Another iteration of "Theorizing Religion" is finished, producing some splendid final reflection essays and a slightly lower energy sharing of insights with each other. The latter was to be expected, as finals for other classes kick in, but the former was a bit of a surprise. They got it! What a privilege to teach a subject that people engage with such openness, curiosity and tenderness. Because many were quite personal I can't share them, but I can share some fun things that happened as gleanings from them were shared with the class.
After giving the students the chance to share their final papers with two classmates, I invited everyone to come up to the board and talk - and to use the colored markers if they wanted. The first were the two open hands, above, from a student who reported their most religious experience was making things, when they felt at one most human and least human at the same time. Next came the rainbow, which, the drawer explained, could legitimately be appreciated as a sign from God by one person and a natural phenomenon by another. The heart with "magic" written at its center accompanied a story of a natural wonder which proved enduringly transcendent, even as the drawer had hoped it would recur and didn't. A shoe illustrated another students' religious devotion to clothing and fashion. A grave pointed to animals' funerary practices, which they of course don't call religious or need to. Others drew a cross (after saying "I don't think I have anything to draw") and described their growing disaffection with the influence Christian ideas of salvation have on people, a circle representing ineffabaility, a dark rectangle connoting the void at the heart of apophatic tradition. And another student cheerfully connected all the others with drawings of rhizomes!
But let me tell you especially about the outline of the continental US with a question mark at its center, which led to some remarkable and complicated insights. The student had written in their final reflection paper that our class had taken them from wondering “what does religion mean to me?” to the “more interesting” questions “what does it mean to be religious in America?”, or even “what does being American mean to me?” After drawing their map on the board they reported to the class that, for the final in a print-making class yesterday, they’d made a series of monoprints of the American west, a place they’d never been, based just on the images they’d gleaned from popular culture—things like the film “Paris, Texas” and the TV series “Breaking Bad.” They’ve never been farther than Missouri or Indiana, although someday they’ll surely go, but they wanted to preserve “the mysticism of this unknowing state,” something they’ll never be able to do again once they've actually been. In their reflection for our class, they had wondered about what the American land they haven't seen looks like (hence the question mark), something they imaged as full of awe. But there’s an awe at the thought of all this awe they haven’t seen, too, they added with coy eloquence, “which is a religious experience in itself.”
They had the prints with them and I asked if they would show them to us. The prints were gorgeous, semi-abstract blocks of variegated blues, golds, reds, greens and browns suggesting horizons, skies, clouds, mountains. As they were held up, the artist named them: Arizona, Montana, Utah, Colorado… through California. We were transfixed. You managed to capture a very specific place in California, a Californian told them, the Tejon Pass! But it turns out that they had added the state names after the whole series was complete. They were all just evocations of "the west." This did not stop another Californian from asking if they were selling the prints, as she has a “California wall” in her apartment for when she gets homesick, and would love the one called "California" for it.
I'm not sure what this tells you about religion - or California! (Coming east from California myself I realized I had been living unwitting in uneasy eastern fantasies.) But it says something about the spiritual scrupulosity of a generation burned by public "religion" yet unsatisfied with the flatness of secularism. I can't generalize about, or from, the students who wound up in the class this semester, but many seem taken by the thought that "religion" might be alive and well not in the "religions" but in places superficially thought of as secular.
