Abstract

This chapter examines the “civic” in civic engagement, connecting issues surrounding citizenship, including voting patterns and globalization, with the pedagogy of civic engagement. It seeks to understand what civic engagement’s place is in the life of the scholar as well as the participating student, whether civic engagement pedagogy is effective, and when it is effective what teaching strategies contribute to that positive effect. Perhaps what we, in the study of religion, offer to civic engagement activities is not just the doing of them but the interpretation, the storytelling around that affective and ethical engagement that internally unsettles norms. The work of civic engagement, along with thinking and writing about it, is a method and practice through which we give up mechanical notions of right and wrong and enter interpretive communities that necessarily include a variety of people and traditions.