Educational theorist Richard Kiely highlights the central importance of "high intensity dissonance" in successful international service-learning. This essay applies Kiely's model of dissonance and transformative learning to Intercordia, an international service-learning program offered at the University of St. Michael's College and the University of Toronto, in partnership with the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Intercordia Canada. By placing its students in situations of significant vulnerability and weakness, the Intercordia program attempts to problematize familiar assumptions about the otherness of oppressed persons and thereby to encourage an authentic sense of belonging across boundaries of difference. The results, as reported by participants in the program, are quite profound. At the same time, the program design invites critical questions about how, and to what extent, such transformative experiences of dissonance should be scripted for students as an expected and desired result of their international service.
Tomoko Masuzawa and a number of other contemporary scholars have recently problematized the categories of “religion” and “world religions” and, in some cases, called for its abandonment altogether as a discipline of scholarly study. In this collaborative essay, we respond to this critique by highlighting three attempts to teach world religions without teaching “world religions.” That is, we attempt to promote student engagement with the empirical study of a plurality of religious traditions without engaging in the rhetoric of pluralism or the reification of the category “religion.” The first two essays focus on topical courses taught at the undergraduate level in self‐consciously Christian settings: the online course “Women and Religion” at Georgian Court University and the service‐learning course “Interreligious Dialogue and Practice” at St. Michael's College, in the University of Toronto. The final essay discusses the integration of texts and traditions from diverse traditions into the graduate theology curriculum more broadly, in this case at Loyola Marymount University. Such confessional settings can, we suggest, offer particularly suitable – if somewhat counter‐intuitive – contexts for bringing the otherwise covert agendas of the world religions discourse to light and subjecting them to a searching inquiry in the religion classroom.
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