Geoff Cobb had been teaching a world religions class to high school students for three years at the Chelsea-based New York City Museum School. His students were certainly religiously diverse – they included Hindus, Muslims, Jews, and Christians. Geoff had lingering doubts, however, about whether he was teaching religion correctly. After all, the bar is set high at the Museum School because its students have easy access to rich primary source collections at the city’s museums. Compounding his concerns, was the fact that Geoff had no formal academic training in religious studies.
When he heard about the new Religious Worlds of New York summer institute in partnership with Union Theological Seminary and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Geoff jumped at the chance to apply. For three weeks, Geoff and his fellow teachers worked with leading scholars of religion such as First Amendment Center Senior Scholar Charles Haynes, who spoke about religious liberty in American ideals and K-12 classrooms, and Northwestern University Professor Robert Orsi, who explored his own groundbreaking work on the study of lived religions. Geoff and his peers also met with a wide range of New York religious leaders and visited local houses of worship. These experiences introduced him to six traditions that are part of the fabric of American life – Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Afro-Caribbean religions – and gave him the pedagogic tools he needs to teach about contemporary religious life.
Geoff says that “the biggest thing that I got out of the seminar was the idea that a religion is much more than a set of core beliefs or understanding a holy book. Religions are living things and my class now explores how religion is lived. I learned to look at religion as a part of culture. I see religion now as a verb, whereas before I saw it more as a noun.”
For the new school year, Geoff was inspired to change the focus of his class to look first at religious diversity close to home and then use this knowledge as a bridge to understand more distant cultures. He is now crafting lessons that ask his students to look around Chelsea and their own neighborhoods for signs of how people live their faiths. Now who’s raising the bar?
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