Afterreligion

"After Religion" wrapped up today. (I'll share the final syallabus another time.) What had initially been conceived as a showcase of students' final projects was at the last minute replaced by a panel discussion about the fruits of the course. It turns out the larger zoom lecture community isn't one in which students feel safe sharing their often quite personal work, though many have shared their work with me (like the magazine at right). So instead the TAs reflected on course materials and discussions they'd found interesting and useful for their own studies and research - two are sociologists of religion, one an anthropologist, one from Iran, one from China, one Mexican American, all of which made for perspectives different from but complementary to mine - and then we opened up for a general discussion. It went well, effectively reviewing and refreshing our discussions over the course of the semester in a forward-looking mode: not just "what's stayed with you?" but "how will this affect what you do next?"

A few student stalwarts stayed on after our time was up, and one asked my own thoughts about the ULEC (lecture courses for students from liberal arts, design, performing arts) experience. I told her that I enjoy teaching the ULECs because the students, coming from across the university, don't just bring gifts in many genres but are also more international than my liberal arts college seminars. But this past year, where many of the international students were dialing in from their home countries, often in the middle of the night, something more clicked. Knowing it was going abroad made my largely made-in-America material feel parochial. I admitted that, if international students were in my physical classroom I'd think less about the appropriateness of a US-anchored discussion - after all, they'd made their way to study here. But now it was different. A significant part of the argument of the class was challenging the naturalness of the modern notion of "religion," a notion which misrepresents non-western traditions and experiences, and in the practice of colonialism and capitalism, profoundly (mis)shapes them. Important clarifying work, even "decolonial"! Still, many of these students were new to thinking about religion in any form. Did I want to be part of broadcasting the modern notion of religion, even to debunk it? 

This related to another realization I didn't mention, a tension I found myself feeling between the call to contribute to the interrogation of the structural "whiteness" in American institutions and thoughts demanded by this moment, and the somewhat different - if related - issues in internationalizing a syllabus. Next year's version of "After Religion" will be a concrete context for thinking this through, the more grounded if we're able to gather together on campus.