Expand Your Definition of “Sacred Text” If You Want to Make Connections
When I was a high school religion teacher, we studied the sacred texts of Christianity. We picked apart chapters from Genesis and Exodus, and all four Gospels. We explored themes and meanings, and we did our best to study pericopes under the historical-critical lens of placing them in the context of their time as best as modern scholarship has allowed us to do, as well as inviting the texts to a next-level drama, reading into them to see what they could mean for us now.
Doing this with adolescents in my adult years brought me back to my own adolescent years, when I spent an inordinate amount of time carefully selecting lyrics or quotes to put in my away message on AOL Instant Messenger, or to scrawl in Sharpie all over my Converse shoes. What do these words mean to the author, to the author’s intended audience? What do these words mean to me now? The texts I considered sacred enough in my youth to tattoo onto my footwear did not come from the sacred scriptures of an organized religion.
My students’ eyes occasionally glazed over in boredom when we were studying sacred scriptures. They might not have written lyrics or quotes all over their shoes like I did in 2003, but their Pinterests and Instagrams were full of them. How could I invite them to discover what it means for a text to be sacred without…