Nathan Loewen:
Welcome to our podcast series from the Global Critical Philosophy of Religion Project. This project aims to rethink the philosophy of religion from the ground up with an entirely new set of categories and questions. As you may imagine, this is no small task. The interview series on teaching is created by Nathan Loewen. The interviews are supported by a grant from the Wabash Center. All of the podcasts you find here on the Global Critical Philosophy of Religion are hosted by Study Religion, a production of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama.
Nathan Loewen:
How might philosophy of religion be taught and studied in the 21st century? Kevin Schilbrack teaches and writes about the philosophical study of religions at Appalachian State University. He is presently interested in the relevance of embodied cognition and social ontology for understanding what religion is and how it works. Dr. Schilbrack was part of a pilot project teaching philosophy of religion with a global critical approach. The pilot was supported by a Wabash Center grant administered by Gereon Kopf of Luther College. We had a conversation on January 8th, 2021. We talked about how a revised approach to the field might influence how philosophy of religion is taught.
Nathan Loewen:
So thanks so much for appearing here at 8:30 in the morning on a Friday.
Kevin Schilbrack:
Yeah.
Nathan Loewen:
I want to talk to you a little bit about getting ready to teach a global critical philosophy of religion course and understand that that’s not something you’ve necessarily done and in fact, probably none of us have done this, in the thorough way that we’re trying to figure out right now in this workshop.
Kevin Schilbrack:
Right. Right.
Nathan Loewen:
What do you think goes into a conventional philosophy of religion class?
Kevin Schilbrack:
The conventional topics, which you’re going to find in any textbook for philosophy of religion are going to be, arguments for the existence of God. And there’s classical ones, the nature of God, what properties God would have to be in order to be God, or to be worthy of worship, so if the arguments include cosmological and teleological and ontological arguments. And then the nature of God question is, what does it mean to be omniscient, what would an omnipotent being be like? If there’s an omnipotent being do human beings have free will? And then there’s usually a cluster of topics like the religious existentialism class that you’re talking about. There’ll be a textbook, could focus on religious experience and mysticism, religious language and whether metaphor or metaphysics is a different kind of language for discussing the objects that people care about in religion. Another topic that you see in a lot of textbooks is religious diversity and how should people in one religion think about those who are on different paths. And yeah.
Nathan Loewen:
And so like when that course is being taught, is there also a set of philosophical tools that you think are being granted or given or equipped with students when they go through that conventional course? You talk about topics, but what sorts of tools do you think they pick up along the way?
Kevin Schilbrack:
I think this is a good question because it gets at a two ways to answer it. And so I have a fairly conservative answer, which is that the philosophical tools in a traditional or conventional philosophy of religion class are simply the tools of philosophy and they belong in the university, they belong as part of the academic study of religion, just like philosophy does. So if the tools have to do with building an argument, critical reading of primary text, a weighing of evidence, I don’t reject traditional or conventional philosophy of religion or exclude it.
Kevin Schilbrack:
I, whatever you want to say, house it, or nest it, within a broader definition of what the discipline should care about. So I think that the discipline has been narrow, but I don’t think it’s been wrongheaded. And one of the reviews of my book said I was merely a revisionist, not a revolutionary, and so that’s the distinction I’m trying to make. I want to revise conventional philosophy of religion to be global and to be critical, but I don’t argue that, and this would be the revolutionary position, which I take seriously and deserves discussion, is that the tools of traditional philosophy of religion or in the classroom in traditional philosophy of religion is covertly confessional theology, and that it doesn’t belong in the academy and that questions about “What would something have to be like to be worthy of worship? Is there too much evil in the world to believe that there is a benevolent creator? Does the ontological argument make sense?” All those traditional questions, they don’t belong in the academy because they’re basically in service of Christian practice as opposed to philosophical investigations that are, I guess, the right word is secular.
Nathan Loewen:
So if I understand this correctly, it’s the tools are good. The application of the tools you find to be not useful for critical approach.
Kevin Schilbrack:
Right. That’s exactly right, but that’s my answer. And then the rival answer would be, “No, the tools are bullshit and that the tools aren’t…” And what you’re asking me about and what you’ve already pulled our conversation into is, I think, absolutely crucial in the academy today, because there are so many people who understand the word “critical” that’s in our title in this particular way where they say, “The critical study of something does not answer its questions or get… Or you can’t undo the master’s health with his tools.” And so criticism is going to be un-asking these questions or putting these questions in question. So really what you and I are already talking about is what is the meaning of “critical” for us in our group, but what does it mean for the academy? And I think there’s a wide range of views of what it means to be a critical scholar.
Nathan Loewen:
Right. So in a way, what you’re saying is that there’s one kind of secularizing ideology-
Kevin Schilbrack:
Exactly.
Nathan Loewen:
… in conventional philosophy of religion, that has a set of questions that inevitably, if you’re trying to be a philosopher about it, lead to an inevitable secularization and that actually whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Stop the record. We need to actually question the ideology of those… Not just the topics, but the questions that are asked under those topics. And maybe even reverse back a little bit over those topics as well, and say, “What’s an alternates set of topics.” So what would the alternate set of topics be then? I’m going off script a little bit here, but I think that’s kind of where we’re going and I’ll pull us back in in a second.
Kevin Schilbrack:
Let’s go off script in one minute, but I just have a quick anecdote that, for me, illustrates how salient this issue is because I don’t think it’s fringy at all. So I was on a panel with a big, big, big name religious studies person and that person said the academic study of religion has to distinguish itself from theology. And that means in the classroom, we’re not going to be telling students, “Oh, this makes sense,” or “This is right,” or “This is good or true.” And I said, “But in philosophy classrooms, that’s what they do all the time.” And the paper might be, “Use utilitarianism to figure out whether or not we should have welfare,” or whatever it is. But when the paper’s going to be the right thing to do is to provide for people in this way, given this definition of what happiness is or whatever that…
Kevin Schilbrack:
Philosophy has this normative agenda and so, in my eyes, philosophy of religion has a normative agenda where it’s going to be making judgements about what’s good or true, or just, or real. And there’s no way to purge those things from the academy, unless you’re kicking philosophy out all together. And so I said, in response, “There’s no way to make your case that religious studies doesn’t tell people right from wrong without also kicking ethics out.” And the person said, “That’s not true at all. Ethics belongs in philosophy, but philosophy of religion, or at least the theological version of it, doesn’t belong in the academic study of religion.” So I consider these to be red hot issues, very live issues. And-
Nathan Loewen:
What I hear you to say, is that the tools that we normally use in philosophy are the ones that we should be using in a global critical philosophy religion class.
Kevin Schilbrack:
That’s right. That is my view.
Nathan Loewen:
Is there another way that we could head into the restructuring of a class?
Kevin Schilbrack:
Yeah.
Nathan Loewen:
That doesn’t involve us repeating a bunch of stuff that we’re only going to debunk in the last four weeks of the semester.
Kevin Schilbrack:
I think a new world is dawning and so there’s the old way of doing things that still continues to be replicated in philosophy of religion textbooks, and we’re looking at a new way. And so if we’re in the middle where we’re critiquing the old and building the new, how much of the old do you have to give them in order for them to understand the critique? And if you just jump straight to the new, what continuity is there in terms of the definition of what we’re doing? Because if you said, “But we’re not going to ask any of those questions and we’ve got new tools and we’ve got new subjects,” it’s not clear that it’s the same discipline.
Nathan Loewen:
Field. Yeah. Right.
Kevin Schilbrack:
That’s exactly right. But what we’re talking about is not… There’s not going to be an answer where the answer’s going to be, “You have to use 50% of traditional or conventional philosophy of religion and 50% of critique,” or something like that. This is going to be an art that depends on whether you have grad students and whether you have undergrad students and whether the class is on, right, religious existentialism, or whether it’s on problem of evil, or whether it’s just on… At my school, it’s called Reason and Religion, the philosophy of religion class.
Nathan Loewen:
Nice.
Kevin Schilbrack:
And so it’s going to depend on your context and your audience and really your goals as a teacher about what you want students to walk out of your class, what learning objectives you have in the classroom, so that you might have, what I would consider, a legitimate philosophy of religion class that had no Christian materials in it at all. And then the students would walk out of there knowing about arguments about God and about ultimate reality and so forth. But they might come from an Indian context, or there’s different ways to do it. It might come from a Muslim context. And there’s so many ways to do it.
Kevin Schilbrack:
But I mean, that’s the beauty of what we’re talking about. Because if philosophy of religion from, I don’t know, 1960 to 1990 or something like that was pretty clear what was going on there and, this is my criticism, and it’s too insular, and it did not build any bridges to history or to anthropology or to sociology or to gender studies and so on. If we want to build those bridges and we want to have a global and critical philosophy of religion that builds those bridges so that we’re in interdisciplinary conversations with others, there’s going to be lots of negotiation of this gray area of, “Are you still doing philosophy of religion? Or…”
Nathan Loewen:
And the defense to that, by the sounds of it, from your point of view might be, “Yes, I am. I have these basic set of tools, that I agree happen seemingly in most philosophy courses, and I’m applying them to just this area or field of topics-
Kevin Schilbrack:
That’s exactly my-
Nathan Loewen:
“… that most people conventionally group into the genre, religious.”
Nathan Loewen:
My final question… There’s a cookbook that I got when I was younger called the More-with-Less Cookbook. And it was how to make food with just small number of things, right? And the maxim “more with less,” or the other way around, “less is more,” has been mentioned by different folks in pedagogy as well. And it sounds like you’ve got an answer to this question already, right? And the question being, we can’t just add more stuff in because that’s just going to make our teaching confusing.
Kevin Schilbrack:
Be any anthropology. I think anthropology may be more than anywhere else, but it’s going to be in global studies and it’s going to be in history. It’s going to be… It’s a great, great question of what criticism means or whether you continue to be critical and what tools you want students to walk out of the classroom having learned to master, what tools you want them to master, because if you’re criticizing people’s ways of life, it’s going to be a politically charged environment. Well, but the foundation of that question was the “less is more” idea. And I mean, there’s no way to cover the whole globe. And so even in aspiration, in philosophy of religion or religious studies is global, you’re going to have to teach it using, as Russ says, an EEG that illustrates a larger point that you’re trying to make. This is good and it’ll be a good lead into the conversations of our workshop.
Kevin Schilbrack:
I have a friend at my university, who’s a film studies expert and being superficial in trite I saw him at an event and I said something like, “Oh, I love movies so much. I should teach a class on religion and film.” And he said, “But what would be the goal or the themes or the point you were trying to make?” And I didn’t have a question for that. I just liked movies. And so I think there’s that danger that you throw together a class, and this is the opposite of what you just laid out which sounded pretty cool, that you just throw together a class with stuff that you like and the students go. But what is it add up to other than the fact that you as a teacher like that topic?
Nathan Loewen:
Well, that’s how world religions is taught a lot of the time.
Kevin Schilbrack:
Yes. That’s a good… That’s right. But as opposed to saying, “I want students to see that the way that this category is constructed, and here’s a way of illustrating that. I want students to see that people who are in religious traditions often have representative intellectuals who devote their lives to demonstrating that it’s true, or at least in line with their scriptures, or whatever it is that intellectual’s trying to do, whether it’s [Shankura 00:14:45] or [inaudible 00:14:47] or whoever it is. And so this is an illustration of that. So just planning where you want to end the class and then finding the elements that help the students get there, that… I mean, that’s really what the best practice is in higher education, I think. But there’s a danger when you’re have so much put in your lap. What we’re talking about now is, “Well, don’t forget Daoism. What about Theravada Buddhism? And is Marxism a religion?” You got to have that in the class. And obviously there’s so many different schools of Judaism and-
Nathan Loewen:
Schools of Marxism.
Kevin Schilbrack:
Yeah. And so there’s too much. You have to think, I think maybe from where you want the class to end up, and then you build it from there.
Nathan Loewen:
Yeah. Agreed. Well, this has been really good, Kevin, thanks so much.
Kevin Schilbrack:
It really was.
Nathan Loewen:
I’m going to close this conversation off here.
Kevin Schilbrack:
Okay. Thanks.
Nathan Loewen:
For more information about the Global Critical Philosophy of Religion Project, please visit our website at global critical, and that’s all one word, .as.ua.edu. There you will find our participating scholars, publications, sponsors, projects, and contact information. Study Religion is a production of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. For more information about our department, please visit the website@religion.ua.edu, or you can search for our department on Twitter, Instagram, Vimeo, Facebook, SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify podcasts. Thanks. Goodbye.