The Religious Studies Skills Book

Close Reading, Critical Thinking, and Comparison

Eugene V. Gallagher, Joanne Maguire

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350033757
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Guías de estudio
• Subtopic: Guías de estudio

Studying religion in college or university? This book shows you how to perform well on your course tests and examinations, write successful papers, and participate meaningfully in class discussions. You'll learn new skills and also enhance existing ones, which you can put into practice with in-text exercises and assignments. Written by two award-winning instructors, this book identifies the close reading of texts, material culture, and religious actions as the fundamental skill for the study of religion at undergraduate level. It shows how critical analytical thinking about religious actions and ideas is founded on careful, patient, yet creative "reading" of religious stories, rituals, objects, and spaces. The book leads you through the description, analysis, and interpretation of examples from multiple historical periods, cultures, and religious traditions, including primary source material such as Matthew 6: 9-13 (the Lord's Prayer), the gohonzon scroll of the Japanese new religion Soka Gakkai, and the pilgrimage to Mecca ( hajj ). It provides you with typical assignments you will encounter in your studies, showing you how you might approach tasks such as reflective, interpretive or summary essays. Further resources, found on the book's website, include bibliographies, and links to useful podcasts.

1

Religion in Higher Education

That religion is an object of academic study surprises many new college students. Those who study religion in college often do so in their first or second years, frequently as part of a general education requirement. They thus embark on a distinctive form of academic inquiry at the same time that they are learning how to function in a new environment. The better you understand the particular environment of higher education, the more you will be prepared to succeed in all of your coursework, not just in the study of religion.

High schools work differently from colleges in several ways. For example, most college courses meet three times, twice, or even once a week. Students are expected to do a lot of their work outside of the classroom, with only twelve to fifteen hours total spent in the classroom each week. Instructors expect students to be independent and self-motivated. Students who grasp quickly how colleges and universities work will be better situated to succeed in their academic work, and those who understand how religious studies fits in the university curriculum will more easily adapt to disciplinary expectations.

The academic study of religion as a disciplinary focus in higher education is relatively new, although its roots go very deep. Religious studies is an interdisciplinary field, taught by scholars who are a diverse mix of anthropologists, historians, literary critics, philologists, philosophers, and sociologists, among others. The ways religious studies teachers are trained and the institutions in which they work have shaped their views about appropriate ways to study religion in courses and in the broader curriculum. Historical shifts have also affected the ways religion is integrated (or not) into the curriculum of colleges and universities.

There are many questions about how religion fits into higher education. You might be puzzled about the different ways faculty handle personal statements of faith in classrooms: some insist on complete “bracketing” of personal belief while others allow students to speak from personal experience. You might be surprised to find religion discussed at all in a classroom, in part because it is marginalized as a subject of study in K-12 education. There are many reasons for this state of affairs, not least the popular (false) perception that religion does not legally belong in public schools or that it is simply secondary to other studies (in some cases true).¹ Campuses have also expanded student services to include religious and spiritual support, a situation that makes the dividing line harder to discern.

Popular misconceptions about religion’s place in college curricula have their roots in the ways religion is handled in public K-12 schools and in the history of higher education more generally. Your reaction to encountering religion in education stems from particular cultural norms. As intellectual historian Paul Boyer says, religion is the “Black Hole of American public culture.”² This is a “black hole” into which most college students have fallen unawares prior to college. Most college students tend to think in terms of more well-known majors, such as English, history, and chemistry. We will begin by sketching the contours of the history of higher education and then describe the fraught relationship between the academic study of religion and public education.

A brief history of higher education

The words we use in higher education today—tuition, campus, prerequisites, convocation, freshmen—have their roots in a long tradition of education stretching back to the Christian cathedral and monastic schools founded during the ninth-century Carolingian Renaissance. Those schools, in turn, looked back to Christian religious institutions of the sixth century and before. Although informal learning and more formal schools flourished under the Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, and Muslims, it was not until the eleventh and twelfth centuries that true universities in the modern sense emerged. These earliest educational institutions were arms of the church: arithmetic was taught in order to calculate church finances; geometry was taught to enable the construction of cathedrals; astronomy was taught in part to allow an accurate calculation for the date of Easter.

The roots of the modern university are, then, in the Christian church, which monopolized education and focused primarily on training the clergy in church law, how to write and deliver a sermon, and how to manage church finances. In a world of widespread illiteracy, medieval universities produced rhetoricians and scribes, whose jobs rarely required individual thought. Indeed, much of the teaching and learning done in universities prior to the sixteenth century was by rote: students spent their time copying texts or devising commentaries on older texts, often on wax tablets if they could not afford parchment. All of this work was done in Latin, even in places where the colloquial language was not Latin. Knowledge of the official language of the church was a prerequisite for entry into higher education.

Unlike our highly structured institutions of higher education today, the earliest “schools” began as private agreements between teachers and pupils who met wherever and whenever it was convenient. There was no governing body over these relatively informal teacher–student relationships. Gradually such “schools” gained the support of secular or church authorities. By the fourteenth century, independent universities began to form when groups of local masters and students were given license to teach and learn by local civil or church sanction. All of those involved were men and all academic work was done in Latin, regardless of the everyday vernacular or common language of the students.

The next phase in the development of the university was the studium generale, arising in the thirteenth century as institutions opened to all men seeking higher degrees in law, medicine, or theology. Teaching duties were restricted to those who had earned master’s status, an early model for faculty at today’s institutions of higher education. Moreover, the status of master allowed a teacher to transfer those credentials to other schools without taking further qualifying examinations. Academic masters also acted as gate-keepers for their particular discipline, retaining the sole right to give examinations that qualified members to join the company of scholars.

Just as trade guilds maintained a hierarchy of apprentices, journeymen, and masters, universities maintained a hierarchy of students, bachelors, and masters. Particular institutions became known for specialization in certain fields in large part because of affiliated masters who excelled in those areas: one went to Bologna to study law, to Paris to study theology, and to Chartres to study music theory, for example. Thus an academic degree came to indicate admission to a particular profession such as law or medicine, just as completion of an apprenticeship in more applied fields allowed one to practice a particular trade.

The curriculum of the earliest monastic schools was initially based on a set progression of texts and meditation that required close, intense reading of the Bible and commentaries. These were studied alongside the great works of the seven liberal arts, divided into the preparatory trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the more advanced quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music). Mastery of those subjects, which generally took about six years (with the bachelor’s degree conferred after mastery of the trivium), allowed a student to depart with master’s credentials or to go on to professional study in law, medicine, or theology. Students generally began their studies in their mid-teens and emerged with the most advanced degree by their early thirties.

Unlike in today’s institutions, there was no required set of courses and certainly no set-aside “general education” requirement, as the liberal arts were a general education. Students took the courses that would allow them to pass the culminating examinations for whatever degree they wished to pursue. The original focus on liberal arts became overshadowed by the sciences under the influence of translations of Aristotle by Arabic and Byzantine scholars in the twelfth century, an emphasis that began to be balanced out in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century with the reintroduction of classical texts. The last few decades have shown a swing back to sciences with the focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education.

Universities today share many characteristics with their ancestors, but the ways in which they differ are notable. University life for students was remarkably similar to today: medieval students regularly wrote home for money and tended to overindulge in alcoholic beverages.³ Many found themselves overwhelmed by the work; others found the intellectual life to be energizing. What is perhaps most different is that the earliest universities were not places divided up into buildings for living and work. They did not have quadrangles and pathways busy with students as featured in glossy marketing materials. They did not have a central core or even share a campus. Originally, lectures were held wherever the master chose, whether that be his home or a rented space. Students lived in rented quarters as they found them, not in university-run residence halls. Some institutions, particularly in Italy, established student residential clubs, which were the earliest models for residential colleges in later universities. And instructors were not salaried professionals: they were forced to market themselves to their students in order to earn their wages.

Unlike the earliest universities, which tended to specialize in one professional area, most universities today grant a range of degrees in undergraduate and graduate fields, while colleges tend to grant degrees only (or mostly) in undergraduate fields. Universities are often made up of colleges, or groupings of faculty in related disciplines. Even the term “university” as used today does not match its earliest meaning for any group of people united in a common endeavor such as a guild.

Today’s university is more like the medieval studium generale, a term that referred more to the student body in its geographical diversity than to the subjects being taught. The curriculum has changed quite a bit since the earliest universities, which put theology, the “Queen of the Sciences,” at the center of the curriculum. Theology is now primarily taught in seminaries, divinity schools, and other denominationally affiliated schools primarily as training for ministry.⁴ Today, students can read the same texts read by those earliest students but they tend to ask very different questions as they engage in the relatively new academic study of religion. For more on this distinction, see Chapter 3.

Student experience in the classroom today differs, too. The earliest universities tended not to quiz or otherwise assess their students in individual classes. The only assessment was a summative assessment at the very end of the education in the form of qualifying examinations. Until very recently, most students spent many hours hearing teachers read aloud and comment on standard texts. Classroom work consisted of lecture with little discussion. In today’s world of immediate access to information of all kinds via the internet, it is hard to imagine a world where an academic library held fewer than 200 books, all uncatalogued (and therefore difficult to find) and often chained to lecterns and thus not circulating. Again, the goal of education in this system was not original research but, rather, the transmission and preservation of knowledge of previous generations. In fact, an emphasis on original research did not begin until the nineteenth century in Germany. That ideal took hold in the early twentieth century in the United States, when the government began providing grants to support research in science to help the war effort.

Both British and German models have shaped contemporary American colleges and universities. British models of residential colleges that teach through individual tutorials and seminars continue to shape American ideals, particularly in smaller liberal arts colleges. The German model that puts research at the forefront has distinctively influenced American research universities. This model puts highly specialized, original research in the center of university life, a model that necessitates academic freedom for faculty and students. The University of Pennsylvania is a fine example of the research model. Founded in 1740, the university began as a small colonial college and has become a research powerhouse. The university boasts an almost one billion-dollar annual research budget.⁵ It is not alone in putting research at the-forefront of its agenda for both faculty and students. Many other institutions also mix the two models in providing a traditional “collegiate” experience even at large research universities.

Higher education has experienced tremendous growth in the last century, with religious studies growing alongside it since the 1960s. In 1900, there were approximately 1,000 colleges and universities in the United States. Today, there are more than 4,700 degree-granting institutions, including both two-year and four-year programs. Those institutions take many forms, from very small liberal arts and church-affiliated colleges to sprawling community college systems and state university systems enrolling tens of thousands of students.

Most private institutions are funded primarily through tuition and endowments, and public institutions receive some dwindling support from state taxes. Most educational institutions are nonprofit, although the last decade has seen a proliferation of for-profit and online enterprises. The key distinction here is whether the university is accountable to shareholders to make a profit or to a board of overseers that is not dedicated to maximizing profit. In general, non-profit colleges and universities are more likely to put student needs (and not financial gain) first, although solid finances are always crucial to student support.

The growth of religious studies departments and courses has paralleled the overall growth of higher education, with many departments of religious studies and religion coalescing in the 1960s. At first, many of these departments were joint departments of Philosophy and Religious Studies, and some remain joined in that way. The Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte is a good example of this parallel growth of the university and religious studies. Founded in 1964 at a fairly new college for veterans, its Department of Philosophy and Religion began with a single faculty member. By 1971, when the departments of Religious Studies and Philosophy split, there were four faculty members in the new Department of Religious Studies. The department gradually expanded, moving from an early emphasis on New Testament and early Christianity to include the study of Hinduism and Chinese religions. The department currently houses fourteen full-time faculty members with specialties ranging from religion and sexuality to race and religion. Some faculty members situate their work in particular traditions while others focus on theory and method. This department, on a large state university campus, is in many ways typical of the kinds of growth seen in religious studies since its inception in the early 1960s.

Colleges and universities today continue to start programs or departments of religion or religious studies. They go by different designations: your institution might have a Department of Religious Studies, a Department of Religion, a Department for the Study of Religion, or a hybrid department with anthropology or philosophy. Some religious studies scholars reside in departments of interdisciplinary studies or as parts of programs or minors, rather than departments that offer major degrees. Religious studies has become one of many respected fields in the liberal arts or humanities, and departments of religious studies often employ faculty who work across discip...