Grant Potts: ‘The Humility We Need to be Good Thinkers’

[00:00:00] Speaker A: This was made by humans. [00:00:05] Speaker B: Welcome to Austin Community Conversations, a podcast featuring discussions about the interests, backgrounds, and projects animating the members of a vibrant college community. The views, thoughts and opinions expressed are the speaker's own and do not represent the views, thoughts, and opinions of Austin Community College. The material and information presented here is for general information purposes only. The Austin Community College Community college name and all forms and abbreviations are the property of its owner and its use does not imply endorsement of or opposition to any specific organization, product or service. [00:01:08] Speaker C: Welcome to the conversation. I'm Tonio Ramirez. If you spend any length of time in or around higher education, you're bound to come across discussions about the value of a college degree. What's in it for a student to enroll in college in the first place, much less to pursue and complete a degree or a certificate, is an interesting issue and one that you'll find informs many of the conversations that appear on this podcast. One natural way of thinking about the value of college is in terms of preparation, which is to say, the value of college in terms of what it prepares a student to do after the fact. This preparation can, in turn be thought of in terms of a wide range of aims. Preparation for personal goals, preparation for a life of civic and intellectual engagement, and, as is perhaps most commonly thought about, preparation for professional life. Many students come to college on the assumption that the subject that they end up studying will lead directly into some specific career. In practice, many students and graduates find that this path is perhaps not quite so linear as they might have imagined at first glance. My guest today is Dr. Grant Potts, who serves as Dean of Curriculum Management at Austin Community College, overseeing award plans and scheduling in accordance with state and federal reporting requirements. He's also a professor of philosophy, former chair of the philosophy, Religion, and Humanities department, and has served in various leadership roles at ACC and in national organizations dedicated to the study of religion into community college teaching and learning. Here we discuss his approach to teaching the value of religious studies as a preparation for a surprising range of personal and professional endeavors, and the cultivation of intellectual virtues as a goal for liberal arts education. Let's dive in. [00:03:13] Speaker A: Grant Potts, welcome to the office. [00:03:15] Speaker D: Thank you. [00:03:16] Speaker A: So I actually wanted to begin by asking you some questions about the variety of hats you have worn in your time at acc. How many years have you been with the college? In total? [00:03:29] Speaker D: A little over 15. [00:03:30] Speaker A: 15 years. Okay, so in that time, feel free to add to the list, but you have been a full time instructor in philosophy, in religion, and in humanities. You have served for Was it Seven or eight years as chair of the Philosophy department. [00:03:47] Speaker D: Yeah, something like that. I think it might be nine if you had that kind of the interim year ahead. [00:03:52] Speaker A: Yes. You served as interim Dean for the Liberal Arts Humanities Communications Division for a year. And I forget this official title that. [00:04:02] Speaker D: You currently hold in your current role, Interim Dean of Curriculum Management. [00:04:05] Speaker A: Curriculum management. [00:04:06] Speaker D: Okay. [00:04:07] Speaker A: So that's a lot of connected, but different stuff that you do. And a lot of the questions that I. That I would like to ask you surround how you have inhabited those different roles. One of the things that these conversations aim to do, though, is to give students and the community at large a little bit of a sense of what it's like to learn with Dr. Potts. So first and foremost, it seems like you came here as faculty, you still teach classes at acc, despite the different roles you inhabit. [00:04:41] Speaker D: Correct. [00:04:41] Speaker A: And so if you were to characterize what it's like to take a class with you, how might that work? [00:04:50] Speaker D: Oh, that's a good question and a hard one because it requires a kind of level of impromptu self reflection. [00:04:58] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:04:59] Speaker D: Understood without, you know. Yeah. [00:05:03] Speaker C: So. [00:05:05] Speaker D: I think on the most fundamental level, what I hope at least my students experience is a class in which they're presented both with knowledge about the world, you know, in the various areas we're looking at. So the content of the class, but also an exploration of the ways we come to that knowledge and how that knowledge then, and how we come to that knowledge shapes how we continue to engage our world. And some reflection about. What your role as a human being is as a knower. Right. In whatever capacity you are approaching that engagement with the world and to think about what. What it means to try to get knowledge down. Well, yeah, right. I think that's. I think if. If anything else, what I think I emphasize with students is quality of craft. Right. And the quality of. The craft of coming to knowledge and understanding of the world. Yeah, yeah, I'd say that. [00:06:28] Speaker A: And. [00:06:29] Speaker D: And so they'll experience that in. And that's kind of very abstract. So on a practical level, what does that mean? That means that I run a class that is often very thick with ideas. Right. Students I'm thick with. With facts and fixed with knowledge. Like students in my evaluations and just in talking to me, just describe my classes as dense. Right. There's a lot there and I move through a lot of material pretty fast. And I think when I look comparatively, there are definitely other faculty who have that in a variety of disciplines where you walk out and you're like. And I think it's partly because I love those classes. I loved the classes where I walked in, walked out and felt like, wow, I just. Not only did I learn a few things, I got exposed to an entire world of things. But it's not. They don't tend to be content delivery classes. And I think one of the things I warn my students about is to not take it. Whether we're reading an extended difficult text together or we're studying a large body of facts, like what goes into, you know, what we understand to be any major world religion. I warn them not to be intimidated by that. Right. That the goal is not to master that. Right. But rather to learn to navigate as best you can in a space where you're totally lost. To be less lost. Sure. Right. I don't think, especially at a first or second year level of the disciplines we teach, you're going to walk out with a sense of. Downstream of that field, of that discipline, or even have some subset of that discipline. What you're probably going to walk out with is enough sense of where you can go and how you can understand that field to really be exposed to how little you know. Right. So you may actually have an experience of feeling more confused by the end of one of my classes, but in a creative way in which you understand the confusion and the dynamics of that confusion better. [00:08:47] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:08:48] Speaker D: Then the feeling like you've gotten more clarity. And again, that's something I've heard students talk about in the past. [00:08:55] Speaker A: This makes a lot of sense. I mean, sticking with the metaphor of exposing or introducing people to a new world, I mean, if we were to kind of play with that a little bit literally, if you were to imagine yourself suddenly in a room in a new world. Right. That room would all by itself be overwhelming to a certain extent, but then starting to realize that, in fact, you can exit that and start to appreciate how much it is that you have not seen yet. This seems to be akin to what you're talking about in terms of being able to appreciate what you don't know. [00:09:28] Speaker D: Right. [00:09:28] Speaker A: But also being able to appreciate that you can walk around in that world, you can navigate it and explore. [00:09:33] Speaker D: Right. And so my pedagogical techniques tend to be less. I mean, I do lecture some, but it's lecture to kind of give people things to work with. Like. Like my. My goal is not to deliver a bunch of content that students need to then memorize or be accountable for that content in terms of the bits and pieces, but rather to lay out that world for exploration in all its complexity. But it does tend to be providing students with objects and artifacts, whether those are ideas or texts or works of art or accounts of religious life, and then to really, in a guided way, set them in conversation with me and with each other about how to work out, how to understand what's going on there, and then to reflect on that process together and in that reflection, hopefully figure out together how we can navigate and understand better. And to some extent, my expertise is less an expertise. That is something where I'm saying, all right, here's how you have to go through things, everyone, and you do this and you do some of that. You can introduce people to tools and processes that are useful, but increasingly I bring those in at the back end instead of front loading those because I'm finding the exploration of the world, like you said, said, and just sort of figuring out the tools you need on your own and then from there saying, okay, well, you can refine that tool in this way and learning ways that I can refine my own tools for my students. Yeah, that's become more valuable. [00:11:14] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay, so maybe we can tease out a little bit some ways in which the diversity of roles you've held at ACC models some of what I hear you say you're trying to do in the classes. So there is. You describe roughly this, like, two big things that are happening. There's a very powerful and maybe hard to articulate abstract set of goals that students are going to get in terms of exploring the world and expanding the world. But then there's also this content knowledge that's a part of your class as well. So beginning with your own experience, your own as a student, if you were to talk basically about the content that you primarily engaged with or exposed yourself to, what did you study? [00:11:58] Speaker D: Well, as an undergraduate? [00:12:00] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:12:01] Speaker D: Coming into. To higher education in particular, yeah, I am. You know, I had a very classic liberal arts education at a small liberal arts college. And that was. That was a gift for me. I went to a college that my. Even if my parents had the means to have sent me there, it would have been enough of a hardship of them. Like, they weren't. We weren't struggling financially, but we weren't wealthy right then. I would have never been able to afford to go there if it weren't for the fact that I got a very good scholarship to go there. And so I always kind of feel like that was a gift. Right. That was a gift from whoever. You know, that was actually a gift from the college itself because it was an internal scholarship. But whoever Set that up. And I'm always grateful for that because. Because it did engage me in a way of learning and an exposure to content. But I actually, I mean, maybe because I drank the Kool Aid early right there. But I think is extremely valuable to who I am and how I function both professionally and in my life. And by that I mean that my classes were primarily text driven. Right. It was rare, although I had a few more on the natural science side. I remember an Introduction to International Politics class that I loved that was kind of a lecture based content delivery class. Right. So most of my. My work of getting the content as a student was reading and very rarely textbooks, in some cases textbooks, but very rarely. So. So in terms of primary texts, mostly primary texts or I actually, what I. What I ended up, you know, I wouldn't say primary text, although to some extent within the discipline, they might be prime primary texts now, but were secondary texts 40 years ago. [00:14:06] Speaker A: Yeah, understood. [00:14:07] Speaker D: But it was more monographs, right. From disciplinary contexts. So, you know, probably the most influential experience just to date was my first semester in college. I somehow during orientation, ended up talking to the chair of the religion program and he thought from where my interest was and where I was with things, that I should take a sophomore level class. And these classes, the way our structure was like those sophomore level classes you weren't allowed to take your first semester. You can only take 100 level classes, freshman level classes, your first semester, unless you had an exemption from a faculty member to be placed in. Right. There was. There was a really attentive attention to the leveling of the experience as you go through. Right. So he put me in. They were 200 instead of 2000, but a 200 level religious studies class called Introduction to the Old Testament. So he was scriptures class. I was excited about this. You know, I had come. I had become interested in religion primarily through, I think, two things. Right. One, I was a tabletop role player. [00:15:31] Speaker A: Okay. [00:15:31] Speaker D: And I really thought like these weird religions in D and D, you know. Sure. Campaigns and stuff like that, and clerics and like this whole sort of fantasy of a priesthood and gods that work through, you know, it was cool to me. Right? Yeah. And I was fascinated by what really was a kind of narrative introduction to an idea of religion in a plurality of different ways of being. Right. And then on the other hand, I was also shaped by this deeply cynical relationship to religion. But, you know, I go back through and I try to find where that is from. I mean, I think some of it is. Again, I was a tabletop Role player during the height of the satanic panic. And so, you know, I have early childhood things of wanting to start an after school D and D club in my middle school and the principal being like, no way. Like the church leaders in our small Ohio town will roast me if I do this. Even though he wasn't like. Like just the fact of that was there. So that. And it was also during a height with that of attempts to ban books around religiously. You know, there's a certain level, like our current. [00:16:55] Speaker A: Era, in that era, there's a lot experiences that might make it easy to equate religion writ large with like the Moral Majority. [00:17:02] Speaker D: Right, Exactly. So I had that. And that was reinforced by being listening to industrial music. My life at the Thrill Cop, like that kind of stuff that was just sort of cynical and mocking of religion. So those two things came together with what in high school was an interest in storytelling and mythology. Right. And so that was where I was interested. I came to college intending to study computer science. And this is one of those interesting things about how credit or satisfying credit prior to getting to college or satisfying requirements can have an interesting effect. I was intending to study computer science. I was very good at math. And so I tested out a math requirement which would have been the beginning of my computer science all right. Thing. And so again, the 1000 level thing. There was nothing that I was supposed to take the first semester in this discipline. I would say freedom there. Right? [00:18:10] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:18:10] Speaker D: And so I started taking other classes and never came back. Right. I took a computer science. I took a Pascal class. I think my sophomore year. I was still kind of entertaining the idea of going there, but. And part of that was that we at Denison at that time, you could with your AP testing test out of the requirement, but you didn't get credit. So I had to kind of come back and do some exploration there. And I. So I was. I was interested more in narrative and poetry and mythology. I was thinking already that maybe I might do something with English literature. I never felt particularly adept at language arts. I was. I was basically a. Even though I was. I was an A student for the most part. I was kind of a B student when it came to English and language arts. Right. I struggle with it. I still struggle with spelling and things like that. Right. You know, and. And so that was my interest. Right. That was. My interest was like, oh, this will be a cool class. I'll understand the mythology here and the storytelling. I also took another class called the Bible and Ovid in literature and the arts. Which was kind of a survey of English literature and arts that was. We read the Hebrew Scriptures, we read and the New Testament, and we read Ovid and then kind of looked at how those references were used throughout literature. But this class, the Introduction to Old Testament, we read first. And this is where I'm getting that kind of content. I think it was. The first thing we read was a book by Paul Hanson called People Cult. Paul Hanson was a Harvard Hebrew Scriptures scholar. And it was a book about the development of apocalyptic narratives within the Hebrew scriptures and particularly looking at the prophets and trying to kind of sort out what's going on with this, which was just cool. I mean, that's interesting, right? Yeah, that's just like if you're coming out of a D and D plane, industrial music listening person, like reading about how the apocalypse comes about and storytelling is like. Is really good. But. But what Paul Hanson did fundamentally changed how I thought about what was going on here. Because what he did was to say, okay, how can we understand this if we use the best knowledge we have from archaeology and from classics, right? You know, and classics here being. I mean, why not just Greek and Roman, but in the study of ancient civilization through the documents that remain with us, right? How can we understand what was going on here? By looking at this text, the Hebrew scriptures, and looking at it as a location in which a community is forming and developing as a community. So that's getting the facts about the community down through the archaeology, through the reference to the documents we have, looking at parallel communities and documents and kind of sort of, what are the patterns, what are the narratives, what's emerging? And then on top of that, doing this as an act of social anthropology really then saying in how we've come to understand how communities form as communities, how they differentiate into social structures, how those social structures interact with each other, how individuals interact with those social structures, how groups form and relate to each other, how group identity, all the things that come from social anthropology, cultural anthropology and social psychology to a certain extent, taking those bodies of knowledge and putting them together and saying what. What's going on here? What's going on here? That people develop this. This strong and pervasive understanding of themselves as a people who live a life in relationship to a God, right, to their God, and really identify who they are as built on that relationship, and then begin to develop an understanding of themselves as having a relationship with a God that is leading them somewhere, and then interpret their experience through that. So when the Babylonian captivity happens, which in the Hebrew scriptures is that moment where the elites of ancient Israel are taken out of Israel and moved to Babylon. Right. This is a central narrative piece of the Hebrew scriptures. It's throughout the Psalms, it's reflected in the prophets. Right. You know, when that happens, that's an event we're, you know, we know that happens. Right. Not necessarily in the way it's narrated there, where it's kind of told as like, all of Israel is taken from what we know. Again, this is partly putting together the facts in the archaeology. The elites of that community were taken because this was part of how the Persians managed conquest, was they would take the upper echelons of the society they conquered and moved them to Babylon, kind of hold them there while they managed the population afar. And it's a way of making sure that those who would get in the way of your rule would don't get in the way. And also to. To kind of try to transform those elites into Persians. Right. How does that then shape the experience for those people who for 100 years, for generations are living in exile. Right. And hold on to this and then return where they have already developed a notion of an idea of a God being a center of who they are, at least for this group, whether it's the priesthood and the monarchy or more extended, there's debates about who all is involved there. And then come back and return to, then say, well, what does this mean for a God who's supposed to be leading us to the promised land? Why were we put there? Oh, we must be being punished for some. Some great problem that we have generated, strayed from where we were and then that returned back, coming back and developing what becomes what we know as ancient Israelite religion, which, again, reading that, I realized, I began to understand that what we understand to be ancient Israelite religion is a very late phase of ancient Israelite religion because it's what we have access to and is very deeply shaped by this experience combined with this narrative to give rise to, you know, the foundations of Judaism and Christianity and to a lesser extent, Islam. Okay, so. [00:25:27] Speaker A: Okay, so. [00:25:27] Speaker D: Yeah. And so that just blew me away. Yeah. [00:25:29] Speaker A: And you're articulating this in a way that makes it engaging. Right. So which, you know, is funny because it's a continuation of an oral tradition of making stories, you know, engaging and worth carrying off. So bringing this back to kind of my own. My own agenda in interviewing you here, I'm hearing you, let's say, as a prospective student, talking about the things that you studied. It doesn't surprise me to hear that Somebody who teaches courses in religion or religious studies, learned a lot about, let's say, the Hebrew scriptures and learned a lot about maybe the context in which these emerge. And I might have some maintenance understanding of, like, this interdisciplinary approach that you're describing here by bringing together archaeology and social psychology, these different approaches. And I might ask myself, okay, well, so this is fascinating. I can see how this would be engaging if you have interests in this. But it might not be as obvious to a student who's thinking about this to see how immersing yourself in that, developing some kind of mastery over this domain of content is connected with the work that you actually do now in something like curriculum management. Right now, I don't think I suspected that there's going to be a very real connection you can draw here. But if I'm thinking about embarking on my own educational journey and there's this opportunity for me to spend some time looking carefully at religious text tests, but I also am thinking about, well, you know, if I am not going to be a professor of religious studies myself, if I'm not going to be a minister or religious figure myself, how. How do I see the direct connection of tying that to something like management, which you've done in an apartment chair role or teams role, or in working through baroque and sometimes very tedious systems of rules that are, you know, numbered in documents. How might you explain that trajectory to somebody? [00:27:36] Speaker D: Yeah, no, I think. I think about this a lot because, you know, someone I work with remarked as I was coming into the curriculum management role that my disciplinary background in philosophy was clearly key to this role. [00:27:54] Speaker A: Yeah, right. [00:27:56] Speaker D: Which is true to some extent. But, you know, I have this weird thing at ACC where because the dominant note we have as a department is philosophy, because I teach philosophy and I have the graduate hours and background to teach philosophy. I do that. And so people routinely identify me as a philosopher, which I'm okay with that identity, but my root identity as a scholar is as a religious studies scholar. Right. And so there's like, there's a level at which I remember hearing that and being like, yeah, I think my disciplinary background is what prepared me. But it's actually the religious studies background that prepared me. The philosophy has been an extremely important part of my journey as a thinker. And it's something I came to because I confronted some sort of fundamental questions about how we go through the work of interpreting cultures. And so fundamental questions about how we constitute knowledge and understanding for ourselves and then began to explore was initially methodological questions that became more Fundamental questions that weren't merely methodological for me. All right. So that's why, you know, as much as I'm interested in metaphysics. [00:29:10] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:29:11] Speaker D: I tend to be interested in, you know, in hermeneutics as a kind of subset of epistemology. Right. Where we're looking to this as as kind of how we produce a good understanding of the world as opposed to kind of these analytic models of knowledge, which I think are useful for doing that, but they're adjunct to the larger work of coming to an understanding. Okay, cool. [00:29:31] Speaker A: If I might interrupt you for just a second. So already I think you're giving an answer that might be surprising, I think, to some of your colleagues. So not only are you saying that it was maybe a little bit less philosophy and much more religious studies that prepared you for much of the more that you do, but even the way that you're describing, the way in which philosophy prepared you, I think is different than what some might expect. [00:29:52] Speaker D: Right. [00:29:53] Speaker A: So there's this. There's this story that you often hear that one of the benefits of philosophy is that it prepares you for a set of critical thinking skills. [00:30:02] Speaker D: Right. [00:30:03] Speaker A: Argumentative construction and analysis, clear rigor, sometimes said in writing and articulating reviews. And not to downplay those, they certainly are valuable skills. It's probably a large part of the reason why philosophy is a traditional undergraduate preparation for work in the legal field. But you're cottoning on to different aspects of doing work in philosophy from those, and it's interesting to hear you talking about those as being the skills that seem most. [00:30:34] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And the rigor is there, but I think. I think. I think of rigor more in quality than correctness. [00:30:44] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:30:44] Speaker D: Okay. If that makes sense. Right. And you can think of correctness as a mode of quality, but that's a kind of formal mode of quality. Right. But to me, the quality is the good you get out of what you're. What you're seeking to do through that thing. Right. If that. I mean, at the end of the day, probably a problem. [00:31:01] Speaker A: Yes, I was about to say that's okay. Yeah, that's good. [00:31:03] Speaker D: Like, you know, like. And. [00:31:08] Speaker A: And. [00:31:08] Speaker D: And so, yeah, so that. That was. That was definitely part that. I definitely see that. Right. That. That interest in then going into, you know, especially the role. I am now managing systems and work units, which, you know, for. For what I manage are mostly individuals, although I do have one sun team who are working with these large information systems right around curriculum and the development and management of curriculum. You know, whether that's the catalog, the degree maps, the regulatory systems for how we build curriculum, the process by which we take that through curriculum development with the committee work with engaging over 100 programs that manage 350 awards. Right? [00:32:02] Speaker A: Yes. [00:32:03] Speaker D: You know, like, like there's a lot of information that just needs managed and a process for managing that information and trying to keep the integrity to that information. And there's a number of different actors coming in at once. Right. There's federal regulation from the Department of Education, there's federal regulation that comes from other entities like the Department of Labor. There is state level regulation that is embedded in state code, and then there's state level regulation that is embedded more in regulatory bodies. And then you have accreditation agencies like sats that are sitting there to make sure that you have a quality institution and a quality set of programs. And then you have individual accreditors for individual disciplines. And then you have the disciplines themselves and their goals and objectives sort of widely. And then you have the individual units within acc representing those disciplines and what they, you know, and bringing that all together into a coherent whole to come work together ultimately to try to achieve some amorphous goal of taking students through a process of acquiring some level of mastery. Right. Whether that's some level of mastery of a workforce discipline so that after that they have the basics they need to enter into that workforce. I mean, keep in mind, like we sometimes think of, of kind of workforce degrees and academic degrees in community colleges is as like workforce degrees bring you to the mastery. Academic degrees kind of get you started so you can go get your bachelor's degree and get mastery. But even in workforce degrees, you're not getting mastery. You're just dealing with disciplines that are more practical in nature and more targeted on particular occupations and occupations that are often more willing to take raw, preliminarily trained people. And you're going to acquire that knowledge as you get on the job and go into the sector. I mean, actually, as I'm doing some work on our labor market analysis, I'm struck by how many of our associates degrees while you can get a job with that associate's degree. When you look at the Labor Market Analysis, 60% of people in that field have a bachelor's degree, which, you know, indicates that that's going to get you maybe a start, but you're going to have to go on and do further education for that. Okay. [00:34:19] Speaker A: Yeah. So if I may. [00:34:21] Speaker D: Yeah. So all of that is kind of. Let me, let me. So all that is coming together. How does religion help me understand Exactly. [00:34:29] Speaker A: Right, yeah. [00:34:29] Speaker D: How? Well, I think that these are fundamentally large normative systems interacting with each other. Which is one of the things I think religions are, is they're large normative systems with institutionalized processes for reinforcing those norms to shape human behavior. They do that one by rulemaking, but also by projecting aspirations, values and ideas and symbols that then shape those sort of rule based systems to try to move them in a particular direction. That can be a direction like enlightenment, that can be a direction that is control of a population. Like whether you have like a romantic or a cynical understanding of religion, I don't have it either. Right. At the end of the day, like my journey in the study of religion is to basically abandon that kind of what I think of as value bias as an analyst. Right. Like, it's like, I think one of the things I try to tell my students at the beginning of their study of religion, my religious studies classes, is, you know, the big thing you need to kind of set aside to begin with is whether religion is good or bad. Yeah. Right. Because you don't know enough to make that judgment. And it's not that you're going to, that you can't make that judgment. Right. Some people sort of approach this as like, when you take this like we can't judge whether religion is good or bad, that's a, that's a judgment that fundamentally we can't make for a variety of reasons. [00:36:07] Speaker A: Right. [00:36:07] Speaker D: I think you can. Right. Betting judgment is going to be preliminary. We're incapable of evaluating. And the reality is that what we call religion is such a complex set of patterns of way humans interact with really their, their, their aspirations to a way of life that they view as good. Right. So that, that, that thinking through how those systems interact and how those interact with human beings on the ground I think prepared me more than anything else for this work. Now that doesn't replace, in terms of the practical day to day management, the well over a decade of experience that I have as a chair working with people, in that case faculty who are there to do a job and thinking as I, you know, I think you experienced as well. What is my job here? My job is on the, on, on the most fundamental level to help the people that I supervise, which I hate that term in their chair work because they, you know, but yeah, I mean, on a certain level that is what you're doing. You're kind of looking at what you're doing. Helping them do their job better. Right. And helping them do their job better. Yeah. In a way that and this is again where. Where I think when I look at religions and what, what they seem, if they do something good for us. Right. When they do that? Well, it seems to be when they project a set of aspirations the community can agree upon are important to them, like as a people, as a church. That kind of clearly defines a kind of trajectory of values, but it's also vague enough and open enough that people can bring themselves and their aspirations to the table. Right. And they can come and participate in concert with each other. Even though they may have very different motivations, they may have different ideas about what's going on. Certain things just sit with me as facts. I'm trying to remember when it was done. It was about a decade or two old. There's a major study survey of megachurch attendees. I think it was through the Harford Center. And I just remember this and sort of pondering. I've talked about this in my classes with students. That's funny. When they were serving attendees of megachurch church, you know, something like 20% of those attendees don't identify as Christian. Like 22% or something. Something like that. Like it's. It's a. A small percentage, but a significant percentage. Right. A minority percentage, say small, believe in astrology. Another similar set believe in reincarnation. Like sort of things that are doctrinally at odds with normative Christianity. Somehow they're reconciling that with getting meaning and direction out of this institution. Right. I think that's what I end up having to do in any kind of management space. Right. [00:39:29] Speaker A: Is to say, clearer as you're saying this to me. [00:39:31] Speaker D: Yeah, here's where we're going. But I'm not asking you to fundamentally change who you are or what you want or what you get out of this, but to figure out how what you want out of this, the work you need to do for the world, can come in alignment with everyone else as we're moving in this direction. Yeah. [00:39:48] Speaker A: So, okay, this is becoming, I think, a little bit clearer as you describe this. There's a feature of religion and religious life that you haven't explicitly articulated yet, but that seems to be a major feature of it. That's also a significant feature of the way that educational institutions are operate. You describe both in terms of, like, tremendous complexity, a lot of moving parts, both being invested in the business of moving people toward aspirational goals. There's another feature of this which is that every level of those systems is in flux all the time. So the values themselves might change over time. People involved in enforcing those values and the way that they go about enforcing them might change over time. And so you may discover that if you start, let's say, a career as an academic in 1975, what your world looks like as an academic in 2025 could be radically different. And there's a very complicated story to tell about how that came about. Just as, of course, you might find that the lives of, let's say, early anti Christianity might be radically different from a contemporary evangelical political movement or something like this. There's a complex story to tell about how those are all part of a tradition. But being able to see that and put it together for practical reasons, let's say, in an academic domain, in order to make predictions about how to move or what kinds of movement are possible, what the Overton window, if you will, is for discussion about possibilities at any given time. I start to see how those things would align a lot more. [00:41:34] Speaker D: Yeah. So. [00:41:39] Speaker A: I'm again a student thinking about maybe taking a course in religious studies. I'm starting to think, well, maybe I might not be completely setting myself up for a life of destitution or, you know, with nothing more than a set of facts that may or may not help me on Jeopardy one day. [00:41:56] Speaker D: Right. [00:41:57] Speaker A: But there is this business about the. Your experience of coming to it simultaneously with interest, grounded in one part of your kind of sphere of influence, your. Your world of tabletop gaming, but then also kind of suspicion or sarcastic approach to it. And I wonder if something about the way that religion plays out in something like fantasy, whether that's in tabletop gaming or fiction or what have you, helps here in that the stakes of taking interest in the religious lives of a fantastic world are different than they might feel in the real world. So, you know, the fact that there are different religious factions and systems of belief in the world of Dungeons and Dragons, that's just a fact of that world, and it has interesting implications for that world. And I can explore it without having to worry about what it means for my own system of belief or something. [00:43:03] Speaker D: Or the destiny of your immortal soul. [00:43:05] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly. To get really real with it. [00:43:09] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:43:09] Speaker A: Very good. So how do you. How do you help students navigate that transition into an analytic frame of mind in thinking about religion? Just because I imagine that there's going to be a wide range of perspectives students bring there. [00:43:26] Speaker D: Yeah. I mean, I think part of it is helping them understand that we're always engaging in a kind of as if work, and we're doing that is. That is basic to the kind of Investigations we do in academic work. Right. I mean, the stakes can be very high, either truly very high or at least effectively very high, so that students might experience the stakes at very high. Again, like you have these moments like, what if XYZ is true and I'm off the path and I'm facing an eternity of torment as a result, you know? And, you know, there have been moments at that. I remember when I was in graduate school, I was taking a. And I think this is a testimony to the strength of. The professor at the time was taking a graduate philosophy of religion class at Penn. And I just remember I was living in this. I can visualize it, right. I was living in this awkward house, right. This, the first house we lived in in Philadelphia when we went there for me to go to graduate school was a. One of those houses like you have in especially urban areas where you rent a room as a student. Right. So we weren't renting the house. We were renting the house. And it was this cool kind of sort of early sustainability architecture with, you know, a big set of windows to let the light in the winter but not have it there in the summer, and by the Swiss architect who lived next door. Right. So. And I lived in this, like, tiny little room at the top with the slanted thing. And the whole image comes back because I just remembered there was a trolley outside that was noisy and whatnot. [00:45:30] Speaker A: You're living the grad student life. That sounds like it. [00:45:31] Speaker D: Up at like 2 in the morning working on my philosophy of Rep. Religion readings and hearing the, the trolley screech like it did every night at 2 in the morning by my window and reading these arguments around the existence of God and just being like, for the first time, really. What if it's true? Yeah. What if, like this particular narrative of this type of God with this kind of judgment, I can just, like, what if I, my, my, my cynicism, my suspicion, my willingness to just be like, hey, let's set this aside. Right. What if that's true? And just confronting that and, and having a moment of terror. Right. A real kind of existential terror. Yeah. So those come up. Yeah. Like, yeah. I think part of it is just we talk about that. Like, okay, we don't avoid it. We talk about it. And just like, that's part of learning. Right. And. And I don't think that's very different than, say, if you're taking a. A class in which you're looking at any number of international situations around warfare or diplomacy where the stakes are really high. But at the same time, you back up and you talk about them as if they're not now, that. That can be its own kind of. Of sickness. Right. And I think this is. This is the danger we have as academics. We can trivialize the magnitude of what we're talking about. Right. We can sort of dismissively say it's like X, Y, Z. And, you know, this is how. How you should approach this idea or that idea. Because we have a certain safety of the classroom and the thought experiment which we're doing that, and we forget that the decision to believe X, Y or Z about this has enormous consequences, whether that's in religion or whether that has to do with your sense of identity as a nation, your sense of what's going on with any number of geopolitical conflicts. Right. We can be quick to a sense of expertise. I think part of what, if we're doing our jobs right. We help students understand that helps insulate from this is a certain level of humility. [00:47:49] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:47:49] Speaker D: Right. Going back to that moment, like, there. There was a sense of just like fundamental humility, not in the face of the divine. Right. Like that's kind of what the arguments were about at the time I was reading. But in the face of the question. Yeah. And kind of a recognition that. That I couldn't arrive at that answer. Right. And that I had to move on. Right. I had to move on from the terror of what was true in one case or another and move on to what do I do with my life, given what I can know, what I can do. I think that's. That's. That's part of what we need to do when we're studying religion. [00:48:30] Speaker A: Right. [00:48:31] Speaker D: Especially if we have. And this comes up more for my students partly because, you know, when I. When I teach introduction, comparative religion, I very much teach it as whether. Whether we are looking at a religion that is your religion or someone else's religion. We're taking a kind of externalist view. Right. We're trying to interpret and understand this religion in a way that would be understandable within a community of knowers that don't have the commitments of. Of one community or another. Right. When I'm teaching philosophy of religion, that becomes much more. How do we confront those questions that actually are about whether you adhere or don't adhere? Yeah. Right. And so that's when those. Those kinds of things I see come up for. For my students. Right, sure. And. And yeah, it's a thing. [00:49:27] Speaker A: It is, Right. [00:49:28] Speaker D: I don't know. Like, it's not like, you don't want to insulate someone from that. You just. [00:49:31] Speaker A: Yeah, you don't. So this is the thing. Right. So I came to philosophy with a deep interest in philosophy of religion myself. And I'm thinking about. Because the experience you describe in graduate school, one that's very familiar to me, I imagine that it resonates with a lot of people who have engaged in serious academic work in this field. But as a sales pitch. Right. So here's the thing. I invite you to take these questions and ideas very seriously. And if you do it rigorously and really commit yourself to it, then you too can find yourself in the loft of an awkward house in a far away city and experience existential terror. [00:50:06] Speaker D: Right. [00:50:07] Speaker A: That's not a great sales pitch on its first. But then there's the crux of the thing where you get to move on from it. [00:50:12] Speaker D: Right? Yeah. And I think that's the thing is like that existential terror happens to people. [00:50:17] Speaker A: It does. [00:50:18] Speaker D: Like we just, we just arrive at it, if we're academics through that academic path, other people arrive at it because they're hiking in Yosemite and suddenly are confronted with the majesty of the mountain. Sure. You know, like, and, And I think what, in terms of that question, part of what? Good academic knowledge of any discipline. Right. And when I, when I talk about academic knowledge, I talk about knowledge that is a knowledge embedded in a long standing discipline that is not oriented around a particular craft of work. Right. That's, to me, the difference between an academic and a workforce discipline. It's that sort of broad reach of an academic discipline. And it's, it's more of a way of knowing than a way of working. A way of working requires a way of knowing. Right. And a way of knowing gives you tools for engaging in a way of working those relationships. And I don't think it's a clean distinction between the two. There are definitely academic disciplines. You know, we have that fundamental difference in our structures partly because the state of Texas creates these structures that really silo or force from academic disciplines. Right. And we as a nation have decided to do that. But I think there's some wisdom in that. Right. There is some wisdom, even if it's a blurry shift from a way of knowing to a way of working. Right. [00:51:42] Speaker A: I'm reminded of a kind of blurry distinction that comes up a lot in philosophical epistemology between propositional and practical knowledge. Like knowing know how and knowing that. Right. [00:51:52] Speaker D: Exactly. [00:51:52] Speaker A: It's not a clean distinction, but there's something to thinking about these things differently. [00:51:56] Speaker D: Yeah. And so what. What academic disciplines often, I think, give you is a way of looking at and understanding the world that allows you to navigate through those moments of fundamental confusion. I mean, that. What is the source of that terror? The source of that terror is not confronting a. Judgmental God. Right. The source of that terror is confronting the possibility of that judgmental God and the confusion that results about whether that is or is not real. What you should do in response to. It's that kind of. That's. That's kind of like there's a potentially a different terror if you confront a judgmental God. Like, if you. If you recognize this is real and you're confronting it that way, that's a different kind of terror. Right. You know, like, that's the kind of terror that you have when someone's chasing you with a knife. Yes. [00:53:03] Speaker A: When a bear is about to maul you. [00:53:05] Speaker D: Yes, exactly. And. And I don't think we want to. I think we don't want to confuse those two moments. Right. [00:53:10] Speaker A: Those. [00:53:10] Speaker D: They both are a sense of. Yeah. I mean, I think in terms of those moments, I've had things like that, that, you know, when I've been in car accidents, when I've been, you know, in moments where I truly face a threat to my moral being, that does not feel like what sitting in that room felt like. Right. And part of that is there's a sense of. If you've ever been in a car accident, have you been in a car accident? Not a serious one. I've talked to other folks about this. There's a kind of compression of time and tunneling of your sense of agency that in some levels is very liberating unless you freeze when confronted with a bear trying to maul you. Right. And you talk to people who are in combat and stuff, they talk about this. You actually get this very strong compression of your agency. So you're. You. It's. It's like the organism takes over and says, okay, you have some decisions to make. Let's focus you on those decisions. Right. Or it just freezes up and says, yeah, that's the kind of fight or flight response that's different than feeling incapable of even knowing where to go. Right. And maybe that is partly like that freeze response. I don't know. [00:54:24] Speaker A: But there's something to what's right. [00:54:25] Speaker D: Yeah. So, yeah. When I'm, you know, in terms of a value proposition, I think part of what thinking through religion, meaning in the humanities, fundamental questions of justice, ethics, like, all the kind of things that are interesting to me. As. As. As a teacher and that I want my students to explore. It allows you in, that is as if space to kind of preview and explore and understand kind of what are the paths through those moments? Yeah. So that you can make some. Not only be able to make some decisions when confronted with those moments and feel like you have tools to navigate through, but to have tools that you have to navigate through that are well worn by others and well worn by others and explored in a way in which you're like, not only is this a way we've navigated through these kinds of moments before, but I have a sense of how that happened, why that happened. I have that experience of moving through the gathering of knowledge, the analysis of the knowledge that kind of makes it stick. Right. I'm thinking here in. In the Meno, when Socrates is talking about the road to Larissa, you know, for. For people who aren't us. Right. In the Mino, there's this question that emerges of what's the difference between true opinion and knowledge? Right. And Larissa is a town in Thessaly, and Socrates is talking to Meno, and they're kind of like with, you know, if you ask someone how to get to Larissa and they tell you how to get there, and they happen to be right, but they've never gotten there themselves, isn't that just as valuable as if they actually had gone? And so what's the difference between these? And I think that. And it's not resolved well. Like, this is part of what I like about the Meno. It's like, there's a level at which, like, Socrates then presents this argument about. Well, I don't know if you'd say it's an argument, but this idea that, well, like, maybe what knowledge is is because you can give an account of how you got there. Yeah. It's more tied down like the statues of Daedalus. Right. And so, yes, Daedalus is. Is a sculptor who is interestingly kind of heroic ancestor of Socrates. [00:56:58] Speaker A: Oh, I didn't. [00:56:58] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. I think it's in the apology where he references that Daedalus is one of his kind of like his demos, his group of people, they draw their descent from Daedalus. Okay. But he's like, you know, he's such an awesome sculptor that, like, his statues were so real that when he made, like, a statue of Zeus, he had to tie it down or the statues walk away. [00:57:18] Speaker A: Well, dude made flying shoes too. [00:57:19] Speaker D: Like. [00:57:20] Speaker A: Yeah, pretty good. [00:57:22] Speaker D: And so there's a. There's this sense, he says, that Knowledge kind of holds things in place better. Like we. If you know why, if you've got the truth, and you know why you have the truth, it lasts longer, it's stickier, it holds down more. Well, then he kind of goes on and says, but, you know, it's really not that much more valuable than it is. What's important is he got the right idea, right? So it's a little ambivalent, but I think there's something there, right. And so models of knowledge have developed around this as justified true belief. And that sense of justification, I think, is. Is the important way. And we can over again formalize justification into correctness. But I think. And when I was looking at this this morning for another reason, you know, when Socrates says it's about giving an account at one point. And so we've often thought about justification as that account, that sort of formalization of it. But when he describes what's going on, it's really more about having had the experience of moving through that process of getting to the knowledge, not merely taking someone's word for it, not merely taking someone's word for it. That gives you that stickiness to what, you know, I think that's kind of what we do, right? That. That's what we do is we, we. We give you ideas, we give you knowledge, right? We give you truths and how to get there. Not so that you can. I mean, I think there is some level. So you can go in and justify that to someone else, right. But more so that you can go through the experience of knowing what it is as a being moving through thoughts to arrive at a quality fact, to arrive at a quality idea. However we think of what that quality is, sure. And. And that's a much more practical sense of knowledge. So I think that's kind of the value. Now. Why religion? David Shuster, in one of my favorite books, Authentic Fakes, which is an interesting kind of thought experiment book, it's all over the place. In some ways. It's very much an exploratory book. But David, in that book, basically what David Shifter does is he says, what would American popular culture look like? How would we understand American popular culture if we examined it as if it were a religion? He begins with these sort of. This chapter called the Church of Baseball, the Fetish of Coca Cola and the Religion of Rock and Roll. And those were kind of all three coming from recent articles at the time or books that were talking about the Church of Baseball, you know, and he says, well, why are people like, out in. And I Think these were mostly journalistic accounts out there, using these to talk about, using religion to talk about these experiences. And then he goes on and just examines a whole bunch of things. Like one of my favorites is this sort of like examination of Tupperware parties as a religious institution. [01:00:35] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:00:36] Speaker D: But what he says is like, religion is really good to think with. Right. And I think at the end of the day, there's two big values and one of them is not. It's one we haven't talked about to the study of religion. Right. Which is understanding what's going on with people around you who have strong religious convictions. Sure. Or mild religious convictions and how that shapes them and how you can interact with them in a way that, that honors them as human being and predicts what they're going to be. You know, like all those things that come in terms of knowing each other. Right. In a kind of cross cultural context. [01:01:12] Speaker A: Similarly, imagine understanding people who have particular hostilities toward religion as well. [01:01:16] Speaker D: Right, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And so that's, that's sort of one. But the other is that I think because religion involves at least, you know, what we've come to understand as religion like involves itself with so many different aspects of our life. There's a political dimension, religion, there's an existential dimension to religion, there's an interpretive dimension to religion. There's a dimension to religion that's just about the creation of arts. Right. If you look at the arts, it's like 80% of the arts is driven by religion. You walk through the museum, there is a meaning making dimension of religion. I guess it's the interpretive dimension of religion, the economic dimension of religion, the military dimension. You know, like anything we think of human life, it has a connection to religion. And religions are these interesting sets of traditions. And at the end of the day, when I think of what a religion is, it's a tradition. Right. That are extremely long standing and pervasive in terms of human institutions. Nothing rivals the major religious traditions in their persistence and their ability to provide a kind of common framework where people can understand themselves to exist in solidarity with each other over space and time. Right. As like nationhood doesn't get there, geographic distinction doesn't get there. Like all those things don't get to the level of where, you know, as a Buddhist, I can understand myself in some level of solidarity with this Buddhist on the other side of the world, but maybe even beyond that, this Buddhist on the other side of the world. Two thousand years ago, when I'm reading an ancient Buddhist text And. And that there's a meaning, meaningful connection between us as human beings because it brings all that together. I do think it's one of the most valuable ways to explore and understand what it is to be human. [01:03:27] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:03:28] Speaker D: And I think the value proposition is that if you study religion and you study it in a rigorous, sophisticated way, you're introduced a whole set of tools that really help you understand yourself and others. In a way that allows you to see the depth and scope of all that goes into a moment like this. Like, you and I are sitting here talking to each other in this room with these microphones. Right. All of that has so many humans. So. Right. And so the microphones. Like. Is this about religion? Probably not. But. But there's kind of a. An institutional transfer of knowledge around the production of audio technology that goes into this. That actually really has its roots in ways of organizing human beings that have deep religious. Sure. [01:04:27] Speaker A: Well, don't undersell the fact that, like, we are, with the meat of our throats, producing sound that is being converted into electricity. Electricity that's being recorded. Like, there's a metaphysical magic to that. [01:04:38] Speaker D: Right. And there's. Yeah. And the experience of all of that and all of, like, this moment right here is shaped by so much more than what's in this moment. And there's some level at which, like, that in itself, I think, is valuable. Right. Having that recognition is valuable. Having that recognition is part of what is necessary to produce in us the humility we need to be good thinkers. The humility we need to be good workers. And it's not. It's a different kind of humility. It's not a humility that's a humiliation. [01:05:08] Speaker A: Right. [01:05:08] Speaker D: Yeah. Okay. It's a humility that is also confident in itself. And it's confident in itself because it begins to understand the way we present knowledge to the world. The way we present knowledge to ourselves is always provisional. Right. I think at the end of the day. And doing that. I've struggled for years with the initial foray into religion for most students is a World Religion Survey. [01:05:34] Speaker C: Right. [01:05:35] Speaker A: Which is how we do it at acc. [01:05:37] Speaker D: Yeah. It's sort of. When I was younger, I was very burned on that. Right. And part of it is I felt like it wanted to emphasize content too much to me. Right. It was just. And it created what I remember my professor, Richard Wentz, described in one of our seminars as the kind of zoo approach to the study of religion. Like, you're walking through. Oh, yeah. Here. Are these Hindus. Aren't they so clever? Here Are these Muslims, aren't they interesting in the way do they do this and that? And so it's kind of like going through the zoom, looking at all the exotic animals with the safety of. With the safety. Yeah, exactly. And it can be that way. Right? It can be that way. But I also think that kind of scope of survey, if you understand that your good job is not to, to get mastery of all that, but to just expose yourself to the complexity is there is part of what contributes to that humility and that ability to operate within a world that's much bigger than you. I mean, I think like, if we think about all this, we can't know what makes all of this at once that brings us to this moment. So how is that valuable? Part of the way it's valuable is the way it just shows us what else besides the two of us goes into this moment. Right. And in that exploration we do learn technical details that become important for how we operate in the world. Yeah. [01:07:03] Speaker A: Well, I think you've done a really wonderful job of describing through the narrative of your own experience how this operates in both the most private of ways and the most public of ways. Yeah. And I think that if that's not a good sales pitch for are taking the field seriously, I don't know, would suffice. [01:07:23] Speaker D: It's interesting. It was, you know, thinking of that public and private like I. I've been thinking about partly because I was talking to Ted, who, who works with me on the Great Questions initiative, and that broader sense of, of thinking about pedagogy around discussion based learning. Right. That like we get a lot of value from creating classrooms where students are set in conversation with each other. Yeah. And to some extent we get out of their way and mostly model what it is to be a good conversant. But we were talking about some. Something else that ended up talking about. In our Great Questions seminar. We have a reflective journaling exercise every week. I was thinking last night about this relationship between on one hand, having the very public exposure of your ideas in conversation with others in the classroom and the very private exploration of our ideas in a journal that is read by you and your professor. It was out of a conversation where I was talking about how important because we were looking at exercises for faculty actually around reflective journaling for a fellowship we're running. And we were trying to figure out should these journals be blog style or should they be private. Yeah. And I was advocating for the privacy because of the value of that privacy. I see. For students in the seminar. Right. Which you know, is where we. We end up deciding. But, you know, when you say that, I think part of it is that. That play between a very private experience of the knowledge in the world and a very public. Yeah. Kind of external experience where you have to give account for that. That account you give, and that goes back to that sense of what is knowledge. Right. The justification that account is valuable because to some extent, it helps you review your experience and see what's most important there. [01:09:25] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:09:26] Speaker D: Right. But it's not the experience. Right. If I know how to get to a town. Right. If I know how to get to Larissa, you asked me how to get there, and I've been there, and I give you that explanation. I give you that justification for how I know how to get there. What's valuable for me in that is that I'm reviewing. Right. I'm kind of re. Narrating for myself that experience. But the true value is having the experience to be there to re narrate. Does that make sense? No, it does. It does. [01:09:54] Speaker A: And I think it's another really delightful illustration of how something. A decision that you might make in a more superficial way here, the decision to either set an assignment up as a blog post or as a journal. [01:10:08] Speaker D: Right. [01:10:08] Speaker A: That could be made from all sorts of lenses. I might think of it as an instructor simply in terms of my own convenience, what I think students would be most likely to engage with. Those are certainly ways we could think about making that decision and setting the course up. But you're demonstrating in real time how you can actually connect this to a far wider and, for lack of a better word, deeper range of considerations that get at the real heart, I think, of what we're trying to invite our students to do. [01:10:35] Speaker D: Yeah, absolutely. [01:10:36] Speaker A: Well, I appreciate you sharing your time, and I think that folks who have taken the journey with us over the last hour think and have a better sense of what goes into being a scholar. [01:10:47] Speaker D: Yeah. [01:10:49] Speaker A: To being not just scholars in an academic sense, but being willing to bring what they might learn in a course like yours to bear on their own experiences and privately product life. Thanks, Brian. [01:11:00] Speaker D: Thank you.