Faith formation in my world religions classroom

It’s the first day of the Encountering Religion course that I regularly teach at Augustana College. Many of the students are here because the course fulfills the college’s diversity requirement. The course will map some of the religious diversity in the United States and in the Quad Cities, which span the Iowa and Illinois sides the Mississippi. It will also give students some modest tools for dealing with religious conflict and bigotry. A handful of students are flirting with majoring in religion, although they have yet to break the news to their parents. A few more will sign up for the college’s new program in interreligious leadership before the course concludes.

While some students assume that being tolerant and appreciative of all religions is the primary goal of the course, the syllabus puts it differently. The first goal is to know something about the beliefs and practices of a handful of different religious traditions, especially as they are lived out in the local community. The second objective is more reflective and personal, or even existential: “to work through the problems and promises that religious diversity poses for people of particular faith traditions.”

I’ve taught the course a dozen times and so know just how easy it is for the majority of my hypertolerant, softly relativistic, Gen Z students to move quickly past the real challenges of religious diversity in order to cordially applaud all diversity with something like a golf-gallery clap. And so I try on this first day to name and model the real questions that religious difference introduces in the lives of people of faith.