Dispelling The Magic: Blogging in the Religious Studies Classroom

Abstract

For most students, the university course is the product of an illusion. Courses like “Western Civilization,” “American Literature,” and “Religious Studies” appear in the catalog and online registration system magically. As historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith put it, university courses are “mysterious objects, because the students have not seen the legerdemain by which the object has appeared” (“The Necessary Lie“ 80). Introductory and survey courses are particularly mysterious. In order to engage students more deeply in our courses, we must reveal the trapdoors, mirrors, and deflections that make up the illusion of “Western Civilization“ or “World History.” How can our syllabi engage the question, “why this and not that?” How can teachers best invite students to peek behind the curtain? I have taken up these questions in my “Introduction to Religious Studies” and “History of Religions of America” courses. At first blush, content and its importance appear to be the answer to the mystery of the university course. Religion is important, right? Many people claim it is a universal and fundamental human experience. But content itself does not solve the mystery, because the importance of this content versus that content is always already assumed. Content is important because it is on the syllabus. The mystery and the magic remain. To dispel the magic, the pedagogy of religious studies must shift from content to critical thinking in ways that mirror a theoretical shift in the study of religion. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and lasting through the twentieth century, the study of religion focused on descriptive accounts of religions. As Mircea Eliade wrote in his foundational work The Sacred and the Profane, “Our primary concern is to present the specific dimensions of religious experience, to bring out the differences between it and profane experiences of the world” (17). Beginning in the 1980s, scholars critical of Eliade’s descriptive approach argued that religion, or “the sacred,” was not a universal and essential given. Rather, “religion” was a constructed category whose content shifted depending on the circumstances. As Smith has argued, “religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization.” Thus, “the student of religion must be able to articulate clearly why ‘this’ rather than ‘that’ was chosen as an exemplum” (Imagining Religion xi). Scholars of religion have pushed past Smith’s argument toward studies investigating the political, racial, social, and colonial ideologies that shape the construction of religion.1 1 See, for example, Chidester, Savage Systems and Empire of Religion; and Masuzawa.