Teaching Resources
This page offers resources for teaching history, religious studies, digital humanities, and related topics using materials from two digital collections: Pandemic Religion and American Jewish Life. Both collections document and preserve responses from different religious communities across the U.S. as they have adapted to the Covid-19 pandemic. The primary sources linked below are accompanied by brief contextual introductions, questions for discussion, and suggestions for further study. By analyzing these sources, students will gain insight into how the pandemic reshaped the lived realities of American religion.
Source #1: Eid Celebration shows the ways in which different religious communities have adapted their holiday celebrations during the pandemic.
Source #2: Capitol Hill Baptist Church v. Muriel Bowser and District of Columbia demonstrates responses to public health directives and reopening plans from religious communities in different areas of the United States.
Source #3: Healing Heartbreak provides a window into how mourning rituals have shifted for different religious communities in the time of Covid-19.
Source #4: Communion & COVID examines how the ritual of the Eucharist has been affected and even adapted within the Christian community during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Students are also welcome to contribute materials to these collections, and many have already done so for class projects or assignments. The collecting form accepts narratives, documents, photographs, videos, audio files and URLs. Student contributions could reflect personal experiences and affiliations, but students are just as welcome to seek out contributions from their network of contacts. This is an opportunity for students to participate in an important, ground-level digital collecting project and to help create an archive of lasting value to future researchers studying the variety of American religious experiences and responses during this time.