Guest Post: Nancy Thompson, Community College of Vermont

Every summer, the Interfaith Center of New York offers a 3-week institute, Religious Worlds of New York, that helps educators from around the country explore religious diversity in the U.S. Participants meet a wide range of local religious leaders, visit diverse houses of worship, and work with experienced teachers to develop their own curriculum projects. I chose to revamp my Comparative Religion course at the Community of College of Vermont. While my students still explore religious philosophies, each belief system is now placed within a much broader historical and cultural framework. This allows students to better understand both the diversity found within each tradition and the impact of actual lived religion on community life. This post outlines what my course looks like now.

Background

For years, I have been teaching Comparative Religion online at Community College of Vermont. The sections I offer are fully online and asynchronous, delivered in Canvas. The course is semester based and presented through fifteen weekly modules. It is listed as a philosophy course, and instructors must utilize essential objectives for the course that are developed by the college. These objectives include:

• tracing the history and mythological origins of the world’s religions
• interpreting the religions’ stories and scriptures
• comparing their beliefs, teachings, and rituals
• examining the roles that religions play in people’s lives and in the world
• analyzing how the world’s religions connect and conflict in a variety of ways

The student body is somewhat diverse but aligns with Vermont’s demographics. Some students are dual enrolled juniors and seniors in high school. Some students are pursuing certificates as funeral directors;  the course is required for the certificate program. Routinely, the class is the first experience and knowledge that students gain with a variety of world religions, such as Hinduism and Daoism.

A Major Redesign

Over the years, although I modified the class frequently, the focus was primarily on what defined each religion. For example, we looked at the Five Pillars of Islam, considered forms and core beliefs of Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism, and so on. However, attending the NEH funded Religious Worlds of New York Institute in the summer of 2024 gave me the impetus and resources to build a major redesign of the class.

This redesign, while meeting all the essential objectives of the class and still presenting the philosophies of the religions, takes a cultural studies approach. Students now learn about world religions holistically and in a broad context, and the course materials highlight how various groups live and practice religion, This includes historical factors, like colonialism and imperialism, that intersect with faith traditions.

The course also grapples proactively and directly with the question of what religion is, which was inspired by students’ frequent dismissal of various religions as “just” philosophies. As well, a resource in the Starting Point module now explains the First Amendment as it relates to learning about religions and offers students the opportunity (and requirement) to self-quiz the knowledge they gain from it. The class is 200 level but has no prerequisites. Thus, the challenge was to build a course that would meet the 135-hour semester expectation for work without going over that and without burdening students who might not have prior learning in critical thinking and academic writing.

My Current Course

The redesign kept a basic structural element of the original class: the class is fully discussion based with no exams. Throughout the semester, students read entire texts (The Bhagavad Gita, The Dhammapada, and the Dao de Jing) and excerpts of larger texts: the Book of Exodus, the Gospels of Luke and John, and selections from the Kojiki, the Analects of Confucius, and the Adi Granth. A variety of resources are provided in each week’s module, including links to religious art, relevant maps relating to diaspora and enslavement, resources I received at the Religious Worlds of NY Institute, and more. A new addition to the class is a non-mandatory Culture Café in various weeks that offers students video opportunities to learn additional and sometimes offbeat (such as techno Buddhist chant) cultural representations of faith traditions. The 15-week course progression is as follows:

Week 1: Ancient Traditions and Introduction to Religion
Weeks 2-3: Hinduisms and Ways to Be Hindu
Week 4: Sikhism and Jainism
Weeks 5-6: Buddhisms and Ways to be Buddhist
Week 7: Indigenous Traditions of China and Japan
Weeks 8-9: Judaisms and Ways to be Jewish
Weeks 10-11: Christianities and Ways to be Christian
Weeks 12-13: Islams Including Sufism and Ways to be Muslim
Week 14: African Religions in Diaspora
Week 15: Presentations/Peer Review of Learning Projects

Throughout the semester, students complete Discussion questions on each topic. Some of these questions are content-oriented. Others are more thought-provoking. Here are a few examples, but please feel free to reach out for the full assignment schedule.

Week One: What ideas start to emerge about the concept “god” from the digital gallery, the music and the poem? In what ways was it useful for ancient rulers (emperors, pharaohs, kings) to claim that they were gods or related in some way to a god; in what ways might such a claim be dangerous? In the modern (since 1900) world, can we see any secular rulers who are connected to gods or believed to be gods?

Week Seven: Think about the time periods that spawned Daoist and Confucian beliefs. What were three or four important social factors in China at the time? Where do we see them reflected in the Analects and the Dao de Jing? What do you see as the main difference between these texts; where can you see an overlap or similarity of concepts? Consider the two pieces of calligraphy in the Met Museum resource.  How does the first example reflect Confucian values, including ideas from the text; what Buddhist and Daoist concepts, including ideas from the texts, can we see reflected in the second example?

Week Twelve: What stands out to you from your readings in the Qur’an?  Where do you notice correlations with the Hebrew Bible and/or New Testament? Does what you read in the Qur’an affirm what is in those texts, put a different spin on them, or perhaps both? Explain, using specific examples. Does what you are reading in the Qur’an seem organized around a historical timeline? If not, how might you describe the organization?

Final Learning Project

At the end of the semester, instead of a final exam, students prepare a learning project. The final learning project has two parts. One part is to undertake field trips on their own to three different houses of worship and to write in detail about their experiences. The other part is analytical. For this portion, students have three choices:

• to locate, summarize, and analyze current articles focused on world religions
• to read a book from a curated list and analyze it, connecting the analysis to at least two essential objectives for the class
• to select and analyze religious art, putting it into cultural and religious context

Conclusion

Although revamping a course is always a lot of work, it feels totally worth it in this case. I think my students have a much better grasp on the importance of religion over the course of history and in the daily lives of people today. Please feel free to contact me at Nancy.thompson@ccv.edu for a more detailed course schedule, a Zoom walkthrough of the Canvas course site, or additional information on the range of exercises, interactives, art images, music, and more that is built into the class.

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