Critical Pedagogies in the Interfaith/Interreligious Studies Classroom

This session is a discussion of and responses to Katherine Janiec Jones and Cassie Meyer’s extensively researched article “Interfaith and Interreligious Pedagogies: An Assessment,” published in the Journal of Interreligious Studies in 2022. The researchers seek to understand what common pedagogical themes and practices appear across interreligious courses in different institutional contexts. Critical interfaith/interreligious studies scholars and educators on the panel explore ways to awaken in students a desire for the impossible—a decolonial future, one that is anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-oppressive, anti-supremacist, and non-hierarchical—while instilling in them the intelligence, proficiency, and commitment to live justly and equitably across religious differences in their local communities and professional organizations, which are often marked by colonial, racialized hierarchies.