RPL in the News: Understanding, Not Endorsement

Inside Higher Ed writer Elin Johnson, reports on the American Academy of Religion's new guidelines on what undergraduates should understand about all religions prior to getting their degrees, a program that was co-led by Diane L. Moore.

"The American Academy of Religion has released new guidelines for how religion should be taught to undergraduates and what students should know about religion by the time they graduate.

The recommendations lay a groundwork for a level of cultural competency that contributors to the project thought was necessary for undergraduates to possess by the time they get their degrees.

According to the guidelines, graduates should be able to “discern accurate and credible knowledge about diverse religious traditions and expressions, recognize the internal diversity within religious traditions, explain how religions have shaped experiences and histories, interpret how religious expressions make use of cultural symbols and artistic representations, [and] distinguish confessional or prescriptive statements about religion from descriptive or analytical statements.”

The guidelines were designed so they could be equally and similarly applied to public and private, as well as two-year and four-year, institutions. The recommendations are broad enough to serve as suggestions to curriculum builders regardless of whether the institution has a specified faith or not.

The program was co-led by Diane Moore, the director of the Religious Literacy Project at Harvard Divinity School, and Eugene Gallagher, a professor emeritus of religious studies at Connecticut College and adjunct professor at the College of Charleston.

“We think it’s pretty important for anybody with a college degree to have some exposure to the serious academic study of religion,” said Gallagher. “That it’s not just an arcane field that only interests a few people, but that religion intersects with so many human pursuits in so many different ways that it’s extraordinarily helpful for people to have some sense of how to approach it in an academic fashion.”

The guidelines are meant to guide faculty and administrators at two- and four-year institutions to better build curricula and courses. The authors intended the guidelines to be usable at any institution regardless of whether or not it has a religious study program.

“As scholars of religion, we know that there are a host of foundational assumptions about religion that we feel are important for citizens of the world to understand,” Moore said."

Read the full article on Inside Higher Ed.