Professor Schaefer took members of his Penn Global Seminar, "Sacred Stuff," on a tour of the UK to sites such as churches and stone circles.
Sacred Stuff explores religion in the material world through interaction with spaces, artifacts, bodies, monuments, color, design, architecture, and film, reading classical and contemporary theories of how religion relates to things. Sensory experience—what a person can smell, see, and touch—influences their perception of the world, some theorists argue.
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The Penn Global travel component fit in with the central [tenet] of Sacred Stuff, Schaefer says. “You can teach, and you can read, and you can explore, and you can even look at pictures of things, but you are missing something if you’re not physically present for the thing that you’re studying, if you’re not physically present for the space itself, for the object itself, for the experience itself.
“That was really borne out by the process of going through the trip,” he says. “The students powerfully resonated with having done a lot of the background reading and having prepared themselves to think about these things in a very rich and detailed way but then actually physically, bodily encountering these places that we’d read about: these churches, these colleges, Stonehenge. I think it was clear to them what was missing when we were just studying it from our classroom in Philadelphia.”