Month: January 2017

Literacy in civics; literacy about history; literacy of belles-letres.  All of these have won attention in public and higher education lately.  Add to these a call now for religious literacy.  Current events demands it, and educational leaders have found funding for it.

Harvard Divinity School, the American Academy of Religion, the Association of American Colleges and Universities have taken up the challenge laid down by Stephen Prothero in his 2007 book, “Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, and Doesn’t.”  It’s a full-court press.

How do they propose to remedy the widespread ignorance on really basic kinds of information that Prothero documents (names of any Bible characters; the name of Islam’s holy book; names of world religions; the founder of Buddhism, etc.)?

But I might ask, does just knowing the facts about any given religion constitute knowledge that matters–matters to the seeking individual, matters for the peace of the world?

Where is the reference to sacred texts?  Where is the method for engaging with the sacred texts?  Prothero’s “dictionary of religious literacy” at the back of the book runs to over 100 pages and is comprehensive, if cursory.  Admittedly, nobody would take this for his ultimate standard of literacy; it is intended as a fund of basic information.  But what if, in addition to information, there were selections from the sacred texts available with brief introductions?

True, religious texts are challenging, conveyed in ancient rhetoric as they are.  But they are the foundation upon which religions stand, without which there remains a literacy gap.  College chaplains can fill that gap if they get creative about how to get those texts off the written page and onto a public, artistic, stage.

As the great hymn proclaims:

New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth.  –James Russell Lowell.

When Christian denominations began to bump into each other more, college chaplains learned to be ecumenical.  When religions began to bump into each other more, college chaplains learned how to be inter-faith, then inter-religious.  Chaplains who direct offices of Religious Life ensure openness to all faiths; denominational chaplains have learned to co-exist closely with all faiths.

A new learning is in order, given the occasion of growing religious illiteracy in a world where religions now bump into each other sometimes violently.  What role can college chaplains play?

Chaplains can go back to teaching their traditions.  If they take this up, it will have to be without the former doctrinal methods.  It will have to be with a pedagogy that enables students to learn from each other by grappling with the sacred texts, themselves.

How can they do this?  By asking them to perform a text, or some portion thereof.  Take a verse, take it from the page to the stage–in song, in poetry, in mime, in drama.  See how they learn!

 

Here are the trends that tell me campus chaplains have to seize a public stage soon or wither completely away:

• religious chaplaincies have over the last fifty years gradually been moved away from the central consciousness of campus life to the periphery;

• in the course of which, religious chaplaincies have come to emphasize pastoral care, that is, ministry in the private sphere;

• faculty in higher education seem less sure than ever about the college’s stake in students’ personal development;

• and administrators making budget decisions today find that meeting the now widely diversified religious needs of students are expensive and ineffective to them;

• finally, the steeply declining religion department enrolments mean that a gap has opened in the means available to raise religious literacy on campus.

Hence, chaplains, it’s time to go public with your culture work.

I see college chaplains needing to fulfill the role of “culture workers,” in Paolo Freire’s terminology. You are, after all, the custodians of great traditions and our society badly needs you to function as such. 

How?  By giving students the platform, the budget and the permission to engage first-hand with the great issues and the primary texts, to articulate issues or to perform texts.  Let them open up a public space that did not exist before, not around the subject of religion anyway. 

It is what Hannah Arendt called for in celebrating the public arena (The Human Condition, 1958).  It is what Parker Palmer called for when he wrote about encountering difference in others (The Company of Strangers, 1983).  It is what Andrew Delbanco saw when he pointed out the link between religion, properly defined, and democracy (College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, 2002).  It is what Martha Nussbaum meant by calling higher education back to some acknowledgement of soul (Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, 2010).  It is what campus administrators call for when they promote civic engagement.  

But much as we have longed for the public experience, we nevertheless find it elusive.  So here is exactly the ministry that I see awaiting adoption by the religious chaplains: give students the reins.