A new academic year means a new iteration of "Theorizing Religion," the one required course for our minor in religious studies. Revising it each year is a chance for me to accommodate what seem to be new issues and approaches in the academic study of religion, as well as the concerns and interests of our students. (Last year, you'll recall, I decided to address students' religious illiteracy by using MOOCs.- It's never easy, since you have to take something out to accommodate anything new. The next year you assess if the cost was worth the benefit. Over time, some texts have found their way in and out and back in again - Tomoko Masuzawa's account of the 19th century western construction of Buddhism as universal and Islam as not is one. This year the core of classic texts, which I'd tried to replace with mini-lectures last year to make way for MOOCs on world religions, is back - hello again, Hume and Schleiermacher! But the MOOCs are there too (winnowed to just the strongest, the ones on Buddhism and Islam), taking fewer class periods because of the awkward gift of three holidays within our first four weeks.
The biggest change this time around involves politics. The shibboleth of "religious liberty" has become a central cudgel in the current administration's arsenal of reaction, and will surely be front and center in the news as a new Supreme Court Justice nominee is vetted, and as the conservative movement seeks grounds for new cases. (The Masterpiece "cake artist" has been persuaded to sue the State of Colorado again.) But there's also the question of the president's most faithful base, "white Evangelicals," whom many - including many religious people - deride as hypocrites, if they are Christian at all. Aren't they? On the other hand, when we read J. Z. Smith's famous critique of the category of "cults," used by mainstream Christians to distance themselves from the People's Temple, we'll have to contend with the claim that the president's supporters are a cult, some even embracing that term!
So what new readings am I including? There will surely be new religious freedom debates in the next months so I'm reserving a class near the end of the semester to see what Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, the tireless critic of the very idea one could have a neutral policy on religious freedom, will have written about them. (Last year we read her take on "Hobby Lobby" - who's to say one's business isn't a religious concern? Religion as essentially private is itself a religious view, contingent and unrepresentative.) An older piece by Saba Mahmood is being replaced by a newer one challenging the glib assumption of secularists that they are reasonable while religion traffics in emotion. On the other hand, political theorist William Connolly's essay "The Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine" is joining the team (indeed the day after the November election), with its affect-centered non-explanation for the partnership of Christianity and capitalism. But, in conjunction with our reading on religious exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism, we'll also read the Barmen Declaration, theological exclusivism as radically anti-authoritarian. More about all those as we get to them. It's all a lot more complicated in practice than liberals (like yours truly) imagine it is in theory.
This is also the time of Black Lives Matter, and this course needs a more consistent engagement with white supremacy, once again apparently on the ascendant. So we're spending a week mid-semester on a splendid new work in the anthropology of religion, Elizabeth Pérez's Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions; also a brilliant work of theory, it also builds out the "lived religion" and "religion-making" themes which have been part of the class for a while now. And I've decided early on to feature part of black liberation theologian James Cone's last book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, which calls out so-called Christians in America for ignoring lynching, and for failing to realize Jesus was lynched, too. Cone makes you want to cry out that "white Christianity is not Christianity!" but it will be my duty as educator to note that this claim, appropriate in a work of theology, isn't available - at least not in the same way - for a scholar of religion.
The biggest change this time around involves politics. The shibboleth of "religious liberty" has become a central cudgel in the current administration's arsenal of reaction, and will surely be front and center in the news as a new Supreme Court Justice nominee is vetted, and as the conservative movement seeks grounds for new cases. (The Masterpiece "cake artist" has been persuaded to sue the State of Colorado again.) But there's also the question of the president's most faithful base, "white Evangelicals," whom many - including many religious people - deride as hypocrites, if they are Christian at all. Aren't they? On the other hand, when we read J. Z. Smith's famous critique of the category of "cults," used by mainstream Christians to distance themselves from the People's Temple, we'll have to contend with the claim that the president's supporters are a cult, some even embracing that term!
So what new readings am I including? There will surely be new religious freedom debates in the next months so I'm reserving a class near the end of the semester to see what Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, the tireless critic of the very idea one could have a neutral policy on religious freedom, will have written about them. (Last year we read her take on "Hobby Lobby" - who's to say one's business isn't a religious concern? Religion as essentially private is itself a religious view, contingent and unrepresentative.) An older piece by Saba Mahmood is being replaced by a newer one challenging the glib assumption of secularists that they are reasonable while religion traffics in emotion. On the other hand, political theorist William Connolly's essay "The Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine" is joining the team (indeed the day after the November election), with its affect-centered non-explanation for the partnership of Christianity and capitalism. But, in conjunction with our reading on religious exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism, we'll also read the Barmen Declaration, theological exclusivism as radically anti-authoritarian. More about all those as we get to them. It's all a lot more complicated in practice than liberals (like yours truly) imagine it is in theory.
This is also the time of Black Lives Matter, and this course needs a more consistent engagement with white supremacy, once again apparently on the ascendant. So we're spending a week mid-semester on a splendid new work in the anthropology of religion, Elizabeth Pérez's Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions; also a brilliant work of theory, it also builds out the "lived religion" and "religion-making" themes which have been part of the class for a while now. And I've decided early on to feature part of black liberation theologian James Cone's last book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, which calls out so-called Christians in America for ignoring lynching, and for failing to realize Jesus was lynched, too. Cone makes you want to cry out that "white Christianity is not Christianity!" but it will be my duty as educator to note that this claim, appropriate in a work of theology, isn't available - at least not in the same way - for a scholar of religion.