Thread by @BradleyOnishi

Thread on the importance of religious literacy:

I recently returned from the Religious News Association conference where I met and attended panels from some incredible religion reporters: @lizkineke @liamsadams , @sophiasgaler @ayshabkhan @andrewmarkhenry @AndrewLSeidel @kathsstewart @C_Stroop

After the conference, a tweet by @sophiasgaler clarified something I’d been hovering over since the conference: both journalists on the religion beat and scholars of religion have a vested interest in explaining why religious literacy is important.

The Religious Literacy Project at Harvard @HarvardRLP uses Diane Moore’s definition (also used by the AAR):

a.a basic understanding of the history, central texts (where applicable), beliefs, practices and contemporary manifestations of several of the world's religious

traditions as they arose out of and continue to be shaped by particular social, historical and cultural context.
b.the ability to discern and explore the religious dimensions of political, social and cultural expressions across time and place.

The Harvard Religious Literacy project makes an important point about this definition: “Critical to this definition is the importance of understanding religions and religious influences in context and as inextricably woven into all dimensions of human experience.”

In other words, religious literacy is not a means of memorizing Methodist theology or learning about Ramadan. It's the understanding that religion is part of every aspect of human life—gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, art, history, migration, literature, philosophy, and so on

When we become religiously literate, we learn to read the human condition as a whole--in all its wonder and beauty (as @raushenbush and @dnewheiser remind me) , and its violence and tragedy (as @C_Stroop and @AndrewLSeidel remind me).

I always tell students who are thinking of studying religion: when you sign up with us, you get to study it all. When we study the history of Christian mystics, we are always also studying their gendered, sexual, and embodied lives.

When we investigate contemporary American politics and religion, we have to talk about race, ethnicity, and migration. When we study religion in New York City, there’s no way to avoid questions about gentrification, housing policies, and systemic organization.

But wait, there's more!

When we explore religious actors and communities, we are often drawn into cultural, political, and institutional spaces that are unfamiliar and at times uncomfortable. We inhabit worlds and histories, texts and traditions.

That type of encounter demands that we become accustomed to the logic and practice of other people in order to understand how their lives work.

This is happens across the humanities, but it’s extra in religious studies. If our scope is the human condition as a whole, our practice of seeing and feeling the world from another’s POV is essential to studying and reporting on religion.

If, as Tyler Roberts argues, the humanities are the site where we respond, inherit, and reflect on what it has meant to be human in the past and what it might mean in the future, then this is their most important function.

How do we practice responding to conflict? To death? To tragedy? To disappointment? To the incalculable and the irrational? We practice by entering the worlds, positions, lives, and texts of those who have come before us.

We ask fundamental questions about mortality, race, gender, sexuality, climate change, love, birth, desire, democracy, fascism, truth, facts, good, and evil. We train our affects and passions with muscle-memory through dialogue, discussion, debate, and argument.

When it comes to religion--and the humanities as a whole--there is more at stake than providing young people precious time and space for individual soul-searching or for wider coverage of people of faith.

What is at stake is the capacity for meaning-making and sociality—the critical inheritance of the past and hopeful anticipation of the future—in a time haunted by the threat of human extinction and lack of trust in cultural authorities and political institutions.

Religious literacy is a means of fending off greed and narcissism in favor of long-term investments into the flourishing of human and non human life. A guard against myopic solutions. A practice of empathy and virtue. A site for encounter, critique, and action.

I'd love to hear what my fellow scholars of religion think about the importance of religious literacy: @JAaronSimmons @jolyonbt @dmcconeghy @ecothought @kelly_j_baker @kkdumez @BRamseyJr @andrewmarkhenry @1StepBeyond1