Episode 2, 40 before 40
Last school year, I ended up teaching world religions. This was not part of the plan. I’m a philosophy student and what I know about is philosophy.
But they stuck me in as a teaching assistant over the summer and then assumed I could teach it. So I taught one online section and one section in person.
I’m not an expert on world religions. I am an expert in philosophy, and I know a lot about Christianity. But I needed to teach about Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism as well. And I was a complete novice on all of that. How was I supposed to teach this?
I discovered something during my second semester teaching world religions. I was talking to a student, and I realized that I was approaching the whole subject with a strong bias. I wanted to present religions in a positive light. The course catalog even talked about gaining an appreciation of different religions, so the class was supposed to be positive, not critical.
We are too contentious in the world today. Sometimes people are mean and rude. Sometimes they are cruel and persecuting. Religion can often be used as a weapon against people in really nasty and horrible ways. Some might approach other religions with hostility and defensiveness. They think that in order to protect their own beliefs, that they have to disparage and fight against others.
That’s why I wanted to talk about the good things about religion. I had to cover Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, but we explored other religions as well, and lots of religious concepts.
There is no way to be an expert in world religions. It’s too vast of an enterprise, and it’s really representing a diverse group of billions of individuals who all have their own lived experience. It’s too complicated. The only thing I can cover in a semester is a vast simplification.
I have grown up in my own religion, but I have talked and listened to others who have had wildly different experiences than I have, despite growing up in the same organization and even the roughly same geographical location. If there is that much diversity within one minor religious group, then there are more things to learn about world religions than we could possibly understand.
This class really wasn’t about the content, though we covered some of that. It was about getting a new experience and realizing the limitations of what you know.
Religion is really about humans, and it’s hard to hate when you get to know someone. Even though there is a diversity of experience, there are also commonalties that we can find that connect that diversity of experience together.
I’ve talked with women from a wide variety of religions and we’re often concerned about the same things (often our children and our family). We can laugh together and connect, even though in some ways we are so different. But in other ways, we are still the same.
We can focus on differences, but I think it’s better to realize that underneath all those differences, we are all human, and we have so much of the same struggles and experiences. We each come with our own ignorance, and we make mistakes, and we can keep trying.
When I learned about world religions, I didn’t learn a bunch of trivia. I had experiences. And that’s what I wanted for my students.
Students went to religious festivals, Buddhist meditations, or missionary farewells. They visited sacred buildings and talked with people about their religious experiences. I went to a mosque and a Hindu temple and participated in meditation and visited a little church that met in an old theater.
We saw radically different experiences. Some find solace and hope in religion, while some people find difficulty and strife. But we are all humans, and religion is really just that human experience of trying and connecting. Of always having more to learn, more to discover.
I think intellectual humility is the most important thing I needed as a teacher of world religions. There is more to learn, and we can learn from a wide variety of places: from teachers, from students, from friends, from each other.
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