All of the resources paint a beautifully fluid picture of faith and religion. 

I loved how Saffron Mustafa chooses how to express her faith and how she keeps re-interrogating and re-inventing how she sees herself within it. Not being religious myself I find it fascinating that someone would choose a specific religion or convert to a faith. So it’s not always about learned customs that are passed down but a choice and a belief in values.

My grandparents were Protestants and went to Church every Sunday and growing up I used to see Christianity as a rigid entity of rules. 

I always understood the underlying longing for meaning, the values and also the grounding nature of the community around the Church that gave my grandparents so much support. On the other hand I have seen the separating nature of religion in them too. For example I only learned when I was about 16 that I had an uncle who was not talked about and never attended any family gatherings because he is gay.

I think that religions have so many valuable lessons and contributions to society but what we see perpetually portrayed in the media are stories of hatred and division. 

The resources on the Religion, Belief and Faith identities UAL website are very thought-provoking. It is a great collection of projects that interrogate religious and spiritual beliefs that can serve well as a basis for discussion.

A lot of creative content relating to religion has the stigma that it concerns ‘someone else’ and isn’t relevant to anyone who is of a different or of no faith. Mohammed Ali makes a great point of this in his interview regarding Religion & Art where he says that even though his art is inspired by religious themes it is relevant to anyone in modern society – how we seek knowledge and take ownership of a space to tell our stories (BBC Radio 4 – Religion & Art with Mohammed Ali (2015), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr_YRmDSRW4).

This is especially important in the context of Higher Education for the arts and design as within the curriculum students are asked to choose a lot of their own research context. We ask them to invest parts of their identities, personal history and intimate thoughts into their design process. Through their work we want to see who they are and how they see the world. 

I find it astonishing that 50% of UAL students identify as religious (Interview with Mark Dean, Higher Power: Religion, Faith, Spirituality & Belief, 2017, p.25) but that in 7 years of teaching there I don’t remember any of my students ever creating a project that was deeply based around religion. Sometimes religion is touched upon, interrogating elements like islamic patterns and buddhist concepts for example, but overall it seems to be avoided. Religion is certainly not something I have put much though into within my teaching context. A lot of food for thought.

Maybe in order for students to trust the space that the university and we as teachers create for them we need to be as open as we ask them to be. Open, respectful and curious that is. Maybe when we ask our students to share about themselves we as tutors need to equally share a part of ourselves. And not a funny story but something that moves us.

Religion in Britain: Challenges for Higher Education

I had never thought about how church and state interact, especially with regards to the National Church and how the non-religious bases of society weigh in on church-related issues, so this was a very interesting read!

Putting this into the context of Appiah’s lecture on Creed this underlines again that religion is malleable. 

The section on religion and dissent in universities showed just how much fear and mistrust there is surrounding religions on any scale. Religions foster so much activism that shouldn’t be overlooked or marginalised. There must be an open platform at university, not just as a passive space but an active one that seeks dialogue and explores the creative possibilities of the religious identities around campus.