Teaching Civic Engagement

Using a new model focused on four core capacities-intellectual complexity, social location, empathetic accountability, and motivated action--Teaching Civic Engagement explores the significance of religious studies in fostering a vibrant, just, and democratic civic order.

In the first section of the book, contributors detail this theoretical model and offer an initial application to the sources and methods that already define much teaching in the disciplines of religious studies and theology. A second section offers chapters focused on specific strategies for teaching civic engagement in religion classrooms, including traditional textual studies, reflective writing, community-based learning, field trips, media analysis, ethnographic methods, direct community engagement and a reflective practice of "ascetic withdrawal." The final section of the volume explores theoretical issues, including the delimitation of the "civic" as a category, connections between local and global in the civic project, the question of political advocacy in the classroom, and the role of normative commitments.

Collectively these chapters illustrate the real possibility of connecting the scholarly study of religion with the societies in which we, our students, and our institutions exist. The contributing authors model new ways of engaging questions of civic belonging and social activism in the religion classroom, belying the stereotype of the ivory tower intellectual.

Forrest Clingerman is Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Ohio Northern University. He is co-editor of Interpreting Nature: The Emerging Field of Environmental Hermeneutics (2013) and Placing Nature on the Borders of Religion, Philosophy and Ethics (2011). He has published on different topics related to environmental theology and philosophy, as well as in the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Reid B. Locklin holds a joint appointment in Christianity and Culture at Saint Michael's College and the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Spiritual but Not Religious? (2005); Liturgy of Liberation (2011); and other works in comparative theology, Hindu-Christian studies, and the scholarship of teaching and learning.