Search Results (20)

Gamification is a specific type of experiential learning theory (ELT) that emphasizes student choice and activities to transform mundane tasks into a desirable opportunity to learn. This pedagogical approach is particularly useful in information-heavy courses, such as courses that engage in the study of religious mysticism or “hagiology”. In hagiology classes, students are exposed to new hagiographic media and discuss methods that are particularly complicated because this content is not only heavy on data but also engages the affective dimensions of human experience. This article explores leessons learned from the successes and failures of gamification pedagogy in my “Masters and Mystics” course, where students comparatively study Christian mysticism and Muslim Sufism. In particular, this article analyzes gamifacation’s ability to promote intrinsic student motivation through “game mechanics and experience design”, which is particularly salient in the hagiological classroom. I end the article with a discussion of how I have reworked the course with new gamification practices into a “Comparative Mysticism: Christianity and Islam” course. Full article

This article offers a pedagogical approach to introducing undergraduate students to hagiology by comparing medieval sanctity to modern celebrity. The bodies of saints and celebrities are important loci for the transmission of sanctity or celebrity from a person to the public and for the continuity of identity. Examples include St. Faith, St. Cuthbert, Kim Kardashian, and Marilyn Monroe. Using a comparative method allows students who are non-religious to better apprehend the unfamiliar practices and beliefs around the cult of saints and relics. Full article

This paper explores the potentially fruitful interplay between a set of practical and theoretical approaches developed to teach post-secondary students about accounts of dreams and of exemplars, in cases where these phenomena have been deemed significant by specific religious discourse communities. Incorporating insights from his participation in the Comparative Hagiology group, the author suggests—in particular—that the expanded perspective on hagiography proposed by Rondolino, Hollander, and others can serve as a fruitful vantage from which to survey both of these phenomena in the classroom, revealing some intriguing correspondences between them. The author concludes by proposing some ways that the comparative hagiological classroom could be a particularly productive learning environment, and one that directly addresses some of the challenges of contemporary post-secondary education (from both the instructors’ and students’ perspectives). Full article

This paper argues that a comparative study of saints is not only a useful classroom tool for historians and religionists, but an exceptionally powerful locus of pedagogical insight and cultural understanding. By reframing contemporary consumptive patterns, media representations, and power discourses as religious vectors of saintliness, the professor has an opportunity to explore and assess cultural values, rituals, beliefs, worldviews, communities, traditions, and meaning making in the contemporary college student’s world. By acknowledging the dangers and possibilities of the category of saint while reframing the ascetical impact on developing subjectivities, we propose six pedagogical examples of how this might best be deployed. Full article

This essay discusses the virtues of hagiology-driven teaching and the pedagogical value of the saint in the religious studies classroom, focusing on how a series of class assignments and activities centered on the Indian devotional saint Kabir function in an undergraduate introductory-level religious studies course to effectively engage student learning, and develop students’ understanding of the politics of religion and the crucial interplay of affect, memory, and storytelling in religious life. Full article

In the early twenty-first century, the humanities are facing attacks on their value. At the same time, colleges and universities in the United States are pressured to retain students as funding models have shifted and become more dependent on tuition dollars, at least in public institutions of higher education. The two go hand in hand because, in this environment, faculty members need to justify what they teach as being relevant to their students, and research has shown that students are more likely to thrive and strive when they see themselves in the curriculum. This is particularly true at Hispanic-Serving and Minority-Serving Institutions. This essay is based on the following question: how do we help students recognize that hagiological texts are relevant to them in a modern world in order to meet both aims? It provides the Life of Anskar as a case study to show that when hagiology is read and analyzed in the classroom in accordance with principles of culturally relevant pedagogy, through comparison and the co-creation of knowledge, the texts provide a way for students to better understand themselves, their world, and the possibility for social justice; in other words, they, the students, matter. Full article

This paper firstly describes how my teaching context and student body shapes the methodological and motivational resources that I use in the first three weeks of a section in comparative hagiographical studies. This practical example demonstrates the importance of being conversant with both our local learning context and the international scholarly comparative community. The second part of this essay outlines my methodological thinking as I propose a historical-scientific example of hagiographical comparison to my students, by employing taxonomies from psychological science for the sake of making helpful comparative observations between thirteenth-century hagiographies. The third part of the essay describes how I ensure that employing a particular psychological paradigm—such as “religious and spiritual struggles”—is appropriate to a given historical context. Full article

This essay discusses the pedagogical value of hagiology by examining how medieval Persian hagiographies can be used to explore the concept of “interpellation”: the process by which individuals are constituted as subjects in particular ideological systems. This essay uses an analysis of Rumi’s anecdote, “Moses and the Shepherd”, to demonstrate how hagiological approaches are valuable not just in understanding how a saint is constructed in a particular historical and cultural context but also how an audience is constructed and interpellated. The essay then introduces a pedagogical exercise that connects an analysis of Islamic hagiographies with an exploration of how students are interpellated with modern subjectivities in our contemporary ideological systems. Full article

Fully realized ethical and metaphysical concepts have intension and extension only within an historically situated epistemic tradition. Only people who live the epistemic tradition fully understand the concept and can accurately identify items that satisfy the concept. Such concepts are only fully understood by those whose lives are shaped from within the epistemic tradition. This makes comparison of ethical and metaphysical concepts across epistemic traditions difficult if not impossible. Comparative hagiology employs theological concepts that may function differently from ethical and metaphysical concepts. The articles in this volume seem to suggest that some theological concepts may function as formal concepts. A formal concept is defined by rules or form, rather than by its intensional or extensional content. Thus, formal concepts may be translatable across epistemic traditions. Because the rules do not fully determine intension or extension, a formal concept can apply to otherwise diverse individuals. Theological concepts may be formal concepts that could provide the basis for comparison of the untranslatable concepts that give meaning and value to the lived experience of people in epistemic traditions. The articles in this volume suggest several candidates for such formal concepts. Full article

The careers of many scholars in various disciplines have been focused on the study of hagiography, including that of the author. Yet, as those scholars have uncovered new knowledge and employed new interpretations of the materials at hand, the very notions of “hagiography” and “hagiology” have become deeply problematized. The issues become more complex as multiple religious traditions are examined. The scholarly work that forms the basis of the essays in this volume has explored the effects of taking a comparative and collaborative approach to “hagiography”. This piece responds to the core essays by showing first how personal the study of such sources and act of comparison can be, and then exploring how knowledge changes through the processes of comparison and collaboration. In the end, this response argues that comparison is by its very nature a provisional activity in that the knowledge it creates constantly changes as comparative methods and theories are re-applied again and again over time. This process is only aided by collaborative efforts which make the act of comparison even more effective and productive. Full article

A workshop on “comparative hagiology” over the course of three years at the American Academy of Religion has yielded not only a series of articles but an experimental methodology by which scholars hailing from different disciplines and working in different fields might collaborate in threshing out commonalities and entanglements in their respective treatments of holy figures. This article’s response to the workshop identifies three pillars of general consensus among the participants that serve as promising footholds for aligned innovation in our respective fields: That hagiography (1) is constituted not only in verbal texts but in a wide array of media, both material and ephemeral; (2) is best interpreted by attending substantially to the “processes” of thought, life, and society in which it is rendered; and (3) opens possibilities of cross-cultural and interdisciplinary comparison by way of the many family resemblances in how saints (or more broadly, religious and even para-religious exemplars) are rendered in transmittable media and mobilized for a particular group’s benefit. The article concludes by suggesting vectors for further development on these grounds, indicating how the category of “hagiography” affords a resource for interpreting unauthorized and apparently irreligious phenomena akin to sanctification, and calling for a professional and pedagogical ethic of collaboration that extends beyond any particular scholarly fruits of hagiological comparison. Full article

In this response essay, I consider Jon Keune’s proposal to prioritize the act of comparison over definitional agreement when beginning an exercise in comparative hagiology. Reflecting on my own experience as the respondent for a panel at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), which saw me comparing two very different “hagiographical texts,” I argue in support of Keune’s approach by stressing its advantage in pushing conceptual creativity and collaborative inclusivity. In the process, I accept Massimo Rondolino’s invitation to consider his working re-definition of “hagiography”, which I take as a starting point for thinking through some of the questions my panel’s unconventional primary texts raise and how they might recommend revisiting our categories. In the end, I advocate for a capacious view of potential comparanda as one of the best ways to foster a process of continuous self-reflection and scholarly development. Full article

This paper argues that a virtue-informed methodology is foundational to best practice in scholarly, collaborative, and comparative hagiological work. Following a discussion of how this resonates with Todd French’s work in this volume, I then draw from my experience as an educator to outline how a virtue-based approach might play out in pedagogy. Finally, I offer two metaphors for an “other-person centered” collaborative–comparativist mindset. Both of these are taken from my lived, and conversational “apprenticeship” in comparative hagiology on the Argentine–Brazilian border. Reflection on these metaphors, as well as their generative experiences, demonstrates the need for holistic self-reflection in the comparative study of religions, and of “hagiography” in particular. Full article

Although the academic study of hagiography continues to flourish, the role of comparative methods within the study of sanctity and the saints remains underutilized. Similarly, while much valuable work on saints and sanctity relies on materialist methodologies, issues of critical bibliography particular to the study of hagiography have not received the theoretical attention they deserve. This essay takes up these two underattended approaches to argue for a comparative materialist approach to hagiography. Through a short case study of the Latin Vita of Lutgard of Aywières (1182–1246) written by the Dominican friar Thomas of Cantimpré (c. 1200–1270), I suggest that comparative material research into the textual history of hagiographic literature can provide us with a more comprehensive and nuanced picture of the production of any specific holy figure, as well as the evolving discourses of sanctity and holiness in general. While this suggestion emerges from my own work on medieval hagiography from the Christian Latin West, it resonates with recent arguments by Sara Ritchey and David DiValerio to call for a materially comparative approach to narratives of holy lives in any religious tradition in any time period. Furthermore, I suggest that medieval studies, and in particular medieval manuscript studies, may have much to offer to scholars of sanctity working in later periods and other settings. Offering a view of material textual scholarship as intrinsically comparative, we may expand our theoretical definitions of the comparative and its possibilities within the study of sanctity. Full article