Teaching mindfully: encountering student spiritualities.

In a 2003 Los Angeles Times story, journalist K. Connie Kang compares the "Do-It-Yourself Religion" or "mix and match spirituality" of contemporary Americans to choosing combinations from a buffet or wardrobe or editorially "cutting and pasting" in a word processing program. [1] A comment by theologian Edmund Gibbs of Fuller Theological Seminary suggests the impact of such syncretistic religious thinking may be having on our students: "Younger people live with ambivalence. It's not either or but both and." [2] These student attitudes inform the articles on teaching religion in this issue of Academic Exchange Quarterly.

Although on the surface, the authors, their teaching contexts, and the issues they address seem to have little overlap, all explore the pluralistic teaching context and diverse expectations affecting the study of religion in the United States and Europe. James Nelson and Norman Richardson reflect on the challenges of creating an ethos of diversity and inclusion while teaching university-level religious studies in religiously divided Irish society. Julia Nagy, of the Research Group for Old Hungarian Dramas, proposes a new method for Jesuit drama research, considering the religious and mythological meanings of drama as a lens to examine how it articulates group identity and aims at religious education. Daniel C. Elliott, who teaches education at a private Christian university in California, evaluates methods of reintegrating character education and a values-oriented curriculum into public education, though such ideas are now more closely associated with religious education. Paul Levesque, who teaches comparative religion at a California State University, proposes methods for helping Christian students in a multicultural, multireligious context to analyze how varying methods of biblical interpretation and differing levels of tolerance for internal theological diversity impact religious views of homosexual behavior. Mary Kremer, who teaches education at a midwestern Dominican university, describes the methods used by secondary religion teachers to incorporate multicultural teaching strategies in urban schools and the resulting increase in student desire to participate in creating a more just society. Marilyn Gottschall, who teaches religious studies at a private liberal arts college in southern California, discusses the ways an assignment to recite the Qur'an in Arabic ...