The Religious Studies Curriculum and the Study of Local ReligionPhilip Boo Riley Table of Contents1. Table of Contents 3.1. Intellectual Rationale 3.1.1. The Problem in Broad Terms 3.1.2. Religious studies as a “contentious” community of inquiry 3.1.3. Religious studies curriculum through a local religion project 3.1.3.1. Religion and Globalization 3.1.3.2. Religion and Civic Engagement 3.1.3.3. Religion and Religious Diversity 3.1.4. LRP in Relationship to Other Programs 3.2. Content and Design: Four Project Components 3.2.1. Project Consulting Scholars and Core Faculty Seminars 3.2.2. Undergraduate Research and Peer Educator Program 3.2.3. Project Pilot Courses 3.2.4. Project Conference: “Religious Studies and the Study of Local Religion” 3.3. Institutional Context 4. Project Budget3.4. Staff and Participants 3.5. Evaluation 3.6. Follow up and Dissemination SummaryThe question addressed in this project is: can the religious studies curriculum engage our students in the complexity of the world’s faith traditions whose increasing interactions with one another and diverse cultures is represented daily in electronic the media, and also nurture the skills and sensitivities their faculty believe students require to appreciate and understand religions as global realities? The answer proposed in this project is yes. The basis for that answer is the conviction that students can engage and understand the world’s faith traditions in their increasingly global context if the curriculum is i) structured around issues whose importance for the world’s communities religious studies scholars analyze from multiple perspectives, and ii) designed so that students experience and study directly and personally in the religious communities just beyond their classroom doors. To illustrate how this can be done, faculty at Santa Clara will develop curriculum resources that exemplify this structure and design by introducing students to Silicon Valley’s diverse religious landscape as a “lab” in which they gain hands-on experience of what is read and discussed in the lecture hall. Narrative ExcerptMost undergraduate religious studies faculty would agree the goal of their curriculum is to introduce and engage students in the questions they bring to our classrooms through the academic study of religion. At the same time, faculty teaching in that curriculum, particularly at the introductory level, do not find that goal easily attained. Among the factors accounting for the latter conclusion is a common thread---diversity. Students themselves enter our introductory religious studies courses with very different assumptions about and/or experiences with institutional religion. The introductory courses they take can appear to be more a collection approaches to diverse but discrete religious traditions; and the advanced courses add to this collection unresolved methodological debates about the t methods taught by faculty from their different specialties. By a process Islamic scholar Bruce Lawrence calls “hypervisualization” (Old Faiths, New Fears [2004]) popular and internet media present to all of us diverse religious experiences and histories that are more often than not in conflict with one another, to which students and the general republic respond by adopting a rather uncritical tolerance or relativism rather than the challenge that practitioners and scholars of religion take it to be. To read more, see the full text PDF edition below. |
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