I write at the intersection of two conversations.
The first is often described as being about the discipline of religious studies. That description is misleading because of its singularity. A more appropriate description of the conversation would evoke a range of disciplines—a plurality—and locate the definition of religious studies in a field where those disciplines intersect. Religious studies is a social science in the traditional sense that understands a science as a body of knowledge. The body itself comes clear in the practice of disciplines that have been understood traditionally as liberal arts. Those arts have been characterized in various ways historically, but what remains constant across the variation is attention to discovery, appreciation, orientation, and application. The creativity of these arts lies in their circularity: application necessarily slips over into discovery. In the “hard” sciences, these arts are often gathered under the rubric of “experiment,” a concept that I will argue is also relevant to religious studies (Hanson, 1958). It is in the interplay of arts and sciences that fields such as religious studies are defined and cultivated. Legitimate as it is to wonder about the object and the subject of religious studies (what do we study and who are “we”?), they do not lend themselves to direct observation but become visible at the corner of the eye in the middle of practice (JAAR 62/4; Miller, Patton, and Webb, 1994).
That leads to the second conversation, which is concerned with pedagogy. What do we teach when we teach religious studies—and how? My choice of words will reveal my direction to those familiar with these conversations. Certainly, scholars of religion—students and teachers—are concerned with an object identified as religion. But this object is even more diverse than the disciplines mentioned above. Particular religions are best taught in particular worship communities. But religious studies—also particular—are most appropriate for particular academic communities. The point in the classroom is to teach disciplines with which to explore fields—topoi, from which the word topic is derived. Those disciplines are unremittingly experimental.
Teachers, perhaps even more than students, use “discipline” when they seem to mean “field.” The conversation about the discipline of religious studies often turns into an argument over territory, a defense of turf in which the primary question concerns who is authorized to occupy a particular space—or who has power to do so. For embodied beings, occupation is a necessity: bodies take up space and occupy place. The question that I find most compelling is whether it is possible to disentangle the necessity of occupation from violence, including the narrative variety that insists on exclusive stories.
My most sustained reflection to date on the concept of experiment was undertaken in a setting that was not strictly academic, during the years in which my daughter Regina regularly participated in her school’s science fair. I remember a series of conversations—really one seasonal conversation that lasted about ten years—revolving around, first, what would count as an experiment and, second, what would happen if the experiment failed. (This latter question became particularly pressing whenever deadlines approached, eliminating the possibility of “doing it over.”) I return to this conversation almost every week after my introductory religious studies class, which I have tried to approach consistently in an experimental fashion as a laboratory for civil discourse. On those occasions when I’m feeling particularly unsuccessful, I remind myself of the conclusion Regina and I reached when she was in first grade: an experiment works. If it doesn’t work, it isn’t an experiment; if it does, it is.
In conversation with my daughter, that conclusion was formed as a way to distinguish a passive report on somebody else’s work, or a simple demonstration, from an active engagement with the world out of which demonstrations and reports could be generated—even if (or especially if) the results were other than expected.
The distinction is useful in thinking about the classroom. As an experimental process, the failed class would be one that does not work. Characterizing the classroom as a laboratory for civil discourse highlights place as well as process and introduces an element of control. If the laboratory is a place for controlled experiment (a supposition which reiterates the centrality of labor, or work), then I also have to ask myself whether civil discourse has occurred in the class. That is a complicated question to which I will devote more attention in a moment, with reference not only to my ten year conversation with Regina but also to John Dewey (1997) and his understanding of indirect education. If Dewey was right (and I think he was), we can rest assured that something always happens in the classroom, though this does not mean that the class always works. We can rest assured that what happens always has a “civil” dimension to the extent that it forms and is informed by some sort of city, but it is important to consider the location and the shape of the city: who or what is working and where? Who is producer, and what (or who) is product?
Before turning to more detailed examination of the shape of the city, one more word about work: I have already indicated that it involves engagement with the world, an engagement that I understand, following the classic Marxist analysis in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in terms of its humanization of the world (Marx, 1964). Work addresses the world in such a way as to humanize it. In more familiar Marxist terms, work objectifies the world by giving it a useable shape, a shape that can be humanly grasped. Most of us are familiar with the description of this process gone awry as alienation. In such a distorted process, the object of work confronts the worker as an alien force, disconnected from his or her labor. Many students experience school as just such a process of alienation, and one of the challenges we face as teachers is how to overcome the expectation of alienation established in many students (including some of us) by long experience. Not surprisingly, that many people have experienced religion in similar terms multiplies the resistance that teachers of religion can expect to encounter. The same might be said, by the way, of the experience of “work” and of the “city.”
I part company with Marx’s analysis at two points that are relevant to this discussion of discipline and pedagogy:
First, to speak of work as humanizing the world says both too much and too little. It says too little because it implies that a nonhuman world is both useless and valueless. It has become increasingly evident to me that, even if the former were true, it would not necessarily imply the latter. That is a departure from classic Marxist theory that has important pedagogical implications: because an object may have value even if it is not useful, our objectification of the world may be regulated by something other than utility. It says too much because it implies that, unless the world is humanized, it cannot address us or act as subject, nor does it make sense to treat it as a subject and address it. In this regard, Marx’s attitude toward the world was shockingly Baconian, a result of the concern he shared with Engels to establish a British pedigree for materialism: as a passive and inanimate body of material, the world must be tortured to yield her secrets (and the use of the feminine pronoun in this approach is revealing).
Second, by concentrating single-mindedly on the important process of objectification, Marx’s analysis fails to attend to the equally important process that Kierkegaard (1987; 1992) refers to as “becoming subjective.” For both the world and human beings in the world, the process of becoming subjects proceeds hand-in-hand with the process of making objects. Becoming a subject is as much a matter of being addressed as addressing, as much a matter of hearing as of speaking.
And that is what constitutes an experiment: it is a process by which (and a place in which) to address and be addressed by the world. Recalling the questions that guided my conversation with Regina, such a process and place would fail only if we did not listen or did not speak—not, it is important to insist, if we heard or said nothing. Recalling the conclusion formed in that conversation, failing to listen and failing to speak in the classroom would be equivalent to substituting a passive report or simple demonstration for an experiment.
Particularly for those of us involved in higher education, it is important to bear in mind that this experimental model is as applicable outside the laboratory as inside. If the classroom is a laboratory, it should serve occasionally to shut out noise and distortion. But it is not the only place (nor is it the most important place) in which we address and are addressed by the world.
There is an unfortunate tendency to assume that civil discourse has occurred whenever two or more people are nice to each other, say something, and don’t get into an argument. That is misleading on all three counts.
Civil discourse is city speech, implying, as Richard Luecke (1968; 1996) has suggested many times, that it is not only how we speak in cities but also how cities speak.
City speech is not simply or uniformly nice; on the contrary, it is often confrontational and rough. A place in which speech was simply and uniformly nice would be homogeneous and have nothing but smooth edges. I am aware that this may well be what Aristotle (1990) had in mind when he described the city in terms of friendship and excluded those who were not “beautiful” (not to mention those who did not speak Greek) from full participation. But, as Martha Nussbaum (1986) has pointed out, Aristotle truncated his own city at this point and (unfortunately) did not allow himself to be carried away by his method. That method is certainly capable of carrying us to a city with a more inclusive aesthetic. Beauty is defined not by excluding those who do not fit within existing boundaries but by crossing boundaries to acknowledge the fittingness of diversity encountered in the city. Crossing boundaries involves confrontation and is rarely smooth. But that it is part of city speech means that civil discourse has not occurred if boundaries have not been crossed.
Nor is city speech simply a matter of saying something. If it does not also ensure space and time in which to say nothing, the listening essential to discourse becomes impossible. In terms of boundary crossing, this means that civil discourse has not occurred if boundaries that define spaces of sound and spaces of silence have not been recognized and honored. Both sound and silence are crucial if the city is not simply to degenerate into a place of violence.
Finally, and most emphatically, city speech does not avoid argument. In fact, the rhythm of crossing, recognizing, and honoring boundaries is descriptive of the discipline of argument. (Remember the formulation at the beginning of this essay: liberal arts are concerned with discovery, appreciation, orientation, and application—redefined here in terms of crossing, recognizing, and honoring boundaries.) Where there is no argument, there is no civil discourse, and there is no city. Such a place is likely to be defined in one of three ways: either it is surrounded by an essentially impermeable boundary that excludes difference; or it is marked by violent struggle for control of turf; or (most likely) it is a mixture of both, with enforced homogeneity near the center of power and violent struggle for control of turf on the fringes.
The introductory course in religious studies begins with a degree of familiarity that is simultaneously obstacle and opportunity. Most students come into the class confident that they know what religion is. Many students come into the class either thinking of themselves as religious or as having rejected religion. Students thus assured in their knowledge of what religion is may experience the critical dimension of the academic setting as a threat to their personal faith. They may also enter with a desire to learn something of the “other” that inclines them to apply their own experience as normative.
A fundamental task of the introductory class is to utilize familiarity as a starting point for reflection (an opportunity for reflection on experience and practice that draws memory into public discourse), while at the same time defamiliarizing the familiar. This makes the introductory course in religious studies a particularly important moment in liberal education, because it can be a laboratory for development of critical thinking and communication—a movement from personal experience through reflection on personal experience toward a community of experience and reflection.
The connection between religion and place (as both noun and verb) is crucial. Space is transformed into place by dwelling, so that place includes space, time, and (because dwelling is also occupation) encounter with others. As a social phenomenon, religion displaces; it takes place. That religion takes place means that it is extended in space: it has spatial dimensions. That religion takes place means that it is extended in time: it has temporal dimensions. As an extension of occupation, religion maps the world. As an extension of taking time, it marks time.
As a subject matter or body of knowledge (a science), religious studies is particularly well suited to investigation of boundary work. As a practice, religion often establishes and regulates boundaries by answering the question “What do we mean by ‘we’?” One object of religion as an instance of human work is people: working at boundaries, religion places people. As an academic discipline (an art), religious studies takes that practice itself as object. Taking the practice as object raises the question of subject, which almost always leads to a complex and controversial answer. Religious communities may see the subject of religious practice as divine: God acts. But it is certainly also possible to see human beings (both individuals and communities) as subjects of religious practice, and this provides a rich field for exploration of human boundary work. How do human individuals and human communities put people in place and keep us there?
Answering that question involves assigning a religious significance to institutions and processes (including classrooms) that are not generally categorized as religious. That, too, is an important opportunity for cultivation of arts of liberation. If the classroom is itself one of the means by which people are placed, then a critical classroom should be an excellent place in which to examine the process in action.
That is where we find out what sort of city is at work in the classroom.
When I experience a particular class as a failed experiment, it is most often because I come away with the impression either that participants have not been transformed—positions held unreflectively at the beginning are still held unreflectively at the end—or that participants have simply exchanged one set of unreflective positions for another. Both outcomes are perfectly compatible with accumulation of information. Both are also perfectly compatible with enforced homogeneity near the center of power. In fact, many of my students, both nontraditional and traditional, see a college education as a way to move closer to the center of power. To the extent that they see classes such as “religious studies” or “cultural pluralism”—both of which are core requirements where I teach—as anything other than distractions, they understand them as tools with which to keep straight categories that are subsumed within the primary distinction between center and periphery. The center may not be homogeneous on every dimension, so being at the center requires both familiarity with which distinctions count and which don’t and facility in making them.
Earlier, I introduced Dewey’s concept of indirect teaching. Dewey’s point was that the structure of the classroom and its place in the process of schooling are more important in determining what is being taught than the content: what is being said is not important apart from what participants are doing and how they are doing it. This does not mean that what is being said is unimportant but that it is not simply equivalent to content: it is part of what is being done and how. Despite my best efforts, I’d say that texts are still privileged over performance in my classrooms; most students still understand the religious studies class in the context of an educational process defined by information transfer and socialization away from the periphery, toward the center of power. That turns me increasingly toward a critical reading of the classroom and the curriculum itself, challenging students to examine the religious function—specifically the boundary work—of the religious studies classroom in the liberal arts curriculum.
But I have to remind myself again of the conversation with Regina: if it doesn’t work, it isn’t an experiment; if it does, it is. This one does. It is time to listen.
My students (and, often, my colleagues) tell me that education is a business and that our students are customers. That, however, is not quite what I hear through the experiment on which I’ve been reporting here. That education is a business seems increasingly accurate; but, though the economy as a whole has shifted toward service, this enterprise has moved in the opposite direction and become a manufacturing concern. In that regard, students are not customers but raw material. Our customer is the service economy (represented equally by private and government sectors), and we (teachers) look more and more like workers on an assembly line—right down to details such as downsizing, outsourcing, and increasing dependence on part-time workers supervised by professional managers (Fernandez and Barbett, 1999).
In the previous section, I referred to privileging of text over performance. This is exacerbated at the institution where I teach by the title of the introductory class and its place in the core: “Religious Foundations and the Bible.” Where the background of students and the context within which the class is taught are overwhelmingly Christian, the tendency to privilege a particular text—the Bible, understood as a Christian book—in judgments about religion is pronounced: people are placed based on where they stand vis-à-vis the Bible. (This is sometimes extended to other texts, as when a student refers to the Qur’an as “the Muslim Bible.”) I also referred to students who see a college education as a way to move closer to the center of power. This perception is often deepened and complicated by employer tuition programs that fully reimburse “relevant” classes (or classes within relevant majors) and/or determine the percentage of reimbursement based on grades, and by corporate policies that tie career ladders to college education. Students are often inclined to understand core courses and electives as obstacles and to place them in the context of their career ladders. Understanding a course as an obstacle may reinforce emphasis on content and on text. Understanding a course as part of a career ladder may do the same, but—particularly in terms of “center” and “periphery”—it may also associate content and text with distinctions that count and with facility in making those distinctions.
The language is familiar, in the world of secondary as well as the world of post-secondary education: business leaders and employers have particular expectations of graduates, the products of particular educational systems. Whether directly (via tuition payments to colleges and universities for employees seeking career advancement) or indirectly (via salaries to employees and taxes to governments that underwrite systems of education), these leaders often understand themselves as purchasers of a product who therefore have a stake in its quality and in the process that produces it.
Which confronts us with a problem. Is there any sense in which a factory production process can itself become a laboratory for civil discourse?
In the best-case scenario, the answer is yes—and non-traditional programs for adults, to the extent to which they become colleges for working people rather than simply assembly lines for efficient production of managers, are in an excellent position to take up the struggle in which labor educators have been engaged for well over a century. Among the heroes of this struggle are Charlie Chaplin’s little tramp in Modern Times and Robert DeNiro’s Harry Tuttle in Brazil. Given the efficiency of the assembly line, we may have to put our hands in the machinery to slow it down.
In this regard, the religious studies classroom and religious studies as an academic discipline hold particular promise. I argued earlier that religion establishes and regulates boundaries, that it places people, and that religious studies as an academic discipline takes this practice of regulating boundaries and placing people as object. The religious studies classroom is a place in which this discipline is taught, but it is also placed in an institution that does what religion does. The institution and its practice, then, are appropriate objects for religious studies as an academic discipline. Making the institution and its practice objects of academic discipline will slow the practice, and it has the potential to transform the institution. Students who participate in this discipline are not products produced for employers by teachers on behalf of educational institutions. They are co-workers engaged with teachers in the production and transformation of the institution itself—citizens who not only live in the city but also make it.
In the worst-case scenario, the factory is Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory. But Mary Shelley saw that experimental work in terms of civil discourse as well: we create monsters when we turn and run. The alternative is to embrace our work and, with it, the world—not to get to work on our students, but to get to work with them.
Aristotle (1990). Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Brazil (1985). Directed by Terry Gilliam. Written by Terry Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, and Charles McKeown. Embassy International Pictures.
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Hanson, Norwood Russell (1958). Patterns of Discovery: An Inquiry into the Conceptual Foundations of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Kierkegaard, Søren (1992). Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton University Press.
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Luecke, Richard (1996). Themes of Lutheran Ministry, 1945-1985. In Churches, Cities, and Human Community: Urban Ministry in the United States, 1945-1985. Clifford Green (Ed.). Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eeerdmans.
Marx, Karl (1964). The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Struik, Dirk J. (Ed.). New York: International Publishers.
Miller, Richard B., Laurie L. Patton, and Stephen H. Webb (1994). Rhetoric, Pedagogy, and the Study of Religions. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 62/3:819-850.
Modern Times (1985). Written and Directed by Charlie Chaplin. Farmington Hills, MI: Playhouse Video. (Originally released in 1936.)
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Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (1993). The Essential Frankenstein. Wolf, Leonard (Ed.). New York: Plume.
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