Tag: Jonathan Z. Smith

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Putting religion in its global context (1): What’s wrong with ‘World Religion’?

I’m not vehemently against the label ‘World Religion’ but I was uncomfortable enough with it to petition our school to change the name of our comparative religions course from ‘World Religion’ to ‘Religion in Global Context’. For many, this may seem like petty semantics. I get that. But when you’re obsessed with your area of study, sometimes being petty is necessary for precision, and precision is necessary for educating. Also, I’m convinced I don’t want to just teach ‘World Religion’, as it has been traditionally understood, but religion—that sloppy ‘term created by scholars for their intellectual purposes’ which is not natural but instead a ‘a second-order generic concept that plays the same role in establishing a disciplinary horizon that a concept such as “language” plays in linguistics or “culture” plays in anthropology’ (see Jonathan Z. Smith, ‘Religion, Religions, Religious’, pp. 281-282 in Critical Terms for Religious Studies).

In other words, I want my students to wrestle with how we define ‘religion’, what makes something a ‘religion’, and why we care so much about differentiating ‘religion’ from say ‘culture’, ‘worldview’, ‘philosophy’, etc. Sure, there are pragmatic reasons for this separation, but there’s also been a long history of political reasons for doing so. I know my students don’t know those reasons, but I sensed that the structure of the class—a class that focused mostly on surveying the ‘Great Traditions’ of Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Confucianism, and Daoism—lended itself toward being an information dump that undermined other important religions like Sikhism and Shinto while overgeneralizing the unity of say ‘Hinduism’ or ‘Christianity’ as if these are monolithic realities.

I could ramble on about this but the ‘Keeping It 101’ podcast has two episodes that are way more entertaining and insightful than what I can write here, so if you’re wondering about the problems with the label ‘World Religion’, let me invite you to listen to one or both of these episodes:

Next time, I’ll start sharing how I hope to morph my class away from just a survey of the ‘Great Traditions’ and more toward a foundational class for Religious Studies and philosophy of religion that will equip my students to think not only about the ‘Great Traditions’ but all the other traditions as well. And it won’t be as hurried because honestly, teaching a survey of Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (and then some years Confucianism and Daoism) is almost impossible to do in a single semester if you want to avoid just providing an ‘info dump’.

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Religion according to the IRS

The late Jonathan Z. Smith in his essay ‘God Save This Honourable Court: Religion and Civic Discourse’ commented, ‘The Internal Revenue Service is, both de facto and de jure, America’s primary definer and classifier of religion.’ (Relating Religion, p. 376) Here’s the criteria the IRS used to determine if a group qualifies as a ‘church’ (some mix needed):

-Distinct legal existence
-Recognized creed and form of worship
-Definite and distinct ecclesiastical government
-Formal code of doctrine and discipline
-Distinct religious history
-Membership not associated with any other church or denomination
-Organization of ordained ministers
-Ordained ministers selected after completing prescribed courses of study
-Literature of its own
-Established places of worship
-Regular congregations
-Regular religious services
-Sunday schools for the religious instruction of the young
-Schools for the preparation of its members

I’ll be dedicating a class period of this semester’s ‘Religion in the United States’ (and next year in ‘Religion in Global Context’) to this topic. It’s a fascinating list of criteria. (In recent years it’s allowed the Scientologist, the Satanic Temple, and even John Oliver’s spoof ‘Our Lady of Perpetual Indulgence’ have qualified.)

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Slow reading with J.Z. Smith

A few days ago I wrote about how I’ve realized that guided questions aren’t doing what I hoped they’d do. By this I mean I would assign reading homework for the week (it’s my tradition to do a single homework assignment per week) that would be accompanied by a document that asks questions about the reading. These documents served as checkpoints to make sure my students weren’t just reporting that they had read but were showing they had done so. Unfortunately, there’s a dual temptation for students:

  1. Scan (not skimming which is like speed reading but scanning which is just looking for key words or phrases) for the answers in order to hit the checkpoints without actually reading the textbook/article.
  2. Since guided questions have a limited range of answers it’s easy to ask a classmate for their responses, alter those responses a little, and then submit your stolen answers.

Neither of these approaches pushes the student to learn from the reading. Now, part of my problem may have been that while I give students a week to do the reading, we know students don’t spread that work across a week. Instead, they wait until a couple hours before the deadline. This puts pressure on them to hurry meaning that if I assign 20 pages with 15 questions and they wait until an hour or two before the deadline they’re going to be tempted to take one of the aforementioned shortcuts.

Jonathan Z. Smith (Photo by Chris Salata/Chicago Maroon via uchicago.edu.)

I’ll be discussing some of the solutions I’m testing in the next few posts. I begin here with the first couple assignments I’ll be giving to my ‘Religion in the United States’ class in January. I’m asking them to read the famous essay by Jonathan Z. Smith, ‘Religion, Religions, Religious’. It’s about 13 pages long. The first week they’ll read 6 pages and the second week they’ll read the last 7. I’ve divided each week into small sections. As they read a section (their homework tells them where to start, stop, and resume) they’ll be asked to write a two-sentence summary in their own words. Since a page to a page and a half being summarized in two sentences can take many different shapes, it’ll be hard for student B to ask student A for their answer because their answer will be unique. Additionally, when you’ve got to read, write, and explain, it’s not wise to wait until the last couple hours before a deadline, even when the reading load is light.

Each of the weeks that Smith’s article is being read have class periods set aside for my class to discuss what they’ve read. This will mean (1) they’ll share their summaries and (2) they’ll try to answer each other’s questions. How exactly I’ll conduct this process over a 45 minute class period is TBD.

If you’re interested in the Docs themselves that my students must complete and turn-in, here they are:

Homework (Week 1)Download
Homework (Week 2)Download