spinning

My mind is spinning tonight. Maybe it's always spinning, maybe it's not just tonight.

A wonderful comment on my last post. Just today I have flip-flopped on the Harvard/Chicago decision about three times. I found out that, should I go to Chicago, I'd be able to TA for world religions next semester by driving down here one day a week to teach, which means that I'd have a lot more money every month and I'd gain more teaching experience. In Boston, I wouldn't be teaching, and I'd probably have to end up running more credit card debt in order to live comfortably and enjoy my time there. Though finances aren't the number one priority here, they're still a factor in the decision. But, as sarah d pointed out, it won't do me much good to be in Chicago if I'm drifting there. I need to have a solid academic reason to go there. What I need to do, in the next week or so, is determine whether there could be an academic reason. One of the religious studies professors (the one with whom I'd be working on the world religions course next term) just got his PhD from U. Chicago, and so I think he could set me up with people there and help me to get some kind of "visiting" status. Their Divinity School is considered the best place to study religion, generally, in the country, and they've got some great people there, so one option would be to go there and sit in on some of the world religions (or religion and society) courses taught by these "famous" people. This probably wouldn't directly apply to work in religion and education, but I'd learn quite a bit more about world religions, which is something I've been wanting to do. I have a feeling that, after talking to some people, the decision will be much easier to make, or at least the terms on which I have to make the decision will be much clearer.

I finished the dissertation narrative for the fellowship proposal today. I finished a draft of it, anyway. I've sent it off to my advisor to see what he thinks. The idea is similar to what we'd talked about before, but it's rooted in an entirely different philosophical framework (I'm not even sure I had a framework before). The idea I have, essentially, is this: Bergmann (who we've been reading in my social philosophy course, who's been so inspiring to me lately) proposes this conception of freedom that is based in people's experiences of being free. He claims that people feel most free when they are engaged in activities in which they come alive, feel a sort of harmony, feel most themselves. He uses the term "identification" to describe the experience; my professor uses the term "self-enactment." This means that we feel free when we are performing actions that enable us to realize an authentic sense of self. I think most of us have had experiences like this, where you get lost in your work or your creative endeavors, where you feel a sense of exuberance or vitality in what you're doing.

Bergmann says that this is what freedom is. I want to take this concept and apply it to the idea of religious freedom. We normally think of this as the ability to practice your religion without being hindered. However, under Bergmann's conception, religious freedom would come to mean practicing a religion (or, more generally, embracing a worldview, religious or not) that you can identify with, that fits for you. This is not the same thing as our traditional notion of religious freedom. Under the traditional notion, you could practice a religion without hindrance that in fact stifles you, keeps you from coming alive, doesn't seem to fit (maybe you do this because of family pressure or social convention). Under Bergmann's notion, you could experience religious freedom even if you were hindered in your practice as long as you were practicing a worldview that felt right, that gave you that sense of exuberance.

So if we accept and value this "new" understanding of religious freedom, then we would want to give people the opportunity to experience this. However, it would require that people have the opportunity to enter into a variety of worldviews--the only way to determine which worldview is self-enacting for a person would be for that person to try to live it, since with the living would come the experience. Yet most people are not exposed to a diversity of worldviews within their families or local communities, especially not in a "lived" or "livable" sense. They could, though, be exposed to these worldviews in the educational system.

I would propose, then, that we establish a sort of "worldview education" in schools that would seriously expose students to different ways of looking at the world with the goal of enabling them to determine which worldview(s) are most self-enacting. A world religions course would be one way of doing this, though it would be a very different kind of world religions course than those typically offered in high schools, colleges, and universities. The typical world religions course approaches the religions from a historical and social viewpoint, with the aim being to learn the key beliefs, rituals, myths, doctrine, and social arrangements of the religions. This "new" world religions course, with a goal of enabling religious freedom, or religious self-enactment, or worldview identification, would have to teach these key beliefs, rituals, etc., along the way, but it would focus on offering lived experiences of these worldviews to the students. The method would involve leading students to "pass over" into different worldviews to see if elements of that view were self-enacting. Students would be encouraged to construct a worldview that seemed to fit for them, with the understanding that what fits for them could change over time.

The end product of my dissertation, then, would be a curriculum for this kind of world religions course (or worldview course) that could be shopped around to various educational administrations in the hopes of having it implemented in policy. Future work would involve observations of these sorts of courses to see how they play out, so that we could determine both what works best in terms of pedagogy and what impact the courses tend to have on students.

That's my idea. Does it make sense? In the dissertation, I'd have to do a lot of work to justify Bergmann's conception of freedom over others, to make a convincing argument that we should value this new conception of religious freedom, and to make the case that a course (or set of courses) in which students reflected on their worldviews, possibly modifying them, would not in fact violate the more traditional sense of religious freedom, which is seen as being protected by the First Amendment (which says in part that Congress shall pass no law establishing religion or prohibiting the free exercise of religion). However, I think I could do all of this, and my hope in actually proposing a curriculum for a worldview course would be that I could show that my theoretical argument for the value of my conception of religious freedom could actually be turned into a concrete educational practice.

We'll see what my advisor thinks.