An easy fast

The New School no longer observes the Jewish holidays, but several students didn't come to class today because of Yom Kippur. Others were out because of the return of covid-19. Seemed best to save the most important topics for another class when all could be present - and to think about ways of sharing what we were doing with those missing class. In "Religion of Trees" our end of class drawing session was given greater resonance for knowing that these other students would see our work (the prompt: "a tree someone worships").

In "Theorizing Religion" we decided to postpone a large group activity and spent the whole class diving deep into the assigned readings - saving time at the end for students to write up what we discussed for the benefit of absent classmates. Time flew as we thought through the results of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project and a literature review calling for more integrated research on gender, sexuality and religion from the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. The latter seemed to offer ways beyond the limitations and implicit agendas of the former, exemplified by the graph above mapping reponses to the rather particular question whether it's "necessary to believe in God to order to be moral and have good values" - which we firmly doubt could be meaningfully translated across religions and languages - with GDP per capita. What the?