I haven't posted much about this year's iteration of "Theorizing Religion" yet. That's partly because the class hasn't met that many times yet - what with various holidays, we saw each each other only once a week for weeks 2-5 of the semester. This week (yes, this is already week 6!) we're finally back to the twice weekly rhythm of a Lang class.
These past weeks have not been without learning, though! Each student is now an alumnus of one of the HDS World Religions and their Scriptures MOOCS, Islam or Buddhism, and has worked with fellow students in that MOOC to share what they've learned with the rest of the class. Over the last week they've also met in small groups, bringing Buddhist MOOCers and Islam MOOCers together to generate comparative questions. All this has been braided together with a series of powerful theoretical pieces - Jonathan Z. Smith on the speciousness of the cult/religion definition, Saba Mahmood on problems with the assumption that secularism is reasonable while religion is emotional, Whitney Bauman on the need to have a definition of religion - perhaps several - as one proceeds, and Tomoko Masuzawa on the distortions of Buddhism and Islam by western "World Religions" discourse in the 19th century. I'm hoping these theoretical questions will have had a new kind of purchase encountered in the throes of a course providing more information about a particular tradition than anyone in the class imagined there was to know.
Today we read selections from black liberation theologian James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, part (along with Mahmood and Masuzawa) of my effort to bring awareness and critiques of white supremacy in religious thinking into our discussion. I was lucky that a young scholar of black religion who's just arrived as a Faculty Fellow at NYU - working on Cone! - came to the class to help us understand. As we proceeded we realized that this was not only the first black theology the class had encountered, but the first Christian theology of any kind. This made for more questions, on more scales, than we could deal with in the hour that our visitor was able to spend with us, but all for the good. One of the reasons I placed the Cone reading right after the completion of the MOOCs was as a first installment of a complicating engagement with Christianity, rendered misleadingly monolithic by both comparative scholarship and general ignorance.
In the traditions Cone raised up, we encountered forms of Christianity none in the class had been exposed to - not just black liberationist but bluesy and Cross-centered. We also faced the question, raised from the start by Cone's work, whether many white Christians are really Christian at all. What had those who participated in lynching or implicitly accepted it - didn't see that Christ was being recrucified across the nation - understood of the message of the Cross? Perhaps most "Christians" are not Christian at all.
The theoretical questions arising here were focused around a formula we'd first encountered in Bauman, whose discussion of definitions of religion is called "Religion: What it is, who gets to decide, and why it matters." Last week I used that structure to engage Masuzawa's challenge: What are world religions, who gets to decide, and why it matters. On the board today I wrote: What is Christianity, who gets to decide and why it matters. I'd been planning to use this as a moment to distinguish the roles of theologians and scholars. It's appropriate, even necessary, for a Christian to decide, but not for a scholar, whose work is not normative in that way but descriptive. Much though I'd personally like to write off folks like those who (this was the example I gave) created and are watching the "Trump Prophecy" documentary as Christians, as a scholar I can't just ignore them (the lesson we learned from Smith), nor even that they would dismiss Cone as non-Christian!
In the event, we got as far as saying that the MOOCs did a commendable job of presenting their "world religions" as not only internally diverse but aware of and in various ways committed to that internal diversity, but that talking about diversity is inevitably homogenizing. Few of the people discussed in the MOOCs were interested in the big umbrella of the world religion. Most are not only unaware of the extent of "internal diversity" but would probably dismiss much of it as, well, not Buddhist, not Muslim. If the religions are families, they are fractious riven families, as full of distrust and condemnation for what scholars see as their co-religionists as for those in "other" religions. Or is that a projection, too, generalizing from the history of Christianity?
These past weeks have not been without learning, though! Each student is now an alumnus of one of the HDS World Religions and their Scriptures MOOCS, Islam or Buddhism, and has worked with fellow students in that MOOC to share what they've learned with the rest of the class. Over the last week they've also met in small groups, bringing Buddhist MOOCers and Islam MOOCers together to generate comparative questions. All this has been braided together with a series of powerful theoretical pieces - Jonathan Z. Smith on the speciousness of the cult/religion definition, Saba Mahmood on problems with the assumption that secularism is reasonable while religion is emotional, Whitney Bauman on the need to have a definition of religion - perhaps several - as one proceeds, and Tomoko Masuzawa on the distortions of Buddhism and Islam by western "World Religions" discourse in the 19th century. I'm hoping these theoretical questions will have had a new kind of purchase encountered in the throes of a course providing more information about a particular tradition than anyone in the class imagined there was to know.
Today we read selections from black liberation theologian James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, part (along with Mahmood and Masuzawa) of my effort to bring awareness and critiques of white supremacy in religious thinking into our discussion. I was lucky that a young scholar of black religion who's just arrived as a Faculty Fellow at NYU - working on Cone! - came to the class to help us understand. As we proceeded we realized that this was not only the first black theology the class had encountered, but the first Christian theology of any kind. This made for more questions, on more scales, than we could deal with in the hour that our visitor was able to spend with us, but all for the good. One of the reasons I placed the Cone reading right after the completion of the MOOCs was as a first installment of a complicating engagement with Christianity, rendered misleadingly monolithic by both comparative scholarship and general ignorance.
In the traditions Cone raised up, we encountered forms of Christianity none in the class had been exposed to - not just black liberationist but bluesy and Cross-centered. We also faced the question, raised from the start by Cone's work, whether many white Christians are really Christian at all. What had those who participated in lynching or implicitly accepted it - didn't see that Christ was being recrucified across the nation - understood of the message of the Cross? Perhaps most "Christians" are not Christian at all.
The theoretical questions arising here were focused around a formula we'd first encountered in Bauman, whose discussion of definitions of religion is called "Religion: What it is, who gets to decide, and why it matters." Last week I used that structure to engage Masuzawa's challenge: What are world religions, who gets to decide, and why it matters. On the board today I wrote: What is Christianity, who gets to decide and why it matters. I'd been planning to use this as a moment to distinguish the roles of theologians and scholars. It's appropriate, even necessary, for a Christian to decide, but not for a scholar, whose work is not normative in that way but descriptive. Much though I'd personally like to write off folks like those who (this was the example I gave) created and are watching the "Trump Prophecy" documentary as Christians, as a scholar I can't just ignore them (the lesson we learned from Smith), nor even that they would dismiss Cone as non-Christian!
In the event, we got as far as saying that the MOOCs did a commendable job of presenting their "world religions" as not only internally diverse but aware of and in various ways committed to that internal diversity, but that talking about diversity is inevitably homogenizing. Few of the people discussed in the MOOCs were interested in the big umbrella of the world religion. Most are not only unaware of the extent of "internal diversity" but would probably dismiss much of it as, well, not Buddhist, not Muslim. If the religions are families, they are fractious riven families, as full of distrust and condemnation for what scholars see as their co-religionists as for those in "other" religions. Or is that a projection, too, generalizing from the history of Christianity?
