Acting Religious: Theatre as Pedagogy in Religious Studies

My passion is embodied learning. Through twenty-five years of teaching Ive learned that students engage with material best when their bodies are active participants in the learning process. I have found this to be particularly true in teaching religious studies and theology. --from the Introduction People are torn by conflict fractured by cultural religious racial and economic divides. Religion has often been a prime motivator for this violence. Classrooms must be places in which we learn to hold differences and commonalities. Classrooms are opportunities to rehearse to practice how we want to live with one another. Religions says Rue are more than ideas: they are lived enacted by human beings in particular ways. And courses in religion need more than a cognitive understanding of central concepts. Rue asserts that students need to viscerally encounter belief religious practice religious imagination and religious experience. Acting Religious a practical handbook maps a new approach that uses theatre to teach religion. For many years Rue has used theatre techniques and plays to introduce students to what she calls the experience of religion showing how theatre makes theological ideas palatable visceral and available. Acting Religious is at once a call to experience meaning and a theatre method to embody it. Experienced and beginning teachers at both college and high school levels as well as religious educators will learn how to use the following techniques in the religion or theology classroom: improvisation characterization memorization script writing performance. From these methods students will be able to engage religious traditions experientially as well as cognitively. Victoria Rue teaches womens studies at San Jose State University. She can be reached at www.victoriarue.com.