Category: Discipleship

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How to Think: Introduction

I’m rereading Alan Jacobs’s fabulous How to Think this summer because I’m teaching it again in the fall. Below are my takeaways from the book’s introduction. After the break, you’ll find some prompts to help you personalize the takeaways.

  • Thinking is hard. There are tons of ways to get it wrong. That’s why we don’t work at it (much less do it) even though we know it’s important.
  • Thinking is the process that goes into making the decision, not the decision itself. It’s the work we did to come up with the answer, not the answer itself.
  • Thinking is social. We never do it alone, and when we fail to think, we often do it because it’s socially discouraged.
  • Thinking is emotional. Thinking is rational too. It’s just that it’s easy to make thinking one rather than both of these things.
  • Thinking is oblique. That’s why the best way to approach thinking is not by contemplating thinking in itself but by approaching it indirectly.
  • Thinking is ultimately moral because it’s primarily a matter of our wills.
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Writing With Purpose: Five Takeaways

Yesterday, I had the chance to lead a session for Southern Wesleyan’s first cohort of EdD students. My assigned topic was Writing With Purpose, and you can find my worksheet after the jump.

My five big pieces of advice were…

  1. Begin with gratitude–for people, events, and God. Even the monumental task of writing a dissertation can be an occasion for thanks, and you can put the hard and often stressful work necessary into perspective when you begin by giving thanks.
  2. Find joy in your work–I had the students read out loud the answer to the Westminster Shorter Catechism’s question about the “chief end of man.” Yes, we are to glorify God, but we are also called to enjoy him. Joy can be a real part of the work we do.
  3. Define your purpose–Students wrote out their answer to a pretty simple research prompt: “I am studying X…because I want to find out Y…in order to help my readers better understand Z.” Yes, this kind of statement works for providing a 40,000 foot view of their project, but, when adapted, it could also easily apply to a single work session that would give each student a chance to measure their progress.
  4. Share–one of the cohort’s greatest resources are their other cohort members. I had them conduct a short conversation with a partner about their answers to the research prompt to help them see how helpful it is just to take five minutes and try to say out loud what they’re doing to another human being. Each of these students have people in their lives who care about them succeeding. Not all of those people have the ability to respond to the intellectual demands of their project, however. Finding someone you can talk to about your project is invaluable.
  5. Know what it takes for you to do your best work–this can change depending on the purpose. You might read best at home and write best in the office. But you need to know yourself well enough to know the details that are non-negotiable (e.g. you have to write before noon or it won’t get done) and ones you can experiment with (e.g. location).
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The Purpose for the Composition Course

[T]he essential purpose of this course goes far beyond the mere technicalities of grammar and rhetoric. Ultimately, this course engages your deepest needs and interests, your thinking, your feelings, your relationships with other people.

From Modern Rhetoric by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren

What is freshman composition for?

In the very first paragraph of their multi-editioned textbook, Brooks and Warren give the above answer. The purpose of the composition course, in their minds, is to unite a person’s feelings and thought as well as increase that person’s ability to commune peacefully with other people.

These are spiritual purposes, not pragmatic ones. Though Brooks and Warren are not explicit about the spiritual roots of their view, they do not simply reduce language to a tool that can be used to accrue power, money, or personal happiness. There is something metaphysical here, a kind of harmony with one’s self and others, that language affords. This is not a bad way of answering the question, “Why do I have to take composition?” though I would want to know what the assumptions are that give Brooks and Warren the warrant for making this argument.

Like every God-given facet of human culture, language is a means by which to love God and others more fully. Here are the assumptions that undergird the composition courses I teach.

  1. Language demands our attention because it’s part of God’s identity and thus is a crucial part of what it means to be a human made in God’s image. Jesus is called the word, and God reveals himself to us in words through sacred writings.
  2. Language gives us a concrete way of ordering and organizing the world.
  3. Language has rules and can be used correctly and incorrectly.
  4. Language not only can be used to bless and curse but can, upon being used correctly or incorrectly, precipitate blessings or cursings.
  5. Language that communicates truth will stand the test of time.

Language is at the core of who we are, how we know anything, and how we act in the world. Our relationship with language amounts to nothing less than our relationship with the God whose language brought the world into existence.

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Reading Notebook

I’m trying to figure out a way to encourage my students to read and take notes in a way that’s productive. After watching some videos by a high school teacher named Tim McGee, I’m thinking about something like the reading notebook he encourages his students to keep.

McGee’s system asks you to divide each page into two halves: the left hand side for before class and the right hand side for during and after class.

On the left side, you track: 1) what happened in what you read (i.e. a summary), 2a) what it means and 2b) how the author says it, and 3a) what other literary works the text under discussion reminds you of and 3b) what personal events the text reminds you of.

I’m leading a reading group discussion of Jane Eyre this summer, so I’ll be keeping the journal as I read it to use as a model. I listened to this episode of In Our Time today to simulate the classroom lecture I was taking notes on. I was really encouraged by how the process worked, and I’m excited about honing it for use in the fall. Who knows? I might even start using it for my Bible reading.

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Five Takeaways from the 2019 SECCL

This past weekend, I attended the Southeast Renaissance Conference on Christianity and Literature. I heard some great papers (on Rebecca, on disenchantment, on Richard Wilbur’s poem “Lying” among others), saw my students and wife give fantastic papers, and talked with friends old and new. Here were my five takeaways.

  1. The conference presenters consisted of undergraduates, graduate students, junior faculty, and senior faculty: the entire academic gamut.
  2. Unlike any other conference I’ve been a part of, my deep respect for these scholars as fellow disciples has fed into my desire to hear their scholarship, no matter what they’re writing about. I haven’t read anything Chad Schrock, Carissa Turner Smith, or Luke Mills (to name just three frequent attendees) have written about the last three, and I’m always glad I get to hear them anyway.
  3. It’s better in community, i.e. when you go with your colleagues and students. I was the only attendee from my school at my first SECCL in 2013. This year, I presented alongside my wife and three students. It was the first time in awhile that SWU was represented at the conference, and I’m committed to our department being a consistent presence there.
  4. You learn to let conversation happen rather than force it. I found time for productive discussions with new acquaintances and time enough for deeper reflections with long-time friends. I was intentional about being in conversation but not overzealous in making conversations happen. I showed myself friendly and was rewarded with friendliness in return.
  5. Post-conference papers are even better. I didn’t get to hear the papers of two people I wanted to hear, so I asked them for copies. They obliged, and I had a wonderful morning reading them after the conference ended. I was able to send comments and ask questions with more acuity than if I had simply heard the papers. What a blessing.
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Providential Reading

As I prepare to teach a new course in the fall—The English Novel—I’ve been preparing the best way I know how: by watching lectures on youtube. Yesterday, I found this lecture given by Dr. Melanie Holm, an IUPUI professor, who posted some lectures from her graduate course on the origins of the English novel. The lecture I watched covered the introduction to Michael McKeon’s influential book titled…wait for it…The Origins of the English Novel.

Holm knows her stuff. She elicits the questions that the introduction provoked in her students then proceeds to work through McKeon’s argument. Her focus is less on McKeon’s thesis—that the rise of the English novel coincides with the rise of the English middle class—than how a critical theorist like McKeon makes his argument. In short, you can learn as much by following the way someone makes an argument as you can by simply reading someone’s thesis.

McKeon’s chief insight is to analogize Marx’s analysis of political economy—the dialectical method—to the historical formation of genre. McKeon manages to synthesize the structuralist critics like Frye with more dialogic critics like Bakhtin to put a properly historical spin on the novel’s origins. McKeon’s prose is knotty, and Holm does a good job of unpacking these dense ideas in ways that were easier to grasp.

But my main takeaway from the lecture was not something about the novel’s origins. It was Holm’s words of encouragement to her students about how to read. To put it bluntly, she talked to her graduate students like they were disciples. Holm urged her students to keep reading even when they got confused because it would all make sense in the end. They simply had to have faith, and they would see that McKeon’s way of getting to his main point—the journey—would be just as meaningful as the main point itself—his destination.

Holm advocated for a kind of providential reading, even though she seemed to buy McKeon’s secularizing thesis about how people rejected scriptural truth authority did not appear to be a Christ follower. Still, Holm’s language indicates that how we read, our posture towards reading, can be a way to work our discipleship. We can believe and hope with faith because our relationship to language and meaning has Christ at its center.

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My 13 Week Journal Bootcamp: Some Takeaways

On Sunday, I finished up my first complete Best Self journal. The journal asks you to set three goals, then gives you tasks–including a space for daily accountability–as you endeavor to meet those goals over 13 weeks.

My wife gave me one of the journals for my birthday in 2018, but after three weeks, I stopped using it each day then lost the journal so there was no way for me to follow through on it. I came back to the idea of this journal at the end of January after starting the year being very intentional about praying and considering what I thought I wanted to accomplish this year. I knew the journal would be a great way to keep myself accountable, so I purchased a new one.

It was worth it.

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