This Just In

Religious Students, Part II

OK, here’s another try at examining some of the strengths that religious students bring with them to a literature class.  I don’t, by the way, mean “religious” in the sense of “religiousity,” pharisaical holier-than-thou-ism, but simply to avoid specifying denominations or even faiths, for students of faiths other than Christian bring things to the table that “secular” students, those without faith convictions, do not.

One of those things might be a willingness to acknowledge an “authored life.”  Religious students are interpreters, whether they know it or not, because they feel that they are part of a story.  They look about themselves for clues to the meaning of that story, for foreshadowing, for symbols, for irony, because they earnestly want to know their Author’s intentions.  Such a conviction might unfit them for some modern writers, for some schools of critical theory, but on the whole, I think it’s a huge resource to draw on for the literature teacher.

A second, related point would be that most students of faith are used to going to a book for meaning.  They are, as I saw on a T-shirt once, “Textually Active.”  Luckily for me, a literature prof at a Christian school, the Bible is full of narrative, poetry, and metaphor.  I think it would be much harder, for example, to adapt the Bible for use in a philosophy class, because the text is not very systematic or organized.  The messiness of the Bible, its openness to multiple interpretations, parallels the messiness of life, which parallels the messiness of literature.  All three need skillful, knowledgeable critics, preferably sharing and sharpening interpretations with each other, to give them meaning.          --MK

Religious Students

After ten years of teaching at a private Baptist university, I have encountered the obstacles that religion can throw in the way of learning, and they are many.  On the other hand, I have thought that there are some advantages to having religious students in class, and I do mean this from a disciplinary perspective, that there are advantages in terms of teaching and learning literature.

I had been thinking along these lines when a colleague (ER) gave me an article from the latest Chronicle of Higher Education.  It was called “Revisiting the Canon Wars,” and, although it did not address religion explicitly, ER’s marginal notes suggested some parallels to HPU.  The notes led me to wonder, “When a student allows her religious beliefs to influence her approach to literature, do those beliefs distract from the work or actually lend power to it?”  This seems a good question, relevant to me as well as to any teacher working in the Bible Belt of America.

As for the first option, that faith can distract from literature, religious beliefs can certainly become just one more form of “identity politics”; just as many educated, modern readers only look at literature through the lens of race, gender, or class, so a religious reader might read everything “through the eyes of faith.”  All of these lenses can be helpful to interpretation, but they all distort a work somewhat (unless the work was written to be read from that perspective, but such is often the mark of lesser art).  Ironically, the Christian student or parent who wants classes taught from a “Christian world view” is really emulating the model of those “liberal academics”—the feminists and multiculturalists—that he or she despises.

What about the second option?  Many academics who are worried about identity politics and its effect on teaching—the article from my colleague mentions Allan Bloom, Stanley Fish, and Elaine Showalter—advocate a return to the Greek idea that the purpose of an education is “the search for the good life.”  One could argue that a religious student is more apt to support this purpose than a non-religious one, for most religions also seek a “good life.”  Thus, a Christian student is more willing than his secular counterpart to accept that there is a core body of knowledge that one should know to be fully human, that there is wisdom to be found in the study of the past, that truth is not completely relativized, not entirely a product of its social and political environment.

This seems to me an important resource that we can draw on in teaching our religious students.  Would others agree?                                           --MK

English majors and minors

I have a question that has puzzled me for some time: how and where should English professors recruit English majors and minors?  Some majors, like pre-med or accounting, have students who arrive at college already signed up, but English tends to be a major that people choose because they are inspired by particular authors or courses.

So, how active a role should the individual professor take in encouraging students in this direction? Mention the joys of English majoring in class--strike up casual conversations on the sidewalks--call a meeting for people who might be interested--start a Blackboard or Facebook group?

For many years, there were so few jobs in English academia that I felt a real need to be passive and let only the most interested and capable students come to me...but we at HPU have a good product to offer and the baby boomers are beginning to retire, so professional possibilities look better.  Is it my role to recruit...or is that stepping over some invisible ethical line? EMR