This semester isn't quite finished - three more classes - but the mind starts to wander toward next semester. I'll be teaching a first year seminar called "Religion in Dialogue." Here's the course description:
This course explores three related questions. What roles has dialogue played in the sacred texts of various religious traditions? Is dialogue between religions — or between religion and secularism, or religion and science — possible? And, finally, is there something religiously significant in the experience of dialogue itself? Students read works as varied as The Book of Job, the Bhagavad Gita, stories of medieval Zen masters, Martin Buber’s I and Thou and Rita Gross and Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Religious Feminism and the Future of the Planet.
But then this afternoon I was talking to a graduate student in media studies who is convinced that social media is transforming the world as we speak. How could I not at least raise some questions about the dialogical world of the internet (if it is dialogical)? There must be ways of integrating it into the class... Any suggestions?
