Indiana Alumni Magazine
Minding the Divine
Is the study of religion academic? Not entirely. Should religion be studied in the academy? Absolutely.
By Lauren J. Bryant
Religious studies and state universities seem strange bedfellows. The nation's separation between church and state causes the idea to give us pause. The very words "religious" and "studies" seem to be in tension. What is religious is unknowable, we think, at least by our reason. But studies are all about reasoning and the mind. Can the two be conjoined?
To be sure, religious studies gets personal. Its questions are the soul-searching kind. Religious studies on a university campus can offend, anger, or scare people, too. But it is precisely because a religious studies department on a public university campus is bound to be troubling that it belongs. Universities are, after all, about trouble: the search to understand troubling questions.
IN THE BEGINNING
The birth of IU Bloomington's religious studies department caused some trouble. You can see it in the public record of conversations about its formation.
"It was by far the most interesting faculty meeting I've ever attended," says Henry H.H. Remak, MA'37, professor emeritus of comparative literature, Germanic studies, and West European studies. Remak, at IU for more than 50 years, is talking about the May 1965 College of Arts and Sciences meeting where the religious studies program was established. (Religious studies became a department of the university in 1971.)
"We had a substantive discussion. It was civilized, but it was a real discussion," he recalls.
At that discussion's heart was this question: Should a state university teach religion?
Many, at IU as well as other state-supported schools, said yes. In the wake of a 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision (Abington School District v. Schempp) that endorsed the objective study of religion in public schools, an IUB committee recommended that a "Study of Religion" program be formed "to enable religious studies to take an honorable and respected place within the total humanities curriculum."
If that seems a mild claim today, it wasn't at IUB in the early 1960s. Opponents dismissed the program as "Sunday School" or thought the topic was already sufficiently covered in other departments — classics, for example, and history, philosophy, and anthropology. Others feared religious positions would be advocated in the classroom.
The minutes of the 1965 faculty meeting call the debate "pointed," noting that the final vote was not unanimous. But the committee's recommendations carried the day, and the new program was approved. Still, the program had to prove itself.
"We were surrounded by faculty and students who were looking at us and wondering who we were and what we were all about and whether we should be there," recalls James S. Ackerman, professor emeritus of religious studies, who came to Bloomington in 1969 to teach.
Within the tiny new program, though, the faculty knew exactly what they were about. Led by William May, an imposing man who came to IUB in 1966 after 14 years at Smith College, the religious studies faculty set out to teach its way into respect.
ENCHANTING EDUCATORS
By any measure of intellectual and professional accomplishment — awards, honors, university rank, lectures given, fellowships received, books and articles published — IUB religious studies faculty, past and present, rate highly. But as teachers, their renown is off the charts.
In the earliest years, the faculty included the likes of Wayne Meeks, a leading authority on the Apostle Paul and now Woolsey Professor of Biblical studies at Yale University. The late Joseph Epes Brown — editor of The Sacred Pipe, Black Elk's first-person account of Oglala Sioux sacred rites — gave lectures that drew overflow crowds of students, not all of them enrolled in his class. "I don't want to call it a cult," says Stephen J. Stein, Chancellor's Professor of religious studies, "but Joe had an aura about him. People would come out of the auditorium enchanted."
They still do. Ask a religious studies student — past or present, major or not — to describe the classroom experience, and you routinely hear "incredible," "unparalleled," "stellar," "shaped my life," "wonderful and exciting," "fabulous and engaging," "the best educational experience I've ever had," and "I fell in love and never looked back."
These fervent descriptions reflect an emphasis on undergraduate education firmly established by May, who is now retired from his post as Cary M. Maguire Professor of ethics at Southern Methodist University.
Richard Miller, professor of ethics and current chairman, describes the religious studies faculty's fidelity to teaching as a "moral commitment to the democratic promise of higher education" and adds, "I feel like we make good on it."
Miller and others certainly made good on it for Wells Scholar Kathryn Bryan. Inspired in part by a seminar with Ackerman, Bryan decided to spend her junior year abroad studying in Israel and Palestine. There, she entered an unimaginable world of political conflict and poverty.
Back in Bloomington, she drifted, she says, unsure whether any course of study could speak to the power and pain of the lives she had witnessed. Finally, she turned back to religious studies and approached Miller. He led Bryan through a course of intensive readings on the question of what makes a war just.
"For the first time," she says, "I found something that looked deeply at the issues I was concerned with, in a way that humanized them. Professor Miller gave me solid ground."
Bryan is headed to Oxford University this fall to study political philosophy, but she insists she'll return to IUB for a Ph.D. in religious studies. "I know I can learn to teach here," she says. "In this department, people have that as their top commitment."
HINDUISM AND HIP HOP
It's not the faculty alone that hooks IUB students on the study of religion; it's also what they teach. The field's sweep across traditions, methodologies, disciplines, and intellectual debates makes it "one of the finest examples of a liberal arts degree," says IU student trustee Sacha Willsey, BA'01. Now studying nonprofit management in SPEA, Willsey earned her undergraduate degree in religious studies.
"Religious studies broadens students' minds," she says. "It teaches them to think that the world can be viewed in many different ways."
A quick scan of some of the department's standard topics bears Willsey out: Buddhism, Augustine, Jewish mysticism, Gnostic religion, Hindu goddesses, Taoist traditions, American religious history, modern American Catholicism, the varieties of Islam, the book of Genesis, the feminist critique of Western religions, life and death ethical issues in medicine, and religion in popular culture (such as "Star Trek and Religion" and "Hip Hop: Spirituality from the Underground"). Not to mention an India Studies program, as well as films and field trips and symposia sponsored by the student-led Undergraduate Religious Studies Association, and chances to study overseas, such as working on an archaeological dig.
Alison Brown, BA'02, was caught up in the department's sweep. "In religious studies, you explore your universe," she says. "It leads to understanding the interconnections between society, politics, power, philosophy. I've become so worldly aware because of it."
Will "worldly aware" get you work? That's hardly why students pursue religious studies, but a sampling of alumni careers, distributed by the department, displays a range from architect, attorney, cantor, editor, judge, physician, priest, and professor to chicken farmer and programmer analyst.
Whether it's a reflection of the department's stature or a sign that the careerist 1990s have ended, religious studies' course enrollments are strong, with an all-time high of more than 200 undergraduate majors. Since 1987, the department has offered a doctoral program. It has minted 16 Ph.D.'s, with seven more candidates at work on dissertations.
OBJECTIVITY AND COMMUNITY
At a public university such as IU, teachers in religious studies abide by the mandate of objectivity in the classroom, although theology is a part of the discussion. Religious studies grapple with fundamental questions about what certain texts, acts, and events mean to us.
But the academic study of religion sets aside advocacy and apologetics. The approach is "more like history," says David Brakke, IUB associate professor of religious studies. Like his colleagues, Brakke asks students in his New Testament course to take into account the contexts of time periods, politics, philosophies, and cultures.
"We're always dealing with not just possibilities but probabilities," Brakke says. "Multiple things are possible, but we are thinking about what is most probable."
For example, Brakke says, Jesus's actions in the Temple are different in each gospel: when he acts, what he does, what he says. "Modern critical historians explain that each gospel writer adapted the account to communicate his own theology," Brakke says.
If a student asks whether it's possible that Jesus appeared four times and each gospel writer is telling one instance, "the historian agrees that such a thing is possible but not probable. The historian assesses the probability of past accounts based on assumptions shared by people with widely differing religious commitments."
"Objectivity" hardly means "clinical" or "detached," though. Brown, who joins Teach for America this fall, describes classes in her other major areas as enjoyable but "regular" academic experiences. "In religious studies," she says, "we have a community. I don't know what makes it work, but it certainly, certainly works."
Walk up to the cozy northwest wing of Sycamore Hall's second floor, and you can feel it working. Follow the strains of hip-hop music wafting down the hall past open office doors decorated with New Yorker cartoons, and you'll reach the office of Caroline Dowd-Higgins, BM'89, MM'95, academic adviser. This is the hub of the department, where students pop in and out all day long, snitching a bit of candy from the brimming bowl on Dowd-Higgins' desk, staying for a bit of encouragement or advice.
Although the department now has 18 full-time faculty members — about twice the average number of full-time faculty at religion and theology programs nationally — an accessible, "small-college atmosphere" prevails, says Dowd-Higgins. "It's unique, much different from any other environment I've experienced at IU," she says.
Mary Jo Weaver has been a professor of religious studies at IUB for 27 years. She says an "IU religious studies spirit" animates students and, especially, faculty.
"We have a real respect for one another's opinions, and we have come to honor our collective judgment," she says. "Everyone listens and learns. You're instructed so much here."
"IT STUDIES YOU"
The study of religion in public universities may be academic — students at IUB attest to the intellectual rigor of their classes — but it's also intimate. In the midst of courses on statistics, French, sociology, English, music, history, even philosophy, religious studies courses stand out because they ask the big questions.
"Religious studies deals with things people think about all the time, even if they don't realize they think about them," says Kevin Jacques, an Islamicist and the department's newest faculty member. "What is the nature of the relationship between God and humans? What's my role in this great cosmos? Just about every religious studies course addresses some essential question that causes students to think about how they understand the world, how they relate to the big questions."
Sometimes, the encounter with those big questions is truly life-altering. Mark Larocca-Pitts, BA'81, MA'88, is now a chaplain at Athens Regional Medical Center in Georgia. He says he lost his faith studying religion at IUB, only to "return to a faith that was mine and more authentic" because of the critical questions his courses raised.
"In a New Testament course with Paul Sampley, we were studying the writings of Paul the Apostle," he recalls. "Sampley remarked that Paul never says Jesus and God are one and the same. I raised my hand and replied that the Gospel of John says, 'I and the Father are one.' Sampley responded, 'Yes, but we are talking about the writings of Paul.'
"At this point I had something of an epiphany. I realized that the Bible was written by many people, that one passage might contradict or misrepresent another passage. I lost a simple faith that could not question, could not live with doubt. But what I found, with the critical tools supplied by religious studies, was a deeper faith that is beyond or behind knowledge."
In the words of Gayle Williams, MA'85, EdD'01, an IUB religious studies graduate who is now an IUPUI assistant dean, "You study religious studies, and it studies you."
Why does a public university teach religious studies? Why would it not? In a world where we struggle to comprehend the reach of religion and how it can twist into terrible forms of violence and abuse, the need for religious studies — "presented objectively as part of a secular program of education," to quote the Supreme Court — seems an urgent one.
"You cannot understand the world unless you understand the role that religions play in the formation of identity and cultures," Miller says. "You can't understand history apart from the movement and migration of religious traditions across the globe. To be an educated citizen who pictures the world entirely in secular terms is to be entirely blind to a fact of life."
It takes no leap of faith to see that. 
Lauren J. Bryant, BA'78, MA'87, received her master's degree from the IUB religious studies department. Managing editor of Indiana Alumni Magazine from 1996 to 2000, she is associate editor/writer for IU's Research & Creative Activity magazine.