c. 1997 Religion News Service

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. _ There is only one required”text”for Harvard University professor Diana L. Eck’s”Religion in Multicultural America”course. But it’s not a cumbersome tome of sacred scriptures or demographic profiles. Nor does it require hours of page-turning or index-thumbing. All students need to do is point, click and _ perhaps _ learn.

Eck, the chair of the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard, has created a new multi-media CD-ROM she hopes will enliven the often stuffy _ and sometimes controversial _ study of religion in colleges, universities, high schools and even houses of worship.

The CD, titled”On Common Ground: World Religions in America”(Columbia University Press), is the result of a three-year effort by the Pluralism Project, a research organization funded by the Lily Endowment to examine ways religious diversity is affecting America.

It is also the most recent stage of Eck’s personal academic journey through religious diversity _ a journey which began in her hometown of Bozeman, Mont., continued in Benares, India, and back to America, where she has found the panoply of world religions to be increasingly present and vocal.”Pluralism is an achievement, it’s not just a given, and it requires relationship, it requires engagement around a common table, so to speak, of our civic society,”said Eck.

Users of the CD can surf through three major sections. In one,”A New Religious Landscape,”they can choose from 18 cities and regions to learn about the community’s religious diversity listed by practice center location _ church, mosque, temple.

Fifteen religions are profiled in the”America’s Many Religions”section, including Baha’i, Jainism, Zoroastrianism and Buddhism.

The”Encountering Religious Diversity”section contains photographs and documents tracing America’s journey from a primarily Protestant country to a largely pluralistic nation.

Each of the sections are replete with explanatory texts, movies, audio commentaries, songs and photos. Eck’s voice introduces each of the three major sections. When she uses the CD in class, however, Eck has been known to say smilingly,”Let me interrupt myself there”as her recorded explanation begins.

Eck, 52, studied the Indian city of Benares, a largely Hindu town on the Ganges, for her doctoral dissertation, which she earned from Harvard in 1976. Eck recalls that a decade later, her work as a Harvard professor brought her to a surprising realization.”Suddenly it became clear to me the United States is also a religious nation, and that in all these years, especially in the 70s and 80s, the impact of the new immigration that had begun in 1965 with the new immigration law had begun to affect our society in profound ways,”she said.”I didn’t need to go to India or Indonesia to study multi-religious societies,”she continued.”We were in the process of creating one right here.” So the Pluralism Project was born. In 1994, its first publication,”World Religions in Boston: A Guide to Communities and Resources,”appeared a precursor to”On Common Ground,”which was released Sept. 15.

Eck said there are multiple uses for the CD, but emphasized its educational value for both college and secondary school classrooms and libraries.

College religious studies and American studies departments can use it as a research tool, Eck said, but high school and junior high school social studies classrooms can also benefit from the liveliness of the multi-media approach.”It brings the voices of practitioners of those religions into the classroom, it enables students to both see and to hear from the standpoint of Jews and Christians and Muslims and Buddhists, what it is they do, what it is they believe, what their faith means to them,”she said.

Charles Haynes, a scholar at the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, said there’s”no question”the project has”the potential to wake people up to the importance of religion in the curriculum.” Haynes, who gives workshops to teachers who teach about religion in public schools, said the CD, which contains more than 3,000″pages”of text, provides schools with resources textbooks cannot offer. “We have very little to put into the teacher’s hands,”he said. But, he added, schools continue to face a significant challenge from parents and community leaders wary of religion as an academic subject.”The formal agreement is more widespread than the actual practice,”he said of schools teaching about religion.

However, at least a half dozen junior and senior high schools, both public and private, have already ordered the CD.”It’s just another avenue to pique their interest in learning,”said Valine Jensen, media specialist at Lakeridge Junior High School in Orem, Utah. She said students in predominantly Mormon Orem will benefit from learning about the diversity of religions in America.”What it really does is opens up the world to them,”she said.

Eck, who has authored and edited a number of books, said she had to be convinced about the CD format.”I had to be sort of dragged into the CD-ROM medium for presenting our material, sort of reluctantly, but I do think, having been convinced by my students and colleagues, this was the best way to go,”she said.

Eck, a United Methodist who has worked with the World Council of Churches on interreligious dialogue issues, now says the visual, interactive nature of the CD has proved an invaluable way to teach students that Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Jainism are living right in their midst.”One of the Ten Commandments is not to bear false witness and we continually bear false witness against neighbors we don’t know,”said Eck.”And we don’t know because we haven’t bothered to know or because we have accepted stereotypes of one another that are half-truths or even distortions. The only way not to bear false witness, you might say, is actually to develop real relationships with neighbors.”

MJP END LEBOWITZ