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ERIC Number: EJ1094900
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2013
Pages: N/A
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0024-1822
EISSN: N/A
Cultivating Student Learning across Faith Lines
Larson, Marion; Shady, Sara
Liberal Education, v99 n3 Sum 2013
Educators face the important challenge of preparing students to live constructively in a religiously diverse world. At some institutions, a reluctance to allow issues of faith into the classroom creates an obstacle to cultivating the skills students need to understand, process, and engage a religiously pluralistic society. At faith-based institutions, by contrast, students are encouraged to see how what they believe connects with their academic learning and their social experiences, but students may not have many opportunities on campus to interact directly with persons who practice a religious or spiritual tradition different from their own. In this article, the authors argue for the importance of interfaith dialogue and service as means to cultivate students who will promote "human flourishing and the common good" (Volf 2011, xvi). Part of this work requires that educators reflect upon the kind of people they need to become in order to interact graciously across often divisive faith lines. Virtue ethicist Martha Nussbaum's work, particularly her book "Cultivating Humanity," has been instructive in this regard. Nussbaum describes three interrelated capacities that those in higher education need to help students develop: (1) the capacity to examine one's own beliefs critically; (2) the capacity to see oneself as part of a larger human community; and (3) the imaginative capacity necessary to see and feel as another person might. This article describes Nussbaum's three capacities more fully and illustrates ways in which these capacities can be further developed through interfaith dialogue and service.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A