The article discusses two versions of a complex role-playing exercise in undergraduate courses on Buddhism. The pedagogical exercise demonstrated how imagination cultivated through creative writing could be used to enhance learning about history, culture, and religion. Students were also challenged to generate an understanding of religious…

Cases like that of John Howard Yoder--a pacifist theorist who perpetrated sexual violence--raise difficult questions about teaching material implicated in traumatic pasts. This paper argues that "moral injury" provides a useful framework for understanding the dynamics of teaching prominent cases of tainted legacies like Yoder's and for…

The learning goals of a well-designed course in the liberal arts include not only the imparting of knowledge but also the development of critical thinking and disciplinary expertise. A class on Luther can help students acquire those intellectual skills associated with the discipline of history and the liberal arts more generally as they consider…

In this essay, I explore an exam format that pairs multiple-choice questions with required rationales. In a space adjacent to each multiple-choice question, students explain why or how they arrived at the answer they selected. This exercise builds the critical thinking skill known as metacognition, thinking about thinking, into an exam that also…

The editor of "Teaching Theology and Religion" facilitated this reflective conversation with five teachers who have extensive experience and success teaching extremely large classes (150 students or more). In the course of the conversation these professors exchange and analyze the effectiveness of several active learning strategies they…

Reflecting on the complementary pedagogical models on teaching courses related to religion and the environment presented in this issue of the journal by Kevin O'Brien ("Balancing Critique and Commitment") and Jennifer Ayres ("Learning on the Ground"), I suggest ways in which these essays form a conversation about teaching.…

What happens when a class assignment becomes a source of controversy? How do we respond? What do we learn? By describing the controversy surrounding an assignment on religion and representation, this article examines conflict's productive role in teaching about New Religious Movements (NRMs) and religion. It suggests that we consider how our…

An historically familiar tension in East Asian Buddhism between meditation and cultivation in broad learning has appeared in discussions and planning for preparing ministerial students in Won Buddhism. This paper reviews the history of preparation in this order, which was founded in 1916. While the alternatives of training based on practice and…

Is it effective or even possible to teach an introductory course in religious studies that not only provides first-year university students with the fundamental vocabulary, concepts, and critical tools of religious inquiry but also invites and stimulates the transformation of the religious imagination? In what kind of teaching and learning method…

Teaching bioethics might be likened to a rollercoaster ride of twists, turns, and dips that invite teachers and students to experience something of their own edges of fear and comfort. Here the author provides readers with a glimpse into her distinctive approach to teaching bioethics that encourages students to move beyond boundaries of personal…

Traversing a rock-strewn terrain of essentialist methodologies historically employed for teaching Islam, the author espouses a non-Essentialist pedagogy that combines critical reflection, analysis of historical methods, and development of an appreciation for alternative notions about Islam and global interdependence. In this essay the author…

In this essay the authors describe how four seminary educators pedagogically engage students in practices of interpretation and explore how the variations in their teaching practices shape the critical thinking they seek to cultivate in their students. The piece is excerpted from an ethnographic study of Jewish and Christian seminary educator…

This article responds to the exponential growth in academic textbooks on Western or American Buddhism by arguing that popular trade books written by Buddhist teachers in the West make more effective tools for teaching and learning about the growth of Buddhism in western societies. The use of such texts in the classroom provides students with…

The Bible is a non-western text subject to a variety of interpretations and applications--constructive and destructive. The academic study of the Bible, therefore, requires critical thinking skills and the ability to engage with diversity. The reality is that most first-year college students have not yet developed these skills. Rather than bemoan…