions we have just discussed, each telling a story of an interreligious encounter that was significant personally, and we analyze in class how the ethical reasoning latent in these essays illuminates the case study.¹⁴ This culminates in a “Case Study Analysis Paper” in which students draw on the ethical reasoning skills and knowledge of the religious traditions to develop their own response to a real-life case of interreligious conflict.

Finally, I have integrated formative and summative assessments that enable students to practice skills for living in a religiously diverse world. Students develop a résumé of religious experience through which each locates one’s own religious influences and interactions. As individuals or groups, students develop, execute, and evaluate a plan to use their right to free expression well on a religiously diverse campus. I have the students practice their interpersonal communication skills about religion, including explaining their perspective on religion in a way that helps others understand why it matters to them, asking questions of someone else’s perspective on religion to better understand where they are coming from, and explaining how they relate to a different religious tradition in a publicly accessible manner. Finally, students visit local religious communities in which they employ their interreligious skills to learn about a local religious community and its perspective on and experience of religious diversity. Students are then responsible for demonstrating the skills to communicate what they learned about a regional religious community in a publicly accessible manner with the rest of the class and reflect together on the interreligious context in which we live. These assessments have enabled me to intentionally develop and evaluate students’ skills for living well in a religiously diverse world.

These four practical transformations of my teaching manifest my theoretical commitments to introduce undergraduates to the study of religion through glocal interactions that highlight the inherent relevance of religious traditions to students’ own lives. Knowledge about religious diversity remains important to the learning objectives in the class and prepares students for upper-level work in religion. The pursuit of knowledge about religious difference, however, is grounded in the lived interactions of religious communities and tied to the students’ own ethical commitments to living well in a religiously diverse world. Furthermore, in the interreligious model, learning skills for interreligious engagement is just as important as gaining knowledge about religious diversity. As these practical examples attest, embracing the interreligious studies model transforms the very structure of introductory, undergraduate education in religious studies.

THE “SO WHAT”: BENEFITS AND LIMITS OF TRANSFORMING THE INTRODUCTORY RELIGION COURSE

I opened this chapter with the valuable question that my college president asked about why we still teach world religions. While this question was part of a positive interaction that encouraged the development of our religion curriculum, it still reflects a broader shift in the academy in which religious studies needs to find new ways to articulate its role in undergraduate education. Using the interreligious studies model in introductory undergraduate courses helps justify the relevance of religious studies in an increasingly career-oriented academy because it highlights the relevance of engaging well across religious difference in students’ lives and communities. As a result, I have experienced increased faculty and administrative support for the value of all students taking the course because they perceive its relevance to professional fields. But focusing on interreligious engagement is not just a sales pitch; it brings real benefits to the classroom experience.

The benefits that I have observed in my students’ experience since I began focusing on interreligious engagement have been significant. I have observed increased student engagement from general education students. Students seem to experience greater respect for their own perspective on religion and, as a result, demonstrate a higher level of commitment to understanding the religious perspectives of others. For example, one student who grew up with parents from two different religious traditions and identified as both an evangelical Christian and as Jewish found acknowledgment of her own complex identity and, in doing so, became more comfortable with learning about other religious traditions that she had previously found threatening. Another student, majoring in global studies, who had no personal experience with religion entered the class unsure of the relevance of the religion classroom to her, but she quickly became the most engaged student in the section because she realized the relevance of being able to interact with the religious perspectives of others to achieving her professional ambitions. Perhaps the most pertinent benefit is that students demonstrate improved skills for navigating religious diversity, including the ability to articulate their own perspectives on religion, to continue learning about the religious perspectives of others in the future, and to develop an ethical framework for negotiating interreligious conflict. Their sense that they are more fluent in navigating religious diversity at the end of the semester is what comes through most clearly in the student evaluations of the course. In what is likely to be the only course dealing with religion in students’ education, they don’t just gain knowledge about religious traditions; they also learn the skills that will help them to live well in a religiously diverse world.

But once you change the starting point of how we introduce undergraduate students to the field of religion, we shift the trajectory of the religious studies major and the relationship of the religious studies program to the rest of the university. The major cannot proceed as normal because the world religions model on which it is built has been dislodged from its foundational position. The interreligious studies model sets a trajectory in which the inquiry into the nature of religion begins from the real-world interactions of different religious traditions. Upper-level courses must fulfill this trajectory by taking students more deeply into the study of how different religious traditions interact to shape the society in which we live. Because Kate McCarthy’s chapter in this volume coherently articulates the theoretical and methodological transformations involved in shifting a religion program from a world religions model to an interreligious studies model, I will just offer a few examples of what this has concretely looked like in my context.

In my department, this has meant a shift from upper-level courses focused primarily on the history and beliefs of a single tradition (for instance, Judaism, Islam, Christianity), toward a model in which upper-level courses focus on the interaction, conflict, and collaboration of multiple religious traditions around global issues of common social concern (for example, “environmental sustainability,” “gender and sexuality,” “violence and peace”). This new trajectory for the study of religion has also opened up new opportunities for religious studies to permeate the undergraduate curriculum, including developing a focus on interreligious understanding in first-year seminar courses and a new curricular program that bridges religious studies and pre-professional education to better prepare undergraduate students to navigate religious diversity in their professional lives.

This chapter has argued that an interreligious studies model offers a more theoretically defensible and pedagogically engaging framework for introductory undergraduate classes in religious studies than the world religions model. In light of the history of colonialism, the reality of globalization, and ongoing challenges of living in a religiously diverse world, the interreligious studies model presents an intellectually and civically responsible alternative to the world religions model. Because the interreligious model refuses the secularizing and othering foundations of the world religions model, it opens the bounds of the discipline to flow out across the rest of the undergraduate curriculum and to allow the rest of the curriculum to flow in to inform religious studies. As a result, the interreligious studies model creates opportunities for collaboration with new disciplines (especially pre-professional disciplines) and for educating broader populations of undergraduates, which promises to expand the impact of religious studies in a time when it is much needed.