This year's round of first year interviews/conversations with alums yielded a rich harvest today. I scaled it back a little from last year, when pairs of students were tasked with interviewing two alums. For good and bad reasons that ended up with each student anxiously interviewing just one alum on their own. So this year pairs of students (in one case a team of three) were assigned a single alum to talk to, and all managed to make it work. The students' work together, during and after the interview made for better conversations and better reports, too.
So what did we learn? The six alums interviewed, ranging from the classes of 2006 to 2018, were international - two born abroad, one in Boriken - and had very different majors while at Lang: literature, economics, sociology, culture and media, fine arts - and one student who made religious studies their major, not just a minor. Since departing they have worked and studied in fields from education to journalism to art therapy to ministry. They shared with students engagement of various forms with Zoroastrian, Christian, Muslim, Taino and (mostly secular) Jewish tradition - most availing themselves of some Buddhist practices, too. They spoke of rituals they participated in with more and less conviction, and when some mentioned partners, it emerged that none of the partners were in the same religious space.
And each shared (and the interviewing students were able to solicit, understand and share) fascinating thoughts on DIY religion. An atheist alum described developing an appreciation for religious conviction in her graduate school friends, and offered a secular appreciation of the work of communal gathering. In college she was figuring herself out, she said, and now is able to help others do the same. A "nontraditional Christian" described religious experiences while riding horses, and how reincarnation made more sense to her than heaven or hell. A priest distinguished her own DIY religious life from her work as a clergyperson, and recommended songs that criticize Christian hypocrisy by ex-Christians familiar with the tropes of faith. The Taino student described the inspired DIY of reviving and reconstructing a tradition the colonizer thought dead - a tradition they carefully don't call a religion.
My favorite insight? The Muslim alum reflected that all religion must be DIY, and that that is as it should be. The Quran is beyond complete human comprehension, so the best we can do is interpret thoughtfully (optimally reading it in the original Arabic, and attentive to the human penchant for self-dealing interpretation). Indeed, DIY religion - doing your best to understand and live it out - is God's will. It would be sacrilegious to suggest that Allah didn't anticipate all these interpretations. Wow!
The interviews will bear one more harvest of fruit: the student interviewers were tasked with asking their alum interlocutors for recommended readings. They have two weeks to track these down, read/watch/listen to them, and tell the class about them. We can look forward to hearing about everything from theology of disability to a self-help book by a queer astrology influencer. More anon!
