Just the moment

Working on an icebreaker assignment for the TESOL Methods Intensive, I imagined giving students newly arrived in "Theorizing Religion" a dozen images from which to choose three which showed the "range of religion." One of the images I came up with was this, from the cover of the 2016 book Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation by Angel Kyodo Williams, Lama Rod Owens and Jasmine Syedullah, three young American Buddhist teachers of color. (Another was the hopefully career-ending image of the president in front of St. John's Episcopal Church holding "a bible" up like an arrest warrant.) My purpose in including it was multiple: here's a Buddhist book whose cover boasts not just the Black Power Fist but Yijing trigrams, too: syncretism is explosive!

I may or may not use that icebreaker come August, though I think I very well might. But this image and what it opens up - that religion can be revolutionary, that liberation struggles rightly help themselves to resources from whatever traditions can help - seems like it might warrant a more central role in the class in this moment. This would build out the "lived religion" theme I've been cultivating and interrupt the slide to a depoliticized tolerance of "you do your thing, I'll do mine" which misses the power of religion as well as its danger.

"In this moment" - what do I mean by that? I suppose I mean the belated discovery by those Americans who think we're white of the structural legacies which make it necessary, every day, even a century and half after the end of the Civil War, to affirm that BLACK LIVES MATTER. But I don't mean that this is a momentary concern or should be, that there is some norm we can or should return to. That's the case for other belated discoveries, too, like the unsustainability of capitalism, of the continued ravages of (especially settler) colonialism and the - related - crisis of anthropogenic climate change. The fragility of democratic culture, too. I guess I mean something more like momentous. How can a course like "Theorizing Religion" speak to these momentous times?