You Are Here: Practicing a Hermeneutic Process in Interfaith Learning

In teaching interreligious and interfaith studies, I always hope that students will carry their knowledge and skills into the wider world. Probably nothing that I teach has made that trek more often than a hermeneutic process that students learn in the first week of class and then apply throughout the semester in class discussion, case studies, site-visit logs—and, as they tell me, conflicts with roommates, courses in various disciplines, and conversations over the dinner table. I’d like to propose a brief presentation on this process for this year’s interactive workshop. The process, called in class “the hermeneutic circle,” aims to foster an inclusive environment and to help students identify and move past stereotypes, practice intellectual virtues, and become more aware of their learning (metacognition).

The circle has six steps: a starting point, first responses, self-reflection on my responses, understanding (including listening with empathy and asking with curiosity), reflection on what I’ve learned, and deciding what’s next—all leading to a new starting point. The circle begins with each student’s starting point regarding what we’re about to engage, whether the course as a whole, the meaning of the word “religion,” or a particular religious tradition. This starting point is holistic, comprising everything a learner brings to an encounter, consciously or unconsciously: feelings, assumptions, past experiences, questions, knowledge, and things they’ve heard that may or may not be true—frequently including, at our Catholic women’s college, TikToks from Orthodox Jewish women. Acknowledging starting points can promote an inclusive community, since each person’s perspective will contribute in a distinctive way to the conversation ahead. It also lays the groundwork for each student’s learning process. As the Committee on Developments in the Science of Learning explains, “There is a good deal of evidence that learning is enhanced when teachers pay attention to the knowledge and beliefs that learners bring to a learning task, use this knowledge as a starting point for new instruction, and monitor students’ changing conceptions as instruction proceeds” (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK223294/).

Asking students to articulate their starting points can be helpful, especially if it’s likely they’re coming to a topic with strong feelings or misinformation. Most often, though, students write about their starting points, but our class conversations begin with students’ first responses: what they noticed in a song, reading, or sacred space; what struck them in a movie; their initial sense of how to respond to a case. For first responses to lead well to learning, they need to fulfill three criteria. The first is honesty: we need to be honest about our responses, including aspects of them we’re not proud of, if we’re going to learn and, perhaps, change our inaccurate assumptions, stereotypes, and unhelpful habits of mind. Second, an initial response is where we begin our encounter, not where we end it; we don’t stop with the hot takes that drive much uncivil discourse. Third, a first response generally teaches us less about what we’re encountering than about ourselves.

In this light, the circle moves from articulating our first responses to reflecting on what our responses reveal about ourselves, identifying the lenses through which we see the world. Students often comment that they make this kind of self-analysis a habit in other courses and daily life. From there, we can move to understanding what we’re encountering. Like many models—the hermeneutic of charity and the hermeneutic of suspicion, Gary L. Comstock’s empathic and critical approaches, Peter Elbow’s believing and doubting—the circle defines understanding as a process in two movements, embodying Arvind Sharma’s claim that “Both the insider and the outsider see the truth, but genuine understanding may be said to arise at the point of their intersection” (qtd. in Amy Braverman, University of Chicago Magazine 97:2 (Dec. 2004), 36). The circle uses the language of intellectual virtues to name these steps: listening with empathy and asking with curiosity. In the last two steps of the process, students reflect on what they’ve learned, comparing their first responses to their current views; and then articulate decisions that follow from this reflection.

I initially present this circle through an example that evokes a lively first-day conversation: how do you react when you’re cut off in traffic? The lesson benefits from neuroscientific research suggesting that people are reluctant to change their minds—that is, to learn—when faced with facts and logical argument. By using a mundane example, abundant honest input, and shared laughter, the example helps students connect the skills we’re learning in our class to daily life in and beyond college. Since the example is drawn from The Book of Joy by the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, and Douglas Abrams, it also allows me to preview our conversations about interfaith and interreligious learning.

A significant practical advantage of this hermeneutic process is that it provides a shared, fairly neutral language for responding to students’ initial misunderstandings, including those that seem to express prejudice. In a hermeneutic process, these responses become not failures of learning, but opportunities for learning. I used to flail when a student voiced a stereotype; now, I can acknowledge the honesty of the comment and then, very naturally, point toward the next step, namely self-reflection, and, following that, the step of practicing the virtues of empathy and curiosity. The circle also allows students to observe and assess their own learning, an important component of critical thinking. We begin case studies by writing about our first responses and our self-reflections on those responses. Then, to implement the step of understanding through empathy and curiosity, we follow an analytical template (based on those from Interfaith America and Rachel Mikva’s work at Chicago Theological Seminary) and practice media-literacy skills as we research the issues involved. By the time students present and write up their final proposals, most can articulate clearly how and why their minds have changed, as well as how they’d approach a similar case if they encountered it in daily life.