 Hello. Welcome to another one of my Dr. Sadler Chalk and Talk installments. This time I am responding to a set of questions that were sent to me through a different channel that I've usually gotten them. Most of them so far have been through VU. However, this one actually came in response to one of my Chalk and Talk videos, number three, where I talked about teaching religion in public schools, and how that can be allowable, and what clarifications have to be made. So somebody asked me, do you have any advice for when students may perhaps have approached you as to which religion is true, and so do they persist more than once? And then they followed this up by asking, as teachers, are we permitted to refer them to textual sources that may or may not be academic? Well, these are some really good and important questions, and I wanted to address this in this follow up, and I think I can actually get both of these in, we're already one minute in, and we'll see if I can get it in in under 15 minutes. So basically what we're looking for here is advice for when students ask the inevitable question, which religion is true? And if you think about it, even if we've adopted the religious studies model, why are we teaching about religion? Why are we investigating these things? Why are we introducing the students to these? Well, because religions are bodies of belief, practices, communities, historical narratives, that people throughout time have considered not only to be true, but to be transcendently true, to be teaching them about what it is you might say absolutely true, not merely relatively true, but true in the deepest sense. So it's inevitable that this question will come up, and I think the key thing to do is to turn it into a set of teachable moments. And I've got a little bit of advice for how to do that. The first thing I would suggest is asking this set of questions. True? Well, in what sense do we mean this? Do we mean that by saying that one religion is true, that it is most correct about God, or the nature of the divine, or the gods, or, you know, an economy of the divine, or who knows, there's a lot of different possibilities there. Every religion has not only origin stories, but also a number of teachings about the nature of human beings. What are they made of? What do they return to? How do they tie in with the divine? Are they made, for example, in God's image, as you find in Judaism and Christianity? What does that actually mean? You know, to be made in God's image, somebody like Thomas Aquinas would say it's primarily through our function of reason. A philosopher like Rene Descartes said through having an unlimited will. Clement of Alexandria actually connected it to music, and a beautiful piece said that we, in that we sing, in that we produce music, are most likely divine. So those are things that religions talk about, and they could be more true or less true, right? The world, not just the world that we see, but the entire world, the cosmos, where did it come from? Where is it going to? Is it cyclical? Are there more worlds than one? Those are things that religion takes hands on. Life and death, this is really key. You know, if you think about it, where does the rubber really meet the road for some of the disagreements? Think about the difference between three basic stances. One stance could be, well, you live, you die, that's it, right? The big sleep, the dirt nap, as they call it. That's one position. Other people say, well, there's a good place, and there's a bad place, you know, the good place is above. And if you're more or less good, you wind up in the good place, or God takes mercy on you, or something like that. And if you're bad, you end up in the bad place. And the bad thing is, once you're in the bad place, you're not getting out. But the consolation is, if you're making it to the good place, you're staying there too. Or could it be that it's cyclical, as in religions that believe in reincarnation? Could it be that there's a whole system of merit and demerit so that what you do in a previous life affects where you go the next life through a variety of mechanisms? Well, those are different positions, and those positions, at least as far as the ultimate truth of them, are not actually compatible. So, it's natural that people would ask about this, and want to know, especially young students. They want to know, you're teaching us all about these different religions, which one is actually true. Get them to ask about these things, and then get them to think about other things. I have another set of things tied in with teachable moments. First, I'd like to tell you about what I did when I taught religious studies at Indiana State Prison. I'm actually a Roman Catholic, so I'm a Christian, and I belong to the Roman Catholic Church. I'll actually worship a marionette Catholic Church, an Eastern Right Church, currently, because I love the liturgy. I had to conceal my Catholic identity from my students when I was teaching in the prison, and there were several good reasons why that was the case. I needed to, for one thing, I needed to maintain a certain sort of reserve, in part because there was already a lot of anti-Catholic prejudice among some of the religious groups. For me to be revealed as Catholic would have led to some of them saying, you can't possibly teach in an unbiased way, you're going to be favoring your group. That could be a legitimate concern, because there may be some cases where people are unable to keep themselves from doing so. What I would point out to them is that if I'm doing my job right as an instructor of religious studies, then it should not matter what religious group I belong to, what traditions I uphold, what my practices are, other than which days I have to take off or things like that. But if I am actually doing my job well, I'm not saying that this is perfect or that anybody can embody this and never falter in this respect. If I'm doing my job well, then it shouldn't matter whether I am a Roman Catholic Christian, an Eastern Orthodox Christian, a Lutheran Christian, a Pentecostal Christian. It shouldn't matter whether I'm a Sunni Muslim, a Shiite Muslim, it shouldn't matter whether I'm a Buddhist or this school, this school, this school. I should be teaching about people's religions and treating them all in a fairly sympathetic way that also has a certain reserve where I don't commit myself. There was one other concern too, I didn't want people to know that I was Catholic because of the Catholic students might try to get over on me, right? They would assume that their fellow co-religionist would do them favors and I didn't want that either. It was really ironic too because I had so many students, there was a large Catholic presence at Indiana State Prison and I had so many students from the Catholic Church in my classes explaining to me what a Church doctrine was, not knowing that I was actually Catholic and that I was teaching Catechesis class on Sunday mornings. That's just what took place for me. I'm not saying that that has to be the paradigm. I think it's useful to teach students about the various attitudes that religious groups do take towards truth, not only the truth of their perspective but the truth of other perspectives. And these are terms that we typically use in religious studies to talk about these. One of them is actually quite new parallels. An exclusivist says that they have the absolute truth and everybody else is basically wrong except insofar as they coincide with them. And some would go so far as to say, well, even if you have any admixture of area, some examples of exclusivists would be Christian fundamentalists. Fundamentalists in the strict sense of the term where it does not include evangelicals but hardcore fundamentalists. That would be an example of exclusivists. Inclusivists believe that their faith is the right faith, is the truest faith, but that other traditions, other faiths, other groups, they are not completely wrong and as a matter of fact they may be on the right track sometimes without even recognizing it or believing it. The Roman Catholic Church is doctrine on this and the other older Christian churches as well, so these are Orthodox, Coptic, Syriac, all these other churches. That seems to be their position. So many Muslims insofar as their view is that Jews and Christians are not totally wrong. As a matter of fact, we're the people of the book and we've gotten some things right. We just got mixed up about who that Jesus guy was or the nature of the Torah and with humanity or who was the first Muslim or things like that. And we're also mistaken about Muhammad. That would be inclusivists. They're not saying you guys are completely wrong. They're saying you are waff on some things in certain respects. A pluralist would be somebody who is saying something along the lines of, well, they're all equally right. They just have different ways of getting to the same basic place. John Hick would be a great example of a class of pluralists. He made a lot of arguments for that. To some degree, you could see Hinduism as practiced by many Hindus as pluralists. As a matter of fact, if you ask Hindus, what do you think about that Jesus guy? They will say, yeah, some of them will say he's an avatar, one face of God. Some of them actually say that about Muhammad, which tends to drive Muslims nuts. Relativists are going a little bit further than pluralists. They're saying, well, it's all just up to the individual or the group, and whatever is right for them is right for them. And there's a little incoherence in that position, which I'm not going to try to explore. And then there's an interesting new way of thinking about this. I'm not sure it's radically new, but to give it a name and to single it out is kind of new. When they speak of parallelism or being a parallelist, and the idea behind that is, you're saying that the different religions are not on the same track to exactly the same truth. Rather, you know, the Christian is aiming for the Trinitarian Christian God. The Muslim is aiming for, you know, turn a life with a lot of paradises that are not exactly the same. This is a complicated issue, and I'm going to actually close that off right here. Here's another thing to think about. What truth claims can we or do we have to make without endorsing or teaching all those studies? There's quite a few. When we are saying, for example, a religion has a certain amount of adherence, that's a truth claim. It's either correct or not. And what's now requiring us to be committed to that religion or to say that, if I say, for example, Buddhists believe in the Four Noble Truths, and here is what they say the Four Noble Truths are. I am making a truth claim, but again, I am not committing myself to the ultimate truth of, you know, the Four Noble Truths as being religious doctrine, whether they're correct or not, whether the Buddhists have all of this stuff correct. As to the question of recommending texts, this is kind of along the same line. That's why I've been heading to this point. If you're recommending a text to a student, what are you doing here? Providing them with resources to more fully understand what it is that you're talking about, the religions, doctrines on all of these things. So if a student asks me about what Muslims believe, and I hand him or her a copy of the Quran or I hand a collection of the Hadith, that's not an academic book. I am not there by saying this is truth, this is absolutely correct. I am actually saying this is what they believe, this is important to them. You can study this, and I think that's completely appropriate. So long as you're not endorsing it.