Jay Ladin, in Cross Currents Magazine, writes about how he teaches Emily Dickinson and aims to explore her religious beliefs as they appear in her works.

It’s common for secular academics to assume that religious belief’s adherence to any religious system or ideology�is fundamentally at odds with the open-minded, exploratory enterprise of critical interpretation. That was certainly my assumption two autumns ago, when, as a new member of the English Department of the women’s college of an Orthodox Jewish university, I led a seminar-style exploration of Emily Dickinson’s poems about God. The question of Dickinson’s religious beliefs “what, if any, beliefs she held and what, if anything, her poems reveal of them�has long been a subject of debate among Dickinson scholars. As I expected, the question was of great interest to my students, who had grown up practicing a modern Orthodox form of Judaism. What I did not expect was that these young women, who knew little about poetry, less about Dickinson, and nothing about Christianity or its nineteenth-century New England manifestations, would see so clearly through the tangle of Dickinson’s contradictory portrayals of God and the equally contradictory conclusions scholars have drawn from them. I had assumed that the intellectual habits promoted by traditional religious belief and humanistic inquiry are inherently at odds, that while humanism encourages the exploration of complexity and contradiction, traditional belief encourages the opposite simplification, homogenization, retreat from the messiness of existence into the comfort of tautological projection. But rather than inhibiting their ability to engage with Dickinson’s challenging texts, my students’ lifelong immersion in Orthodox Judaism helped them recognize dynamics at work in Dickinson’s poems about God that my secular approach had obscured.