What I would like to do is to give you an abbreviated, interpretative overview of the history of the Religion Department as well as I can piece it together from college catalogs, personal accounts, and other incidental sources. There are people in this room who know parts of that history much better than I do, and to them I offer my apologies in advance if I do not get things quite right or if I do not give sufficient attention to certain details. My basic thesis is that the establishment and development of the Religion Department at Oberlin parallels and in some ways mirrors the rise and evolution of the field of Religious Studies in America.

The beginning of the Religion Department at Oberlin occurred for all practical purposes with the arrival of Clyde Holbrook at Oberlin in 1951. Officially, he was charged with reviving the moribund Religion major, which then was functioning somewhat parasitically on courses mainly from the School of Theology. What Holbrook envisioned, or perhaps conceived of once he arrived, was a new approach to studying religion, one that avoided an overtly confessional treatment of religion found in seminaries and Bible departments on the one hand and the psychological, social, and political dissection and reductionistic treatment found in some social sciences on the other. He believed that the academic study of religion could allow for a critical examination of religion, admitting even the possibility that atheists might be right, but also for an empathetic approach to it–recognizing its ennobling and redeeming qualities. This stance became the hallmark of the study of religion at Oberlin, inherited to a certain extent by all of us today, and it also became the prevailing ethos of Religious Studies in America, of which Holbrook was one of the pioneers. One thesis of mine is that this approach to religion, and hence the advent of Religious Studies, arose out of liberal Protestant Christianity, and not from comparative religion or the so-called "scientific study of religion" that appeared in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

In Holbrook’s first three years, he taught most (though not all) of the religion courses in the college. In 1954 he got help with an additional appointment in the Department, and in 1957 with yet another, Ed Long. It was in this period that some of the classic religion courses at Oberlin came on the books: Holbrook’s trademark "Introduction to Religion," in which he laid out his approach in what he identified as the "religious quest" found in Christianity, non-theistic Humanism, Hinduism, and Confucianism; "Life and Teachings of Jesus," one of the most popular religion courses in the history of the college; "Christian Ethics," which eventually evolved into the "Moral Issues" course under Ed Long; and "Modern Religious Thought," for which Holbrook became renowned. (The student rumor was that, when God took the MRT course, he got a B+, and he’s been mad at Oberlin ever since. That’s why it rains so much here!) In the beginning, Holbrook taught everything, but he gradually ceded curricular areas to others as new appointments in the Department came on line. By the mid-1960s much of the curriculum was in place. It was weighted toward Christianity (and its Jewish antecedents), though taught from Holbrook’s distinct non-confessional standpoint. The Christian area was finally consolidated with the appointment of Tom Frank in Biblical Studies in 1964 and Grover Zinn in the History of Christianity in 1966. From the late 1950s, however, Nate Greenberg in Classics contributed a course annually on the "History of Judaism," and the study of Judaism was later expanded, with some course offerings in Islam also, with the establishment of the Judaic and Near Eastern Studies Program in the early 1970s. That program operated outside the rubric of the Religion Department, but many courses were cross-listed.

The establishment of the curriculum on non-western religions was more protracted. If the first phase of the Department’s development, up to the mid-1960s, consolidated the area of western religions, the second phase, up to the early 1970s, expanded the non-western ones. Holbrook was always aware of the importance of having non-western representation in the curriculum, though he never taught it himself beyond a smattering in the Introduction to Religion course. The first attempt to include this in the curriculum came with a course on the "History of Religions" in the late 1950s and on "World Religions" in the early 1960s. But this area was established in earnest when a position was dedicated specifically to Asian religions, occupied by Don Swearer in 1965. Commitment to the non-western curriculum was further expanded with the partition of this position into two in 1970, one on South Asian religions and the other on East Asian. At that point the general shape of the Department was largely set, and continued in this configuration for the next two decades. Areas included Biblical Studies, Modern Religious Thought, Ethics, History of Christianity, South Asian religions, and East Asian religions, with cross-listed contributions from Judaic and Near Eastern Studies. Though there was not parity between western and non-western religions, Oberlin’s curriculum was more expansive than that of the vast majority of Religion Departments in the country. During the following two decades, the most notable change was the reconfiguration of the Judaism position in the early 1980s so that it became a partial appointment in the Religion Department, and also the loss of cross-listed courses on Islam.

The third phase in the development of the Religion Department began in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was marked, first, by the creation of a position in Islam, which in some ways was unfinished business from the second phase, aimed at diversifying religious representation in the curriculum. But what arose at the same time was recognition of the need to include not only other religions but also diverging voices in religions. Hence, the curriculum was expanded to include the African American religious experience, and there has also been a concerted effort in recent years to increase course offerings on women and religion. This shift has occurred in part from the late twentieth-century critique found in all academic disciplines of so-called dominant vs. marginalized viewpoints. One other development in this third phase has been the diversification of the Introduction to Religion course, so that it is now taught in different ways by different people. The Introductory course had in fact undergone some modification over the years, but in the 1990s it has become an untethered forum for diverse issues and many subject matters.

In conclusion, let me make a few comments about trends in the Department over the years. One is that the study of religion has not been driven by a single organizing principle; rather, sub-fields have been defined sometimes by disciplinary approach, sometimes by geographical location, sometimes by historical periodization, sometimes by specific religious tradition. This is true of not only Oberlin’s Religion Department but also Religious Studies nationwide. To outside observers this state of affairs may seem chaotic, but there are adventitious historical reasons that it has unfolded this way. Suffice it to say that Religious Studies as a field is still a work in progress. The second point I would make is that the teaching of religion has changed over the decades because of changes in our student audience. They have gradually gained more awareness of other religions than they had fifty years ago. But many also have less understanding nowadays of the formative religions of our own culture. This situation has forced us to modify what we present in our courses and how we present it.