ABSTRACT
Telling stories about animals in places can therefore offer faculty and students another way to connect to the places. A number of students also noticed similarities between how the animals they were paying attention to engaged with their meditation place and how the student was doing so. Specifically, in all three of the courses, people adopt a comparative religious and cultural approach, focusing especially on traditional Native American and Christian thinking about place and animal. By assigning contemplative practices within the context of courses in comparative religion, people hope to show the students that one can both be a practitioner of and a scholar of religion. To maximize their effectiveness at reinforcing course content, people have the students complete the meditations during periods when the people are reading related material.
