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Discussion of faith and religion has been a significant part of my teaching of writing and literature because these things have been central to the lives of the students, and humanistic study is interested in those experiences. It's the opposite of verboten.
Is this an Ivy League thing? I've spent most of my career in the South, teaching undergraduates (predominantly first-year students, even), and there's nothing weird about discussing these issues in context of class, even though I'm towards the left side of that chart.
Faith and belief are among the most fascinating subjects I can imagine, and teaching the humanities the thought that they might be excluded or verboten is just bizarre to me. If they're verboten, I've closed off a huge avenue of fruitful critical inquiry.
Sometimes when I see characterizations of institutions and students by folks who work in elite contexts I wonder if I've spent my entire career in bizarro world, but I think it's the other way around. Unfortunately, it's those folks who get to explain what's up to the rest of us.
At Clemson, because of the mix of readings and students in a gen ed literature course, we spent so much time on faith & belief I was invited by students to speak at the annual Campus Crusade (now Cru) dinner. I had to disclose I wasn't a believer. Students were surprised.
I took that surprise as a compliment in a way, but I'd never been hiding my own beliefs with any kind of intention. We were just talking about what ideas and experiences the literature we'd been reading invoked. It couldn't have been more natural.
That was more than 10 years ago, so maybe times have changed, but I hope not so much.
I mean, in a gen ed contemporary literature class with reading novels like The Road, The Handmaid's Tale, and the like, how are we not going to talk about topics like faith and religion?
