HIC Sunt Dracones (“Here be Dragons”): Global Cartography, Transnational Pedagogy, Religious Formation, and Learning

Abstract

Religious learning within the currents of global cultural flows necessitates risky movements into terra incognita—be they unknown internal landscapes of the mind and heart in religious knowing, or external territories of culture, ideas, and the politics of identification. Drawing on insights gained from three seminary-sponsored “travel study seminars” to Western and American Samoa, Malaysia and Vietnam, and India, this article picks up on the challenge posed by “pedagogies of contextualization” (Foster et al. 2006). Using “context” as “method,” Foster's pedagogies of contextualization as an evaluative framework, and James Loder's “transformational logic” as a guiding hermeneutic for understanding human learning, the article maps out certain epistemological dispositions and pedagogical practices that seem generative for the work of global/transnational religious knowing and learning.