Asynchronous online instruction has become increasingly popular in the field of religious studies. However, despite voluminous research on online learning in general and numerous articles on online theological instruction, there has been little discussion of how to effectively design and deliver online undergraduate courses in religious studies. Drawing on recent research, experiences teaching and learning online, and interviews with colleagues, this paper discusses key principles of effective online instruction. It recommends instructors focus on humanizing their course website, “chunking” their course content, making their approach to the study of religion clear, structuring and monitoring online discussions, prioritizing prompt and constructive feedback, and making course material relevant to learners.

This article discusses an experiential teaching method that uses secular activities that are simple, accessible, and analogous to religious practice in order to facilitate comparative religious study. These "analogous activities"for example, social rituals, stillness, yoga, a social media fast, singing, nonviolent communication, and mindfulness meditationprovide a third point of reference that allows students to pivot between their understanding of religion and those of practitioners and scholars of religion. Experiential learning can be quite successful if deliberately sequenced to allow students to encounter a series of interpretive frameworks and structured with prompts and parameters that encourage reflection and critical analysis of their experience. In my course engaging in analogous activities not only impacted students' understanding of Asian religions, but also led them to question two previous assumptions: first, that religious beliefs were more important than religious practices, which is particularly problematic in regards to Asian religious traditions that place more emphasis on orthopraxy than orthodoxy, and second, that religion was something separate from one's everyday or lived reality. KEYWORDScomparative study of religion, experiential learning, introductory courses, lived religions, religious practice 1 With gratitude and thanks I would like to acknowledge all of those who helped me in the writing and editing of this paper, especially

This article presents a comprehensive review of the literature on teaching in Buddhist Studies within a framework of backward design, which begins by identifying our learning goals, then determining evidence of learning and planning course activities to facilitate such learning. It identifies big ideas in Buddhist Studies and transferrable skills that could serve as learning goals for our undergraduate courses. Finally, it concludes by suggesting future avenues of research about Buddhist pedagogy in the field of scholarship of teaching and learning.

This paper explores structural similarities between playing a digital game and experiencing grief. The digital game Mandagon evokes a sense of loss through its game environment of grey mountainous landscapes, broken wooden scaffolds, and Tibetan temples and prayer flags in states of disrepair. It elicits feelings of disorientation and dependency as players repeatedly fall from scaffolds but ascend by using lifts or finding air bubble streams underwater. It encompasses terrestrial, corporeal, and cosmic crossings as players move through air, land, and water, as they neither inhabit nor encounter a human body, and they cross various cosmic thresholds through the course of the game. For players struggling with grief, it validates and normalizes feelings of emptiness, loneliness, and vulnerability in the wake of death and loss.

Divination has been a pervasive phenomenon throughout Chinese history, but scholars have tended to focus on indigenous divination practices and overlook Chinese Buddhist ones. Scholars that have attended to Chinese Buddhist divination have largely debated the extent to which it derived from indigenous Chinese or Indian sources. This article advocates a different approach for future studies -one that focuses on the way in which practitioners of divination viewed themselves, their divinatory practices, and their reasons for practicing divination. It illustrates this method with a case study of an eminent Chinese Buddhist monk named Ouyi Zhixu (1599-1655), who viewed divination as a diagnostic tool to determine his karma and prescribed repentance rituals for redressing such karma.