Helsinki!

I spent last week in Helsinki, Finland, at a conference about Religious Literacy and religious pluralism. We did what most interesting conferences do, which is take the subject around which the conference was organized and interrogate it until it is meaningless. And then go for drinks.

It was great. My hosts at Helsinki University, Titus Hjelm and the rest of the team, were excellent organizers and warm hosts. My paper tried to historicize Religious Literacy in America by looking at how different historical periods understood why and how children should read the Bible in school. I divided my analysis into three basic periods:

1. The sectarian era (roughly the 1840s - 1950s)
2. The secular era (roughly the 1950s - 1990s)
3. The scholarly era (roughly the 1990s - 2010s)

Each era could be distinguished by its orientation toward a singular concept that defined its preferred reading practices. In the Sectarian era, Horace Mann worried about how sectarian readings of the Bible might exacerbate social schisms. The secular era, which hinged on the Abington School District v. Schempp case (1963), advocated for reading the Bible in public schools as part of a “secular course of study.” The scholarly era drew on the reading and analytic practices of the academic field known as religious studies, and tried to apply them to the study of religion in secondary classrooms.

But focusing on reading the Bible runs up against the inevitable tide of technology and the fact that people are reading more and more, but are reading long texts with less frequency than they did in the past. So what does religious literacy look like in a post-literate age? I don’t know, but it is worth thinking about, especially for those of us who take religion and text seriously.