Reflections on Wolfart, Challenges to Religious Literacy, and Course Design.

Despite its recent prominence as a rationale for the academic study of religion, Professor Wolfart shows both that "religious literacy" has been poorly defined and that little evidence has been adduced for its positive effects. Yet the institutional and social pressures that have led some to embrace religious literacy as a positive argument for the academic study of religion persist, and the essay offers no alternative conception of the broad goals towards which collegiate education about religion should be directed. It is worth considering, therefore, whether some of the flaws with religious literacy as an educational approach might be remedied. In particular, this response proposes that the yawning gap between the abstract goal and the fact that in the U.S. most undergraduates will take only a single course in the study poses a challenge of course design. Carefully designing courses for religious literacy might diminish the imprecision in the concept and provide more tangible evidence of what religiously literate students might be able to do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]