— Midweek Meditations:
thoughts, inspiration and encouragement
from ACF community members —
Last week at UWC Robert Bosch College, I began teaching a unit on religion as part of the International Baccalaureate course ‘Theory of Knowledge’. It’s one theme of five that students can choose among. Many did in fact, wanting to explore the interesting relationship between knowledge and religion.
Religion is a very important topic for RBC students, who are from 80 nations around the world, as it is generally for people beyond western Europe. For many students, religion is the subject of very personal and deeply held convictions, and it provides a background to all other knowledge that they have. Moreover, religion often plays a great role in the societies from which students come, influencing, for example, politics there in ways now inconceivable here.
The first lesson in the unit was about its subject matter, religion. I asked the dozen students to individually attempt to define ‘religion’, based on their experience and learning. In the discussion that followed, the consensus among them was that my question was not as easy to answer as it seemed. In particular, the students who believed in a religion had never considered what makes a religion a ‘religion’. My supplementary question, namely how they think that religion is similar to or different from ‘culture’ and ‘ideology’, only increased their perplexity.
In retrospect, the students’ difficulty can be explained by referring to a(nother) parable of the fish, this one made famous by the US writer David Foster Wallace in a commencement speech:
“two young fish [are] swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’”[1]
What Foster Wallace was suggesting thereby is that sometimes the most obvious and important realities can be for us the most difficult to see or talk about. It’s like they’re hiding in plain sight all around us or they’re hard to imagine the world without.
To help the students out, I offered them a definition of ‘religion’ from anthropology to consider. Those students who weren’t believers readily accepted the idea that religions have three aspects, namely a ‘substantive’ (core beliefs, including values), a ‘functional’ (a role in society, including in public affairs), and a ‘formal’ (practices, including rituals).
The believers in the class, however, objected to this definition. They found it deficient, arguing that it does not take into account what religions provide people, such as hope or identity. From their perspective, the scholars diminished religion’s meaning by omitting some of their essential, lived experience.
The hour was then up, and our discussion about the definition of religion unfortunately had to end, unresolved. The believers among the students left the lesson challenged to perceive what the non-believers did and vice versa. The believers couldn’t see, as it were, what was in front of them (‘this is water’ per Foster Wallace); the non-believers couldn’t feel what might be going on inside them (and this is what it is like to be wet).
[1] David Foster Wallace, “Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address – May 21, 2005”, athttp://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html [accessed 18 February 2024].
The ACF Midweek Meditations
are written by a diverse group of our church members with the intention to seek God’s fingerprints in our lives. They range from somber to humorous and are inspired by all facets of live and faith. Written by ordinary people from all walks of life, they reflect a wide range of Christian backgrounds and spiritualities.
Each week’s text portrays the individual viewpoint of its author. They might not always resonate with everyone, and are not meant to be understood as representing the Anglican Church Freiburg as a whole. Yet, as a church that is aiming to ‘Build a Community of Grace’ we seek to practice learning from and listening to one another.
We pray that these humble ponderings add a small spark of blessing to your week.
Freiburg Anglican Church 