Once again this spring semester, I'm a Teaching Fellow for an undergraduate course on Death and Immortality. The professor is the hip and cool Steve Prothero, author of the best-selling Religious Illiteracy, who does the lectures Oprah-style, getting many of the 200 students to engage directly in discussion of the daily topics. Last spring students were particularly dazzled since Steve would appear in class one morning then on the Jon Stewart show that night. They could email their high school friends links to a Newsweek story quoting him. A celebrity professor!
I, of course, was just a lowly T.F. who had them--35 at a time--for two discussion sections, but the unusual nature of the course and the discussion-oriented culture converted me to the power of religious studies to open up conversations and avenues in the brains of undergraduates that often seem to be lying dormant. When I was an undergrad I recall long dormitory conversations on the meaning of life that were richly funded by the religious traditions in which various students had been submerged before coming to Bucknell. Now, however, it seems what many of these students have been submerged in is the same American youth culture where death is everywhere but insight into its meaning is nowhere. In the context of religious studies, I get to introduce a wide range of thinking about these questions and provoke thoughtful conversation about them, without having to promote one over the other.
I was deeply moved by many of my students last year. Some took the course only because they had heard that Steve was cool and the course was pretty easy (it is), but many had deep personal reasons for being there. Like the historic Buddha, they had had some experience where they had been confronted by death and had woken up to this larger drama that was taking place around them and that they, for better or worse, were in, too. A few students had recently lost parents, either quickly (cerebral hemorrhage) or slowly (brain cancer). Two others had been seriously ill themselves. A huge percentage had lost friends in car crashes in high school. Some had been shocked when, after the death of a grandparent, some unfamiliar religious tradition surfaced out of the family's history and shaped the funeral and mourning rituals. Whoa! What's this? they were forced to ask.
I got amazing emails, often written in the middle of the night. It was a blessing and privilege to be able to respond to them. So I am looking forward to the semester.
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