World Religions

I'm teaching a months long world religions unit. It is difficult. I want to do justice to these important belief systems yet also have students think about them critically. I can't proselytize, nor should I. Yet, as we break religions down into just their practices and beliefs, we do little to capture what adherents get out of their practice.  Okay, okay, many people dutifully attend religious services only out of a sense of duty to family or heritage. But many others find deep meaning. And that's what is so hard to teach.

Religion is multi-sensory. I happen to be Catholic- a disaffected and deeply upset Catholic, but Catholic nonetheless. On reason I remain one is because Catholics at their best worship with all five senses. There's sublime (and sometimes ridiculously awful) music. There's art, incense, bread and wine and kneeling, standing, sitting and processing. Jews also worship with all 5 senses. So do the adherents of many other faiths. We mainly teach and learn with two senses. Perhaps this is one reason why it's so hard to teach about religion. There's a lived experience aspect to religion that mere words can't capture.

Yet, what's really tricky in teaching about religion is that religion itself, as Ken Wilber points out, has always performed two important but very different functions. For millennia, religion has allowed humans- through  stories and rituals- to make sense of the world, our role upon it, to understand suffering and to explain death.  This is the religion we attempt to teach in our world religion units- the religion that bolsters the self and society. But there's another aspect of religion that we don't even begin to explain. The great insight/ triumph achieved by mystics across faith traditions is religion that transcends the self instead of reinforcing the self. It's the genius of Gandhi and Francis of Assisi and Buddha and Hildegard. Something happened to these people. Yet, today, we're just as likely to call them crazy.

I teach in a school born of a religious tradition. William James called George Fox, the founder of this tradition, a spiritual genius. William James suggested that we study religion through those individuals who "have a genius for religion."  We don't talk much Fox's genius nor of anyone else's, really. Perhaps I should take William James up on his suggestion. But I know I can't. Because it isn't "history". And that's crux of the pickle in which I find myself.