“Religion in Philadelphia” for General Education

A few years ago Temple University restructured its general education program, and faculty members were all encouraged to design new courses, especially those that would incorporate “the Philadelphia experience.” Why not Religion in Philadelphia, then? Schools in Chicago and New York were teaching equivalent courses, and surely Philadelphia would lend itself to such a project. Philadelphia was founded on the principle of religious freedom, thanks to William Penn and his Quaker tradition. It was home to the first free African American churches in the United States. George Washington prayed here, as did our own saint Benjamin Franklin. (In his later years Franklin himself followed the work of itinerant evangelical preachers, with their messages about morality and salvation.) Immigrant Catholics and Jews of various ethnic backgrounds were both welcomed and reviled when they arrived en masse in the nineteenth century and built strong communities including institutions and edifices that still survive. Temple University was founded by a Baptist preacher who was one of the early proponents of the gospel of prosperity. Later immigrants brought vibrant Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist cultures. Religion plays a part in many dimensions of civic life, from commerce to popular culture, social services to the arts, politics to the school system. Philadelphia, past and present, is saturated with sacred places and stories. You just need to look for them. As I began the work of syllabus creation, I used students’ desires to explore their new urban environment to help them discover where religion lives. In the classroom they would learn about how religious people carved out lives, created communities, and integrated themselves into broader social networks. Outside the classroom they would discover for themselves what those lives and communities and networks looked like, how they worked, and what they contributed to life in the city. The course would also broaden their view of where religion resides in urban areas beyond houses of worship and beyond the Christian traditions most of them grew up with. It would have them explore the different ways religion may appear in unexpected places and see how religious symbols connect to the landscape and neighborhoods of the city. Projects would develop students’ skills in observation and their capacity to be curious (rather than judgmental) about unfamiliar religious spaces, practices, and practitioners. As students worked through the course, they would become better observers. They would better understand the role