I know that there are many people out there who would like to major in something as fun as religious or biblical studies, or go to graduate school to study religion, or seminary to study theology, but because of the inflation related to earning a degree, and because of the demands of life, are unable. If that’s you, and you run across this (unpaid/unsponsored, by the way) blog post, let me make a few recommendations for how you might still get an education a less traditional way.
Religious Studies Andrew Mark Henry, the creator behind the fantastic YouTube page “Religion for Breakfast”, has just launched a new website called “The Religion Department”. Since it’s brand new, there’s a “trailer” that just dropped where he tells you all about what will be offered with a subscription. Let’s just say, it looks fantastic and he’s lined up some excellent professors to contribute. Basic membership (only $99 a year, which is way cheaper than graduate school) gets you a past catalog of classes and access to upcoming ones. Special seminars where you can learn Greek or Coptic, for example, cost a little more, but still look amazing. See the announcement below though. It tells you what you need to know!
Theological Studies I’ve been a long time listener of Tripp Fuller’s podcast “Homebrewed Christianity”. He brings on some of the best guests one can find. And he’s connected to a whole host of amazing theologians, scholars of religion, and biblical scholars (which makes his service a little bit “religious studies,” “theological studies,” and “biblical studies,” but since he leans mostly into theology, that’s how I’m labeling it). Not too long ago, Fuller launched “Theology Class”. There are already 55+ courses in the catalog ranging with topics ranging from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to Process Theology, to Black Theology, to J.R.R. Tolkien, to the “Nones” and deconstruction, and so forth. The offerings align more with progressive/liberal theology, if that’s your taste.
Biblical Studies Finally, both of the aforementioned programs offer Bible-related content, but it’s the team that’s put together the Bible for Normal People podcast that I want to mention with their “Classes for Normal People”. The current catalog has classes ranging from the Infancy Narratives of the Gospels, to the Apocrypha, questions about hell, the origin of the Old Testament, divine violence, and a lot more. Sometimes these courses venture into theological/religious studies as well, so there’s overlap between these three offerings.
I hope someone looking to increase their understanding of these subjects who can’t go the traditional route stumbles across this post and that it helps connect you to these amazing, affordable resources.
Crash Course has started a series on religion! Here are the first two videos:
Most high school teachers appreciate Crash Course. I’m happy to see that they’re doing a religion series. Also, I’m happy that my friend Andrew Mark Henry, who has done great work with the Religion For Breakfast YouTube page, is serving as a “Subject Matter Expert”.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about my ideal list of classes for high school freshmen (see “If I could select the courses high school freshmen take”). More precisely, I wrote about the classes that I wish students at the school where I teach had to take. One key idea is that we would offer a class that helps students think deeply about what it means to live a good life, what human flourishing looks like, and how we should treat ourselves and others. I don’t have interest in teaching something preachy. The goal is to help our students learn to think about these types of things, important as they are. But it must be done in a way that encourages them to take ownership of the questions and what they might mean for their futures.
Now, I won’t say that my idea has the green light just yet. But we are having important discussions. Something like what I pondered could become a reality as early as next year, at least with a soft launch. I’m busy outlining this potential class while reading everything that I can to help me prepare the lessons I would teach if we decide to move forward with my proposal.
The class as I’m outing it is basically a philosophy class. The tentative title is “Philosophy of Human Flourishing” which takes its inspiration from “The Human Flourishing Program” at Harvard University. Today, I mentioned the possibility of this class to some of my students. You see, I have two rituals to start each class: (1) a “Song of the Day” that ties into the lesson and (2) a “Question of the Day” that sometimes is connected but at other times can be contextual (e.g. “favorite Halloween candy?” near Halloween) or frivolous (e.g. “what’s your favorite fruit?”). Today, for my “Religion in Global Context” students, I asked, “What’s one ‘big question’ that you would like to have answered some day?” They shared some excellent questions (e.g. “Is there a God?”; “What’s true success?”). This is why I told them about the possible class we may offer. Some students seemed quite excited. A couple of seniors in the class expressed disappointment that they’ll graduate before it’s offered (not that they’ll be graduated but that we didn’t offer it earlier).
Then one student asked a good question, one I’ve been asking myself: “And this is a religion credit?” He didn’t say it in a negative way. He sounded excited that such a class would count toward his religious studies requirement if he chose to take it next year. But it’s a question that I need to answer, whether it’s asked positively or negatively. Can a philosophy course be a religious studies course?
Let me provide a couple of reasons why my answer is “yes”.
(1) Paul Tillich’s definition of religion. (2) Religion asks us to consider how we should live.
The Protestant Christian theologian Paul Tillich, wrote in his book Theology of Culture, pp. 7-8:
“Religion, in the most basic sense of the word, is ultimate concern.”
A philosophy of “the good life” or of “human flourishing” (A) is about ultimate concern as well, both in how we live for ourselves and how we live for others, and (B) religious answers can be explored philosophically. By this second statement I mean this: a religious answer doesn’t need to be mindlessly considered or submitted to because it’s “revelation” (if such a concept applies to a particular religious claim). All religious answers come from humans. Yes, the approach is often different when we come at things religiously rather than philosophically but that doesn’t mean that we can’t consider from a philosophical vantage point what religions claim. Religion exists, in part, because people have had questions about our existence. If Siddhartha Gautama thought that our primary problem was dukkha, i.e. “suffering” or “disease” or “dissatisfaction” we don’t have to dismiss his diagnosis just because it has been understood religiously. In fact, we don’t have to dismiss his prescription for healing, namely his Four Noble Truth and his Noble Eightfold Path, either.
Philosophy is a mindset that requires us to be reasonable, logical, open, critical in the best way. It asks us to question the traditions we’ve inherited not to ignore them. This means that even as a class is structured around asking students to think reasonably and critically and to be logical and sound in their arguments, not appealing to divine revelation or tradition as an easy escape from tough questions about how we should live, we can include the insights of the world’s great traditions and some of the most prominent minds like Jesus of Nazareth and the Prophet Muhammad. If they had opinions on how to live, and those opinions have shaped humanity, then we should consider them! Religion can be mixed throughout a philosophy-first course so that students are thinking about religious matters especially when ethics, morals, and values are involved.
This doesn’t depart from how we’ve taught religion at my school. Even in classes that are primarily “religious studies” there’s no side-stepping the rigorous demands of studying religion in an academic setting. For this reason, the dichotomy between religion and philosophy, at least when considered through a Tillichian definition, appears to be a methodological difference at best, and a false dichotomy at worst.
A final word on this from the perspective of someone teaching in an Episcopal school. The reason-revelation divide isn’t a strong one in my context. All texts, traditions, etc., that claim the status of “revelation” are engaged with “reason”. Anglicanism has the three-legged stool of (1) the Bible; (2) Tradition; and (3) Reason. Wesleyanism added a fourth: (4) Experience. Now, I’m aware that for many Anglicans and Wesleyans, these legs aren’t equal. The Bible and Tradition take precedent. But there’s an argument to be made that they’re equal because they’re mutually interdependent. The Bible contains reasoning about which we must reason. Tradition contains reasoning about which we must reason.
Episcopal schools face a unique double challenge. First, they serve as private religious schools that promote academics, scholarship, reason, science, and the Enlightenment values in a market where many religious schools don’t. Second, they serve as private religious schools in an increasingly—for better or worse—secular society. In all likelihood, the Episcopal Church must be prepared to represent an increasingly minority position both culturally, as the denomination shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, but also ideologically, as less and less space is made for those who value the benefits of a secular society, and who share a commitment to many Enlightenment ideals regarding rationality, science, and technology, but who remain drawn to religion/spirituality and what it offers us. Our culture is sometimes pulled between extremes like exclusivist Christian Nationalism on one side and religiously disaffiliated, even anti-religious, secularism on the other side. For those who don’t want to give up their Christianity, or maybe I should say their religiosity, but who also embrace what it means to be a modern person, what survives of the Episcopal Church will (hopefully) carve out this small space that will be an essential space for many. It must be a space that embraces pluralism and openness but also welcomes people to discuss, think, and practice spirituality and value-formation. For this reason, I don’t see a contradiction between offering a class that counts toward one’s religious studies in a private religious school that happens to be heavy on philosophy and that introduces and explores religious concepts from a philosophical perspective. It’s what I’ve been doing for over eight years now!
(Of course, there’s nothing that says we can’t reframe the requirement as “Religion and Philosophy” which would be something you might see in many Catholic schools where theology and philosophy have been in dialogue from the beginning; where Thomas Aquinas, arguably the greatest and most influential thinker within Catholicism, was shaped by Aristotle as much as he was the Bible and Catholic Tradition.)
Next summer, I plan on teaching a philosophy and religion class focusing on the concept of “God”. My summer ’23 class, “Philosophy, Religion, and Sacred Texts” asked whether sacred texts could be read as sources of philosophy. It was fun but too broad. When the philosophy/religion class circulates in ’25, I want to narrow the focus. I’ll build on the foundation of the ’23 class but we’ll discuss one unified topic: theisms and atheisms.
Currently, I need to think of creating about 8-10 lessons for that class. Here is my current list of topics, though they’re not settled:
This was of interest to me because I teach high school age, emerging young adults.
Ryan Burge teamed with the people over at the “Freedom from Religion Foundation” to survey “Nones”. They came up with a lot of interest insights, though this is the one that stood out to me. Not surprising at all though. Probably just confirms what we know intuitively. Read the whole post: “We Asked the Nones a Bunch of Questions About Leaving Religion”.
Movies are a teacher’s friend. They give you a reprieve from lecturing. They shrink the amount of time that you have to invest in lesson planning. They provide visuals for students to help them better understand what you’ve been trying to teach. They act as helpful summaries of previous material. I could say more.
I want to write a few short posts explaining why I’ve chosen the movies that I’ve chosen for my classes. It should be noted, I teach high school, so I’m limited in what I can show. Some of those limits are self-limits because I don’t want to have to address certain concerns or skip past controversial sections. For example, Life of Brian is a film that I would like to show in my “Introduction to the Bible II: The Christian Scriptures” class but it has enough controversial content that I’ve decided it’s not worth it. I do show a couple of “R” rated movies so my students have to have parental consent forms signed but they’re not the type of “R” rated movies that upset parents. Here are the movies that I’ll discuss over a series of future posts:
“Introduction to the Bible I: The Hebrew Scriptures”
When I write my posts, I’ll explain (1) why I show the movie; (2) the strengths of the movie for what I’m trying to accomplish; (3) the weaknesses of the movie for what I’m trying to accomplish.
Mostly, I’m writing this post so that I can have this information in one place in case I want to come back to it at a later date. But I guess this is an opportunity for me to process some of the data as well. First, I begin with the new PRRI study, “Religious Change in America”. This was the major finding:
Around one-quarter of Americans (26%) identify as religiously unaffiliated in 2023, a 5 percentage point increase from 21% in 2013. Nearly one in five Americans (18%) left a religious tradition to become religiously unaffiliated, over one-third of whom were previously Catholic (35%) and mainline/non-evangelical Protestant (35%).
This isn’t fueled by a growth in the “Nones” i.e. people who answer “nothing in particular” when asked what their religious affiliation is. Instead, it’s because we’ve seen atheist and agnostic identity double in a decade:
While the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as “nothing in particular” is similar to a decade ago (16% in 2013 to 17% in 2023), the numbers of both atheists and agnostics have doubled since 2013 (from 2% to 4% and from 2% to 5%, respectively).
This doesn’t minimize the demographic impact of Nones though. Earlier this year, Nones became the largest single block in the United States when it comes to religious affiliation: see NPR’s “Religious ‘Nones’ are now the largest single group in the United States”. Many headlines make it sound like this should be a moment for Mainline Christianity to shine, especially when we read titles like Texas Public Radio’s “People say they’re leaving religion due to anti-LGBTQ teachings and sexual abuse”. But the Mainline continues to die quickly. PRRI found, as mentioned above, that “over one-third of” the previously religiously affiliated “were…mainline/non-evangelical Protestants (35%).” The branch of Christianity that has had the most openness to LGBTQIA+ peoples is disappearing.
This appears to be due to the reality that most people who are leaving their religions are doing so because they have stopped believing the teachings of their religion, plain and simple. PRRI summarizes:
The reason given by the highest percentage of religiously unaffiliated Americans for leaving their faith tradition is that they simply stopped believing in their religion’s teachings (67%).
While Evangelicals have been able to limit the bleeding since 2016, they’re not growing. As Religion News Service presented it: “Study: Unaffiliated Americans are the only growing religious group”. But the PRRI study does note that, “The net loss of members among white evangelical Protestants has declined since 2016. In 2023, white evangelical Protestants have one of the highest retention rates of all religious groups (76%), an improvement since 2016, when white evangelicals retained just two in three members (66%).”
On the whole, we’re becoming secular, even among the religious: “A slim majority of Americans (53%) say that religion is the most important (15%) or one among many important things in their lives (38%) in 2023, notably lower than it was in 2013 when 72% of Americans reported that religion was the most important thing in their lives (27%) or one among many (45%).” While only 22% of Republicans say that religion is the most important thing in their lives, increasingly, being religious and being Republican are coming to be seen as one and the same: “Americans continue to lose their religion as GOP pushes it”.
Ryan Burge, the political scientist that I’ve referenced on this blog a few times, released an interesting find last week just as all of this PRRI information was being made available. His research shows that religiosity (as measured by attending religious services) among high school seniors (which in turn reflect high schoolers, the demographic with which I work) is plummeting. Here’s his graph:
That religiosity is declining because people have stopped believing may indicate that religion is being understood as increasingly anti-intellectual or irrelevant in our scientific, Information Age. That high schoolers who attend religious services are the ones displaying the highest level of “smarts” (as measured by GPA) may push back against that. But high GPA could mean that religious families are more stable, or supportive. It could mean that the type of kid who will do well in our education system is one who can conform and regurgitate the “correct” answers. And who knows how many of these high performing religious teens remain religious during and after their college years?
Neil distinguishes factual beliefs from religious credences. If you factually believe something – for example, that there’s beer in the fridge – that belief will generally have four functional features:
(1.) It is involuntary. You can’t help but believe that there’s beer in the fridge upon looking in the fridge and seeing the beer.
(2.) It is vulnerable to evidence. If you later look in the fridge and discover no beer, your belief that there is beer in the fridge will vanish.
(3.) It guides actions across the board. Regardless of context, if the question of whether beer is in your fridge becomes relevant to your actions, you will act in light of that belief.
(4.) It provides the informational background governing other attitudes. For example, if you imagine a beer-loving guest opening the fridge, you will imagine them also noticing the beer in there.
Yesterday, as I celebrated Easter, I wondered whether most of the people with which I was saying, “He is risen!” thought of this as a factual claim along the lines of how Van Leeuwen defines factuality. (I was in an Episcopal Church, for what that’s worth.) Do they think of Jesus’ resurrection as something that’s as clear to them as the fact that if they don’t eat all day, they’ll feel unwell, and if they don’t eat for many days, they’ll die. Is their believe falsifiable in any way? Could they be convinced that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead. Do they live as if they know that no matter what happens in this life, resurrection awaits them in the future? Does it shape their ethics and morals, what job they work, how they spend their money, or how they raise their children? Or do they accept that their beliefs are a different category: religious credence? Back to Schwitzgebel’s summary:
(1.) Voluntary. In some sense – maybe unconsciously – you choose to have this religious credence.
(2.) Invulnerable to evidence. Factual evidence, for example, scientific evidence of the non-existence of Hell, will not cause the credence to disappear.
(3.) Guides actions only in limited contexts. For example, it doesn’t prevent you from engaging in the condemned behavior in the way a factual belief of the same content presumably would.
(4.) Doesn’t reliably govern other attitudes. For example, if you imagine others engaging in the behavior, it doesn’t follow that you will imagine God also condemning them.
I mention this because I think of Mainline Christianity as a way of practicing Christianity that’s sees the doctrines as more akin to poetic knowledge than scientific knowledge. Mainline Christianity has been a way to continue to participate in the communities and rituals that provide meaning without being forced to assent to the irrationality of fundamentalism. But the Mainline is vanishing. And I think this may mean that religion as poetic knowledge is vanishing as well. This makes me wonder whether the debate over religion, and who participates or doesn’t participate in religious community, has begun to boil down to rationalism (for lack of a better word) v. fundamentalism. People like me—people who see the doctrine of the resurrection as a poetic symbol pointing to the hope I have that we’ll experience some form of continuation after our death—may be going extinct in America. On the “rationalist” side (again, for lack of a better word), I’ll be seen as kooky because I haven’t abandoned all forms of my inherited superstition. On the fundamentalist side, I’ll be seen as heretical for doubting the literalness of Christianity’s claims. If most Nones have left because they don’t believe the doctrines any more, then this makes me think that they were told that they have to choose between these two poles and when forced to choose, they chose the rationalist worldview (and I don’t blame them). But again, the Mainline seems unable to keep people, so if they’re making space for a more poetic religiosity, is it a failure in marketing or have we arrived at the point where most people, especially younger people, feel like even poetic religion is basically a fundamentalism?
Yesterday, I was reading some excerpts from Lucretius, the first-century Roman philosopher. He is considered to be a central contributor to the philosophy of Epicureanism. He was an “Atomist” which was akin to modern materialists. In his On the Nature of the Universe(De rerum natura ), he declares that “death is nothing to us” since his understanding of death is that it’s a mirror to our non-existence prior to birth. We don’t feel sadness about all of the cosmic history that we missed before our birth, so why should we care about all that we’ll miss after our death? He states, “…when the union of body and spirit that engenders us has been disrupted—to us, who shall then be nothing, nothing by any hazard will happen any more at all.”
Then he says something that has stuck with me since I encountered it as an undergraduate a couple of decades ago. He writes,
If any feeling remains in mind or spirit after his has been torn from our body, that is nothing to us, who are brought into being by the wedlock of body and spirit, conjoined and coalesced. Or even if the matter that composes us should be reassembled by time after our death and brought back into its present state—if the light of life were given to us anew—even that contingency would still be no concern of ours once the chain of our identity had been snapped.
Lucretius’ statement causes trouble for people who believe in religious/philosophical concepts like resurrection and reincarnation but also for some post-humanists who imagine someday uploading our consciousness into a digital utopia. For Lucretius, even if this body or this body and mind combination would be reconstructed, it wouldn’t be “me”. I ended. This is someone new with recycled parts!
This raises the “Ship of Theseus” (Greek) or “Chariot Simile” (Buddhist) problem. If discontinuity is measured by change, then how do we have any continuity. In both the Greek and Buddhist ways of framing the problem, we have an object made of parts—either a ship or a chariot—that can have parts replaced. Since theoretically each part can be replaced to the point that there’s no original ship/chariot parts, we must ask, what’s essential to the identity of Ship A or Chariot A. If Ship A’s parts have all been replaced, how can it be Ship A still? But if it’s now Ship B, when did it become Ship B? And if we can take all the old parts in a pile that was made as Ship A was being deconstructed, would rebuilding it make it the real Ship A?
An answer to this that comes from the Buddhist monk Nāgasena is that we’re thinking of identity wrong. He claims in the Chariot Simile that the name “Nāgasena” isn’t referring to a singular static person but an observable process. The child named Nāgasenaisn’t the adult named Nāgasena but they’re connected in that the child is part of the same process that led to the adult who will lead to the old man before the whole process ends with death. Nāgasena isn’t a fixed object; Nāgasena is an organic movement.
I don’t know that I had encountered Nāgasena in college (pretty confident that I hadn’t) but I do remember doing a presentation that made a similar argument in favor of the coherence of the doctrine of bodily resurrection. If we’re a process now, why can’t that process resume at the eschaton? My criticism of Lucretius’ idea is that he sounds like he assumes we’re static now, but we’re not. If we’re not static now, but our modern self has a sense of continuity with our former self, then why wouldn’t our future resurrected self, as different as it may be from our previous self, maintain that same sense of continuation. Now, obviously, we’re talking about taking a logical argument only so far before having to use a God-of-the-gaps to get us from death to resurrection, but I was proud of the argument nonetheless.
In some way, this could work for reincarnation or post-humanism too. But does it work or does Lucretius’ critique hold? I think there remains a problem. Often we hear about how the human body regenerates new cells every seven years, on average. And this gives us a sense that we experience something like complete bodily renewal every seven years but that’s not quite accurate. Here’s a summary of what happens in actuality:
Some parts of our body are renewing constantly but some parts of our heart, brain, eye lens, and another source I read said cells within our spinal cord, last a life time. Therefore, unlike the Ship of Theseus or the Chariot Simile, we never quite get to the point where we’ve been completely replaced. Until we die, there is some stability though not much. What does this do to undergraduate me’s argument that our existence is dynamic already therefore a resurrected identity (or reincarnated or uploaded) isn’t a massive discontinuation as it may have been claimed. It would seem that if our bodily life is anchored to even a few bits of continuation, then when those end we lose what we were and Lucretius’ point stands centuries later.
Obviously, I’m pondering this on Easter Sunday when Christians celebrate Jesus’ resurrection. I’m wondering what it means for our understanding of the doctrine. I know that the Pauline interpretation in 1 Corinthians 15 makes it clear that discontinuity is built in. He talks about how Jesus’ resurrected body is animated by spirit and how our bodies are “flesh-and-blood”. Whatever we may do with his language, his point is that Jesus resurrected body, while a body, isn’t like our body. The Evangelists do something similar when they talk about Jesus appearing and disappearing but also being able to be touched and even consume food. But this brings me back to Lucretius: if this is the resurrected body, how is this not a new Jesus? How does the resurrected Jesus related to Jesus of Nazareth?
Analogously, let’s imagine that in the future people can map our brain patterns. As we die, they scan our brain and upload that pattern to a computer. My body dies but my “code” awakens in post-humanist, digital bliss. Is that me? Is that a copy of me? If my current bodily state is impacted by everything from my synapses connecting to my gut bacteria to my external stimuli, would merely reproducing my brain patterns be preserving me? This may be where religious thinkers retreat to a dualism: the soul (or “Atman” in Indian philosophy) is the real me, it interacts with my body, but it’s independent of my body in some way even now. But that pushes us to deal with the problems of dualism, and there are many! But is dualism the only escape if you want to preserve concepts like resurrection or reincarnation? Or does the Buddhist claim that we’re processes already, even if there is a portion of who we are that remains static, continue to hold in some way that I’m not considering?
It’s Good Friday. As Christians around the world ponder the meaning and significance of Jesus’ crucifixion, here are two podcast episodes that take a look at the event within its historical context:
Lucio Mare’s presentation of Hadot and the philosophy of history and science
Yesterday, I spent a few hours attending a conference via Zoom called “Philosophy in High School”. It was organized by the Student Advisory Council of PLATO: the “Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization”. What I admire about this conference most was that it combined presentations from faculty and students. As a member of the “Educational Resources and Review Committee” of the Society of Biblical Literature, I can say that I’ve been part of conversations around what it could look like to do something like this for the field of biblical studies. I’ll say more about that idea below. For now, let me praise the student organizers who made the “Philosophy in High School” conference a reality. They did a great job!
Sin Man Lea Cheng and Xiaotong Chen presenting on how philosophy is useful for teenage life
I attended four presentations. The first was by Lucio Mare of Stanford Online High School. He spoke on “Philosophy as the Education of High Schoolers: Using Pierre Hadot’s ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’ to Teach History and Philosophy of Science”. The remaining three presentations were by students: Sin Man Lea Cheng and Xiaotong Chen, “Philosophy: making life vibrant”; Sophie Zhang, “How can learning about ethics help high school students inside and outside of school?”; and Kate Given, “Transforming Classroom Conversation with Philosophy”. All three were well done! As a high school teacher, I know that it can be difficult to get students prepared for 5-10 minutes of presentation. These young people had a half hour set aside for presentations and discussions!
Sophie Zhang’s presentation, “How can learning about ethics help high school students inside and outside of school?”
While philosophy has its own uphill battle agains the cult of STEM (and FYI, philosophy and STEM shouldn’t be rivals at all, so this means we’re doing STEM wrong!), biblical studies is much further down the hill when it comes to attracting enough young people to do a conference like this one. There are a few reasons.
First, philosophy is far more accessible. Yes, the Bible can be found anywhere but good tools for studying the Bible are difficult to find. Where I live in San Antonio, it’s difficult to keep up with current biblical scholarship because there are few libraries who do. For example, when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, I could spend a day at theFlora Lamson Hewlett Library at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. There were a ton of resources there. But San Antonio has nothing quite like this. While I know there are topics within analytic philosophy (e.g. philosophy of mind) that share similar limitations when it comes to resources and that prevent entry by people who can’t keep up with the quickly unfolding literature on the topic, there’s so much more than you can do under the purview of “philosophy” than you can under “biblical studies”.
Kate Given’s presentation, “Transforming Classroom Conversation with Philosophy”
Second, and this is related, you can philosophize from anywhere about anything at any time. There’s the story of how Raymond Aron was sitting with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir at the Bec-de-Gaz bar in Paris in 1932-33 drinking apricot cocktails when Aron, who had been studying the “phenomenology” of Edmund Husserl, told Sarte and Beauvoir, “if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!” (See Sarah Bakewell’s The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, pp. 1-3.) I can philosophize about friendships, education, music, movies, traffic, city planning, travel, etc. I can do biblical studies with regard to the Bible and the reception history of the Bible, which is extensive but also limited in comparison.
Third, as I’ve discussed recently, biblical studies are less attractive to young people because the Bible is becoming less attractive to young people. We’re in the midst of a cultural shift away from Christianity, so there’ll be fewer people reading the Bible in the future. Teens are philosophizing all the time, whether or not they’re aware of it. Teens aren’t reading the Bible all the time. You would know it if you’re were doing it! What it means to study the Bible is a more restricted activity.
If we’re to create a conference on biblical studies that includes high school participants, we’d have a fourth and final obstacle: philosophy has a rational air about it. When people encounter the Bible prior to reading it in an academic context, the vibe is something like “devotional”. How a conference for high school readers of the Bible wouldn’t devolve into a series of devotionals or apologetics is something that would need to be discussed. Religious studies may have more promise here. (In other words, something connected with the American Academy of Religion.)
That being said, it was wonderful to see a conference like this one. Kudos to PLATO and their Student Advisory Council. I hope to see future conferences like this one!
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