Religious Studies News

Delaporte and Wiersma were both participants in a Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion group that has received a continuation grant to study “Pedagogies for Civic Engagement.” As part of the “professional application” dimension of this working group, both of us were, independent of the other, inspired to add the site visit assignment to our respective courses. The main source of inspiration was, for each of us, the growing awareness that the standard textbook, lecture, and film approach was, in the end, inadequate to the task of motivating students to make connections between the world in which they live and the Christian histories and communities they were studying.

For both us, therefore, the introduction of a significant community engagement experience arose out of particular frustrations with past incarnations of our courses. Delaporte had been teaching the “Modern Christianity” course since 2002; Wiersma had been teaching the “Life and Work of the Church” course since 2005. Delaporte felt that students were having a hard time associating the history they picked up through texts and lectures — and the occasional video documentary — with the real world and actual experience. She wanted her course to stress the “modern” and to allow her mostly Roman Catholic students to see and experience the Christianities that are all around them. Similarly, Wiersma sensed that although his students appeared to absorb much knowledge about Christian communities past, present, and emerging, they were not getting a handle on the significance that religious and spiritual pluralism holds for the “life and work” of today’s Christian churches. He wanted his mostly Lutheran students to experience this diversity firsthand.

Above all, we were inspired to make the kinds of significant course changes described above as a result of simple engagement and conversation with experienced colleagues. Delaporte was influenced in the shaping of the strategy by meeting with Philip Boo Riley at Santa Clara University and by his work with the Local Religions Project in the Silicon Valley area. Boo Riley’s contributions are detailed and dependent on much fieldwork with undergraduates. The aspect of Delaporte’s strategy that involved the evaluation of media imagery of the respective Christian groups was inspired by Erin Runions of Pomona College. This exercise pushed students past their first impressions of a religion and focused on questions about the media’s portrayal of religion. Most students began by being surprisingly uncritical of media portrayals, but after viewing a variety of them and contrasting them with portrayals by the religious denomination itself, they were able to discuss how outsiders perceive and portray the denomination.

Wiersma was, in turn, influenced by a fortuitous meeting with Eboo Patel and subsequent familiarization with his work leading the Interfaith Youth Core. Patel’s contention that college-level religious dialogue is best honed in the honest appreciation and discussion of differences, rather than a smoothing over of differences, was supported by the experience and feedback of the students in this course. In addition, the guidance and encouragement of Mary Laurel True, associate director and coordinator of community service-learning at Augsburg College, Minneapolis, proved invaluable.