Curriculum Review: Proposals

A Proposal For a Freshman Level Religion GER (#48)

I. Why a Religion GER?

First, Furman’s heritage, its existing defining documents (The Character and Values Statement, for example), and the public claim that the University takes seriously the need to educate the “whole person” demand a non-optional GER in Religion that gives a central place to the biblical traditions.

Beyond that there are many other reasons to argue for the importance of a religion course as a non-optional GER in a liberal arts curriculum. One cannot understand history, art, music, or literature without knowing something of religion’s role and influence in different cultures. Religion is also a central factor in virtually all the cultures studied by social scientists, and it figures prominently in human psychology. Religion competes with science and philosophy, but for most of the world’s people it remains the lens through which truth is understood.

In the contemporary world, religion is a powerful motivator for both good and evil. It has inspired suicide bombers, American politicians, and Mother Theresa. It fuels war and feeds anti-intellectualism, but it is also at the heart of civil rights movements and heroic humanitarian campaigns, as well as profound thought. Religion also enables millions of ordinary people to find meaning in the face of adversity and joy in the midst of pain. Unfortunately, some of those same ordinary people use religion to justify bigotry, oppression, and even abuse.

Given this, the University cannot with integrity say that religion is a purely private matter that should be relegated to the fringes of the academic program. It is crucial that young people understand what religion is and how it operates in their lives and the lives of others. Developmentally, the time could not be better; most of our students are at a crucial stage in their identity formation, and, inevitably, religion will for most students be important in that process. The academic program should not leave the spiritual formation of students to chance or to the efforts of student religious organizations, many of which are led by young, relatively uneducated individuals who are not employed by the University and who may not be as committed as the University to “freedom of inquiry” and a context in which “faith is cherished but not coerced.”

Neither should the Religion course be an optional requirement. Indeed, there is no area of study about which students are more profoundly ignorant. Moreover, the students who believe they are knowledgeable of the subject, fundamentalists and skeptics alike, may be at once the most ignorant and the very ones who would choose not to take a religion course. Yet, arguably no other course in the curriculum could as effectively open their minds.

II. Which Religion Course?

The proposed non-optional Religion course is most like the existing Religion 12, Introduction to Religion, which contrary to popular opinion, was actually designed and approved as an introduction to religious phenomena using the Biblical traditions as a starting point. It does, however, include comparisons with other world religions, even though it is not intended as a systematic introduction to the world’s religions.

Some would argue that in today’s world an Introduction to the World’s Religions would be a more appropriate choice. As valuable as that course is, its weakness as the Religion GER is in part the very fact that it is a survey and not a course that allows students to see any tradition with the kind of depth that allows them to really know something of each tradition’s vulnerabilities. In fact, I would suspect that most university survey courses of world religions attempt first, and often primarily, to present other traditions in a positive light, avoiding material that might lead students to make a reductionistic judgments about a tradition. On one level there is no problem with this practice, but it does not accomplish what the required religion course should accomplish. Knowing a little about and appreciating “other” religions might make students more tolerant, but it does not necessarily challenge their religious framework. A world religions survey course has a very important place in the curriculum, hopefully as one choice in a list of “diversity courses” required for another GER, but an in-depth, critical examination of the biblical traditions is for most students more challenging. It provides a provocative context for helping students examine and reformulate their religious paradigms. As for the students grounded in something other than the Bible, experience indicates that they not only want to understand the tradition that dominates western culture but that they are also challenged to examine their own tradition when they see the faith of the dominate culture subjected to scrutiny. In many ways the skeptics are the most resistant to such a course, but many of them operate on a false premise that fundamentalism is the only possible religion.

III. The Proposed Course

Title: Religion, Identity, and Culture: Interpretation and the Biblical Tradition

Proposed Course Description: Drawing primarily, though not exclusively, on the biblical traditions, this course explores the nature of religious experience and interpretation and the influence of religion in all aspects of culture. Equally important in the course are the ways in which religious experience is influenced by and interpreted from within a cultural context.

Content Goals of the Proposed Religion Requirement:

• To provide students with a sympathetic but critical introduction to the biblical traditions, including core material taught in almost any academic introductory Bible course, i.e., significant biblical narratives and characters, basic biblical history, literary genres of the biblical books, and the issue of biblical canon
• To acquaint students with the basic elements of the religious traditions that are rooted in the Bible: Judaism, Christianity (Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism), and to a lesser extent, Islam
• Using the biblical text as a starting point, to acquaint students with religious phenomena—the holy, sacred space, sacred objects, sacred story and myth, ritual, Scripture, institutions, theology, ethics
• To give students an understanding of the nature of religious texts, religious canons, and how text-based religion is different from religion based on oral traditions.
• To give students an understanding of the variety of methodologies used in the study of religion

Interpretive and Synthetic Goals of the Proposed Religion Requirement:

• To dispel ignorance on both the right and the left about the nature of religious experience and faith (e.g., to help students understand that science and religion are different undertakings, with different methodology, and need not be seen as contradictory)


• To help students understand that religious texts are interpreted and reinterpreted in different social contexts and that this process in effect reformulates the canon


• To demonstrate the relationship between religion and culture and to help students see how, even within the biblical tradition and its interpreters, power and the dominant culture influences the directions religion takes


• To help students, both religious and nonreligious, understand why religion is such a powerful motivator, one that might even lead an individual to die for a cause


• To help students understand the meaning of religious diversity by first seeing the diversity both within the Bible itself and among the Bible’s interpreters, including Muslim interpreters


• To acquaint students with the ways in which religion is reflected and interpreted in art, music, and literature


• To help students see that rituals and institutions, and not just belief, carry sacred meaning


• To demonstrate the fact that different groups of people see different meaning in the same texts

Personal Goals of the Proposed Religion Requirement:

• To help students see the ways in which their own social location influences their beliefs and religious perspectives, just as they did in biblical history


• To help students see the ways in which different theological perspectives inform their political and social decisions


• To help students recognize what might make a religious perspective problematic or even dangerous, i.e., to give students tools for making judgments about matters of religion


• To encourage students to learn more about their own and other world religions

Sample syllabus: http://alpha.furman.edu/~hlturner/assigrel.htm

Staffing Issues:

It is obvious that a course that attempts to challenge the religious paradigms of students should be small enough to allow for conversation. That alone might require additional faculty. Perhaps even more important, however, is the concern that staffing a non-optional GER course not be allowed to detract from our growing offerings in religions of the world. Consequently, it is hoped that the Peace Chair will be filled by someone qualified to teach this GER.

Posted by mfairbairn at November 3, 2004 11:52 AM
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