Religious Pedagogy

One of my favorite passages in "Pedagogies of the Sacred" is "It is not that (post)modernity's avowed secularism has no room for the sacred… it is rather that it profits from a hierarchy that conflates Christianity with good tradition while consigning 'others' to the realm of bad tradition" (p. 296). The sacred is troubled in its juxtaposition with modern "secular" societies, which have largely exiled religious pedagogy from mainstream society. In many ways modernity rejects religious pedagogy as laughable, as more conspiratorial mumbo-jumbo than actual pedagogy. But, the author makes the point that "some of [the self's] most formative categories - migration, gender and sexuality, experience, home, history, and memory - can be made intelligible

It's not exactly new, per se, to include the creation of the self as part of religious pedagogy, because surely anyone who goes to temple, church, mosque etc. will tell about how much their religious teachings have shaped their person/selfhood. In the religions of Santeria and Vodou that the author engages with, however, creation of the self seems more complex, in the sense that there are so many intersecting identities as well as identities that are oppressed and delegitimized. Followers of these religions thus operate within a pedagogy that is more encompassing (i.e., more involved in daily life and identity-production) than a secularized religious pedagogy to which most in the U.S. are accustomed. That is, someone who adheres to these religions and their pedagogies will find more prolific avenues to answers about identity, and likely more "identities" in general, than someone who does not. The pedagogies of these religions are also linked to a variety of experiences and historical lineages that are more fraught than secularized