How this got started was that I had this idea that with our world changing so much--with so many different cultures becoming a part of the United States, we could be a more loving and compassion people if we understood some of what these different peoples believed.
(Plus the truth is that I wanted to study the different reliigions myself to see what they had to say about God, the universe, death, etc.)
Traditionally in public school across our nation (and here in Kingston Springs,) the sophomore English year was a hodge podge of grammar and literature, while the junior year was American literature and the senior year was British literature. Now I had noticed that in most private schools, their sophomore year was the study of world literature.
What I convinced my then principal of was to allow our English department to let our sophomores study American literature, our juniors study British literature and our seniors study world literature. That way our students would not lose anything--like the study of great bodies of American and British literature--but they would be mature enough to study about the world through some major pieces of world literture and through the major religions. And their literature experience would be an ever-widening circle to include everyone and all cultures, as I hoped their education would be.
This was in the 90s and I began to study and to learn and to teach though literature as gently as possible about the major Eastern faith traditions such as Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism and about the major Western faith traditions such as Judaism and Christianity and Islam. The actual studies of these religions were quite superficial--highlighting only the very basics of each religion. (For I was discovering that any one of these faith traditions could be studied in depth for the rest of one's life; they were that complex and complicated!) But it was a beginning point for high school students and for me.
I searched for the "perfect" pieces of literature to wrap each study around. For example for Hinduism and Christianity and Islam, it was the novel Life of Pi , and for Buddhism, it was the novel Siddhartha, and for Christianity it was the drama Murder in the Cathedral, and for Judaism it was the novel The Chosen. We also studied Antigone and Julius Caesar and Things Fall Apart and one year we even read The Shack! Except for the last title mentioned, they are all such great pieces of literature. (Though I loved the ideas in The Shack, the writing itself was not good enough to rank as great literature.) We read Huston Smith's renowned book entitled The World's Religions and Philip Novac's The World's Wisdom.
Wow, I'm getting enthused all over again just describing the class to you! We studied extremely short excerpts from the Bible, from the Vedas, from the Torah, from the Gita, from the Quran (Koran), and from The Tao de Ching. (After we transitioned Advanced Placement English to Dual Enrollment English these excerpts usually came from our college composition textbook entitled World of Ideas.) The course work eventually became too much to study for the allotted time--especially after the high school transitioned to block scheduling, whereby the class was "shortened" to a semester, albeit 90 minutes a day, but that meant we had fewer weeks to read and study each great piece of literature. Thus we could not study all of the works mentioned in the paragraph above in one year; which ones we studied over the years varied somewhat. I was searching for the literature that the students would appreciate, and I was attempting to balance out the studies about the religions. If I didn't watch out, the course work could be slanted toward the religion I knew the most about--Chritianity.
I worked hard not to proselytize concerning these religions or any religion, for I knew that in public schools, we could study about the religions, but that I as a teacher could not try to convert anyone to any religion. Hardly was that my intention! As the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly said, "[i]t might well be said that one's education is not complete without a study of comparative religion, or the history of religion and its relationship to the advancement of civilization."
I worked hard to annihilate stereotypes and misconceptions concerning these religions. To this end, I tried to incorporate some meaningful and educational field trips into our semester. One of my favorite field trips was to the Hindu temple on Old Hickory Boulevard in Bellevue. Our guide there was always so gracious and heart-warming that the students could see her spirituality shine through her face and could understand how someone could be as fervent about their beliefs as we might be about our own. To her delight, one year our principal chose to go on this field trip with us.
What is beautiful about the Hindu faith is that they believe in accepting all of the other religions as legitimate paths to God. They do not believe in one "right" way! As a matter of fact, we discovered that it is primarily some Christian denominations that believe in this "only one right way to God" idea.
Hopefully, our study was opening minds and opening hearts! And thus we continued for many, many years until as the saying goes, someone decided to throw a wench into the works!
to be continued . . .
