In graduate school I attended faculty senate meetings along with many other spectators. At one meeting a famous professor challenged somebody even more famous, asking him if he really understood deconstruction. “Understand it? I haven’t even taught it,” was the response. That’s when I discovered how professors learn a new subject. Get a textbook and teach it, and try to keep a page ahead of the students.
All that was a good thing to know when, ten years later, a dean called me into her office, put down her newspaper and told me that I was going to be teaching religion. I explained that I knew nothing about the subject, except that God was three persons, a father, a son and a holy spirit, some kind of identity crisis. And then He sent Himself down to be crucified by the cops.
She sent me out to buy a survey text. That's how I became a professor of the desert religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) and Greek and Norse stuff and Buddhism and Hinduism and others. I learned that the Yazidi did not eat lettuce, which strongly recommended them to me. Only a fool eats lettuce. I became religious, apparently. But students found the course disappointing. The text did not even try to answer the obvious if simple question that has mattered most for ten thousand years: which God is best?
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