I'm just three weeks from the first meeting of my new lecture course "After Religion," and much remains up in the air about it. We'll be in zoomland still, and this time - since it's a lecture, with graduate students helming discussion sections - it's possible that I might never see even one of my students. I don't like the idea to a lecturing to a grid of black boxes "live," though students responded well to opportunities to participate in last Spring's course (though that was building on the momentum of having met in person for the first half of the semester). Very reluctantly I'm inclining toward prerecording my lectures and inviting students to meet me in small groups during the officially scheduled time - reluctantly because prerecording seems so impersonal, so resistant to the spontaneous and the playful which live classes allow. It also means that class visitors - I have a few planned - won't he able to take questions.. though perhaps I could have a few live classes when we can all be together? Tradeoffs whatever you do!
Also not finalized, though I'm nearly there, is the course material. A lot of things sorted themselves out when I decided (last week) what the assignments should be, and in particular that the final assignment should, as in the Job course, be one students might tackle in any medium. The prompt, once I'd decided that, was easy: What comes after religion? I'm actually incredibly excited to see what students come up with, whether they're designers or social scientists, creative writers or performers or activists... but that just makes me more desperate to find a way to make a personal connection to them earlier in the class.
Helpful in winnowing possible readings was also the decision to try to include a non-text each week, whether a podcast, a video interview, an archive, a photo essay, even a guided yoga session. (Like this or this or this or this or this.) These will appeal to different learning styles - recommended especially for online instruction - and also make real my endorsement of multiple media for the final project. They also let me disrupt stereotypical views of what various religions look like. But they'll need to be good, since students in a hurry will almost certainly choose these if they don't have time for all the assigned work! Where they're instructively bad (like this) I'll need to integrate them into the lecture to make sure students aren't taken in by them!
The most intellectually exciting (and difficult) challenge is in the course material itself. This was going to be my take on "Religion 101" or "Intro to Word Religions" and the vastness of potential material is matched only by the number of ways any such project will go astray. I'd decided to sequester "world religions" at the center of the class - the middle of the semester - so I could inoculate the class against the dangers of this discourse, and let the constructedness of Buddhism, Judaism and their ilk become a feature not a bug: at a certain point and for a variety of reasons people started bundling things as "religions," all remarkably unified and coherent and many of hoary antiquity. All of them are in fact modern constructs, but so are we, and so is everything else we wrestle with... The course is called "After Religion" in part because we know better than to think that "religion" is a clear and enduring thing - but many other modern constructs have been historicized in this way, too (like "secularism"!), and part of being a modern person may be feeling the need for something like religion (especially if you call it something else, like "spirituality"!) - another reason for the course title.
The other reason for the course title - the one which most students probably think is the main one - is facing the idea that religion is over, a thing of simpler, perhaps more superstitious times (although some scary people seem not to have got the memo). That's wrong, of course, on many levels, and it'll be my pleasure to explore them. One is problematizing what Charles Taylor calls "stadial" thinking - the idea that history moves inevitably through discernible stages, say from magic to religion to science, so I decided the start and finish of my course should jumble that sequence: we would begin in the present, and end with the indigenous traditions usually left out (if not explicitly presented as superseded) in accounts of "world religions," appreciated again or anew by a generation which sees how the old modern constructs have devastated our relationship to our non-human earthly kin. "Indigenous" traditions are every bit as constructed as the others we'll have looked at - indeed often more clearly so, having had to reorient themselves after violent displacements of every kind.
So what might this all look like in practice? Here's the course skeleton I shared with the TAs. The high-minded theoretical aims are invisible but, I hope, operative through well-chosen topics presented in a compelling sequence.
1 1/20 Welcome
2 1/27 SBNR
3 2/3 Yoga – in West and beyond
4 2/10 (White) (Evangelical) (American) (Christian)
5 2/17 What is religion anyway? And “secularism”?
6 2/24 Invention of world religions
7 3/3 The invention of Buddhism
8 3/10 Islam as a world religion
SPRING BREAK
9 3/24 Modern religions: Baha’i and LDS (and Judaism?)
10 13/31 Provincializing Christianity
11 4/7 Syncretic new religions (and cults!)
12 4/14 Hindu TV Mahabharata, Left Behind, sci-fi
13 4/21 Indigenous resurgence
14 4/28 Transhumanism, online religion, fashion
15 5/5 Conclusions
I'll talk you through them once I've determined the readings - next year!
