"Theorizing Religion" wrapped up today, a small group of zoom-weary students savoring our final time together. The final assignment, as ever, was a reflection/synthesis on what they'd taken from the class, and, as per usual, we heard about ignorance overcome, biases revealed, permissions granted - and, of course, questions unanswered! As a parting gift I shared these two nuggets from Kimberley Patton's "'Stumbling along between the Immensities': Reflections on Teaching in the Study of Religion," to which an AAR panel I attended last week had taken me back. Patton's point in the essay is that, despite our theoretical scruples and specialist efforts to avoid generalizations (not to mention the professional pressures of our academic guild), in undergraduate classes scholars of religion face students who are asking the big questions and seeking answers to them in what we offer them.
I'd like to think I provided a venue for reflecting on big questions as well as questions about those questions, and students seem to have appreciate it. One put it particularly eloquently:
Upon starting the course, I was struck anew by something which had often bothered me in a weaker form: the way that religion is a subject both academically crucial and personally captivating, but it seemed to demand a generalizing of the ungeneralizable. ... In reading the work of some of the consummate professionals included in this course, there are two immediate effects. One is the appreciation for the beauty and intrigue of any given topic when illuminated by a loving scholar, the other is seeing where this light ends, how far the surrounding unknown goes.
Not sure what the Academy thinks of "loving scholars" but I say Amen.
Kimberley C. Patton, "'Stumbling along between the Immensities': Reflections on Teaching in the Study of Religion," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65/4 (Winter, 1997): 831-49, 836, 840
