Discipleship – Page 4 – Education is Discipleship

August 2, 2019

Thursday Reading Log

Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostovesky: I’d never read it before, and our SWU students wanted to tackle it this summer. I’m glad I have an excuse to read it. I’ve read about 200 pages thus far, and it’s very good. The murder is horrifying (as it should be), and I’m already starting to see how Dostoevsky is going to handle its brutal aftermath: through periodic peaks and terrifying depths in Raskolnikov’s emotions and mind.

The Rhetoric of Transformation – Adam Ellwanger: This is a friend’s forthcoming book, and it was a gripping read, high praise for a book destined for an academic press. Ellwanger traces the classical rhetorical term metanoia from a way to describe a linguistic apology to a term that described personal transformation in Christianity to a means to assert the reclaiming of one’s original identity in contemporary secular culture. The final section, where Ellwanger explains what the ramifications of this turn might be for how we think about composition studies, is an absolute haymaker.

Why Liberalism Failed – Patrick Deneen: I continued reading this book, and I found it a nice companion piece to Ellwanger’s book. The biggest attraction and flaw of liberalism, according to Deneen, is the way it privileges the autonomous individual. There are weaknesses in Deneen’s argument. I’m not ready to cede that liberalism, root and branch, is the problem. But Deneen’s arguments force me to come up with compelling arguments for things I considered givens re: my political beliefs.

The Case of the Daring Decoy – Erle Stanley Gardner: The latest novel I’m reading for my Perry Mason podcast, this book is notable for giving Paul Drake a potential love interest, a first for any novel I’ve read. The novels never feature a confession (this one is no different), but Perry’s courtroom means of confirming the murderer’s guilt while in court is quite nice. The television adaptation of this episode took most of its beats from the novel.

July 31, 2019April 19, 2020

How Do You Think Well?

Jacobs, Alan. How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds, 2017.

Alan Jacobs, an English professor in the Baylor University Honors Program, provides hope for those who wish to think more soundly in these contentious times through this short, lively manual on the way we make decisions. Jacobs engages with the experts on the topic (chiefly Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Haidt), pulls specific examples out of the recent past to illustrate his points, and even provides a compelling checklist for thinking well. As Jacobs contends, part of good thinking is merely diagnostic: knowing that you have a thinking conundrum. If you can internalize a few more of Jacobs’s recommended best practices, you’ll be glad you read the book.

July 30, 2019

Why I Believe in God Part 1: Rhetorical Analysis

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be analyzing the rhetoric of Cornelius Van Til’s “Why I Believe in God.”

In the first part of his apology for believing in God, Cornelius Van Til argues that believing in God is necessary because without God we couldn’t understand anything else. He begins his apology for believing in God by bringing up eminent scientists and philosophers who are have recently addressed belief. Jeans and Eddington allow for the possibility of religious experience, and Joad says that evil’s reality forces him to consider the possibility of God’s existence. Van Til wonders if the reader has pondered what happens after death. After all, even Socrates—the wisest philosopher—was uncertain of what would happen after he died. Is there a judgment or might there be a God? How does one know for sure. Asking such questions is a sure sign of intelligence and indicates a desire for you to know why it is you believe what you believe. You want to know what’s real, and asking about God is one way of doing that. Van Til indicates that his belief in God started when he was young and that he knows such an admission will taint his case in the reader’s eyes. He doesn’t agree, however. He will discuss the arguments he’s heard against God since he’s been an adult and why he’s even more positive now that God exists. Both the arguments he makes and the arguments he anticipates his readers will make are premised on God. He compares this state of affair to arguing about air while breathing it the entire time or trying to blow up a gun stand while using the gun stand as a foundation for your guns. Unless the thing you’re attacking existed in the first place, you couldn’t make your attack on its existence.

July 30, 2019

Verse of the Week: Psalm 139:23

Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.
Psalm 139:23

I am anxious and am worried about many things. I am worried about my adequacy as a teacher and scholar. I am worried about my adequacy as a husband and father. I am worried about my adequacy as a child of God.

Yet the solution proposed in the Psalm is not intense self-analysis or reflection. Instead, the Psalmist asks God to search him and, through testing, to know my anxious thoughts.

This, indeed, is a radical kind of pedagogy!

If I am the student, the one who endures the test, then how am I learning if it is God who knows my heart and my anxious thoughts? Wouldn’t it best for me to know them so as to, you know, give them over to God?

The root of a God-centered education might very well be letting go of that need to know our own hearts first.

This week when I feel anxiety, I want my first impulse to be prayer: that God would know my heart and my anxious thoughts and that the Holy Spirit would intercede for me in my ignorance. This semester when I feel anxiety, I want my first impulse to be prayer too so that this semester when my students are afflicted by anxieties, I can with confidence encourage them to turn to God and pray this Psalm as well.

July 27, 2019

First Principles: Teaching Reflection

Every summer I tell myself to just let my courses be. I can keep the syllabus, I reason, but tweak the in-course execution of my overall plan.

It never works, however. As I pray and read and think about what my students struggled with during the previous year, I always end up changing something. This summer was no different: new assignments, new course schedule, and a new assessment approach.

The tension I felt acutely this week was that my focus was supposed to be on living out God’s commandments rather than simply learning about them or passively believing them. What did that look like for me as I put together my assignments and assessment percentages for the new semester?

July 25, 2019

Reading Log

Raised in Captivity – Chuck Klosterman

In his first collection of short stories, Klosterman presents fictional answers to implicit hypothetical scenarios. What would you do if you encountered a puma in an airplane lavatory? How do you communicate through an ad the quantum leap of a new product? Can someone get a little rabid from a rabies shot, and if so, how responsible are they for seeming menacing? What happens when the wrong kind of fans make a song you made popular though the fans seemed to have missed the point of the song? My questions are a bit too specific. Klosterman is interested in how technology and modernity have made us captive to specific kinds of expectations, perceptions, and experiences. The stories, at their best, alert us to our own chains. What’s shocking is that there’s really nothing in here I would classify as spiritual. Let’s say that one thing these stories are about is the way that we need fictional constructs to help us engage the truths of the world, that we would go blind if we looked directly into some of those truths without protective eye-wear. Then what’s the story in here about growing up Catholic or being a Christian or converting to Buddhism? I’m not saying it’s not here, but it seems like that kind of story should be here and it’s not.

The Ghost Map – Steven Johnson

This is gripping narrative of how two men, a doctor and a minister, helped solve the cause of the cholera outbreak in 19^th Century London. John Snow, a doctor, and Henry Whitehead, an Anglican clergyman, collaborated to disprove the miasma theory and locate the source of the deadly outbreak in the water Soho residents were drinking. Johnson’s portrait examines how and why certain kinds of scientific arguments persuade while others fail and how important the marketing of an argument is. For instance, Snow’s two maps of the outbreak were more compelling than any single piece of writing he or Whitehead released to the public. Along the way, Johnson delves into the benefits and vulnerabilities associated with densely populated urban spaces. Snow and Whitehead won a victory for human flourishing in the big city, but Johnson warns we must continue to learn from their example in the era of biological weapons. Johnson’s analysis is indebted to evolutionary theory, and the book’s few mentions of religion reduce it to superstition. Whitehead, Johnson makes it seem, helps solve the cholera plague in spite of, rather than because of, his religious beliefs. What Johnson fails to mention is that one of the reasons Johnson was such a good neighbor to those who were in need was precisely the very real religious convictions he held. What role do spiritual communities play in ensuring the flourishing of the densely populated urban spaces Johnson adores?

Why Liberalism Failed – Patrick Deneen

I’ve just read a couple of chapters, but this book is a really compelling argument that representative democracy—which claims to provide political liberty and human dignity—is the source of the very problems that ail it. I’ve only read the diagnosis yet, not the cure, but Deneen is challenging both conservative and liberal thinkers in this book by going after the greed of the free market, on the one hand, and the disregard for tradition and entrenched forms of community on the other.

July 25, 2019April 19, 2020

The Novel Is A Circus

A novelist is a circus impresario, someone who puts on a grand performance for the reader. The chapters are tents, the characters the circus performers and the narrator a kind of ringmaster. How can you measure one circus against another? For that matter, how can you measure one circus performer against another? What matters is that the audience keeps wanting more, keeps wanting to come back because they sense, albeit dimly, that what they’re witnessing is truly fantastic, something spiritual not just material.

Erin Morgenstern pursues this metaphor throughout her novel The Night Circus. Why night? Probably because the circus is a waking dream, and fiction, Morgenstern’s analogue for the circus, is the mirror image of the daytime and “real life.” In 1870s Victorian England, two magicians challenge one another to a contest via their students. They’ve done this before. The man in gray, Alexander, seems to have won the past few. But now his opponent, who goes by the name Prospero, has his daughter as a student. Alexander claims Marcos from an orphanage as his pupil. Prospero and Alexander set to work training their respective students, and the novel recounts the outcome of their battle.

July 25, 2019

Educational Aspiration: Rhetorical Analysis

In his opinion editorial titled “Aspirational parents condemn their children to a desperate, joyless life,” George Monbiot argues that our culture’s quest for success is actually guaranteeing its opposite. Children are told they can improve their lives, but they are looking at a world that is worse than the one their parents grew up in. Childhood is being stripped from young people as they must begin training for success immediately. Everything from internships in college to getting into the right elementary show how success rather than happiness is culture’s ultimate goal. What makes it worse, Monbiot argues, is that the British government doesn’t seem to care about the mental toll this is taking on the country’s youths. Recent survey results show there is cause for concern. Children are hurting themselves and getting eating disorders more frequently. They feel less secure about their future and have less of a desire to go to school. Monbiot concludes that the very ambition that motivates these children to endure these hardships will rob them of the joy that their material success is supposed to bring.

July 22, 2019

Verse of the Week: I John 2:3

We know that we have come to know Him if we keep His commands.
I John 2:3

To know God is to love Him, and to love and glorify Him is the grand purpose for our lives. In the same letter that declares that God is love, John tells us that we can know if we know God by looking at our actions. Do we keep His commands? Do we love God with everything we have and seek to love others in the way we love ourselves?

This week, I will be using this verse and the questions it provokes to orient my course plans for the new semester. I want to give students the opportunity to do things with what we’re learning. Yes, we will read, and yes, there will occasionally be lectures. My best gauge for their knowledge will not be answers to an exam, however. It will come in the form of practice: note taking, timed writing, revised essays, and multimedia projects.

More than that, I will demand my own participation. I will not just talk about my discipline and its spiritual foundations. I must live them out. I pray that God gives me the grace and skill to do that.