How I teach theology to undergrads

When I was hired at Fordham University in 2000, I was told that I was to teach the core freshman theology course, Faith and Critical Reason. I guessed that many students in the class would resent being forced to take a theology course as a core requirement, for two reasons: (1) many students would be burned out on the theology courses they might have taken in a private Catholic high school; and (2) some students would question how theology could be taught in an academic setting when it is a matter of private, subjective “opinion.” The study of theology is virtually absent in schools at all levels in the United States, and many students find it an affront that Fordham would dare defy that consensus on the moratorium on the study of theology. These students, I thought, would be on the defensive, having already decided that taking this course was simply the price they had to pay for attending Fordham.

I structured my course to address this resistance by making students aware of how they arrived at their own ideas about theology. To accomplish this self-critical awareness, I set up the first part of the course as a sociological, historical, and philosophical exploration of secularization in the United States. We look at the debate about secularization, return to the past to make schematic sense of how we got here, and discuss fundamentalism as the face of modern religion. In historically tracing the process of secularization, students study Descartes, Newton, and the masters of suspicion—Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud—who, in my opinion, did theology a favor with their unrelenting and vociferous attacks on religion.

My goal in this part of the course is to make students aware that their ideas about theology, their interpretation of the religious experience in terms of being religious versus being spiritual, and their resistance to and caricatures of what it means to be religious did not emerge in a vacuum. Where they stand in relation to theology has much to do with a process that began almost 400 years ago with the scientific revolution and the Enlighten­ment. They are products of this history as much as they are actors in it. I end with a discussion of fundamentalism to demonstrate that what students see as the dominant face of religion is, ironically, a modern phenomenon. In making students more critically aware of the context within which they construct their own ideas about theology and religion, I help them to be more open to thinking otherwise. My goal is to open them up to the possibility of theology as a form of self-critical reflection on questions posed to the human experience that are simply unavoidable.