This one-day workshop will bring scholars from around the world to Stanford to discuss how people learn religion, learn about the religious, and experiment, practice, and make sense of religious commitments and beliefs. Each of the four workshop sessions will bring together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds to focus on a particular aspect or arena of learning religion: spiritual practices, texts, institutions, and imaginaries, respectively.
The sessions will be connected by questions about how religion and the religious are taught, learned, and constructed. We will ask all of the panelists to speak about what their disciplinary training and unique empirical cases illuminate about the process of learning or becoming religious. In the panel on religious practices, we will consider both the process of apprenticeship - or learning to practice - as well as how spiritual practices shape a broader process of religious formation. In the panel on religious texts, we will reflect on what makes a text sacred, on the nature of textual interpretations, and on the relationship between content and the practice of textual study. In the panel on religious educational institutions, we will discuss how both social forces external to the community as well as the community's internal dynamics and tensions shape the structure, content, and impacts of religious education. In the panel on religious imaginaries, we will consider where different imaginaries come from, and examine the consequences they have for adherents and the broader community. Finally, we will ask each of our panelists to reflect on what scholars at the intersection of religion and learning should consider moving forward. In doing so, we hope to identify areas of investigation that are currently under theorized as well as pressing questions that remain unanswered.
We aspire to create a dynamic and relatively informal dialogue between panelists and workshop participants through a series of guided conversations. Panelists will speak about empirical questions, theoretical perspectives or insights, and methodological issues related to learning religion that have shaped, informed, or challenged their research. Panelists will have the opportunity to engage with and respond to one another’s comments. Audience members will be actively encouraged to contribute with insights, comments, and questions of their own. Our hope is to provide a space for open-ended discussions and inspired intellectual exchange.
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