Some of Blacksburg's most notable religious scholars aren't leading the faithful in prayer on Friday afternoons, reading from the Torah on Saturdays or standing at pulpits on Sundays. Their sacred space is the second floor of Major Williams, their crumbling cathedral, Newman Library. The six religious studies faculty members at Virginia Tech provide a particular service to the university community in maintaining the careful classroom balance necessary for contending with some of the day's most heady questions.
Religious studies courses take an almost invariable tack in their first few lectures.
"I talk about my first lectures as 'truth-in-advertising lectures,'" said Elizabeth Malbon, a professor who teaches courses on the New Testament. "I say, 'This is what I have to offer; if this isn't what you're looking for, goodbye, good luck. Life is short - go get what you want.'"
What religious studies professors have to offer, they say, is the academic study of religion.
"We're observing religion. We're thinking of religion and respectful of religious practice, but that we're also respectfully critical," said Brian Britt, a professor specializing in the Hebrew Bible.
It's a distinction that's tough for many students from confessional faith backgrounds to grasp.
"This isn't Sunday school. This isn't CCD. Students think they know what they mean when I say, 'Here's the distinction,' so there's a lot of head nodding on day one," said Grace Kao, an assistant professor who studies religious ethics. "Then maybe on day 12, we're talking about what scholars will say about flood counts in the Hebrew Bible, and it's clear by the way some of the students respond that they're not really ready to do the academic study."
The struggle to explore a faith tradition at hand while students remain rooted in their own tradition is not aided by the fact that many students only take a single religious studies course over their time at Tech.
"You find yourself re-inventing the wheel, class after class, as opposed to being able to grab a bunch of students at the intro level and move them through your program," Kao said, an issue that can make it difficult to allow students more room, paradoxically, to challenge the nature of religious studies inquiry.
"There are rigorous debates between theology and religious and whether it is really the case that religious studies is this neutral, academic thing. But you can't destabilize something before you have the basic categories. You have to start with the distinction," Kao said.
Even so, the battle needs to be fought.
"Most of the students that are taking our classes, this is the first and only class in religious studies ... It's unrealistic to expect students will have calculated that ... but it clears the floor, it opens the space, it makes it possible for us to be there," Malbon said.
The Challenge of Nuance
While Kao noted that she found it puzzling that many students spent "significant energy" trying to figure out her personal faith beliefs, the professors' ability to keep their own backgrounds out of the discussion was noted time and again in interviews with religious studies students.
"(Malbon) never mentioned what her beliefs are. And I really like that way of learning and just perfect for the scholarly setting. That means that both Christians and non-Christians can relate and understand," said Melanie French, a sophomore majoring in communication with a minor in religious studies, of Malbon's New Testament course.
The drive to determine a professor's beliefs belies another streak that religious studies faculty have noticed: the need to posit essential answers to religious questions. In one method of essentializing their religious studies education, students separate: their academic study is one thing, their personal faith understanding something else.
"Because a lot of the information that we cover is from what scholars and historians believe, I try to see the class as a history class. There are certain things that I will learn for the class but I will dismiss because I don't think they are true or I haven't researched enough," said sophomore interdisciplinary studies major Carrie Lillard. "The Gospel of Thomas is not something I know much about and neither does one of the leaders of my church back home, so I set that aside."
Another form is the attempt to concretize religious traditions into definitive categories.
"I've had some students tell me ... what is difficult is the lack of definitive, unambiguous answers to questions," Britt said. "I interpret that as partly as a typical Virginia Tech expectation perhaps because many of the dominant disciplines seek and get decisive and definitive answers to their questions. At other colleges and universities, students will shop - they are spiritually seeking alternative options for their religious lives. That's something I encounter here but not much as at other places."
This perceived need to find an answer to religious questions can be even more trying in subjects of political controversy.
"The challenge lies in getting students to give up thinking in terms of Islam is 'x' or the position of women in Islam is 'x' as if Islam is some kind of simplistic, unchangeable, monolithic entity. The challenge lies in encouraging students to take a nuanced view of Islam and to understand how Islamic beliefs and practices - with all their richness and multiplicity - are so rooted in a particular historical context," Rachel Scott, an assistant professor who studies Islam, wrote in an e-mail.
Using clever teaching methods can go some distance in exposing students to this problem. In her course on Women, Ethics and Religion, Kao begins the course by exploring Buddhist texts and only later delves into the Abrahamic faiths.
"When you're talking about feminist interpretations of Buddhist texts ... The students, because it's Buddhism and the vast majority of them don't have a personal stake in what the Buddha did or did not say, they're totally signed on," Kao said. "And I say, 'A lot of you seem to be having no problem with this article I've just assigned to you that makes that claim. Let me just preview for you. When we get to Judaism and Christianity and I start to say 'scholars are not entirely sure if the Apostle Paul actually did write all the letters, my guess is that a lot of you are going to have a lot of resistance to that.'"
Attempting to unravel deep complexity is at the very heart of the religious studies experience.
"One of the things that our courses deal with directly is not necessarily the truth or falsity of any religious claim but the complexity of religious traditions and the numerous competing perspectives within traditions. That's something that gets right at the heart of one of the central development challenges for adolescents for intellectual or cognitive development," Britt said.
"One response is radical skepticism, to reject complexity; another is to struggle with complexity. The way I teach these traditions and the way most of us teach these courses is that a lot of people who choose to struggle with complexity in these courses, come out at them and of the struggle reaffirming commitments they had before. They may say they do it with more depth or more complexity, and maybe they see it in a new way. (Affirming processes) aren't the focus of our teaching but sometimes they are the most important outcomes. If students remember something about our courses in a year or two it's probably not the list of terms they memorized, it's whether or how they struggled with the complexity."
Delving into this complexity, freshman economics major Mike LaHaye said the experience gives him the religious tools necessary to engage public questions concerning religion.
"It helps you see which aspects of the Bible should be focused on and what shouldn't especially when the church today, politically, seems to have two or three big issues that are hardly discussed in the Bible," LaHaye said. "They tend to ignore the more striking things that Jesus talked about like care for the poor, the sick and love one another, a lot more than don't be gay and don't allow abortions."
Talking Heidigger after bedtime
The powerful engagement with complexity doesn't end in the classroom for the tight-knit group of religious studies faculty.
"I've had the opportunity to get be on the search committee for all of my colleagues, and we really think our best resource is our faculty. I don't think all students realize how active in research they are," Malbon said.
The small size of the program allows the faculty to both work more closely with their students as well as with their faculty colleagues.
"I get a lot of my ideas, and we develop a lot of our ideas through undergraduate teaching. It's very easy to ask research questions in undergraduate classes," Britt said. "You could call it learning communities, you could call it the merger of teaching and research that happens in a small program like this. The fruits of our research tend to be primarily single-authored papers and books ... but if you read our footnotes, we often cite each other and thank each other and our students for ideas that we get."
It's a powerfully inviting environment for new faculty like assistant professor of Judaic studies Ben Sax, who arrived on campus in the fall of 2008.
"Just on this side of the hall I have three-world recognized scholars in their craft who are generous with their time and generous with their help. So while you're dealing with the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the university, there's a home with the people that you may not find in other places where egos tend to lead the goals and aspirations of the department," Sax said.
The close academic proximity helps to assuage some of the structural challenges of the university system. While a lack of support for faculty travel and the resources to hire new faculty members are irksome, the paucity of material at Newman Library is the subject of special vitriol.
"The library is our laboratory, it is the basis, the center for our research tools and at the moment it doesn't really serve the needs of our undergraduate teaching much less our research," Britt said.
Perhaps most wounding (and puzzling) to the group is the need to justify their craft in the eyes of the broader university.
"I've spent countless hours explaining to colleagues and administrators what it is we do. It seems counter-intuitive when we equally have Ph.D.s from fairly reputable places," Sax, whose doctorate is from the University of Chicago, said.
Kao, a Harvard Ph.D., added that one needs only to pick up a newspaper to see the import of the religious studies craft.
"On the American stage, you can not understand our basic institutions or even everyday politics unless you know more about religion than what you know confessionally. If anything, I only mean to say I find the question that we would have to justify what we do to be, "Really? Really you have to justify the study of religion?" Kao said.
At a time when budget cuts will cause the dissolution of the department of interdisciplinary studies, the academic home of religious studies, the religious studies faculty do have one significant booster. College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences Dean Sue Ott Rowlands has publicly stated her support for the program.
"She's encouraged us to think big about our future," Britt said.
It's an assurance that comes close to the camaraderie that makes working as a religious studies faculty member at Virginia Tech a unique experience. After putting his daughter to bed one weekday evening, Ben Sax was considering watching college basketball or heading to bed with a book when the phone rang. It was professor Ananda Abeysekara. And he was hopping mad.
Abeysekara had just encountered a particular reading of the German scholar Martin Heidigger he considered violently racist.
"It was entirely because he was so angry about something he was reading that he needed to vent. So by venting to me I got access to this interpretation and wisdom that I wouldn't have otherwise that isn't circumscribed to this place and time - I'll call someone at home. The life of the mind doesn't end at home. I love that," Sax said. "It makes this place immeasurably wonderful."