Amy Carr
Western Illinois University
Carleton College, January 14, 2006

I reflect on this question from two standing points: my memory of being and becoming a religious studies major as a student at Carleton, and my current experience teaching in the philosophy & religious studies department at Western Illinois University. I’m also mindful that many religious studies majors do not go on to teach in higher education, so I will be curious to hear how those of you who are not college professors might describe your sense of the place of religious studies in a liberal arts education.

Let me start with my remembered experience as a student. I’ll start narratively, with memories of why I made the choices I did as a student, and incorporate conceptual observations along the way.

Although I can remember being drawn to philosophical and theological questions since I was a small child, at Carleton I initially pursued an English major because I imagined that religious studies was all about the ideas of long dead white men (why I thought English literature would be any different here, I cannot say). More specifically, I imagined that religious studies would present ideas in a dry and abstract way, and that I would be freer to exercise my imagination and think theologically for myself if I could explore religious ideas in the context of an engagement with literature. But two things happened. First, I took a religion and literature course with Anne Patrick and read Paul Tillich and H. Richard Niebuhr, who seemed to give words to ideas I’d had for quite some time. Then I took a comparative mysticism course with visiting professor Jose Cabezon, and discovered that the religious writers from generations ago were not always men and not always dry. Second, in the literary theory course I had to take as an English major, I found myself more and more at odds with the focus of the course. Our readings encouraged us to attend to gender and class dynamics in the literature we studied, whereas I was more interested in analyzing more existential sorts of questions—like conversions of perspective, or coming to terms with finitude and with human evil, or thinking about time and eternity, about God or the nature of ultimate reality. My religious studies courses were fine-tuning my vocabulary for exploring the kinds of questions I really cared about, whereas my literature courses—at least in the late 1980’s—were often far more interested in social history. It became clear that I should change majors, and I did so with a sense of “right fit.”

Once I was a religious studies major, I became amazed at how interdisciplinary the major was. I could study history, literature, anthropology, sociology, cultures from all over the world. It seemed that religious studies offered a way of focusing not only on the core questions of human existence, but on the breadth of human traditions that shape and sustain answers to those questions—and the breadth of methodological approaches to studying human cultures. I remember being struck in an anthropology of religion course with Ann Braude by how I could continue to pursue theological sorts of questions precisely by using the anthropological approaches we were learning in order to see from another angle. I analyzed the three different ways the communion ritual was practiced in my hometown Lutheran church, applying the difference between “elite” and “popular” perspectives that I’d learned from Sherry Ortner in Sherpas through their Rituals. I continue to like to work with a “history of religions” and rituals studies approach to theological questions. But what struck me as a student was that no matter what course I was taking in religious studies, I could always find a way to pursue the big religious questions that most drew me, even as I learned to contextualize those questions and their answers with respect to broader patterns of culture, history, and ideology.

Selah Saterstrom, a recent writer-in-residence at Western Illinois University, articulated similar reasons for changing from English to a religious studies major when she was a student at Milsaps College, and for pursuing both an MFA and a masters in theology. Selah writes experimental fiction that is not overtly theological, but she said that the kinds of big life questions she wants to pursue in her writing were not being addressed in her English classes. They were explored in her religious studies classes, where she found what she called “a love of the question.”

As a teacher of religious studies in a very different context from Carleton, I notice other dimensions of religious studies’ place in the liberal arts. At Western we do not yet have a religious studies major—only a minor. I teach one upper-level course each semester, but encounter most of my students in introductory courses like “Exploring Religion” and “The Christians.” Most of my students are taking a religious studies course to fulfill the humanities portion of their “Gen Ed” requirements. I am currently on the university committee that is reconsidering the whole structure of “general education,” and one of the background questions is whether or not expectations for “general education” are the same as those for the “liberal arts.” In any event, my students often resent their gen ed requirements, and are not convinced of their usefulness, though most find religion more interesting to study than many other possible course offerings. Most of the students have some sort of Christian background, and by the end of the semester most give voice to whatever ways they are beginning to deal with the new awareness that religions are internally diverse, and that there really aren’t any easily-obtainable answers to questions about the nature of heaven or hell or the after-life. For my students, religious studies courses are often about finding for the first time a space in which they feel free to question what they have been taught in church, to learn the basic beliefs and practices of religions that are foreign to them, and to find more resources for sorting out answers to their own ultimate questions. A Wabash Center study of the teaching practices of 50 religious studies professors confirmed some of the same things. At a conference about the preliminary results I attended last summer, we learned that our students repeatedly gave more priority than professors did (at least on their syllabuses) to the goal of formulating their own religious or spiritual understandings. Those of us participating in the study spent quite some time talking about whether that discrepancy was more apparent than real, but for many students, it’s clear that their religious studies courses potentially deepen not only their understanding of peoples different from themselves, but also their understanding of their own deepest convictions about the path and purpose of life.

Especially in my introductory courses, I often feel obligated to attend to the ideological uses of religion in order to help students understand in more complex ways the relationships between religion and violence that they’ve observed—especially about religions about which they know virtually nothing. But I also continue to give space to questions of theodicy, to the exegesis of religious myths, to paradoxes and tensions within religious thought itself. Let me close by suggesting a thought experiment. If religious studies remained a major but not a department, what courses would be lost? History, anthropology, philosophy, and literary studies could house some of the courses, certainly. But what about courses on individual thinkers—like the courses I took on Kierkegaard, Buber, al-Ghazali, and Nishitani? What about courses on the Bible or other religious texts? What about courses on liberation theology or feminist theology? Where would I have written about Abraham Joshua Heschel’s answer to the question: is there a connection between spiritual emptiness and human wrongdoing? There will always be courses in the social sciences that analyze how religious passions can fuel prejudice and generate violence, or shape political life. But would there still be a place within the liberal arts for engaging the existential questions that generate and animate religious traditions themselves—the questions about origins and end, about God or ultimate reality, about the meaning and purpose of life, about evil and coming to terms with it, about our capacities for reflection and transformation?