Engaging Religion

How do you "teach" religion—to the practitioner, the puzzled, or the nonplussed? How can engaging religion benefit broader audiences?

As anyone involved in teaching about religion could tell you, there are some occupational hazards that come with the vocation. It can be difficult to make the significance of studying, thinking, and talking about religion clear to our families, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and students. Many of our everyday interlocutors claim expertise in ways that challenge our position as educators. At times, moments of misunderstanding, or even failure, in the project of religious studies can be productive (even if painful) in the ways they tell us about the complexities of belief, thought, and tradition.

To help a broader community involved in engaging religion with various publics, TRiP is sponsoring academic contributions in the form of essays and teaching modules from scholars and educators who think and teach about religion. The essays are organized under the themes of Difficulty, Practice, and Failure, which have been the semester-long foci of our Teaching Religion in Public Reading Group. Both modules and essays will discuss the challenges of translatability and methodology when teaching religion from diverse perspectives: ethnomusicologists, historians, literature scholars, anthropologists, and more!

In our mission to support public-facing interdisciplinary and cross-cultural research on religion, we invite you to explore these accounts, reflections, and resources.

Maggie Slaughter, Public Editor for TRiP through Spring 2023

Essays and Teaching Modules

Failure is an Option: Queer Failure and the Negotiation of Religious Identity

by SJ Crasnow

"My life as a queer and trans Jew also provides me with personal experiences of how marginalized people navigate their relationships to religious traditions and communities. These experiences then become examples of religious diversity I can choose to share with students."

Teaching Religion in the Foreign Language Classroom

by Jermaine Butler

"But without the time and materials to engage in an extensive discussion of religious taboos, what can we do?"

Hosting Paikea: On Indigenous Ontologies of Carving and Kinship

by Aaron Glass

"...I wanted to feature Paikea’s story to educate audiences on how Indigenous conceptions of 'active matter' are challenging standard Western ontologies and museum values, and how some museums are productively engaging with communities to adapt and adjust their protocols."

Teaching Queer Christian Theology [Where It Can’t Be Taught]

by Samuel Ernest

"Christian institutions that refuse to hire LGBTQ faculty are precisely the places where queer theology and queer theological pedagogy belongs. Not just because the student body needs it, but due to the constitutive irony of queerness..."

한글 Hangul and Kreyòl: Indigenous Languages and Religious Development

by Benjamin Hebblethwaite

"Examining the history of Hangul helps us to comprehend the role of public life in the mutual expansion of language adoption and religious understanding."

Cultivating Curiosity, or, Why Study Scripture At All?

by M. Adryael Tong

"Different people and different publics will have different reactions, thoughts, and answers to the question. But for me, it is precisely this practice of asking, thinking, and answering that is important."

Keramat: Beyond Imagined Divisions

by Teren Sevea

"The following example of a keramat suggests that the imagined divisions of scripture/practice, elite/popular religion, cosmopolitanism/vernacularism, mysticism/legalism, and Sunnism/Shi‘ism, amongst others, are inadequate when thinking about Islamic settings."

Animating Religious Literacy: Japanese Pop Culture and Teaching through Video

by Kaitlyn Ugoretz

What do you know about Japanese religions? And how have you come to know what you know?

Rastafari: Creative Rupture and Consciousness Raising

by Ennis B. Edmonds

"Coming of age in Jamaica in the 1960s and 1970s, I had hazy notions of Rastafari on the periphery of my consciousness."

The Need for Developing an Afro-Latinx Theology

by Guesnerth Josué Perea

"As a Colombian, Black, Latino, ecumenical Christian, I am faced with the complex reality that the expression of the faith I profess, was born in, and grew up with, has often been the very tool used to pilfer the imago dei from me and others of African Descent."

Devotional Absurdity and the Efficacy of Failure

by Bertie Kibreah

"At certain shrines in Bangladesh, the performance of absurdism is neither a perfunctory nor frivolous act, but reverberates at a poignant intersection between failure and religious meaning."

Maddened Pedagogies: Teaching Religion and Black Popular Culture

by James Howard Hill, Jr.

"At its core, this teaching module highlights pedagogical gaps and silences that might occasion the opportunity for professors teaching at the intersection of religion and black popular culture to lean fully into the disturbing, mad and maddening epistemic possibilities found within the architecture of black popular culture."

A Cat in the Basket and Other Scholarly Stories

by ANAND Venkatkrishnan

"Spend enough time being broken down by your teachers and you will think that criticism is a form of love. But bring your whole being into the life of learning and your values change. This is what I’ve learned from students who agitate for a more just and democratic educational space. "

Asian Women, Christianity, and American Purity Culture

BY MIHEE KIM-KORT

"Through an engagement of the discourses of evangelical purity culture we can see how the figure of the Asian woman in Asia and in diaspora, particularly in the U.S., acts as a canvas on which expectations and anxieties around domesticity, sexuality, and nation-state converge to produce more than a scapegoat, but a particular objecthood and aesthetic that evokes a racialized femininity."

Let the Past Fail Me

by Hsiao-wen Cheng

"When I fail to make sense of what I see in a historical record, or when I fail to apprehend someone’s response to my question, maybe that means I am asking a failing question."

The Journey Toward Wholeness: Personal Growth, The Angulimala Sutra, and Therapeutic Interventions for Men

by Bruce Scavuzzo

"I often observe that while many of us seek wholeness, we struggle to integrate our pain, trauma, shame, and particularly, the memory of our misdeeds."

Explaining Why Jewish History Matters: Drawing Big Lessons from a Small People

by Jason Lustig

"What is the utility of looking at a small subject, and how can we translate it into the largest possible lessons that will illuminate issues on a global scale?"

Webs of Knowing: Birth and Religion

By Morgan Barbre

"Such a practice acknowledges the richness that comes from sitting in and with the uncomfortable dissonance of holding many ways of knowing all at once without giving in too quickly to an easy resolution."

Openly Practicing

By Josie Wenig

"We are all practitioners of many things, but my concern here is with those whose practices of religion, sexuality, and gender represent what Eve Sedgwick called an “open secret”—practices that are known (or at least assumed), and yet because of their supposed deviance, inexpressible in the classroom."

Religion and Relationality: Insights from Indigenous Studies

by Paul Gareau and Jeanine LeBlanc

"Teaching religion in public necessitates strong, reciprocal, and consensual relations. Indigenous knowledge, peoples, and relations cannot be possessed."

Teaching Mysticism: An Exercise in Productive Failure

by Brian Hillman

"Mysticism presents a good case for examining failure because mystical texts themselves often claim that the things they describe cannot be expressed in language."

Teaching While Muslimah: Difficulties in Sounding Islam in the Classroom

by Aliah Ajamoughli

"In 2018 after giving a presentation in Chicago on Islamic worship practices, I was approached by an audience member who thanked me for challenging his assumptions about Muslims."

Race and Blackness in Early Islamic Thought

by Rachel Schine

The concept of “race” in the early Islamic world is bounded not by a single word, but emerges from a matrix of terms such as ‘irq (one’s root), nasab (one’s lineage) ‘unṣur (one’s stock or tribe), and shu‘ūb (one’s people), all of which indicate what scholars of race refer to as a “lineage-essentialist” understanding of how human heredity and groupings work.