Innovative ideas

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This article was published 06/04/2019 (2429 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If she had the funding, religious studies professor Sandra Gravett would push her first-year university students off campus and into community service projects to make connections between religion and issues such as poverty, homelessness and environmental sustainability.

“As they’re doing this work, they will also be learning how religion is having an impact on these issues,” the professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., says in a telephone interview.

“So we’re teaching them religion through service.”

The author of the recently published Teaching Religion in a Changing Public University presents a public lecture on rethinking the divide between sacred and secular in public universities, on Thursday, April 11, at 7 p.m. at the University of Winnipeg.

Gravett’s lecture is part of a two-day conference examining the role of biblical education in post-secondary education, especially in the context of the post-truth era, says organizer Arthur Walker-Jones, who teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses in religion and theology at the University of Winnipeg.

“Part of my own question is do I teach the Bible differently in the religion and culture department than in theology,” says Walker-Jones, who holds the United Church of Canada Research Chair in Contemporary Theology.

“I have a sense that I’m not supposed to talk about how the church uses the Bible.”

Many universities, including the University of Winnipeg, were founded with theological faculties to train Christian ministers, and later added religious studies departments as part of their humanities offerings.

Increased emphasis on science, technology and professional studies, coupled with anxiety about the cost of a post-secondary education, has resulted in fewer American college students taking courses in religion and the humanities in general, says Dale B. Martin, who retired early from teaching religious studies at Yale University partly because of that decline.

“Once you quantify the study of religion monetarily, our enrolment really went down,” he says in a telephone interview from his home in Durham, N.C.

Gravett’s research shows that religion as a college major is declining across the United States, with the largest percentage graduating from Liberty University, a private evangelical Christian university founded by televangelist Jerry Falwell in 1971.

She says that decline doesn’t reflect public interest in religion, or the increased need for understanding religions other than your own in a pluralistic society.

“I’m trying to teach people who will be in other careers, how religion integrates into their lives,” she says of the future teachers, medical professionals or lawyers in her courses.

“We have lots of religions’ traditions interacting in our cultural stew.”

The study of religion in the university setting remains important because it offers historical perspective and cultural context, teaches about religions instead of teaching religion and invites students to question deeply held religious beliefs, Martin argues.

“Blowing people’s minds is what education is supposed to do,” he says.

Gravett advocates moving religious studies from purely academic discussion to working in the community, something she’s attempting with a recent grant proposal which would place students in a summer community project.

Her attempts at innovation also include teaching religious studies courses exclusively online, using a combination of short videos, discussion boards, social media and other interactive platforms.

“The exciting thing for me as a teacher who is in it for a long time is I had to learn an entirely different way of teaching,” says Gravett, who lives in Greensboro, N.C.

However it is delivered, biblical studies is more than learning the historical context of the text, but also more than the confessional approach of the Christian church, says Martin, who delivers a public lecture immediately after Gravett’s talk on why people should care about the Bible.

“There’s not one way to read the Bible, and there’s not only two ways to read the Bible,” he says, adding people can approach the biblical text through post-colonial, feminist or Indigenous lenses, as just three examples.

He says it might be more useful in this postmodern age to compare biblical studies to jazz, where musicians work with melodies and harmonies in new and innovative ways.

“Improvisational music is a great model for learning to get meaning out of a text, especially a text as loaded as the Bible,” Martin says.

brenda@suderman.com

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