Teaching Religion and Upholding Academic Freedom

Abstract

The editors of the JRE collected short essays from scholars of religion in response to a recent incident at Hamline University that made national headlines. Last fall, Hamline University administrators refused to extend a contract to an adjunct professor of art history after a Muslim student accused her of Islamophobia for showing a 14th-century image of Mohammad in an online class. The event provoked intense conversations about issues of academic freedom, religious diversity, the status of contingent faculty, and race. These essays bring together scholarly and personal reflections about the incident at Hamline and what it means for the pedagogy of religious studies.