HDS - News - In Dialogue - Mark U. Edwards, Jr.

In Dialogue is a recurring HDS web feature that showcases faculty commentaries on issues of religion and contemporary life, and encourages readers to submit responses for public posting. Mark U. Edwards, Jr., member of the Faculty of Divinity and associate dean for academic administration, addresses the challenges of faculty discussing belief and perspective with students.

As I reported in my recent piece for Harvard Divinity Bulletin ("Private Belief, Public Scholarship"), I have asked faculty in several seminars around the country whether they mentioned their religious convictions in class and, if so, why. It turns out that many religious faculty do self-disclose, both to inform their students where "they were coming from" and to encourage students to become more self-aware of their own commitments and their influence on their own thinking. These professors also made clear that this pedagogical strategy was not without risk. Students may feel uncomfortable or even coerced. And once the professor broaches the ban on religious discourse in the classroom, some students may feel they have been given permission to witness or proselytize. The strategy, most seminar participants agreed, required a honed ability to handle disagreement and a willingness to entertain and encourage alternative perspectives.

Given limitations of space, my article did not mention that some faculty also raise explicitly religious considerations because they want their students to be aware of certain moral, metaphysical, or anthropological issues in their discipline that are religiously contested and what the religious alternatives may be. (This is sometimes termed "natural inclusion." By natural inclusion, philosopher Warren Nord and other commentators mean that "courses . . . that deal with religiously contested issues should at least acknowledge the existence of the religious alternatives and engage them in conversation.")

In practice, "natural inclusion" might mean that a course in, say, economics would acknowledge that religious views influence economic activity by influencing thought on justice, human rights, suffering, the good life, and so on. It would place in conversation the different assumptions that various religious traditions and academic economics make about human nature or morality. Students should be introduced to the important controversial issues and given opportunity to explore the assumptions underlying economics and alternative views.

Natural inclusion as a pedagogical strategy has its challenges, especially what to "naturally include" and how to include it competently. As my colleague Diana Eck's Pluralism Project has amply illustrated, the world today is characterized by religious and spiritual variety, and much of that global variety is now at home within the United States. What religiously contested issues should academics include? For example, some conservative Christians might wish the professor of an introductory biology course to acknowledge the (from their perspective) contested nature of evolutionary theory. Catholic Christians might prefer that the professor acknowledge the morally contested status of, say, embryonic stem cell research. Hindus may think it most important to acknowledge the religiously problematic character of vivisection and animal experimentation. If all these contested issues are included, an introductory biology course will rapidly qualify for cross-listing in religious studies and students will find themselves shortchanged when it comes to their education in biology.

And then there is the matter of competence. To be religiously or spiritually inclined does not automatically make one an expert on religious or spiritual perspectives. For natural inclusion to work responsibly, its practitioners need to acquire sufficient understanding and expertise to deal with the religious issues responsibly. Given the demands of disciplinary work, it may be unrealistic to expect scholars in other disciplines to devote sufficient time and energy to gain such requisite competence in religion. And without such study, scholars practicing natural inclusion run the substantial risk of making pronouncements about matters they understand only superficially.

In my recent book, Religion on Our Campuses, I concluded the chapter on religion in the classroom with some cautions that I want to repeat here. There can be good pedagogical reasons for introducing explicitly religious or spiritual claims in classroom lectures or discussions. In so doing, however, we faculty are likely to be at least bending our discipline's standards and practices regarding religion. We may also be pushing against our students' sensibilities. We should, therefore, be able to explain and justify why we're introducing religious perspectives and why we have introduced them in the way that we have.

As responsible professionals, we have additional obligations. If we decide to bring religious or spiritual convictions into the classroom, we need to be adept at handling heated exchanges that may be construed as disrespectful by one group of students or another. And if we want our students to recognize the religiously contested issues and their religious alternatives, we owe it to our students (and our colleagues in our own discipline and in religious studies) to handle the religious alternatives with competence and fairness. In the classroom, we are the authority. If we are going to explain religious alternatives, we need to make sure that our authority is warranted. With religion in the classroom, it is better not to venture than to venture badly.

Readers can submit responses to indialogue@hds.harvard.edu. Harvard Divinity School reserves the right to edit responses for space considerations. Not all submissions can be posted.