Teaching Philosophy of Religion Series Ep. 4 Jin Y. Park on Inclusive Approaches to Teaching Philosophy Of Religion

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 in the 21st century? Jin Park is a professor and department chair of the Philosophy and Religion Department at American University in Washington, DC. You may learn more about Professor Park’s research and teaching at www.american.edu/cas/faculty/jypark.cfm.

Nathan Loewen:

Dr. Park 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. Our conversation on August 17th, 2020 focused on how Professor Park structures a cross-cultural introduction to the philosophy of religion.

Nathan Loewen:

Thank you, Jin, for joining me here. We’d like to ask you some questions about what you understand about the global critical philosophy of religion. What might that mean? What are some examples? We have a few short questions, if you’d be so kind to answer, we’d love to hear your thoughts, and then we can use those as jumping off points with the others.

Jin Y. Park:

Thank you very much, and thank you for inviting me, just to get this project started, so I would have to have a conversation with you about those issues.

Nathan Loewen:

What does global critical philosophy of religion mean to you? I mean, is it distinct from comparative intercultural or multicultural philosophy? And finally, what would the significance of a global critical philosophy of religion be as opposed to those other ways of doing philosophical inquiry?

Jin Y. Park:

Yes. I think, the first to start to answer that question is to really define what do we mean by global and critical. I think these two vocabulary seems obvious, but if we really think about it, we can really clarify what this project could be, or to me, what it means.

Jin Y. Park:

So let’s think about global. Obviously, global means that relating to the world. So global philosophy of religion is a kind of philosophy of religion which is trying to examine, discuss the religious traditions around the world. That much sounds clear, but I’d like to kind of move one step farther and think about global in a way more kind of content oriented. In other words, global also means something related to the whole of something, as we say, globally speaking. So, global philosophy of religion should be something that can look at the phenomenon of religion globally, not only just to worldly, geographically, but in terms of topic.

Jin Y. Park:

What I mean by this, in the traditional philosophy of religion, there are only certain topics that have been discussed dominantly, and those topics have been based on the Judeo-Christian tradition. And because of that, there are a number of issues that have been excluded in this discussion. But, as you know, religion is really broad, especially what I call the act of religion. There are religious traditions, religious texts, religious doctrines and institutions, and rituals, all kinds of things. There are a lot of different issues. So I’d like to see this global, not only something related to the world in terms of geographical religious tradition, but in terms of topic, so then we can address those topics which have been excluded so far.

Jin Y. Park:

And then critical, obviously, we use this expression a lot, critical thinking. But what does it mean, exactly? And then sometimes people think that critical means criticizing something. Well, that is not exactly what we mean by critical. So in this case, I’d like to think about critical in the way that, to look at things and then examine the foundation of an argument, for example. If you claim [inaudible 00:05:03], and then critically approach that statement means that what is the foundation of that claim? Does it make sense? And then after you approach that from the foundation of that argument, also trying to place that in the context, and [inaudible 00:05:22] doesn’t make sense in Judeo Christian tradition, doesn’t make sense in Buddhist tradition or Hindu tradition, then you get different answers.

Jin Y. Park:

So put them together in a way that I’d like to think of global critical philosophy of religion is a kind of discipline in which we not only examine the religious traditions around the world, but also the topics that are related to religious phenomenon, all the topics globally. The whole thing, entirety of religious tradition, and does that by contextualizing our questions, and also examining the foundations of certain kind of claim that we are making about certain religions or religious phenomenon.

Jin Y. Park:

And you asked how this might be different from something like comparative philosophy of religion.

Nathan Loewen:

Right.

Jin Y. Park:

Now, this discipline called the comparative something has a lot of problems for a long time. Comparative literature, comparative philosophy, comparative philosophy of religion, in a way that the question is, what is meant to by comparison, is it methodology or content? Actually I teach a, quote unquote, comparative philosophy course, Derrida and Buddhism, that has been one of my major fields. And at the beginning of the semester I ask students, what does it mean that we do comparative philosophy between Derrida and Buddhism? What do you do with this? So Derrida has this, and the Buddhism has that, okay we compare them, there are similarities and differences. It’s actually fun to see that.

Jin Y. Park:

But so what? There we get to, that’s really the core of comparative philosophy. So in other words, if we do not get to, so what part, I mean, it might be fun to compare Judaism and Buddhism, but so what? What do you want to do with that? And I think there, you can use a comparative philosophy religion as just a methodology, or if you get to the content of it, so what do we do with this comparison? You might get to something similar to what we just defined about global critical philosophy of religion. So it depends on how you approach that.

Nathan Loewen:

Right.

Jin Y. Park:

And comparative philosophy of religion, or comparative philosophy, it sounds like, and usually that’s what happens, it sounds like comparing two separate independent entities. So here is a tradition called Buddhism, for example. Here is the entire tradition called Christianity. You compare them, they are separate.

Nathan Loewen:

Right.

Jin Y. Park:

And I think a global critical philosophy of religion is not really approaching the different religious traditions from that perspective, that’s what I meant when I said contextualizing certain questions. And how about the multicultural philosophy of religion? I think it’s opposite of comparative philosophy. For example, multiculturalism is more content based. Multiculturalism is an effort to recognize different cultural traditions. Plurality is the kind of basis of this multiculturalism, but then, so what? There are different traditions of culture, what are you going to do with that?

Jin Y. Park:

So there it comes again, the so what issue? And here, we once again get to the content issue, comparing and recognizing different kind of cultures and traditions. Now what do we want to do with that? I think that content is what the global critical philosophy of religion is kind of trying get at, from my perspective. In other words, I think the significance of this project in a way can be explained by comparing what Peter Hershock says in his Valuing Diversity, the difference between variety and diversity.

Jin Y. Park:

So nowadays, at the university, we hear a lot about diversity and inclusion. I think it’s the same at your university too. And okay, what do you mean by diversity? If you bring students from different countries and culture, Asians, Africans, African Americans, and white people, colored people, put them together on campus, does not make it diverse. It’s a variety. We have a variety of students from different colors, colors of skin. Right?

Nathan Loewen:

Right.

Jin Y. Park:

And if each kind of individual leaves separately without getting connected to one another, what’s the point of bringing them together? So as Peter Hershock says, variety means simply co-existence. That’s better than exclusion, but then that does not mean that actual inclusion. You just bring those students from a [inaudible 00:10:33] place and then just to place them on campus, and if you do not take care of them and teach how their culture can help other cultures to understand each other, what’s the point?

Jin Y. Park:

Diversity, Peter Hershock says, is a kind of narrowly simple co-existence, it’s the awareness of interconnectedness. So in other words, how the understanding of Asian religious tradition can help understand Christianity. Or how understanding of Jewish tradition can help somebody to understand the Buddhist tradition. So this kind of interconnectedness and the mutual influence in the identity formation and understanding of its own tradition is, I think, the benefit or significance of global critical philosophy of religion.

Nathan Loewen:

Right. Since you mentioned students, I think we could jump to a question that heads into the practical issues. You covered a lot in that response, and now that you mentioned students, it might be worthwhile for us to hear from you about how you translate your understanding of global critical philosophy of religion as you’ve just talked about it. How do you translate that into your pedagogy and strategies that you would suggest for an undergraduate student body? Where do you go there? Could you lead us in that direction please?

Jin Y. Park:

Right. So I think one of the obvious efforts to do this global critical philosophy of religion in our curriculum is to bring in this kind of non-Western philosophy religious traditions. So I don’t know how many people actually teach the philosophy religion as an independent course. At my university, in my department, we have Philosophy of Religion course, but this is only for upper level grad course. We don’t have Intro to Philosophy of Religion. But the way I do it, I incorporate it in my religious heritage of Asia, or the kind of world religion course.

Jin Y. Park:

So, first thing, that obvious thing that we can do is really add those non-Western religious traditions in your curriculum and see how students respond to those materials, and help them understand non-Western traditions. But at the same time, ask them how this understanding of non-Western religious traditions helped them understand the religious traditions that they are familiar with.

Jin Y. Park:

So that’s the kind of first thing that we can do. The second thing is, as I mentioned before, to think about different topics. Traditionally, philosophy of religion is, does [inaudible 00:13:25], and so then why is there evil in the world? And so, and so forth. But bringing different hot topics that are really relevant to us today.

Jin Y. Park:

And one of the thing I usually do is gender issues. Gender in Buddhism, for example, gender in Confucianism, and think about how this different gender, women or men, actually understand the same religious tradition differently, and they are treated different. What does that mean for us when we understand religion? So kind of draw from practice and the meaning of religion from marginalized groups, not only women, but then socially marginalized groups, and things like that.

Jin Y. Park:

So the first one is geographically drawing from different religious traditions, especially include non-Western materials. The second one is, topically, we included those religious practices of those people who have been marginalized or excluded in the traditional philosophy of religion discourse. But this does not necessarily mean that Western religious traditions cannot be part of global critical philosophy of religion.

Jin Y. Park:

For example, actually this semester I’ll be teaching one credit course, titled Religion Without Religion. You should know what this means, right? So it’s obviously [inaudible 00:14:52] there is a philosophy of religion. That he’s a philosopher of religion, but his religious approach. Capital called it religion without religion. So what I try to do is to read some sections of Derrida’s work. And think about what it means to practice religion, what do we know about religion?

Jin Y. Park:

So this is a way of using Western material, but then critically approaching, critical Derrida asks, when do we pray? To whom do we pray? And this is a whole question about prayer. And then how do we do the prayer in the [inaudible 00:15:30] and things like that.

Nathan Loewen:

Right.

Jin Y. Park:

So this is one of the case that by using Western tradition, you also do a critical approach to the philosophy of religion. So, yeah, so I think there are various different ways that we can actually incorporate this in our curriculum.

Nathan Loewen:

Thank you so much for are answering these questions. These are a great way for us to start moving into our discussions about what global critical philosophy of religion can turn into, particularly for different teachers and instructors across the United States.

Nathan Loewen:

Thanks for listening. For more information about the Global Critical Philosophy of Religion Project, please visit our website at globalcritical, and that’s all one word, .as.ua.edu. There you will find our participating scholars, publications, sponsors, projects, and contact information.

Nathan Loewen:

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 at religion.ua.edu, or you can search for our department on Twitter, Instagram, Vimeo, Facebook, SoundCloud, Apple podcasts, or Spotify podcasts.