Scholarship and teaching are both forms of human relationship. The purpose of both is to enable the development of further relationships characterized by integrity and by an ongoing process of coming to understand. Both must therefore be governed by the same principles.
The study of religions consists in listening to unfamiliar voices with sacrificial attention, constructing conceptual models that allow one to relate what one has heard to familiar categories, and then subjecting those models and categories to deconstruction through self-criticism and further acts of listening.
Teaching religions must therefore begin by identifying or providing some elements of a shared historical or conceptual matrix that can serve as a framework for listening. This initial matrix must provide categories that can be specifically related to the primary materials that will be examined. The centerpiece of a course will then consist of engagements with unfamiliar primary texts and living voices. The teacher must model the process of coming to understand these voices in terms of the shared framework, and coach students as they do this for themselves in a variety of formats, some of which should be shaped by students’ individual interests. Some of the primary materials should call into question the initial matrix.
Students should leave a course not so much with a new ability to talk about religion, as with what I like to call “listening knowledge:” a basic mental map, and the skill to use and redraw it as they work to understand new religious voices that they encounter beyond the classroom.
Since teaching not only enables the development of new relationships, but is itself one form of human relationship, attentive listening and self-criticism must be hallmarks of student-teacher interaction in and outside the classroom. Students’ contributions must be given the same quality of attention as the voices being studied, so that they too may spark revisions in my ways of thinking and teaching.