Religious Panel Discussions
By Christopher Smith
Religion is coming to ACC in the form of diverse and engaging panel discussions hosted by ACC’s Philosophy, Religion, and Humanities department. The department will host three panels this semester, the first on September 10th at 7 p.m. in Eastview Campus room 8500.
“What we want to do is create dialogs that are interesting to the community,” says Grant Potts professor of Comparative Religion at ACC. He hopes the panels will be “interesting to our students in comparative religion but also interesting to the broader range of students at ACC.”
The series began last year with panels on Judaism, Buddhism, Identity, Dissent, and Muslim women in Austin. The first panel discussion this Fall semester is titled “Sacred Story and the Art of Storytelling” and will center around Austin’s own David Thompson who will talk about the power of storytelling.
The storytelling panel on September 10th will also feature two ACC students. Students are included on most of the panels and are usually volunteers from comparative religion classes.
The next event, scheduled for October 15th, will deal with religion and the media, and the final panel discussion is set for November 19th and is titled “Death and Dying: An Interfaith Discussion.” “Sometimes we try to focus in on a particular tradition and get different people in that tradition,” explains Potts. “Other times we try to pick a topic like we are doing this semester and try to find someone who is doing something interesting on that.”
Potts would like the program to become both a resource for representatives of different religions, students, and members of the community and a place where people can come together and dialog because Potts’ believes “it’s good for our greater understanding of ourselves as a community in Austin.”
