Filmmaking Beyond the Film Classroom

Filmmaking Beyond the Film Classroom

by Everett Hamner

We're approaching the lovely season when department chairs start asking for next semester’s textbooks, and while the syllabi themselves may still be months away, it’s never too early to dream up something different. In the spirit of collegial inspiration, and partly to build on recent journalistic treatments of unusual teaching approaches in The Chronicle of Higher Education and The New York Times (not to mention Michael Pasquier’s post from Tuesday), I want to share a nontraditional seminar project I undertook this time last year. While few readers of this blog may work in bioethics, the methodology is easily transferable to American religious history, or whatever else rocks one’s boat.

On the first day of my Genetics, Ethics, and Narrative seminar last spring, I looked around the room at thirteen students and saw not only reasonably strong academic abilities, but also moderately high computer skills and levels of personal responsibility. One student worked part-time cutting video at a local television station; another had shared several short films with me during the previous semester. I had already planned for students to do some kind of creative work in the course alongside their major research papers, and my idea was simple: why not collaborate on a documentary film instead of doing individual projects?

Some may respond, “Why not take your students on a field trip every week and drive them for ice cream, too?” Sure, this is beyond-the-call-of-duty stuff, and it requires that a professor generally likes her students and is willing to deal with surprises. It also helps if one’s institutional context welcomes rather than frowns upon innovation. Given these criteria, though, there are excellent reasons to risk such an unorthodox endeavor. Paramount for me was the way it motivated my students’ curiosity about the subject matter. Knowing they would be screening the film for their peers at an end-of-semester reception, they wanted it to be good, and they had to understand the subject matter well for that to happen.

How does one begin such an undertaking? Fearlessly. Confidently. Even when one feels grave doubts. It is amazing what students can achieve when their professor believes in them. I also think they respond well to a professor working not just in front of them, but also beside them. Too often we hide the boundaries of our expertise, expecting students to collapse in dismay if there is something we do not know. Watch what happens in class, though, when the learning direction occasionally reverses, even in casual chats outside of class time. When my students have a minute to instruct me on the finer points of motorcycle engines, the logic of a baseball trade, the experience of raising children while a spouse is stationed in Afghanistan, or the going rate at local egg donation centers, we become people to each other, not just roles. They begin to care what I think rather than merely submitting to my authority for a time.

There must be a downside to such creative collaboration. Indeed: time. The investment here can be immense, especially on a first go and insofar as one cares about the result. I did, and though the final cut of our film retained minor flaws, it was accurate and cohesive. I moderated discussions, distributed tasks, and signed off on most components. According to my email client, this involved more than five hundred messages. Even so, my students owned the project: they parsed the relevant ethical questions, arranged and conducted interviews, wrote more than ten screenplay drafts, created five times more footage than we used, researched copyright laws and acquired the rights to soundtrack music, completed several edits of the whole, and advertised the screening at nearby campuses.

I’ll add one other thought: even if the final product had self-destructed after the screening, the project would have been worthwhile for its impact on the more traditional academic aspects of the course. When students work together on something they think is cool, it significantly strengthens the course’s more ordinary components. Having decided to look each other and their professor in the eye, it is no longer an option not to do the reading or just to phone in the research paper. Not every essay submitted for the course achieved all it could, but almost. .

For those who would like to view the result, here is our fifteen-minute claim to fame, Imagining Genetic Enhancement. You’ll notice how extensively bioethics and questions of American religion intersect, and that while the future is the explicit focus, past contexts remain inescapable. Whatever decisions we make about testing or modifying human genomes, we need to do so in light of the history of science and technology. And for better and worse, whether we are discussing eugenics or stem cell research, cloning or IVF, these debates have almost always involved American religion.

For those interested in the pedagogical minutiae, I’m happy to provide further details. I’d especially enjoy hearing other ways people have used collaborative or individual art in “non-creative” courses; conversely, I’d welcome skepticism about its ultimate value. Perhaps I’ll follow up in the months ahead with a post on the less time-intensive but still promising creative project I’m trying this semester.

Risk, Wisdom, and Education

Paul Harvey

Earlier this week I was reading through files for colleagues at my university coming up for their 2-year, 4-year, and tenure reviews. The files here include a complete record of student teaching evaluations, and (contrary to the propaganda generally dispensed about higher education) teaching is taken very seriously as a part of regular faculty reviews.

Reading through these evaluations is always a fascinating exercise in seeing how students think about teaching, and teachers, in various disciplines. Going through the file for one colleague who is very obviously a superior scholar and teacher, I was struck by one set of teaching evaluations which complained, sometimes kindly and sometimes bitterly, about “having” to read material which “is personally offensive to My Lord,” as one student put it. I think this student was referring probably to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or maybe Howl, both of which were on the syllabus for a particular class. Or maybe something else, I’m not sure. With the kind of mindset of these students, it’s pretty hard to read anything without getting offended somehow -- all those Greek gods having sex, all that love poetry in the Bible and in medieval literature, all those n- words in Huckleberry Finn, all those nasty deaths in All Quiet on the Western Front, and don’t even get me started on William Faulkner or Queequeg in Moby-Dick.

It’s not unusual to hear about these kinds of complaints, yet it always amazes me that these same students would not balk at “having” to read the Old Testament, with its graphic details of rape, pillage, incest, and human sacrifice, not to mention some erotica that makes Howl seem pretty tame by comparison.

In this particular case, I think I only took notice because there were about 6 or 7 student evaluations in a row that demanded there be “alternative” reading assignments, or that students not be “forced” to read material that somehow offended them. These were not offered as suggestions, but with more insistence: when a piece of literature crossed some of their personal religious values, they felt it their right to demand that they not have to encounter it, at a public university. I’m paying your salary, after all (actually about 8% of my salary, but that’s a subject for a different post). It's a strange sense of entitlement, indeed, to demand not to be educated in literature, in a class on literature.

It’s easy enough for me to brush this stuff off. I don’t get a lot of that in my classes; history books tend to be dry enough that I count myself lucky if students read them at all, and "offensive" material is understood to be just bad sinful stuff that people did in the past. Some years ago, though, I had a student complain about the great novel Invisible Man; in fact, she just refused to read it after an early scene in the book which portrays (with great humor and satire) an obviously allegorical dream that involves some incest. The student persuaded herself that she could read no further, never mind that Invisible Man is surely one of the cleanest (and most hilarious) books in all of American literature. Her loss, I thought, and moved on.

I also didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the evaluations for this one colleague earlier this week, whose sterling record spoke for itself. But I did think about it tonight, reading our own blog contributor John Fea’s nice short blog essay What is a Liberal Arts Education? Risk and Wisdom.

John draws from Mark Schwehn’s Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America., a kind of ur-text of the Lilly Fellows Program. John’s students at Messiah College evidently share a lot with students everywhere. John writes:

Unfortunately, too many students today are unwilling to engage in the kind of risk-taking that is essential to education. Many of the students I teach at Messiah, and especially their parents, do not understand what education at a liberal arts institution is all about. They think that college is a place where "cherished beliefs" should be not be challenged, but affirmed. They want to have a four year experience in which they are told that everything they have ever believed about life, God, society, etc... is true. If this is what college is about, then what is the point? Students can participate on championship sports teams, make friends, have meaningful social experiences, find a spouse, play in the band, or learn certain specialized and technical skills, but I wonder: will they really be educated? Why not just send students to vocational schools so they can gain the necessary knowledge needed to do this or that job and live a comfortable middle-class life.

At any academic gathering I attend where teaching is discussed, we all have our own “war stories” that reprise some variation of the theme John describes above. John continues to hope that education in its truest sense can happen at liberal arts colleges:

Having said that, I think it is essential that this kind of education--the kind of learning that truly transforms--happen in a safe environment where students can work through this transformative time in their life with caring professors who love them and want to walk alongside of them. This, it seems to me, is the genius of a small, residential, liberal arts college. For the students who come to Messiah College, it is what makes their college experience "Christian."

Those of us at state universities (if you can call an institution which is 8% supported by state tax dollars a "public" institution, and it's only at that high a level thanks to the temporary infusion of stimulus dollars) can sometimes experience a bit of this as well. A few years back, attending a reunion for those fortunate enough to have been Lilly Fellows in Humanities and the Arts at Valparaiso University (1993-95 for me), I gave a short talk for this gathering entitled “On Being a Scholar of Religion in the Historical Guild at the Public University Amidst a Charged Atmosphere of Religion, Politics, and War.” I was referring to Iraq then, in the title; obviously I could be referring to Afghanistan today (some of my students are on their way there, very shortly). I reflected in that talk on the virtues of academic guilds (whatever their faults) in providing some space for the life of the mind in the midst of the prevalent propaganda about higher education.

Our students at a public university obviously won’t have a college experience designed to be “Christian,” but I’ll walk alongside any of them who want to take some risks, and ideally gain some wisdom. I laughed when I read the narrow and ridiculous evaluations of my colleague’s class; they liked this colleague as a teacher, but they wouldn’t even risk thinking about the reading material (including some classics of American literature) that was assigned. Today, thanks to John’s post, I laughed less and contemplated more about how to pursue my vocation when cherished beliefs are only to be affirmed and not even questioned, much less challenged or deepened.

Race/War/Genocide, U.S and Germany: The Role of Religion?

Paul Harvey

A mid-day "thinking out loud" post. I've just been talking with a colleague that I'll be team-teaching with next semester, an undergraduate course on Race, War, and Genocide in the U.S. South and Germany, 1865ish - 1965ish (dates are flexible on either end). This sort of started out as a "comparative genocide" kind of course (how's that for a cheerful semester for you), but we've narrowed it down somewhat, in part to our two specialties (the colleague is a German historian).

This is all exciting to think about, but now we're getting down to themes and readings for the course, which is always where a lot of good readings/ideas to pursue have to be jettisoned, given the constraints of the semester, how much one can ask students to read, etc.

We came at the course with a paradox and question. An observer looking at the U.S. South in the 1890s and Jews in Germany during this period might well have predicted that, if a genocide (I know the word would not have been invented yet -- just play with me here) were to come, it would surely be in the U.S. Lynching was a gruesome practice to a larger pogrom, of course, while in Germany laws liberalizing social strictures on Jews gave reasonable hope that German Jews would eventually be incorporated into German society in a way that must have appeared impossible for African Americans. In short, things were getting worse for blacks in the U.S. and better for Jews in Germany.

Fast forward 50 years -- what happened? That's a central question of the course.

One part of that question might involve religion -- obviously the case with German Jews, but clearly the case for black and whites in the U.S. as well. What might make a good reading exploring the influence of religion in the U.S. on the move from the proto-genocide of the lynching era (with all the religious imagery that went into lynching as a sacrificial act, as Donald Mathews has argued) to the stirrings of civil rights in the 1930s/1940s? Or what might be some good ways to frame the discussion for students? Just asking.

A Novel Approach to Teaching American Religious History

by Phillip Luke Sinitiere

For my American Religious History class this fall, I'm considering revamping the course by assigning 3 or 4 novels (and perhaps a memoir). As I've done in the past, Religion in American Life will serve as the main anchor text for the course, and I'll have a host of other primary and secondary readings for students to examine.

I once assigned a memoir, James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963), and asked students to consider Baldwin's ideas about the relationship between race, religion and democratic society. Students enjoyed the book--partly because of its relative brevity--but mostly due to its deep and hefty subject matter and Baldwin's engaging and accessible writing. I will probably assign it again at some point.


Some have suggested using Black Robe (1985), and Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood (1952). Malcolm X's Autobiography seems to be a mainstay. For me, the fact that each of these books have been made into a movie makes them compelling assignments--rich ground to discuss interpretive vantage points via text and film--but certainly there are many other worthy choices. I'd like to assign novels (or memoirs) that cover multiple time periods and address a variety of themes.

So, what are your experiences using novels (or memoirs) to teach American religious history? What novels (or memoirs) have worked best for specific periods? What novels (or memoirs) work best to address topics such as gender, immigration, race, ethnicity, class, unbelief, or sexuality? What novels (or memoirs) explore lived religion or popular religion, or even religious pluralism? What are the possibilities, promises, and peril of the novel (or memoir) approach?

Teaching American Religious Pluralism

On Teaching American Religious Pluralism to Foreigners
by Kevin M. Schultz, University of Illinois, Chicago

I just had the joy of teaching about America's religious pluralism to 30 high school teachers from around the world.

My school, the University of Illinois at Chicago, participates in a State Department exchange that brings to Chicago 30 American history teachers from around the world. They're here for six weeks, including two weeks of travel time, to learn about all-things-American. There were two teachers from Japan, two from Norway, and two from Scotland. Other than that, there was one representative from places all over the world--Belgium, South Africa, Nairobi, Turkmenistan, the Czech Republic, Italy, Columbia, the Philippines, Israel, and much more. I got to lecture on American religion and religious pluralism. We read about the culture wars and Bellah's "Civil Religion in America." I lectured on American religious history from the Puritans to today. A full three hours, to say the least.

The first thing I learned was how unique our system of religious freedom is.

The separation of church and state, with the state still being relatively friendly to religion, is one-of-a-kind. And, besides a few of the Muslims in the crowd, most of the others envied our system, although they remained baffled by how we Americans could be such a nation of believers but never have to learn about religion or religions in public schools. They had me there--parents do carry this burden, or pass it on to the institution of their choice--but that was the deal we've brokered here in the United States. The Palestinian guy wasn't buying it, saying in his nation-less land, the schools taught the "two religions around them, Islam and Christianity." He didn't flinch when I asked if they taught Judaism too. Of course they didn't.

The second thing I did was hypothesize that our history of recognizing religious pluralism has four stages, each resembling the swing of a pendulum: (1) the Puritan "city on the hill" which declined as soon as it was established into the Founders notion of religious freedom as enshrined in the Constitution (no religious tests) and the First Amendment; then (2) a swing back toward creating a culturally unified Protestant nation beginning with the Second Great Awakening and carrying on until the first decades of the 20th century (see Ed Blum's Reforging the White Republic); then (3) the decline of this Protestant hegemony (and another swing of the pendulum) from, say, the 1920s to the 1970s, with the 1962 and 1963 Supreme Court cases bringing the point of pluralism home (with Catholics and Jews in the vanguard); and (4) pluralism challenged, with the rise of the Religious Right and the Moral Majority trying to push the pendulum back.

I'm not sure how far the pendulum will swing back this time around, but I do think it's interesting, and vitally important, that each time the pendulum swung to the "honoring pluralism" side, a batch of laws were passed or upheld, first in the form of the Constitution and the First Amendment, and second in the Supreme Court cases of the early 1960s that declared that "favoritism cannot be tolerated."

Perhaps the enshrinement of these ideas allowed the pendulum to go back again toward Protestant Christianity, with Americans secure in the knowledge that the religious freedom that Americans are unique in possessing will remain intact. After all, even in phase four, the Moral Majority includes among its ranks conservative Jews and conservative Catholics. Pluralism wins?

Just a thought. Or just another over-simplification.

The Democratic Virtues of Notre Dame

Notre Dame Commencement 2009
by Kathleen Sprows Cummings

What a pleasure to walk across the quad this morning without having to keep my eyes downcast. The “abortion plane,” the one towing a banner with a graphic picture of a 10-week aborted fetus, is gone now, after having circled Notre Dame’s campus for weeks on end.

Participating in yesterday’s commencement—I was seated with the faculty about 100 feet from the stage—was both exhilarating and exhausting. The nervous tension before and during the event was unbelievable. There was a Secret Service agent disguised in academic garb (the earpiece was a dead giveaway) seated in the row in front of me, and U.S. Marshalls posted throughout the arena never stopped scanning the crowd for threats. Worst of all were the hecklers at the beginning of the President’s speech, whose comments and subsequent removal were far more disturbing in person than they appeared to be on television.

We had all heard that Randall Terry’s group had obtained tickets, but we didn’t know how many of them there would be, or whether there would be disruptions throughout the speech, or how exactly the crowd would respond. It was a relief after the first five minutes passed, when we could all really start to listen to the President’s marvelous speech (the New York Times reports on it here). And when that was over, we could go about the business that brought us all there in the first place, honoring and celebrating Notre Dame’s class of 2009.

There is no question that the last six weeks have been the most painful in my life as a faithful Catholic. Two weeks ago my daughter’s second grade class held their First Communion retreat on campus, and the joy of participating in that event was overshadowed by worries that the abortion plane would disrupt our nature walk, or that I wouldn’t be able to avoid the demonstrators and their placards as I drove my group back to school. How, after all, does one explain dismembered fetuses, or baby dolls covered in blood, to a group of eight year olds?

But if the Obama controversy has saddened me as a person of faith, it has heartened me as a teacher and scholar of American Catholicism. The folks in administration and development will almost certainly grimace if they read this, but on balance this episode made my professional life, at least, a whole lot LESS complicated. I always search for opportunities to engage past and present in the classroom, and so I was delighted when, early in the semester, Kathleen Sebelius’ nomination for Secretary of Health and Human Services was announced the day before we were scheduled to discuss the election of 1928.

But if I was pleased with the thoughtful discussion about Catholics in American public life that Sebelius’ nomination generated, I was astounded by the level of intellectual engagement that characterized our discussions of the Obama controversy. As a prelude to those discussions, we read and analyzed a host of primary documents, ranging from Monsignor John Tracy Ellis’ 1955 critique of Catholic intellectual life to the 1968 Land-O-Lakes Statement of Catholic Higher Education, from Mario Cuomo’s 1984 speech at Notre Dame to the USCCB’s statement on Faithful Citizenship. We debated what the controversy revealed about faith and public life, dissent, episcopal authority, Catholic education, and electoral politics in the post-Vatican II American church. My students came to these discussions from a variety of ideological viewpoints, yet our conversations were invariably characterized by respect and by a sincere desire to understand what developments over the last half-century have brought us to this moment in American Catholicism.

On my way home from work each day, I couldn’t help but marvel at the contrast between our provocative discussions and the daily circus staged by protestors at Notre Dame’s Main Gate. I have never felt more privileged to be a faculty member at the University of Notre Dame than I have been this semester, and I was even prouder during yesterday’s ceremony. Between the legacy of Father Ted Hesburgh, evoked so elegantly by President Obama, and the leadership and courage of Father John Jenkins, displayed so prominently in his own remarkable speech, I was repeatedly moved to tears. I plan to use both speeches as a springboard to discussion in my classes next year, and there is much more that can and will be said about them. Today, though, I am just grateful it is a quiet and happy day at Notre Dame, with nothing but blue skies overhead.

Religulous and the Problem of Belief

Kelly Baker

Over at Religion Dispatches, S. Brent Plate has a thoughtful opinion piece on Bill Maher's documentary, Religulous, and the "antiquated" definition of religion that Maher uses to ostracize religious people. (Also, check out his newest book, Blasphemy Art that Offends.) Plate argues that Maher's belief-centered vision of religion ignores how practice defines religious life and presents religion as an individually centered enterprise. By parodying and ostracizing what people believe, Maher misses the communal and ritual aspects of religion and how both define why religious people believe and act in the ways that they do. Plate questions why Maher sticks to such a definition, and he concludes that Maher would probably garner a "C" in his Intro to Religious Studies Course. Here's an excerpt:

Bill gets this low grade because his definition of religion appears to have been culled solely from Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary in which religion is essentially defined, in solid US-Protestant style, along the lines of a set of beliefs in God. (To give credit where credit is due, the problem also lies with the director Larry Charles and whatever half-baked research team they assembled; and while Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens are all susceptible to the same critique, in these pages I’ll confine myself to Religulous.) This is the kind of thing a fair number of my students, raised in the Protestant-dominated United States (even Catholics and Jews have assimilated this definition), come to university thinking about religion; the two key components of which are “belief” and “God.” Religion is some cryptic interior, individual thing that exists in one’s own head, and is only understood in relation to a God. I don’t blame my students for the deficiencies in their cultural upbringing; rather, I see a chance to expand their horizons, to get them, as my wise colleague Andy Fort says, to “mentally migrate,” to come to terms with the radical diversity of religions as they historically and presently occur around the world. ... It's somewhat unfortunate, given the film's title, that Maher and Charles never offer a working definition of religion. But the mode of questioning lays bare the thinking that went into Religulous. Except for an early scene at the “Truckers Church,” Maher interviews individuals, alone, as if he’s on his HBO talk show (but even there, there’s a panel . . .). It’s a great strategy for TV but that’s not the way life, to say nothing of religious life, operates. This is the first key problem with the modus operandi for the film: it functions like a talk show, imagining that religious life can be reduced to a few sound bites, told via spoken words, by a single person, in an artificially constructed environment. Maher’s question to the “ex-Jew for Jesus” about suicide (“If heaven’s so great, why not kill yourself now?”) only underscores the individualistic framework of the film: religion is about solitary individuals and their own pleasures and desires. No traditional rituals are shown—almost no communal gatherings at all in fact—nor do many of the realities of religion, either good or ill, make much of an appearance.
...
So, here’s the thing: Maher mocks people for their antiquated beliefs though he never moves beyond an antiquated definition of religion himself. He borrows the same viewpoints of religion that all the way-out interviewees have. He is indignant that people actually believe in an existing Adam and Eve and the attendant talking snake, or in a man (Jonah) swallowed by a whale (or, really a “big fish”). These are the problems he keeps seeing: conservative religious people actually believe the myths of their traditions. But then Religulous splices in images of explosions, violent street demonstrations, and other aggressive activities. So, what’s the relationship between people who actually believe that Jonah was swallowed by a whale and suicide bombings? The film doesn’t really make those connections, nor could it, because they don’t connect. The broader connections between belief and violence could have (and, I’d say, should have) been made, but it would have taken some much more careful consideration of the topic at hand.

What Maher and filmmaking cohorts don’t appear to understand is that a person can be a Jew, have an enjoyable evening around the Sabbath table, and not believe that God actually created the world in seven days; that a Christian can stand up with her community, recite the 1700-year-old Nicene Creed, not believe a word of it, but still be moved by the experience of collective recitation; that a Muslim can make the pilgrimage to Mecca, touch the Kaaba, and still realize that at its base it is, indeed, a meteorite and not a holy rock from God. Maher even goes so far as to claim that “Christians believe” they are drinking the blood of a man who lived 2000 years ago. But he never asks anyone if they believe that. It’s a straw man argument. Even if this theological idea of “transubstantiation” has been written into Catholic dogma for centuries, I’ve yet to meet a Catholic who believes what Maher claims they believe (though I’m sure he could find a couple if he just kept throwing money at the film).

Funny thing is, had he watched Tim Burton’s Big Fish, he could have garnered some insight about how stories operate within human life. Here’s a hint, Bill: The big fish doesn’t have to be real! It’s a great story.

Islam and American Religious History

by Phillip Luke Sinitiere

As a corollary to Kelly's previous post on Edward Curtis's work on the NOI, in a recent H-AmRel post he announced a new encyclopedia on Muslim-American history.

The post reads:

How have Muslims shaped American religious history and U.S. history
overall? I am looking for writers--professors, graduate students, or
talented undergrads--to contribute my 1000 pp. Encyclopedia of
Muslim-American History, a reference that will show how Muslims have
mattered to American life since the colonial era. I know we are all
pressed for time, but let me appeal to your sense of public outreach.

"Muslim" continues to be read as "foreign" and "unassimilated" not only
in Islamophobic genres (including the recent film "Obsession," 28
million copies of which were distributed for free in swing states [see
further http://www.obsessionwithhate.com/]), but also in mainstream media
outlets. The exotic, overly-religious, first-generation, "fresh off the
boat" Muslim too often stands in for all Muslim Americans in newspapers
such as The New York Times. Such forgetting writes tens of thousands of
Muslims out of the historical record.

We have a chance to correct that by analyzing--not exaggerating--the
presence of Muslims in the Americas. The work will be published by Facts
on File, which has great success marketing their products to high
schools and community libraries. It will have an impact at the
grassroots.

You needn't be an expert to participate in this project. After editing
this project for a year now, I can tell you that there are virtually no
experts on Muslim American history, with the exception of those who are
trained in African American history. Most Islam in America experts are
concerned only with today, or with the history of Muslim America post
1965.

In addition to documenting "religion," this reference will chart Muslim
involvement in U.S. politics, business, music, sports, agriculture, the
military, literature, the visual arts, poetry, social movements, and
more. It will cover the biographies, events, places, themes, and
institutions that have shaped a Muslim-American community diverse by
race, ethnicity, class, and national origin. Five hundred entries will
shed light on everything from Georgia's Sea Island Muslims and the
Muslim sodbusters of the Dakota plain to Ahmet Ertegun's influence on
the music industry and the hundred-year-old legal struggles of Muslims
in U.S. courts.

If you are willing to write even 500 words, that would be a great help.
Please contact me off list, and I will send you the list of entries and
other information. Thanks very much for your consideration.

This will no doubt be an important work, and serve as a great resource for classrooms at all educational levels. I look forward to seeing it in print and using it in the future. As for teaching, readers might also consult Curtis's great article on Islam and the U.S. history survey in the January 2008 issue of the OAH Magazine of History (John Turner posted on this, too).

In other news, Baylor University historian Thomas Kidd's latest work, American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism, is scheduled for release in November. Here's a brief description:

In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, many of America's Christian evangelicals have denounced Islam as a "demonic" and inherently violent religion, provoking frustration among other Christian conservatives who wish to present a more appealing message to the world's Muslims. Yet as Thomas Kidd reveals in this sobering book, the conflicted views expressed by today's evangelicals have deep roots in American history.

Tracing Islam's role in the popular imagination of American Christians from the colonial period to today, Kidd demonstrates that Protestant evangelicals have viewed Islam as a global threat--while also actively seeking to convert Muslims to the Christian faith--since the nation's founding. He shows how accounts of "Mahometan" despotism and lurid stories of European enslavement by Barbary pirates fueled early evangelicals' fears concerning Islam, and describes the growing conservatism of American missions to Muslim lands up through the post-World War II era. Kidd exposes American Christians' anxieties about an internal Islamic threat from groups like the Nation of Islam in the 1960s and America's immigrant Muslim population today, and he demonstrates why Islam has become central to evangelical "end-times" narratives. Pointing to many evangelicals' unwillingness to acknowledge Islam's theological commonalities with Christianity and their continued portrayal of Islam as an "evil" and false religion, Kidd explains why Christians themselves are ironically to blame for the failure of evangelism in the Muslim world.

A brief portion of Chapter 1 and the Table of Contents are available from Princeton University Press.

Both Curtis and Kidd have added and, it appears, will continue to offer much to the collective understanding of Islam and American religious history.

Portraits of Hate, Lessons of Hope

Kelly Baker

Recently while reviewing textbooks for my Religions in the U.S. class, I found myself getting more and more frustrated at narratives of progress and triumphalism while underplay the role of conflict in American religious history. For anyone familiar with my work, this should be no surprise (and this is likely a tired lament of mine you have heard before). Anyone who works on including the Klan as a viable religious movement in American culture tends to predisposed to looking for the seamy side of religious experience. As I looked through some of the texts, I craved any mention of intolerance and violence. Where were those very real trends that also mark our history?

An addendum to whatever text I chose will be the Portraits of Hate, Lessons of Hope website created and designed by Lynn Neal and her students at Wake Forest University. Lynn brought together graduate and undergraduate students to discuss the history of religious intolerance in the U.S., and the website is the fruition of their efforts. Portraits of Hate uses visual imagery to tell the stories of anti-Catholicism, Antisemitism, anti-Mormonism, the Klan (the order merits its own page), and the process of dehumanization. The images depict common prejudices about a variety of groups but also the commonalties between attacks on different groups. Sexuality emerges as a consistent theme from fear of lecherous priests to polygamous Mormons. The site provides an excellent teaching tool to get our students to think about interaction between religious peoples and types of conflict that arises. The images also allow them to see how the same tropes are recycled in the twenty-first century against other groups, especially Muslims. Portraits of Hate demonstrates that alongside progress, intolerance has also festered. To tell the stories of the religious nature of our nation is to embrace both. Lynn writes:

However, while many remain unaware of the scope of contemporary religious intolerance, even more fail to realize that it has been a persistent theme in U.S. history. From the very start of European settlement, religious groups—Catholics, Native Americans, and Pilgrims—viewed the world in different ways, which led to forced conversions, if not religiously “justified” conquering and killing. Similarly, many laud the Puritans as the epitome of religious freedom—they left the Netherlands and England to avoid religious persecution and built what is now the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. However, many neglect to consider how the Puritans built a religiously intolerant society—they banished religious dissenters like Anne Hutchinson and they hanged Quakers like Mary Dwyer. Religious freedom for the Puritans meant the freedom to be a Puritan. Failure to understand this dimension of American religious history makes it difficult for people to understand the present vitality of religious intolerance. It then becomes easy to write off acts of religious violence as aberrant and random, rather than as constituent parts of a larger historical trajectory. Consequently, this gap in our historical knowledge fuels apathy about the protection of religious rights and an inability or unwillingness to talk about religious violence. If we do not begin to learn about this unsavory part of our history, little or no substantive change will occur to promote greater peace between religions and increased tolerance of religious difference.

Given this lack of knowledge and awareness, this spring (2008) a group of nineteen students in my class, “Religious Intolerance in the United States,” undertook the creation of a web-site designed to educate people about the history of religious intolerance in the United States through images of religious hatred. Together the students collected the resources, conceived of the site, and created the content for this venture. Portraits of Hate, Lessons of Hope provided the class with a way to put their learning and commitments into action—to bridge our classroom learning and our cultural problems in a positive way. As a learning community, we believe in the power of education and discussion to create positive social change. In her preface to The New White Nationalism in America, Carol M. Swain writes, “White nationalism thrives by its willingness to address many contemporary issues and developments that mainstream politicians and media sources either ignore entirely or fail to address with any degree of openness or candor” (xv). So, too, does religious intolerance thrive on our unwillingness to acknowledge its present and historical reality. This site is our attempt to fight religious intolerance. We must begin to educate ourselves and others about religious intolerance, provide conceptual tools for thinking about it, and establish forums for discussing it. Hate groups already have web-sites advocating for their causes, as responsible citizens can we do any less?

(Please note all the images posted come from the Portraits of Hate, Lessons of Hope website.)

Summer School: Teaching Du Bois

by Phillip Luke Sinitiere

Since reading Ed Blum’s W.E.B. Du Bois, American Prophet last June, Du Bois has been on my mind, on my research radar, and was a part of my teaching this past year in new and I hope interesting ways. So in this post I want to think about the extent to which historiography informs our teaching, and how it shapes and inspires our pedagogy.

Admittedly, before making my way through Ed’s book, Du Bois occupied staple places in my teaching of U.S. history (e.g., Du Bois’s debates with Booker T. Washington, Du Bois as founder of NAACP, Du Bois as Pan-Africanist, etc.). But that changed drastically when, thanks to Ed’s intriguing and compelling arguments, I began to see Du Bois as something more than merely a writer, an activist, an organizer, and an intellectual—I began to see Du Bois as a prophetic figure, a spiritual sage, a religious thinker—and how religious conviction influenced his activism, organizing, propaganda, and intellectual pursuits.

So last summer and fall as I read tons and tons of Du Bois, I began to think about Du Bois in the classroom, and began to contemplate ways to reconfigure my lectures, discussions, and assignments to make use of these new discoveries. Here's what I came up with for the spring 2008 semester.

Given time frame (2-3 days) and grade level (sophomores, juniors, and seniors), I settled on 4 short readings: "Credo" (1904), "The Forethought" from Souls of Black Folk (1903), and two short stories from The Crisis: “The Sermon in the Cradle” (1921) and “The Son of God” (1933). I opted for the shorter readings so as to cover Du Bois in a different kind of breadth, as well as to offer a challenge to students—given the religious dimensions of the readings—to think about Du Bois’s ideas both in literature and religion classes.

In terms of the units that structure my class, I introduced Du Bois during the Interwar unit as I felt this allowed me to discuss him with considerable leverage—glancing back to his work in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, while focusing on his life as editor and propagandist in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s (and then later framing the interesting juxtaposition of his death in 1963 on the eve of the March on Washington). Situating Du Bois as I did, I hoped, would also provide considerable context for the Crisis short stories.

For the sake of brevity, I’ll limit the main points of discussion below to one of the two short stories I assigned, as Blum effectively narrates “The Son of God” in American Prophet (ch. 4).

The first day’s lesson began with a relatively quick overview of Du Bois’s life via PowerPoint and blogpost (I specifically referenced the interactive map and the FBI files in class; students followed other links on their own time). I concluded the class with a brief discussion about Du Bois’s relationship with and to religion and ended with a reading and class discussion of "Credo." As for Credo, I asked students to think about context—how the ideas, phrases, images, metaphors and the like reflected some of the major social, political, and racial issues of the early 20th century. I also noted its parallels with early Christian creeds, statements of faith Du Bois would have recited or heard recited in the Episcopal liturgy he knew well (for more on this see Blum, pp. 28-31). This set the stage to discuss Du Bois’s configuration of “twoness” and the veil metaphor from Souls, followed by comments about using “Souls” in the title of this most important book (see American Prophet, ch. 2 for a fuller discussion of Souls).



The first short story students read, “The Sermon in the Cradle,” appeared in the Christmas 1921 Crisis number. This story retold Jesus’ birth as if it happened under British colonial rule in Benin. Wise men came from the East to inquire about this “new Christ,” which then troubled the Prime Minister and other officials. In the story, Du Bois rewrote the Nativity prophecy from Isaiah: “And thou Benin, in the land of Nigeria, art not the least among the princes of Africa: for out of thee shall come a Governor, that shall rule my Negro people.” The star later guided the wise men to the birth site (“in a house”), and upon seeing this new African Christ, worshiped and presented gifts—“gold and medicine and perfume,” presents with symbolic significance and practical value. All of the wise men then left (warned by God in a dream not to return to London), except one black wise man who was from Benin. He “lingered by the cradle and the new-born babe,” Du Bois wrote. Eventually “the multitudes” showed up and the black Christ child broke into sermon, as Du Bois reconfigured Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount:

Blessed are the poor folks for they shall go to heaven. Blessed are the sad folks for someone will bring them joy. Blessed are they that submit to hurts for they shall sometime own the world. Blessed are they that truly want to do right for they shall get their wish. Blessed are those who do not seek revenge for vengeance will not seek them. Blessed are the pure for they shall see God. Blessed are those who will not fight for they are God’s children. Blessed are those whom people like to injure for they shall sometime be happy. Blessed are you, Black Folk, when men make fun of you and mob you and lie about you. Never mind and be glad for your day will surely come. Always the world has ridiculed its better souls.

After reading this story aloud in class, I then posed several questions, and along with discussion aimed to highlight the following points:

First, the date of publication in the December 1921 issue. Many of Du Bois’s short stories about a black Christ appeared at particular times of the year—in December and in April. Du Bois himself understood the significance of Christian celebrations and the liturgical cycle, and some of his readers no doubt did as well.

Second, “The Sermon in the Cradle” is yet another instance of Du Bois retelling the life of Jesus as a black Christ. For comparison, and also part of a subsequent lesson, I reminded students that Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes, for instance, also wrote about black Christs in the 1920s during the Harlem Renaissance.

Third, Pan-African and anticolonial movements were underway during the 1920s, and as is well known Du Bois understood World War I to be in part a colonial conflict and sought and pursued solidarity internationally. What’s more, Du Bois organized the first Pan African Congress in Paris in 1919 and another in 1921 and so this story is a clear indication that these issues were on his mind at the time. And of course it is significant that Du Bois chose the story and teachings of Jesus as one way to creatively narrate these larger global concerns. This begs the question, particularly in light of his life’s work: for Du Bois, was salvation to be found in Africa?

Fourth, and finally, the reformulated Sermon on the Mount highlights Du Bois’s explicit focus on the ethical dimensions of Jesus’ teaching, perhaps another example of Du Bois as a “religious modernist” (American Prophet, p. 160). There are no miracles and “The Sermon in the Cradle” is devoid of divinity: social and economic justice will eventually come for those subject to hurt and wrong, and even though there existed a deep thirst for vengeance, Du Bois placed God on the side of Black Folk since “the world has ridiculed its better souls.”

Whereas “The Sermon in the Cradle” focused on Africa and the globe, the short story “The Son of God”—published in the December 1933 edition of The Crisis—quickly narrated the course of Jesus’ life, from birth to death. In it are familiar characters: Joe and Mary are the parents of Joshua, a carpenter from the South who uplifts the meek, tends to the poor and disheartened, and blasts rich folks by saying they won’t be in heaven. Yet the end of the story claimed the death of Jesus and its redemptive elements for an (African) American context as it concluded with the lynching of Joshua—“Behold, the Sign of salvation, a noosed rope,” Mary said. (I also showed students some of the lynching artwork from The Crisis, some of which carried the same message as “The Son of God.” Follow this link to see one example of this artwork, and see ch. 3 of Amy Helene Kirschke's Art in Crisis. )



Reading “The Son of God,” coupled with discussion of lynching in my unit on the Gilded Age and Progressive Eras, I hope added significant texture to my teaching of early 20th century American history. In the end, enlivening discussions with my students about literary and artistic responses to lynching led to new thoughts about Christianity’s complex and contested role in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century American culture.

To conclude: well beyond his storied debates with Booker T. Washington and his instrumental efforts in the early years of the NAACP, for example, inspired by Blum’s work my students were able to see how Du Bois creatively, engagingly, and prophetically responded to the events, trends, developments of his time, and hence gain a better grasp of American (religious) history. Also, as I teach at a religiously-affiliated college preparatory school with required classes on biblical interpretation, after reading about Joshua and the birth of a black prophet in Benin, the Euro-American Jesus with which my students are most familiar became a far more complex and problematic figure. I hope to expand upon this dimension of my classes in future years, drawing insights from Paul Harvey and Ed Blum’s forthcoming volume on racialized images of Jesus.

In the end, adding these elements to teaching Du Bois I hope allowed for a more layered analysis of the multiple issues of his time, utilization of my own interests and research in the spirit of uncoverage, and the incorporation of new historiographical insight to the classroom.

So, as we conduct summer school here at the blog, where does Du Bois fit into the narrative of your classes on American religion, or American history? What texts do you use to teach Du Bois and his life and times? Any tips and/or strategies to share?

"In the Beginning...": Teaching American Religious History

By Phillip Luke Sinitiere

One of the current threads over at H-World is about sharing teaching strategies and best practices in the classroom: what teachers and professors do on the first day of class to introduce world history.

Some have a class discussion to define world history; others use string to illustrate human history and the scope of universal time. Some even give geography/map assignments as a way to introduce the breadth of world history.


The H-World thread thus prompts this query: What do you do on the first day of class to introduce American religious history? What strategies work best? Why? And these questions are for students, too: what first day assignments or activities have you found most interesting and intriguing in American religious history classes?


In the past I've posed the question, "When you think about religion in America, what comes to mind and why?" The answers are always interesting, and usually prompt engaging discussion.

I've also brought up the question of religious (il)literacy, passing out Stephen Prothero's 2005 Christian Science Monitor article, "A Nation of Religious Illiterates" (a very short, concise version of the larger argument in Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know-and Doesn't) for students to read and discuss. (You may also want to show Prothero's interview on The Daily Show from March 2007; it is just under 7 minutes.) I followed this discussion (for last summer's class) by giving students the 15-question religious literacy quiz from the Appendix of Prothero's book. While I don't formally grade this quiz, I do discuss the answers with students-again an occasion for lively conversation.

To engage discussion, I might ask questions such as: Why does Prothero make this argument and what evidence does he cite? What exactly is religious literacy, and why does it matter? As for the quiz, I ask students to think about what religions and/or religious practices do not appear on it, and why they think this is the case? I also ask them to propose one or two questions they think should be added to the quiz (and why).

Teaching American Religion Through Film

KELLY BAKER

The H-Amrel listserv currently has an ongoing discussion about useful films for teaching American religious history. The most popular suggestions seem to be Black Robe, The Apostle, anything by PBS's American Experience, and Malcolm X.

So following this discussion, I would encourage our blog readers to post their favorite films in the comments section. I currently like to use a documentary on Appalachian snake handlers called the Holy Ghost People, available here, and I am toying with Jesus Camp and Jonestown: The Life and Death of the People's Temple. (Also, Internet Archive has great resources, including documentaries and video clips, for class.)

Teaching Religion in America, from the OAH

Teaching Religion in America
by John Turner

This month's OAH Magazine of History is dedicated to "Teaching Religion in America." Most of the magazine is not available without a subscription, but you can see the table of contents and access an introduction and several primary source documents. Many departmental offices or libraries will have a copy for interested seekers.

First off, what an enlightened choice of topics!

The articles place a very strong emphasis on religious diversity throughout American History, perhaps slighting themes of Protestant establishment or Protestantism more generally. But that's quibbling. In particular, classroom instructors will find the "teaching resources" most useful, including links to a veritable wealth of primary documents. [These "teaching resource" sections are another good reminder that we need not always reinvent the wheel when planning class session!].

On another topic, progressive evangelicalism received the imprimatur of the New York Times's Nicholas Kristof (from last Sunday).

Why I Teach American History

BY JOHN FEA

Why do I teach American religious history? This is a tough question to answer since I do not teach a specific course on the subject. (American religious history at Messiah College is taught by my colleagues in the religion department). I have always preferred to think of myself as an early American historian whose work focuses on religion, so I hope readers will not mind if I tackle the original meme: Why do you teach American history?” Here are three random thoughts:

Teachers of American history usually do not have to start from scratch. Since most of the students I teach know something about American history (granted, I teach mostly white middle-class students), my lectures and discussions do not always need to engage in the preliminary work of identifying basic facts as much as my colleagues who teach world history, a subject that is largely unknown to my students. Most of my students know something about (or at least think they know something about) George Washington or Abraham Lincoln or Ben Franklin or democracy or capitalism, etc… Since many of them share a very basic common narrative I can spend more time on the work of interpretation, conversation, and debunking.

History offers a rebuke to our collective narcissism. Christopher Lasch’s scathing critique of American culture—The Culture of Narcissism—is probably more relevant today than it was when it first appeared in 1979 and became an important influence on Jimmy Carter’s famous “malaise" speech. History serves as an antidote to our innate desire to think we are dealing with issues and problems that no other society has had to confront. And when we become aware that we are part of a larger human story we are not only humbled, but we gain a much richer and more thoughtful response to contemporary issues. We may even get inspired to become agents of social change.

Historical thinking instills virtue. In his award winning book Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, Stanford education professor Sam Wineburg suggests that history “holds the potential, only partly realized, of humanizing us in ways offered by few other areas in the school curriculum.” In every encounter with the past, he argues, there exists a “tension between the familiar and the strange, between feelings of proximity and feelings of distance in relation to the people we seek to understand.” Historical thinking forces students to encounter the past on its own terms and avoid the temptation of pillaging the past in search of examples that support their view of current events. An honest encounter with the past instills in students the virtues of hospitality and empathy. It forces them to understand people who they would not keep company with in their everyday lives. It teaches them what it has meant and what it means to be human in this world. It sharpens judgment and produces wisdom. As Wineburg puts it, “Of the subjects in the secular curriculum, it (history) is the best at teaching those virtues once reserved for theology—humility in the face of our limited ability to know, and awe in the face of the expanse of human history.”

I am sure I could come up with some more reasons for why I teach American history, but these are the ideas that are at the core of my vocation.

“It Wears Me Out / It Wears Me Out”

BY KATHRYN LOFTON

You know who is really funny? Old people. You know what is even funnier? Old people singing disconcertingly ribald lyrics. I speak, of course, of the new documentary by Stephen Walker called Young@Heart, which tracks an eponymous vocal choir whose average age is 80 and whose choice of material does that thing (the thing Hollywood loves, Kodak loves, we love) where you smile wryly before despair. Sure, we’re all going to die and sure, death is pretty much always grotesque, and yeah, disease and dying are currently managed in an unbelievably cavalier way by insurance interests and, of course, every single other piece of this culture idolizes the flesh and voice and excess of youth but you know what? Old people are funny. They’re feisty and they’ve got weird vocal patterns and their faces squish in ways that make for sculptural screwball. And at Sundance Film Festival, the glitterati needed some comedy because Ledger was dead (youth lost too soon) and they needed to be reminded that it was going to be okay.

Enter Young@Heart. Like other feel-good documentaries (think March of the Penguins, or The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill), the purpose of this text is not to instruct structure, but to inundate with the sucker-like sweetness of sentimentality. Global warming and homelessness and health care are subtexts so sub as to be imperceptible. Front and center is the (wait for it) triumph of the human spirit. Just what is triumphed over is always cast as unchangeable and inevitable. Never is context or contingency identified (How does homelessness persist? Why is the glacier shrinking?). Don’t be such a drag: quit that Michael Moore talk and just watch grandma mumble Radiohead lyrics. “Fake Plastic Trees” never sounded so true.

We need a new word for the sort of role old people occupy in contemporary film, a word that could combine the condemnatory analysis of “Orientalism” with the permissive caricature of “slapstick.” I say “we” because religious life is hardly removed from such age imagery. Young@Heart previewed before my viewing of There Will Be Blood, and the images of infantilized seniors stuck with me throughout Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic rumination on Daniel Day-Lewis’ eye muscles. There Will Be Blood has enjoyed such lavish praise that it can endure a little tough love, especially from those (us) whose responsibility it is to pursue the odd tropes wended into this little masterpiece. I speak not of an appraisal of historical accuracy (which seems to me a wrongheaded response to a film relying more on the history of cinema than an accurate history of evangelicalism) but an appraisal of archetypal dependency.

Not surprisingly (to any religionist, to any cultural observer) Anderson hunkers into two stock profiles to tug warmth from Day-Lewis’ shatteringly cold stare. I speak of the desperate elder and the wounded child (the latter which deserves more attention but suffice to say, “I abandoned my child”).You don’t need to have seen the film to imagine the geriatric minstrelsy that it included when panning clapboard church scenes and evangelical entourage. The history of movie religion is littered with audience shots of aching arthritics hungry for Aimee’s or Elmer’s or Steve Martin’s healing touch. But it’s hard to think of a scene quite like this one, where the Mrs. Danvers lookalike grasps his parishioner and pulls from her rheumatoid malaise. Eli Sunday (the young preacher, played by Paul Dano) caresses his old lady with an astonishing intimacy, and intimacy that presumes an easy convert, a needy geezer in desperate, easy-to-access hour. The scene would make a good launch pad for an in-class conversation about preaching, performance, and the truths of healing. But it would also make Exhibit A in a history of our moment, of the way we enjoy the impassive sexed bodies of the elderly to work our evangelical, and cinematic, magic. What miracles they do provide, singing songs of youth as they die before our eyes.

P.S. For those wondering how to incorporate film into their syllabi, a great starting place would be to pair the essays from Catholics in the Movies (2007) with screenings of their films. I have never read such an accessibly thoughtful text that so neatly fits undergraduate curricular scheduling. The Introduction, by Colleen McDannell, makes a fantastic argument for the preponderance of Catholic imagery in U.S. film production, even those films (like There Will Be Blood) which convey Protestant thematics. Highly recommended.

Darren's Uncoverage Course in American Religious History -- Part 1 of Many!

BY DARREN GREM

Dispatches From LeConte Hall 323

In a few minutes, I’ll go upstairs to the third floor of LeConte Hall and start another term of my HIST3150 - Religion in American History course. I’m teaching two sections of it this time around, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and, for the most part, it’s a redesigned course.

Earlier, I wrote here about my reflections on the course’s purpose and pedagogy and, with the blessings of this blog’s big kahuna, we’ve decided to invite y’all along for the ride.

So, over the next fifteen weeks, in the moments I have away from the dissertation, I’ll send in regular dispatches from LeConte Hall 323. By opening the door to my classroom, I hope to offer an inside look at how my students and I are working through my “uncoverage” survey of American religious history. Student privacy, of course, will be maintained, but I’ll try to be as honest as possible about what I see as the course’s successes and failures. I don’t intend these dispatches to be an exercise in narcissism or catharsis, but rather an informal and informative way to discuss publicly the ins-and-outs of teaching religious history in university classrooms today. As such, I welcome your thoughts and reflections on my thoughts and reflections.

FYI, the course’s website is here.