Religious Studies, Left Coast Style
Yang
http://www.latimes.com/living/lat_ucsb010527.htm
Religious Studies, Left Coast Style
UC Santa Barbara's program teaches the subject in broad,
multicultural terms.
By MARY ROURKE, Times Staff Writer
Gurinder Singh Mann, professor of Sikh studies at UCSB, holds a
kirpan, a Sikh symbol of divine justice.
MEL MELCON / Los Angeles Times
GOLETA--The students call their major "religion on the ground."
One studies a singles group looking for love in a Los Angeles
synagogue Friday nights. Another compares Hinduism and Christianity.
His master's thesis profiled Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm
Workers, as a religious mystic.
A class schedule at the religious studies department of UC Santa
Barbara reads like a road sign in a global village: Islam in America,
medieval Judaism, early Christian novels, Taoism and Shintoism, along
with related languages from Arabic to Ugaritic. The array of ethnic
faces here is as vast as on any University of California campus. But a
closer look at the faculty, dressed in turbans and Indian jewelry,
hikers' vests and slouched sport jackets, illuminates the sweep of
this program.
Tucked inside the Humanities building, a California-rustic box of
stucco and glass, their offices are dotted with Buddhas and prayer
rugs, ritual swords and a global selection of sacred texts, all facets
of the larger picture they are trying to create: UC Santa Barbara's
religious studies program brings together the jumble of modern culture
and reassembles it under the heading of religion.
Though the standard university approach to the study of religion
draws heavily from the Protestant, Catholic and Jewish traditions (not
surprising in a country that is, according to the most recent census,
84% Christian), Sikhs, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Native Americans
and others get equal time here. And though some observers fear that
this sort of broad egalitarianism can dilute all religions, many
clearly see it as the future.
"It is very California," says Barbara DeConcini, executive
director of the American Academy of Religion, an Atlanta-based
scholarly group of about 8,000 academics. "It's also way ahead of its
time. UC Santa Barbara is one of the leading religious studies
programs in any public university or state school. Others have looked
to them for how to do it."
Facing the Pacific, on a bluff laced with trails leading down to
the beach, the school has always seemed to catch the winds of change
along with the ocean mists. Richard Hecht, a keeper of the
department's history, remembers the impulse that led to the school's
unconventional approach.
The program's founder, D. McKenzie Brown, was an expert in
India's politics and history and, says Hecht, he wanted religion
courses on campus because he felt his students needed to know more
about that part of life in India. Exposure to the country's religious
life, Brown believed, would help them understand its social problems.
That was in 1958.
The first member of the new religious studies faculty was a
political scientist. Then came a sociologist. The first wave of
faculty also included a religion theorist, Walter Capps, who liked to
combine religion and politics. (He later won a seat in the U.S. House
of Representatives and served from 1996 until his death in 1997.) Paul
Tillich, a towering German theologian who fled Europe before World War
II, joined them. By 1964 there was a full-fledged religion
department for undergraduates. Five years later a doctorate
program was added.
"From the beginning, there was a sense that religion and culture
needed to be studied," says Hecht, who was a philosophy student at the
school in the '60s and now teaches Judaic studies there. "The school
never followed the seminary model." Nonetheless, when he joined the
faculty, his colleagues in other departments assumed that the
religious studies program trained people to be ministers.
"They thought we were clerics with a professional career, like
monks who had come out of the monastery to work in the world," says
Hecht, who adds that it took many of his 37 years at the school to
correct the misperception.
But within the department, the distinctions could not have been
more clear. Asian religions were incorporated in the very first class
offerings in the early '60s, even as more predictable subjects were
all but eliminated. Church history, Bible study and theology all got
sidelined. By conventional guidelines, UC Santa Barbara set aside the
basics.
It was a bold step, avoiding the traditional seminary format.
Top-rated universities from Harvard and Yale to Princeton had been
founded with close affiliations to ministers and churches. The schools
still support divinity programs that train Christian men and women for
ordination, and universities across the country have followed the Ivy
League plan.
Instead of promoting any one religious faith, all of them are
researched and analyzed, says Wade Clark Roof, head of the UC Santa
Barbara department. Religion is studied by comparison: How is God
different for a Hindu, say, than for a Jew?
Wade Clark Roof, above, head of religious studies at UCSB, in his
office with portrait of the Dalai Lama.
MEL MELCON / Los Angeles Times
Roof, a sociologist of religion, is a prime example of how Santa
Barbara's program is different from most others. Roof tracks
contemporary trends in religion, particularly among baby boomers, and
was among the first to notice their "cafeteria" approach to faith and
beliefs--Catholics who allow for reincarnation and Jews who meditate
with Buddhist teachers.
His approach to teaching religion is as much a product of
constitutional law as it is of modern American culture. The separation
of church and state, which makes it illegal to promote religious
beliefs or practices in a public school, helped shape the UC Santa
Barbara program from its earliest days. "Our department has very
secular roots," says David Marshall, a comparative literature
professor who is dean of the program. "We approach religion the way we
do the study of history or literature. We look at it from every point
of view."
He sees religion as an all-purpose major, like literature or
history, a way of understanding the world. Right now, for instance,
fundamentalism is influencing events in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan
and the Middle East, he notes. "If you don't understand religion," he
says, "you are not going to understand many of the global issues."
Santa Barbara is the only school in the UC system that offers a
doctorate in religious studies. It is also one of the oldest and
largest religious studies departments in the state school system.
There are currently 70 students working toward graduate degrees and
about 200 undergraduate majors.
Of the other large UC schools with such programs, including San
Diego, Riverside and Davis, none offers advanced degrees, and all of
them have fewer than half as many undergraduate majors as Santa
Barbara. Their departments are also considerably newer. UC Riverside,
the baby of the bunch, is 9 years old.
"Our program has an affinity for the California context," Roof
says. An American family rarely represents just one religious faith,
anymore, he explains, as in-laws, second spouses, adoptions and
personal religious conversions complicate the picture. Many California
families are shaped by blended faiths, he adds, and beyond that, "the
state's demographics force us to deal with pluralism." That pressure
helps fuel the school's attempt to talk about religion in a more
open-ended way.
"The definition of religion is broader here than at other
schools," says Steve Lloyd-Moffet, who studies Hinduism and
Christianity, spending part of each school year at a Greek Orthodox
seminary in New York to deepen his understanding of that tradition.
"Here, religion is defined as a way to create meaning through
symbols." Even a standard dictionary gets more specific, mentioning
God, beliefs and worship. But the absence of such particulars has
attracted many of UC Santa Barbara's students and faculty members.
Inés Talamantez, an expert in indigenous religions, has led about
20 students through doctoral dissertations. UC Santa Barbara is one of
a small handful that offers any courses in her field.
"I was shocked to see that the school was actually looking for
someone to teach Native American studies and related languages," says
Talamantez, who is part Apache, part Mexican American. She discovered
the job was open by reading an ad on a kiosk at Harvard, where she was
a student in the late '70s. Now she receives letters from colleges
around the country asking whether any of her students are ready for
the job market.
The university's professor of Sikh studies, Gurinder Singh Mann,
spent 15 years teaching at Harvard University and later at Columbia
University in New York, coming to Santa Barbara two years ago. "The
program in south Asian studies compares with any I have seen," says
Mann. "The entire department is becoming more and more comprehensive,
with offerings not available anywhere else."
Catherine Albanese, a professor of American religion, teaches a
course on American spiritualities, a subject treated as a footnote in
typical church history classes. "When I was in graduate school in the
late '60s, the study of American religion meant the study of church
history," she says. Her class, by contrast, starts with the
transcendentalism movement of Ralph Waldo Emerson's day and continues
to the New Age philosophy made famous locally by Marianne Williamson
in the 1980s. One of her students wrote a paper on "A Course in
Miracles," a self-help guide to spiritual healing written in 1975 by
two New York psychologists.
Such projects are grounded in a basic curriculum that stresses
history and methodology. Finbarr Curtis, a student of American
religions, says the required courses at UC Santa Barbara make the
program as rigorous as any he's seen. Students spend four semesters
learning how to collect data and evaluate it. Four semesters of theory
lead them through the major philosophers, from the ancient Greeks to
post-World War II Europeans.
Curtis did his undergraduate studies at Columbia, which is
affiliated with Union Theological Seminary and has its own religion
department as well. The two did not fit well, in his opinion. "I felt
things there were polarized," Curtis says. "Seminary and religious
studies were at two extremes."
As the country changes, and a more diverse population enters
public universities, programs built on Christian orthodoxies are
coming to seem increasingly narrow, even insensitive. Santa Barbara's
approach is by necessity moving into the mainstream. "The knee-jerk
reaction is, if you are teaching religion, you are proselytizing,"
says Randall Balmer, a professor of American Religion at Columbia. The
challenge, Balmer says, is to find ways to teach about religion. "The
wise course in a public university is to stay away from classes in
theology and move toward a comparative study," he says. Otherwise,
"people get prickly."
Rowland Sherrill, chairman of the religious studies department at
Indiana University at Indianapolis, says their program is a smaller
version of UC Santa Barbara. "Religion for us is an academic
enterprise," he says. "Religious studies is a way to wrestle with the
social realities of the whole country."
Even admirers, however, advise caution about the trend Sherrill
pinpoints. "There is danger of reducing religion to social studies,"
says Benjamin Hubbard, head of the Comparative Religion Department at
Cal Sate Fullerton, one of the largest in the Cal State system.
"Questions of what the 1st Amendment permits have raised concerns
about proselytizing in public schools," he says. "But religion is a
complex subject. Sacred texts, music, philosophy, architecture are all
part of it. They shouldn't be ignored."
In his job, Hubbard sees public university programs starting to
overshadow more traditional divinity schools. "I looked at 85
applicants to fill a position in my department this spring," Hubbard
says. "Not one of them went to a seminary. They studied religion as an
academic subject."
Current offerings at UC Santa Barbara reflect the shift in the
way religion is taught. Christine Thomas, the school's professor of
early Christianity, teaches a course about Jesus by comparing the ways
that Jesus is understood by several different religions. The reading
list includes, "Living Buddha, Living Christ," by the Buddhist monk,
Thich Nhat Hanh.
"We hope to communicate a vision of religion that is broader than
what students have coming into the program," says Roof.
The department plans to add new programs, including a center for
religion and public life and an endowed chair in Roman Catholic
studies. The students seem ready for that and more.
Marcy Braverman is majoring in Hinduism and plans to teach after
graduating. "I study the Eastern religions," she says. "You learn a
deep respect for all of the traditions. People tend to exoticize them.
I can help them understand the reality."