Debate about whether the academy functions to indoctrinate students in a liberal agenda frequently presumes a conception of political identity as binary, discrete, or mappable along a single spectrum, and as doxastic, in that it is reducible to one’s professed beliefs.  Such an assumption, however, ignores the ways in which power dynamics and hierarchies that exist outside the classroom also operate within it.  We propose here that the critical examination of positionality within the classroom, and of how classroom activities can contest, reinforce, and reconfigure such power dynamics, offers an alternative way of conceiving the political.  We argue that the methods and literature from the academic study of religion offers a particular contribution to make in such a project.

Once we acknowledge that we cannot escape politics in the classroom, it is imperative that we, as instructors, adapt our pedagogy accordingly, with the knowledge that our choices in the classroom will replicate, reinforce, or resist the political status quo. The political embeddedness of religion makes this all the more urgent for instructors of Religious Studies, as we attempt to guide students through explorations of communities, identities, histories, ideologies, and representations of human experience which all have political implications in the present. This article delineates several parameters for crafting our pedagogical initiatives, offering classroom climate considerations to keep in mind while we establish our own best practices. It then offers several suggestions—structural, instructor-focused, and student-focused—of best practices to implement in the Religious Studies classroom so as to achieve optimal learning outcomes for all of our students. Key among our conclusions is that inclusive pedagogy is effective pedagogy in Religious Studies.

How and why should scholars of pre-modern topics in Religious Studies responsibly incorporate politics into the classroom? This piece introduces the reader to these questions and our motivations for asking them as scholars of late antiquity. It orients readers to this Special Issue, framing the contributors’ motivations for wanting to engage politics in the classroom and for producing this special issue. It introduces “late antiquity” and addresses the question of how religious studies instructors, whether teaching late ancient topics or not, can responsibly address the political present.

In this conversation, the Reverend Dr. Shanell Smith shares her strategies for incorporating politics into the classroom via an explicitly politicizing technique, “Keepin’ it Real.” She discusses the process of considering what to include and how to include it (and why we must!), and offers a window into how it might look in the classroom, using examples from a class on Mary that she teaches in an online seminary setting. Smith emphasizes the importance of modeling personalized scholarly inquiry for our students, including and especially the openness and vulnerability that make our scholarship matter both to us and to the world we share.

Christianization required the construction of a worldview capable of adapting to transformations of the physical, political, and social landscape. This article argues that Prudentius attempted to cultivate such a worldview in his readers by teaching them how to interpret their surroundings through the lens of Christ-imitation and martyrdom. Through an extended ekphrasis, Prudentius demonstrates the role of interpretation in the construction of martyrdom—a mother’s interpretation of her son’s suffering in Peristephanon 10 both cements her son’s martyrdom and opens the possibility for her own, although she does not die. Prudentius uses her example to guide his contemporaries to develop their own martyrial Christian worldviews.

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