Chapter 5: Feminist and Liberatory Voices in Islam and Christianity: Teaching Diversity Within Religious Faith

In her first high school teaching position, Esther helped build upon and implement a humanities curriculum at a private school in Seoul that was quite explicitly atheist. Students were asked to leave their faith at the door of the classroom and to critically examine the claims made by authors such as Jean-Paul Sartre, who famously argued against the existence of God. Two years later, she developed and taught a world history curriculum at a conservative, evangelical Christian school in California that often asked students to view history through their lens as a Christian. Religion was no less present and no less deeply felt in the classroom in Seoul than it was in California. In spite of or perhaps because of several teachers shutting down any talk of faith in their classrooms, her office hours in Seoul were often filled with tearful students facing crises of faith, “What am I supposed to do with what I’m learning in school and what I’m learning in Catechism class? They both sound so right to me.”