Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Catholics & Cultures As An Act Of Improvisation: A Response, Thomas M. Landy

Journal of Global Catholicism

This essay responds to seven articles published in the same issue of the Journal of Global Catholicism on the use of Catholics & Cultures, a multimedia website, as a pedagogical resource for college classrooms. The site is deliberately presented in a fashion that undermines notions of center and periphery and presents Catholicism from a lay, lived-religion perspective as the multicultural faith that it is, minimizing reference to religious typologies. Particular attention is given to how to navigate tensions around theorizing, categorizing and sorting information for cross-cultural comparison. Given scholars’ current state of knowledge, writing about and teaching about global Catholicism …

Catholics & Cultures: A Panoramic View In Search Of Greater Understanding, Stephanie M. Wong

Journal of Global Catholicism

While internet-based technologies can open up greater awareness of the world or create self-perpetuating echo-chambers, the Catholics & Cultures project aspires to do the former. Aiming to ‘widen the lens’ on the variety of Catholic communities and practices, the site delivers on this goal by introducing viewers to a vast array of articles, pictures and videos from around the world. The organization of the site by country and by certain key features of lived Catholicism offers some interpretive guidance. However, the project could be strengthened as a pedagogical resource if it were more extensively thematized and hosted reflections on potential …

The Value Of Online Resources: Reflections On Teaching An Introduction To Global Christianity, Hillary Kaell

Journal of Global Catholicism

Reflecting on my experience teaching Introduction to Global Christianity, this essay ponders questions at the heart of undergraduate teaching: How can we encourage students to utilize online sources? How can we empower them to seek out answers to their questions? It offers practical examples of how I have used the Catholics & Cultures website in my classroom at a large public university. In particular, I reflect on my experience working with students who are mostly of Catholic heritage, but from many cultural and social contexts.

Teaching Sexuality On The Catholics & Cultures Website: A Refreshing Turn Toward The Longue Durée, Marc Roscoe Loustau

Journal of Global Catholicism

I present a close reading of the Catholics & Cultures (C&C) website’s treatment of sexuality-related issues and discuss this material in relation to debates about how to teach sexuality in religious studies and theology classrooms. The C&C website occasionally and intermittently uses a typical “contemporary issues” approach that considers sexuality in relation to legal and legislative decisions and government policies. In contrast, country profiles consistently situate sexuality in relation processes like nation building, urbanization, and lay Catholics’ growing authority. My interpretation highlights the site’s decision to emphasize the longue durée, long-term and deep structural processes driving cultural and religious changes. …

Ritual Among The Scilohtac: Global Catholicism, The Nacirema, And Interfaith Studies, Anita Houck

Journal of Global Catholicism

More than six decades after its publication, Horace Miner’s 1956 article “Body Ritual among the Nacirema” remains a reliable pedagogical tool, remarkably successful in helping students see their own ethnocentric biases. Catholics & Cultures has potential to do similar work. The site lacks some of what makes Miner’s text so effective, in particular its capacity to bring about a sudden shift in perception. The site also shares some of the article’s limitations, particularly in focusing on ritual to the relative exclusion of other aspects of religion. That said, the site can help students gain the religious literacy and develop the …

Focus On The Busy Intersections Of Culture And Cultural Change, Laura Elder

Journal of Global Catholicism

The dynamics of religious resurgence reveal the important ways that religious ritual and performance are meaning making spaces which are not self-contained or cut off from the rest of culture, but rather are a key locus of cultural change. A renewed emphasis on the busy intersections of meaning making – as rituals are connected, disconnected, and reconnected to other domains of social life – would improve the utility of the Catholics & Cultures website for understanding global cultural change. And a renewed emphasis on cultural change would also provide a better means for exploring reflexively by seeking to understand both …

A Widened Angle Of View: Teaching Theology And Racial Embodiment, Mara Brecht

Journal of Global Catholicism

Today’s undergraduate students are digital natives, shaped by constant access to information and countless experiences of encountering the world through the convenience of a screen. The ostensible comfort students have with difference gives way to a paradox, and one that’s made especially apparent in the theology classroom: Students are comfortable with seeing difference and particularity at a distance, but not adept at locating difference and particularity “at home.” I contend that Catholics & Cultures can help students from the dominant culture—namely, white students who comprise the vast majority of Catholic college students—destabilize their notion of the Catholic tradition as tightly …

Pedagogical Philisophy And Education In The Middle East And Central Asia (Ix-Xii Centuries), Baxrom Maxamadxodjaev

The Light of Islam

The article describes the period of the rapid development of education and culture in the Middle East and Central Asia in the IX-XII centuries. At this time, the ideas of the great thinkers Muhammad al-Khwarizmi, Ahmad al-Ferghani, Abu Nasr al-Farabi, Abu Ali Ibn Sina, Abu Rayhan al-Beruni, Ibn Iraq developed, which opened the way to a widespread of science and education in Europe.

Islamic culture has grown based on interconnected cultures of the countries of the Arab caliphate, Byzantium, India, and China. The Arab conquest did not mean a complete break with the cultural and pedagogical traditions of Hellenism and …

Ascetical Practice And Ignatian Pedagogy For Sustainability: Tools For Teaching Sustainable Living, James Leighter, John O'Keefe

Jesuit Higher Education: A Journal

Inspired by Laudato Sí, we outline an application of the Ignatian Pedagogy for Sustainability to our course, Sustainable Practice: The Examined Life. We describe the development of the course in the context a new undergraduate program in the College of Arts and Sciences at Creighton University. In the course, we draw from the notion of ascetical practice, an approach for students as they strive for incorporating more sustainable practices into their daily living. We concentrate on four domains of asceticism: attention, sustenance, materials, and energy. Additionally, we argue that mindfulness through meditation is a necessary activity for students pursuing …

Addressing Reconciliation In The Esl Classroom, Michael K. Westwood

International Journal of Christianity and English Language Teaching

The extent to which teachers’ spiritual identities should inform their pedagogy has been a topic of much discussion among TESOL professionals. Under particular scrutiny have been Christian English teachers (CET), whose faith can be disconcerting to a multicultural field that strongly values diversity. Meanwhile, another conversation continues regarding ways in which language teaching can be used as a means of promoting social justice and global citizenship. This article attempts to add to these conversations by proposing that reconciliation should be addressed in the classroom and by suggesting that it is a topic of interest to both CET and others who …

Faith And Pedagogy: Five Voices From Japan, Paul Wicking

International Journal of Christianity and English Language Teaching

Despite a recent increase in research into the relationship between faith and practice in ELT, the ways in which actual Christian teachers make meaning of their faith through pedagogy remains largely unexplored. There is little empirical data about the ways in which witnessing and evangelism are (or are not) conducted through English classes. The present study is an analysis of interview data collected from five evangelical Christian teachers living and working in Japan. The participants vary considerably in age and teaching context, yet all share a strong religious faith and a desire to express it through their profession. Each participant …

Belief Is Not Experience: Transformation As A Tool For Bridging The Ontological Divide In Anthropological Research And Reporting, Bonnie Glass-Coffin

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

For more than a hundred years, anthropologists have recorded stories of beliefs in other-than-human sentience and consciousness, yet we have most frequently insisted on contextualizing these stories in terms of cultural, epistemological, or ontological relativism. In this paper, I ask why we have had such a hard time taking reports of unseen realms seriously and describe the transformative role of personal experience as a catalyst for change in anthropological research and reporting.