Why the World Needs Religious Studies

[rug]

November 20, 2011
By Nathan Schneider

The first time I went to the American Academy of Religion conference it really got my hopes up. This was the fall of 2006 and, with only a summer in between, I’d just finished college and begun my first year of a PhD program in religious studies. The AAR was at the enormous new Washington, DC convention center. Fittingly, one of the plenary speakers was Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state who had just written a book about why religion is so important.

What I remember her saying, which stuck with me and probably a lot of the other graduate students in the hall, were things like this: “Our diplomats need to be trained to know the religions of the countries where they’re going.” And: “I think the Secretary of State needs to have religion advisors.” I hadn’t really thought of it that way before, but it made great sense, especially with someone like Albright saying it. Religion is everywhere. It does matter. The ongoing sectarian violence in occupied Iraq had turned the headlines into daily reminders about the consequences of not taking religion seriously—to say nothing of politics in DC back then. Yes—sounds like a job for a religion scholar.

Suddenly, committing the next however-many years to getting my degree in this stuff switched from the leap-of-faith category to eminently reasonable. Sure, maybe I’d end up a scholar. But I could also be a diplomat. Or the director of an NGO. Or a bartender. Or an astronaut.

Fast-forward a few years—the AAR, 2010. Grad school hasn’t really panned out. (It wasn’t you, PhD, it was me.) By this point I’ve become a journalist, but I still go to the conference to connect with friends and keep up with the field. Things have changed, though. The economy crashed, and the bottom fell out of the academic job market. Quite independently, a handful of scholars—established ones, tenured ones, reputed ones, etc.—tell me the same story in the hallways. They confess to feeling remorse about training graduate students. There are so many bright young people, but so few jobs. (The AAR reports 193 positions filled in 2005-2006, compared to 49 in 2008-2009.) They sound kind of despondent

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/4636/why_the_world_needs_religious_studies_

[Jim__]

1. Interesting article. The main question it raised for me was how does the drop in demand for ...

religious studies compare to the general drop in demand for degrees across the humanities. I think that drop is largely due to the view that higher education is really just job training. Some of what he says indicates that he agrees with that - that higher education is a form of job training.

[rug]

2. Yeah, driven by these obscene rises in tuition.

[trotsky]

3. Yes, the more knowledge about religion the better.

So we are less likely to repeat the many, many mistakes made by humans following it.

[rug]

4. And vice versa.

[NMMNG]

5. It helps create atheists

Worked for me. :shrug: