Reading – Page 4 – Education is Discipleship

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 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 20, 2019

Humor and Faith

Reinhold Niebuhr’s essay on humor and faith situates humor in the context of the Christian life. He begins with a verse from Psalms that records God laughing at sinners: “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision.” Because this kind of laughter is pure judgment with no mercy, it represents a point Niebuhr wants to make about humor. True laughter acts as a gateway to the reconciliation of two contradictory principles, like justice and mercy. Thus, Christ is the answer to the derisive God who laughs in the OT, and the cross, while featuring irony, is not a place of laughter. It is deathly serious.

Why do people laugh? Because they are able to discern an incongruity between the way things are and the way they should be. The incongruity of human existence is still too much for laughter to solve. That’s where faith comes. Laughter can be a way of gaining self-transcendence, of experiencing what it feels like to stand outside oneself and discover a greater order existing above the current disorder. This ability has its limits when confronted with humanity’s simultaneous power and powerlessness. If one must err on either favoring a rationality that exalts human strength or humor that admits human frailty, Niebuhr agrees that humor is the better option because an all-encompassing rationality will only lead to despair. True laughter, however, dies away as the sinner enters the holy of the holies. Humor lays the groundwork for true faith in God, the only one who can address humanity’s sin but cannot forgive those sins.

July 13, 2019

Introduction to Literature: More Fascinating Questions

I continue to deliberate on fascinating problems to present my students with rather than a series of facts with which to stuff them.

My next series of questions come from the first real chapter of Literature Through the Eyes of Faith. I’ve put together question with examples from scripture, everyday life, and literature as possible test case answers. You can find the questions and answers after the jump.

July 10, 2019

The Democratic Spirit: How To Think Chapter 7

In this chapter, Alan Jacobs uses a David Foster Wallace book review to tout the two most significant traits of good thinking: rigor and humility.

Wallace’s review demonstrates a person thinking well as review that he is good precisely because it upholds the Democratic Spirit (yes, with capital letters as a kind of tongue in cheek joke). The book Wallace examines is about language usage, and Wallace finds it refreshing that the book’s author, Bryan Garner, is able to offer expert advice without being preachy. In short, Garner manages to write with the authority of a lawyer or doctor rather than a dictator or preacher. This means that Garner meshes rigor (clear answers with solid reasons on all sort of usage questions) with humility (clear explanations that resist the urge to demean, belittle, or assume his position is automatically the correct one).

Once again, Jacobs preaches temperance. We cannot possibly maintain a constant Democratic Spirit about us at every conceivable moment. Instead, we must make a concerted effort to admit where we’ve erred, show a willingness to learn from mistakes, and demonstrate a willingness to believe our opponents might benefit from the extension of that Spirit. This is easier said than done. It’s when reading books like Garner’s, or reviews like Wallace’s, or books like Jacobs’s that we can best see this kind of rigorous and humble thinking in action.

July 8, 2019

Open Minds: How To Think Chapter 6

In this chapter, Jacobs explains that neither an open nor a shut mind is preferable: the two should work in tandem. Someone who has no set beliefs cannot be trusted. Someone whose every belief is unshakeable cannot be reasoned with.

Jacobs offers two metaphors to help us understand the proper relationship open and shut minds. The first is our appetite. We shouldn’t open our mind unless we intend to close it. If we’re going to think about something, we should be ready to digest it. The second concerns solidity. We should aim for firmness in our beliefs, neither rigidity nor flimsiness.

Sunk costs pose the greatest danger for the person prone to rigidity. Sunk costs refer to unrecoverable resources that one invested cannot be reclaimed. For instance, if you’ve been supporting a cause for 30 years, it will be difficult to renounce your position without putting your identity in jeopardy.

One of the things I’ll insist on my students considering is that college is a time for them to take advantage of their minimal sunk costs which can encourage their flexibility. At the same time, they’ll need to be responsibility not to mistake flexibility for flimsiness under the mistaken impression that changing your mind has no cost or that lacking firm beliefs is a virtue.

July 6, 2019

Splitting > Lumping: How To Think Chapter 5

Alan Jacobs uses this chapter to distinguish two different dispositions: lumping and splitting. The first leads people to aggregate, to lump individuals or concepts together into larger groups or categories. A splitter does the opposite, uncovering dissimilarities and points of difference.

A quick thought experiment will show you how important such categories are. A prompt: which of these groups most determines your intellectual commitments?

Religious beliefs
Nationality
Political beliefs
Gende
Ethnicity
Education
Socio-economic background
Sexual orientation

We choose to belong to some of these categories. Some are not ours to choose. Others tend to overlap. Again, the problem is not lumping or splitting in themselves but relying on one or the other as an answer to every problem: in short, as an alternative to thinking. Jacobs in particular warns against lumping which can lead us too easily into dehumanizing our neighbors and letting them disappear into the crowd so it’s easier not to have to think about them.

In class, we’ll use the prompt above and see what kind of explanations students have for their lumping and splitting habits.

July 5, 2019

Word Power: How To Think Chapter 4

In this chapter, Jacobs observes that words can only accentuate our disposition. They are not a replacement for wisdom. Used as currency, they only hasten our intellectual bankruptcy.

Jacobs discusses the general role words have in building community and dismissing opponents. We use keywords to help unite us to like-minded people, letting short words do a lot of heavy-lifting either in support of our position or dismissing the positions of others. Those keywords are often bound together by metaphors, analogies that we use to help explain difficult ideas by framing them in terms of something we understand better. Thus, it matters if we connect argumentation and war: winning, destroying, shooting down, etc. Finally, these metaphors get woven into myths or narratives (stories about our tribe or about the tribes we define ourselves against). Now our language is way too weight bearing for what we ask it to do.

Again none of this is necessarily bad. What is harmful is when we use keywords in place of thought, metaphors as though they are natural, and stories that predict ahead of time how we will interpret any new evidence we receive.

Jacobs admits that it really appears at times as though it is impossible to ever change someone’s mind. But we do know that people change their minds, and this can provide hope when we grow despondent.

One thing we can do when confronted with a position that differs from our own is attempt to summarize that position in such a way as to demonstrate to ourselves and the person who hold that position that we actually understand what we’re disagreeing with.

If we want to think well, we must distinguish good preconceptions and bad biases, between recognizing that words can be a way of intensifying our thoughts just as they can be a way of avoiding thought altogether.