Thinking about religious thinking

I’ve been reading Dr. Gottlieb’s Ph.D. dissertation, which he graciously emailed to me when I requested for it.  It’s fascinating. He talks about the need for studies not so much on the CONTENT of religious thinking (so much written about that already), but about the FORMS and PROCESSES of religious thinking.  For example:  How different is religious thinking — including, I guess, religious beliefs and knowledge claims — from, say, mathematical or scientific thinking?  In other words, as a judgment domain, how distinct is it from the others identified by Kuhn et. al.:  personal tastes, aesthetic judgment, value judgment, social truths, and physical truths.

I suspect reading Gottlieb will be a defining moment in my research experience.  There’s so much in there that I resonate with and that is quite provocative actually.  For now, I still have that lingering question in my head — or perhaps an insight about to be born — this whole relationship between religious belief, on the one hand, and Authority/Expert Knowledge and Certainty Knowledge on the other.  My hunch is that contrary to my initial guess, it’s Certainty Knowledge that is crucial to a more “sophisticated” religious epistemology, not Authority/Expert Knowledge.

But that, of course, is only a hunch.

The problem with working students

It’s been a while since I blogged because it’s been a while since I thought about my research.

And that, I think, is precisely the problem with working students — which applies to most of the population of graduate students anyway.  We can’t just think about our studies and nothing else.   It takes an entirely different mode to think deeply about teacher beliefs compared to my day job of running a school.  True, the two can feed on each other — as I sure hope they will — but the stage in my life does not have enough room for both the scholar and the practitioner to share the limelight.

So what happens is that given the daily rush of things, the non-stop series of concerns and things that crop up the way they do in the real world, the scholar is elbowed back to the wings, waiting for his chance to be summoned on stage.  The practitioner does his thing, and only when there’s a lull — like a holiday like today — does he concede to bow out and give the floor to the scholar.

Second Thoughts and What If’s…

It ain’t over.  Just when I thought I’ve had enough of it, here I go again, having second thoughts about my research design.  As it is, there are three parts to my data gathering:

(a) I’ll use a survey to determine someone’s epistemological orientation in the six judgment domains (nominal scale).

(b) Then I have a Likert scale to measure religious beliefs, values, and practices.

(c) Finally, I’ll do a semi-structured interview to determine ontology, fallibility, and decidability.

Two Days to Go

No. of words required for the research proposal (for submission on Tuesday):  2,000

No. of words written thus far: 0.

Two thousand words with two days to go.