In "Religion of Trees" today, students encountered religious studies for the first time. We've read things about tree veneration, etc., but mostly by botanists of various stripes, and students have formed teams to research the Bodhi tree, the trees in the Garden of Eden, and Yggdrasil. So I thought we were ready for my standby crash-intro to the field, "Religion: What is it, who gets to decide, and why does it matter?” the opening essay in Whitney Bauman et al 's Grounding Religion: A Field Guide to the Study of Religion and Ecology.
The essay - which is followed by a parallel essay on "ecology: What is it, who gets to decide, and why does it matter? -" offers a nice introduction to religious studies for non-specialists. Before introducing (and complicating) the distinction between insider and outsider perspectives of theology and religious studies, it goes through five punchy definitions of religion, from Paul Tillich, D. T. Suzuki, Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx and Judith Butler. The discussion are inevitably compressed but between them they raise key questions about religion, even before the "who gets to decide and why does it matter?" questions raise questions about authority and the politics of knowledge. It does a lot with a little!
Maybe a bit too much for my first years, just a month into college! I found myself having to explain the separation of church and state and how, despite the Supreme Court's distinction between teaching and studying religion, most Americans learn nothing about religion in school - except maybe that it's a difficult subject to talk about, or maybe something you just can't talk about. The definitions showed that you could, the discussion surfacing a variety of views about whether religion was a good or bad thing for individuals or societies. But what counts as religion and are all religions the same? I got a bit farther by triangulating from the idea that multiple definitions are better than one, each bringing into focus a different aspect of reality and together allowing you access to depths beyond any one view, and the argument that you don't know what language is until you know more than one. Are there things even about one's own religion (if one has one) that one cannot understand without looking beyond it?
I needed to leave time for the research teams to work together (it emerged they had not done any work yet...), but our closing drawing session allowed a kind of coda to the discussion. The prompt: five trees.
