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All Truth

On the final day of class last week, I had students read Arthur Holmes’s classic statement on Christian education: “All truth is God’s truth.”

It forced me to try and articulate for my students the truth I felt we had discovered together in our literature and writing courses. I realized that if I began and ended the course with Holmes’s statement, I probably would have had a good litmus test for what to emphasize and omit over the course of the semester. I tend to be so fixated on tactics that I forget to reiterate the deeper reason for the tactics. In other words, I err on the side of teaching students efficiency rather than effectiveness.

If the goal is to discover and learn the truth about the world, we’ll have a different orientation to reading and writing.

The basic premises of a Christian orientation to literature and writing are that:

  1. When we reading and interpret books, we exercise an aspect of God’s image in our lives and find a concrete place to see the gap between ourselves and our maker (i.e. our interpretations are limited and prone to error).
  2. Thus, reading provides us a place to discover truth (facts) and meaning (interpretation) about God’s world. Literature allows us to access those facts and interpretations in a different, and potentially more powerful, way then descriptive prose.
  3. When we write, we engage in a special form of communication that God used to reveal Himself to humanity.
  4. Thus, writing provides a means to more truthfully and faithfully think God’s thoughts after Him.

If I kept coming back to these points and used literature to illustrate them, I would give students a more affective relationship to the idea that all truth is God’s truth. It’s not enough to know or repeat this. This idea should be formative. As I consider that statement’s effect on my life, I will be more able to convey its important to my students so that their own wisdom begins with a proper relationship to God and truth.

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100%

Our university’s ENGL 101 course focuses on writing about literature. After writing about assigned poems, short stories, plays, and a novel, students get to pick the novel they’ll write their final paper about.

In order to let each student share what they learned, I let them present their project to their peers and me on the final day of class. I did make a subtle change this semester. Rather than having the presentation include complex analysis, I insisted it only feature three things: the novel’s title, the project’s thesis, and whether or not the presenter would recommend the novel and why. The recommendation section was my new wrinkle. I wanted to see if students would ride hard for the books they wrote or insist that their classmates stay away.

One of my ENGL 101 sections reveling in their post-presentation freedom…

Do you know how many of my students recommended the novel they read? Every. Single. One. 100%.

From adult classics (Pride and Prejudice) to YA staples (The Fault in our Stars), from romances (Even Now) to dystopian morality tales (1984), from the allegorical (The Shack) to the horrifying (It), the students told their classmates to read whatever book they had. In some cases, students were already reading the book over again. This was their fourth or fifth time through the book.

This wasn’t my doing. I didn’t tell them they had to like the book the picked. I fully expected the ones who picked high school English staples like The Great Gatsby or To Kill a Mockingbird to find the books boring or ineffective. On the contrary, they found the books more compelling and more insightful.

We’ll see if this necessarily translates into stronger papers, but for today, it didn’t matter. The biggest delight was seeing and hearing their delight.

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Rhetorical vs. Dialectical Books

In the opening chapter of his Self-Consuming Artifacts, Stanley Fish distinguishes between rhetoric and dialectic.

While rhetoric “satisfies” readers that “mirror[s] and present[s] for approval the opinions its readers already hold”, dialectic is unsettling for it “requires of its readers a searching and rigorous scrutiny of everything they believe in and live by.” Fish adds that a dialectical work does not simply proclaim the truth “but asks that its readers discover the truth for themselves.”

This made me wonder what the dialectical books in my own reading history had been, works that had challenged the assumptions of my worldview and had motivated me to seek truth in a new way. I came up with short list that follows (note: I’m omitting the Bible, the book of books that stands as the primary lens through which I view the world).

They include:

  1. Cornelius Van Til’s apologetical work, particularly as excerpted and commented on in Greg Bahnsen’s Van Til’s Apologetic
  2. James K. A. Smith’s view of educational formation in Desiring the Kingdom
  3. Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of traditional morality in The Genealogy of Morals
  4. Northrop Frye’s approach to literary criticism (it can be pursued with science rigor) and literary evaluation (it’s worthless) in Anatomy of Criticism
  5. James Baldwin’s scathing look at the complicity of the Christian church in America’s troubled history with race in The Fire Next Time
  6. C.S. Lewis’s representation of academic moral cowardice in That Hideous Strength
  7. David Foster Wallace’s examination of addiction and depression in Infinite Jest

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Asking Questions

Last week, I had lunch with a colleague. As we parted, he said, “I enjoyed this, but next I have to ask you questions. It felt like you were interviewing me.”

This morning, I arrived to class 15 minutes early, and I had a ten minute conversation with a student about her two brothers, her dad’s motorcycle fascination, her summer job as a lifeguard, and her athletic injury. In the other five minutes, I discovered a a student had been playing Carole King’s “It’s Too Late” on repeat.

At lunch, I asked questions of two other friends between bites of food, discovering that one had taught Spanish in public high schools for 16 years and another had been a youth minister at a church plant in New Zealand.

During office hours, I recorded an interview with a senior English major about her honors project.

This, apparently, is one of my daily practices.

After lunch today, my friend asked me why I ask so many questions. I replied that so often, people never ask someone else how they’re doing because they just want to talk about themselves. I decided I would be the outlier and try to address that imbalance. I like hearing about how others are doing.

During the interview today, I was particularly engaged. I wanted to know what my student would say, and while I had questions to get to, I was never preoccupied with the next question while the student was providing a current answer. It was a real conversation. I left having learned something and, hopefully, I gave the student a chance to articulate some things that would otherwise have gone unsaid.

The only problem is that question asking can be a way of hiding. I can ask questions for selfish reasons: because I don’t feel like talking or feel like I don’t have anything smart to say or because I want to be seen as a good question asker.

The way I know my question asking is doing some good is if I’m not thinking about the person I’m having a conversation with more than myself. I pray have more opportunities like today to exercise this habit: informal conversations with students, longer conversations with colleagues from different disciplines, and celebratory interviews with budding scholars. I also pray that I help my interlocutors feel heard, and that when it’s time for me to open my mouth, I add something to the conversation.

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Cognitive Overload

I have to imagine that some comic book writer has already done this: put Superman in a situation where the problem is not any specific challenge but the fact that he has to be three or four places at the same time dealing with equally difficult challenges. For all of his strength and speed and nigh invulnerability, he’s not omniscient or omnipresent. How would his ability to fly get him out of a situation where he has to stop three bombs from going off when they’re in opposite parts of the world? He can’t do it all himself, and how does he decide what job gets his personal attention?

I bring this up to confess that my greatest weakness is cognitive overload. When I have too much to think about and prioritize, I get paralyzed in inaction or take a whole lot of time to do stuff that keeps me busy but doesn’t help me in getting done what I want to really accomplish.

I do this by starting twenty books at the same time or seizing up when picking a new one or not working on substantive writing projects because it’s so much easier to start a new one or revise old ones.

This isn’t just about work either. If I could just be a dad or husband, things would be so much easier. The fact that I have to be both and then balance those responsibilities with my professional life fills me with stress.

When I feel like this, I come back to a couple of verses:

The first is Matthew 6:33: “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”

The second is Luke 10:42: “…but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.”

I pray that in any given moment, I will have the courage to seek God’s kingdom first, to do the one thing that is necessary, and to seek others’ good before my own.

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Description and Practice

I’ve been playing pickup hoops this academic year, and it’s been a blast. A colleague in the English Department was the one who talked me into playing, and one of the most enjoyable parts of the Tues/Thurs games is our inevitable text exchange about our respective performances that day and the games’ other points of interest.

Confession: I haven’t picked up a ball outside of these Tues/Thurs games. I run during the week, so I show up ready to burn some calories and play as well as I can. Over the course of the year, I’ve gotten better but I still play more unevenly than I would have hoped.

This wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but I find that I’m still replaying games in my head from the previous day, and as I ramp up to the noontime games the following day, I’m constantly thinking about how I can improve that day.

Today, I tell myself, I’m going to work on passing (no turnovers) or on help defense (rather than over-helping) or driving to the rim (instead of settling for jump shots).

I can describe those things to myself in my head all I want and even get feedback on them from my colleague, but the only way to improve is to actually play.

I’m encountering something similar in my writing courses this semester. I’ve given students the better part of a month to work on their final papers, projects that demand they choose their own novel and generate a research paper about them. I’ve given them lots of class time to work, and I’ve given them open-ended quizzes to keep them accountable.

At first, I asked for 150 words describing what they had done on their project since the last class. The point here was to have them summarize what they were reading, survey the criticism they had found in their initial research, and give them a space to ask questions about the direction their project was taking.

Now that we’re getting close to the end, however, I had them switch from description to writing that could actually end up in the paper. No more telling me about what they worked on. Instead, I want them to show me what that work has led to by writing a body paragraph as the day’s assignment. All of them struggle with this, but the practice is worth it because it forces them to apply the things they’re supposed to be working on outside of class. At some point, commentary and description are just ways of hiding. Just as my commitment to getting better at basketball will come down to whether or not I want to ever shoot outside of the two hours I play a week, so too will their commitment to improving their writing come down to their practicing output (i.e. actual body paragraphs) than recording input (i.e. a description of what they’ve done).

As I enter the summer, I will be thinking more about how to balance description and practice for my students so that they can apply what they’ve learned and then get some post-game commentary that helps them know how they can improve their performance. The answer is more practice, punctuated with helpful description.

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Writing to Remember

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

From Billy Collins’s “Forgetfulness”

At the beginning of the semester, my ENGL comp students had to memorize a poem. While some struggled, all of them tried, and many of them recited their selected poems perfectly, everything from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 to Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.”

Yesterday, we read the above lines from Billy Collins’s poem out loud, and I asked them to take 30 seconds and write down one line from the poem they had memorized in January. Only half of them could do it.

We did this exercise as a way to explain why I had given them a reflective essay for their final exam. For this exam, students have to reread something from one day of class earlier in the semester. Depending on the day, they could reread a short story by Jhumpa Lahiri, an act from Macbeth, or some chapters from Mother Night. Their task is to then reflect on how the second time through compared with the first: whether or not what they got out of the reading changed (or didn’t) and how they altered their reading methods and to what effect.

I told them that given the fact that their memory could be spotty (as demonstrated by the fact that some of them had already forgotten a poem they had tried to memorize just ten weeks earlier), they should plan on writing about something they had already written a paper on. If they wrote their first paper on Lahiri’s story “The Third and Final Continent” they should think about rereading it. Why? They already have the paper as a testament to what they had gotten out of it the first time. It makes it a whole lot easier to tell how the second time through it had changed (or not changed) things.

The students are telling the story of their semester in this assignment, and it’s powerful to see them exercise their memories through their writing even as they use writing to jog their memories.

Yes, I hope they’ll see how they’ve grown as a reader and writer over the semester, but the other takeaway I hope they’ll get is that writing is a powerful way to remember. To use Billy Collins’s simile, writing is the phone service that allows you to get ahold of your memories when they’re in a Brazilian fishing village.

I’ve got a file in Dropbox with my daily prayers from every day since the end of 2016. It’s an amazing time machine, better even than a diary, because it reminds me of conversations with God: a whole heap of gratitudes, requests that have been answered for others as well as myself, and the scriptures that helped me hear God’s voice in response to my petitions. I never wrote the prayers down to have something to remind myself of that particular day’s events. I always did it to focus myself in the moment. But now that the past two years have gone by in a blur with significant changes in my personal and professional life, it’s amazing to have that repository available. I hope my students start building one like that too.

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Conversation Piece

At this time a year ago, I was finishing up my final year at Charleston Southern University. Because I had accepted my new gig at Southern Wesleyan in March, I had a month to say goodbye to everyone who had made my time at CSU so special. This included not only colleagues but students too. Before I left, I sent the students who had meant something to me an email asking for a conversation piece. It said this:

Before I hoof it up I-26 to the upstate (it’s happening this week!), I wanted to ask you for something to remember you by: a particular poem, song, novel, video game, graphic novel, tv show, movie, food type product—you get the idea—that you think I should check out but that I either don’t know exists or haven’t made time for. Some of you have already given me elaborate playlists, and now particular songs from Hamilton and Fall Out Boy’s Mania are inextricably connected with you forever and ever Amen. This is a good thing! I wouldn’t have listened to either of them without the two of you, tbh, and I wouldn’t have it any other way!

You each will be in my prayers, and I will do my dead-level best to keep up with you. Commiserating over the too-good-to-pass-up deliciousness of Market Pantry Fiddle Faddle will be an excuse to say hey. (Note: I don’t know if Target makes good fiddle faddle. That’s just a made-up example, but you get the kind-of point, right?)

This week, I made my way back through some of the emails and listened to the song below that had been recommended from one of my fave non-English major students. It gave me an excuse to pray for the student, reach out and say hello, and give thanks that I get to do what I do for a living, where an ongoing personal connection can be made over books and writing and education and discipleship. I’m blessed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0345Ls4IJf4
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Asking the Question

How can I help?

What can I pray for?

These are just two questions I’ve asked my students repeatedly over the past two weeks, and I’ve been bowled over by the answers I’ve received.

Yes, they want help with writing. Great. That’s what I’m here for.

But they also have real prayer concerns that come from places of pain and guilt and shame.

The two are not unrelated. I am asking them questions because I’m teaching them how to read and write more effectively. My ethos as a Christian comes from my ability to show Christ to them through our shared coursework.

My students’ concerns are bigger than the course, however, and when I ask a spirit-led question and have the God-given patience to listen, I am right where God wants me to be.

I can’t address every need I here, even if it is more about writing than it is someone’s life. I know who can though. I know that He hears my questions too.