Philosophy
I view my task as an educator to be primarily one of information architecture. Religions are complex cultural systems, and there is little uniformity across the span and history of human religious practices. Therefore, when I teach about a religious practice (or, in the introductory classes, about "religion" as a discipline) my main goal is to find a path through the content at hand that can be made most intelligible to my students.
I have found that simple, concrete examples are quite effective for teaching religious subjects. Instead of offering my students an abstract concept or a theory, I present students with practices and artefacts. This might be a two-minute video of a Hasidic man describing how one washes before a meal, or an advertisement that plays on sacred symbols and secularizes them, or the everyday rituals of American life like saying the Pledge of Allegiance before a football game.
Through a pedagogy that begins with these sorts of concrete and discrete bits of data, I have found that students in a class can build over a semester to a quite sophisticated level of analysis and synthetic reflection about human religious behavior. It is my job as an educator to chart the path to this goal, arranging the data and guiding the reflections of the class so that we move, each week, from the concrete evidence to more abstract reflection and theory.
Christian Brothers University
Recent Courses
