Yet Another Unitarian Universalist
A postmodern heretic's spiritual journey.
I just updated my story-based curriculum “Beginnings,” aimed at middle and upper elementary ages. This is a “light revision,” mostly cosmetic but with a few major changes.
This eight-session curriculum features explorations of truth — what is true, how do we know what truth is? This topic seems quite relevant in this presidential election year.
The American Academy of Religion (AAR) has released a set of “Religious Literacy Guidelines” setting minimum standards for all graduates of two- and four-year colleges in the United States. An excerpt from these guidelines summarizes the minimum knowledge about religion that all college graduates should have:
“‘Religious literacy’ helps us understand ourselves, one another, and the world in which we live. It includes the abilities to:
— Discern accurate and credible knowledge about diverse religious traditions and expressions;
— Recognize the internal diversity within religious traditions;
— Understand how religions have shaped — and are shaped by — the experiences and histories of individuals, communities, nations, and regions;
— Interpret how religious expressions make use of cultural symbols and artistic representations of their times and contexts;
— Distinguish confessional or prescriptive statements made by religions from descriptive or analytical statements…”
It turns out that in 2010, AAR released a set of religious literacy guidelines for K-12 students. The K-12 guidelines are also well worth reading. They include some basic premises from the scholarly discipline of religious studies, premises which AAR considers essential for teaching religious literacy:
— religions are internally diverse;
— religions are dynamic and changing; and
— religions are embedded in culture.
Anyone who has gained basic familiarity with religious studies at any time in the past 20 years will find no surprises in either set of guidelines. For example, even though these guidelines are new to me, I’ve been using the underlying premises for at least a decade, as I develop curriculum on religions. But though there’s nothing new here, by formulating these guidelines, AAR has done us all a favor: now we have checklists that we can use to assess how well curriculums promote religious literacy.
We can also use these guidelines for some rough-and-ready assessment. When I look at these guidelines, I see that for the most part Unitarian Universalist adults do not have solid religious literacy, e.g., many UU adults are unaware of the immense religious diversity within Christianity, many UU adults are not able to discern accurate and credible knowledge about religious traditions, etc. This becomes problematic when adults with a low degree of religious literacy teach religion to children; and this suggests that curriculum development needs to include basic religious literacy knowledge for adults teachers, as well as content for children.
“What does religion look like to you? Taste like? Smell like?” So asks Pauline Lee, associate professor at Saint Louis University (SLU) — as she and Pauline Lindsey, an assistant professor at SLU, create a digital database of lived religion in St. Louis, Missouri. A press release from SLU dated Nov., 2018, says in part:
“Our hope is to tackle preconceived notions about this thing we call ‘religion’,”Lindsey said. “What does the study of religion look like when we shift public attention from shared beliefs (be they theological, moral, or civic) to shared spaces? And more than that, what does religion do in these spaces?”
A recent article from Religion News Service (RNS) reports on the progress of the project, called Lived Religion in the Digital Age. According to the article, “Lived Religion is a method of studying religion that focuses on religious practices and beliefs in everyday life — not only those that take place in a church or during a religious celebration.”
The RNS article reports how the researchers are documenting what’s going on a Centenary United Methodist Church, which continues to house a church, but also houses a bakery staffed by ex-felons and run by a Buddhist priest. After noting that Centenary Church is LGBTQ-friendly, the article quotes Lindsey as saying, “then you have these stories of Buddhism and social justice all happening in the same place and in conversation with each other, and it’s hard to think about this using the categories that we typically use to study religion.”
This approach to religion has implications for how we teach religious literacy to Unitarian Universalist children and teens. It is tempting to teach children about religion based on the old categories we Unitarian Universalists have inherited from our Protestant past, which emphasize belief and hard boundaries between religions. However, in an increasingly multi-cultural world, those old categories are becoming less and less useful for understanding how people are doing religion today. In addition, we Unitarian Universalists are also likely to believe that, while religions may be different on the surface, they all have the same goal. Yet as the world becomes increasingly multi-cultural, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the fiction that religions as diverse as Cao Daism, Scientology, Santeria, fundamentalist Christianity, and Therevada Buddhism are pretty much like Unitarian Universalism.
These days, when I teach or write curriculum for Unitarian Universalist kids, I try to point out both the similarities and the differences between religions. For example, I’ve been developing (and am currently co-teaching) a curriculum with the working title “Neighboring Faith Communities” which invites middle schoolers to explore the emotional, social, and material dimensions of nearby faith communities. Exploring the social dimension of other faith communities can help reveal differences such as treatment of men and women and non-binary genders, differences of treatment of races (yes, we do explore just how white Unitarian Universalism is), attitudes towards various sexual orientations, etc. And another aspect of the social dimension of religion, how a faith community tries to affect the world outside it, can reveal commonalities such as a shared desire to assist people who are poor, homeless, or hungry. I have come to feel that in order to teach about other religions, the teacher must cultivate in students both an understanding of the profound strangeness of other religious traditions (Confucian priests put out bowls of celery in certain rituals), and the commonalities between religious traditions (Sikh gurdwaras provide free meals to all comers, mainline Protestant Christians are committed to helping the poor, etc.).
At the same time, the growth of digital resources allow us teachers to present students with more than written statements and religious texts. As a teacher, I can always use more resources that present lived religion digitally, because those digital resources allow students to see in new ways how people are actually living their religions. Unfortunately, there’s very little about lived religion yet posted on the Lived Religion in a Digital Age Web site — let’s hope they begin posting their video documentation, and crowd-sourced photos of religion, soon.
Here’s a five-minute video I made about what to pay attention to when you visit services at a faith community that’s not your own. Drawing on Ninian Smart‘s seven dimensions of religion, the video suggests that when visiting another faith community it’s most interesting to focus on three of Smart’s seven dimensions: the emotional/experiential, social, and material dimensions.
I’m in the process of updating our congregation’s “Neighboring Faith Communities” course for middle schoolers (available online here).
The introductory video for this curriculum might be of interest to readers of this blog, so here it is:
I’ll put the script for the video below the fold, as some group leaders might want access to it. Continue reading “Look. Listen. Feel. Visiting other faith communities.”
In the second breakout session of the Religious Education Association 2014 conference, I attended a combined colloquium. Wing Yu Alice Chan, a doctoral student at McGill University, presented work in progress under the title of “Can Religious Literacy Deter Religious Bullying?” Andrea Haith of Canterbury Christ Church University presented her work in progress under the title of “An Exploration of Religious Education Teachers’ Understandings of Religiously Inspired Violence and the Worldviews of Children in the Classroom.”
Chan presented a definition of religious literacy based on a definition by Diane Moore (2007), the ability to discuss and analyze the intersections o religion with society.
She next defined religious bullying as bullying on the basis of religious difference, including physical and psychological bullying, online bullying, etc. In a review of literature on religious bullying, she found research that indicates that religious bullying gets transmitted across generations. Furthermore, she found research that the aftereffects of religious bullying can lead to religious extremism.
At the moment, her research is focusing on two North American religious literacy programs in public schools: Quebec’s “Ethics and Religious Culture” program, and the “World Geography and World Religions” programs in modesto, California. These are the only two mandatory courses in religious literacy that she found in North America. In her research so far what is most prominent is the role of dialogue.
Her research methodology is outlined in her online prospectus here.
Andrea Haith is a teacher of religious education in the United Kingdom (U.K.). She began by saying that teaching religious education is extremely challenging, as the young people taking the courses “don’t see the point.” It is also challenging because “any discussion of Islam does evoke stereotypes.”
Haith said that the U.K. has complex legislation that implements religious education in the public schools. The challenge then is how to discuss religiously inspired violence within this framework. Her research focuses on the teaching of religiously inspired violence as it relates to religious education teaching more generally.
Her hypothesis is that religious education has become “sanitized,” in part because examination-focused learning outcomes may serve to distort the subject matter of religious education. Her research questions include:
— What is the nature of RE teacher’s understandings of religiously inspired violence?
— How are these understandings translated into teaching practice in the classrooms?
— Is there a relationship between teachers concepts of religiously inspired violence and their pedagogy?
Haith’s research project is outlined online here.
At the end of the two presentations, a questioner pointed out that a key issue is how we train teachers. Haith and Chan both agreed.
Another questioner pointed out that it is problematic to consider religious literacy out of any other context, and that religious literacy must be placed in a values-based context. Haith and Chan seemed less interested in this idea.
I asked a somewhat inarticulate question about the importance of students recognizing their own religious identity. Interestingly, in a later colloquium, I learned about the “worldview framework approach” in Mualla Selçuk and John Valk’s presentation “Journeying into Islam” (more on their research here); Selçuk and Valk’s worldview framework explicitly names religious identity as important.
I would say that I found both Haith and Chan’s research to be of great interest and importance. Chan’s research into the relationship between religious literacy and religious bullying could be especially valuable.
I skipped the morning breakout sessions, and instead had a meeting and spent some time at the poster sessions.
First I met with Beth Katz, the executive director of Project Interfaith. I had attended a presentation Katz had given yesterday, and had become very interested in the curriculum guides she is developing. These curriculum guides are designed for use in middle school, high school, and college classrooms, but I wanted to talk with her about adapting and using these curriculum guides in congregationally-based education.
We had a good, fruitful conversation. After hearing what we’re doing in my congregation with our middle school group, she showed me the new middle school curriculum guide that Project Interfaith is going to release next fall. She was kind enough to agree to let me purchase a pre-release copy so that I could try it out in our congregation. This should be an exciting addition to our current middle school program in which we visit other faith communities at worship.
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After meeting with Beth, I went to the poster sessions. I particularly wanted to talk with Christopher Welch about his presentation titled “A Pedagogy of Critical Consumption as a Task for Religious Educators.” Welch is a Ph.D. candidate at Boston College, and his poster presented the research he’s doing for his dissertation. He has a model for using religious values to challenge the values of the wider consumer culture.
Welch teaches at a Catholic high school, so his doctoral work is grounded in his practical teaching experience with actual teenagers. I loved his model, but unfortunately now I can remember little of what was on his poster. This is the problem I have with poster sessions — I have a lousy memory to begin with, and then I spend more time talking with the presenter than actually working through the material on the poster. So I’m going to have to email Welch and ask him to send me a summary.
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Following the poster sessions, I attended the community luncheon. I wound up sitting with John Falcone, another Ph.D. candidate; Yolanda Smith of Yale Divinity School (and president of the REA); Mark King, who teaches high school at a Catholic school in the Bronx; and Beverly Johnson-Miller of Asbury Theological Seminary. We had a wide-ranging lunchtime conversation that covered both personal and professional matters. What really stuck with me, though, was talking about how we all want to change the world, to make the world a better place; and how hard it is to remember that the work we do as religious educators — whether in theological schools, high schools, or congregations — is indeed world-changing. And I argued that while of course we should do whatever social justice work we can manage, on top of our professional and personal responsibilities, the work we do as religious educators may be enough. We religious educators change the world through education.
Dianne L. Moore, Senior Lecturer on Religious Studies and Education at Harvard Divinity School, was the speaker for the second plenary session of the Religious Education Association (REA) 2013 conference. She spoke on the topic “Overcoming Religious Illiteracy: A Cultural Studies Approach.” Moore chaired the Task Force on Religion in the Schools for the American Academy of Religion, which looked at teaching religion to grades K-12 in the public schools in the U.S. She is the author of Overcoming Religious Illiteracy: A Cultural Studies Approach to the Study of Religion in Secondary Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Moore told us that in large part she was going to present the material that is in her book.
It quickly became clear to me that she was interested in teaching religious literacy in the schoolroom and in academia, not in the congregation. Her approach draws from religious studies, which tends to bracket the truth claims or other claims that religions make. As she puts it, she wants to distinguish between her approach and a devotional approach. However, in my own work as a religious educator working in a congregation, I can’t do that; e.g., my tradition has integrated feminist theology to a very large degree, and when I am teaching about another religious tradition that I feel denigrates women, I am going to say something critical about the sexism of that other religious tradition.
Nevertheless, in my own work, I do draw on the insights of religious studies and cultural studies, and I found Moore’s talk to be enlightening and useful. She reminded us that religious studies makes it clear that theological voices do not represent the tradition itself (i.e., James Luther Adams does not represent Unitarian Universalism any more than Charles Hartshorne does). Further, religions are internally diverse (thus Transylvanian Unitarians are very different from North American Unitarian Universalists), and indeed local religious communities can be internally diverse (e.g., my congregation contains both theists and atheists). Another key insight from religious studies is that religions change and evolve.
As an example of how not to teach religious literacy, Moore pointed to the common practice of teaching about Buddhism by referring to the Four Noble Truths — which practice ignores how Buddhism has evolved and is evolving, and how Buddhists may have internal differences.
Moore also gave some great examples of how religious illiteracy manifests itself. The following are examples of religious illiteracy:
— representing religions as static and unchanging rather than as diverse and evolving
— representing religious traditions as either wholly positive or wholly negative
— assuming that individual practitioners of a religious tradition are experts in their traditions (“Oh, let’s bring in an imam to tell us what Muslims believe”)
— assuming that religion is a private matter that can be kept out of the public sphere
I found this last point to be extremely important. Moore said that the notion that religion is solely a private matter, and that it can be kept out of public life, is “a legacy of the Enlightenment” that has become “very problematic.” By contrast, Moore asserts that religions do not reside in some separate sphere; they are “embedded in all dimensions of human experience.”
Continue reading “REA 2013 conference: Dianne Moore”