“The Teacher’s Dilemma: Redescription in the Teaching of Religious Studies”

In "Private Irony and Liberal Hope," Richard Rorty points out that redescribing people often humiliates them. Yet unless religious studies courses suppress the importance of the questions they raise, it seems that they directly or indirectly redescribe the students who take them. Hence the dilemma: do we eschew redescription at the price of a weak treatment of our subject, or do we practice redescription at the risk of humiliating our students? This paper reviews five strategies that do not solve the dilemma, then offers a sixth that does – by developing the distinction between proposing descriptions and imposing them.