Guest Blog: Vicki Michela Garlock, Ph.D., Editor, Religion Matters Review of Teaching Religious Literacy to Combat Religious Bullying: Insights from North American Secondary Schools by W.Y. Alice Chan (Routledge, 2021) We’ve read about increased antisemitism in the U.S. (Shveda/CNN, 2023). We might have heard that the majority of Sikh school students are harassed and ridiculed […]
Religious Literacy
Religion All Around: Engaging Students with the Category of Religion
Guest Blog: Elsa Kunz, Graduate Student, Harvard Divinity School The category of "religion" is a challenging one, and many students arrive in the classroom with unexplored assumption about what "counts" as religion. For many students, "religion" is an isolatable category that occurs in designated spaces, places, and people. Yet the reality is that religion does [...]
Teaching Religious Literacy with Films
Guest Post: Jennifer Fischer, Co-Founder, Think Ten Media Group Big Sonia follows the life of Sonia Warshawski, a Jewish teenager living in Poland when the German army invades in the 1930s. Her father and brother were shot, her sister disappeared; she and her mother became slave laborers and were finally deported to a death camp. […]
Ritual Selections: Deciding to See What Takes Place
Guest Post: John Soboslai, Assistant Professor of Religion, Montclair State University In my first post I outlined the goals and hopes that brought an interdisciplinary group of scholars and media creators together in June of 2022. Seeking to lay the foundation for a series of immersive, interactive, virtual reality experiences of religious rituals around the […]
Countering Islamophobia Through Film: Recommendations & Resources
Guest Post: Jennifer Fischer, Co-Founder, Think Ten Media Group Given how prevalent media is in our daily lives, challenging Islamophobia through film is an important and urgent matter. But doing so requires careful curation of the media that we consume. Nuanced, complex and authentic media representations do exist, but deliberate efforts are needed if we […]