I'm trying something new in "Theorizing Religion," to address the reality that most students have no background in the study of religion. For the past several years I had student teams audit Harvard Divinity School "World Religions through their Scriptures" MOOCs (Buddhism or Islam)m a kind of crash course they had to report to the class on over four weeks near the start of the semester. But those MOOCs aren't available anymore, at least not for auditing, so I had to think of something else.
What we're trying this year, instead, also involves student teams giving a sequence of presentations to the class over multiple weeks based on out-of-class research. For the first week, they're to "look wherever you usually look when you want to find out about something" (online of course). For the next, they need to go to the NYU Library and explore the stacks to get a sense of what kind of academic work there is on their topic. For the third we'll either seek out native informants or endeavor comparisons - TBD. The rather naughty list of topics, designed to force reflection on theorizing religion? "The religion of Confucianism / Buddhism / Fashion / ISKCON / Neopaganism / Secularism." These images are from the first presentations.
