Formation in the Classroom

Abstract

What is the relationship between the academic knowledge of the guild and the formation of students in the classroom? This Forum gathers four essays originally presented at a Special Topics Session at the 2009 conference of the American Academy of Religion (Atlanta, Georgia), with a brief introductory essay by Fred Glennon explaining the genesis of the panel. Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen clarify some of the issues at stake in undergraduate liberal arts classrooms by distinguishing between four dimensions of what they refer to as “the (in)formation teaching matrix: institutional context, course content, faculty roles, and student outcomes. John Thatamanil argues that all learning necessarily presupposes formation. Amanda Porterfield argues against using the word “formation” because it complicates and undermines her teaching goals to historicize religion and narratives about it through open-ended inquiry. And, finally, Mary Elizabeth Moore explores the interactive processes linking formation, information, reformation, and transformation.

Introduction

Fred Glennon, Le Moyne College

The question about the role of faculty in the formation of students, particularly formation around religious and ethical commitments, reemerged in part because of findings in the Walvoord study sponsored by the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion. While students and faculty seem to be equally interested in information (gaining factual knowledge and understanding about religious beliefs and practices) in their introductory courses, Walvoord (2008) discovered what she calls the “great divide” between faculty and students when it comes to formation about religious and ethical commitments. Undergraduate students are far more interested in these learning goals than their professors, a statistic that holds across institutional contexts. Her findings mirror those of the Higher Education Research Institute (2007) whose multi-year study of spirituality among college students found that three-fourths of students were interested in “searching for meaning/purpose in life” and hoping that their college experience would help them in their spiritual formation. Professors on the other hand, the Walvoord study notes, are more interested in helping students to become critical thinkers. Why this disparity?

Some would contend that the roots of these different emphases on the part of many faculty emerge in part from the debate within religious studies about ways to become its own discipline separate from theology and seeking to establish its identity within the university as a fixed field of study, along the lines of the humanities and the social sciences, yet distinct from them.¹ This desire to specify its own identity has created an identity crisis for Religious Studies, straddling the fence between interpreting data religiously (theology) and interpreting religious data (the human and social sciences) (Smith 1988). To resolve this identity crisis, many in the field of religious studies have adopted the identity and epistemology of the scientist,² and see religious studies as scientific, which Donald Wiebe defines as “the attempt only to understand and explain that activity rather than to be involved in it” (1998, 95)³. He suggests that the only way the academic study of religion can be taken seriously as a contributor to human knowledge is through accepting the objective stance of the dispassionate observer that is the norm for scientific knowledge at the university.⁴ Those who adopt this identity fear that any attempt on the part of the religious studies scholar to engage in formation of students could be seen as some form of indoctrination, which Wiebe argues, could have disastrous results for the discipline. “A study of religion directed toward spiritual liberation of the individual or of the human race as a whole, toward the moral welfare of the human race, or toward any ulterior end than that of knowledge itself [information], should not find a home in the university; for if allowed in, its sectarian concerns can only contaminate the quest for a scientific knowledge of religions and will eventually undermine the very institution from which it originally sought its legitimation” (1998, 97).

Not everyone who teaches religion agrees with this assessment. Warren Frisina argues that purpose of higher education is not only the expansion of knowledge, as Wiebe contends, but also “the enlargement of meaning which is the ultimate object of the educating act” (1997, 30). It is here that the humanities in general, and religious studies in particular, can make significant contributions. Religious studies is one of the places where teachers and students ask the questions: Who are we? What can we know? What shall we become? Our literatures, philosophies, and histories have always provided a critical moral and ethical edge and engendered transformative experiences for students. Thus, contra Wiebe, Frisina contends that what we do should contribute significantly “to the intellectual, moral, and yes (though not in the way it is usually understood), spiritual development of our students” and “directly to the overall health and well being of the community” (1997, 33). If we lose these contributions, it is difficult to see how we can continue to gain support from a skeptical public that questions the value of religious studies in the university and, in the face of budget cuts, is placing whole departments of religious studies on the chopping block.⁵

In many ways Frisina's emphasis on moral and spiritual alongside intellectual development for the sake of the benefit of the wider community has been part of the purpose of liberal education since the time of Dewey, who argued that liberal education plays a crucial role in the formation of students for citizenship in a liberal democracy (1966). Former Harvard President Derek Bok (2006) has argued recently that today's colleges and universities are not helping students improve their skills in critical thinking and moral reasoning the way they should which means they are not learning “what they need to know to become active and informed citizens.” The American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has advocated for a return to liberal education's role in forming students for personal and social responsibility, which authors of the American Academy of Religion's white paper (2008), “The Religion Major and Liberal Education,” suggest has always been one of the five foci of the religious studies major.

In addition to a renewed emphasis on liberal education's role in forming students for active citizenship, there has been a significant emphasis on strengthening the teaching and pedagogical abilities of the faculty who are teaching those students, proponents of which often use the language of formation and transformation. Lilly Endowment has played a substantive role in these efforts, particularly in religion and theology. First, in conjunction with the American Academy of Religion (AAR), they sponsored regional teaching and learning workshops which involved hundreds of teachers of religion and theology in fruitful dialogue on best practices in teaching. In addition to those efforts, Lilly Endowment funded the creation and development of the Wabash Center in 1995. The Wabash Center has sponsored countless workshops and colloquies, provided individual and institutional grants, and publishes (with Wiley-Blackwell) a quarterly journal on teaching theology and religion, all of which are undergirded by a philosophical belief that teaching is a vocation and that forming teachers who take their craft seriously will ultimately contribute to environments in theological schools, colleges, and universities where good teaching and learning is the norm. In their view, “sustained conversation about teaching and learning is indispensable for transforming the culture of teaching in a school or department” (Wabash Center 2011). Thus, the language of formation and transformation is at the heart of what they do and hundreds of professors of theology and religious studies have been participants in those efforts.⁶

The confluence of these ideas and developments served as the backdrop for the decision by the Academic Relations and Theological Education Steering Committees of the American Academy of Religion to sponsor a Special Topics Forum at the annual meeting in 2009 with the title, “(In)formation: Religious Studies and Theological Studies.” Members of each committee recognized that there seems to be a disconnection between faculty interest in forming students academically and student interest in spiritual or religious formation. The questions we asked ourselves included: What are our responsibilities for forming our students? Are they purely academic? Or are they also spiritual, understood broadly? Does institutional context play a role in this? For example, seminaries have expectations about the formation of students for ministry. But do all theological faculty members agree with that charge? Or are they more interested in forming their students academically? Is the expectation different in divinity schools? What about in religiously-affiliated undergraduate programs? State schools and private universities may eschew religious formation. But what if a faculty member has interest in such formation, especially since so many of their students, as the Walvoord study illustrates, have interest in such formation? To get at these questions we invited panelists from different institutional contexts to explore the role of religious studies and theological studies in forming, informing, and transforming students. The result was not only a very lively discussion among the participants at the session but also the set of insightful papers that follow.

Formation versus Information and Other Myths of the Religion Classroom

Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen, Messiah College

Religious studies courses and theology courses have their own caricatures. Religious studies courses, it is said, are about “information.” They focus on the knowledge base and skill set students need in order to master the disciplinary study of religion, an objective task meant for persons who have no particular attachment to the religion being studied. Theology courses, on the other hand, are caricatured as being about “formation”– the construction of self and personal identity within the framework of a specific religious tradition. If these caricatures represented reality, then formation would in fact belong in the theology class and not in classes that deal with religious studies.

Most theologians and most religious studies professors acknowledge, however, that this neat division of information and formation does not really exist. Religious studies courses are never solely about information because information has unavoidable formative implications. Every professor picks and chooses which topics to cover and which to ignore, which methodologies to employ or not to employ, and what pedagogical style to adopt – humorous or serious, lecture-based or discussion-oriented, experiential or text-based. This is not an objective process. Whatever information faculty may choose to include or not include in their classes and however they decide to communicate that information to their students, what is being done is not neutral. Rather, the decisions made by a professor about content and delivery inevitably encourage students to ask certain kinds of questions and not to ask others.

The chosen path of most professors usually leans heavily toward the informative. As one of our now long-retired graduate school professors used to say at the beginning of almost every class: “I'm pitching and you're catching.” Today, almost everyone would describe that particular professor as sadly misguided, missing the obvious point that the whole enterprise is about students' learning and not about the disembodied balls of knowledge the professor might fling their way. But that was this particular professor's style – he pitched and we caught – and despite the lack of pedagogical relationality, a significant amount of old-fashioned learning occurred nevertheless. Even in that kind of stridently uni-directional, no-questions-asked, professor-in-charge classroom, however, other dynamics are at work and learning that is more formative and personal will occur. Students can feel liberated or troubled or inspired or baffled or challenged or even “called” in ways that change who they are as persons as a result of the information included in a class.

The professor shapes the classroom experience, but students bring a host of factors into the classroom with them: all the facts and facets of their life experiences up to that point in time. “Learning” takes place when those two worlds meet, and the learning that takes place invariably mixes formation and information. In that sense, formation is always taking place in even the most information-centered courses and classroom settings. A colleague at a major research university had a student in her astronomy class who was troubled by the fact that the course had led her to become an agnostic instead of a confirmed atheist. This was not a religion course, but the complexity and beauty of the universe had inspired such awe in this student that atheism seemed simply insufficient as a human response to the realities she was studying.

Responses such as this should not surprise us. Most of the students who arrive on our campuses come with the desire for both information and formation. In fact, two-thirds of first-year students indicate that they would like their college or university experience to help them in their own self-formation as moral, spiritual, and religious persons. Even though this is no longer breaking news, many faculty members still find it unsettling. Some professors who teach courses dealing with religion react to student questions about personal meaning as if vampires have entered the classroom, and firmly announce “This course is not about you, and it is not about the meaning and purpose of your own precious little life. It is about facts and information, cognitive understanding, and critical thinking.” And students in response sometimes say things like one recent posting on RateMyProfessor: “If given the option of having Professor X for this class or Satan, I would definitely choose Satan. Satan probably has more of an interest in seeing you succeed in [this class] than X does. He most likely has a better personality as well” (Meyers 2009, 206).

Barbara Walvoord has called this difference between student and professorial classroom expectations the “Great Divide” (2008). However, we think that calling the different expectations of faculty and students a “great divide” is overblown. There is no question that “we” (the faculty) and “they” (our students) bring somewhat different hopes and expectations into the classroom. Professors, on some days when we are feeling especially idealistic, envision our courses as incubators of critical thinking: helping our students to interpret evidence wisely, to identify salient arguments, to analyze alternatives, to draw well-formulated evidence-based conclusions, and to present their views cogently. On our more realistic days, we remember that most of our colleagues and even we ourselves can operate at that level of intellectual finesse perhaps only one or two days out of every week. As for students, on their more idealistic days they would like their classes to help them become better, wiser, more caring, and more spiritual people, but that is not every day. Most days, they simply want to know what we expect them to know, and that is quite enough for everyone.

Instead of a great divide, there is actually a great deal of overlap in the expectations of students and faculty. This is borne out in the data that Walvoord herself collected as part of her study. In the somewhat stilted language of standardized evaluations forms, faculty and students are in strong agreement that courses on religious topics should help students to “acquire a body of knowledge” (eighty-four percent of faculty agree with this statement and so do seventy-five percent of students) and to “understand and appreciate a variety of religious beliefs and practices” (seventy-one percent of faculty and sixty-eight percent of students agree with this statement). In our view, those numbers represent an astonishing and very reassuring level of student-faculty agreement about classroom priorities.

If students and faculty both expect that information (acquiring a body of knowledge) is a priority for religion courses, where does formation fit into the classroom equation? Even though we tend not to be fond of postmodern neologisms, we think that the parenthetic spelling of “(in)formation” aptly names the complex and muddy relationship that exists within every learning situation, where formation and information interact in ways that are hard to observe and even harder to predict. Formation and information are mixed in religious studies and theology classrooms in ways that are impossible to fully separate or clarify. This muddy, foggy terrain of (in)formative teaching and learning has only begun to be explored, and as yet there is no unifying theory about how (in)formational teaching should proceed. What we can do, however, is briefly describe four dimensions of the (in)formational teaching matrix that might clarify where some problems and possibilities might lie: (1) institutional context, (2) course content, (3) faculty roles, and (4) student outcomes.

Institutional Context

The institutional context in which teaching and learning takes place is significant, especially when the topic is religion or theology. For example, there are obvious differences between the context provided by church-related colleges and universities and the context provided by public institutions of higher learning. Many professors (as well as many students, parents of students, administrators, and church leaders) assume that while formation may be allowable or even desirable in the church-related setting, it has no place in a public educational setting. While there is some merit in this distinction, we think (as you might suspect by now) that this bifurcation between religion courses as they are taught in public and private institutions of higher learning is another myth. We have found a great deal of overlap in what actually takes place at public and private schools, and sometimes it is precisely the opposite of what might be expected.

During the past few years, we have visited more than fifty colleges and universities as part of a major research project on religion in the academy.⁷ One conclusion we have reached is that the more “formative” aspects of religious studies often thrive at public universities, including many community colleges. Conversely, professors at church-related schools are often very cautious, even quite leery, about intentionally introducing formative elements into the classroom or even into out-of-class conversations with students. To be blunt, it is simply not true that explicitly religious schools (colleges, universities, or even seminaries) are intent on indoctrinating students into the religious beliefs of their related churches. Most of the religious studies professors and most of the theology professors at most church-related schools are as nuanced in their thinking and teaching as their colleagues who took positions at public universities. There is much more that is shared across the church-related versus public divide than anything that distinguishes the teaching of religion at one or the other.

A more significant institutional distinction may exist between those schools that see themselves as “elite” and those that serve a broader spectrum of the student population. Our impression, based on conversations and observations at many campuses, is that professors at “elite” colleges and universities tend to be a bit more allergic to the idea of allowing issues of personal meaning or spirituality to “intrude” into the classroom, whereas less selective institutions are more prone to allow or even invite discussions of meaning, spirituality, and personal religious concerns into the academic learning experience. This is not a huge divide, and we certainly do not want to turn it into a new myth about religion and higher education. In our experience, however, faculty at elite institutions expressed more worries about self-disclosure or “off topic” conversations in class, perhaps because of the risk of damaging their reputations in the high stakes world of tenure and promotion at these schools. But there are signs of change. Indicative of this is a recent self-study undertaken by a group of faculty and religious life professionals from four nationally ranked liberal arts colleges (Bucknell, Macalester, Vassar, and Williams) that was called “Reconceiving the Secular Liberal Arts” (for specifics, see Religious and Spiritual Life 2011). The professed goal of this project is to widen the circle of discussion about a “secular, but not secularist” approach to the liberal arts. The word “secular” in this case is defined as neutrality toward both non-religious and religious views, while the word “secularist” denotes anti-religious bias. This new framing may move faculty at these schools to allow more free-ranging classroom discussions that welcome matters of personal meaning and spirituality. One participant in the project told us that none of the involved schools would have moved in this direction alone. Since they are already perceived as top-tier institutions, any innovation or change poses a risk of lowering institutional reputation and national standing, and undertaking the project as a group made it safer.

Course Content

The myth that religious studies courses are about “information” while theology courses are about “formation” has a corollary: the assumption that student concerns about their own spirituality, religion, values, and sense of meaning and purpose in life ought to be kept to a minimum in the “religious studies” classroom, while they can be happily included in “theology” classes where all students talk freely about what they personally feel or believe. Once again, this is not necessarily what happens in practice. The simple fact is that most college and university classes, even those bent in the direction of human subjectivity and personal meaning, contain significant amounts of “information,” and this applies to theology classes just as much as it applies to religious studies classes and most other courses in the humanities and social sciences. Much of the work that is required in theology classes consists of reading theological texts and trying to understand them. This is an intellectual task – an informational task – and it is only tangentially related to personal formation or spiritual growth. We know many colleagues who teach theology who repeatedly tell their students before explaining a writing assignment, “I don't care what you think about this text, just tell me what the text says.”

What is also true for both religious studies and theology courses is that each has the potential to raise personal or existential questions for students. In fact, religious studies classes may do this more effectively (if sometimes less intentionally) than many theology classes. Learning about the Crusades or the bloody evangelistic conquest of the Americas or the complicity of Christians during the Holocaust – all standard parts of any “religious studies” class focusing on the history of Christianity – can be deeply unsettling to many Christian students who want to see their religion as a force for good in the world, and it leads many students to reflect personally on their own faith. Courses that require participation in experiential learning, with assignments like visiting the worship centers of unfamiliar religious traditions, can also be dramatically formational. The discovery that people and practices do not fit neatly into safe cognitive categories can be profoundly unsettling on a personal level as well as on an academic level. The same sorts of formative experiences can occur in theology classes when students are asked to provide personal assessments of the veracity or livability of the ideas they are studying. In sum, classes in both religious studies and theology have the potential to raise powerfully personal questions for students.

Faculty Roles

One of the comments expressed repeatedly during our campus visits with professors – both in departments of religion and elsewhere – is that they were neither trained nor hired to be student counselors. They are scholars. They are teachers. They are researchers with specific fields of academic expertise. They are not, nor do they have any desire to be, spiritual guides helping students through personal crises of meaning or faith. There are some exceptions to this rule, and we could all name some colleagues who truly enjoy attending to the spiritual struggles of at least some of their students. Yet most professors feel distinctly uncomfortable when they are asked to be part of an intentional process of personal formation for students. This asks the professors to become something for which they have no time (because their schedules are already more than full), no aptitude, and no desire.

In response, most students likely would say “Thank God!” Students are, for the most part, even in their most personal-search-for-meaning moments, not expecting nor wanting faculty to be anything but what they are: faculty. They do not expect professors to be like their pastors or youth group leaders. In fact, they might well respond by saying “I have my own friends, thank you very much, and, other than on Facebook, you are not one of them.” But what they do want, once in a while, is a hopefully more informed and possibly wiser person to engage in conversation about life in general and perhaps about issues that have been raised in their heads or their hearts by the content of a course. They want someone other than another college student as a partner in brief, but intelligent, conversation about what it means to be human.

Student Outcomes

As anyone who has taught knows – and this is perhaps especially true in religion and theology courses – different students experience the same class differently. In Walvoord's book she describes students in religion classes as generally falling into three groups that she labels: “secure” Christians (sixty-three percent), “doubting” Christians (eighteen percent), and others (nineteen percent) (2008, 25). These three categories are helpful in part because they explicitly acknowledge that most American students come from Christian backgrounds, rather than making vague reference to a “variety of religious traditions.” However, a more nuanced and complex typology may be needed to understand the real dynamics of formation that occur in the classroom. In particular, it may be helpful to be aware of the eight student perspectives identified by Nash and Bradley: (1) orthodox believers, (2) mainline believers, (3) wounded seekers, (4) mystical seekers, (5) social justice seekers, (6) existential humanists, (7) scientific empiricists, and (8) spiritual skeptics (Nash and Bradley 2008).

Formation, whether it is understood in terms of being mentored by others or as a form of self-authorship, would likely proceed differently for students in each of these eight categories. No one way of communicating information or of paying attention to student formation or self-authorship will work for students in all categories. No matter how adept the professors may be, we will be effective teachers for only some of our students and not for every one of them. Precisely because of that dynamic, Sharon Parks, who for years has been examining the many different ways colleges and universities help students ask big questions and pursue worthy dreams, says that there is something in the educational process that is far more important than any one faculty member. That something is the “mentoring community”– the mix of faculty and staff – that exists at any given school (Parks 2000). The hope is that a college or university will provide a mentoring community with sufficient diversity that each student can root out the one or two or three people on the faculty or in other roles at the institution who might be able and willing to provide those brief, but intelligent, conversations about personal meaning and convictions that students desire and sometimes need.

In the end, however, most students understand that learning, whether in the more academic sense of that term or in terms of their own self-formation, is their responsibility and not ours (the professorate's). We once attended a meeting that included students, college faculty, and administrators, and a student made a heartfelt comment that has stayed with us ever since. She said: “You faculty talk all the time about what you are going to do to us. How you are going to teach us and mold us and change us through your teaching. I have some unfortunate news for you. You are not that powerful, and we are not that pliable. We appreciate your work, and we welcome (within bounds) your friendship, but we will decide for ourselves who we will be and how we will use the knowledge and skills you help us acquire.”

Formation is happening in our classes all the time, and it happens even in the most un-subjective, information-filled, and theory-driven classes we teach. That is a fact, not a hypothesis. The question that arises then is what to do, if anything, in order to aid, abet, influence, or intervene in that formative process. And the answer is that it all depends, and it depends on a host of very particular circumstances and relationships that, placed in the same situation, each professor might interpret quite differently. So there are no simple and clear answers, no handy formulae for what to do. Hopefully, the simple awareness that formation as well as information will always be part of what takes place in our classes is itself a step toward being more sensitive to our students as human beings and more able to recognize those serendipitous, and even sometimes terrifying, moments when we have the opportunity to be teachers of meaning and not merely teachers of methodologies and facts.

Comparative Theology and the Question of Formation

John J. Thatamanil, Union Theological Seminary

The following reflection is one voice in a conversation (sponsored by the Theological Education Steering Committee and the Academic Relations Committee of the American Academy of Religion) dedicated to comparing the nature of teaching and formation in religious studies departments and theological education. Our question: Is teaching in these different institutional and disciplinary settings, especially as it bears on the matter of student formation, marked by sharp difference verging on incommensurability or might there be considerable overlap? The customary assumption in such conversations is that education in these two kinds of institutional settings is qualitatively different: religious studies departments are committed to information– teaching some body of knowledge – whereas seminaries and divinity schools are dedicated to the religious formation of their students. I argue that this assumption is misleading and superficial. The real question to be asked is about the different kinds of formation that take place in these locations.

In what follows, I write not only as one who teaches theology within a divinity school but more specifically as one who teaches comparative theology. Comparative theology is the pursuit of truth about ultimate matters that draws upon the resources of more than one religious tradition. Comparative theology is not merely (Christian or Buddhist) reflection about the meaning of religious diversity as such. That is the work of theology of religious pluralism. Comparative theology is instead theology done in conversation with the resources of another tradition. Comparative theology is conversational even when comparative theologians work alone reading scriptures or the writings of theologians from a tradition other than their own. Comparative theologians do not pretend that their tradition stands alone in thinking about ultimate matters. Christian comparative theologians are all together aware that Hindus and Buddhists have rigorously engaged common fundamental questions such as the nature and existence of God, the human predicament, and soteriology. In the reflections that follow, I take up the question of formation from the perspective of one who teaches comparative theology.

In his now classic article “Four Pedagogical Mistakes: A Mea Culpa,” published in these pages, Ed Farley argues that to teach in any field – and in his case the field in question is theology – one must make a genre decision about the nature of the field (2005). In his piece, he argues that theologians in general have made the mistake of teaching as though theology is primarily an academic field or science. Farley argues that theology should not be so understood. Rather he calls teachers of theology to understand that theology is a kind of wisdom first before it is an academic discipline: “the critical and creative thinking of the situations of life and world under the perspective of the Gospel” (200).⁸

If that is what theology is, first and foremost, then Farley notes that in addition to the standard practices by which academic theology is taught, we must pay attention to the practices of contemplation that make theological wisdom in this primary sense possible. Put still more radically, apart from an engagement with such practices, academic theology as it is customarily taught is likely to go awry and fail to capture the needs and interests of most students as only a handful are themselves in training to be scholars of theology understood as an academic field. But the challenges to incorporating contemplation into theological education, regardless of institutional setting are, as Farley admits, daunting. He notes that although a contemplative tradition is available in Western Christianities, it has been located in monastic institutions and largely marginal especially in Protestant life. Hence, the way forward is hardly clear.

If one accepts the fundamental conclusions of Farley's arguments, as I do, then what follows for comparative theology? What are the implications of teaching comparative theology if it too, like all theology, must aspire to be a kind of wisdom and not just an academic field? I begin my exploration of these queries with a few theses that I take to be axiomatic:

• 1
  Every way of teaching is a way of formation. The critical question then is not whether instructors should form their students but rather how they are already forming their students.
• 2
  To know anything at all, the knower must be formed such that knowing in that modality is possible. No reality, object of investigation, or body of knowledge is exempt from this logic. To come to know any reality whatsoever, one must assume the stance or comportment necessary for such knowing.
• 3
  It follows from the former two theses that instructors must strive for a measure of clarity and self-consciousness about how they are already at work in forming their students. They must ask, “What do I want my students to learn, and how am I forming my students so that such learning is possible?”
• 4
  Finally, if the three aforementioned propositions are true, it must also be true that there is no way to avoid questions about the formation of the teacher. By what processes of formation has the teacher come to know what she now proposes to teach?

The implications of these claims are striking especially when the field in question is theology and quest for knowledge is directed toward ultimate matters. No religious tradition I teach (Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism) ignores questions about the virtues and qualities of the exceptional teacher. Advaitins, for example, specify explicitly just what virtues, disciplines, and dispositions the teacher must possess if he – and traditionally, it was always he – is to be a qualified teacher of non-dual liberating knowledge. The same can be said about the Buddhist tradition and certainly also about the monastic communities within Christian tradition.

To teach theological material in the face of such claims is to find oneself in an extremely complex pedagogical situation because the materials taught – the traditions themselves – customarily insist on particular formative regimes and disciplines if transformative truth is to be known and understood. The requirements are often explicit and detailed: scripture reading, prayer, meditation, liturgy, or karmayoga– sit here, stand there, do this, and only by doing so can you become capable of genuine understanding. If such claims are taken seriously, teaching religious traditions might well be more akin to teaching an art form like dance or acting than we usually imagine. Religious knowledge – rather than knowledge about religious traditions – can be gained only by somatic teaching and learning. Such knowledge, like the arts of dance and acting, requires embodied knowing. One cannot read about dance and hope to find that one has thereby become a dancer. To teach Buddhism or Vedanta – as traditions of theological wisdom rather than as more or less systematic networks of propositions – is not very different.

It is just at this fraught juncture that we who teach either in religious studies departments or divinity schools find ourselves insisting that we do not teach religion. We teach about religion. Admittedly, a claim of this sort is more easily and understandably made in religious studies departments than in a divinity school or seminary, but the difference is not qualitative. I have been teaching at Vanderbilt University Divinity School, which is not a denominational seminary.⁹ We have chapel but chapel is not required. We have agnostics and a growing variety of persons from non-Christian traditions represented on the faculty and in the student body. I mention these institutional particularities in order to indicate that although many features of our common life are indistinguishable from those which might transpire at a seminary, our pluralistic and non-denominational character and the fact that we offer masters and doctoral programs in religious studies means that our situation is not different in kind than life in most religious studies departments. Given such a complex institutional location, the proposition that our primary business is teaching about religion rather than teaching religion is an appealing prelude to the corollary claim that we do not mean to form our students but rather to inform them.

However tempting such claims may seem, they strike me as disingenuous. Even the scholar who teaches religious studies as a putatively neutral and objective science is committed not merely to teaching a body of knowledge but rather to teaching research practices and cultivating scholarly habits of mind and virtues that prepare students to generate new knowledge rather than merely to memorize discrete bits of information about religious traditions. If the liberal arts truism – we teach students how to think rather than what to think – is indeed true, then all teaching is formative and not merely informative. That this is so is especially clear as students move into advanced work in the religious studies major and still more so as these same students enter graduate school. The vital question then is not about whether religious studies scholars and theologians form their students but about the nature of the formative processes in question and their end product, namely what the fully formed scholar looks like when training is completed. In an era in which the myth of objectivity has been disclosed as just that – when even ethnographers refuse to adopt a posture of disinterested and detached observation and embrace instead the role of observing participant – the sharp dichotomy between a putatively neutral and scientific study of religion and the believing scholar's theological study of religion proves to be unpersuasive. The real conversation to be had concerns the formative intentions that drive teaching and learning in our different institutional contexts. What are the capacities and virtues that a properly formed student should exhibit at the culmination of graduate training?

As a comparative theologian, I want my students to exhibit a number of virtues:

• • 
  An empathetic appreciation for and even love of traditions other than their own and a willingness to learn from them.
• • 
  A theological desire to know more about the nature of ultimate reality by learning from Hindu and Buddhist texts and practices.
• • 
  An interhuman and theological desire to meet persons from other traditions with more than a narrowly anthropological or reductive gaze.

The desire to inculcate such virtues in my students has meant that I must make some effort to teach them how to learn from other traditions by taking up the modes of learning commended by the traditions themselves. Such a commitment has come to mean that I include elementary forms of guided meditation in my comparative classes. I find it impossible to talk about mindfulness or insight in a Buddhist key without introducing my students to practices that Buddhists themselves commend for generating such insight. In some cases, this has meant co-teaching with persons from other traditions. But that is not always possible. Hence, this constraint has meant that I must learn forms of mindfulness practice in order to teach them myself. This commitment has in turn meant a greater involvement in the life of Buddhist communities of practice so that I can authentically learn and thereby teach what it means to see and experience the world from a Buddhist perspective.

This mode of participatory learning and teaching is not different in kind from the kinds of participant-observer or observing-participant learning that take place in much contemporary ethnography and religious studies. Moreover, many religious studies scholars and ethnographers are now acutely sensitive to the danger of reducing persons and communities under study to the status of native informant rather than as co-producers of knowledge. Those committed to avoiding an older and scientistic reductionism should find no great difficulty in entertaining the comparative theologian's further gambit: what Buddhists or Hindus say about the nature of reality might not only be interesting and important for the sake of improved knowledge about the human in general or cultures in particular, but some of these claims might actually be true! Moreover, if a variety of scholars now agree that the meaning of cultural forms of life can be understood not only by practices of reading but also by immersion and practice – I am thinking in particular of Loïc Wacquant's (2003) now famous study of the life of an inner city boxing club in which he did not merely observe life therein but became a boxer himself – then the time has come to leave aside the simplistic and overly neat distinction between information and formation, between religious studies and theology, most especially comparative theology.

The Problem of “Formation” for Historians Teaching Religion

Amanda Porterfield, Florida State University

As an historian of religion, I would never use the word “formation” to describe my work with students because the word connotes expectations of spiritual development that would complicate my primary goal of open-ended inquiry, and possibly undermine it. Often associated with Catholic moral philosophy (for example, see van Kaam 1983–1992; O'Malley, Padberg, and O'Keefe 1990; Conn 1989; and Meisner 1984), the concept of spiritual formation through academic coursework in religion is not uncommon in the United States, especially at institutions of higher learning with strong religious missions (Porterfield 2001). Expectations about student formation tend to presuppose a hierarchical structure or pathway of moral development. They also tend to presuppose a normative code of emotional expression that elevates empathy above skepticism and dispassion. Commitment to student formation obliges instructors to take responsibility for student growth according to these norms.

As an historian of religion at a state university, my primary goal as an instructor is to teach students how to historicize religion, and narratives about it. By historicizing religion, I mean situating religious events and interpretations in their historical contexts in order to analyze religious expression as a mediator of identity, social construction, and historical change. I take my students to be responsible for their own beliefs and feelings and try to give them space to think through any dilemmas that this historicizing approach to religion might occasion. Acknowledging that personal feelings and religious beliefs may well trigger important questions and insights about course material, I explain that they will not be evaluated on their feelings or beliefs, however, but rather on their ability to analyze the operations of religious feeling and belief in the world, or at least in the piece of the world we are considering in class. I hope that learning to think historically will help students think about everything more critically, but I do not know what impact it will ultimately have on their personal lives, and do not think it is my place to attempt to control that impact.

From what I hear in class discussions and read in assigned papers, my students are not digesting course material in any uniform way as far as their own religious beliefs and feelings are concerned. For me to work toward harmony at that level would work against their own intellectual independence and creativity. It would also sidetrack my primary goal as an instructor, which is to help students investigate religion's role in mediating identity, expression, and change. That work is difficult enough without confusing it with agendas of spiritual or moral formation. As a result of such confusing, the worthy effort to understand how religion operates in the world can be subverted.

I do not mean to imply that historians of religion, and students learning to be historians of religion, are bereft of moral principles. Nor would I deny that people's outlook on the world and themselves may be transformed by learning to think critically about sources and received narratives. But to confuse the student with the work the student is doing can be counterproductive; foregrounding the importance of the student's personal development encourages emotional reaction, preempts dispassionate judgment, and diverts sustained inquiry into how religion operates in the world. Related to all of these problems is the imposition of religion on the study of religion; pedagogy that incorporates expectations of spiritual formation into the academic study of religion develops according to a normative template tied to religion itself.

In teaching undergraduates, instruction in the historical study of religion is basic, though not necessarily easy. I find it important to repeatedly discuss what historicizing religion yields, and to give assignments that engage students in that practice. While I hope these assignments stimulate self-reflection, and suggest that self-reflection may help them find a topic to write about, I also make it clear that self-reflection will not fill the assignment; they will have to explain how religion works in an assigned text or set of events apart from themselves.

In many cases, undergraduates come to religion courses simply expecting information about distinctive characteristics of particular religions. Some want their own religious views confirmed and expanded; others are looking for answers and new information. It is often obvious that students have their own projects of self-formation well under way. In working at assignments that require them to focus on larger historical forces mediated by religion, they have to reach outside of categories that revolve around self-definition. In the area of American religious history where my courses are situated, students may find themselves analyzing political, economic, and emotional forces that condition their own identities and personal development.

The work of graduate teaching in American religious history operates at a more advanced, professional level, but is no less geared toward detachment and skeptical inquiry. In our graduate program in American religious history at Florida State, the students are young scholars who have already chosen to undertake historical studies of religion in the U.S., and who are already primed to investigate the explanatory power that can result from analyzing religion as a medium of historical expression and change. Their investigations proceed through analysis of how other historians have dealt with religious events, people, and sources, as well as through primary research into religious events, people, and sources. In historiographic work, the goal is to identify the contributions that particular historians have made to the advancement of knowledge about American religious history, and also the underlying premises driving their narratives. Underlying premises favor certain kinds of sources and lines of questioning, and downplay or exclude others. In the historiography of American religion, these premises have often been theological. Operating within narratives about American religious history, theological agendas draw readers into processes of religious formation. Graduate seminars work toward discovering those agendas and understanding their implications and impact as fully as possible.

To the end of identifying the historian's task with respect to narratives driven by theological assumptions, let me clarify how I am defining theology, its role in the historical development of religious studies, and the underlying historical conflict that has existed between religious studies and historicizing analysis. I understand theology to be the advancement of normative claims about life that are contingent on authority or inspiration based in transcendent reality. By transcendent reality, I mean something believed to supercede or fundamentally condition material reality and historical events. Theology is sometimes part of the academic study of religion, and sometimes not. Under the large umbrella of academic studies of religion, scholars employ a variety of different methodologies ranging from numerous forms of outright theological analysis to, among other things, full-bore historical study of religious movements, people, and events.

Under this large umbrella, there exists a distinctive and what I would call classical form of religious studies that is something like a discipline in itself, one that incorporates historical research to a certain extent but is finally theological in its goals and assumptions. I refer to it as “classical” to signal its importance in defining the academic study of religion at the crucial stage of its rapid growth after World War II, when the Chicago School associated with Mircea Eliade provided a model for religious studies emulated in many other institutions. This classical form of religious studies has developed in close conjunction with spirituality, and is often an encouragement to it. I work against the practice of religious studies in its classical form, which assumes that religion is a universal phenomenon, which I take finally to be a liberal theological claim that takes people along trajectories of sympathetic projection that subvert historical analysis.

Religious studies in its classical form went through many iterations predicated on an underlying, driving belief that religion was a universal phenomenon with countless particular instances inviting comparison and relative equivalency. Often dependent on notions of transcendental consciousness associated with neo-Kantian continental philosophy, religious studies in this narrower sense took the impulse to religion to be part of the human condition and thus in the last analysis ineradicable and ahistorical, however much subject to modernizing forces shaping its expression this impulse might be. In important ways, this classical religious studies approach called on religion to do the work of God. Embedded in every historical context imaginable, religion in this methodology operated as a place holder for apperceptions of the numinous reality beyond human perception and rationality. Religion's utility as a surrogate for God and defense against atheism were only two reasons for holding onto a universal understanding of the term. There were also more progressive reasons for employing religion as a universal category. With Diana Eck's work in mind as a strong example (2001; also see The Pluralism Project at Harvard University 2011), I see religious studies in this quasi-theological sense as a kind of labor that serves a higher end of promoting tolerance, an end that works to minimize absolutist claims about religious truth any one group might make. Religious studies in its classical form invites respectful understanding of different religions as expressions of the best and deepest parts of human nature, to be appreciated as one might appreciate different types of music or styles of visual art. By treating religions as ultimately on a par with one another as expressions of a universal human quest for meaning, practitioners of this methodology emphasize the positive aspects of religion and encourage forms of spirituality that highlight attractive aspects, often in combination with one another in a way that assumes that religion, in its essence, is good. This “let a thousand flowers bloom” sensibility often lifts up religion and religious freedom as essential components of democracy. Inadvertently or not, this appreciation of religion carries forward, in a new key, long-standing protestant rhetoric about religion as essential to American freedom and national strength.

As it developed in the U.S., this quasi-theological approach to religion was strongly tied to liberal protestant institutions and also to modern efforts of global outreach and ecumenism supported by protestant institutions. My purpose is not to denigrate this approach, the institutions that have supported it, or the purpose of teaching empathy and tolerance, but to distinguish this approach from full commitment to the historicizing process and to show how it protects religion from analysis as a mediator of larger social forces and powerful emotional drives. While religious studies in the classical sense often employed historical research, its final goal was not historical inquiry for its own sake, or open-ended historical analysis. Its goal is promoting tolerance, empathy, and last but not least, religion.

Different enterprises associated with the academic study of religion can and do coexist in Departments of Religion and Religious Studies, and each has numerous subdivisions. While each of these trajectories operates with its own assumptions and purposes, scholars who work in different tracks can respect and benefit from each other. That said, as someone who attempts to be an historian of American religion, I think it important to confront the fact that conflicting agendas operate within the academic study of religion. The clearer we are about the implications of these agendas and the interests they serve, the better prepared we are to identify the most pressing needs in teaching and research in the academic study of religion, and shape our programs to meet them. With regard to the future, building on the gains made in historical studies of religion is one way to foster the skills and habits of critical thinking that people need.

Unfettered and open-ended commitment to the historicizing process locates religious events in their social, intellectual, and emotional contexts without making empathy a requirement or seeking to represent religious events and people at their best. Investigating changes over time as they occur in particular historical contexts, and religion's role in mediating those changes, is a worthy end in itself. It is especially so given religion's enormous power in the world. In the past, the distinction between such efforts to fully historicize religion and what I am calling religious studies in its classical form was obscured by the term “history of religion” which the Chicago school associated with Eliade appropriated to describe investigation of religion as a universal phenomenon manifest in countless different historical guises. This confusion may not be a thing of the past but, in my experience, it has diminished considerably.

The practice of historicizing religion has a dissolving effect, subjecting implicit as well as outright claims to authority to historical inspection with respect both to their sources and to their operations and effects in social, intellectual, and emotional life. Historians break down beliefs about transcendent reality into social, intellectual, and emotional components as they change over time, trying to understand how beliefs are spread, sustained, and deployed through institutions and organizations, and through practices like writing, reading, lecturing, listening, singing, praying, feeding the poor, condemning opponents, saving sinners, and other means of expression, communication, and religious performance. To emphasize the dissolving effects of historicizing religion is not at all to imply, however, that the sum of the various factors feeding and resulting from any religious event is equal to the whole. Religious events often take on a life of their own in ways that alter the social, intellectual, and emotional conditions out of which they emerged.

Historical investigations into religion have many things to commend them. They develop historical knowledge about events in the past, and about the role that religion has played in those events, and it is hard to imagine how anyone could have too much of that. They also develop understanding of how individuals and groups change over time, and of the role that religion plays in conceptualizing the past and determining the future. Critical scrutiny of sources, evaluation of evidence, and attention to historiography all serve to sharpen analytical skills. Thinking historically about religion also develops respect for honesty and intellectual courage. If I had to defend historical research as a means of developing moral character in students, I would point to the appreciation of scrupulous honesty that historical research fosters and to the intellectual courage involved in rigorous study of religion's role in society. I would also point out that religion is often an obstacle to honesty and intellectual courage, which is one more reason why linking the academic study of religion to the religious formation of students is a bad idea.

Because they invite open-ended reflection, historical investigations into religion prompt insight into how the past might have been different, how accidents or individual bravery or group prejudice conditioned religious events, and how religion may operate in our own social environments and emotional lives. Open-ended reflection and willingness to ask skeptical questions are not the only things a liberal education has to offer, but they do play a crucial part, and the historical study of religion is an important component of that education. Because skeptical inquiry and open-ended searches for historical understanding are easily subverted by theological assumptions, I try to help students put those theological assumptions aside if they can, not necessarily forever, but in the context of the historical work I ask them to undertake.

To offer a very general illustration of what I mean, let me take as an example claims about American exceptionalism, and how difficult it has been to fully historicize them. Such claims have persisted from the seventeenth century until today, and they often involve religion, from outright claims about America's pivotal role in providential history to celebrations of American religious freedom as the epitome of democracy. Commentators on American religion have often seen problems in American history through the filter of some form of religious belief in that exceptionalism. Some Americans have endorsed the idea of God's assignment of a redemptive role in history to America and pronounced judgments against American corruption and immorality in line with God's judgments against Israel described in the Bible. Others have endorsed the notion of the two kingdoms of church and state, with the American nation privileged above others because of the freedom the U.S. has extended to Christians.

More subtle still is the celebration of religious pluralism as a unique American ideal, an achievement in progress, and one that requires the constant vigilance of respect for religious difference. “Learning to hear the musical lines of our neighbors,” writes Diana Eck, “their individual and magnificent interpretations of the themes of America's common covenants, is the test of cultural pluralism.” For Eck, religion is the music of democracy, the ground upon which American democracy will succeed or fail. “Our challenge today is whether it will be jazz or simply noise, whether it will be a symphony or cacophany.” This promise of American religious achievement has enormous consequences for the world, Eck believes, and she calls all Americans to action in behalf of a pluralistic but essentially religious society: “as we move into the new millennium we must find ways to make the differences that have divided people the world over the very source of our strength here in the U.S.” (2001, 58–59, 25).

For Eck as for proponents of Christianity in America, American exceptionalism hinges on religion, and the flourishing of America depends on the flourishing of religion. Once we begin to recognize this intellectual dynamic, and see it in a variety of different guises, we can begin to analyze it and its powerful effects. Rather than allowing a theological interpretation of religion in American history to catch us up in its sweep, we can begin to question where it came from, who deployed it, and what interests it serves. In addition to opening up the power of religious beliefs about American exceptionalism to systematic study, we could also focus on the limits of that power, and the American people and events that operated outside of it. We might begin to conceive of religion in the U.S. as a cloak for larger forces of global change, many of which have been cruel and violent.

Historical analysis of religion demands penetrating skepticism with respect to religious assumptions buried within interpretive schemes as well as with respect to overt claims made about religion. But historical analysis of religion is not nihilism. Commitment to advancing understanding of the past is an end in itself, and one that strongly affirms the importance of intellectual curiosity, close scrutiny of historical claims and sources, and the art of narrative construction. By defending the skeptical aspect of historical investigation I do not mean to imply that the narratives historians craft are value free, or not driven by underlying agendas, but rather than their purpose is to understand the nature and power of values and agendas. Historians are as located in particular historical situations as anyone else and the narratives they construct about religion are as much for their own time as they are about the past. They are as subject to skeptical analysis as anything else.

(In)formation and Beyond: Religious and Theological Studies

Mary Elizabeth Moore, Boston University School of Theology

A query into (in)formation highlights a popular bifurcation between information and formation in education, which is problematic in both religious and theological studies. The dichotomized language is illusory, implying that information and formation are separable. It is also limiting, narrowing the scope of religion and education, both of which require a wide range of knowing in their most full-bodied forms. These points are already made in this issue by John Thatamanil and Douglas and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen. My intent is to explore the curious relationship between religion and education, and to probe a wide range of knowing in religion and theology, recognizing the potential of education to tap into that full range.

When one problematizes dichotomies, one critiques dominant cultural assumptions about the purposes of education. Such assumptions are highlighted when religious and theological studies are separated into radically different genres of study, but the assumptions are also found within each genre. As a theological educator, I will focus particularly on the presence of bifurcating assumptions within the study of theology; however, as a teacher in joint doctoral programs for three decades, I see many parallels in the study of religion. Dichotomies surface in the classification of disciplines and courses. Courses focused on textual analysis, history, theology, and ethics are assumed to be information-based. Courses focused on religious practices, histories of a particular denomination or tradition, or internships are assumed to be formation-based. Such assumptions deny the inevitable formative influence of the former and the intellectual content and questions of the latter. I suggest that any simple bifurcation is flawed, a point that has been made by numerous feminist scholars. I would add that all courses in theological and religious studies are informative, formative, and more. I suggest that they are also reformative and transformative. The critical question is not whether each area of study performs these roles, but how.

Curious Blending of Elements in Religion and Education

The pattern of blending diverse ways of learning and knowing is prevalent in religious traditions through time, as it is in education. The blending occurs in diverse forms and with diverse assumptions; however, the blending itself reveals the curious mixing of information and formation, reformation and transformation.

The blended elements of knowing can be found in texts from diverse traditions, but I will explore one briefly to uncover how, even within a religious tradition, information and formation are intertwined. Facts found in the world interplay with interpretive ideas and affective responses. Consider Psalm 19 from the Hebrew Bible:

The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims [God's] handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. . . . The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul; More to be desired are they than gold, . . . sweeter also than honey. . . . (Psalm 19:1–2, 7, 10, NRSV)

This psalm engenders wonder in the face of knowledge. Such wonder led Jews in some times and places to introduce their children to learning by painting large Hebrew letters with honey and inviting their children to taste the sweetness of the letters (Alexander 2001). The wonder of the Psalm stirs pictures of the heavens telling the glory of God and the earth proclaiming God's handiwork. Days pour forth speech, and nights declare knowledge. The Psalm calls forth images of sunrises and sunsets, mountains and valleys, waterfalls and ocean waves. It also evokes the wonders of ecological systems in which plants and animals and sun and rain support one another in their complex, interactive lives. The pictures also evoke tragic images in thoughtful readers and raise sharp questions about flooded valleys, earthquake-destroyed cities, and war-ravaged countries.

Psalm 19 is religious language in a particular tradition, with a long trajectory of interpretation within Judaism and Christianity. The point here is a simple one, however. The Psalm, as much of religious poetry and prose, communicates the wonder inspired by learning. In the view of the psalmist, people can learn from all aspects of the universe and from the law of God that stands under everything. Most colleges and universities make no such religious claims, but they still might be called “sacred” sites insofar as people meet wonder in the biology lab, the poetry class, and the library stacks when they are researching the social history of a once obscure country. They are sites where people stretch their abilities to relate with others, to ice skate as they never have before, to work together on the soccer field or basketball court. This comparison between academic pursuits and the knowledge addressed in Psalm 19 could be elaborated with far more nuance; however, the resonances are striking.

In Medieval Europe, Christian religious orders founded universities to educate clergy and public leaders and to spread knowledge as far as people could imagine. Between the early seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, Christian leaders in the United States founded colleges and universities for similar reasons. They often built university libraries to resemble Gothic cathedrals. The Yale University Library even has a long aisle leading to what resembles a high altar, where the circulation desk sits. Consider the awe inspired by this early library architecture of Yale University, Bowdoin College in Maine, or the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England. Consider also the Cathedral of Learning in the University of Pittsburgh, a Late Gothic Revival structure that houses faculty offices and classrooms. These architectural adventures have served diverse purposes in diverse contexts, and the people who built these buildings had varied intentions. Certainly the people who teach in them now do not commonly associate their work with religion or sacrality. The major point here is simply that the buildings did (and do) blur the boundaries between academic study and religious aesthetics. They visually connect universities with religious traditions or values, and thus suggest the sacredness or wonder of learning and deep connections between intellectual inquiry and religious impulses.

We can critique these practices of interlocking religion and academic study. We can argue, for example, that such practices are Eurocentric and they have fed the hegemony of Christianity in the United States and other parts of the world, communicating that Christianity was the only religion of a land. On the other hand, the same people who were passionate in their religious lives were often passionate in their search for scientific truth, poetic beauty, and anthropological understanding, and they were passionate about the wellbeing of the world. Further, scholars who made scientific discoveries or studied ancient literature or astronomy often experienced moments of sacred awe, whether or not they associated such moments with religion. In many parts of the world and many different religious contexts, students and scholars did associate their wonder with faith.

Probing

So where does wonder lead? I suggest that knowing leads to wonder and wonder leads to probing. Probing is a natural human act that takes many forms, and it is a shared activity of theological and religious studies, indeed of all education. We probe why a tragedy happened or why someone acted the way they did. We probe frontiers of neuroscience and frontiers of the universe, searching the planets and other distant bodies. Boston University, for example, was founded by religious people who cared about clergy education and public leadership. The founders were abolitionists who wanted to further justice in the United States. The University is still today bound by a common passion to discover and create knowledge, to probe questions deeply, and to cultivate good living. A modern university, as an open institution, does not ground its intellectual probing in a theological position on God and knowledge. Yet, probing is itself an act of wonder – caring enough to dive as deeply as possible into a pool of knowledge. As Bernard Meland argued more than fifty years ago, the act of probing beyond the obvious is critical to higher education. It is the pathway by which people discover the “deeper import” of what they are studying; they discover wonder (1953, 28).

The act of probing is also socially functional. It is a never-ending quest that encourages people to continue learning, wondering, and questioning. According to modern neuroscience, this is good for the health of the human brain, as well as for deeper understanding of the world (Chen, Sanaiha, Lynch, and Gall 2010). Authentic probing leads to insight and to further probing. Probing is also an antidote to foolishness, warning people of dangers in not knowing and dangers of being lured into unexamined, false goods. Again I turn to a text from the Hebrew Bible. The first chapter of Proverbs urges people to resist the enticement of people who will lead them into war and greed (1:11–13). The plea sounds more loudly later in the book: “Wisdom cries out in the street; . . . ‘How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?’ ” (1:20–22a). These Proverbial words are warnings against simplistic answers – warnings that over-simplification can contribute to social destruction.

To this point, I have underscored the beauty of knowing and the ways that continual seeking can protect against foolishness and socially destructive action. Knowing is not always delightful and protective of the knower, however, because it also awakens people to what they would rather not know and it requires something of those who know. People are responsible for that which we know. When we learn of human destruction done in the name of religion, we are horrified. When we learn of destruction in the name of racial purity – whether in Japan, the United States, Germany, Poland, or Rwanda – we awaken to human self-deception and violence. The knowledge itself obligates us to analyze, critique, and reshape knowledge. This is hard work and often does not happen because dominant facts, fictions, and worldviews have enormous shaping power. They become cultural “common sense” through the shaping power of what Pierre Bourdieu calls habitus (1990; especially 52–65).

Knowledge does pose questions, however, leading people to see the contradictions and consequences of certain views. Consider the memories of Bosnian young people, who played daily with children of different faiths before the war in their land. Their playground knowledge contradicts their later knowledge of publically constructed enemies. Such contradictions pose questions and have potential to produce new constructions. Here we see the link between probing and formation. The very act of probing contributes to formation and often to questioning and re-formation.

Many Faces of Formation

This exploration of knowing and probing leads back to questions of formation: information, formation, reformation, and transformation. I argue that these are interlocking processes in the complex dynamic of learning. Nowhere is this more evident than in theological and religious studies.

Information is the way by which people encounter new knowledge, or new theoretical constructs on knowledge that they have previously held. When Buddhists study Buddhism, they often discover aspects of Buddhist worldviews or practice that they have never encountered; they may also discover new information that knits together the lifetime of knowledge they have acquired in Buddhist practice. When non-Buddhists study Buddhism, they also discover much about Buddhist perspectives, values, and practices, and these discoveries cast new light on what they have learned in other life contexts. This suggests an intimate relationship between information and formation. Information contributes to formation by offering a body of knowledge that promises a larger, more complex, and more coherent picture of the world from Buddhist perspective; it can also correct a previously held view.

In either case, I am seemingly contradicting Paulo Freire's insistence that banking methods of education, or information insemination, are dysfunctional. I am. I am not contradicting his practices of education, however. For example, when he worked with the leaders of Guinea Bissau after the country's independence from Portugal, the leaders reshaped history texts to include indigenous histories (Freire 1978). They reshaped schools to create opportunities for school children to spend time with peasant farmers, learning farming and life skills from them while teaching the farmers to read. These are all examples of information-sharing, but the sharing is done in the interest of liberation and human flourishing. What is instructive here is that the role of information is not at issue. The critical questions are why information is important in education, what information is most needed for those purposes, and how information can be shared in life-giving ways.

Formation is similarly a challenging process. In formation, people learn by engaging in the practices of a tradition, which opens pathways for deep encounters with that tradition. These practices may include exegeting texts, critical questioning, meditation, prayer, or engaging in ethical practices of mercy or justice. Note that I have not separated practices of intellectual engagement from practices of faith. Most religions have traditions regarding how people engage with texts and traditions, and how they live their lives. All of these are part of formation.

Engaging the practices of a tradition, even experimentally, can expand one's understanding of that tradition, whether shedding light on the tradition or raising questions. Active engagement can be important, whether people are studying their own tradition or others, because it is the pathway for knowing through one's whole body. This phenomenon is exemplified in memoirs of interfaith encounters, in which people come to know the depths of their souls or to understand others more deeply through the sharing of spiritual practices across faith traditions (Richardson-Jensen and Harris-Watkins 2005; Arai and Ariarajah 1994; Eck 2003).

My point here is not only to accent the power of sharing practices within and across religious communities. I propose that theological or religious study can often be done best if readers engage a text with the method that the author(s) used to produce it, thus attuning to the multidimensional influences on the writing. How much deeper will be our understandings of Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz or Howard Thurman or Thich Nhat Hanh, for example, if we engage their texts through the practices that underlie their writing of them, whether practices of interviewing ordinary women or practices of meditation? We can never enter the experience of these authors, but we can engage in formative practices that enable us to glimpse their passions and to understand them better.

Reformation is a third form of formation. It is the reshaping of knowledge in light of new discoveries or in light of critiques that problematize our previously held assumptions. Reformation is an ongoing process that is sometimes so subtle as to go unnoticed. It can evoke major historical shifts, however, as did the many reformations of Christianity in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. Here I am proposing that the teaching of theology and religion, to be authentic and thorough, requires the kind of critique that cuts to the center of treasured assumptions in order to propose reformulations of worldviews, values, and practices. Here I am making a case similar to that of Amanda Porterfield in this issue, especially her defense of the “skeptical aspect of historical investigation.” The reformation that takes place in the learning process may be the reform of students' perspectives on a theological formulation, religious tradition, or religious practice. It may also be the reshaping of a society's judgment about a particular tradition, or a religious community's dominant theology and practice. If educational practice does not invite the kind of depth engagement that opens pathways toward reformation, our practice is superficial. The educator's role is not to produce reformation, but to open pathways that open people to entertain reformation if it emerges.

Transformation is the last form of formation that I will address here. This is the kind of re-creation of self and community that can take place in the learning process. Like reformation, transformation is a gift of the educational process, but cannot be produced or forced. It is the humanizing dimension of education in theology and religion. As people encounter religion in the ways of information, formation, and reformation, they meet themselves and their own communities in new ways. This can take place in the study of one's own tradition (whether one claims or rejects it) or in studying traditions outside one's own experience. The result may be a deepening or renewing of earlier commitments or a radical transformation of values, ideas, and ways of life. Such transformation is the promise of education in theology and religion, but it is also a testament to the scary and hope-filled power of education. People engaged in the educational process are on a pathway toward becoming different people in one way or another. To recognize this is to respect learners and the educational process itself, which finally transcends the control of teachers and educational systems.

Footnotes

• 1

  See, for example, Hart (1991) and Ogden (1995) for two perspectives on this debate. The next couple of paragraphs are drawn from my essay, “Service Learning and the Dilemma of Religious Studies: Descriptive or Normative?” (2002).

• 2

  Juschka (1997) suggests that this is really a “non-identity.” The “non-identity” of the social scientist has also led some to question whether one could even call Religious Studies a discipline. Tim Fitzgerald argues that it really offers nothing distinct from social scientific approaches to the study of religion (quoted in Juschka 1997, 8). If this is the case, then why even have religious studies as a distinct and separate entity on the college campus.

• 3

  Russell McCutcheon defines Religious Studies as “the effort to define and secure an institutional space by developing an objective science of religion clearly demarcated from the confessional practice of religion” (quoted in Juschka 1997, 9).

• 4

  Wiebe writes, “The sciences . . . espouse a search for objective knowledge of the world and involve a conscious attempt to avoid (or at least minimize) idiosyncrasy and bias in that search” (1998, 96).

• 5

  In addition to the epistemological and pedagogical concerns noted here, Frisina points to the institutional concern for survival. Many question the value of religious studies in today's higher education context, a context in which we are losing support from those above and below us. Academic administrators and deans are shifting resources away from us and students are not choosing religious studies as a major. This is not a problem of religious studies alone, but a problem for all of the humanities. In this context, we have to justify our existence in higher education by reclaiming the contributions we make to the moral well-being of our students and our communities. “If we were to remove the ethical and moral challenge that has always been at the heart of what we do, all that would be left is mere fluff, a bit of style and not much more. In the end I do not think that will be sufficient to sustain us before a skeptical public that needs good reasons to continue supporting us” (Frisina 1997, 30).

• 6

  Another significant project funded by the Lilly Foundation from 2000–2009, was the “theological explorations of vocation” initiative which involved eighty-eight undergraduate, church-affiliated colleges and universities and invested $218 million into the programs they developed. I note this program because a key focus was “to assist students in examining the relationship between faith and vocational choices” (Programs for the Theological Exploration of Vocation 2011).

• 7

  Religion in the Academy (RITA) is a three-year project devoted to exploring the ways in which careful and nuanced attention to religion can enhance, rather than undermine, higher learning. We are co-directors of the project, which is funded by Lilly Endowment Inc.

• 8

  Farley goes onto define “Gospel” as follows: “ ‘Gospel’ here is short-hand for that cluster of insights occasioned by the teaching and figure of Jesus that both expose the perennial features of how we human beings go wrong and uncover redemptively transforming possibilities” (2005, 201).

• 9

  Beginning in July 2011, I will be teaching at Union Theological Seminary, a multi-denominational seminary in New York City.