As someone raised Jewish and who has lived and worked in education in New York City for the past thirty years, I have found the discourse around religion in education in the UK incredibly foreign, more so than the other readings in this unit. In the United States, a right-wing, evangelical Christian movement has captured major governmental institutions up to and including the Supreme Court (which just this year has dismantled a woman’s right to abortion and legalized anti-gay discrimination based on religious belief among other rulings), and local school boards around the country are banning books and interfering with school curricula whitewashing the teaching of US History, all predicated on a combination of white supremacy and Christian Nationalism. On the other hand, in New York City, most public institutions observe religious holidays of all major world religions, and awareness and acceptance of different faiths in most social contexts is a cultural norm. So on the one hand, unlike in the UK, on a national level in the US, a political battle is raging trying to keep religious matters firmly outside of educational policy in order to protect the rights of religious minorities and atheists from an emboldened and activist reactionary Christian movement. On the other, coming from cosmopolitan New York, I have found London to be a city with far less cultural sensitivity, knowledge, and understanding of different faiths. All of which is preface to say that I appreciate how much work I still need to do to understand the new cultural context in which I am teaching. I found it striking that the two required readings chosen for this blog in a sense both advocated for embracing religion and centering it more within higher education (as opposed to focusing on Islamophobia or antisemitism, say). This is not a critique, just an observation of a major difference between the cultural contexts between teaching in New York City and London.
I found the ideological steer of Craig Calhoun’s “Religion, the public sphere and higher education” to be quite off-putting and ahistorical. Most problematic is his lack of theorization of the “public sphere” as “defined by its openness and participation, inclusivity and reach of connections” (18). The lack of reference to Habermas, the theorist most associated with the concept of the public sphere, and its emergence in European history as a site of exclusion as a bourgeois field enforcing white, male, Christian, hegemonic power is emblematic of the ahistorical nature of his argument. That said, I strongly endorse Calhoun’s plea for greater understanding of world religions as an urgent necessity amongst staff and a greater consideration for the role of religion may play in our students’ world view.
I have enjoyed Kwame Anthony Appiah’s writings on Cosmopolitanism elsewhere, but personally found this lecture, perhaps because of its brevity and extremely wide and public-facing nature, to be a vague and rather toothless Enlightenment-based, rationalist appeal for tolerance and understanding. I found it revealing in the question-and-answer section when asked about religious fundamentalism that his response was basically to say that he was open and willing for conversation. While this sort of approach should be our ideal within an educational environment, as a basis for a geo-politics given the current state of world politics, I find Appiah’s views increasingly inadequate as a response. Appiah himself is so charming and appealing and his life story embodies the values he espouses, so this is quite an accessible and useful artefact to bring directly into the classroom as the basis for starting a discussion about faith with students.
The complexity and intersectional nature of these issues is apparent in the “Interview with Rahul Patel” in the Shades of Noir text Higher Power: Religion, Faith, Spirituality & Belief. Patel’s description of his own relationship to his Hindu faith resonated with my own experience, being raised what I would call “culturally Jewish,” connecting with the social and community-based aspects of faith without adopting the religious beliefs (which also resonates with Appiah’s lecture as creed as a doing, as opposed to a set of beliefs). As Patel continues to reflect on religion in the context of UAL, he often conflates racial representation, Islamophobia, lack of diversity in staff, a lack of knowledge of world religions, and a feeling that UAL has not created an inclusive environment for non-Christian staff (particularly Muslims). This perception sadly reflects a conversation I had just last month with a Muslim student on my course who felt alienated by our department’s decision to have all three third year productions derive from Dante’s Human Comedy, imposing a Judeo-Christian framework for their public showcase. Clearly, the issues Patel raised need to be more urgently addressed at the programme level.