Religious Studies News

When I teach religious studies courses (and for that matter, African-American studies courses), my goal is to equip students, not simply with descriptive data on religion, but with the intellectual resources necessary to disrupt the reproduction of multiple intersecting marginalities that occur in and through religion, while at the same time giving them the theoretical tools to investigate the meaning and function of religion. Therefore, the pedagogy that I employ in “Introduction to the Study of Religion” in particular is necessarily interactive via the organic lecturing style but also independent with respect to reflection papers and group projects.

My Louisiana State University courses have ranged from the “Religious Thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X,” “Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Black Religious Thought,” “Introduction to the Study of Religion” (theories of religion), “African American Film and Religion,” “African American Intellectual Thought” (that always includes texts on Black Feminist thought), “Theory and Method in the Study of Religion,” and religion and literature courses that focus on religion, race, and colonialism.

My teaching philosophy, generally, is that education is an exchange between students and professors and that this exchange can and should be mutually edifying and make a social impact in terms of understanding human diversity and coexistence. This is to say that I learn from my teaching experiences in the classroom, and I teach in a manner that affirms the ability and potential of my students to read, write, and think critically about ideas and the world. In line with this philosophy, then, my teaching style emphasizes discussion and organic lecturing in order to facilitate students’ engagement of religion and their ability to interpret the meaning and function of religion and to critique religious ideas and practices. I encourage students, who are sometimes intimidated by religion and its claims of sanctity, that ideas and practices cannot escape critique because they are “religious” and that they have the capacity and agency to interpret religious phenomena. In other words, my courses help students to identify their voices and give them the confidence to read, think, and write critically, and to talk about religion in scholarly and meaningful ways.

All of my courses, for these reasons, have some discussion, group projects, and written critical reflections in which students offer their own interpretations of the important ideas of the course. Of all my courses, these approaches are most significant in “Introduction to the Study of Religion” (REL 2000), a freshman and sophomore lecture course that I have taught six times in my four years at Louisiana State University. The students in this course have typically never thought of religion in critical ways. Largely from Louisiana, these students tend to be Catholic and Protestant Christian, and they often see their religious experience as self-evident and factual. Most of them, according to our discussions, have never considered the human dynamics and anthropological origins of their religious traditions, and many of them are initially uncomfortable with the notion that religion can be engaged intellectually. Therefore, attention to pedagogy is important, especially since they are often nervous about the content of a course on religion in a public university setting. In this sense, even an introductory class on the study of religion can be heavy when one considers what it might mean to encounter the theories of Freud, Durkheim, Tylor and Frazer, William James, Otto, Loyal Rue, Richard Dawkins, and Mary Douglas for the first time.

Consequently, organic lecturing is crucial in that it gives often-anxious students an opportunity to participate, to ask questions, and to engage the subject in ways that impact the direction of the lectures. The organic lecturing style means that the class sessions begin with a set of questions such as: 1) What is the theorist’s definition of religion?; 2) What type of theory is this?; 3) What is the evidence for this theory and the method of gathering data?; 4) What types of religion does this theory help to explain?; 5) Who is the theorist and what is the relationship of his/her background to the theory of religion? The lecture then progresses in response to the issues that students raise about the theory in question. This means that class sessions are always interactive, and students learn (hopefully) that I value their perspectives on complicated matters. Likewise, reflection papers offer students an opportunity for their own critical analyses of theories that develop their ability to apprehend and synthesize the complexity and diversity of religious ideas in written form. Finally, the group projects allow them to come together, to negotiate differences in perspectives and experiences, and to extend what may have been a cursory treatment of a theory of religion in class or to develop their own. By the end of the course, most of them will gain a deeper appreciation for how significant religion is in human societies and interpersonal relations.

Two years ago, for instance, students did their group project on Louisiana State University football as a religious phenomenon. That was interesting enough by itself, but it was more impressive that these first- and second-year students incorporated the ways in which masculinity was constructed within the homosocial arena of sport and in this setting, how the presence of cheerleaders function to reinforce and stabilize a certain view of aggressive heterosexual masculinity as normative. My conclusion — similar to that which my students drew in their group project — is that “religion” is the “arena” that coalesces all of these factors and gives ultimate authorization to racialized, gendered, sexualized, and classed divisions among human beings.