What I asked them to think about for next class: how are fundamentalists “modern”?

This meeting went a lot better. I began by asking people for general thoughts and reactions about Endo, specifically to say what characters they found most interesting and why. Everyone agreed: Otsu and Mitsuko. I spent some time talking about how I understood those characters and the dilemmas they raised. There was quite a bit of interested discussion, and I eventually had to cut it short and move on to talking about the textbook.

Discussion of the textbook readings began with some spirited critique of the book itself and its structure. Several people seemed to feel that the overly historical focus was (1) boring and (2) ineffective for conveying the right kind of “sensibility.” They wanted to know what the religion was like as a way of being, not as “something that happened” (as D. brilliantly put it). Other people leapt to the book’s defense. It was pretty interesting for me to hear what they all had to say.

Ultimately we moved on to what I consider the most important point in these opening sections of the chapter: namely, the concepts of fundamentalism and modernism. I spent some time getting them to lay out their ideas of what fundamentalism and modernism are, and I addressed those, then left them the final question as above.

Just walked out of my World Religions class a few minutes ago, and am preparing for my next one. The first one didn’t go so well, I’m afraid. I didn’t feel adequately prepared. I also had asked students to pick up where we left off Friday and to spend a little time reflecting on some of the issues that were raised by Deep River, but I didn’t have a clear idea of how that ought to happen, so the discussion kind of fell flat. In general I felt my students were suffering from a kind of Monday morning slackness, but it seemed pretty late in the morning (11 a.m.) for that to happen. A lot of non-participants in discussion.

Anyhow … I guess I am going to have to rethink what I’m doing in the afternoon section. I’ve got forty-five minutes to make up my mind how to run that one. I realize in retrospect that one thing that’s very important for me is for students to think through the modernist/fundamentalist distinction as a basic category for the rest of the course. I asked them to think about this for the next class. Better not forget that.