Humanizing Religion: Teaching Religion as Practice

I truly appreciate the focus of Michael C. Weber’s article Teaching Religion in the World History Class.  Which is, in short, that when it comes to teaching religion, we've inherited a pedagogical tradition of focusing on the ideas, the laws and theological abstractions, while leaving out the people, and thus leaving out what religion actually looks like. 

So lets add the element of humanity to curricula on religion.  Weber urges teachers to present students with sketches of what devotees and practitioners actually do: how did kings and peasants practice Buddhism?  Villagers and urbanites?  Upper as well as lower class women?  How was their practice influenced by their life - was the practice, the devotion, the way of believing influenced by being a king, a farmer, a woman? How did their practices and beliefs shape their lives? 

Weber offers some resources in his article, but notes that they are not ideal.  A single source providing short biographical sketches of contextualized religiosity would be incredibly helpful.  Anybody know of something like that?   

In the blog post just before this one, I focused on the problem of religion often being taught as uniform and static – an ahistorical understanding of religion that Dianne L. Moore has called a world-wide form of religious illiteracy.  Teaching the diversity and dynamism of any one religious tradition is important because it humanizes the religion.  And vice-versa: teaching about actual human practice would be a great way to highlight the diversity and dynamism of religion.  

Weber gives a good snapshot of how reducing religions to sets of beliefs, while leaving out an understanding of what people actually do, makes religion and the people who practice it appear rather silly:

…books and teachers usually opt for a quick essential description of the belief system: with this essentialist approach Judaism simply becomes a series of beliefs about ethical monotheists, the covenant people of the one God who controls history; Buddhism about following the Eight Fold Path to Nirvana; Islam is reduced to being a radical, legalistic religio-socio-legalistic monotheism of the Arabs; and the Christian religion is summed up in the somewhat tragic narrative of the "life of Jesus of Nazareth" and the idea of love of God and fellow Christians.  

These oversimplifications are dehumanizing, in a very real sense that the human experience has been stripped away.  Without a focus on the religious experience and practice and the role of religion in society, these beliefs simply appear bizarre.  My feeling is that an essentialist presentation of religion is likely to cause students to perceive current as well as past religious practitioners as naive.  It may cause religious students to feel disconnected from school.  Presentations of religion that fail to present spiritual experience and practice also fail to provide students with spiritual nourishment, including the ability to understand and analyze themselves and others as spiritual beings.       

The focus on religious practice is in accord with recent trends in religious scholarship.  One resource that has interesting potential for us as teachers is the Princeton Readings in Religions series, which describes itself thus: “Princeton Readings in Religions moves away from an emphasis on philosophy and the religious expressions of elite groups to represent instead a wide range of current and historical religious practices”.  The website is well worth checking out...

The books are organized around themes that would be helpful for a world history teacher: for example, Religions of Japan in Practice has 45 short readings split in sections on "Ethical Practices," "Ritual Practices," and "Institutional Practices," and includes lists that categorize the readings chronologically, geographically, and according to religious tradition.  The readings are too dense for most secondary school students, but if we’re searching for rich, historically contextualized depictions of religion in practice, and are willing to write a few scenarios up ourselves at the appropriate reading level, this is a goldmine.     

As always, I would love to hear any ideas readers may have :)