Religious Studies News

As in the “Religion and Literature” class, I ask students engaged in undergraduate research (UR) to concentrate on a particularly important passage and to annotate it. The student brings that annotated passage to our conversation. Whether reading a literary work or a theoretical text, she must be able to put into conversation the arguments of that passage with the text and the significance of that passage for the text compared with another text. For example, this semester I have a student reading the works of Rudolph Otto (The Idea of the Holy), Mircea Eliade (Sacred and Profane and Cosmos and History), and Joseph Campbell (Hero with a Thousand Faces). The reading practice has helped him to focus on key passages in order to connect Otto’s sense of the holy, the numinous, with Eliade’s notions of sacred and profane, and to connect those to Campbell’s monomyth about the role of the hero. But it also helps him to differentiate between these thinkers in a more sophisticated way. He has had a paper accepted for the Southeastern Commission for the Study of Religion meeting and is working on a second paper to submit to a journal.

In undergraduate research, my overall goal is that students attain a sense of mastery over the idea that interests them. Michael Ondaatje, whose words helped shape the teaching strategy outlined in this article, once talked with Willem Dafoe, the actor, about writing The English Patient. His English patient’s insistence on reading a book at the speed it was written puts the reading in the space of the “other” and opens the compassionate and critical faculties. His thoughts on rereading his own work, on editing, illuminate what this strategy tries to teach. Ondaatje says that writing is framing: “Recognizing a new arc.” He continues: 

I am outside myself. I’m looking at [my work] much more clinically and saying, okay, get out of this scene quicker. There’s that element of technique and dramatics and timing and “lighting” in those last stages.…[Y]ou’re writing at a different level, you’re shaping it, you’re aware of a scene in the context of this big arc. You are not just creating a moment. … Small scenes that build and merge, and then you recognize the larger context. … I love those moments. [A] curtain opens for a second. You get a further glimpse into a truth.

Stephen Brookfield described a critical thinker as someone who is in the habit of attempting to identify and examine the assumptions that underlie his or her habitual ways of thinking about something, and the assumptions underlying habitual ways of acting in situations — identifying and scrutinizing them as to whether or not they are well-grounded in reality. In addition to being able to identify assumptions, the other facet I try to develop in students is someone who is able quite easily to slip into alternative perspectives and inhabit other interpretive frameworks — someone who can see a situation from a number of different angles, put themselves in another person’s head and see through their eyes, and do some role-taking. These two very difficult intellectual, or cognitive, functions are both encouraged and supported by careful attention to helping students develop their close reading skills (Brookfield).