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Because religions discipline and interpret bodies; create and define sacred spaces; generate, adore and study images in all media; regulate the intake of food; structure temporal experience; and in general interpenetrate and are permeated by the cultural landscapes in which they exist, religious studies must engage material religion and religious materiality. We encounter bodily realities of other religions and cultures through our own disciplined bodies, which are both necessary and problematic for those encounters. This article connects theoretical and practical resources needed to help students discover the stuff of religion – flesh and blood, bread and wine, songs and sound, knives and body parts, movement and music, human bodies, time, space, cosmograms composed of and composing the bodies of the religious – uncovering the materiality of religion, existing underneath, alongside, without, and amidst religious textuality and verbal ideation.

The challenge of learning to teach online leads a junior faculty person to achieve greater levels of teaching satisfaction and proficiency overall. For this professor transitioning an on-campus pastoral liturgy course to an online environment brings about serendipitous discoveries that allow him to do more than survive as a frustrated teacher. The transition creates a revolution in one professor's whole approach to teaching.

Face-to-face, hybrid, and online courses are part of the panoply of course options available to students and teachers in the twenty-first century. This essay tackles the promise of hybrid courses for enhancing student learning in seminary contexts. The author contends that the introduction of hybrid instruction prompts faculty to revisit questions about pedagogy and improves student learning.

Finding themselves teaching to increasingly diverse student populations, two mid-career faculty from different disciplines embarked on a common voyage to make their foundational courses more sensitive to student learning styles. Adrift in the seas of multiple intelligences and multiculturalism, the researchers quickly abandoned any hope of developing distinctive teaching portfolios for individual learning profiles. Instead, they structured the syllabus to be the passport into a common culture of teaching and learning in the classroom. Syllabus design and on-going "spot" assessments proved trusty guides in re-centering learning on the students' needs. In the process of outlining these two strategies for creating a common culture of teaching and learning, the article offers testimony that old dogs can learn new tricks! Additional materials, including syllabi used in these courses and in class assessment tools, can be found on the Web page of the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion: http://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/journal/greenstortz.html

In a postcolonial environment, our students will encounter multiple representations and diverse followers of various religions outside the classroom. Students need to think critically about the representations of all religions and recognize the humanity of all people. Too often, students leave courses discussing one or more world religions with an idealized view of other religions that draws strict boundaries around the components of each religion. Bringing postcolonial thought into introductory and survey courses highlights the diversity within each lived religion and encourages students to critique those strict borders and all representation of religions. Based on continuing experiments with critical theory in undergraduate classes, the six strategies presented here use the diversity of lived religions to promote critical analysis of representations of religions. These strategies move beyond the rejection of common representations by introducing set theory as an alternative framework that students can use to theorize about the complexity within religions.

Secularization, the idea that religion would gradually diminish over time, was once widely assumed to be true by scholars of religion, but the unexpected resurgence of religious traditions has called it into question. Related debates on the distinction between religion and the secular have destabilized religious studies further. What does the crisis of secularization and secularism mean for the religious studies classroom? This essay proposes a model of religious criticism in the wake of secularism. No longer simply claiming a "view from nowhere," students and instructors can (by observing standards of evidence, reason, and self-disclosure) combine criticism with learning. Drawn from aesthetic and ethical traditions of criticism, religious criticism can be practiced by "teaching the conflicts" and through the pedagogical models of Freire and hooks.