Religious Studies News

Of course, the use of this explicit liberal education approach does not have to stop at the religious studies theory course; it can be used to frame the entire major. A major structured in this way would begin with lower division courses that focus primarily on description and interpretation — such as the introductory world religions course or survey courses on specific traditions or regions. These would then be followed by the introductory theory course described above, followed by a series of midlevel courses that highlight targeted theoretical approaches to specific traditions or cross-cultural topics (the "religion and …" course). Upper division courses would then be the place to develop the metatheoretical critiques in-depth, since it is at this level majors have the requisite descriptive and critical theoretical background to understand why these critiques are relevant. Indeed, such a clear step-by-step sequence insures that students are prepared at each level to understand the theoretical moves being made by religious studies scholars — too often we throw theoretical or metatheoretical arguments at our students before they even grasp the questions such theories are designed to answer, thus creating the kind of academic cluelessness that demoralizes so many students (Graff, 2003).

Finally, the capstone course would assume a special role in the liberal education-structured major. In the capstone, students would be encouraged to think through the real-world implications of the three-step liberal education approach to religion, whether it be for their personal lives or for their lives as citizens in a liberal society (for an example of how this might be done in the context of a public institution, see Noddings, 1993). In the nineteenth century, American colleges typically offered a senior capstone course as the place in which students were asked to reflect holistically on their educational experience and relate it to their future lives — it is for precisely this kind of practical purpose that I would like to bring back to the capstone course in the religious studies major.

Beyond actual student learning, the advantages of structuring the religious studies major along these lines are manifold. First, it charts a clear progression with learning outcomes that can be assessed at each stage, thus providing us the kind of concrete evidence necessary to back up our claims that we are teaching crucial critical thinking skills. Second, it provides the major with a clearly defensible rationale that can be neatly dovetailed with all but the most narrowly drawn administrative strategic plans — at least at public institutions where the duty to teach citizenship skills can and should still be insisted upon. And third, it provides a unified focus for those departments whose faculty are riven by factional squabbling over theoretical positions. (As a past department chair, I know how divisive theoretical debates can be, especially if one or more faculty members are heavily invested in a particular approach as the one valid path that will turn the field into a discipline). By employing a pedagogy based on the demands of liberal education and making that the foundation of departmental unity, theoretical diversity in a department truly can become the asset we often say it is and not the liability that it all too frequently becomes in reality. In other words, an explicit liberal education approach provides a source of coherence that religious studies as a field has always seemed to lack.

Of course, why stop at the religious studies major? The most logical extension of this approach would be to the university’s liberal (or "general") education program overall. If adopted as the structure for such a program, this approach would address many of the misgivings about the supposed incoherence of most liberal (or "general") education programs by placing the emphasis on students’ acquisitions of the tools necessary for living productive lives as citizens in a liberal society instead of strictly on the content of such programs.