Campus Voices
Upper School
“Hinduism: It’s better than Harry Potter!” exclaimed one of my world religion students during a mind-bending conversation about Krishna’s theophany in the eleventh teaching of the Bhagavadgita.
At that moment I sat back and smiled. It wasn’t simply the catchy phrase that made me smile (though it was catchy indeed); rather, it was the fact that my students were taking this strange world into themselves and making sense of it. “No, No, No!” One student adamantly proclaimed during our first discussion of the Gita. “You’re forgetting that when Arjuna kills them he’s not killing them; they don’t die; not really. And he’s not killing; not really. He’s fulfilling his dharma and making good karma.” “Or,” another added, “if he’s doing it in a spirit of perfect discipline and renunciation, no karma.” “No karma?” another asked. “Why no karma?”
Teaching world religions at BB&N poses a unique set of challenges and opportunities. Having spent much of my time as an undergrad and all of my graduate school years studying religion, I have longed for the opportunity to teach a religion course. High schools, however, don’t abound in such course offerings. Thus when I first met with Leigh Hogan, chair of the History Department, about a possible position at BB&N, and he asked whether I would be interested in teaching a course in world religions, I nearly fell out of my seat. Would I be interested? Are there 330 million Hindu Gods? You bet!
But how, in six-and-a-half months, do you teach seven religions to a group of almost entirely secular 17 year olds? Feels like one of those riddles with a trick answer. Fortunately, it is not a riddle and there is no trick answer; the answer is as real as the fruits it yields.
Over the summer, I assembled primary and secondary sources that introduce students to a set of fundamental ideas and issues in each faith. For instance, when we study Christianity we will follow a line of thinking by reading the Pauline letters, excerpts from Augustine’s City of God and sermons by Martin Luther. In doing so, we will trace the development of a certain Protestant understanding of the human will. When we study Judaism (which, in this course, comes after Christianity) we will consider how differently rabbinic scholars read some of the same biblical texts we saw handled by Christian theologians and explore the different anthropologies that arise through different interpretive strategies. Heady stuff, no doubt. But it is also stuff that engages more than the just head.
“I had the best conversation with my mother last night,” a student announced at the beginning of a recent class. “I was explaining the idea of reincarnation and we really started talking about what we think, and feel, and believe. I think it was the most serious conversation we’ve ever had about religion.” Studying world religions not only requires drawing on an array of academic skills or ways of thinking (literary, historical, philosophical, aesthetic, sociological, to name some), it demands that we seriously engage ideas radically alien to our own; that we open ourselves to complex ideas and behaviors which might initially repel us ideas and consider how, through them, people experience (and explore) being human. Thus there is something both deeply personal and deeply unsettling about studying an array of religions. Something which, when coupled with rigorous academic inquiry, sets students on fire and broadens their understanding of the world, human nature, and themselves.
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