This session examines how religious traditions are taught, learned, and embodied in contemporary spaces beyond formal classrooms, including temples, museums, and public urban streets. The session explores how participation, material culture, ritual reenactment, and spatial design function as powerful pedagogical frameworks. Moreover, the session invites scholars and educators to rethink what counts as “teaching religion” by attending to embodied learning, relational mentorship, affective experience, and community-based pedagogy in secular and pluralistic contexts.
This paper examines how Buddhist youth programs at Hsi Lai Temple in Southern California function as sites of experiential religious education for second-generation Asian American adolescents. Drawing on ethnographic research with 22 youth participants and 7 program leaders, the study explores how volunteering, peer relationships, ritual participation, and community activities serve as pedagogical processes through which Buddhist values are embodied and transmitted. Rather than relying primarily on formal doctrinal instruction, these programs cultivate learning through participation, relational mentorship, and everyday ethical practices. Using the Buddhist concept of the Five Skandhas as a theoretical lens, the paper proposes a pedagogical framework that highlights the roles of environmental learning, role modeling, and linguistic transmission in shaping identity formation. The study contributes to broader discussions of experiential learning and demonstrates how temple-based youth programs function as important environments for teaching Buddhism beyond the classroom.
In a secularizing society, art museums offer an accessible and low-stakes environment for diverse public audiences—particularly K-12 and university students—to learn about Asian religions. Among these, Buddhist art has had the broadest geographical reach. This paper examines the ways in which select high-profile museums present one of the most vibrant and dynamic facets of Buddhist visual culture, that of the Himalayas and Tibet. It will examine radically different displays of Tibetan artworks at major institutions across the United States, from gilded sculptures against austere, deep gray walls, sparsely exhibited under dramatic lighting, to vivid, intricate, and densely populated shrine room reconstructions. In the process, this comparative study will closely consider the experiential and pedagogical impact of gallery displays and their accompanying didactics, shedding light on various attempts to elucidate one of the most pervasive yet intellectually challenging schools of Buddhism in the United States today.
In Mircea Eliade’s seminal work The Sacred and the Profane, he notes that religious [humans] “experience two kinds of time: the profane and the sacred” (104). The repetition of a ritual or the “cosmicization” of a space is to get closer to the gods (32). Is this possible in contemporary and public spaces? What of helping the sacred erupt in profane spaces?
For four years, the lifelong formation department of a Chicago-based seminary has partnered with The Way of the Cross, a non-profit in the historically Mexican neighborhood of Pilsen in Chicago. The event mobilizes hundreds of volunteers and thousands of participants for Via Crucis, a mile-long re-enactment of the stations of the Cross.
This paper uses Via Crucis as a way to explore this question: what can we learn about public religious practice and nontraditional theological education in the face of dwindling traditional church communities and seminaries?