My courses approach religion as an academic discipline. Whether studying Christianity or comparing traditions more broadly, I ask students to develop the skills of a scholar of religion: the capacity to observe, analyze, and understand religious phenomena from a third-party perspective rather than a confessional one. This means learning to ask not “Is this right?” but “What does this practice reveal about the people and communities who engage in it?”

In my courses on Christianity, students examine the tradition’s origins in the ancient world and trace how those roots developed into the wide diversity of Christianities that exist today. My comparative courses take a broader view, treating religion and culture as windows into how human communities construct meaning, negotiate identity, and respond to fundamental questions about existence. In both cases, the real work is metacognitive: learning to recognize the assumptions you bring to an encounter with difference and to set them aside long enough to understand another community on its own terms.

These are transferable skills. The capacity to engage thoughtfully with unfamiliar worldviews serves students in any professional or civic context, not only in conversations about religion.