Category: Discipleship

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Teaching Statement for 2019

As I enter the new year, I have tried to articulate my teaching purpose. Here is as concise a statement about who my courses are for, who I will focus most on helping, and the promise I make to those students.

My courses are for people who believe words matter and our God-reflecting imagination rivals reason in its power.

I will focus on people who want to connect—to God and others through the power of words— and grow—in their ability to interpret and communicate what they’ve interpreted.

I promise that my courses will help students get closer to God and others. They are about discipleship. The ability to read and write well draws you closer to the God who made you and the people who were made in God’s image.

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Lit Eval

A responsible reader will 1) grant that values always inform the act of reading, 2) attempt to put Christian values to work in his or her reading, 3) consider the purpose and point of view of the text, and 4) realize that texts may be immoral in other ways than by using profanity and sexual explicitness.

From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith

These are Susan Gallagher and Roger Lundin’s guidelines for evaluating work in a Christian way that neither discourages reading something just because it has an immoral act in it nor dismisses ethical perspectives in favor of a work’s aesthetic achievement.

Two cases in point…

In my Intro to Lit course, I teach Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night. The former is an example of a work filled with explicit violence that never gives us a sense that the text supports what’s being represented. Macbeth is not completely irredeemable, though he tries to act like he is, and it would be a perverse reading indeed that says he’s supposed to be praised for killing Duncan, Banquo, and Macduff’s wife and children. John Cox’s article “Religion and Suffering in Macbeth” works out a pretty convincing Christian interpretation of the play.

Mother Night, on the other hand, wants to make a moral statement, but I don’t think it’s central insights can be completely reconciled with Christianity. Vonnegut wants to make the point that everyone can hate and that the worst kind of hate is to believe that God supports your hate. We get all of this filtered through the novel’s conflicted and unreliable Howard Campbell, however. By the novel’s end, he believes that evil is a more ultimate force in the world than good. It’s a grim view that Vonnegut’s authorial comments–“We are what we pretend to be”–cannot wholly ironize. The novel criticizes adroitly, but I don’t think it’s positive view matches anything like Christianity. Vonnegut was a virulent atheist who thought religion encouraged evil rather than stemming it.

Gallagher and Lundin call for me to make these evaluations much more overt as I teach and to model the four steps above that avoid simplistic aesthetic approval or dismissive moral disapproval.

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Christian Texts and Intro to Lit

Texts that focus on Christian topics, or include biblical references or Christ figures, require careful interpretation, not rash conclusions.

From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith

In the quotation above, Susan Gallagher and Roger Lundin insist that like most good interpretation, parsing the relationship between Christianity and a specific piece of literature requires time and care. Below I try to think through how I will demonstrate that time and care in my intro to literature class, specifically in how we read our short story collection by Jhumpa Lahiri.

Continue reading “Christian Texts and Intro to Lit”
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Expanding Horizons

By confining ourselves as a community to reading C. S. Lewis and Flannery O’Connor, extolling T. S. Eliot, and searching for works with Christian messages, we will neglect the bounty of good works and the variety of ways that literature can benefit us.

From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith

In the quotation above, Susan Gallagher and Roger Lundin call on Christian scholars to expand their reading horizons. In this new year, I want to expand my own horizons by simply getting to know my own period of specialization better. When I look at the works I’ve written about for the Conference on Christianity and Literature (which has featured quite a few papers on Lewis and O’Connor), I can only find one from my area: King Lear. This shouldn’t be the case.

I’ve just finished reading Marilynne Robinson’s What Are We Doing Here? and one central thrust of her book is that we should read the Puritans. She argues that we have dismissed a rich heritage because of our prejudices against what Puritans were supposedly like. If we read them wisely, we would find advocates for the kind of liberties we hold dear. This may be where I begin. Yes, I will reacquaint myself with the normal PhD-comp-exam-type works from my area, but I also want to find the poetry, prose, and drama that I missed the first time around.

The literature of the Early Modern Period is God’s plenty. I hope to harvest more of it in 2019.

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Conflicting Interpretations

How do we discover that truth? We discover it by the slow and arduous task of weighing any interpretation against what we already hold to be the truth about the matter in question.

From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith

In the quotation above, Susan Gallagher and Roger Lundin outline a guide for discovering truth when we encounter conflicting interpretations.

The key words in their advice are “slow” and “arduous.”

It takes time to understand a poem, story, or novel before interpreting it. This is where we are first comparing what we’ve read against truth we already know, most likely from scripture or reason or experience or tradition. Then begins the long process of figuring out which interpretations of the work we’ve just read are complementary and which are mutually exclusive.

I can focus on the biographical interpretation of Hamlet (the death of Shakespeare’s child in 1596; the Catholic recusancy of Shakespeare’s father), and this does not necessarily stop me from also interpreting the play’s commentary on education.

As I begin to focus on specific scenes, lines, or characters, however, I will run into mutually exclusive interpretations (is Hamlet’s tragic flaw memory or pride; is the play ultimately Catholic or Protestant in its commitments).

I think it’s worthwhile for my students to see and know the difference between complementary and competing interpretations so I will need to work up examples of these for most of the works we read.

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Two Conversations

In prayer, we have a model for a holy conversation. Calvin writes that in order to experience prayer’s power, we must “have our heart and mind framed as becomes those who are entering into converse with God.” That is, we are prepared not just to share our thanksgiving and petitions with God, but also to listen.

In their book Literature Through the Eyes of Faith, Susan Gallagher and Roger Lundin use a conversation as a model for reading: “Understanding another person or a book is thus not a matter of casting off our own assumptions in order to put on those belonging to someone else. Instead, when we read, we are striving to hear what the other person has said about a subject that matters to us.” That is, we come to a book to have a dialogue, not simply to be passive and be lectured to.

If our traditional model of prayer is a time of simply speaking, our traditional of model of reading is simply listening. Calvin, Gallagher, and Lundin ask us to realize that both practices require an actual dialogue.

In this vein, I am struck by the final metaphor George Herbert uses for prayer in “Prayer (I)”: “something understood.” That word “understood” is not talking about something implicit or a meaning below the surface. The word is Old English in origin, and the “under” actually means “between.” At the heart of our spiritual lives are to be two great loves: for God and for others. We can exercise these loves in conversation–in speaking and listening–through prayer and reading.

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Finding a Balance

As I approach the New Year, here are five areas for which I pray that God will help me find a happy medium.

  1. My commitment to discipleship at home (with my family) and at work (with my colleagues and students)
  2. My input (the things I read, watch, consume) and output (the things I read, teach, and create)
  3. My view of literature as a means for social action and source of delight
  4. My commitment to orthodoxy and my commitment to orthopraxy
  5. My pursuit of glorifying God and my pursuit of enjoying Him forever

The balancing act required for the goals I want to achieve are less quantitative than qualitative. I pray for the emotional and rational discernment necessary to feel and know how to let God work in my life in these areas today and in the days to come.

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Three Ends

Yesterday, I responded to an observation by Susan Gallagher and Roger Lundin about our obsession with origins as opposed to ends. This prompts the question: what are the proper ends of reading literature?

Gallagher and Lundin advocate for three:

  1. Cultivation: the active ordering and structuring of the creation God has given us
  2. Delight: joy found in the
  3. Love: committed and humbling service to God and our neighbors

My courses tend to get atomistic after the first class. We pick up different works and interpret them as specifically as we can for the purposes of developing particular writing / analytical skills, but the ends or purposes of all those readings get lost. As I try to give students a paradigm for interpretation that glorifies God and helps them enjoy him better, these ends will be good hooks for the reading and writing we do.

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Purpose and Origin

For several centuries, however, the emphasis has been shifting from questions of ends to questions of origin. When we seek to explain something, we are no longer likely to ask, “What was the end for which this object has been created?’ but “What was its source?’ To understand something, we tend to want to learn where it has come from and how it works; we think of facts as items to be calculated or explained to help us understand how things have developed.

From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith

In the quotation above, Roger Lundin and Susan Gallagher identify one sign of our culture’s move away from Christianity: we ask for something’s origin instead of its purpose.

The “origins” move is genealogical. My wife and I joke about how literary theory’s constant dictum is “everything is constructed.” What that discussion tends to obscure is the purpose or end of the cultural practice under examination.

As I put together biographical notes for my upcoming literature classes, it’s far easier to find facts that explain the origins of an author’s work. Jhumpa Lahiri was a Bengali immigrant who had academics as parents and spent a key time of her life in New England. This would go a long way towards explaining where the key elements in her short story collection Interpreter of Maladies came from, but it does very little to explain why she wrote the stories in the first place.

In an interview last year, Lahiri commented, “I know that writing is a way of expressing oneself, of communicating. But it’s not made for the reader. Of course there will always be a reader; but when I write I don’t think about that hypothetical person.” Writing, she contended, is “an internal dialogue.” Given the role that interpretation, translation, and just plain old communication play in her collection’s stories, this claim about writing’s purpose can go much further in helping us figure out what her writing is doing than simply providing biographical facts that can be matched one-to-one with details inside the story.

I will take Lundin and Gallagher’s admonition to focus as much if not more on something’s purpose than its origins and will attempt to direct my students to do the same.

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Grades and Sanctification

“This A is not an expectation to live up to, but a possibility to live into.”

From The Art of Possibility

In the quotation above, Rosamund and Ben Zander encourage us to give ourselves and those we teach As. The point is to remove the comparative measurements that too often stifle and paralyze us.

To make a theological analogy, the Zanders encourage us to use grades as an act of sanctification rather justification. Justification of course is “an act of God’s free grace, wherein he pardoneth all our sins,” according to the shorter Westminister Catechism. No amount work on our part will earn us that pardon, and it doesn’t matter what the quality of that work is or how long we do it for. Sanctification, on the other hand, is a process no less of grace “whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God, and are enabled more and more to die unto sin, and live unto righteousness.”

I will be meditating on how this distinction should work itself out in my assessments and the joy, love, and peace that accompany the work of the Spirit in our lives.