Letter from the Editor: Why I majored in religious studies

DANIEL DASSOW Editor-in-Chief

I decided to take a gen ed class my first semester at UT called “Religion in a Global Perspective.” I was fresh off a 12-year stint as a private Christian schoolboy. My senior Bible class had a “world religions” unit where we researched a religion and then presented on how it fell short of God’s truth. So I was pretty interested to see how a public school taught religion.

On the first day of class, the professor, a man named Randal Hepner, set out his goal for the course.

“I’m going to attempt to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange,” he said.

And from the first day of class until the last, he did just that. He lectured for 80 minutes straight twice a week and it was never uninteresting.

He’d grown up Catholic and was so shamed by his Protestant cousins for his biblical illiteracy that he read the Bible cover to cover seven times by his 18th birthday. He’d lived with a Hasidic Jew in Brooklyn and almost converted. He’d dedicated much of his academic career to studying the Rastafarian movement, and he’d chosen terrorism as the theme for the class.

His favorite prefix was “I gotta tell you…” and he did have to tell us. He laid forth the most colorful expositions of each “major” religion and the complex and often violent interactions between them.

From that point on, each time I took a religious studies class, I wrote down something my professor said on the first day.

Professor Rosalind Hackett, a renowned Africanist of English birth and a former head of the department, told us who she was on the first day of Anthropology of Religion.

“I love complexity,” she said. “I lead a complex life.”

Just a few months before, she had received the honorary chieftaincy title of Yeye Mother, or “mother who knows our ways,” from the Elerinmo, or king, of Erinmoland in Nigeria. She occasionally missed class to hop on a plane to somewhere halfway across the globe. Maybe that’s why she was my first professor to understand the imminence of the pandemic.

“If you cannot improvise, you should not be in the field,” she said to us the first month of the class. It was only a few weeks later that she was teaching us on a Zoom screen.

“Let’s stop moving and cooking and settle down,” she said during our first class in quarantine.

She taught me bit by bit how the framework of cultural relativity used by ethnographers is a wellspring of empathy. How does one enter into another person’s space and set judgment aside? That changed how I treat people.

And then I met two professors who used their classes to get students through a pandemic.

On the first day of Mindfulness, Professor Megan Bryson gave a rapid fire introduction of Buddhism to a classroom of masked students and to a grid of Zoom windows simultaneously with dexterity and good humor.

There was a distinctly masterful way that she made distanced students part of the classroom and opened the space for us to both learn complex history and share our own experiences with mindfulness.

“I treat this like magic,” she said, moving between screens in an unprecedented time, and the calm I felt walking into her classroom each day during one of the worst times of my life was almost magical.

And then I met Professor Manuela Ceballos on Zoom for the first meeting of Islam in the Modern World. The course material would have been difficult to navigate on a large public campus had it been in person, but we were balkanized by videotelephony.

She told us we would all feel like outsiders at some point as a multi-faith classroom.

“We get offended. We get upset. And then we get over it,” she said. “These are spaces of complete surprise.”

That’s how I would define a religious studies classroom: a space of complete surprise. I declared myself a religious studies major shortly after, and I’ve been more surprised by the challenge and the joy of it than I ever thought I would be.

Religious studies is for people who love complexity. It is for people whose desire for knowledge is matched by an appetite for mystery. You come to these classes to open up your world, to learn how to be in the world with others, and they certainly do that. But you stay because of the people – the wonderful, wonder-filled people.

Letter from Managing Editor: Religion’s not my career, it’s a lens!

ABBY ANN RAMSEY Managing Editor

When I tell people I’m double majoring in journalism and religious studies, I’m almost aWlways asked how I plan to get a job that uses both of those degrees.

For a lot of people, the two fields exist in entirely separate spheres — journalism in a sphere of secularism, politics and questioning and religious studies in a sphere of spirituality, firm beliefs and isolation from the rest of the world. But in reality, neither of these boxes that people put the fields in even begin to encapsulate them.

In fact, the two overlap much more than people would expect and studying religion can provide increased understanding of subjects that journalists report on. Understanding religion and how it affects culture, identity, society, politics and history is vital to understanding the communities and issues that are the subject of news stories.

There’s a scene in the 2021 film “Shiva, Baby” that makes me laugh just thinking about it because of the way it so poignantly describes Gen Z twenty-somethings but also because of the way I relate to the protagonist’s struggle. She graduated college with a gender studies degree and everyone keeps asking her how she plans to have a career as a feminist.

“[Feminism] is not my career!” she yells at one point. “It’s a lens!”

As easy as it feels to laugh at, it also feels very true for me when I try to tell people that religious studies is a lens I can apply to whatever job I work in in the media industry. It’s something that’s hard to describe though when people ask if I’ll choose the pastor route or the journalist route.

More and more in recent years, people have begun to recognize the effects that religion can have on culture and politics, particularly in the south. Telling the stories of cult survivors requires more than an interest in the increasingly popular and glamorized true crime genre — it requires being educated enough on new religious movements and the power that leaders can have to write with empathy for the victims and to take them seriously. Reporting on legislators that call for a spiritual awakening to solve gun violence requires an understanding of the history of religion and the effects it can have.

We don’t even have to publish an issue dedicated to religion to see the impact of religion influencing stories on campus and in our community. Even though it’s not blatantly mentioned in the stories you read, understanding religion means understanding that our sources’ identities are sometimes shaped by belief systems we might not be familiar with or are shaped by the belief systems of those around them.

It means taking our sources’ and peers’ ideas seriously, whether those ideas are about politics, Tennessee football or spirituality.

While religion is embedded in journalism and in the stories we tell, this religion issue aims to dynamically explore religion’s impacts on campus and in the community. Even though it might seem like religion is in its own box, isolated from the rest of the world and occasionally uncomfortable to talk about, it’s all around us.

I’m grateful that UT’s journalism and religious studies departments have helped me to see that and that my professors in religious studies have challenged the way I think, read and write to ultimately help me grow into a better journalist.