Learning about religion from outside any one religion is exciting. But it can be unnerving, too. When students happen upon a religious studies course for the first time, they're often surprised by what they find. Expectations frequently don't match experience. Based on years of teaching such courses in the setting of a large state university (Virginia Commonwealth University), my colleague Esther Nelson and I set out to pave a way with What Is Religious Studies?: A Journey of Inquiry. Light and straightforward, it touches on the challenges of defining religion, the relationship between religion and spirituality, what is the sacred, religion and violence, and some of the defining voices and theories that have shaped the academic study of religion over the years. Using the extended metaphor of a mountain climb, we wrote this little book (it's a quick and easy read) to help prepare people to get the most out of any religious studies course, their first or fiftieth… and to have a little fun along the way.

Learning is a journey. Basic to all learning are the qualities of dynamism, novelty, and personal transformation. Learning about religion can be an especially profound journey, as it involves many of the things that are of deepest significance and dearest to us. This book concerns the learning that happens in religious studies. Specifically, it directs readers to understand what religious studies is. In our years of teaching, we have found that there is considerable misunderstanding about the academic study of religion not only among our students but also among professors in other disciplines as well as school administrators. With this book we aim to dispel such misunderstandings and to lay the groundwork for readers to continue to learn about religious studies.

CHAPTER 1

OUR BACKPACKS, PACKING FOR THE JOURNEY

"People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering."

                        -- Saint Augustine

            We each carry a backpack. This is the stuff that comes along with us on our journey. Some of what we carry is useful and sustains us; some of it may be dead weight. Only in the course of our journey will we be able to make such judgments about the contents of our backpacks. We will have a chance, when we reach base camp before scaling the summit, to empty our packs, sort, and repack in preparation for the final ascent. By then we will be able to determine what helps and what hinders our ability to understand the study of religion.

For now, at the very beginning of our journey, our packing happens at home. What we carry is defined partly by our personal histories and partly by what we expect to encounter and/or need along the way. Some of us bring the practices and assumptions of a particular faith such as southern Baptist Protestant Christianity. Others of us may carry other traditions such as reform Judaism, Sunni Islam, or devotional Hinduism. Perhaps a few of us carry experiences of transcendental meditation, psychedelics, astrology, or Tarot. In our journey to understand what religious studies is, we are informed in part by what we have identified as religion in our own lives. These experiences and ideas are not irrelevant. They help us frame and so make sense of what we come across along the way.

However, our personal experiences can also weigh us down when they interfere with our ability to be open-minded about the study of religion. Such study requires that we employ critical thinking. By “critical” we do not mean “to criticize,” a phrase often used negatively or dismissively. To think critically is simply to subject whatever it is that we are studying to open inquiry.