The true test of intelligence is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don't know what to do.

--John Holt, How Children Fail

 

While preparing to meet my first class as a teaching fellow in East Asian Studies at Harvard in 1985, I visited several professors I admire, told them of my new responsibilities and sought their sagacious advice. My inquiries brought me up against the curious fact that many university teachers are reluctant to talk about teaching, even though they spend much of their professional time in the classroom. While some professors entered into animated conversation with me--"I find that I get nervous about meeting my classes even after twenty-five years. Why do you suppose that is?"--a more common response was along the lines of "Well, Mark, teaching is very idiosyncratic. Either you have it within you to do it well or you don't. Not very much can be said on this matter. Good luck."

It's true. Some people are more adept at teaching than others, and temperament may be a distinguishing element here. New teachers spend a lot of time searching for that particular style of communication that will instruct and motivate others. But more can be said on this matter than just this. To view teaching as utterly idiosyncratic is to miss the fact that, like any art or craft, it entails a recognizable set of attitudes and skills that can be learned and used so that teachers and students might better express their own voices.

In this essay I will introduce some practical, common sense perspectives on teaching by commenting on three overlapping areas of interest to beginning TAs. First, I will provide some specific items to consider as you plan your first section meeting. First impressions count in the classroom, and it is important to get off to a good start. Second, I will introduce ideas for section leading and give you some things to consider as you prepare to meet your students from week to week. Finally, I will offer some thoughts on the nature of your authority as a teacher. Questions surrounding authority are often at the root of anxieties we bring to first (and subsequent) class sessions.

I. Preparing for the First Section Meeting

While most teaching assistants are not in on syllabus planning, preparation for a course begins with attention to the syllabus and questions like What are the purposes of this course? Are assignments clear and reasonable? What are the aims of written work? Are materials on the syllabus good for discussion in sections? Will materials for the course be in the bookstore on time? What is expected from the professor and the TAs? How much autonomy will TAs have? Discuss these questions with the professor and other TAs far in advance of the first day of class. Make this one of many discussions you will have about the course. Ongoing conversation about the aims and effects of the course will likely influence the construction of future syllabi (yours and the professor's).

Early preparation also concerns the physical arrangement of the classroom. Is the room an appropriate size? Do you have proper furniture and equipment (chalk, markers, overhead projector, etc.)? Will everyone seated around a table be able to see everyone else? Where will you sit? Advance attention to details like these will free up energy for interacting with students.

In the first class meeting it is good to enter into some kind of substantive discussion related to the content of the course. In addition, this meeting provides an opportunity to set the tone, lay down some ground rules, begin the process of getting acquainted, and generate interest among students. Students are very interested in learning just how open and accessible you are, so the manner in which you present yourself and items for discussion is of the utmost importance.

I like to arrive early to the first class and write the following information on the board:

• My name
• Course name and number
• Office number and phone number
• Office hours
• Email address and home telephone number[2]

Once students are comfortably settled, I introduce myself with reference to the above information. You will have to decide how much more you want to say about yourself at this time. I usually talk about how I became interested in the subject matter and identify several aspects of the course that I'm particularly excited about. I also mention something I hope to learn more about as the quarter goes along.

I next emphasize that section meetings are for discussion. It is, therefore, important that students get to know each others' names and make an effort to get acquainted for the sake of the class. To get this process started--and it will take several class meetings before people begin to feel comfortable with each other--I hand out 4" X 5" index cards and ask students to record information like the following (noting that it is optional to do so):

• Name
• Year
• Academic major [or concentration]
• Telephone number and email address
• Other courses they are taking that quarter
• What they expect from this course
• An unusual fact about themselves

The final item on this list will open up avenues of conversation that go beyond the bounds of the course. These cards will prove helpful as you start to put faces with names.

Before collecting these cards you may want to use them to help students introduce themselves. I like to pair students up, have them exchange cards, converse a few minutes and introduce their partner to the group. Students won't remember many names at this point, but the ice will be broken enough to move things along. At the beginning of the next class you may have everyone state their name before selecting someone to go around the room naming each and every person. This exercise gets people to attend to learning names, especially if you say you may ask somebody else to do this at the beginning of the next meeting. In these early meetings you might also have students make name cards which they set on the table.

Once introductions are taken care of, it is time to look more closely at the syllabus and set ground rules for discussions and written work. By reviewing the syllabus you let students know where the course is going and how, in your mind, various topics fit together. Students will learn better if they keep this overall picture in mind. By setting ground rules that let students know your expectations and policies concerning their work, you become trustworthy as you put your cards out on the table. What, for example, is your policy toward late written work? Do you expect people in the section to arrive on time? What will you expect from students who are making class presentations?

Think carefully about your expectations and policies, for you will be bound by them as the course goes along. Deviations from stated policies are often the cause of trouble; it is to everyone's advantage if you are firm and remain consistent with the framework set forth the first class. Reiteration and explication of these items will probably be required at a later date, especially around the time when the first written work comes due.

Every class period should be carefully planned in advance. There is never enough time and you must set priorities. While introductions and discussion of expectations and procedures are necessary, it is important that a portion of the first class be devoted to intellectual work. After all, the main purpose of discussion sections is to examine texts and ideas in ways that promote the development of intellectual virtues. Giving part of the hour to consideration of a question or small portion of a text will help set an appropriate tone.

Choosing a substantive issue for the first day can be difficult. Time will be limited and you will want to find something that piques curiosity and points to questions and concerns that will be important throughout the course. In some classes reading for the first section will already be assigned on the syllabus. In that case, I recommend you select just one important paragraph from the assignment and work with that. Have students read this paragraph in silence before asking if anyone would like to summarize it (those who haven't already done the reading are then included). Ask for additional summary statements and have a student or two raise a question for the group to consider. A discussion may take off from there.

If the selected passage is from a supposedly familiar text (i.e., something students may have encountered in a required freshman seminar like CIV), you may wish to work through it line by line, showing what close reading is about. Students will find things in the familiar text they have not noticed before, and you can point out that the kind of attentive reading and rereading just demonstrated will enhance their appreciation of assignments throughout the term.

If you are not starting with something already assigned, you may wish to demonstrate close reading with a text you select and bring in. You may also begin with a relevant newspaper clipping, or start by summarizing conflicting interpretations of a salient idea in work for the coming week. Whatever you do, remember that students will learn a good deal about the way you plan to facilitate section discussions. This first session, then, provides a great opportunity for setting an appropriate tone, demonstrating your approach to discussion leading, drawing attention to important skills and creatively introducing course material. Don't worry if time runs out before the discussion really gets off the ground. The rest of the quarter lies ahead!

II. Leading Discussion Sections

In the course of your life as a student you have undergone an "apprenticeship of observation." That is, you have observed a lot of teaching over the years. Your experience as a student is one of your best resources for preparing to teach. Which models will you emulate? Which will you try to avoid? In this section I will note several important characteristics that distinguish effective teachers. Good teachers are imaginative, well-prepared, flexible, and available.

A. Imagination

After many years of schooling, teachers and students have come to expect certain norms in classroom life. Sadly, many students will assume that life inside the classroom isn't going to be very interesting or relevant to life outside. This poses a challenge to your imagination. Are there ways you can upset expectations and improve classroom culture so students might change their ideas about the value of classroom time? Can you imagine ways of keeping students off guard so that they remain attentive and eager to exercise their skills? What happens if, for example, you try to introduce ideas in a text through music or pictures?

In most classrooms--even those intended for discussion--lines of instruction run separately from the teacher to each individual student. While this may be convenient for instructors, this dyadic dynamic inhibits the creation of an atmosphere where students will learn to work together. Are there ways of facilitating greater communication among students so that interaction extends beyond the class hour and makes classroom time less discrete?

I once set things up so that students in my section were writing to and for each other. It has always seemed strange to me that students rarely read each others' papers. Why should communication in writing go only from student to teacher? In an effort to upset this norm, I arranged things so that each week a student would write a short essay on a very broad question relevant throughout the course. All students wrote on the same question--something like What is history? What is scripture? What is the good life? Why should one study religions? The first draft of this paper was read by two students who commented on it in writing. The author took these comments into account and composed a final version. The final draft, attached to the first draft and peer comments, was then turned in to me.

This experiment had many good effects. The papers generated ongoing conversation about the one, broad question students shared. Writing kept conversation about the question topic going, people remained interested in how others would approach the question and references to ideas in these papers came up in class discussions. I learned that students are very interested in what their peers think and appreciate the opportunity to express their ideas through the more controlled vehicle of writing. Finally, students learned to value rewriting and the process of collaborative learning, one of the purposes of the discussion section format.[3]

One of the main aims of discussion sections is to help students learn how to learn through participation in the life of a group. You may want to be very explicit about the skills that are necessary for this and discuss these skills in your class. You can't assume that students understand the reasons why lectures and sections are organized as they routinely are. Use your imagination to upset the routine--thereby drawing attention to it--and find ways of facilitating interaction among students who are capable of learning from each other. (See Mark Unno's "Pedagogical Tools and Strategies" for additional ideas.)

B. Preparation

If you expect students to be serious and prepared, you must be well-prepared too. You will teach much by example. Have you been to the week's lectures? Have you worked through course materials with points for discussion in mind? That is, have you identified essential tensions and questions in the materials assigned for the day? Have you clarified your goals for the section meeting? What would you like students to be thinking about when they walk out the door? How does what you are doing in section relate to the course as a whole?

It is good to begin class meetings by helping students focus on the hour that lies ahead. Students often arrive in section with a variety of things on their minds (sleep, food, sex, the last class, the next class, the weekend, etc.). I help them prepare mentally for class by taking a few minutes to review salient features of the last meeting and give an overview of plans for the present hour. This draws everyone together, creates narrative continuity and turns attention to matters at hand.

Students will forgive most everything except the offense of being obviously under prepared. Being well-organized and helping students focus on immediate tasks demonstrates that you care about the course and value class time.

C. Flexibility

It is possible to be over prepared. In this event you may be so set on covering your agenda that you leave little room for student input and spontaneous "teachable moments." The atmosphere in a discussion section should be one of give-and-take. If you are too organized, there will not be enough room for spontaneity: creative energies will wane and the class will lose its conversational tone. If one is not organized enough, discussions may be unfocused and difficult to summarize and assess.

While it is important to arrive with an agenda in mind, you should be flexible enough to bring extemporaneous questions and ideas into your plan. Since good discussions have a life of their own, unexpected insights may take the class in surprising and exciting directions. You will have to assess whether unanticipated detours are productive or distracting.

If you begin the class by spelling out an agenda, the session can end (as it should) with a summary of what has transpired. If items on your agenda were not spoken to, you have a way of measuring what was accomplished by relating it to your original plan. Sensing just how much preparation is necessary and knowing when and how to get things back on track when unproductive digressions appear is an art you will learn over time.

D. Availability

Student surveys repeatedly indicate that a TA's availability is a primary concern. While you cannot be available twenty-four hours a day (and some students might expect this), you have an obligation to be available when and where you say you will be. Set office hours and stick to them.

Office hours often provide some of the best teaching time. Quieter students will be more forthcoming (not everyone is comfortable expressing themselves in the larger group), and you will have a chance to become better acquainted with your students as you meet to discuss particular ideas and projects.

It is also important to be available at the end of each class hour. Be careful not to schedule anything that will prevent your interaction with students at this time. Some students will use this time to ask questions they weren't able to bring to the group. They may also want to push the preceding discussion further. This is also a common time for discussing assignments and arranging meetings during office hours.

III. Your Authority as a TA

At institutions such as Brown or Stanford you are teaching in a lively, multicultural environment. As a teacher, you represent academic culture. That you are a TA indicates you have learned to be at home in the academic world, and that you understand its rituals, procedures, languages, politics, and resources. The fact that there may be things about academic culture that you do not like is itself an indication of your growing familiarity with it.

When you walk into your first class meeting, students--however suspicious they appear--are going to view you as someone with a tremendous amount of authority. In large part, this is because you represent success in a culture they want to participate in and know. Since questions concerning the nature and exercise of authority are at the root of many of the anxieties TAs have, I want to briefly grapple with that vexing problem here.

I think your main task as a teacher is to help students articulate and explore genuine questions--questions that somehow connect students' lives to the subject matter at hand. The skill you most need to develop is that of guiding others through the process of working toward meaningful answers. Your authority as a TA is based on your proven ability to identify and explore serious questions. The best, most immediate, resource you have for developing this skill is your own experience as a learner: When confronted by a genuine question, how do you proceed?

TAs are usually better off when they claim authority on the basis of their ability to learn. Good teaching, then, is not a matter of presenting yourself as a walking Encyclopaedia Britannica, (though information is fundamental to the teacher's task). The good, most authoritative teacher is one who is able to engage others in a process of discovery. This process of discovery and the excitement it generates is what makes life in the university worthwhile.

I mentioned that one of the best resources you have for becoming articulate about the processes and joys of scholarship is your own experience as a learner: When confronted by a genuine question, how do you proceed? One of the best ways to prepare for teaching a course is to reflect upon this question so that, through your words and actions, you may communicate those energies, insights, and resources that have carried you along.

When stepping into the teaching role, it takes courage to trust in your own experience, use your own voice, and really be yourself. It takes courage not to try and be somebody else--probably the most common mistake beginning teachers make. In honestly expressing yourself and drawing on your own experiences and inner resources, you will be able to claim and enjoy authority as a college teacher.

Conclusion

In the epigraph to this essay, John Holt suggests that intelligence is best indicated by how one behaves in a new situation. While college teaching isn't entirely new to you (remember your apprenticeship of observation), the transition you are making from being a student to being a teacher sets you in a situation that brings new responsibilities and problems. If it seems that my advice is common sense, that's good. Becoming a teacher can be difficult, and in difficult situations it is not uncommon to throw common sense right out the window.

It will take some time to become comfortable in this transition, and patience is required. It helps to remember that the teachers you most admire and plan to emulate have become good at what they do because they have been working on it for a number of years. They have experimented, measured student responses, reflected on their aims, talked to colleagues and fine tuned their particular approaches. Now you can begin to do the same.

In the course of my work as a teaching assistant and instructor, I have had the opportunity to try out a variety of tools and strategies, and I would like to share some of them. Many will already be familiar with them as they have had occasion to encounter them in other situations or as students. Furthermore, they are not necessarily specific to religious studies and can generally be used in any humanities course. Nevertheless, I thought it might be helpful to review some of them.

Weekly Short Assignments

I have found it useful to assign one- to two-page response papers on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. I ask students to reflect on each week's readings and to bring in a few well-thought-out questions or a brief analysis of an idea or passage that they found particularly insightful, difficult to understand, or otherwise thought-provoking. I collect these short assignments at the end of each section and return them the following week with my comments. Making comments on these short assignments and returning them regularly assures the students that the teacher cares about their work and maintains two-way communication. I do not grade them, but they are required, and together with their participation in the discussion sections accounts for approximately one-tenth of the students' course grades.

These assignments fulfill several functions. They help students to reflect on the readings and provide the teacher with a means to get a sense of their overall development. This in turn enables the teacher to understand students' longer papers better and to make more meaningful comments on them. They provide a springboard for discussion; the short assignment makes certain that students have something prepared for discussion, and shy students tend to be more confident in speaking up if they have something written prepared. It is also easier for me to call on students when I know they have something ready. If the discussion bogs down, I can always call on someone to present what they have prepared.

I have generally found that the short paper fulfills these functions well. Even when I was TAing for a course that satisfied a double distribution requirement and was graded pass/no-credit, students consistently handed in these assignments, made insightful points, and used them to engage in high-level discussions.

Student Presentations

Each week, I also ask students to pair up to make ten-minute presentations on the readings. I suggest that one student present some analysis or problem and that the other respond, but I leave the format fairly open. Depending on the number of students in the section, each member of a discussion section usually ends up doing these presentations one to three times. Most of us have had experiences with this in graduate seminars, and I have found that it works quite well for discussion sections in lecture courses.

I usually begin the section with these presentations. This allows students to take control of the discussion and present ideas that they are most interested in. Usually students are able to carry on a focused discussion based on the initial presentation for fifteen to twenty-five minutes, and I only intervene when necessary, that is, to correct misinformation or to refocus a discussion that has gone too far off on a tangent.

When the discussion initiated by these presentations begins to wind down, I either pose further questions that I would like to have the students consider or make my own presentation as a supplement to or clarification of the readings and lectures.

I have found that discussion sections serve two main purposes: to clarify and elaborate upon course material that could not be covered adequately during lectures and to help students develop their ability to discuss and reflect on the material intelligently. Beginning discussion sections with student presentations first and introducing one's own material later on is one way to balance these elements.

Student Debates

I usually have students engage in debates two or three times a semester. Of course, debate is a normal part of any discussion section, but here I am referring to a more formal situation in which students are asked to represent a particular position. I first learned of this as a teaching intern for Hester Gelber's Philosophy of Religion (RS42) at Stanford University and have used this often.

I prepare a passage of paragraph-length which describes a scenario involving problems relevant to the course material and pass it out to the students at section. I have the students divide up into groups of four to six and have each group represent one position. For example, I might have different groups represent the position taken by Hume, Kant, and Kierkegaard on the question of the existence of God. Each group elects a spokesperson, and after ten to fifteen minutes of discussion, the spokespeople engage in debate with each other in an attempt to establish their own position and to critique the others.

This has been a useful format for several reasons. It helps students to develop discussion skills, to learn what it means to represent a particular position, and to take on perspectives that might not reflect their own personal convictions. As Steve Wilson has noted,[5] this is a particularly helpful format for certain students and even whole sections that tend to be reserved, as it is often easier for such students to play a role rather than give voice to their own position.

The debate format is especially helpful in courses with a philosophical dimension, since effective argumentation is essential to philosophical discourse. It can contribute significantly to the study of nearly all subjects to the extent that critical analysis and argumentation constitute a part of most academic work. It is also a nice change of pace to insert debates during the course of a quarter.

Grades

Grades are, it seems, a necessary evil of higher education. There is an unavoidably subjective element in grading papers, and it is difficult to be consistent. As a TA I found various standards applied by different professors, and I tried first of all to be consistent with the individual instructor's own standards. It is important for students in different sections of the same course to have the same standards, and one of the easiest ways to achieve this is to consult with the instructor and to come to some kind of consensus regarding standards that are consistent across sections. If one has strong disagreements with the instructor in this regard, they can and should be voiced.

One advantage of being aware of the instructor's standards is that, when students have grievances concerning grades, the TA can appeal to the instructor as a referee. Eventually, however, TAs must be weaned from reliance on the instructor's authority and be willing to take sole responsibility for grading. I have my own genearal criteria for grading which I use as an instructor, and these are explained in the sample "Paper Writing Guidelines" which have been included in this volume. I make adjustments in these criteria for different courses as necessary.

Students at institutions such as Brown and Stanford are intelligent and motivated, and it is fairly unusual to give a grade below a B-. There are, however, often enough cases in which students' work is less than adequate, and lower grades given accordingly. Whenever I do I ask the student to speak with me briefly, either after section or during office hours. I do this for several reasons: 1) to make sure that students understand why they received the grade they did, 2) to suggest ways of improvement, and 3) to encourage students and highlight the positive points of their papers. Time and again I have been surprised to see how students improve in their writing over the course of a quarter.

There were several instances in which the students' writing was so poor that I was not certain whether they could complete the course satisfactorily, but after making some suggestions and encouraging them, virtually all of these students reached a surprisingly high level of proficiency by the end of the course. I recall one case, however, where a student performed quite well on the rewrite allowed for first papers but failed to reach her potential later on. It was a case where she simply had other priorities.

In another interesting case, a student received a low grade, and when I explained why, he told me that he knew he had not done a very good job but did not want to do a rewrite. He also did not contribute much to the discussions and seemed rather disinterested. In such cases I sometimes try to involve the student by calling on him or her and making various suggestions. But in this case, something told me that I should just let him be. He was in a small section of highly capable and motivated students. He remained silent through most of the quarter but became visibly more interested as he was infected by the enthusiasm of the others. He gradually took a deeper interest in the course, and his writing naturally improved. Sometimes less is more, as this case seemed to illustrate.

Peer Review

Another tool I began using this past year is the peer review. Mark Gonnerman had mentioned this to me, but I decided to use it for the first time in two seminars that I taught this past year, using my own format.[6] Students were required to hand in drafts two weeks before the final due date and exchange papers with a partner. Once the peer reviewers made comments on the draft, they were required to hand in the drafts with comments to me, and I in turn made comments on the comments. This process served to refine student writing, empowered students to benefit from one another's work, enhanced the collaborative character of their study, and brought more focus to bear on the quality of writing and thinking rather than on quantity. In both classes the the effect on the quality of writing was positive across the board, and students' response to the peer review was equally strong.

Working with Other TAs and Instructors

I have learned a great deal from other TAs as well as from my own teachers and colleagues, and I have found it helpful to work with them in a variety of ways. Especially in my early experiences, I found it just as helpful to consult with more experienced TAs as with the instructor. This has included everything from procedural matters to the presentation of specific ideas.

Sometimes I had TAs from other sections serve as a guest TA for my section. Students in the section were thus exposed to different styles and approaches to the same material, and their learning was enriched through broadening the scope of their experience. At times I asked other TAs to consult with students in my section when they had particular difficulty understanding the material or working on a paper. Other TAs may be more knowledgeable in certain areas, or they may be able to provide an angle that I had overlooked. Teaching is a highly individual affair, and much depends upon the chemistry between teacher and student. While there may be consistently good teachers, no one is good with every student.

One helpful tool for gauging students' experiences in section is the mid-quarter evaluation. I have most often used anonymous evaluation forms for this purpose. Most departments have standard forms that can be used, but I have usually formulated my own, for two reasons: 1) Standardized forms usually have a ranking scale for different areas of pedagogy as well as specific questions; I have found that students tend to focus on the ranking scale at the expense of providing detailed comments, and the latter are often more helpful for making adjustments midway through a course. 2) I also make minor changes in the form depending on the course.

Handouts

Various types of handouts have proven beneficial. I have already touched on the Paper Writing Guidelines which have been included in this volume. I would like to mention just three other types that I have used: 1) supplementary bibliographies, 2) glossaries of names and terms, and 3) diagrams. Supplementary bibliographies with brief descriptions of the works listed can be helpful, because bibliographical information for works cited frequently by the TA but not listed in the course syllabus can be included. Glossaries are useful for making sure students know the spelling for certain terms, providing brief definitions of terms students are expected to know, and generally highlighting key concepts and names. Diagrams provide a means to organize one's thoughts, as schematic presentations of key concepts provide a framework in which various ideas can be placed. In this sense, diagrams, like theoretical generalizations, are limited but useful. Here is a case where a picture is not worth a thousand words but meaningful nonetheless.

Conclusion

The tools and strategies described above are just a few of the ways in which I have tried to make the learning experience for students as meaningful as possible. Each teacher will develop her own strategies as she builds on her experience, and I look forward to learning more from what others have to offer as I continue to develop my own repertoire.

The idea for "Paper Writing Guidelines" began with my work as a teaching assistant as I started to assign and grade papers. At first I explained orally what I expected and required regarding the procedures, mechanics, content, and overall evaluation of papers. However, I began to recognize that students sometimes did not remember everything, and I was having to spend a great deal of time explaining these matters during section as well as writing the same comments on papers repeatedly.

I decided to hand out a written set of guidelines for papers to lessen my work in this regard. In addition, the Guidelines proved a helpful reference for questions and grievances that arose. Students were clear about what was expected, and I was accountable for my own position.

The Guidelines seem to be helpful, as students have responded positively, both in terms of their feedback regarding the Guidelines and the quality of their written work. Two of the most important skills that are taught at the undergraduate level are how to think and write well. The two are distinct but closely interrelated, and it has been my experience that a basic foundation in clear and organized writing often aids in the development of critical thinking skills. In humanities courses, the written paper is the only tangible evidence of the students' work, and it is our responsibility as teachers to see to it that they are given the necessary tools to excel.

This requires a grasp of basic procedure and mechanics. They are like the tools used by a carpenter or the utensils of a chef. Without a basic knowledge of these instruments, the carpenter cannot complete a project, the chef cannot cook an adequate meal, and the college student does not have the necessary framework to express her ideas effectively. Beyond these basics, the college or university paper usually represents a genre that is more complex than anything students have attempted before and incorporates elements that are new to their thinking and writing. I will not go into each area in detail here; the sample which follows is fairly self-explanatory in this regard.

Students may sometimes become preoccupied with the details of the Guidelines, and their writing may become cramped in an effort to satisfy the instructor. In order to counterbalance this tendency, a brief essay on academic writing as a creative process, "Writing: The Bridge between Consciousness and Unconsciousness", has also been included after the Guidelines.

The Guidelines presented below are in turn meant to serve as a guideline for your own thinking about these matters, and I merely hope that they will stimulate reflection.

Please follow these guidelines when writing your papers.

1. Deadlines

Submit your papers by the deadlines stated in the syllabus. If for some reason you cannot hand in a paper on time, contact me by the day before the due date. In all reasonable cases I will give you an extension, but if you don't let me know, there will be a grade deducted for each day it comes in late.

2. Mechanics

Mechanics are important. They are the basic tools that make the paper possible.

a) Descriptive Title. As simple as this is, some people do forget.

b) Page numbers. In case the pages come loose, I will be able to read your paper.

c) Consistent citations. You may use either footnotes, endnotes, or intra-textual parenthetical notes. However, do not mix forms of citation. There are some exceptions to this rule. Some examples of standard citation formats follow:

Footnotes and endnotes

Books: Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life (New York: Washington Square Press, 1985), 42-44.

Article in an anthology: Hideki Yukawa, "The Happy Fish," in Experimental Essays on Chuang-tzu, ed. by Victor Mair, 85-100 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983).

Journal article: Philip J. Ivanhoe, "A Happy Symmetry: Xunzi's Ethical Thought," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 49:2 (Summer 1991), 309-310.

Intra-textual note

(Ivanhoe 1991:309-310).

Bibliography

Yukawa, Hideki. "The Happy Fish." In Experimental Essays on Chuang-tzu, ed. by Victor Mair, 85-100. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983.

For a more detailed explanation of standard formats, consult:

Kate Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 5th ed., rev. by Bonnie Birtwistle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

If you do use intra-textual references, be sure to provide a full bibliography of cited works at the end of your paper.

d) Use block quotations for citations four lines or longer. When using block quotations, do not use quotation marks at the beginning and end of the block.

e) Check your spelling. There should be few errors in this regard.

3. Style

There are a few stylistic matters to be aware of.

a) Avoid using too many conjunctions and qualifiers, such as "however," "then," and "given that." Except in a few cases, the reader will know how one sentence relates to the next without the use of these terms, and the resulting paper will be easier to read.

b) Use natural English. There is no need to fill your paper with technical vocabulary or difficult terms. If you do use them, they will have a greater effect when you write for the most part in clear, straightforward English.

c) Tenses. Be consistent in your use of past and present tense. If you are writing a thought paper (ideas, philosophy), it is accepted practice to put everything in the present tense. For example, you may write, "The Buddha says, . . . ." or "The Tibetan master Milarepa behaves in unconventional ways."

If you are writing a research paper dealing with historical issues, you should put scholarly assertions in the present tense ("I think," "Gregory Schopen states") and historical facts in the past ("Sakyamuni delivered a sermon," "Devadatta turned traitor"). In any case, be consistent.

d) Documentation. Whenever you make generalizations or assertions, document your claims with citations, either from the lectures or readings. If you make a statement that seems controversial and you don't cite a reference, then I will not know where your ideas came from. You cannot be too careful on this point

e) Subheadings. They are not required, but it can be helpful to insert subheadings as you go along. They let the reader know that new topics are being addressed.

f) Gender. It is now widely considered that the exclusive use of male pronouns to refer to both sexes is unacceptable. There are a number of strategies that can be used to negotiate this matter. You may use i) male and female pronouns alternately, ii) neutral pronouns such as "one" and "they"; however, avoid mixing these two pronouns in the same sentence, iii) both (When a person finds him or herself in this situation . . .), or iv) "s/he". If you have any questions about this, please see me.

4. Drafts

You are not required to submit drafts, but I will be happy to look at them for you. It is the surest way to improve your performance, and it will help both your thinking and your writing. At the same time, I won't have the time to look at a draft at 10:00 p.m. the night before a paper is due. Please give me at least three days before the due date to look over a draft.

5. Types of Papers

There are generally two types of papers, thought papers and research papers. There are commonly elements of both present, but papers largely fall into one of the two categories.

a) Thought papers may make use of materials beyond the required reading but need not do so. Rather, the focus is on careful study, analysis, and elaboration of ideas presented within a limited context, such as a single article. It is often helpful to focus on one idea, passage, or paragraph and consider the ramifications thereof.

b) Research papers deal with a careful study of objective evidence available to support and refute arguments. You do not need to go to outside material, but it is often helpful to obtain supporting evidence to back up your assertions.

For the purposes of this course, you may choose either type, but the emphasis will be on the former. You may write on one of the suggested topics, or you may choose your own topic; in the latter case the instructor's approval is required.

6. Grading Criteria

Although grading is an imprecise art, it is possible to attain a considerable degree of consistency. I look for the following when reading papers:

a) Writing. If you write clearly and grammatically, you will think clearly and in an organized fashion. If you think clearly, this will be reflected in your writing.

b) Accuracy. Have you represented the relevant ideas fairly?

c) Sophistication. Have you taken into account various facets of a problem or idea? You can be accurate at a general level ("The Buddha was a seeker of truth."), or you can be accurate at a sophisticated level ("The Buddha was a seeker of truth who formulated his understanding in terms of the four noble truths.").

d) Breadth of knowledge. Have you covered the main ideas relevant to your topic?

e) Depth of analysis. How deeply have you delved into the topic? Have you uncovered problems that might not be apparent at first glance? How carefully have possible objections been taken into account?

f) Engagement and effort. How hard have you tried to tackle the topic? Even if the paper might not seem so great at first glance, it will be apparent if you have made an honest attempt to understand what you are studying.

g) Creativity. Do you have a flair for expressing yourself? Are there unexpected insights and a sense of adventure?

Although there are no hard and fast rules, if you cover criteria a) through d) and execute them well, you should get a B. Provided you have gone that far, you can add further dimensions to your paper. If you have any questions about comments I have made on your paper or your grade, please come and see me. It is important for me to know of any doubts or problems.

Rewrites will be allowed for the first paper only.

7. In Conclusion

If you study these guidelines, it will make the learning experience more pleasurable and rewarding for both you and me. At the same time, this represents nothing more than what it says, "guidelines." They are meant to help you polish a skill, academic writing, that you are developing as you progress in your studies. Don't get so hung up about them to the extent that you feel your creative processes hindered. If anything, they should provide just enough of a framework to express your creative and analytical skills. The accompanying essay addresses the creative aspect of paper writing.

I like writing. When I am totally absorbed in writing, many ideas which have never occurred to me before can pop up in my mind, or once confused and fragmentary information and thought can be spontaneously organized and become clear. It is one of the most satisfactory moments for me.

Yet, I often struggle for long periods trying to organize ideas in front of the cruel white paper. This is especially true when I am trying to be systematic and logical, beginning with an outline. Since anything unclear or vague is eliminated in the process of making an outline, the paper turns out to be organized, clear, and compact, but I rarely have a sense of satisfaction.

What is the difference between a paper which emerges spontaneously and one that begins with a concern for logical consistency? I have been wondering how I can bridge the gap between these two types of writing and the attitudes they represent. I have found some clues to these problems in three articles written by Donald Murray, Peter Elbow, and William Stafford.[9]

What they emphasize in common is the process; writing is not the description of a result; in fact, writing itself can create the result. This means that we should not worry too much about how the last draft will turn out, or how we can organize all of our ideas before we begin. According to Murray, what we need for writing is enough information and a clear purpose: logic or order can appear later in the process. Elbow even denies the need for coherence in the initial stages of producing writing. He suggests "freewriting," which activates the writing process by getting rid of any concern about correction. Also, Stafford remarks that the most important things for his writing are receptivity and a willingness to give up high standards. For all of these writers, logic and organization, which has restricted me in certain ways, are secondary at the initial stage of production. It is true that logical rigor is important, but we can worry about that as much as we like after everything has been written down that we want to say.

What is important in writing is, as the three writers agree, the productivity of writing. According to Murray, for example, writing is the process of "making something that was not there before, finding significance where others find confusion and bringing order to chaos."[10] By writing you can find new things, which may be a new thought, a new feeling, a new idea, or even a new self which you would never have found without writing.

In order to promote this kind of productivity, Murray, Elbow, and Stafford agree on the importance of opening our minds. Murray points out that writing gives us an opportunity to capture, at the conscious level, unconscious feelings and ideas we had not noticed or had forgotten. Elbow says freewriting is a method to make our consciousness empty so that we can pick out something unconscious from deep within our hearts. Stafford remarks that the power letting him write is not a conscious device but his "own weak, wandering, diffident impulses" and his "confident reliance" upon these impulses.[11]

Writing might be compared to a breeze blowing towards the small window between consciousness and unconsciousness. The window is usually closed because consciousness is too strong to let the window open, and one ends up living in only half of the house, that is, the entire world of one's existence. But when writing occurs with the mind open, a breeze opens the window and one can encounter other aspects of the self, or even another self and become more fully integrated: The wonder of the writing process may even be the act of another self.

When I try to stick to the rules of logic from the outset, my consciousness prevents the window from opening to the other world. My writing then becomes a mere product of my pre-existing consciousness rather than the activity of my whole self. Repeated experience and practice of freewriting has helped me to open my mind. I can worry about logic and organization after my creative impulses have found expression on paper.

*What is a teaching portfolio? It's a collection of materials documenting your strengths and accomplishments as a teacher. Peter Seldin, author of The Teaching Portfolio (Anker, 1991), says "The portfolio is to teaching what lists of publications, grants and honors are to research and scholarship."

*What should my portfolio include? There is no one formula for preparing a teaching portfolio. Each portfolio reflects the capabilities and responsibilities of different, individual teachers. However, portfolios typically include a brief table of contents, a personal statement, supporting material from others, and evidence of effective teaching. Your portfolio is not an exhaustive compilation of everything that reflects your teaching performance. It's a selective, thoughtful collation making the best case for your effectiveness as a teacher.

*Personal Statement. Personal statements are generally 4-6 pages long and may include the following items: 1) a reflective statement of your pedagogical interests, strategies, and objectives; 2) a summary of your past and present teaching responsibilities; 3) a description of steps taken to evaluate and improve your teaching, including changes resulting from attending teaching workshops, being videotaped, or meeting with a Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) teaching consultant; 4) an explanation of appended supporting materials such as syllabi, exams, handouts and other evidence of effective teaching.

*Supporting Material from Others. You may include: 1) statements from professors with whom you have worked as a teaching assistant; 2) statements from professors, other teaching assistants, and colleagues who have observed you in the classroom; 3) student statements and evaluations of your teaching (forms are available at CTL); 4) documentation of teaching/development activity with CTL staff, including written results of student small group evaluations and video consultations.

*Evidence of Effective Teaching. You may wish to submit: 1) copies of exemplary student essays; 2) student work you have graded showing excellent, average, and poor work along with an explanation of your grading and evaluation strategies; 3) an audio or videotape of you lecturing or leading a discussion section. (Videotapes made by CTL can be purchased at cost.)

*Collaborate. Teaching portfolios are best prepared in consultation with others. As you put your portfolio together, seek the advice of your academic advisor, other TAs, and members of the CTL consulting staff. One great benefit of assembling a teaching portfolio is that it helps you become more articulate about your teaching strategies as you review and reflect on your work, consult with others, and clarify your pedagogical aims.

*Summary. There is no one way of compiling a teaching portfolio. The above suggestions provide general guidelines. Use them to assemble a portfolio demonstrating your particular interests and accomplishments. And remember, your portfolio is not set in stone. The contents will change as your teaching experience and insight grow.

I have been asked to address the curricular ramifications of the emergence and development of the field of religious studies-with particular reference to Brown University. I am happy to do so, but must make it clear that when it comes to history I am an amateur (my areas are comparative religious ethics and philosophy of religion, not history). So what I'll be discussing are some of my impressions about the topic, informed by some rather skimpy materials in university and departmental archives and guided by three brief but insightful historical sketches of the field and its curricula-one published by John Wilson (Princeton University) in 1970, another by Thomas Benson (University of Maryland-Baltimore) in 1987, and (especially) a third published by Frank Reynolds (University of Chicago) in 1990.

Let me start with a brief "external" history of the department that I found in our departmental files and which, I think, reflects the development of both field and curricula within older "private" nonsectarian colleges and universities more generally. The department had its origins in the 19th century when the study of classical languages and literatures ruled the day-including Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Biblical and other philosophical and theological texts. In 1891 a professor of semitic languages and oriental history (William Jewett) was appointed to the faculty, and in 1897 a Department of Biblical Literature and History was established. In 1935, with the appointments of Robert Casey and Joachim Wach (the first a specialist in what we now call "early Christianity", and the second, an omnicompetent historian and sociologist of religion with an interest in both Western and non-Western religious traditions), the department's name was changed to the Department of Biblical Literature and the History of Religions. In 1953, following a Corporation Committee Report on the status of religion within the university, the department's name was changed once again to reflect developments in the field: the Department of Religious Studies. These nominal changes mark important developments in the field as well as significant evolution in the curriculum, and so I now turn from this brief capsule view to discuss what I perceive as important issues of subject-matter, method, and curricular thinking lying behind these name changes.

Underlying these changes is a gradual evolution of the department and field through four phases, each with a relatively distinctive conception of the study of religion and a relatively distinctive curricular paradigm. Adopting and refining Reynolds' three-fold typology of Early Modern, Late Modern, and Post-Modern, I identify the four phases as: Early Modern Theological (roughly 1800-1900), Transitional Ethnocentric (roughly 1900-1950), Late Modern Critical-Scientific (roughly 1950-1975), and Post Modern Hermeneutical (roughly 1975-1991). This typology may over-simplify, and the labels may not be entirely satisfactory, but they will have to serve (e.g., one can discern sub-phases within and overlapping between these four phases). Notice, by the way, that by my accounting each successive phase is relatively shorter than the preceding one, reflecting the intensity of methodological self-exploration and understanding of the field. I now want to characterize each of these phases in terms of what I perceive to be its corresponding conception of the study of religion in general as well as a curriculum appropriate for undergraduates-I leave graduate study to one side in these formal remarks. Since I have been asked also to address general socio-cultural and institution-specific factors that may bear on the emergence and development of these phases, I'll do that too, but with considerable unease about my competence to do so (here I will rely heavily on Reynolds, Wilson, and Benson to help me out). When I state intersubjectively verifiable facts that have some consensus, I'll so indicate; when I interpret, I'll say so; when I speculate, I'll say so (without apologizing each time).

The first phase-Early Modern Theological-needs to be understood in the context of what Reynolds claims was the predominant educational mission of most colleges in this period (late 18th to mid-late 19th century). They were, he suggests, committed to preparing students for taking up positions of intellectual and social leadership in what was perceived to be a relatively homogenous society and culture-by providing them with trained minds and restrained passions, both of which were to be achieved by a strong grounding in classical languages and literature. In this period, the study of religion in American colleges was dominantly theological, aimed at the understanding and apologetic defense of the Christian way of life. It focused on the subject-matter of what the Christian scriptures say or imply and how this content is played out in terms of a rationally based theological worldview and morality. It employed the methods of philologically oriented study of Christian Scriptures (New Testament, Old Testament) combined with Enlightenment-oriented reasoning about the nature and justification of the Christian religion and its claims. Faculty undertaking these inquiries were professors of divinity with (I speculate) college-seminary training in major relevant primary languages, study of scripture, and theology.

This conception of the study of religion as theology is expressed in a curriculum that has as its fundamental mission the initiation of students into a reflective Christian way of life (what Wilson calls "religious-moral nurture"). Courses appear focused on scriptural study in the original languages as well as careful reading of major English-language works in natural theology and natural law. In 1821, for example, Brown's total curriculum was 20% theological, including courses in the Greek New Testament, Paley's Moral Philosophy, Paley's Natural Theology, Paley's Evidences of Christianity, Butler's Analogy of Religion, Barlemagni's Natural Law. Pedagogy, then, appears to involve (as expected) study of classical languages and literature as well as study of theological texts with an eye to evidences and arguments for the truth of Christianity.

The second phase-Transitional Ethnocentric-needs to be understood in a socio-cultural context of what I speculate is a society becoming increasingly aware of its heterogeneity-especially following World War I and the waves of immigration that came shortly thereafter-a society less insulated from other societies and cultures and a society that is industrialized and becoming increasingly oriented to science and technology. Reynolds claims that colleges and universities at this time are beginning to conceive of their mission as preparing students for technical leadership in a modern industrial and scientific world and have decreased commitment to providing religious-moral nurture. (Indeed, as early as 1891 at Brown, the function of religious enculturation is split off from the curriculum and assigned to agencies at the periphery of the curriculum-chaplains, Y. M. C. A., voluntary Bible classes conducted by the President, etc.). Reynolds further suggests that the colleges and universities feel increasing pressure and need to devote greater proportionate attention to the sciences and somewhat less proportionate attention to the humanities. He also reminds us that this period sees the gradual emergence of the psychological and social sciences claiming to be a distinctive set of disciplines essential for understanding human behavior and social institutions and needing incorporation within the education of future leaders.

It is documentable that the conception of the study of religion in this period shifts from the explicitly theological to the historical understanding of Christianity (origins and development) in comparison and contrast with other religious traditions. The aim is to historicize the study of Christianity by employing tools of critical history and literary analysis and by comparing its content with the scriptures and historical development of other traditions, both East and West. Its methods include philological tools, standard techniques of historical inquiry, literary analysis, as well as some use of concepts and models adopted from the social sciences. Faculty undertaking these inquiries include both professors of biblical literature and history and professors of the history of religions. Most (I speculate) are trained at university-based divinity schools or independent seminaries, some at theological faculties in foreign (principally German) universities.

This conception of the field is played out in gradual changes within college curricula. Brown is a forward-looking case example. The curriculum now sees its mission in both research and teaching as to connect the "study of the bible with the general history of religions" (East and West) and to emphasize "the importance of religion as a factor in general culture . . . an active and measurable force in individual and social history" (Visiting Committee Report, Department of Biblical Literature and History of Religions, 1938, quoted in departmental file history). With regard to students, this presumably means their initiation into a critical understanding of the history and literature of their perceived primary tradition (Christianity) conceived as being enhanced both by comparison with other world religious traditions and by exposure to (e.g.) sociology of religion. Courses include a dominant "core" in biblical literature and history (Old Testament, New Testament, biblical themes and topics such as "Social Teachings of the Prophets and Jesus"), but this "core" is increasingly surrounded by courses in ancient civilizations (taught with the Classics department), contemporary religion (the development of modern forms of Judaism and Christianity), religions of the Orient, primitive religion, and sociology of religion (taught with the Sociology department). Pedagogy appears less focused on language-training-this period documents the emergence of the study of biblical literature in translation (beginning around 1910), which is (I interpret) a reflection of the demise of the classical education associated with the Early Modern Theological curricular paradigm. It is to be emphasized that the theological orientation of that earlier phase no longer holds sway, though this is not to say that the curriculum is not still appreciably ethnocentric in its orientation to Christianity as the religious tradition of primary focus and interest. The biblical "core" is a "core", and the comparison of Christianity with other traditions is in service of understanding Christianity better (or so I interpret).

The third phase-Late Modern Critical-Scientific-marks a "watershed" (as our departmental file history puts it) in the development of the study of religion at Brown as well as in American higher education more generally. Here, I speculate, we have a society that, after World War II, has emerged as a dominant force in the modern world-decisively involved in the affairs of other societies and cultures, conceiving of itself as self-consciously secular, scientific-technological, pluralistic, and egalitarian. Reynolds suggests in so many words that college and universities now conceive of their mission as to prepare an increasingly diverse student body for leadership through critical training in the natural and social sciences (primarily) and the humanities (secondarily). But these generalities aside, it is clear that, following upon the breadth of advances of the Transitional phase in the study of religion, a relatively "hospitable environment" (in Wilson's words) exists for further development of the field. This is, in fact, the period where the academic/scholarly study of religion emerges in its full flower.

The 1953 Brown Corporation Report in "Religion within the University" expresses this complete emergence quite well. It clearly distinguishes the work of the department from that of the chaplaincy, and it specifies that the mission of the department is now to pursue a scholarly understanding of "the nature and role of religion," with an emphasis on "a historical approach," though intended to work in "the philosophy of religion, its sociological implication, and the areas of conflict with scientific thought," covering the study of Christianity, Judaism, and other religions. The aim of the field, then, is conceived to be the historical-scientific-philosophical study of religions, self-consciously employing multi-disciplinary tools and methods in the effort to understand, interpret, and explain features of the world's religious traditions. The ethnocentric bias of the past is broken. The limitation on methods of critical inquiry is ended. And we can see in the emphasis on combining historical, philosophical, and sociological approaches an underlying commitment to the ideal of detached objectivity and value-neutral inquiry-in strong and self-conscious contrast with work done in the earlier phases. "Critical" and "multidisciplinary" and even "scientific" are the watchwords here. Over this period, we see faculty coming to be increasingly trained by graduate programs in religious studies with self-conscious commitment to these aims and methods; as seminary-trained scholars retire, they are replaced by people fully trained in the academic study of religion.

Needless to say, this large development in the study of religion results in concomitant changes within the curriculum. No longer is its aim explicitly theological or mutedly ethnocentric. Its mission now is to initiate students into the critical study of the world's religious traditions so that they might appreciate and understand in an historically deep and theoretically sophisticated way the nature and role of religion in human life. Courses involve sophisticated periodization and contextual-ization of the history of traditions, East and West. They involve exposure to alternative critical methods of inquiry as well as interpretive and explanatory theories of religion (e.g., psychoanalytic, phenomenological, social-functional, cultural-symbolic). And, generally over time, they increasingly include a broadening of the "texts" studied with reference to religions-not only basic scriptural canons and major intellectual figures but also ethnographic data, aesthetic forms, etc. Rather surprisingly, perhaps, given this openness to alternative critical methods and the sorts of texts studied, the pedagogy of these courses remains somewhat "traditional" in the sense of employing the standard lecture/discussion section format, mid-term and final exams, a final term paper. This may be due to the enormity of the task taken on by these courses of trying to teach students both a large amount of information as well as a variety of approaches-resulting in the felt need to teach somewhat didactically (this is my interpretation).

The fourth phase (thus far)-Post Modern Hermeneutical-like the other phases, has a distinctive socio-cultural context. Reynolds suggests that this context involves the vivid and self-conscious awareness of pluralization within American society-as represented, for example, by the increasing size and "voice" of minority groups-and a vivid and self-conscious awareness of an interdependent global world order-as reflected, for example, in global concerns about the natural environment, the legacy of the nuclear arms race, the extent of starvation and suffering throughout the world. Furthermore, one cannot help but notice an important intellectual shift away from the hitherto dominant image of detached, objective, and value-neutral inquiry. Suggests Reynolds, gone is the Enlightenment myth of monolithic objective reason able to produce algorithms for "proper" science, "proper" morality, "proper" social change, etc. In its place is a rather more humble sense of the reaches of context-dependent rationality and the historical and social location of all human endeavors. And it should not go unnoticed that colleges and universities must take account of a student body shaped by such self-conscious plurialization, global sensitivity, and historical and social awareness. I suspect that many colleges and universities have adjusted their mission accordingly and now conceive of themselves not only as preparing such students to be scientifically and rhetorically competent but also as responsible for educating them in such a way that they may be able to grapple critically and creatively with social and global problems of considerable political, historical, and moral complexity. Brown would be no exception.

My perception is that the academic study of religion is significantly affected by this socio-cultural context-in both aim and method. One can discern, I believe, a clear interest in approaching religious traditions as complex organic systems embodying forms of life and thought that have their own rational integrity different from but just as "authentic" as the rationality of research programs and disciplines concerned with the study of religion. So the aim of religious studies becomes less of a hegemonic theoretic effort to explain (objectively) the religious Other and more of an attempt of one "equal" to understand and appreciate another "equal". Though the critical methods of inquiry that have been employed are certainly still used (with appropriate refinement and expansion, e.g., feminist critique), nonetheless they are now used with a somewhat different manner and tone: to set up an interdisciplinary and intercultural dialogue with the worldviews of the traditions being studied. A more self-consciously humble dialogue or hermeneutical conversation is established to probe not only the traditions under study but also the assumptions, norms, and values of the disciplines doing the study. Ethnocentrism is left firmly behind-not just in the sense of not presuming the priority of a certain religious tradition but also in the sense that the scholar must be ever alert to more subtle ethnocentric (and gender) biases built into disciplinary approaches and methods. I, for example, can no longer do comparative religious ethics in the way that I did in the late 1970's and early 1980's: developing an analytical framework based on western moral philosophy's typology of normative moral theories (e.g., varieties of deontology, consequentialism, etc.) and then blithely imposing this as a sortal device on non-western religious-moral traditions, thinking that I can therewith understand these traditions in their subtlety and nuance (often involving ideals of character and virtue and norms of rationality very different from my own and the framework that I employ). If I use this framework at all-as perhaps a means of starting up a conversation with traditions I am interested in studying-I must now allow these traditions to critique (as it were) my framework and all of the assumptions about self, society, and human nature that may underlie it.

Now such changes as these cannot but help to be reflected in curricular development in religious studies. The goal now becomes to initiate students into a critical understanding of and dialogue with religious traditions conceived as complex forms of life and thought with their own integrity and rationality, different from but prima facie equal to our own. Teaching and learning are more focused on using methods of inquiry in a radically self-critical way to foster deeper understanding of the problems posed by trying to make sense of other cultures and religious traditions. Questions arise: What does the world look like from the Other's point of view? How can we know that it looks the way we think-as revealed by a certain method-given the possible tension between the way we construe the world and the way that the Other construes the world-after all, are not all ways of construal historically, socially, and culturally conditioned? As might be expected, this sort of teaching and learning requires some change in pedagogy-away from "traditional" didactics and toward more interactive learning designed to foster awareness of the significance of interdisciplinary dialogue and comparative inquiry as hermeneutical conversation between disciplines and traditions. More discussion classes, more frequent short papers focused on problems of critical interpretation, and a willingness to engage normative issues (aesthetic, moral, political) that may surface in interpretation and conversation. And so in addition to methodology and theory of religion, sophisticated periodized history of religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Israelite, ancient Greek & Roman, etc.), our department now has such courses as Comparative Religious Thought: Judaic & Christian; Parables and Paradoxes: The Limits of Language & Redescriptions of the Self; Religious Ecstasy & Performance in the Hindu Tradition; Secular & Sacred Readings: Paul, Pascal, Kierkegaard, & Kafka; Religion & the Good Society: Sex, Children, & Gender; Calvin's Institutes: Rereading the West's Master Narrative; War & Religion in the Near East; Freudian Ego and Id from the Perspective of Western Religious Thought; Sacrifice & Sacred Violence in Ancient Religions; The Compassionate Way: Confucian & Buddhist Ethics (in dialogue with western understandings of altruism); Status of Women in Early Christianity; Women in Religion; etc.

By this time in my discussion, I hope that you are gaining a clearer sense of not only the history of curricular development in religious studies but also the nature of religious studies as a field of academic inquiry. I think that two issues remain to be addressed. First, how exactly does this field now understand itself? That is, is it a distinctive discipline, or what? Second, why exactly are there departments of religious studies? That is, how does one explain the existence of free-standing departments and disciplines? The answer to the first question has been provocatively addressed by Benson. He suggests quite straightforwardly that religious studies is not one discipline per se-representing one distinctive mode of cognitive inquiry governed by a single set of questions, goals, norms, and a community of scholarly consensus-but rather a "community of disciplines" brought together to focus on a common subject-matter in all of its myriad richness and complexity. He observes, quite correctly I think, that simply having a common interest in the study of religion is insufficient in itself to justify viewing this study as a single unified discipline (though there have been unsuccessful attempts in the past to project a "science of religions"). As Benson points out, there is no shortage of multidisciplinary scholarly groups in the academic world, brought together by general themes or shared subject-matter (often, I might add, in the form of extradepartmental or interdepartmental centers and programs-this university is notable for its past encouragement of such efforts). So why exactly a department of religious studies, given this understanding of religious studies as a community of disciplines gathered around a common subject-matter?

John Wilson, I believe, provides the beginnings of an answer to this second question. He suggests that two significant types of factors lie behind the trend in American higher education to form departments of religion rather than to permit the "diffusion of the study of religion" throughout other already established disciplinary departments in colleges and universities. The first type of factor is practical: colleges and universities may perceive administrative and organizational advantages in establishing separate and free-standing departments of religion (e.g., I speculate, avoidance of interminable turf-battles over allocation of FTEs to the study of religion, seeking development monies for a new department, etc.).[14] While this type of factor may constitute a necessary condition for departmental establishment, it seems insufficient by itself. The second sort of consideration advanced by Wilson is more "theoretical": the need, as Wilson puts it, for the co-residence of scholars involved in the study of religion, so that they and their field might benefit from the cross-fertilization of ideas that comes from sustained interaction in doing research and developing curricula. Taken together, these two sorts of factors-administrative-practical and scholarly-theoretical-may be sufficient to explain why we have departments of religion, but I (for one) am not entirely convinced. I think that other factors may have been at work here; for example (and this is speculation based on the Brown case): the professional eminence of scholars in the study of religion during what I have identified as the transitional phase (Millar Burrows, Robert Casey, and Joachim Wach were major international figures in the study of religion who left Brown for more prestigious institutions, e.g., Yale and Chicago); the need for the university, the field, and the transitional phase department to distinguish in a decisive way the academic study of religion from the past university role of religious-moral nurture; the fact that religions constitute a significant type of cultural force and dimension of human experience and behavior roughly coordinate with art, politics, economics, etc.; the rise of identifiable professional organizations and journals dedicated entirely to the academic study of religion; and so the list could continue. I suggest, then, that the confluence of myriad factors and forces virtually overdetermine the decision to found departments of religious studies. In my opinion, that decision has borne considerable fruit. There is no question in my mind that the academic study of religion would be considerably worse off if departments with stabilized and interacting faculty, graduate programs, and undergraduate programs had not been formed. American higher education is not alone in this view apparently, for following upon the American experience, there have been comparable developments in other countries as well.

By way of conclusion in the form of a postscript, I might mention that I shared a draft of my remarks with some of my colleagues in the department in order to solicit their critical response to my historical vision of religious studies at Brown. I am happy to report that all found it instructive, thought-provoking, and largely accurate-a somewhat heartening response-but some thought that I may have overplayed or downplayed certain points, and these are worth sharing with you. First, some suggested that I may overestimate the extent to which 19th century students studied the Bible in the original languages. Perhaps, but all I can say is that the catalogues of the university indicate rather clearly that both the New Testament and the Old Testament (the Christian version of the Bible) were read in the original languages (though greater emphasis was placed on the New Testament) and that a wide variety of language courses were taught at various levels. Second, some suggested that I ought to emphasize that graduate training in the history of religion in the post-modern period incorporates both philosophical-methodological sophistication and the detailed mastery of religious texts and that this training helps to account for the hermeneutical character of the post-modern undergraduate curriculum. This observation is, I think, clearly true, and I accept the clarification with gratitude. Third, at least one colleague thought that I ought to mention that the post-modern curricular paradigm includes courses in "constructive religious thought" (as distinguished from the doing of theology per se)-that is, courses that explore how systems of religious thought might (or indeed, ought to) respond to non-religiously based understandings of human nature, society, and culture, with it being understood that the inquiries in such courses are answerable to canons of reflection and argument typically associated with the university context as contrasted with canons of theological argument as might be specified by particular religious institutions or communities of faith. I am happy to accept this clarification as an extension of my point about the re-emergence of normative inquiry in the post-modern curriculum.

Bibliography

Catalogues of Brown College/University, 1820-1991

"Departmental History," Files of the Department of Religious Studies.

Citing:

Visiting Committee Report, Department of Biblical Literature and History of Religions, 1938

Report of the Special Committee of the Corporation on Religion Within the University, 1953.

John F. Wilson, "Introduction: The Background and Present Context of the Study of Religion in Colleges and Universities," in Paul Ramsey & John Wilson (eds.), The Study of Religion in Colleges and Universities (Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 3-21. Thomas L. Benson, "Religious Studies as an Academic Discipline" (sub-entry of three-part article entitled "Study of Religion"), Encyclopedia of Religion, 16 vols., Mircea Eliade, editor in chief (Macmillan, 1987).

Frank E. Reynolds, "Reconstructing Liberal Education: A Religious Studies Perspective," in Frank E. Reynolds & Sheryl L. Burkhalter (eds.), Beyond the Classics? Essays in Religious Studies and Liberal Education (Scholars Press, 1990), pp. 3-18.

Related Useful References:

Ninian Smart, The Science of Religion and the Sociology of Knowledge (Princeton University Press, 1973).

John F. Wilson & Thomas P. Slavens, Research Guide to Religious Studies (American Library Association, 1982), esp. ch. 1 ("The Study of Religion").

Jonathan Z. Smith, "Narratives into Problems: The College Introductory Course and the Study of Religion," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 56: 4 (Winter 1988): 727-739.

Teaching living religions is tricky business, but teaching Islam is trickier than most. The reasons, it seems to me, are obvious; but let me offer a word of explanation.

Courses on living religions always draw a fair number of those students who come from families traditionally belonging to that specific faith which happens to be the subject matter of the course. Let us call these students "believers"--but with one proviso: they may not be so in the strict sense of the word; nor is it always the case, so experience has taught us, that they consciously share their parental religious identities at all. What motivates these students to take college courses on their "own" religion is a phenomenon that is both complex and fascinating, something that deserves a thorough sociological study in its own right. But one thing is certain, and it is that their motivation generally arises, at least partially, out of some inner personal concern.

So to speak, the rhythm of the believers is different from that of the rest in the class. There are things that touch them deeply, same things which are treated with disinterest by others; many specific religious terms, phrases, formulas, and anecdotes strike a familiar chord in the listener who is a believer, while for the rest all this is likely to serve a cognitive function, rather than an existential one. Then, there are issues which in the history of religions have been profoundly divisive; there are, for example, questions of theological controversies, heresies, betrayals, persecutions, bloodshed, and wars. Here the believer may have heard accounts that are at variance with that of the teacher, and the believer may have inclinations to be sympathetic with the "culprit" rather than the "victim," and with the "heretic" rather than the "faithful"--thereby tending to reverse the standard scholarly appellations.

It is very easy for the teacher to forget all this, and it is for this reason that I say that teaching living religions is a tricky issue. True, in the world of learning we have made an uncompromising commitment to respect all faiths and creeds equally, to encourage critical inquiry, and never to impose dogma, nor to indoctrinate. But beyond the boundaries of our campuses lies a bigger world; in that world many divisive religious issues are alive: here much polarization does exist, and here religious battles are still being fought. We cannot possibly view our students in isolation from this bigger world. When they come to college, they inevitably bring with them a heavy baggage of popular and private perceptions.

This baggage is heavier in the case of Islam, and that is why I say that teaching Islam is trickier. In fact, this specific case is more obvious than the general one, for while Islam--like any other living faith--is no petrified monolith, it is at the same time a bubbling political issue of global proportions. To be sure, no other religious community in the world receives such extensive, animated, feverish, and frequent media coverage as do those identified as Muslims. And more, Islam remains a major concern for world leaders and policy-makers, generating inter alia an enormous body of political rhetoric, highly publicized and deeply polarized. Added to this is the fact that the proportion of American high schools offering courses on Islam is infinitesimal, something that contrasts sharply and painfully with the daily journalistic portrayals and analyses of Islam on the television and in the newspapers. Here we have an asymmetry leading to a paradox--the paradox that typical high school graduates, while feeling that they know quite a bit about the Islamic world, in fact know practically nothing; and what they feel they know is, at best, a jumble of contextless truncated truths.

What is the result of all this? Evidently, it produces before the teacher of Islam an intricate jungle of misunderstandings, stereotyping, polarization, and even fears. But let us pause here to note that the carriers of this jungle, namely the young students, are utterly blameless; the responsibility lies rather on the shoulders of the "grown-ups" of the bigger world existing beyond the boundaries of school campuses. The students have no choice in the matter: they do not pack their baggage themselves. They unload before the teacher what they receive from their environment.

Teaching of Islam to a typical American student body, then, happens to be a much more serious pedagogical challenge, more serious, that is, than teaching other world religions. First, there are problems intrinsic to Islam itself, similar to, though more intense and complex than, other living faiths. To begin with, the Western tradition of separation between one's private life and professional life is still alien to many Muslim students--how can, they wonder, a non-believer teach, say, the Qur'ân? Or understand the life of the Prophet? Or speak about the Islamic obligation of Pilgrimage to Mecca when non-Muslims are not even allowed to visit it? These questions evaporate only when it is discovered that the teacher is not only a Muslim, he or she is a practicing one--a state of affairs which, speaking empirically, rarely obtains in American universities. This mistrust results in what I call psychological dislocation, a dislocation that manifests itself in many ways: some Muslim students become over-aggressive in the class, heckling throughout the lecture; others turn cynical; some take a defensive and apologetic posture; some suffer in an intriguing and glowing silence; and so on.

Then, there is that familiar problem of the believers. Islam, as I said, is not a monolithic body of doctrine or of people; there exist deep differences of opinion within the Islamic world, and there exist different sects. In fact, this very concept of "sects" is a serious issue in itself. For example, the minority Ahmadiyya group, which originated in the South Asian subcontinent in the late 19th century, considers itself to be a Muslim sect; whereas it has been declared a non-Muslim "heresy" by the bulk of the Islamic world, and this after a good deal of bloodshed. The problem looms large: an Ahmadî student who typically insists on considering him- or herself a true Muslim would feel dislocated if the Ahmadiyya is not included by the teacher among Muslim sects. But if it is so included, the majority of Muslim students would condemn the teacher for what they see as a gross misrepresentation of Islam. Here we have a formidable challenge for the teacher: how to construct a critical framework of pedagogical methodology that, on the one hand, ensures fairness, accuracy, and balance; and, on the other, promises a high degree of sensitivity to the full range of differing opinions, perspectives, and affiliations represented among the believers in the class audience.

But this does not exhaust the baggage students bring with them. There remains what is by far the most daunting challenge--the challenge of cracking through the hardened crust of popular perceptions of Islam. Here the teacher faces double jeopardy: to begin with, there exists typically a profound psychological polarization between believers and non-believers among the audience in an introductory Islam course. We know all too well that the mention of Islam evokes terrifying images in the minds of most non-Muslim students who frequently expect to hear from the teacher not so much about the religious, doctrinal, theological, and cultural features of Islam, but rather specifically about hijackings, terrorism, violence, fundamentalism, polygamy, and veiling. To be sure, I have noticed the impatience of some students when I talk somewhat at length about the diction and stylistics of the Qur'ân and its legislative and ethical contents; or about the normative status of Prophetic Traditions; or about the structure, function, and principles of Islamic jurisprudence; or about the sources of Islamic ethics. These blameless students feel that all this is too long a prologue to the main act: the act in which the dominating characters are bearded, berobed, and fire-breathing Ayatollahs of Iran, and state-sponsored terrorists, and shrouded women of the Middle East, and the rap bands of the Nation of Islam.

But, then, when the teacher does turn to the contemporary world, the weight of his or her onus increases further. For here the serious instructor moves directly against the overwhelming currents of media sensationalism. The task, after all, is to explain, not to utter platitudes or invectives. Explanation, let us note, is not apology, nor is it advocacy, nor, indeed, is it a moral or normative act. Thus, any respectable scholar teaching the contemporary Islamic world would construct historical and contextual frameworks, theoretical perspectives, comprehensive corpora of facts, all this to explain. For example, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 cannot be explained in isolation from the turbulent and bloody history of Iran during the Shah, a messy history with international actors. But if this is done without due pedagogical reflection and judiciousness, and without keeping in view the nature of the audience, the teacher's explanation is likely to be equated with apology for the Ayatollahs, or worse: with advocacy for "Islamic" violence. This is one horn of the double jeopardy.

Clearly, when the teacher of Islam attempts to discard the vilifying trade of stereotyping, presenting Muslims in the historical context like any other people, the believers in the audience begin to feel gratified, perhaps exonerated. But if extreme care is not exercised here, another problem emerges. On the one hand, given the polarization of opinions typically existing between the Muslim and non-Muslim students, the teacher in the process of explanation might set the poles even farther apart. Obviously, a result of this kind constitutes a very sorry situation. But on the other hand, a sensitive issue lies in store, begotten by the teacher's elaboration of what I just said: that Muslims, when represented in the sweep of history, turn out to be just like any other people. And this brings us to the other horn of the jeopardy.

The historical observation that Muslims are just like any other people is grounded in data which have both happy and unhappy elements. For among other things, it throws into relief the fact that there indeed are episodes in the fifteen centuries of the history of Muslims when they have made their own serious lapses; when they have taken more than a small share in internal intrigues and bloodshed; when they have not been tolerant of ideological differences; when they have committed offense to their own doctrinal principles and axioms. Such critical approach has to be informed by a need to balance: for otherwise, a psychological crisis is likely to develop among Muslim students, especially those who are practicing ones.

This jeopardy is similar to the one faced by the teacher of other living religions, such as, say, Christianity. But it is comparatively more complex in view precisely of the polarization typically existing in the audience in an introductory course on Islam. Again, the insensitive teacher might deepen this polarization, receiving the flak now from the believers. For now the believers might easily equate a critical account of the history of Muslims with apology--apology this time to the non-believer. But it can be worse: it may even be considered a misrepresentation, based on the reports of unsympathetic, non-Muslim historians.

Having said all this, let me admit that what I have presented here is the worst-case scenario. These problems may not emerge all in the same class, and they may remain feeble enough not to disrupt the smooth flow of pedagogical discourse. On the other hand, these problems are not hypothetical; I have myself faced them in the early phases of my teaching career. And, to be sure, some of my colleagues who teach Islam do report to me the kinds of crises I have outlined; and they sometimes approach me for advice. The question arises: What is to be done to keep introductory Islam courses commotion-free? How does the teacher win the trust of the undergraduate audience? Over the years I have reflected hard on these challenges, and I have in the process developed my own pedagogical system. When my colleagues ask me to articulate this system by way of advice, I begin by identifying four mutually supportive pillars on which it rests: methodology, strategy, sensitivity, and courtesy.

Let me elaborate. As for methodology, every scholar must have one; but the point is to articulate it and announce it explicitly before the class audience. Take the question of truth for example. A historian of religion, insofar as he or she is operating as a historian, is not concerned with the issue as to whether or not a given religious belief is true: for instance, a group of people believe that monkeys are gods, but it is not my concern to judge if monkeys can be true gods, or if polytheism can be true at all. I am interested, rather, in the function of these monkey-deities: what specific role has a faith in these gods played in defining a religious system; and what are the cultural yields of this faith; and how do believers make sense of this faith; and what is the nature of the social and moral ethos it begets; and questions of this kind. But I am not concerned here with the question of truth. I do not stand before my audience as a preacher; I stand as a scholar. This methodological principle--which is a grand principle of my methodology-- should be made public before the students.

Thus, when comparisons are made, and parallels are drawn, students ought to be informed that these are not moral or value judgments. When I compare, for example, the Christian trinity with the radical monotheism of Islam, my audience is made to understand that here in the capacity of a university teacher I am not saying that Islamic monotheism is true monotheism and that the standard Christian idea of trinity corrupts it. Similarly, when I say that, as contrasted with Christianity, there exists in Islam no doctrinal clergy and no official orthodoxy, the students are reminded that my exposition is not judgmental: that here I do not mean to claim that in some absolute sense one religious tradition is better than the other. I find it important to clarify that I am not engaged in a moral-normative exercise of sifting good from evil and truth from falsehood, sifting with an implicit appeal to some presupposed eternal principles. I tell my students that in the classroom my approach is disciplined--that is, it conforms to the norms of critical inquiry set by the discipline of Religious Studies as this field is understood in an institution of higher learning. And in the same vein I announce that there is no penalty for disagreeing with me, just as there is no reward for agreeing with me. And more, I frequently assure my students that they are totally free to express their own opinions, as free as it gets.

Such methodological declarations prevent many problems, for the rules of the game are known in advance. Besides, articulation of methodology is beneficial in its own right both for the teacher and the students. But there does remain the somewhat informal question of strategy, my second pillar. Here my concern is an efficient and credible presentation of my case. Thus, for example, when I move against the familiar Western misunderstandings of Islam, I buttress my position, as a matter of strategy, with citations from Western authorities--highly respected Western authorities whose erudition is widely recognized and who can in no way be considered apologists for Muslims. Take the popular view that Islam spread through the sword; here I quote the dissent of a Bernard Lewis rather than a Fazlur Rahman, and of a Francis Peters rather than an Ismâ`îl Farûqî.

But conversely, when I come to the darker side of the history of Muslims--and here it is clarified that I speak not of moral but historical darkness--I quote Muslim historians, those Muslims who are considered to be the unparalleled luminaries of Islamic historiography: a Tabarî or an Ibn Khaldûn, rather than a Philip Hittie or a William Muir. This conveys a sense of credible balance to my scholarly position. To be sure, this strategy is not a ploy of clever salesmanship; on the contrary, it adds to the rigor of the discourse by providing a principle of source selection, a principle which requires the use of academically respectable and recognized primary and secondary sources.

The need for a wise and well-meaning strategy becomes particularly urgent when one deals with intensely sensitive and controversial issues. I spoke above of the Ahmadiyya's Muslim self-identity in the face of its fierce exclusion from the pale of Islam by a vast majority of Muslims--this is a case in point. Does the teacher include this group among Muslims? My strategy here is to declare at the very outset another methodological principle: Islam is what Muslims say it is, and Islam ought to be what Muslims say it ought be; just as the American constitution is what Americans say it is, and the American constitution ought to be what Americans say it ought to be. To examine a body of doctrines and principles in isolation from the way it is received and understood by its primary followers is, in my view, a mere pedantic exercise empty of historical content.

Thus, after tracing the history of the emergence of the Ahmadiyya, and after presenting it on its own terms, I tell my students of the grounds on which the overwhelming majority of Muslims condemned it as what they considered a mischievous intrigue against Islam; and I end by pointing out that following several bloody incidents, most Islamic governments have officially excommunicated this group: that, in other words, the bulk of Muslims do not recognize the Ahmadiyya as a Muslim sect. And here I leave the matter. Similarly, when I deal with controversial issues which are historically distant, I likewise let Muslim authorities have the final say: a typical example is the vexed question of the Muslim treatment of the Jewish clans of Medina during the time of the Prophet of Islam. I handle this question in two steps: first, I place the matter in its fuller historical context invoking several non-Muslim scholarly sources; then, I present the Muslim explanation of the events, using a range of standard Muslim sources. Thus, again, I end by expounding what Muslim themselves have to say about the matter; and again, at this juncture I lay the matter to rest.

Strategic considerations are equally important when we deal with today's Islamic world. To be sure, every serious teacher of Islam has been mercilessly exercised by this whole contemporary question of jihâd, militancy, terrorism, violence, and fundamentalism, given the preconceived pictures typically existing in the minds of the young audience. Here I find it most useful to issue several disclaimers, announced expressly and in advance: That in dealing with these issues my primary preoccupation is not moral, rather it is historical. That my chief aim is to provide contextual explanations; and explanation in this critical sense is not meant to be advocacy or apology. That here in the academy we do not support violence, bigotry, discrimination, or hatred. That we do not promote violations of fundamental principles of human liberty and freedom. That we have no tactical political axe to grind. And that, above all, our conclusions, generalizations, and views are not presented as incontrovertible truths to be accepted uncritically. These advance disclaimers prevent a great deal of potential misunderstandings, and more: they help develop a sense of trust on the part of students.

Let me now turn to my third pillar, sensitivity. It goes without saying that every teacher is virtually duty-bound to operate with heightened sensitivity to the range of differing opinions, outlooks, and sensibilities of his or her student audience. In fact, what I have already said effectively takes care of much of this. But here I wish to address a specific issue concerning the believers, an issue I referred to in the very beginning: that among other things, it is some private concern which generally motivates believers to explore their own faith in a college course. This concern often manifests itself in what may be called the "believer's agenda"; but let me illustrate this. Some of my Muslim students, I have noticed, are from the beginning interested in certain specific questions, practically to the exclusion of all else: the question of women's rights in Islam typically looms large. Some other believers focus throughout on certain tenaciously-espoused sectarian positions and vantage points which they are wont to defend. Yet others simply wish to corroborate what they hear in a mosque. A teacher ought to remain sensitive to these concerns, for they merit recognition and support rather than dread and suppression. To be sure, I do encourage the believers to pursue their agenda--but, then, along with my blessings I also provide professional guidance, and it is this guidance which is the crucial thing here. The agenda should receive a careful intellectual nourishment from the teacher so that it is articulated, developed and defined--and carried out with critical control. Such sensitive nourishment generally produces very happy results, happy not only in terms of pedagogical rigor, but also in existential and scholarly terms.

Finally, a word about courtesy, the last of the four mutually supportive pillars of my pedagogical system. Again, all teachers are duty-bound to be courteous anyway. But in dealing with a living religion, and particularly if it happens to be Islam, certain peculiar issues emerge on the horizon which require a careful identification. Muslims, until this day, use standard honorific forms of address and utter deferential salutations whenever they name sacred figures and personages in their tradition. For example, the Qur'ân is generally, "The Noble Qur'ân"; God is referred to as, "Allâh, May He be Praised and Exalted!"; the names of the Companions of the Prophet of Islam are always followed by the invocation, "May God be Pleased with Him/Her!"; and so on. But by far the most important one, and here we are dealing with a highly sensitive issue, is the case of the Prophet himself: in the universe of Islam, his name is always--uncompromisingly-- followed by a deferential formula, "Upon Whom be Peace!"

It is understandable that a teacher of Islam may not be able to stretch his or her courtesy to the degree so as to utter these invocations each time a revered name is spoken. But I think it is important to point them out to the class, and thereby recognize them; and by the same token it would be a profoundly touching gesture of courtesy to the Muslim students if indeed these formulas are declaimed here and there, especially upon a first naming. To be sure, the case of uttering the name of the Prophet deserves the fullness of the teacher's courtesy. On the other hand, this needs a balancing gesture: the same sense of courtesy ought to be extended to the sacred and respected entities of all religious traditions: be they clerics, rabbis, heroes, objects, or gods.

I must now acknowledge at once that this largely informal account in no way constitutes a manual for the teachers of introductory courses on Islam. It is intended neither to be comprehensive nor authoritative; nor indeed does my system come with any warranties. All I can claim is that this system has worked for me.

It has already happened a number of times. There is a bright, motivated senior in one of my sections. Towards the end of the class, I ask him or her what next year's plans are. The answer will often be "I'm going to law school" (although one could substitute investment banking, management consulting, etc.). I then ask, "What aspect of the law are you interested in? Why have you chosen that career path?" The response will be something like, "I'm not really interested in the law. It's just that I don't know what else to do. A lot of my friends are going to law school, and my parents think it's a good idea. At least the money's good for lawyers."

In contrast to the students' utter lack of thought about one of the most important decisions they have made in life thus far, they have put a great deal of thought into how best to accomplish the goal. Most have known exactly what to do to position themselves well for a career they're not even sure they want. They have received excellent grades, have done well on the standardized exams, have good recommendations and are skilled at the interview process. They have all the right answers even if they don't believe in them.

Each time such a situation occurs -- and it occurs far too often -- I reach the same conclusion: these students have missed out on a crucial aspect of their university education. What does this have to do with the teaching of religion? Everything -- or so I will argue.[15]

The American university system is training a nation of means-ends thinkers. The worlds of business, law, management, politics and science are filled with highly skilled problem-solvers. Whenever the government sounds the alarm about a crisis in education in this country, they point to how far behind the Japanese or Europeans our students are in math or science. While our emphasis on problem-solving has created one of the most technologically advanced societies on earth, the advancement has not seemed to carry over into the realm of our humanity.

While many can find the means to almost any end, few direct their attention to the ends themselves, which include the ends of their particular company or profession, and more importantly of their own lives. The problem seems to be captured in the distinction between intelligence and wisdom. In almost every sector of the American landscape -- Wall Street, the Beltway, the academy, Silicon Valley -- there are numerous people of exceptional intelligence. They are quick, creative and driven. But, I would contend, there is a dangerous lack of people who truly possess wisdom. While an in-depth discussion of the distinction between intelligence and wisdom is far beyond the scope of this essay, it seems to me that a central element of the latter that is often missing in the former is reflection. Not calculation, computation, or instrumental reason, but reflection. Although means-ends thinking may be a part of it, the type of reflection I am referring to -- the type that distinguishes people of true depth as opposed to those that, for example, merely get good grades -- is reflection on ends, on the most important things in life.

Perhaps the most important element in such reflection is self-reflection, which centers around (ultimately, though not always explicitly) the question, What is the best way to live? or How should one live? This requires that we look closely and seriously at questions such as, What is a human being? or What is the nature of the self?

The Importance of Comparative Religion

Exploring such questions is one of the most important reasons to study religion. And this is one of the reasons I disagree with Jonathan Z. Smith, who argues that the subject matter of the introductory course "is of secondary interest (indeed, I suspect it is irrelevant)."[16] I take him to mean that the fact that we are teaching religion is not important, as long as we give the students certain skills, in particular reading, writing and speaking. In fact, Smith writes that "there is nothing distinctive to the issue of introducing religion."[17] I would argue that since an introductory course is the only place that many students will ever be exposed to other religious traditions, and because the study of the "content" of a religion, in particular its world-view and normative thought, is critically important for stimulating reflection, the "religious content" should be central to the course. For it is within religious texts, articulated by the great religious thinkers, that the ultimate questions are posed and grappled with, and that answers are offered. By standing on the shoulders of religious giants, we gain a vastly expanded, and often breathtaking, perspective on the world. When we encounter these texts, we are given compelling visions of what the best human life is, what the human self is (if there is one), and how the self relates to itself, to others, to nature and to the cosmos.[18]

Students in a religious studies course have a unique opportunity to reflect on these fundamental issues; and they will be doing so not only in the company of a professor and fellow students, but with the guidance of the greatest minds working through these most important issues. While many students might sign up for a religious studies course because it fulfills a distribution requirement, or out of mere curiosity, it can also be the opportunity for an existential encounter with powerful alternative visions of the world and our place in it. As much as possible, we as teachers should try to bring about such an encounter. While we are certainly not trying to convert anyone to any particular way of looking at the world, we are trying to facilitate the kind of encounter that can act as a catalyst to a deepening self-understanding -- one that stimulates sustained reflection and develops imagination, empathy and a greater awareness of human possibility.

I believe that the comparative study of religions can accomplish this task in a uniquely powerful way. A deep, honest encounter with an "other" can expose the "false fixities" of one's own way of living and thinking. It can call into question one's most deeply held assumptions and engender a type of intellectual and spiritual exploration that is the fount of true reflection.

The student may come to see that there exists a genuine plurality of human goods, a multiplicity of forms of human excellence (this is brought to light by studying the exemplars held up by the world's religious traditions, figures as varied as Sakyamuni, Confucius, Augustine and Maimonides).[19] Hopefully, we will also show that this is a bounded plurality; that not "anything goes," and that there are ways of thinking about better and worse-and truly unacceptable-lives. (In fact, it is hard to find a religious tradition that is truly relativistic in the crude sense.) This means that in addition to showing students different religious visions, we must also help them develop the necessary skills not only to appreciate them, but also to critique them. What we must aim for is not to have the students suspend judgments in the light of plurality, but rather to hone their ability to make better judgments.[20] But here, too, content matters, for studying the methods (in addition to the visions) of religious thinkers can make us better at ways of thinking most of us already, implicitly, employ (e.g. reading Aquinas) or can radically undermine certain forms of thinking and present powerful alternatives (e.g. reading Zhuangzi).

It is not necessarily the case that the student's view will be challenged by the religious view being studied, for many students have not yet developed any well thought-out picture of the self and the world. Many people's views on the most important issues are inchoate or unarticulated. One of the most important things the study of a religious tradition can do for students is simply to get them to articulate their beliefs about these issues. Just getting clear about what we think is a critical first step in the process of self-reflection. Confronting a challenging religious vision will force the student to ask him or herself, "What do I think about that?" Such an encounter makes students become articulate about what they believe, which often means discovering or developing a view on an important issue. For a student who has never thought through these issues, the encounter with a religious vision can show how thinkers organize their lives around certain ideals and principles which have a profound consequence for their lives. The study of religion will not only challenge those students that have a different worldview, but will make those that have no articulate, well thought-out position wonder what they might be missing without it.[21]

Confronting the "Other"

What attitude or disposition toward the ends that other religious traditions pursue should we aim to cultivate in our students? In order to truly see these ends as goods, the student must learn to see them as perfective of the human being, as capable of providing fulfillment and humanity to the individual and society. Given that different religious traditions often pursue radically different ends, the student will ultimately recognize that there is a plurality of human goods. How, though, can a reflective individual see an end under such a description (i.e. "perfective of the human being") --in other words gain a deep appreciation for the goods represented by a certain type of spiritual life -- and still decide not to pursue it? Lee Yearley offers an answer to this in the form of a uniquely modern religious virtue, that of spiritual regret.[22] One who cultivates this virtue recognizes a religious good, and to some extent feels the power of its pull, yet chooses not to move toward it or actualize it in his or her own life.

The modern sensibility that makes spiritual regret possible is the recognition that true human goods exist which may not be available to oneself, but which are still perfective of others qua human beings. It recognizes that we all unavoidably live partial lives, where the element of necessity, our facticity, moves us irrevocably in certain directions. Historical, cultural, ethnic, and other factors make some goods simply unreachable for us; they are not real options if we are to remain ourselves. At the same time, we recognize that our own culture and tradition makes certain goods available to us, and these are the ones we must pursue. At a certain point, we must commit to our own real possibilities and follow a path toward a good that is fulfilling of us as we are. We recognize that we have an identity, and that to move toward a good that is too "other" would fundamentally change who we are.

The attitude we take toward the goods we recognize but cannot possess, and thus will not move toward, is a complex one. On the one hand, there is a type of joy that lies behind spiritual regret, a celebration of the diversity of human possibilities that manifests itself in the plurality of human goods. This is accompanied by a feeling of sadness, for those who truly feel the existential pull of a profound human good must also feel the sense of loss when they recognize that it can never be theirs. The best that we can do is cultivate a deep appreciation for that good -- in effect to share in it by appreciation -- which is why imagination is such an important part of the process. The regret also comes from the realization that being human involves recognizing a finitude that ensures no individual can ever possess "the good" in its entirety; the most any of us can hope for is a movement toward our own good supplemented by a deep appreciation of the goods of others.

One will not remain unchanged by the encounter with the goods of others. When the range of human possibilities opens up for one, and when another good is recognized as possible for human fulfillment, one's own notion of what it is to be human is inevitably transformed. While one might continue to pursue one's own good, it will be done with a renewed sense of the partial nature of that good from the view of humanity; in fact, the nature of the good itself might change in the course of the encounter. The space opened up by spiritual regret is the locus for some of the most important forms of self-reflection.

Spiritual regret changes who one is because it involves a new choice, a choosing of oneself anew in light of options of which one was previously unaware of. Even if one chooses to reject it, or modify and incorporate some of it, one is still transformed. Living without spiritual regret is like walking down a trail never realizing there were crossroads. One who follows the same path but is aware of alternatives chooses her path and because of this leads a different kind of life, for she has a different self-understanding.

The Comparative Imperative

How do we help students cultivate this virtue? In teaching comparative religion, our imperative is to walk the fine line between the Scylla and Charybdis of domestication and exoticization. Each one provides an easy escape from the task of a true encounter. In the former, one concludes that the other good is, in reality, the same good as (or at least not in tension with) one's own. It is a denial of radical difference and incommensurable plurality, and in the end fails to see the richness and power of the other good. One tames a potential challenge to one's way of life by smoothing it out until it looks enough like one's own to avoid confrontation. In the latter, one keeps the good at a safe enough distance by carefully packaging and displaying it as a museum piece or tourist attraction rather than as a good that might potentially speak to one. It provides fuel for superficial cocktail party conversation which, in effect, sanitizes it for one's own spiritual protection. At best, one might see it as a good for humans qua Chinese, or qua Ancient Greeks, but certainly not qua human being. It is their good, it is fascinating and different, but it is not compelling to me.

Spiritual regret rejects both of these escapes by seeing the other as both radically different and a compelling human good. The domesticator convinces himself that he is not, in fact, failing to move toward that good. The exoticizer never considers the good as a possibility for himself, so he does not even get to the point of having to reject movement toward it. Those who take the radical other seriously fail to move toward that good only with the deepest sense of regret that choices must be made, and with the awareness that we all must live partial lives.

Teaching Methods

What I am advocating, then, is an approach which emphasizes the comparative study of religion as an existential encounter, in particular one that fosters reflection on life's most important questions, provides competing visions as candidate answers to those questions, and develops the intellectual capacities to critique them, adjudicate among them (or to know when disputes cannot be adjudicated) and make meaningful choices. I am also arguing that the study of religion is uniquely important because it alone poses these questions and offers these answers in such powerful, beautiful and compelling ways.[23]

This picture generates a number of specific approaches and positions in teaching, three of which I will briefly mention here. First, this suggests an approach that could be described as an "imaginative insider's vision". More and more, religious studies departments are being asked to justify their continued existence. The question is often, "Why should there be a separate religion department if religion is studied in numerous other departments, e.g. history, anthropology, psychology, literature, etc.?" While I believe there are a number of answers to this question (including the importance of the multi-disciplinary approach that religious studies scholars bring to their topic), one is the need to enter into a conversation with particular traditions from, as far as possible, the inside. We are not just studying, for example, what Buddhists did in Tang China, or what happened to Buddhism in Kamakura Japan, although these things are truly important. We should try to show our students why this vision has been so deeply compelling and profoundly moving for so many human beings in so many different cultures for over two millennia. A student should see how Nagarjuna, Wonhyo, or Shunryu Suzuki views the human condition, what type of life they feel is the highest form of human flourishing, what spiritual practices they recommend for transforming ourselves or realizing our true nature. Certainly, as noted above, we should provide the students skills with which to critique the visions they study (this seems to be what Smith is emphasizing)-- skills which are often provided by the traditions themselves (which is why it is important to show that the ongoing conversations that define traditions often involve passionate conflict) -- but first they must learn to appreciate the vision of life these thinkers represent.

This requires the development of a key capacity for any human being, imagination, which is developed in the making of analogical connections between religious pictures and entering into another way of looking at the world and the self. We learn to see our face in the face of an "other" while still preserving and appreciating the radical difference. The development of the imagination (as opposed to instrumental reason, analytical skills, etc.) is a critical part of cultivating empathy, which is a precious and rare capacity. Learning to truly appreciate (not merely tolerate) that which is radically "other" will allow one to experience the truth of the statement "I am a human being. No other human being do I deem a stranger." Hopefully, not only will the student learn to appreciate the vision of a great religious text, but also that of the person across the seminar table. Where a student differs with each, hopefully he will learn to work through these differences in a productive and deep way, not afraid to challenge, but always maintaining an attitude of respect that arises from seeing the possible goods in a picture that one does not possess. What better place than religious studies to learn to do what America must learn to do to survive: work through passionately held differences with civility and sophistication?

Second, it is an argument for depth over coverage. Deeply confronting one powerful vision, such as that of Dogen, is a more effective, potentially transformative experience than being able to name all of the patriarchs or schools of Buddhism. While basic coverage is important to give a student a sense of the overall tradition and to locate the specific thinkers and texts culturally and historically, the aim should be to bring the student into a deep conversation with a thinker or tradition.

Third, this is an argument (contra Smith, again) that specific content matters. Smith claims that in an introductory course "there is nothing that must be taught, there is nothing that cannot be left out."[24] While I agree with much of his article (particularly, that "less is better"), I would contend that certain texts are required, and for two reasons. First, since we want students to encounter the depth of a tradition or vision, we must give them the texts that most powerfully and beautifully convey that vision -- which is an important reason that such texts have survived and become classics. Second, to truly encounter another culture, to take its visions seriously, a student must work with the texts that matter the most to that culture. I would argue that any course on classical Chinese thought must include, for example, the Analects, the Mencius, and the Zhuangzi. Students who take a course on classical Chinese thought that leaves out these texts have not seen what mattered to the ancient Chinese, have not entered into their conversation and understood what was at stake in it. Even if, as Smith wants, the students have improved their reading and writing skills, they have missed perhaps their only opportunity to truly encounter the visions that have shaped a rich, enduring culture, visions which speak to all of humanity.

Encountering Resistance

We are trying to show students that a plurality of possible human goods exists. The students may resist this notion for two reasons, based on two alternative ways of viewing the world in regard to the presence of human goods. The first is the belief that only one good exists, and is the good for all human beings, the sole way to fulfillment and completion. This was the dominant view in many pre-modern cultures, and many hold to it passionately today. The students who hold to this will reject other visions as, at best lesser or distorted versions of their own good, and at worst examples of human error or deformation.

But this is unlikely to be the prevailing attitude among modern students, for the primary modern problem is a sense that there are no goods at all. Rather than think in terms of goods that are to be moved toward -- a conception that requires a sense of looking outside ourselves for the promise of fulfillment that moves us (which involves the notion of passivity; we are drawn toward that which perfects us) -- our society is dominated by those who think in terms of desires that we follow and fulfill. In the absence of any end that we should pursue, we have merely desires to be satisfied; one's only guide is what one wants at any given time. It is this model that underlies much of decision theory and procedural notions of rationality: we calculate means to satisfy preferences. Rationality is bound up with thinking about means. As desires can change over time, and often conflict even at a given time, one will have no sense of a continuous narrative that would constitute the self.

What is puzzling is that most moderns conceive of the fulfillment of desires as a more "active" way of thinking about movement than being drawn toward a good (which is "passive"); yet Thomas Aquinas points out that being a simple follower of desires is another kind of passivity, a more slavish kind where one is led by impulses as if they were vectors that simply propelled one in any direction whatsoever. Without a meaningful end, there are no criteria with which to judge some desires as preferable to others; thus, the intensity or quantity of desires is all that is left. With such a model, individuals are left running faster and faster on a treadmill to keep themselves from noticing that they are not getting anywhere. When there is no destination, all one can do is run in place. Encountering religious models shows that there are fundamentally different ways to conceive of the self and its dispositions.

Dealing with these two forms of resistance will require different approaches, which is a topic for another essay. In both cases, though, we must strive to present a sympathetic, compelling account of spiritual visions that will lead the student to see these visions as containing true human goods and examples of human flourishing. This will require a shift in ways of conceiving the world. For the first kind of resistant student, this means entertaining the possibility that there are other forms of life that are fulfilling of human beings. While the student who embraces a narrowly uniform conception of the good (e.g. some who identify strongly with an exclusivist religious vision) can never accept this premise completely-and we should not push anyone to do so-it is important to move someone closer to being able to accept other ways of life as representing human excellence, as truly human alternatives; perhaps this means showing that there is at least enough shared by the religious visions so as to allow them to mutually recognize forms of excellence in each other. For the second kind of resistant student, it means just learning to think in terms of goods at all. While many students will still hold tightly to the desire-based model, at least they will see that it is merely one model among many, and one with potentially serious flaws.

There is a kind of resistance (which is actually a "non-resistance") which is quite difficult to combat because it hides behind a seemingly benign tolerance, one that is based on what Lee Yearley has called "bourgeois relativism", a form of tolerance that avoids any kind of true encounter at all.[25] Very well-intentioned students who hold tightly to a crude relativism could face a radically "other" religious vision and, rather than resist or reject it, merely respond (as some literally have), "That's cool. But that's their thing. I have mine." This is a failure to see what is truly at stake in such confrontations. For these students, we hope to engender some form of resistance, to show them the challenge that is posed to their way of thinking and living, even if they do not recognize or acknowledge it at first. Lionel Trilling writes about this beautifully:

(T)o some of us who teach and who think of our students as the creators of the intellectual life of the future, there comes a kind of despair. It does not come because our students fail to respond to ideas, rather because they respond to ideas with a happy vagueness, a delighted glibness....When that despair strikes us, we are tempted to give up the usual and accredited ways of evaluating education, and instead of prizing responsiveness and aptitude, to set store by some sign of personal character in our students, some token of individual will. We think of this as taking the form of resistance and imperviousness, of personal density or gravity, of some power of supposing that ideas are real, a power which will lead a young man to say what Goethe thought was the modern thing to say, "But is this really true -- is it true for me?"[26]

The Possibility of Crisis

If the students are exposed to other powerful religious visions, they should see that our cultural nomos, the order which we take for granted, is merely one possible grid thrown over the infinite possibilities of existence. Such an experience can be deeply unsettling, for it exposes the constant but hidden presence of anomie and forces us to confront human possibility and freedom. For some students, this can cause a great disturbance and even precipitate a true crisis. Thus, if we are going to teach religion with this existential aim, we must ask the question, Are undergraduate students prepared for this kind of crisis? Are we, as teachers, prepared to help them? Is this entire approach crossing the boundary of responsible pedagogy?

I would argue that, at its heart, the university experience must involve some form of this unsettling experience if it is to be at all meaningful. When one chooses to enter a university, part of the bargain is that one is going to open oneself up to serious challenges. For many students, this may have never occurred up to this point. And for many others, if they do not have the experience in college, they may have it at a far more difficult time, when too many irrevocable choices have been made.[27] We are not here to reassure students that their choices are good ones, but to show them the possibilities and give them the tools to make truly reflective choices rather than live an unconscious and inauthentic life.

At the same time, however, we must be very sensitive and attuned to a student's particular situation. For many students, the transition to college can already be a time of crisis, and often students must deal with a number of personal traumas while they are there that might make them particularly fragile at certain times.[28] With certain classes, it might even be a good idea to give a short caveat at the beginning stating that certain issues in the course might strike deep chords with some students, and that they will have to deal with some important existential questions. If they are not prepared for this, or are unwilling to go through this process, they might not want to take the course. And if particular students approach you individually and say, for example, that they take the Bible to be a sacred text and that probing its contradictions and various theories of authorship is a problem for them (as has happened to teachers I know), then you must decide when (and how hard) to push a student to challenge himself, and when to simply suggest that he might be better off dropping the course. This should also remind us that we should always be available for our students and approachable; bringing about existential reflection can lead to some important conversations during office hours-e.g. how a student who has lived with naive assumptions about religious texts all of his life can come to terms with certain methods of interpretation. Professors might want to bring these issues to the attention of teaching assistants, and prepare them for the possibility that they may have to face these issues (probably not often, but even if it is once, thinking about the issue is worthwhile).[29]

Let me conclude this section with a thought experiment. Let us assume that, during a course on Buddhism, a student comes into your office and tells you that she has found herself powerfully drawn to the Buddhist monastic vision. Not only has she withdrawn her law school applications, but she has decided to drop out of college and move to Tibet indefinitely (imagine, also, the phone call that you might receive from her parents upon learning that you are the teacher that opened her up to the beauty of the Buddhist vision). How should you respond?

While such situations might be rare, they are possibilities given what we are teaching and how I am advocating we teach it. My feelings on this are ambivalent, and at this point I can say with certainty only that we should think about and discuss situations like this. For now, I will only mention some preliminary thoughts. First, situations like this should make us reflect on our own career choice, for we should be able to give a convincing account of why the academic enterprise is part of the good human life. We should be able to present a case to our students that despite the appeal of other visions, there are goods that can only be realized in higher education, and that these goods should be a part of most kinds of flourishing lives.

Ultimately, however, the student may still decide to leave. And this is not necessarily a cause for alarm or regret. If we believe in the profundity of what we teach (not in the sense that a particular religion is the "right" or "true" one, but that these religious visions represent forms of human excellence), then we must be willing to accept this result and entertain the possibility that this will be deeply fulfilling for the student. Maybe she sees the significance of what we are teaching in an even deeper sense than we do. And who among us has not felt the pull of a religious vision or in fact acted on it? Perhaps the student is not being rash but is simply being honest or courageous.

This brings us to an important point that I hope will temper much of what I have said: As teachers, our influence over students is significant but extremely limited. I am not so deluded as to think that the kind of existential encounter I hope to bring about, (or the kind of situation represented in the thought experiment above, which I do not aim for, but must accept the possibility of) will occur with any kind of frequency. More likely, the type of students who will respond to this approach in any immediate way are quite rare. A student must be prepared for such an encounter to occur; at most, we are simply catalysts for the event. If the student decides to leave, there are most likely many other factors at work and the timing is right for such an encounter. There are probably reasons beyond what we could fathom.

If the type of existential encounter I aim at is likely to be so rare, why do I emphasize this approach to teaching? First, I believe that we should aim as high as possible when teaching at a university; we should hope to connect with those students who are open to the possibility of a true encounter with another religious tradition, not those who are merely there for the credits. At the same time, I believe that those students who do fall in the latter category will still benefit most from this approach. While the response may not be immediate, I believe that we are planting seeds that may come to fruition later, often at unexpected times or in subtle, mysterious ways. (This has happened to me a number of times, where the full impact of a text or thinker I encountered as an undergraduate only struck me years later, with surprising results). I think that all students in the class will have a better learning experience if they see how engaged we are with the tradition; we must communicate not only the "facts" about the tradition, but why we have found it so powerful so as to devote a substantial portion of our life to thinking about it. We must show how we are moved by it, and also show that our enthusiasm is not tempered (but is rather expressed) by how vigorously we critique aspects of that tradition.

In a sense, I see this type of religious studies as walking carefully between the type of advocacy or apologetic often found in seminaries (what might be associated with "first naivete"), and the attitude of many who view religion with suspicion, irony or outright hostility (this might be a form of "anti-naivete", which could argue for a pure social-sciences/reductionistic approach to religion). We must aim to cultivate what Ricoeur calls the "second naivete", which (re)discovers meaning in religious visions without abandoning critical method (I believe both devout members of religious traditions as well as those who belong to no tradition -- including atheists -- can cultivate second naivete).[30] Second naivete incorporates elements from both sides: a true appreciation of the position of those who hold to the first naivete, what we called the "insider's perspective"; and critiques from numerous perspectives (historical, literary, political, psychological, sociological, philosophical, etc. -- perspectives which, I should add, can be of just as much value in the other aspect of this approach, the "appreciative" side, as in the "critical side". In reality, no clean separation can be made. Each involves the other). All of this is a way of saying that religious studies operates in a realm of powerful tensions: the familiar and the strange, the appreciative and the critical. But these are productive rather than harmful tensions, and their most valuable product is reflection. Bringing about such reflection requires teachers to perform a balancing act.

Concluding Thoughts

Some might see this approach as paternalistic. Rather than merely presenting material, I am aiming to make my students certain kinds of people. I suppose I would have to plead guilty to this charge, but I would argue that education itself is a paternalistic enterprise, and it is the denial of that fact that has disturbing consequences. I don't believe aiming to change students is something we should apologize for. We must face up to the normative aspect of our project. If we did not believe that we could make ourselves and our students better people through this kind of inquiry, why, after all, would we teach?[31]

However, there is the threat of seeing ourselves as "gurus" hoping to transform or enlighten our students. We should be very aware of the shadow side of our role as teachers,[32] and should always try to avoid any kind of crude proselytizing. Nevertheless, what I aim for is far from this. The kind of people we should hope to contribute to forming are those who will not uncritically buy into any view, including the professor's. They will have a better sense of the variety of possible flourishing spiritual lives; will see what is at stake in asking and answering certain questions; will see the variety of methods for examining these issues. In short, they will have a well-developed critical capacity, an awareness of issues of interpretation, and a deep appreciation of and openness to different spiritual visions.

We are not asking our students to adopt any particular religious view. Rather, we want them to imaginatively see the world from other points of view and ask each time, What if this thinker is right? What if this picture of the human condition, the goal of spiritual cultivation, the vision of the cosmos, is true? This should be a question that confronts us whenever we pick up a religious text. While the students might come to reject, for a variety of reasons (ethical, metaphysical, epistemological) the vision they encounter, they should see the goods (and the problems) inherent in it. They should either recognize it as a legitimate model of human excellence, or be able to give a sophisticated account of why it is not so. In doing so, they will open up their own beliefs to critical assessment and theoretical reflection. They will also have better skills and dispositions to carry this out responsibly, for reading great religious texts not only shows us the thinker's vision, but also the way the thinker works through the issues.

Finally, I should note that one of the reasons I am convinced of the value of this approach is that a class that employed it did, in fact, change my life. I dropped my plans to go back into the business world and applied to graduate school in religious studies. It was a class that made explicit what had been unconscious and implicit in my thinking. I encountered new visions, and different kinds of questions and challenges. Some of the traditions I encountered even offered ways to resolve tensions that had long existed in my own (unconscious) attempt to combine a variety of Western traditions (e.g. Aristotelian virtue theory, existentialism, and Enlightenment liberalism).

In other words, the course not only showed tensions and contradictions in my thought and exposed all of my dearly held false fixities, but also forced me, for the first time, to truly reflect on the most important issues in life. Fortunately, it also gave me the skills and dispositions to begin doing it fairly well, although I know that I will spend my life trying to do it better. I had to unpack my assumptions and work through them in light of a radical challenge, a task that has become a lifelong project.

The religious studies course is one of the best places in which to engage in reflection on the most important issues; cultivate the skills and virtues that allow us to reflect, choose and ultimately live well; and encounter those traditions and thinkers that provide us with visions that show us other human goods and forms of excellence that will always draw us, disturb us, and transform us. Getting students to undertake this project, what Socrates called "the reflective life", must be a goal of the university education. As teachers of religion, we have a special opportunity -- in fact, I would argue a responsibility -- to make this happen.

A graduate student from Comparative Literature and fellow teaching assistant told me what he regards as his most important goal in the classroom: motivating students to think and interpret totally for themselves. I have heard this aspiration pronounced so often that it sounds almost like a cliché. The problem with the slogan, stated in unqualified fashion as above, is that the instructor who subscribes to it also potentially condones too many cases of uncritical thinking and uncritical interpretation.

Teachers have the honorable task of enhancing the lives of those whom they inform combined with the weighty one of helping to shape their beliefs, and when the latter is done poorly the consequences are seldom harmless. That Romans, for example, has been traditionally explained as a treatise on human sin rather than as a letter dealing with problems of ethnicity, has had real and unfortunate effects on the history of non-Christian peoples in homogeneous, medieval Europe. If Romans has been mistranslated, and as a natural consequence misinterpreted throughout a significant portion of its history, then as responsible scholars and educators we must see ourselves as accountable for the tradition of which we are heirs. In this specific case we would be accountable for the policies and sanctions that were in part fueled by an incorrect, or at least poorly supported reading of Romans, policies and sanctions that were especially damaging to Jews and alienated practitioners of other religions who resisted assimilation. Through the promulgation of a better supported reading, the teacher has the ability to contribute to the eradication of anti-Semitism and other forms of religious discrimination. The critique of destructive myths, then, becomes a teacher's constructive tool. It allows her to create new metaphors which appeal to a wider audience, an audience perhaps alienated by the old reading. In any case, whichever reading of a text that one prefers becomes very important. An egalitarian approach, by contrast, sees all interpretations as one form of a myth or another, in effect giving equal worth to the arguments for each. The egalitarian justifies her complacency by engaging in the rhetoric of open-mindedness. I do not contend that the teacher should be intolerant of the various recommendations which come her way, nor that she be wary of her tolerance. Rather, I am advising that when such options come to light, they should be judged against the standards of good scholarship by which she learned to abide in her own academic training.

I hear my Comparative Literature colleague remark that texts have lives of their own, that the more adaptable they are with respect to furnishing multiple interpretations, the more deserving they are as documents due our attention. Interpretations say more about the aims, biases and insights of interpreters than they do about the texts interpreted. Consequently, a text is successful simply to the extent that it serves as a vehicle of expression or as an opening for a large and diverse audience. Because all interpretations distort the intended meaning, he argues further, attempts to ascertain the original author's aims are abrasive and do violence to the text. We thus best fulfill our roles as educators by receiving graciously each reading and by resisting conclusions which reduce options. Good scholarship involves recognizing, even highlighting, competing alternatives. Progress, for the egalitarian, amounts to giving new life to old texts rather than entombing them in dominant forms. We are encouraged to listen to as many voices as possible.

While I appreciate this perspective, there may be some important weaknesses here. In the setting of our current academic environment, however, where the many and trendy forms of relativism (good and bad) are gaining increasing acceptance, these need to be carefully shown. Such a demonstration is not easy. At least it will entail a confrontation with some very formidable practical difficulties.

At a modern, liberal university, where participants in any deliberation can appeal to a number of authorities, arriving at a "right" answer seems nearly impossible, not just some of the time, but ever. Yet, history is so often shaped by some interpretation which emerges as the dominant one. How does a teacher of the humanities constructively fulfill her role as authority? How does she privilege this interpretation of a text over that one, while managing at the same time not to discourage the participation of students informed by multifarious traditions, each with different commitments and priorities? How are her students to best benefit from her experience and insight? Can she ever be justified in directing them away from the wrong options, the wrong interpretations? If so, can she still manage to head a discussion in which she comes across neither as overbearing nor manipulative in a pseudo-Socratic way? This is all to ask: how can she both gain and deserve the trust of those whom she hopes to instruct?

Last semester, which was my first semester as a teaching assistant, I learned how hard these feats are to accomplish. One mostly laudatory student offered the following critical suggestion on his section evaluation:

Andrew's enthusiasm was tempered from time to time by silent stares from his audience. Sections would have been improved had Andrew not come with an agenda. He directed the flow of conversation from beginning to end, often in such a way as to arrive precisely where he had anticipated he would. What we gained by virtue of competent analysis, we lost due to limited student-student interaction.

I was initially defensive after reading this comment. Had I let my students govern themselves more freely, I thought, too much would have been left up to chance while pertinent issues would have remained unaddressed. But by refusing to risk this outcome I had sacrificed something even more important: an environment where the exchange of ideas was encouraged. What I had intended merely as good guidance verged on dogmatism. Stylistically, I compromised the appeal of my delivery, regardless of its clarity and relevance. Many students, I should say, appreciated that I insisted that we all be critical of the suggestions we each had to offer. But often it is the unheard voice, fearing that what it has to say is bound to share a similar fate as the less-than-persuasive contentions that happen to have preceded it, which under more welcoming circumstances would offer the most salient contributions.

As resident expert, or "senior conversation partner"--as I have heard John P. Reeder, Jr. fondly use the term, the burden of engaging this particular student falls on my shoulders. The challenge is to create conditions for inspiring her to want to make herself heard. Teachers have the complicated chore of adequately fulfilling their dual roles as authority and mediator. In the former role, the teacher maintains a certain, even necessary distance; in the latter she must in some sense be perceived as an equal, eager herself to learn. Students gain from a teacher's expertise, but perhaps they gain more by taking advantage of a chance to inform and draw others into a new understanding, seeing themselves as the authority. Such an undertaking, of course, presupposes a level of commitment that many at the undergraduate level would rather not assume. These majority rest quite comfortably with the traditional lecturer-to-recipient format of learning. But, to address a central question raised by J. Giles Milhaven in his contribution to this manual ("Teaching, Learning and Feeling"), teachers in practice evoke pleasure in students insofar as they allow them to become involved in the whole process. The affective and imaginative dimensions of learning, I want to suggest, are essential to good teaching. It is, for example, when students see other students respond to their insights and when they then realize the extent to which those other students would not have benefited had it not been for their involvement, that they become not just curious, but passionate. I say this because feedback of this sort does more to inspire me than anything else.

One can emphasize student involvement in the teaching process and still believe both 1) that there do exist "better" answers to questions of interpretation and 2) that their intellectual and affective acquisition is worthy of any questing scholarly forum. Just as coming to a seminar with an agenda can jeopardize a student's trust in a teacher, as I learned first hand, over-tolerance of poorly supported assertions, which in a seminar setting are too often permitted to survive unscathed for the sake of provoking the intellectual and emotional development of the errant participant, cannot help but annoy and diminish the faith of those others in the audience who want to see emerge the adjudicator in their teacher. They, to a certain extent, depend on her to draw upon the resources of her experience both in her particular academic field and as an educator in general (e.g. as one capable of directing inquiry). In this way will their learning be more efficient. Otherwise they would not feel the need to go beyond the text itself and to the classroom in the first place (as indeed many do not). Of course, the one officially in charge will not always be the best judge. This is why challenges by students are healthy. They clarify persisting ambiguities and force proponents and defendants to better marshal the evidence which support what they hold to be true. At the end of the day, plenty of issues may well remain unresolved, and some of those, irresolvable.

To be sure, a text protected by double meanings and contextual considerations to which we as outsiders lack any access may declare victory over its reader. Yet, this is not a priori true, and so it does not have to be the case. A significant purpose of scholarship in the humanities is to provide clues which shed light on context. It helps, for instance, that we know that a particularly mysterious phrase from Romans about homosexuality can also be found in the work of Philo, who wrote during the same period as Paul, and whose intentions in this case we do have the sufficient contextual evidence to grasp. It helps to know that according to Kierkegaard, his large pseudonymous corpus was purportedly conceived all at once, indicating a grand rhetorical strategy on the part of the author wherein each work comprises merely one element of the whole. To conceive Fear and Trembling in isolation, one might not gather from a first reading, is in part to miss the point of Fear and Trembling. It is precisely facts like these upon which judgments about the correctness of interpretations must rely, and it is the teacher's business to make herself and her students acquainted with as many of those as possible. As I said before, our history demonstrates that the privileging of interpretations is bound to occur; it is up to the teacher to see that it occurs in an informed way.

In the West education tends to be a public affair. When we teach, Alasdair MacIntyre rightly contends, we teach from an inherited tradition which, even when we amend it, we are affirming and endorsing as well. This is important because it acknowledges that there are norms which govern scholarship, and to administer these effectively requires practice just as does all good craftsmanship. I believe good teachers are as the myth says they are: wise people. They are able to draw upon the resources of their tradition in such a way as to discern that which might qualify as augmentation, for not everything will. Rarely if ever is it possible for contributors to the academy to fail to recognize the debt they owe their predecessors. The drawback here, some argue, is that by paying mandatory homage to the pillars in the field, scholars turn education into an impersonal enterprise. Peter Brown puts the problem nicely when he observes that under such conditions people learn to "mold themselves, like clay, carve and polish themselves like a statue (I use the current images of education) so as to form themselves through and through according to the very rigid and demanding rules of exemplary behavior." (Peter Brown, "The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity," in Saints and Virtues, 1987) One wonders if the bringing to bear of rigid criteria in evaluating interpretations, criticisms and so forth stifles the creative aspect to learning.

The significance attached to dialogue in learning helps to assuage this worry. Feedback from ones peers in a seminar setting--also a part of the Western legacy--is tantamount to making learning a dynamic and novel activity. Additionally, the way in which knowledge learned in the classroom translates into normative forces at work in society is in a very important sense our concern and not one of our forerunners. As authority, the teacher situates these concerns; she links the present to the past. As mediator, in dialogue with her students, she looks to the future. It is her students who in numbers take knowledge out into the world and affect personal lives, policy, public opinion and history. And of course it is the good students who teach the next generation.

Søren Kierkegaard ruminated for years on the most effective way to communicate ethical and religious knowledge. His solutions were various, but for much of his authorship he insisted on the necessity of indirect communication. In this paper I will sketch Kierkegaard's ideas about indirect communication and subjective and objective understanding, and then argue that while the dramatic differences between contemporary America and Golden Age Denmark require substantial changes in Kierkegaard's prescription for teaching religious ethics, his central concerns can still provide helpful guideposts as we reflect on how to teach in the modern academy.

One of Kierkegaard's pseudonyms, Johannes Climacus, discusses indirect communication, subjectivity, and objectivity at length in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Climacus draws a stark distinction between objective and subjective reflection. Objective reflection abstracts from the individual human being who does the thinking, moves away from her subjective concerns, thereby making the person in her distinctness completely unimportant; the degree of this irrelevance is the measure of the thought's objective truth.[34] Subjective reflection, on the other hand, "turns inward toward subjectivity and in this inward deepening will be of the truth, and in such a way that, just as . . . when objectivity was advanced, subjectivity vanished, here subjectivity as such becomes the final factor and objectivity the vanishing."[35] Here one's particularity as an existing human being is never forgotten, but instead brought into constant dialectical relation with whatever ideas one is considering.

Corresponding to the distinction between modes of reflection is a distinction between essential and accidental knowledge. Climacus writes, "All essential knowing pertains to existence, or only the knowing whose relation to existence is essential is essential knowing."[36] Essential knowing is the fruit of subjective reflection, and as we will see, is characterized by an individual's personal appropriation of ethical-religious communication. Climacus continues, "Therefore, only ethical and ethical-religious knowing is essential knowing. But all ethical and all ethical-religious knowing is essentially a relating to the existing of the knower."[37] Ethical and religious knowledge concerns how to live; to understand or to think it is to apply it to one's own life. There is a distinction lurking here, between what Stephen Evans calls subjective and existential knowledge, i.e. between the potential and actual appropriation of subjective reflection, but both are steps on a single ladder, different stages in one reflective mode.[38] In contrast to this, when one's particularity is avoided, objective reflection issues in "accidental" knowledge, such as the truths of natural science, world history, and veterinary medicine.

Accidental, i.e. objective, knowledge can be communicated directly. A scientist can report the result of his experiment, and does not need to reflect about how to express it. In contrast, conveying subjective understanding is more problematic because the goal of such communication is personal appropriation, or as Climacus says, "reduplication," not rote memorization of formulas.[39] Since a direct form of address assumes that appropriating the information passed along will be easy, so easy that it can be ignored, this will not do for ethical-religious understanding, where a direct mode of presentation tends in general to prevent real appropriation by implying such an incorporation would be effortless.[40] In this case an indirect form is necessary. Direct communication of religious thought is a "fraud."[41] Climacus writes,

 

Wherever the subjective is of importance in knowledge and appropriation is therefore the main point, communication is a work of art; it is doubly reflected, and its first form is the subtlety that the subjective individuals must be held devoutly apart from one another and must not run coagulatingly together in objectivity.[42]

Indirect communication of ethical-religious knowledge requires artfulness, subtlety, and self-control. In order to encourage genuine appropriation on the part of her listeners, a subjective speaker must avoid a direct presentation; her hearers should think things through for themselves, rather than parroting her phrases. This is the art of "setting the other free."[43]

One of Kierkegaard's favorite methods of indirection is pseudonymous authorship. Kierkegaard aims to distance the reader from the source of the thought offered for her consideration; she is forced back onto her own interpretive and evaluative devices, rather than invited to entrust her faith to someone else, an authority, thus forfeiting responsibility for her own existence. Climacus's humorous "revocation" of the Postscript functions similarly. Perhaps the whole book is a jest; the reader will have to decide for herself. All devices employed in indirect ethical-religious communication aim at the individual hearer passionately appropriating the communication in her inwardness, which is accomplished through her subjective reflection on the ideas at hand.

Climacus specifies more fully what he has in mind. Ethical knowledge must be presented as a "live option," a possibility for the listener.

If actuality is to be understood by a third party, it must be understood as possibility. . . . What is great with regard to the universal must therefore not be presented as an object for admiration, but as a requirement. In the form of possibility, the presentation becomes a requirement. Instead of presenting the good in the form of actuality, as is ordinarily done, that this person and that person have actually lived and have actually done this, and thus transforming the reader into an observer, an admirer, an appraiser, it should be presented in the form of possibility. Then whether or not the reader wants to exist in it is placed as close as possible to him.[44]

When an ethical position is presented as a real existential possibility, the position is experienced by the listener as a demand to change her life, which is likely to call forth authentic subjective reflection. If it is presented as the heroic achievement of a particular gifted individual, the listener is seduced into admiration, and after more experience eventually becomes a connoisseur of "the good," evaluating positions from a safe distance, i.e. objectively.

What are we to make of these ideas today? First, the temptations and goals of teaching ethics today are essentially the same as Kierkegaard's. Directly presenting numerous ethical theories as facts to be considered trains students to treat ethics as a unique domain with its own aesthetic standards, and also trains them to avoid subjective reflection on the existential possibilities such positions represent, while concentrating on the logical structure and justification of various positions. Appropriation is forgotten. "Doing ethics" becomes a special kind of philosophical reflection with its own exemplars and standards of professionalization. On the other hand, a contemporary teacher of ethics may seek to engage students intellectually in what they are reading and hearing, and this engagement, when the subject is ethics, ideally becomes existential. Appropriation of ethical ideas in one's life, i.e. becoming a better person, does not drop out of sight, but instead becomes the raison d'être of the whole enterprise.

Given that the context for this discussion is the teaching of religious ethics, a critic might object that I am advocating proselytizing, however subtle, and that this has no place in a modern liberal university. Kierkegaard should certainly be understood as a Christian author whose writings were for Christian purposes. I am arguing that his ideas have merit outside the context of strictly and explicitly Christian "upbuilding," and can have a legitimate place in a genuinely pluralistic community. His ideas about the value of subjective reflection on ethics and the perils of similar objective reflection, as well as the necessity of taking these into account when you try to communicate ethical knowledge, have enduring value, and can be recast in a contemporary idiom.

In fact, we need to reformulate Kierkegaard's insights because our current American situation is very different from that of 1840's Denmark. Kierkegaard perceived his age as one of Christendom triumphant, where in the eyes of the state and of society everyone becomes a Christian "as a matter of course," without thinking about it. Climacus writes,

Because everyone knows the Christian truth, it has gradually become such a triviality that a primitive impression of it is acquired only with difficulty. When this is the case, the art of being able to communicate eventually becomes the art of being able to take away or to trick something away from someone.[45]

This throws new light on the questions at hand. Climacus can stress that direct communication of ethical truth is a waste of time because everyone has already heard it. In this special case communication must be indirect even to the point of destruction of some received ideas if subjective reflection is to be possible. If the situation were different, though, different methods might be necessary. Climacus writes,

As soon as the truth, the essential truth, can be assumed to be known by everyone, appropriation and inwardness must be worked for, and here can be worked for only in an indirect form. The position of the apostle is something else, because he must proclaim an unknown truth, and therefore direct communication can always have its validity temporarily.[46]

When a listener is genuinely ignorant of some ethical truth, direct communication of that truth can have its place. For Climacus, and for Kierkegaard, the paradigm case for this is the apostles, but the gravity of the comparison need not cow us from recognizing the necessity of tailoring one's teaching to circumstances if it is to be effective.

Contemporary America, unlike Kierkegaard's Denmark, is an increasingly diverse society. Different communities and disparate understandings of humanity exist side by side, and frequently mingle or collide with one another. In this climate, and especially within the critical hothouses American colleges have become, students are often confused and uncommitted, espousing varieties of relativism and romantic emotivism. Ignorance and incoherence loom, not to mention nihilism. Furthermore, if one believes that good, even great, human lives can be intellectually informed by various traditions, then the task of "setting the other free" demands an especially stern discipline. The positions and traditions one's students choose to appropriate may be other than one's own.

Kierkegaardian insights can be put to work in such a situation, but creativity is required, and certain other tenets of Kierkegaard's thought will have to be set aside.[47] I will call my prescription "pseudonymous teaching."

When leading a course covering multiple theoretical standpoints or traditions, the teacher should dramatically present each position with maximum force and vividness. This includes two steps: first, an historically accurate study of the text with a sufficiently complex description of its context so that the students have some hope of grasping what the author was attempting to do; second, "translation" into the most compelling modern version of such a theory one can imagine, especially if the text makes claims to which contemporary college students might initially be averse (e.g., the need for radical self-sacrifice or proper relation to previously unknown metaphysical systems). This translation is not code for "watering down" a hard teaching, but rather a metaphor for the passionate attempt to present the existential possibilities within a text as real possibilities for the students. In this way one can deliver the ethical demand of each author in person, as compellingly as possible, all the while keeping one's own views cloaked in secrecy. This presentation of existential demands can prompt students to reflect subjectively on their own lives, to question themselves within a new framework, and conversely to question the applicability of each new text to their lives. When this is done well, it can seem as if the dead have come back to life.

This process should be repeated with each new author or position. In this way the teacher "retreats" from her students, using her superior knowledge and philosophical power to present each position authoritatively, and then backing away, leaving students with the awareness that a thoughtful person takes this seriously, but without giving a result to recite unreflectively, or providing a personal authority to whom one might cede one's soul. In this way the authority that the teacher displays by means of her erudition and critical skills is transferred to the texts, and students intellectually engage the subject matter in a way which might bear ethical fruit in their own lives. The teacher opens up possibility as a demand for individual students, which if successful may lead to soul-searching and partial appropriation, and the desire to learn more.[48] Equally important benefits of this method include learning the intellectual virtues of historical sensitivity, close textual analysis, rational argument, and continuous work on writing skills through paper assignments.

In this way both direct and indirect communication are utilized in the service of intellectual development and inward appropriation. The teacher directly presents unknown authors, texts, or traditions, and this is as it should be if inquiry into these positions is to get off the ground. Yet indirection persists in the dramatic presentation of the demands inherent in possibilities, the concomitant hiding of one's own assessments,[49] and the resulting transference of authority from teacher to texts. The goal of this indirection is the same as Kierkegaard's: to stimulate subjective reflection.

This assumption of multiple ethical/intellectual identities is most effective in introductory and intermediate classes. As students become more knowledgeable, the pseudonymous retreat becomes less beneficial and can be positively harmful if repeated too long, which might suggest that a lack of commitment to any position is both possible and desirable. As the distance between teacher and student decreases, a more collaborative model of teaching should come to the fore, and direct expression of one's own views, as one's own, becomes essential. But when introducing students to powerful thinkers, especially when they come from cultures either temporally or spatially distant from our own, this more Kierkegaardian way seems both appropriate and fruitful.

--Unknown

Introduction

In the classroom we as teachers spend much of our time explaining, analyzing, and debating the factual accuracy, rational coherence, and overall sense of the texts we present, read, and examine. In a seminar teacher and students are seated in chairs separated by the span of the table; in lectures we stand before a seated audience uniformly facing us. Preparing for class, both teacher and student have been sitting at desks and bringing our minds to bear on the readings that will be lectured upon, discussed, and for which papers will be written. All of this is designed to maximize the sense of equidistance among the students and the sense of distanced objectivity; it also subordinates personal contact and engagement to intellectual demands.

Exams and papers likewise tend to emphasize the importance of consistency and analytical clarity. Although there is increasing flexibility in style and genre, assigned paper topics generally place a premium on theoretical mastery and the careful analysis of textual evidence.

Thus, within the framework of our institutional practices-in lectures, discussions, reading texts, and evaluating written work-our primary mode of engaging undergraduate students is intellectual, and students naturally strive first and foremost to grasp textual ideas in terms of their logical relationships and coherence.

The texts that we examine in religious studies, however, often contain knowledge that was not appropriated in a primarily or exclusively intellectual mode. Texts conveying knowledge of ritual, visions, dreams, personal encounters, and the like may appeal to intuition, emotion, and bodily or somatic awareness as much as to intellectual understanding. Different genres emphasize different modes of knowledge. Journals, essays about personal experiences, and fiction often appeal equally to a differentiated sense of affect as to intellect. Poetry and works of devotion frequently represent a blend of intuition and affect. Manuals on ritual and meditation speak of somatic appropriation. All texts are subject to intellectual analysis, but the full range of their contents may not be accessible to the rational intellect alone.

The representation of texts in religious studies occurs at the historical intersection of complex practices. On the one hand, the secular, liberal, democratic university based largely on the ideal of public, equal access to objective bodies of knowledge could not have been created without the distance and universality thought to be afforded by the rational intellect. On the other, the content of texts in religious studies indicate that other modes may be involved. The intellect has tended to be regarded as objective, while intuition, affect, and somatic understanding have been relegated to the problematic sphere of the subjective or even the irrational. Yet these other modes of knowledge suggest a logic each unto its own, highly differentiated and consistent within its own sphere.

Of course, it would be an exaggeration to say that these other modes are completely excluded from undergraduate education. In fact, it would be impossible to engage students meaningfully in their subject matter without some appeal to the intuitive sense and emotional impact of textual ideas. This is especially true in religious studies. Thus, we intersperse our explanations with analogies, illustrations, and stories to evoke interest, wonder, empathetic understanding, appreciation, disgust, and humor in our students. But there are limits to the extent to which we can ask students to become engaged. One might explain William James' conception of prayer in the Varieties of Religious Experience and convey some intuitive sense of the world of meaning that it constitutes for him. However, it would be going too far to insist that students identify with James' sense that prayer is "the very movement itself of the soul . . . [in] contact with the mysterious power."[50] Similarly, one might explain the logic and sense of a Zen Buddhist meditation manual, but it would be inappropriate to require that students engage in formal training in meditation techniques.

The religious studies curriculum of the contemporary American university provides access to a wider range of texts in religious studies than ever before, but we are far from having worked out the problem of how and to what extent knowledge of these texts can be conveyed. This essay represents a preliminary attempt to consider three questions related to this problem: What is the relationship between different modes of knowledge in the pedagogy of religious studies? Whence does the teacher derive her or his knowledge of texts in religious studies? And how does one bring different texts into conversation with one another?

The Relationship between Different Modes

Thus far the intellectual, intuitive, affective, and somatic modes of appropriating knowledge have been mentioned. There may be many others, but I have found it a useful point of departure to begin with these four. In terms of working with students towards an understanding of texts, I have also identified a general sequence of progression between these modes, although exceptions are frequent enough. In actual practice there is a shifting back and forth between modes rather than a smooth linear development, and more than one mode is usually operating simultaneously. I have nevertheless found the following schematization helpful.

The first mode of engagement is intellectual, since students usually seek to work out the conceptual relationships between ideas before they can fully enter the world of the text.

Once a general framework has been established at this level, the students can start to explore individual ideas and themes within the larger context. That is to say, they begin to internalize a map of meaning by means of which they can intuit the sense and meaning of individual pieces in light of the whole. A map, however, can be no more than a crude approximation of the actual landscape.

In order to see what it might be like to actually traverse and live in the world represented by the text, students need to become responsive to the shades of emotion found therein; this is probably the most difficult area to facilitate on the part of the instructor. In order to engage students and to present a sophisticated rendering of the text, the teacher must open the possibility to affective engagement but not coerce students into emotional identification.[51] It is difficult, for example, to appreciate the passion with which Simone Weil pursues her philosophical endeavors without having some inkling of the suffering undergone by the factory workers with whom she toiled; at the same time, it would be sermonizing to tell students that they must confront the class conflicts at work in their own lives. As mentioned earlier, one means of providing the opportunity for affective engagement without forcing students is to give illustrations and analogies as indirect channels of access.

While somatic modes of acquiring knowledge are integral to athletics, performing arts, and the like, we rarely attempt to engage students at this level in religious studies. At the same time, many students become highly intrigued by the possibility of engagement at the somatic level, such as what it might mean to do meditation. On the one hand, it is enticing precisely because somatic engagement is excluded, and students feel that their overburdened minds are cutoff from their bodies; on the other, somatic knowledge seems to some to provide a more intimate, deeper knowledge of the ideas represented in the texts they study.

It should be noted here that somatic engagement does not entail an exclusively or even predominantly sympathetic attitude towards the object of study. The practices associated with virtually any idea can have both positive and negative effects, and one can often gain the deepest and most critical understanding of these effects at the somatic level of engagement. The violinist who is competing for a chair in a major professional orchestra knows intimately both the beauty of playing Stravinsky's The Firebird and the almost cruel demands of practice and competition that pervade the professional world of concert performance. Similarly, some of the harshest and most incisive critics of religious traditions have come from adherents and former adherents of these traditions. All of this is further complicated by the fact that the ideological practices that have produced texts used in religious studies not infrequently mask the darker side of the ideas they propound. Peter Berger has suggested that the true adherent must also be the harshest critic, one who obeys "the heretical imperative."[52] This is one reason why the application of external perspectives and theories to critique ideas represented in a text plays an important role.[53]

My pedagogical strategy in negotiating the four modes has been to bring the intellectual and intuitive modes of engagement fully into the classroom, to open possibilities for affective engagement through lecture and discussion, and to provide opportunities for deeper affective and somatic engagement at the individual level when queried. If a student comes in during office hours expressing interest in doing Zen meditation, then I will provide information about nearby meditation centers. If she or he would like to meet a Buddhist monk, then I can similarly provide information about public talks and other situations to fulfill their needs. I also offer advice about things to look out for and further texts they might read to acquire a broader base of knowledge, but at this point I usually restrain my avuncular instincts and keep this to a minimum. As individuals on their own life-journeys, students need to find out things for themselves.

The Teacher's Appropriation of Knowledge

The issue of how to convey knowledge of texts on various levels implies a second question, that of whence and how the teacher derives the knowledge she or he communicates. Graduate training today involves both research and pedagogy, and while the two are closely related, they are not always complementary. In graduate research there is a high degree of specialization, the audience or readership is usually small and learned, and students learn to qualify their statements extensively in both papers and at conferences. In undergraduate pedagogy, especially in lectures, material is presented at the introductory or intermediate levels, the audience is often large and highly diverse, and the ability to evoke interest and start with useful generalizations is important.

In a word, graduate research is significantly devoted to professional training, while in undergraduate education students are in a much more exploratory, search mode. For this and other reasons described by Mark Berkson in his essay, "Reflection on/through Comparison," effective undergraduate pedagogy depends upon the teacher's skill in enabling students to enter imaginatively into an unfamiliar world of textual ideas. In order to do this, we go beyond the boundaries of our research to draw upon analogies and examples from daily life with which students can identify. Furthermore, many of us are required to teach texts outside of our research specializations.

As we blend the knowledge gained through research with our own reservoir of experience in order to create an effective pedagogy, we have to ask ourselves, how accurate is the representation of the text that we communicate to the students? Unlike some, I do not believe that there is a single, exclusively correct reading of a text. At the same time, I think that there are better and worse renderings, as indicated by Andrew Flescher in his essay, "Teacher as Authority and Mediator," and just as one can say that there are better and worse interpretations of a Mozart piano concerto. Like a Mozart concerto, our knowledge of texts involves the intellectual, intuitive, affective, and somatic levels, and we can examine our knowledge by asking ourselves, "On what levels have I appropriated knowledge of this text, and on what levels can I speak competently?" It is not that difficult to give a convincing representation of a text to an audience completely unfamiliar with that text, but it is another question altogether of whether a particular representation is fair and faithful.

By continually reexamining our own knowledge at various levels or modalities, we can gain a greater degree of internal consistency at the same time that we develop a more effective outward presentation. In talking about Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, I might draw on my own experiences of encountering prejudice; I can set the appropriate sense of distance by explaining differences in degree and kind. In examining Confucius' understanding of ritual (li) in the Analects, I might draw parallels with an orchestral performance,[54] but I am careful to explain that this is a metaphor that makes intuitive sense but is not meant to be an illustration of the Confucian implementation of li, which is historically and culturally delimited.

By simply being clear about what I do and do not understand and at what levels, misinformation is avoided, students receive a more effective presentation, and they themselves may become more aware of the limits and possibilities of their own discourse.[55]

Comparison and Conversation

One of the hallmarks of the liberal arts education found in the contemporary American university is its multicultural character. Not very often in past history have such a diverse curriculum and student body been brought together in a single institution. As I look out onto the audience before me, I cannot help but see that the encounter between different cultures, traditions, and ideas is very real, not merely notional, to use Bernard Williams' terms.[56] As I am about to begin lecturing for my course on Eastern and Western conceptions of the self, I realize that the authors, practices, and ideas that we will be examining comparatively are already intermingled in conversation as students talk to one another.[57]

In the past, comparison frequently meant that one of two thinkers, traditions, or texts being compared would serve as the standard by which the other would be measured, or that some predetermined paradigm would be used as the norm for classifying and evaluating the elements of comparison.[58] It seems that we are now moving towards a more complex approach wherein the objects of comparison are used to illuminate one another, to identify differences in similarities and similarities in differences.[59] In a sense, rather than comparing static entities presumed to exist unchanged in abstraction, a more conversational approach is coming to the fore.[60] However, if it were merely a friendly conversation, then it would not be possible for each to call the other into question and to engage in critical evaluation. If it were solely a question of objective comparison, it would be easy to overlook the fact that the person undertaking the comparison helps to shape the nature of the inquiry and has a normative stake in doing so.

In my teaching experiences I have found that students are more interested and willing to engage deeper levels of knowledge when the format of a course involves this blend of comparison and conversation, partly because they seem to feel that no single voice or paradigm will dominate the discussion and partly because they begin to see their own identities as being informed by the multitude of voices found in their world, both at the macroscopic level of an increasingly global society and the microscopic world of their classroom. The conversational tone invites them to see the other-in-self and the self-in-other, and the comparative thrust enables them to evaluate and move towards a more integrated self-understanding.

In Conclusion

Although undergraduate education is largely restricted to the intellectual and intuitive modalities, the teacher can articulate her or his understanding of texts more fully and skillfully at these levels if thought has been given to one's knowledge at the affective and somatic levels. When appropriate, the door can then be opened to deeper levels of engagement. Even if a student gains only a glimpse of other possibilities, the manner in which we as teachers articulate ourselves may very well lead students to reflect later on in life about what it means to read, think, discuss and enlarge one's world of knowledge in a variety of ways. I can report that students have already taught me much and enriched my life immeasurably by contributing to my knowledge at various levels of engagement.

When I came to Carleton [College] eleven years ago, straight out of graduate school, I was ill-prepared for the challenges that faced me as a teacher. Like most people in my situation, I had never been taught how to lecture, lead discussion, compose exams, or evaluate student work. I was very unsure about how to play the role I had taken on, and, not surprisingly, hypersensitive about how I appeared to my students. My main goal at first was to become comfortable in this new persona.

Teaching successfully, it seemed to me at the time, was basically a matter of acquiring certain specialized skills. During that first year I got a good deal of support, both from departmental colleagues and from Carleton's Student Observer program, whereby students sat in on my classes and gave me their suggestions for improvement. Experience itself proved to be an effective teacher.

Gradually, I became more comfortable in my professional role, more competent, more relaxed about the image I presented of myself. By the end of that year and into the next, student evaluations became more positive. I felt proud of my progress. I had really made it; I had become a teacher. Or so I thought.

A shift in orientation

In the years since then, I have come to look at teaching quite differently, though I cannot now recall when my orientation first began to shift. To be sure, professional competence counts. There are certain skills involved in teaching which we all must learn. But these tools no longer determine the way I measure myself as a teacher.

I now view teaching as an interpersonal relationship, more than a professional one. It is not fundamentally about skills and competence, but about integrity and openness. I have begun to measure success in terms of the quality of our interaction. All of this stems from an awareness that, banal as it sounds, students are people. They come to school with a whole host of baggage, most of it much heavier and less apparent than the trunks we see them lugging across campus. They come with loads of insecurities about who they are, who they would like to be, and anxieties about living up to adult expectations. And what is true of my students is equally true of me. I believe that openly acknowledging those very personal qualities of our lives as teachers and students is central to what I do.

When students walk through the classroom door, they do not leave their personal lives behind; neither do we. To pretend that we do is, at best, a form of self-deception. When students receive a poor grade on a paper or flounder during a class presentation and come to talk with me about it, I am faced on one level with a professional problem: how can I help them do their best work. Maybe they need help understanding the material, or honing their reading and writing skills, or learning how to manage their time better. Maybe the resources that the student used were unhelpful, or the assignment was unclear. All of these are possibilities. Figuring out how to diagnose such problems would be helpful were a big part of learning how to be a teacher those first few years.

Recognizing the real task

But over time I have learned to attend to another set of concerns entirely, and so to ask other questions. Is this student in the midst of some personal crisis at school or at home so she can't concentrate on her work? Is this a freshman who thinks his acceptance to Carleton was a fluke and now is simply terrified that he can't keep pace with his peers? Is this student so anxious to figure out what I'm looking for, or so concerned to find the right formula for success, that her own creative energies have been blocked? If this student is the first person in his family to go to college, is he burdened by totally unrealistic expectations, either of himself or of the educational process?

Sometimes, of course, none of these personal factors is involved. If that's the case, my interaction with that student is focused strictly on the academic problems. More often that not, though, when I begin to ask any of these sorts of personal questions, students feel they have permission to talk about whatever it is that may be affecting their work. When they do share that sort of information with me, the teacher-student relationship is not really about academics at all. It's about an older person helping a younger one cope with life. The challenge to me as a teacher at that point is not to solve their academic problems, but to empathize with their human situation.

I can't generally help students solve their personal problems, but now I can at least acknowledge that they exist. I can, if I choose, even reveal the secret that I too have felt insecure, or incompetent, or just plain stupid. Amazingly, this often comes as a great surprise to students, but almost invariably it helps them accept their own humaneness. And that, it now seems to me, is my real task as a teacher.

I once assumed that my job was only to teach them about religion or, more broadly, about how to think clearly and learn effectively. I still think that is true, though I now understand that is but a small part of what I should be teaching them.

An expression of values

In every interaction, I have an opportunity to teach students something of value: how to take responsibility for themselves, how to listen carefully, how to respond honestly, how to be sensitive to those with special needs, how to cooperate with others even in a competitive setting, to name only a few. It seems to me, in fact, that the whole debate about teaching values in education is misdirected. The fact is that all teaching is value laden, not only because what we teach is necessarily infused with values, but more importantly because the very act of teaching (and of living) is an expression of values. When I succeed in communicating clearly, grading fairly, remaining open to criticism, I am not only doing my job well as an educator, I am teaching them something about being a responsible person. And my suspicion is that they will remember that lesson long after the assignments and grades have been forgotten.

Does it belong to good college teaching to enable and encourage the student to develop emotionally? Whether or not it be true of all college courses, is it true of many -of any?- that they do, or should, lead the student out (e-duc) not only further into knowledge, insight, information, etc. but also further into passion, feeling, affect, etc.? I put this question to the last three Deans of the College at Brown, Deans Massey, Sheridan and Blumstein, during the deanship of each of them. All three courteously and sympathetically declined to answer, saying they did not feel competent to say anything on the question. I respect these three educators. I respect their declining to answer. But a fool can rush in where angels fear to tread.

Does it belong to good college teaching to enable and lead the student to develop emotionally? The question is, I believe, at first answered readily in the affirmative by most of us college teachers and administrators. Yet the more one presses the question, the more difficult and foggy and multiple the question itself becomes. The more engaging and demanding and expanding. More obviously tentative and fragmentary are any answers one comes to. In this essay I report some of my varied wandering on the tracks of this question, some glimpses between mists that I believe I gained and now hold for the moment as true, and some of my resultant, present searching. I report in order to stimulate or suggest further discussion with others, whether you follow my lead or go off in other directions.

A few years ago, an alumnus, successful businessman, wrote Brown faculty urging that they contribute to Brown's annual fund. He wrote of the "impact of outstanding teachers" on him when he was a student at Brown. He summed up the impact simply: they opened him "to the excitement of intellectual discovery." In this alumnus, when a student, Professor Silverman "inspired a passion for intellectual study, a passion that has never abated." Since then I have noted other alumni summing up what they appreciated and carried away from their Brown education. Many times the key word was something like "passion" or "excitement" in learning.

But the alumnus permanently impassioned by Professor Silverman does not have today a passion for intellectual discovery in the professor's field of media studies. I recall a colleague's once telling me that the example of her chemistry professor had moved her to enter her career of scholar and university professor. In medieval literature! Over the years some students have told me I was one of those who helped stir and move them into and in their life of intellectual search and discovery, but for most of them it was not in my field of inquiry. It was often in a field in which I have little interest. We teachers can inspire students into lifelong desire of seeking and finding knowledge while influencing them little as to what concrete knowing they seek.

Of course, the actual knowledge that we college teachers communicate to students is valuable. Yet while alumni often praise gratefully various things they gained at Brown, I have heard few -any?- mention with appreciation for itself the content of their classes, of lectures and study. Gentle probing suggests that they have forgotten most, if not all, of the subject matter required for exams and papers. Not just in my courses either!

In brief, many alumni, as they look back, recognize as still with them and valuable for itself in their ongoing lives not subject matter but modes of inquiry and discovery that in certain Brown courses they grew in and have since made integral part of their lives. These are modes of inquiry and discovery that are passionate in seeking and pleasureful in finding, in coming to know. In this short essay I focus on what motor such inquiry. What passion? What pleasure?

I ponder this passion for and pleasure in knowing that immediately and indispensably moves us teachers (some of us, anyway) in our pursuit and gain of knowledge. I ponder this same passion and pleasure we strive to infect our students with so that the passion and pleasure move them inescapably and extensively for the rest of their lives. As I ponder, however, further questions come to me out of the fog. They confront my search. It seems that I must try to answer some of them first. In this essay I first point to some of them for the reader's own pondering. Then for the rest of the essay I stay with one question for a while and try to map the way a bit towards an answer. [780]

Q. 1: just as knowledge sought and gained is often a worthy end in itself, so, too, is not the passion for this knowing, this passion gripping and driving me and the students in our inquiry, more than means to an end? And this kind of pleasure we gain simply in gaining the knowing, is it not more than welcome aftereffect? Is not such passionate, pleasureful coming to know an important, enriching end in itself, essential, worthy goal for university education, and manifestly worth repeating, living out, rhythmically throughout a lifetime?

However one answer or pass over the preceding question, an equally sweeping, basic and practical question urges. Q. 2: Can one come to any knowing that is not merely useful for further ends but worthwhile in itself if one lack passion for this knowing itself? I incline to answer the question "No!" but at the moment I cannot articulate my evidence even to myself. The question raises subquestions that must be first taken up. I believe, for instance, that the knowings of certain truths of history or physics or mathematics or sociology are not only of practical use but are also worthwhile in themselves and in themselves are worth knowing. But, if I'm right with any one of these kinds of knowing, how can I show this convincingly? Even if only to myself? And, if I do, then how show that such knowing arises only out of passion and always with pleasure?

In any case, there is "knowing" that is not really knowing. The old axiom contains truth: the content of the notes of the professor can pass into the notes of the student without going through the mind of either. What teacher would deny that a student with a skilled ear, sharp logic, minimal conceptualizing and deft verbalizing might pass a course on, let us say, ancient Athens without coming really to know that ancient people and their lives? It is often difficult, if at all possible, for the professor to prevent some such students even from getting "A" for exams and papers. There is "knowing" and knowing!

We teachers know this and work against it in order to communicate genuine knowing to our students. We do so in part by stirring and engaging their passion for this knowing. Our goal is not that they figure out what we want them to think and say. Our goal is that they do the thinking on their own dynamic, in order to come to know what they want to know. We may have some success but we may also find evidence for Voltaire's assertion that the passion for truth, though the strongest of all human passions, is the hardest to arouse. It may come to seem less strange to us that the Athenians put Socrates to death only because he would not stop asking them questions. By his questioning he made them realize that the answers they gave themselves verbally as to why they did this or that important thing-go to the temple, the assembly, the gymnasium-obviously did not hold. They did not know why they did these things and, somewhat to their surprise, Socrates made them face the fact they did not want to know why they did them, much less know whether their motive was a worthwhile one.

Socrates, as indeed Aristotle, Augustine, Luther, Kant, Sartre, Rosemary Ruether, Carter Heyward, and others, lead me to press my search a bit for this kind of knowing which the Athenians and all the rest of us often neglect. It is a kind of knowing for which I and many other teachers strive, for itself and in ourselves and others. I mean knowing of good and evil. That is: knowing what is truly, humanly good in itself or evil in itself. (How can I "strive for" and yet "neglect" this knowing? I'll come to that).

Even in Anglo-American universities dominated by the ideal of disinterested scientific method many of the faculty work to bring about explicitly or implicitly, in themselves, their colleagues and students, more knowing of the evil of such realities as racism, sexism, poverty, war, and of the corresponding goods that these evils destroy or badly diminish. As corresponding goods, I think of in my own department courses on Stoic virtue or Buddhist compassion or early Christian compassion in Syriac-speaking lands or contemporary feminist critique, negative and constructive, of our present civilization.

But not all college professors who teach about, say, racism or poverty or sexual abuse or compassion, would grant that even if only implicitly they teach about these realities as good or evil in themselves. Here is another question for working with and discussion: Q. 3: When, if ever, is it appropriate in college to aim courses at coming to know personal or social evils or goods precisely as intrinsically evil or good?

Yet further do I narrow my focus as I move to another question. Suppose, at least for the sake of argument, that in certain courses, e.g. on sexism or global starvation or child abuse, we professors do want to teach, among other things, something about the intrinsic good and evil of some of the realities we teach about. We want our students, as ourselves, to come to know better this or that intrinsic good or evil. Q. 4: Can one come to any knowing of good or evil if one lacks passion for this knowing itself? Suppose my students' study of such realities is motivated solely by future use of this knowing, e.g. doing well on the exam or pleasing teacher and parents or even in using the knowledge in some further worthy way. These can be excellent motives, but if they are their only motives, it is not possible, I submit, that they will come to know truly better the human good or evil they are studying.

Part of the difficulty lies in human resistance to or difficulty in knowing good and evil. I and others fight readily for some good and against some evil. We believe readily that certain realities are good in themselves or evil in themselves. But are we interested in knowing much of what is this good and evil? Really knowing more of the evil of sexism or starvation or war? Not necessarily. In my experience: not often.

I have come only slowly and very incompletely to recognize that myself and others who over years have combatted doughtily and rightly sexism reflect rarely, if at all, how little we know of its real, live evil and the corresponding actual good: good, human, nonsexist living together of men and women. My belief, my conviction, in regard to sexism is strong and active. My knowledge of the very good and evil that I here believe in is minimal. Yes, after years of reading and listening I know a large number of facts and truths about sexism, facts and truths useful for combating sexism. But how well do I know the very evil of sexism? Not much.

So, too, with heterosexism. If I believe strongly in but do not know what good homosexual living can be, I lack a knowing valuable in itself. My relating with gay and lesbian persons, or correspondingly (in regard to sexism), with women, is impoverished in regard to what it could be. Moreover, my efforts to carry out actively my convictions and bring about in our society more equality of women with men or of homosexuals with heterosexuals may as a result be less effective.

You, reader, may be wondering more and more what I mean here by "know". I wonder, too. But my wondering is not mere speculation. My wondering has grown with a growing number of convergent experiences. I will now point to a few of them and then be silent, leaving the reader to reflect.

Students or others I know who have suffered child abuse have often, intentionally or unintentionally, communicated to me, who have not so suffered but talk on the subject, how little I know the evil of being abused as a child. I know it only a little even though I have become informed on facts, statistics, action to be taken, etc. I find myself talking, e.g. in ethics class, as if I know well the evil. I don't. I may use the same words as they do but I know little what evil was done them and to some extent still lives in them. So, too, with those who have shared with me and my class their being date-raped.

This question about knowing good and evil expands into countless facets that provoke further essential abstract questions. What do we here mean by "evil"? By "good"? By "knowing"? But right now I make myself turn to real, individual experiences of good or evil, such as this human being's date rape or abuse as a child. I turn to experiences that I have not had but others share with me. As I listen, can I learn, come to know, something of what they knew in that experience and now know for the rest of their life? It helps me, I find, to recognize that the knowing here by most of them is of a similar, singular kind. It is this knowing that I want to share and they want me to share. What kind of knowing is it? What characterize such knowing? Passion, feeling, yes, but it is more than the simple passion for knowing I discussed above.

I conclude this essay, not by attempting to answer these questions, but by moving towards answering. I simply list some relevant experiences of evil recounted in class over the years by students or colleagues of mine. I leave the reader and myself to ponder, perhaps try to share, something of these individuals' knowing. And try to trace out characteristics of this knowing. Those of us there listening were helped to share the speakers' knowing because we heard their voice, almost always a tense, intense monotone, as they spoke and we sensed how all of us listened intent, gripped, unmoving.

*Yasher, Palestinian, recounts with muted anger how Israelis evicted his family from home, livelihood and land.

*Deborah describes her attacks of deeply embodied turmoil and pain as her mother, after years of dying, died.

*For years Angela was haunted by shame and guilt, recalling how on a picnic she in drunken stupor was raped by her boyfriend. Only yesterday did anger sweep up in her and she spent a half hour of fantasy subjecting him, with whom she long had lost contact, to various torture and humiliation. She recounted this fantasizing with humor and, she said, definitive peace on the subject. She could move on.

*Alan, a gay man, gave us a dramatic presentation, sad, angry, humorous, triumphant, of what a gay man often experiences from straight men.

*Martha, accompanied to class this time by her husband, recounted her repeated sexual abuse in her early teens by her father.

*Thad, black chaplain, exemplified how racism is underground nowadays, but alive and well: he notices how in an elevator white people put space between him and them that they do not do with white men.

How then does, for example, Thad's words increase a little my knowing the evil of racism? Surely I have had for many years will and passion for knowing this evil? But Thad, standing there quietly, stirred a different passion that moved me forward, however slightly, to know this evil more.

So, analogously, with my other examples referred to above. Could it be that what opens me to know more is not a passion to know anything generally? It is a different kind of passion rising unbidden in me as this person speaks to me. Is it not a passion to share this woman or this man's experience? To know what they know because I feel for them? If possible, to feel what they feel? Do I not get a deep, very bitter sweet pleasure at this knowing feeling for and with this individual?

It is a surge of passion, of feeling, with which I may open myself to this lived evil of the person telling me of it. Even if I thus come to know his or her tragedy a little better, I have come also to recognize how little I know it because I feel so much less than the person sharing with me. Passion is not dictatable on demand. There are human evils that I have had to recognize in talking with victims that I know hardly at all their real evil!

In the present essay, I seek to convey something of the flavor of a classroom exercise that I have found leads to a unique form of experiential learning. I am not unaware of the irony involved in setting out to write a scholarly piece about an experience. When someone asked the late dancer Isadora Duncan what one of her dances meant, she is supposed to have replied, "If I could tell you, I wouldn't have to dance it." Accordingly, my account of what we did and of my students' comments immediately afterward can be at best a pale reflection of the experience itself. I offer it in the simple hope that it may stimulate thought about other experiential approaches to teaching.

I have long rejected the notion that religions are abstract systems of ideas that can be adequately presented and analyzed philosophically. In courses on the Hindu tradition, for example, I play excerpts from tapes of Vedic chanting and talk about sound patterns and their effects on consciousness, as these are set forth in classical Indian treatises. In courses on the Buddhist as well as the Hindu tradition, I show films of evocative ritual and performance sequences and discuss the shared experiences to which they may lead, in the light of broad social and cultural patterns, including prevailing mythic structures.

Another major goal of my teaching is to encourage students to be active rather than passive learners. There are many ways of accomplishing this objective through the skillful use of such traditional methods as lecturing, leading discussions, and assigning papers. However, I have found students' learning enhanced by such non-traditional techniques as setting up a class debate on a controversial issue or designing an exercise in which students participate actively in the process of discovery. For example, having heard that a prominent performer of classical Indian dance would be teaching a class of modern dance students in Brown's Ashamu Dance Studio, I decided to take the students in my methods seminar to witness the lesson. We had just been studying anthropological approaches to religion; their task was to become cultural anthropologists, observing this intercultural encounter and writing field notes on the basis of their observations. The results of this experiment were dramatic. Several students in the seminar had protested, claiming that the exercise would have little or no educational value. However, even the most skeptical among them had to acknowledge its worth when I read them excerpts from their accounts: these were so disparate-even at points mutually contradictory- that it seemed as if the students had not even witnessed the same event. Their own field notes graphically demonstrated a point that I had been trying to make, that ethnographic accounts, which seem so solid and definitive once they appear in print, are in fact conditioned by any number of subjective factors.

Among the exercises that I have carried out, my favorite is one that was inspired by a single footnote in Edward Conze's Buddhist Thought in India. Conze suggests that the Japanese language, with its use of impersonal constructions, lends itself far better to the expression of Buddhist ideas than does English, with its heavy use of personal pronouns.[62] While one might smile today at Conze's cultural naivete, what would happen, I wondered, if a class were to attempt to minimize or even eliminate such pronouns? An idea for an exercise had been born.

I have used the exercise in my sections of Religious Studies 3, "Introduction to Eastern Religions," after the class spends two weeks reading and hearing lectures on the teachings of the Buddha, as these have been formulated by the early Buddhist community. When I introduce the task to the section, I don't mention pronouns. I simply ask the class to list everything that would have to be avoided if we were to use English in a way that does not violate the insights of the early Buddhist teaching. Chief among these insights are that all conditioned things, including states of consciousness, are impermanent (anicca), that there is no unchanging eternal essence in a human person (anatta), and that all things and states in the conditioned world are radically interdependent (paticca-samuppada). As students list words and phrases that imply existents that the early Buddhists denied, such as a substantial self, I write them on the board, and the class strives to speak without using these words and phrases. One of the first to be mentioned is always the word "I," and this is usually followed by the related terms, "my," "mine," and "me." Other personal pronouns invariably follow. There is sometimes debate about the plurals, but it is usually acknowledged that "we" and "they," as well as "us" and "them," likewise contain major distortions. What, though, about the words "it" and "one"? These are usually retained, because they are judged to be less distorting that "I" or "you." Other terms that are sometimes debated are "love" and "hate," but these are usually allowed so long as they are recognized to be transitory states. Substantives as a whole have even come under attack at times: students rightly note that nouns create the illusion of unchanging entities. Two of my favorite substantives to be subjected to such an analysis are "enemy" and "border," entities whose lack of an unchanging substratum is obvious, once one thinks about it.

The reader may well be wondering how the students can be saying anything at this point, now that so many basic elements of the language have been declared off limits. In fact, they do so haltingly and imperfectly. At some point, someone usually comes up with the idea of using impersonal constructions, and the expression "I think," for example, might be replaced with "It is thought" or "A thought has occurred in this corner of the room." Similarly, "I don't like that idea" might become "A feeling of antipathy toward that idea has arisen in this constellation of momentary psycho-physical entities called a person." Cumbersome, you may say. Indeed. But this very difficulty is essential to the experience and to the learning it promotes.

Once the class has identified elements of the English language that are not in accord with early Buddhist teaching, and has struggled for half an hour or so to speak without using these words and constructions, I declare the exercise over. I then spend the last ten minutes or so of the class doing a debriefing. The students' comments point to aspects of their experience that I had not anticipated before I tried the exercise with a class. The first comment is usually about how difficult the exercise was, and how awkward they felt at first. Everyone can relate to this comment, and there are some relieved smiles. The students invariably go on, however, to reflect out loud on deeper layers of the experience. They often express surprise that an atmosphere of cooperation prevailed throughout the exercise, replacing the competitive atmosphere that they say is universally present in their classes at Brown. They sometimes report that they experienced a falling away of ego, and thus a lack of self-consciousness in being conduits for the new ideas that came to them. They tell of having felt a strong sense of peace and well-being in this setting, a freedom from the tensions engendered by competition.

In addition to the absence of tension and of the usual barriers between students, a few students report that they experienced a lack of the hierarchy that usually characterizes the relation between student and teacher. During the exercise they felt that we were all on the same level. My experience accords with theirs: while we were doing the exercise, I, too, spoke haltingly and imperfectly. For its duration, I hardly had the sense of being any sort of authority.

Finally, students report different reactions to the pace of the discussion. Some give voice to their frustration at not having been able to express themselves as easily and quickly as usual. Others, however, say they liked the slower pace, pointing out that the task made everyone think a lot more before they spoke, and that the pace gave listeners time to reflect on what the speaker was saying and to ponder its relation to their own experience. Some especially perceptive students are able to discern a meditative quality to the discourse; I liken it to a Theravada walking meditation in which the slowly walking monk is to say internally, "Now the Tathagata (here, the monk) puts his left foot in front of his right foot, and now the Tathagata puts his right foot in front of his left foot. (A far cry from the frantic pace of life to which students of the nineties are accustomed!)

In a short space of time, roughly half an hour, students have experienced in nuce some of the goals of early Buddhist practice: the falling away of ego, the sense of connectedness to all other persons in the room, the dissolution of class hierarchy, and a certain meditative calm. I make no claim that our classroom exercise corresponds directly with anything that Buddhists do or ever have done. Neither do I mean to assert that Buddhist history has been free of classism and hierarchy. Yet this exercise has served to provide a glimpse of the profundity and truth of the early Buddhist vision.

The experiment has not always worked perfectly. On occasion, a resistant student has disrupted the proceedings, impatient with the slow pace or uncomfortable with his inability to speak in accordance with the increasing restrictions on language. The exercise is vulnerable to such disruption by virtue of its open, democratic structure. The student, however, can usually be prevailed upon to give it a try, or at the very least to remain quiet for the short time that remains so that others may participate.

I originally undertook this exercise as an experiment. The strikingly consistent results over more than a dozen trials have convinced me that it is worthwhile. Students often single it out for comment in their course evaluations, citing its value for helping them understand early Buddhist insights and experience. A unique blend of analytical and experiential learning, the exercise will doubtless remain in my students' memories long after all my lectures have been forgotten.

The classroom has been historically a place for elites to teach the canon-for a capitalist patriarchal society to further its ideas through its own construction- authority. Multiculturalism entered the classroom as a challenge to Western universalism and elitism. We are now taught that the other of an other culture is not inferior but different, and we approach these traditions with respect and deference. U.S. second-wave feminism succeeded in adding women's voices to a male debate, arguing that women's experience was often different from men's, that the perspective of the person was not something which should be shunned in favor of an objective God's-eye "view from nowhere" in favor of arguing from where one stands. Experience stands at the forefront of these battles. When we look at the experiences of other cultures, of other peoples, of ourselves, perhaps we can learn to do away with our false sense of the universal, with our naive belief in objectivity. But is objectivity the only thing we need to question? Is the Western white male universal the only danger in patriarchal culture? Will any exploration of another culture lead to a more open-eyed approach to cultural difference? Will the act of granting authority to women result in toppling the Phallus?[64] How do we deal with these questions, and, consequently, how do we deal with the problem of "experience"?

There are two kinds of experiences that enter the classroom with which we need to deal. The first is the experience of the other as an object of study-of particular importance in the religious studies classroom given the confessional texts and traditions we study. The second is the experience of the self as a source of authority-again, of particular importance in the religious studies classroom, given the existential nature of the subject matter we study. We begin with the first.

In religious studies especially, experience is a problematic category. William James's pioneering studies of religious experience argued from the perspective that one could benefit from studying people's experience. Recent writings in the phenomenology of religion have sought to further James's model by placing experience in its proper context.[65] Some of the most recent writings on pedagogy in religious studies argue for a decidedly experiential approach to studying religious phenomena. One important example is found in Stephen Dunning's recent article, "Autobiography and the Introductory Course." In it, Dunning argues that "autobiographies confront the students immediately with the fact that religions are made up not just of doctrines or dates, but of individuals and groups who are struggling to find meaning in their lives."[66] He continues, telling us that this approach

can provide students with, so to speak, bridges from their familiar world to a new world of spiritual commitments that were previously unimaginable to them. These bridges help students to become aware of how very different alien traditions really are. They do not make understanding of the otherness of others easy, but they can help to make it possible.[67]

The problem with Dunning's approach, of course, is not its use of the personal narrative as a means of exploring otherness; nor is it Dunning's commitment to preserving the otherness of the other. Rather, the problem is the exclusive use of the personal narrative in an introductory course, which will in the long run undermine Dunning's dual goal of connection and respect. In confining oneself to autobiography, one furthers the belief that experience is foundational, thus undermining the possibility for a student to connect fully and adequately with the other. If the only texts read are ones written "from within" it becomes difficult for the student to get inside.[68] Moreover, when seen within the context of an "Introduction to Religions" course, such a syllabus may lend itself to the reification of the belief in a pluralistic hypothesis as found in, for example, W. C. Smith or John Hick-an approach fundamentally opposed to furthering Dunning's dual commitment to connection and respect.[69]

The pluralist focus on commonality between various quests undermines precisely the specificity it wishes to address, for all differences become secondary to the primary shared goal-the human response to mystery, infinity, what-have-you. When differences are approached with an eye towards what they share, what they all share, the differences become only "cultural" constructions of a deeper underlying "reality." To critique this is not to say that there isn't such a reality underlying these differences. Rather, it is to say that when the arrogance of the scholar emerges such that he thinks he can locate this reality, or at least locate its existence, regardless of the unknowability of its traits, difference becomes simply an issue to be understood and overcome, not its own "reality" to be embraced and celebrated. In seeing a single thread running through all the specific manifestations of the shared belief, false universalism overtakes real difference and erases it.[70] Instead of the single thread model, we need an overlapping threads model, seeing various traditions crisscrossing each other in a mutually engaged playing field. When we approach the other with both wonder and interest, with the hopes of making connections, understanding, seeing points of agreement and disagreement, without the hidden agenda of reductionism or "commonality" (another way of saying we are in fact really the same), then true difference can emerge in its positivity and we can engage the other without reducing her to the same. I would call this model one of engaged respect-one which does not enclose the other's experience in an iron cage free from critical-contextual evaluation, but which does allow for a mutually engaged response to the difference of the other, one which allows the other to be other, yet necessitates connection without demanding sameness.[71]

It is clear how much we have learned and will continue to learn from experiential studies of the sort Dunning advises us to read-when couched in the proper (read non-pluralist) theoretical framework. Studying the experiences of a particular religious group with an eye towards internal understanding (which is not to say we are not engaged in critical explanation as well and at other times) is an essential component of our teaching and research. But the second question remains: what do we do when the experience that enters the classroom is that of a student-when the experience we are confronting is no longer that of the other but that of the self, the student-self, when the voice from the class speaks "But in my experience . . . "? Is this a welcome and necessary component of the teaching process, or a hurdle that needs to be overcome?

Questions of experience, subjectivity, and authority have found a prominent place in recent writings on feminist and poststructuralist theory. Charges of elitism, reverse discrimination, complicity, and naivete fly from both sides of the debates. The battle over the place of personal experience in theory is far from over, and while it is easy to take sides, it is unclear where the debate is moving next. The call to personal experience which became so powerful with the eruption of second wave feminism was at first a response to the feigned objectivity engendered by the positing of the male as the universal. As objectivity and neutrality came into question, the move to locate oneself in one's historical and cultural context, the need to "speak from somewhere," became an essential component of the move to undermine the oppression and domination of patriarchal thought. However, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues, as the various political movements of the sixties and seventies progressed in our highly personalist culture, the battle cry "the personal is political" soon degenerated into the belief that "only the personal is the political."[72] The question facing us now is, what do we do with personal experience? The stakes are high wherever this debate takes place-perhaps nowhere more so than in the classroom.

The voice of experience is often invoked to validate a student's right to enter into a debate. This is one of the great achievements of second-wave feminism. The voice of experience can be a significant event in a student's career. Being able to add her own life to the discussion can give the student a new found feeling of control and importance, or competence and insight, which we as teachers need to foster in those whose minds we touch. It can be an especially liberating moment for a student who has trouble expressing his opinion. And given the large number of students who have been historically excluded from the conversations-women, people of color, lesbian, gay, and bisexual students, for example-it is clear that the common discourse which has been formulated over the years is lacking in perspective and diversity. Clearly, we need to be adding the voices of those who have been ignored or silenced. But as experience has caught on as a "place from which to speak" it has usurped other positions, non-experiential ones, and made them untenable. Diana Fuss tells us, "[i]t is the unspoken law of the classroom not to trust those who cannot cite experience as the indisputable grounds of their knowledge."[73] Unfortunately, such a law results in stifling as opposed to furthering conversation. A student is often forced to begin her statements with the words "as a . . ." or, more forcefully, "in my experience as a . . ." A student speaking from his own experience will not accept any challenges from other students, believing that personal experience is itself an unshakable foundation of thought, and that no one else can "understand my experience." Additionally, this belief in the foundational status of experience allows a student to forgo any argument or analysis-experience, she believes, is enough. The once political voice of experience becomes the voice of a particular kind of politics-a reactionary separatist unchallengeable politics that seeks to accentuate difference at the expense of understanding and connection.[74] In this, as Fuss warns, that "contrary to the well-worn feminist dictum ´the personal is the political,' personalizing exploitation can often amount to de-politicizing it."[75]

So, we do need to continue to add voices to the conversation, to diversify the discussion. But should adding voices to a debate also entail delegating out new authority? When we expand the conversation, is our goal a larger pool of conversational authority, or a different kind of conversation? Here we must remember that not only does the privileging of experience often invalidate other epistemological starting points, it wrongly asserts that experience is in fact itself a good foundation for authority. Poststructuralist theory has fortunately taught us otherwise. Through Lacan's reading of Freud and Derrida's readings of, well, just about everyone, we are coming to realize that experience alone is not the key to truth, but that experience, and truth itself, are ideological productions, occurring in the structures of language and society and the depths of the unconscious.[76] We don't really know what/as we think we do. Looking back on her own career as a feminist theorist struggling with poststructuralism, Spivak reminds us, "may [we] not forget to question: what it is to assume that one already knows the meaning of the words" (or the thoughts, or the actions).[77] All our thoughts, even those which are rooted in our personal experience, are open to interpretation, are laden with ideology and the unconscious-we cannot forget this.

Of course we do not want to silence students who are already silenced by the structures of oppression they find in society. Rather, we want to encourage them to speak, to engage, to bring their voice, and yes even their experiences into the discussion. If, in fear of the evils of authority and mastery, we continue to silence those who are already silent, while we may think we are attacking the structures which oppress, we are in fact only buttressing them from another angle. We must be consistent in our struggles and consistent in our attempts to empower those who have for so long been dismissed. Fuss reminds us: "The anti-essentialist displacement of experience must not be used as a convenient means of silencing students, no matter how shaky experience has proven to be as a basis of epistemology."[78]

So, given all of the rights and wrongs of the voice of experience, how is one to go about teaching? In a recent issue of Religious Studies News: Spotlight on Teaching, Robert Detweiler has given us just the direction we need:

the poststructuralist notions of text, discourse, and language might inspire us to rethink the power relationships between religion teacher and student. These are always more complex than one thinks, because many students of religion take it personally, and many of us, at least secretly or unconsciously, like that. I work with many doctoral students teaching for the first time, and their early impressions generally include a version of the surprised comment, "My class takes me very seriously." My response to that tends to be, "Yes, but you shouldn't take that seriously." Why not? Well, because you can then fall into the illusion that you have something special to say, that you have the right, if not the duty, to manipulate your students' lives-an impulse that to my mind is lethal. It is a temptation that religion professors are especially vulnerable to, since the subject matter gets so close to the existential core, and the response, I believe, should be: resist it, and turn the opportunity to exercise power into an analysis of power that will profit your students and yourself.[79]

Detweiler teaches us an important lesson. For that we should all thank him-or, perhaps, better we should ponder what it is for him to have taught us at all. Poststructuralism teaches us that power and authority are not problematic simply because they have been placed in the hands of a select few-rather, they are problematic (which is not to say evil or completely beyond redemption) in and of themselves; it is not simply the "who" that oppresses, but the "what" of the "who," as well.

What's a teacher to do? For one thing, we should remember that we, too, are students, and always will be-and that some of our best teachers are those we set out to teach. Additionally, we must remember that while we must strive to add many voices to a debate previously dominated by a few, we must be careful not simply to reduplicate the oppressive structures by placing them in the hands of the oppressed.[80] Finally, we must continue to remember what it is we are doing when we teach-we are touching minds. I dare not say shaping-that would be arrogant-but I also dare not undermine the power we do have when we teach. If we remember what our task is-to open up new worlds and new ideas to those who want to know-perhaps we may find some success.

-Nagarjuna, Seventy Stanzas

It is a little known fact of Wittgenstein's much heralded life that during the early 20's, shortly after his tour of duty in the Austrian Eleventh Army, he was employed as a primary school teacher in a tiny village called Trattenbach. Disillusioned by the sort of academic dilettantism that he suffered at Cambridge, Wittgenstein entered the ranks of the teaching profession accoutered with an idealistic set of intentions and a Tolstoyan conception of what it would be like to work and live among the rural poor. In keeping with his Tractarian Weltanschauung[81] at that time, Wittgenstein labored not to advance the external conditions of the villagers' plight, but to better them "internally," to impress upon his students the value of educational attainment for its own sake. To his credit, Wittgenstein never abated in his zeal to convey his ideal. However, it became all too apparent to the unwitting students of Trattenbach that Wittgenstein's zeal, instead of confining itself to encouragement and care, dilapidated into impatience and choler. A recent biographer characterizes the situation as follows:

With everything he taught, Wittgenstein attempted to arouse in the children the same curiosity and questioning spirit that he himself brought to everything in which he took interest. This naturally worked better with some children than with others. Wittgenstein achieved especially good results with some of the boys that he taught, and with a select group of his favorite pupils, mainly boys, he gave extra tuition outside school hours. To these children, he became sort of a father figure. However, to those children who were not gifted, or whose interest failed to be aroused by his enthusiasm, he became not a figure of fatherly kindness, but a tyrant.[82]

Indeed, it was not uncommon for Wittgenstein to bluster into insufferable rages or to engage in corporal punishment (e.g., hair pulling, ear-boxing). Ultimately, Wittgenstein was forced to resign (in what would later be called the "Haidbauer Case") when he struck a boy on the head two or three times, causing him to collapse.

This brief sketch reveals not so much the uninteresting truth that corporal punishment is harmful and should be avoided, but how in some rudimentary ways, Wittgenstein's early pedagogy was informed, ironically, by a kind of solipsism: in essence, the ideological reality of Wittgenstein's ideal conceptions precluded any genuine mutual interaction between the students and the teacher, to the detriment of both parties. J. Giles Milhaven suggests that activities such as teaching have been paradigmatic in the Western philosophical imagination of an ideal of self-sufficiency predicated upon the autonomous willing of the individual. He writes,

Models deeply influencing Western thinkers from the beginning were activities such as teaching, sculpting, and ruling. The teacher becomes neither more nor less wise when the pupil learns wisdom from him. The sculptor neither gains nor loses the beauty in his mind when he carves marble. The ruler becomes neither more nor less just by making his laws and decrees just. The ideal is to be as active as possible and as little passive as possible, which means being as little receptive as possible.[83]

The hapless circumstances of Wittgenstein's foray into the field of primary education evince the extent to which self-sufficiency (as a model of activity) may be impoverished in grounding and providing content to the mutual understanding and growth of teachers and students alike. Hence, it is my wish throughout the rest of this paper to suggest ways in which the ever-present pedagogical danger of solipsism, manifest in a variety of forms from curricular myopia to stifling discussions, may be avoided, or at least palliated, through the mutual affecting and interdependence of teachers and students.

Dogen, the thirteenth-century Zen Master, suggested four practical methods (giving, kind speech, benevolence, and identification/cooperation) that bodhisattvas, as people committed to the liberation of all sentient beings, could practice in order to embody nonselfish ways of existing in the world. Just as bodhisattvas are said to transcend transcendence (i.e., Nirvana) through absorption in the liberation of all sentient beings, teachers can analogously transcend their own "transcendence" (i.e., knowledge), albeit intellectually, through their identification/cooperation with students. Although these instructions were originally intended for a sectarian audience, Dogen's words speak with a vitality pregnant with suggestions for our own teaching.

The notion that concerns us most in this regard is the wisdom of identification/cooperation. Dogen states,

Identification means nondifferentiation-to make no distinction between self and others. For example, it is like the human Tathagata who led the same life as that of us human beings. Others can be identified with self, and thereafter, self with others. With the passage of time both self and others become one. Identification is like the sea, which does not decline any water no matter what its source, all waters gathering, therefore, to form the sea.[84]

Identification, however, should not be construed as a literal fusion of metaphysical ultimates. The water is still the water and the ocean still the ocean. Although the relationship between teacher and student is not a "oneness," ontologically speaking, a substratum of equality, even in the midst of difference, undergirds the interactions between the two. As Dainin Katagiri indicates,

... The teacher is the teacher and the student is the student. We have to see equality, but not in the realm of equality; we have to see equality in the realm of differentiation. Differentiation must be formed not in differentiation, but in equality. Then, differentiation and equality are working in identity-action.[85]

Hence, instead of an autonomous teacher, hierarchically related to his/her students, there is an interdependence that is responsive to the needs and concerns of all members involved. In a classroom setting, however, this ideal is extremely difficult to realize because of the tension that is created between the teacher as an authority figure and the teacher as one of many interlocutors in a conversation. If the authoritative aspect is overly accentuated, then we have, as in the case of Wittgenstein, a pedagogical myopia that attends to the needs of the teacher over and against the needs of the students. However, if the relational aspects are too heavily underscored, the teacher's effectiveness, as a scholar and critical voice, can be jeopardized.

Practically, one way that this tension can be mitigated is to initially, as much as possible, enter the imaginative world of the students, seeking to understand their concerns and needs. This first step, if nothing else, ensures that a plurality of voices will be discerned.[86] The teacher can then, on the pupil's terms, try to rationalize how and in what ways his/her views could be inadequate or unintelligible even to his/her internal methods of rationality.[87] Thus, for example, a teacher could, engaging a pupil in his/her conceptual framework of Marxist feminism, question whether there is sufficient theoretical room for the analysis of race or gender, above and beyond their roles in economic production. Of course, dissidence will be inevitable as is the case in any multi-vocal discussion. However, I think that the good faith effort initiated by the teacher will in the end provide a much fuller basis for conversation and dialogue.

Beyond the facilitation of genuine understanding, identification, as intimated by Dogen, furnishes a way in which interlocutors can not only enter the imaginative worlds of others, but also be transformed by them. Thich Nhat Hanh reveals how, at the most elementary level, transformation can supervene upon genuine understanding:

Suppose your son wakes up one morning and sees that it is already late. He decides to wake up his younger sister, to give her enough time to eat breakfast before going to school. It happens that she is grouchy and instead of saying, "Thank you for waking me up," she says, "Shut up! Leave me alone!" and kicks him. He will probably get angry, thinking, "I woke her up nicely. Why did she kick me?" He may want to go to the kitchen and tell you about it, or even kick her back. But then he remembers that during the night his sister coughed a lot, and he realizes that she must be sick. Maybe she has a cold, maybe that is why she behaved so meanly. He is not angry anymore. At that moment there is buddh [lit. to wake up, to know] in him...[88]

Granted, the explicit task of a teacher is not to fathom the personal tribulations that may beset his/her pupils from time to time. However, on an intellectual plane, the dynamics of understanding and identification can secure, through the critical referential function of others' perspectives as well as one's own, a kind of intellectual modesty. There is activity as well as receptivity in the willingness of the teacher to not only give but also to receive from his/her students. Consequently, a mutuality is engendered through the interdependence of teacher and student to engage in and transform each others' perspectives. This cooperative license seems, as a model, particularly apt in our increasingly pluralistic society in which voices often unheard are becoming all too common in the classroom. It is through this "sufficiency of selves sufficing for themselves and each other"[89] that a genuine mutual affecting can take place.

Indeed, to return to the figure who served to illustrate our original problem, Wittgenstein in his mature years came to be regarded by many as a masterful teacher, demanding of his students earnest engagement yet able to illustrate his points so effectively precisely because he could understand their conceptual problems and formulate his ideas knowing how they would comprehend them.[90]

[1] This essay first appeared in A Guide to Teaching in Religious Studies (Stanford: Department of Religious Studies, Stanford University, 1993), 13-19.

[2] If you choose to give out your home phone number, you will want to specify the hours when it is okay to call. I didn't do this at first, and I received calls at all hours of the day and night.

[3] It has been my experience that students in the sciences and engineering are much more attuned to the benefits of collaborative learning than are students in the humanities and social sciences. This is an area that humanists are still reluctant to explore.

[4] An earlier version of this essay appeared in A Guide to Teaching in Religious Studies (Stanford: Department of Religious Studies, Stanford University, 1993), 20-23.

[5] Stephen A. Wilson, "On the Problem of Shyness," A Guide to Teaching in Religious Studies (Stanford: Department of Religious Studies, Stanford University, 1993), 26-30.

[6] For Mark Gonnerman's implementation of peer review, see his "Advice for Beginnning TAs" in this volume on page 7.

[7] These guidelines first appeared in A Guide to Teaching in Religious Studies (Stanford: Department of Religious Studies, Stanford University, 1993), 38-42. The sample guidelines that follow have been updated for this volume

[8] This essay is an adaptation of Megumi Unno, "Writing: The Bridge between Consciousness and Unconsciousness," Foothill College, 1990.

[9] Mary Jane Schenck, Read, Write, Revise: A Guide to Academic Writing (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), pp. 2-17, cites Peter Elbow, "Freewriting Exercises," Writing without Teachers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973); Donald Murray, "Why Write?" Write to Learn (CBS College Publishing, 1984); and William Stafford, "A Way of Writing," Field 2, Spring, 1970.

[10] Schenck, p. 3.

[11] Schenck, p. 16.

[12] This was originally published in TA Talk, vol. 3/2 (spring 1992), a newsletter of the Center for Teaching and Learning, Stanford University.

[13] *Text of a talk originally presented to Center for the Advancement of College Teaching , Brown University, April 1991, and at Connecticut College, New London, CT, September 1991.

[14] FTE-Faculty Teaching Equivalent. An administrative category used at Brown University and other similar institutions to denote one full faculty member's slot for one full academic year. -eds.

[15] Most of what I know about teaching has come from studying with and observing some of the finest teachers in our profession, including Lee Yearley, P.J. Ivanhoe, Van Harvey and Mark Unno (although I take sole responsibility for the views represented here). It is to them that I dedicate this essay.

[16] Jonathan Z. Smith, "The Introductory Course: Less is Better" in Teaching the Introductory Course in Religious Studies: A Sourcebook, ed. by Mark Juergensmeyer (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), pp. 186-7.

[17] Ibid, p. 192.

[18] There are many other reasons to study comparative religion: 1) We are always thinking comparatively anyway. It is not too great of an exaggeration to say that all understanding is, to some extent, comparative. Whenever one studies another culture, period or person, there is an implicit comparison with one's own horizons. We need to have a critical understanding of what occurs in that process. 2) The understanding and appreciation of difference is particularly important in a world (and especially a country like the United States) where different religious, ethnic and cultural groups are living more closely and interdependently than ever before. 3) Anyone who is going to teach at a multicultural institution must think about these issues. Given the student composition of the university, if these issues are not dealt with explicitly, then they will continue to have their influence in various hidden ways around classrooms and seminar tables. 4) We would have no field without it. As Jonathan Smith points out, the concept of "religion" itself is the product of the scholarly imagination. Its foundation is comparative. For a discussion of this, see his Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

[19] The plurality of forms of human excellence can even be illustrated from within one religious tradition (e.g. St. Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, Gustavo Gutiérrez). We should also show the students that religions are not monolithic. By entering into the conversation of a religious tradition, students can see both the diverse nature of the tradition as well as its unifying themes and elements.

[20] For a good discussion of the need to combine a sympathetic understanding that makes the agents we are studying understandable with a critical capacity that can expose the agents' errors and contradictions (in other words, a sophisticated combination of hermeneutics and critical theory), see Charles Taylor "Understanding and Ethnocentricity," in his Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 116-133.

[21] The importance of this point was shown to me by P.J. Ivanhoe in a very helpful conversation.

[22] For a discussion of spiritual regret as a new religious virtue, see Lee Yearley, "Conflicts among Ideals of Human Flourishing" in Prospects for a Common Morality, ed. by Gene Outka and John Reeder (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 233-253.

[23] This is not to say that this method is the only valid way to teach religion. I certainly recognize the importance of other approaches to the study of religion, including historical, political, and sociological, as well as the approach of scholars who focus on popular religion or cultural studies, and/or who come from a post-structuralist perspective. A good religious studies department should have scholars coming from a variety of different angles; their mutual conversation is necessary for the health of the field. I would argue, however, that the approach that I am discussing in this essay is critically important for three reasons: 1) In introductory courses, we must facilitate a genuine engagement with the tradition, which requires a close, sympathetic reading of its texts and a compelling presentation of its world-views, central questions and ongoing conversations. Of course, this is also going to involve a discussion of the tensions and problems within the tradition, with critical perspectives coming both from within the tradition itself and from other perspectives. We must begin by addressing questions before we address meta-questions (e.g. "How is a course on the Buddhist tradition to be taught? Or, as Smith might put it, What kind of decisions go into the making of the syllabus?"). If we start by creating a distance between students and the tradition, they may never truly engage with it. In other words, we should first show what the tradition has meant to those who have lived it, and only then show what we can do with it as scholars. While the other approaches are important, I would argue that they are better introduced later to the student who has already gained an appreciation for the tradition. 2) This approach is something that is unique to the field of religious studies. While the other approaches can be found in departments around campus (in fact, religion is taught in some way in almost every department), only within a religious studies department can a student acquire the vocabulary, knowledge and skills to enable an existential encounter and insider's perspective. Thus, in any religious studies department, this is a necessary, though not sufficient, approach to the study of religion, and perhaps can be seen as the department's distinctive contribution to the university education. 3) What is at the heart of the essay is that this approach can stimulate reflection on the most important issues in a uniquely effective way.

[24] Smith, "Introductory Course," p. 187.

[25] For a discussion of this problem, and how to meet it in the classroom, see Lee Yearley, "Bourgeois Relativism and the Comparative Study of the Self," in Tracing Common Themes, ed. by John Carman and Steven Hopkins (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), pp. 165-178.

[26] Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (New York: Viking Press, 1965), pp. 4-5.

[27] I believe that the failure to truly reflect on one's most important choices for the first few decades of one's life is what lies behind many so-called "mid-life crises"; these seem to happen not only to those who have failed to reach their goals, but to those who have reached their most important goals -- becoming partner, making a certain salary, sending the kids to good schools, etc. -- and then ask, "Now what?" They realize that all of this has failed to bring true fulfillment.

[28] I am indebted to Laura Medin for helping me to think through this issue.

[29] For a detailed discussion of these issues, see Mark Unno, "Levels of Pedagogy and Individualized Instruction," A Guide to Teaching in Religious Studies (Stanford: Department of Religious Studies, Stanford University, 1993), 53-58.

[30] I am indebted to Greg Kaplan for our valuable conversations on Ricoeur.

[31] I agree strongly with Smith when he writes, "What ought not to be at controversy is the purpose for which we labor, that long-standing and deeply felt perception of the relationship between liberal learning and citizenship." (in "The Introductory Course: Less is Better", p. 188; see the discussion that follows on that page).

[32] For a discussion of related issues, see Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig, "Quacks, Charlatans and False Prophets," in Meeting the Shadow, ed. by Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams (Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1991), pp. 110-116.

[33] This essay is offered in honor of Lee Yearley.

[34] Søren Kierkegaard, The Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments, Trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. p. 193.

[35] p. 196.

[36] p. 197.

[37] p. 198.

[38] Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard's "Fragments" and "Postscrip,." Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1983. pp. 100-102.

[39] Postscript, pp. 242-3.

[40] p. 242.

[41] p. 77.

[42] p. 79.

[43] pp. 74.

[44] pp. 358-9.

[45] p. 275n.

[46] p. 243.

[47] If subjectivity is the truth, then investigation of previously unknown possibilities can easily become a waste of time. Climacus writes, "The person who is so fortunate as to be dealing with multiplicity can easily be entertaining. When he is finished with China, he can take up Persia; when he has studied French, he can begin Italian, and then take up astronomy, veterinary science, etc., and always be sure of being regarded as a great fellow. But inwardness does not have the kind of range that arouses the amazement of the sensate. For example, inwardness in erotic love does not mean to get married seven times to Danish girls, and then to go for the French, the Italian, etc., but to love one and the same and yet to be continually renewed in the same erotic love, so that it continually flowers anew in mood and exuberance..." (pp. 259-60). Kierkegaard was no friend to the comparative religionist of his day, but he might come to understand why what I propose is not as pernicious as the "System."

[48] Obviously some positions will have to be rejected as well.

[49] The degree to which this is appropriate depends on the specific context, as I discuss below. For the psychodynamics I describe to operate, however, this retreat to hiddenness must occur in some form. Nevertheless, critical judgments are made and demanded in the context of discussing and writing papers about the various positions presented. One teaches the intellectual virtues inherent in good criticism in the context of more individualized instruction in section and in the evaluation of student papers.

[50] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 464.

[51] Cinthia Gannett examines how the use of journals in composition courses can contribute to engagement at the affective level: Gender and Journal-Diaries and Academic Discourse (Albany: State University of New York, 1992). Although I have never used journals in teaching, I have found that when I offer paper topics allowing for first-person narrative, students with an affinity for the affective mode often pursue these topics to great effect. For example, I have asked students how they might continue a diary kept by someone had they lived longer. One such diary I have used as a text is Pure Heart, Enlightened Mind, by Maura Soshin O'Halloran (Boston: Tuttle, 1994).

[52] Peter Berger, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (Garden City, N.Y. : Anchor Press, 1980)

[53] S. Nomanul Haq in his essay, "Some Reflections on the Pedagogical Challenges of Introductory Courses on Islam," suggests several ways to use scholarly sources that are internal and external to a particular text's religious and cultural traditions.

I return to the problem of applying external perspectives in the section entitled "Comparison and Conversation."

[54] This orchestral metaphor was given by P.J. Ivanhoe while I was a Teaching Assistant for his course, RS55 Introduction to Chinese Thought, Department of Religious Studies, Stanford University, Winter 1992-93. Musical performance itself is an important example of li, but of course this is different from an orchestral performance given by the Chicago Symphony.

[55] David Fryer's essay on "The Politics of Experience and the Experience of Politics" provides multiple perspectives on the relationship between the subject matter of a course and the voice of personal experiences. A consideration of the various modes of appropriating knowledge may provide a means to further differentiate this relationship.

[56] Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 160-161.

[57] The Darker Side of Human Existence-Conceptions of the Self, East and West, Department of Religious Studies, Brown University, Fall 1995-96.

[58] On this point see Sumner B. Twiss' discussion of the contrast between the postmodern phase of religious studies in contrast to earlier phases in his essay, "Shaping the Curriculum: The Emergence of Religious Studies." See also Twiss, "Curricular Perspectives in Comparative Religious Ethics-A Critical Examination of Four Paradigms," Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics (1993).

[59] See, for example, Lee H. Yearley, Mencius and Aquinas-Theories of Virtue and Conceptions of Courage (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990).

[60] Anne Klein, in her most recent book, Meeting the Great Bliss Queen-Buddhists, Feminists, and the Art of the Self (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), explicitly casts her ideas in a conversational framework.

[61] Reprinted with permission from Liberal Education, Fall 1994. Copyright held by the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

[62] Edward Conze, Buddhist Thought in India (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 102

[63] The following is a poststructuralist psychoanalytic feminist critique of experience, authority, and tradition, with Marxist undertones.

[64] The Phallus is the upholder of modern Western patriarchy and its power of domination and oppression. By positing the Phallus as the master signifier, psychoanalysis places sexual difference, understood psychically, not physically or merely socially, as primary. Laplanche and Pontalis on the Phallus:

In classical antiquity, the figurative representation of the male organ.

In psycho-analysis, the use of this term underlies the symbolic function taken on by the penis in the intra- and inter-subjective dialectic, the term "penis" itself tending to be reserved for the organ thought of in its anatomical reality ...

In France, Jacques Lacan has attempted a reorientation of psycho-analytic theory around the idea of the phallus as the "signifier of desire." The Oedipus complex, in Lacan's reformulation of it, consists in a dialectic whose major alternatives are to be or not to be the phallus, and to have it or not to have ... (Jean Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton, 1973, pp. 312, 314)

Feminist writings on the Phallus are a bit more playful. For instance, Jane Gallop tells another story:

Anna Freud was reaching maturity and began to show an interest in her father's work, so Freud gave her some of his writings to read. About a month later he asked her if she had any questions about what she had been reading. "Just one," she replied, "what is a phallus?" Being a man of science, Freud unbuttoned his pants and showed her. "Oh," Anna exclaimed, thus enlightened, "it's like a penis, only smaller!" - A Joke. (Jane Gallop, Thinking Through the Body. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988, p. 124.)

In Lacanian discourse, the status of the phallus, of course, is that of a fraud. No one can be or have the master signifier, and while men still believe in this impossibility, women, already excluded from the fraudulent order, don't.

[65] For a helpful treatment of the various approaches to/in the phenomenology of religion, see Sumner B. Twiss and Walter Conser, Experience of the Sacred: Readings in the Phenomenology of Religion. Hanover: Brown University Press, 1992.

[66] Stephen Dunning, "Autobiography and the Introductory Course," in Religious Studies News: Spotlight on Teaching, February 1995, p. 4)

[67] Ibid.

[68] I will return to this difficulty in greater detail below when discussing the problem of a student's personal experience as authoritative in the classroom.

[69] It is not my intention to suggest that Dunning himself believes in the pluralist hypothesis - his own work radically suggests otherwise. My point is, instead, that his choice of autobiography as the sole text for study in the introductory course betrays his best intentions, and places his commitment to connection and respect in jeopardy.

[70] None of this is, of course, the goal of either Smith's or Hick's approaches. My argument here is that it is the necessary and unfortunate consequence of such approaches.

[71] This is precisely the approach which Irigaray advises we take on the question of sexual difference. See Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. I believe it is also similar to what Ellen Rooney works toward in her brilliant critique of pluralism. See her Seductive Reasoning. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989.

[72] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak with Ellen Rooney, "In a Word. Interview," in Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed, The Essential Difference. Providence: Brown University Press, 1994, p. 155.

[73] Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking. New York: Routledge, 1989, p. 116.

[74] Again, note that I cite the problem of accentuating difference at the expense of understanding, not at the expense of commonality. The point of this essay is not to argue that we must return to the essentializing gesture of the common, but that we must seek to make connections between and across differences - a necessary strategy often sacrificed in the name of the personal.

[75] Fuss, p. 117.

[76] A few brief words are perhaps in order about poststructuralist theory. It is nearly impossible to sum up poststructuralist thought as it informs this paper in a few brief sentences, I will make no pretensions to doing so. However, I will offer a brief sketch of the major commitments underlying this paper. My own brand of poststructuralism comes very much out of Lacanian psychoanalysis and various feminist responses to it. My own ideological preoccupations are with the prevalence of the unconscious, the unknowability of the known, and the impossibility of self-mastery, and, at the same time, the necessity of identity, the usefulness of myth, and the power of the political. These things taken together form a radical potential for social change and political reordering. For those of you wanting to know more about poststructuralist theory, I highly recommend part two of Toril Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics. London: Routledge, 1988, as an introductory text to poststructuralism from a feminist perspective. Robert Detweiler's "Poststructuralism and the Teaching of Religion" in Religious Studies News: Spotlight on Teaching, May 1995, is another excellent, much more concise, summary piece.

[77] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "French Feminism Revisited" in Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, Feminists Theorize the Political. New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 57.

[78] Fuss, p. 117.

[79] Detweiler, op. cit., p. 2.

[80] James concludes that the mystical experience is authoritative only for the one who has that experience. While we wouldn't want to do away with all of the authority that or any experience holds for anyone, we might want to take experience out of its iron cage and open it up to the realities of the psychical/social - ideology, language, power, and the unconscious.

[81] I am referring here to the thread of idealism that recurs throughout the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C.K. Ogden (New York: Routledge, 1992), especially in propositions 5.6-5.64. For example,

5.62: That the world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of the language (the language which I understand) mean the limits of my world.

5.63: I am my world. (The microcosm.)

5.632: The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world.

[82] Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 195.

[83] J. Giles Milhaven, Hadewijch and Her Sisters (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), p. 42.

[84] Zen Master Dogen: An Introduction with Selected Writings, trans. Yuho Yokoi (New York: Weatherhill, 1976), p. 62.

[85] Dainin Katagiri, Returning to Silence: Zen Practice in Daily Life (Boston: Shambhala, 1988), p. 172.

[86] I am tacitly endorsing a Gadamerian view of the cultural/linguistic embeddedness of all understanding. Consequently, an absolute, objective standpoint, capable of adjudicating all disagreements, is superseded by a dialogical encounter between conditioned perspectives (i.e., a "fusion of horizons") that not only constrains but enables the pursuit of truth.

[87] This idea is an extrapolation of MacIntyre's method of adjudicating between two rival moral traditions, where one tradition, A, is rationally superior to another, B, if A can resolve problems and anomalies in B in such a way that B can understand why it cannot solve those problems and anomalies utilizing the intellectual resources available to it in its tradition. See his Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1988) and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1990).

[88]Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1987), p. 14.

[89] Milhaven, p. 45.

[90] To some, however, it was all too apparent that Wittgenstein never became entirely free of the overbearing attitude first manifest in his youth. Dogen, too, has at times been seen as more than a bit cantankerous in his criticisms of his contemporaries. Here it is hoped that we are inspired by the best to be found in the lives and thoughts of these figures.