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The Examined Life: Religious Studies and the Cultivation of Self-Reflection - Religious Auto/Biography PDF-NOTE: Internet Explorer Users, right click the PDF Icon and choose [save target as] if you are experiencing problems with clicking. Print

What makes religious studies courses distinctive in the humanities curriculum is the role that imagination and self-reflection must play in the courses we teach. We teach our students various facets of the world’s religions to increase their religious literacy and encourage them to be engaged global citizens, asking them to consider, if only for the time in our class, what the world looks like from other religious perspectives. Much of the writing on religious literacy focuses on developing ideas of empathy in one way or another, and empathy requires acts of imagination. I ask my students to consider what the world looks like from frameworks that have been elucidated in class, to imagine others having religious values and practices as precious as my students’ values and practices are to them. Asking them to consider those beliefs and practices most dear to others usually leads them to think, at least a bit, about their own beliefs and practices. Frequently, I stop there, having opened the door, and leave students to decide the next steps.

I encourage my students towards self-reflection, and my course invites students to take a step through that door. My course is designed to deepen their religious literacy, to help them see in more ways how the strange is familiar and the familiar can be strange (McCutcheon, 2007).  I endeavor to bring that to my classroom in a variety of ways through a course on “Religion and Auto/Biography.” In this course, students read a variety of autobiographies, including Simon Wiesenthal, Marjane Satrapi, and the Dalai Lama. In reading these works, I help students apply the religious literacy we cultivate in the classroom (the what and wherefore of religious studies) and reflect on the ways these different authors from various traditions talk about their lived religions, their faith or lack thereof, the ways in which they lived up to or failed to live up to their religious convictions, and the ways religion enriched or damaged their lives. These questions are particularly distinctive to teaching religious studies. We discuss the constructed nature of the texts, how authors imagined their audience, what is revealed about the individual, and what is elided. In addition to learning “facts” about religions, autobiographies also lead students to see the ways in which lives are lived. Religious studies invites students to imagine the world through another lens. And by reading these life stories, and seeing the ways individuals have reflected on their religious lives, students have an opportunity to see the tensions that can arise when there is a conflict of values or clash between cultures, or how people wrestle with gender and sexuality, war and peace, inter- and intra-familial conflict, international politics, natural disaster, the human capacity to believe, disbelieve, regret, and forgive, and all the ways that people have resolved or failed to resolve those conflicts. This cultivates empathy and imagination.

In important ways, these autobiographical works invite self-reflection and are very personal works for students to read. During the course of the semester, in addition to reading autobiographies, I ask students to write a biography of someone and focus on the ways in which religion factors into that person’s life. Finally, as a significant segment of our class meetings, I have students keep a guided journal. This journal, I think, gets at the heart of religious studies in the humanities curriculum. Students are forced to take time to reflect on their lives and beliefs in a structured environment that is safe, as I do not read their journals. The questions come primarily from Harry Cargas’s Exploring Inner Space (Saint Anthony Messenger Press, 1991). I have modified some of the questions to better connect to current issues in the world or the readings.



 

This website contains archived issues of Religious Studies News published online from March 2010 to May 2013, and PDF versions of print editions published from Winter 2001 to October 2009.

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