Does the English Department Have a Jewish Problem?

Inside Higher Ed’s Scott Jaschik has written another fine article, this one reporting on a panel discussion at the Modern Language Association on the relative paucity of experts teaching Jewish literature. The panel was entitled “Does the English Department Have a Jewish Problem?”

The underlying premise of the panel was that English departments that would never allow themselves to be without experts in the literatures of many racial and ethnic groups in the United States don’t think twice about failing to have a knowledge base in American Jewish literature. Further, the view of many here is that discussions about multicultural literature that ought to include Jewish writers simply don’t.

Jaschik’s detailed overview of the panel discussion could well serve as the starting point for a faculty conversation on how different religious and ethnic traditions are treated in today’s literature, history, and cultural studies departments.

Scholar who promotes religious pluralism on campus wins Grawemeyer Prize in Religion

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Eboo Patel, “the founder and executive director of an organization that promotes religious pluralism and is active on 50 American college campuses,” will receive the Grawemeyer Prize in Religion.

Mr. Patel, a former Rhodes scholar who holds a doctorate in the sociology of religion, was honored for his 2007 autobiography, Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation (Beacon Press), in which he describes his own life story as an India-born Muslim raised in America. The autobiography shows how an angry youth can be transformed into a leader for peace, according to the award announcement.

The organization Mr. Patel founded, Interfaith Youth Core, works to build mutual respect and pluralism among young people of different religious traditions by focusing on shared values and community service.

More information about the Grawemeyer awards and their recipients at the organization’s website. To set up a faculty conversation on this year’s award winner, use the longer citation and biography at the site.

Teaching Sankara and St. Gregory of Nyssa at Harvard

I have mentioned in earlier posts the splendid blog by Francis X. Clooney, S.J., which frequently deals with the experience of teaching comparative theology—in Clooney’s case, Hinduism and Christianity. The latest post replies to comments on an earlier post on his course on Hindu goddesses and the Virgin Mary and explains how in another course he and his students are reading Sankara on the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad and comparing Sankara’s interpretive attempts with Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses.

Helping college students find purpose

Robert J. Nash, author of the forthcoming Helping College Students Find Purpose: The Campus Guide to Meaning-Making (Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 2010), has an op-ed piece in Inside Higher Ed that offers several propositions to ponder and suggests readings to help the weighing. He is clear about where he is coming from:

I mourn the current turn to the far pedagogical right in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. I am deeply troubled by the retreat from recent curricular reform, alternative research methodologies, innovative teaching and learning experiments based on a multiple-intelligences understanding, and, most of all, the turning away from helping students at all levels to find and make meaning of their personal and professional lives through their classroom studies. And, so, in the spirit of reviewing the personal meaning of my own professorial calling — particularly its teaching-learning dimension — I offer the following propositions….

No mention of religion in the following five propositions but his overarching concerns suggests that he would be a good conversation (or debate) partner in discussions about religion on campus.