Christian Educators Journal October 2023 Vol. 63 No. 1
Hospitality Teaching and Learning Civic Hospitality Our Civics and God’s Hospitality Civic Hospitality and the Challenges of/to Pluralism Hospitality, Politics, and Human Nature Hospitality and Schools Hermeneutics, Hospitality, and the Bible Classroom Don’t Be a Jonah
Future Issues December 2023—Parent Partnerships Connecting and communicating with parents is one of the most important yet challenging aspects of education in the twenty-first century. While the media is filled with negative labels like “helicopter” or “snowplow” parents and political leaders have weaponized parent-run school boards, parents are actually vital and valuable agents in their students’ academic and spiritual education. So: how does your school work with them? What are the best practices for communication at various grade levels? How do you encourage appropriate levels of involvement from parents? What do parent-teacher conferences look like at your school? Do you get parents into the building for career chats, field trips, or volunteering? What assignments do you give in class that encourage students to engage with their parents? We want to hear the success stories of how you reassured parents about a touchy curriculum choice or enticed parents to attend a college fair. February 2024—Inclusive Education Christian schools have long been known as welcoming and supportive communities for students with a variety of learning needs. It has been more than a decade since CEJ has focused on inclusive education, and we are eager to hear how schools have found creative ways to include and support students with disabilities in the body of Christ. Ideally, this issue will include students with physical disabilities (e.g., Spina bifida, limited mobility, or visual impairments), cognitive impairments or emotional disabilities (e.g., Down syndrome, emotional impairment), or neurodivergences (e.g., autism, ADHD). What are the best practices for serving these students in the general education classroom? What unique programs does your school offer to enrich these students and those around them (sports, clubs, tutoring partnerships)? How do you train aides, parapros, and faculty alike? What physical spaces and adaptations do you offer? We’re hoping to hear from classroom teachers, support staff, inclusion coordinators, parents, and even students themselves. Proposals (informal—just email us your idea!) are due October 13. Articles are due November 13 . April 2024—Resource Review Each year we highlight the best books, films, websites, teaching tools, and other resources for Christian school teachers. We publish reviews of student-facing material (like which books to stock in your classroom library), as well as materials relevant to school staff (like curricula or books about teaching). Articles may focus on one text or may be written in a list style featuring multiple texts around a particular theme. Proposals (informal—just email us your idea!) are due December 29. Articles are due January 29
Contents
3 Editorial 4 Teaching and Learning Civic Hospitality: Where Do We Start? DAVID I. SMITH
9 Our Civics and God’s Hospitality MATTHEW KAEMINGK
13 Civic Hospitality and the
Challenges of/to Pluralism KEVIN R. den DULK
22 Hospitality, Politics, and Human Nature MICAH WATSON
26 Hospitality and Schools: Four Lenses DAVID I. SMITH
31 Herman Who? Hermeneutics, Hospitality, and the Bible Classroom MARK VANDERWERF
35 Don’t Be a Jonah KELLI BOENDER
Christian Educators Journal
October 2023
1
Christian Educators Journal Vol. 63 No. 1, October 2023 cejonline.com Editor Abby Zwart cejeditor@gmail.com The Christian Educators Journal (CEJ) encourages letters to the editor in response to articles presented in the CEJ. Letters must be accompanied by the author’s name and email address. The CEJ reserves the right to edit letters for length and clarity. Where a letter addresses issues raised by the author of an article, the CEJ reserves the right to invite the article author to respond to the letter. Subscriptions Klaas Wolterstorff 2474 Westboro Dr NE Grand Rapids, MI 49506 business@cejonline.com Subscription Price (US dollars) US: $25.00 (one year, print) Canada: $30.00 (one year, print) Digital: $25.00 (one year) Beginning September 2021, all subscriptions outside the US and Canada are digital only. Please visit www.cejonline for subscription information. US Postal Information Nonprofit Organization Postage paid in Grand Rapids, MI Permit No. 657 Return postage guaranteed to: Christian Educators Journal 2474 Westboro Dr NE Grand Rapids, MI 49506 Address Correction Requested Canadian Postal Information Registered under Publications Mail Agreement: No. 40022165 at Norwich, ON Return postage guaranteed to: Christian Educators Journal PO Box 39 Norwich, ON N0J 1P0 Indexed in Christian Periodicals Index Copyrighted 2000 CEJ. All rights reserved. Christian Educators Journal (130630) is published quarterly by Christian Educators Journal Association. Scripture All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com
Statement of Purpose The Christian Educators Journal Association publishes the Journal as a channel of communication for all educators committed to the idea of Christian day school at the elementary, secondary, and college levels. The views expressed are those of the writers and not necessarily those of the association. Reprint Policy We allow free reprinting or photocopying of individual articles that have appeared in our journal, as long as the copied articles are used within the context of schooling and the source is acknowledged. Editor Abby Zwart Copyeditor Bethany Murphy Design Editor Klaas Wolterstorff Business Manager Klaas Wolterstorff Web Shepherd Heather Altena Board of Trustees Dr. Henry Algera Heather Birch Justin Cook Sara Leo Albert Kok (Chair) Gayle Monsma Ed Noot Jim Rooks Sean Schat Christine Scholma (Secretary) Tricia Stobbe Edith van der Boom Heather VanDyke Christine Webb Supporting Institutions Calvin University Edvance Christian Schools Association The King’s University Redeemer University Trinity Christian College Tyndale University Subscribing Organizations Christian Educators Association Christian Educators of British Columbia Prairie Centre for Christian Education Printed back issues (if available) can be purchased for $7.50 per copy (cost of shipping to be added to total). Some back issues may be available in digital format.
Editorial
L
ike many of our most important words, “hospitality” can carry a range of meanings. In contrast to the slick imagery of the hospitality industry and the parading of our good taste in Martha Stewart–style entertaining, Jesus focused hospitality on welcoming the poor, taking the lowest seat at the table, and being known for eating with sinners (Luke 14:1–15:2). In Scripture, hospitality is not a gracious creation of space for others to appreciate our magnanimity, but a love of neighbor that does not rest on in-group status or social standing. It receives others because they are created and cared for by God. The essays in this issue grew out of a multi-year project at the Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching and Learning and the Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics at Calvin University, with financial support from the Issachar Fund. The result, called the Civic Hospitality Project, focuses on hospitality as a public virtue and what that might have to do with how we learn to participate in society. The first article provides some background to the project and a brief introduction to the free resources that we created for schools. You can explore those resources at civichospitality.com. Our project team drew together expertise from theology, political science, education theory, and the classroom. Given the various meanings that hospitality can have, we wanted our work to have a clear theological grounding. Matthew Kaemingk of Fuller Seminary, author of a recent book on hospitality and Muslim immigration, led this aspect of our conversation. In this issue, his article similarly grounds us in a biblical theology of hospitality. Kevin den Dulk and Micah Watson were our political science experts, and their essays here offer insights into facets of the political and social context in which we are educating that make learning hospitality a vital need. My own work focuses on discussions of faith and teaching, and in my second contribution here I survey several ways of linking hospitality and schooling. Our teacher team consisted of Kelli Boender, Erik Ellefsen, David Tsui, and Mark VanderWerf. The essays here by Kelli and Mark highlight practical ways in which reflecting on hospitality has shaped their teaching choices and strategies. We hope that these essays offer a way into conversations about Christian hospitality and education that are grounded theologically, examine our context carefully, take time to reflect on the nature of education, and yield classroom approaches that can be life giving for us, for our students, and for the communities to which they will contribute. — David I. Smith
Christian Educators Journal
October 2023
3
Teaching and Learning Civic Hospitality: Where Do We Start? DAVID I. SMITH
I
Tolerance has its part to play. Yet it also falls short from a Christian viewpoint, not so much because it allows others too much space as because it demands too little of ourselves.
Hospitality asks me to actively make space for them and intentionally care for them because of the worth that God places on them.
n too many contexts around the world, it is easy to find a familiar refrain: our ability to relate constructively to one another in public spaces is being eroded by polarization, tribalization, fear, and anger. Unease is fueled by anxiety about the future combined with proximity to people who are different from us in their cultures, goals, ideologies, and priorities. Rushing to the ramparts to defend the boundaries of our enclave becomes a tempting response, one that can quickly turn ugly if it is not tempered by a fundamental love of neighbor (and not just of the neighbors we like). Loving those who seem to threaten us has never been one of Jesus’s more convenient commands. A common liberal democratic response to such tensions has been to emphasize the need to learn tolerance. In any society, let alone in the globally networked webs of awareness that we currently inhabit, we will not agree with everyone, like everyone, or approve of everyone. The possibility of a society not riven by conflict rests on a certain willingness to put up with others, to let them be, to let the weeds (at least those we imagine to be weeds) grow with the wheat. Tolerance has its part to play. Yet it also falls short from a Christian viewpoint, not so much because it allows others too much space as because it demands too little of ourselves. As Luke Bretherton notes, “Tolerance, understood as never challenging opinions others hold, reduces us to silence and inactivity, because to add to and seek to change what others think is by definition intolerant” (99). Tolerance therefore seems to motivate withdrawal from engagement. Tolerance secures a minimal level of peace but contains little that would move us to actively invest in making things better. It leaves us with relatively little to say and little to work for as long as we are individually being left alone. Does that push us back toward shouting from the ramparts until others admit we are right and should be in charge? Not necessarily. As Bretherton and others have noted, there is a key practice in the Christian tradition, rooted in the Scriptures, that addresses the presence of differences in a more constructive way. This is the practice of hospitality to strangers. While tolerance merely asks me to endure those who are different (a useful first step but a low bar), hospitality asks me to actively make space for them and intentionally care for them because of the worth that God places on them. Our reactions of irritation and defensiveness are not merely to be suppressed; they are to be replaced by love, a love that has to be more concrete than a pious sentiment. This essay first appeared in Christian Teachers Journal volume 31 issue 1 and is reproduced here by permission.
4
October 2023
Christian Educators Journal
We need to pause here to note an immediate risk. Hospitality is a familiar, widely used word with a range of cultural meanings. Use it to search for images, and you are likely to see pictures of hotel reception areas and restaurants, referencing the “hospitality industry.” Chase it into lifestyle magazines, and you will find a vision of tasteful decor and ostentatious welcome that focuses on the host’s self-presentation. Take your starting point from its default cultural meanings, and you are likely to end up with something somewhat distant from the biblical idea, something that focuses on preparing nice meals for your friends, showing off your lovely home, and networking with the folk who can be helpful to you. The Bible consistently pushes back against this picture of hospitality. Leviticus 19 includes two “as yourself ” commands—the first says to “love your neighbor as yourself ” and the second to “love [the stranger] as yourself ” (vv. 18, 33). Isaiah 25 pictures God as a host offering a banquet for all the nations with a specific focus on welcoming those overshadowed by death and disgrace. Jesus warned in Luke 14 against taking the best seat at the table and told us not to invite “your friends, your brothers or sisters, your relatives, or your rich neighbors” (v. 12), but rather those from whom we will receive no benefit. In Matthew 25 he equated our ability to be hospitable to strangers with our ability to welcome him and connected our salvation to both. These and other biblical texts push us toward a more challenging image of hospitality. Here hospitality is active care extended to those who have not earned it, who are not the same as us, who are not attractive guests, and who may well not repay us. We are invited to reflect on the reality that as we welcome them, we welcome Christ. (To explore the biblical treatment of hospitality in more detail, see Jipp.) This biblical web of references to hospitality led to a long Christian tradition of wrestling with the practice of hospitality. It is not a simple practice, and hard questions have regularly recurred. How do we distinguish guests we can welcome from those who will only do harm? How do we react to guests who take advantage of our hospitality and drain us? How much hospitality can we bear before we are worn thin or overwhelmed? Is this an individual or a community calling? There is much rich Christian reflection on all of these questions and more (see Pohl, Oden). It is not a matter to be approached glibly. Yet the challenges all sit nested within the framing call to love our neighbor, even when the neighbor does not have our favorite face. What happens if we take this vision of hospitality as a lens for civic engagement, for interacting with others in public spaces and working with those who are different? Civic hospitality does not imply that we agree with everyone or approve of everything; to welcome others well, one does not need to become them. It does, however, imply being quick to listen, quick to serve, quick to care, even in the face of differences that might tempt us to fearful dismissal and preservation of our own comfort. It challenges us to love our neighbor even when the neighbor is a stranger, and to actively seek their good. It asks us to do more than tolerate others as long as they leave us alone. Now what does this have to do with schooling? Our students already live in and are already influenced by a culture marked by polarization and hostility. When they graduate, they will go on to live, work, and contribute in the midst of others who are unlike them. They will of necessity have to position themselves amid differences. What kind of education might prepare them well to become principled agents of civic hospitality? Teaching Christian Educators Journal
October 2023
5
Hospitality is active care extended to those who have not earned it, who are not the same as us, who are not attractive guests, and who may well not repay us.
Civic hospitality does not imply that we agree with everyone or approve of everything.
On the cross, once and for all, God’s arms are outstretched in costly welcome.
Like Jesus, students should be able to enter someone else’s political home to listen, learn, and enquire with political humility and care.
guest. Here the God of the universe asks others for a meal, for shelter, and for community. The Almighty stands at our door and knocks. In the life and teachings of Jesus we learn what it means to be a humble guest vulnerable and dependent on the hospitality of others. Ultimately, Christ’s cross represents not simply the culmination of Christ’s teachings about radical hospitality; it represents the consummation of God’s mission of hospitality begun in the garden. There on Calvary, Christ “makes space” once again for all creation and all his creatures. This spacemaking endeavor on Golgotha is costly and gruesome. Here the hospitable God makes space for a creation who made no space for him. On the cross, once and for all, God’s arms are outstretched in costly welcome. Like Israel before them, followers of Jesus are called to actively respond to Christ’s hospitality with a political hospitality of their own. To remember the hospitality of the cross is to imitate, image, and reflect the hospitality we have received in our political lives. The witness of the early church amid the violence and domination of the Roman Empire was marked by a strange witness of hospitality. Women, children, minorities, widows, the poor, and the sick were not only given shelter, they were honored as sisters and brothers, baptized as holy saints, holy members of the body of Christ, the Lord and Savior. In Greco-Roman culture, showing mercy, grace, and honor to the least of these was a mark of religious and political weakness; in the early church it was the mark of religious and political strength. The early church grew exponentially throughout the empire as it honored women, cared for unwanted children and the sick, included dominated tribes and nations, and shared a common table and purse. What does this mean practically for a civics course in a Christian school? I can offer a few final remarks that will hopefully enrich the pedagogical imaginations of other teachers more gifted than myself. First, students must learn to be a guest in the political lives of others. Like Jesus, they should be able to enter someone else’s political home to listen, learn, and enquire with political humility and care. Like Jesus they should be able to approach “political others” who have been shunned by their religious and political community. Those who have been marked as unclean, unworthy, and unsafe. To be a political guest is to enter into someone else’s political story and pain, not out of moral weakness, relativism, or lack of conviction, but out of love and grace. Jesus did not compromise his religious-political holiness when he encountered the centurion, the tax collector, the prostitute, or the Samaritan; his holiness was on display as he came near, listened, ate, touched, and healed. As a guest, he managed to show hospitality. Finally, like the people of Israel before them, a civics student must learn that they should show political hospitality to other citizens as a way of honoring and remembering the hospitality that was shown to them. The cross of Jesus Christ has political implications for our civic posture. If we fail to create generous civic space for others in our political imaginations, if we fail to open our political arms, we fail to remember and honor the nail-pierced arms that made space for us. Dr. Matthew Kaemingk teaches Christian ethics and public theology at Fuller Seminary where he serves as the Richard John Mouw Associate Professor of Faith and Public Life. 12
October 2023
Christian Educators Journal
Civic Hospitality and the Challenges of/to Pluralism KEVIN R. den DULK
N
early a decade ago, my university and our sibling seminary took an unconventional path to a prison-education program. We could have focused on learners who would parole soon with the goal of reducing recidivism rates by helping incarcerated persons re-enter broader society well. We also could have built a curriculum that would inculcate the technical and “soft” skills that prepare re-entering citizens for the challenges of the workforce and the broader culture. These are the typical elements of a prison- education program that win the support of departments of corrections, state legislators, foundations, and employers. But our university-seminary partnership started with a counter-cultural line of thinking: What if we built our efforts around those with life sentences and others with a long road to parole, that is, those most unlikely to re-enter society any time soon? And what if our curriculum was designed less to foster skills for re-entry and more to cultivate a deep community within the prison itself? Our answers to those questions resulted in the Calvin Prison Initiative (CPI), a national gem in prison education that seeks transformation within prisons through a degree program that fosters moral community exclusively among the long-term incarcerated. CPI boldly declares that God’s image bearers are created for each other—and that our communal selves are not checked at a prison gate. CPI also declares, equally boldly, that community is possible even amid profound diversity—in fact, that communities of inquiry will thrive in diverse places. There is no mistaking or escaping the powerful differences among students, faculty, and staff on CPI’s prison campus. But a hallmark of the program is to practice habits and form dispositions that help us navigate our differences as a necessary feature of living in common.
CPI boldly declares that God’s image bearers are created for each other— and that our communal selves are not checked at a prison gate.
Democracy, Difference, and Civic Education As a political scientist, I have always seen CPI as an encouraging glimpse into what we might hope for for civic life on the outside of the prison’s walls. And what a contrast outside those walls. Modern democracy seems tormented by difference. We not only find little to agree on about human sexuality, immigration, race and policing, or other hot button issues of the day, but we also distrust the institutions that are supposed to help us forge a life in common. The irony is that we widely share that institutional skepticism but can’t agree on the reasons. Electoral integrity? Judicial bias? A failure of law and order? Money in politics? There are plenty of reasons to join the chorus of distrust. Christian Educators Journal
October 2023
13
We distrust the institutions that are supposed to help us forge a life in common. The irony is that we widely share that institutional skepticism but can’t agree on the reasons.
Hospitality, Politics, and Human Nature MICAH WATSON
Thinking about how to better prepare our students and future citizens now for the political storms coming next year may feel a bit like planting trees in May to give us shade in July. But we have to start somewhere.
W
hile there is still a little over a year before the formal election day takes place in November 2024 for American voters, we can already feel the approaching political season heating up. For many of us, this may trigger a knot of anxiety in our stomachs and call to mind previous election controversies and political conflicts, tense Thanksgiving Day family conversations, and awkward-to-ugly interactions on social media. Thinking about how to better prepare our students and future citizens now for the political storms coming next year may feel a bit like planting trees in May to give us shade in July. But we have to start somewhere, and there will be many more hot Julys to come. In what follows, I describe four insights that help explain the importance of Christian civic hospitality and why we should practice it such that it becomes an ingrained virtue for us as individuals and groups.
Perennial Disagreement
For Christians, the political debates and divides go back to the very beginning of our faith.
On this side of eternity, we will always wrestle with how to live together, and we will never completely get it right.
First, while it feels like the last few years have been rather rough on the civility front, differences, disagreements, and polarization are not new, nor are they going away. As the smash hit musical Hamilton reminds us, it was only a few years into the American political experiment that a sitting vice president shot and killed the country’s first treasury secretary. For Christians, the political debates and divides go back to the very beginning of our faith. Jesus did teach that we are to give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God (Mark 12:13–17), and Paul and Peter instruct us to honor political authorities (Rom. 13; 1 Pet. 2:17). At the same time, we know our citizenship in God’s kingdom far outweighs any claims from merely human authorities. We long for a “better country—a heavenly one” (Heb. 11:16), and if human authorities demand that we compromise our faith, like the apostles, we “must obey God rather than human beings” (Acts 5:29). Christians have been wrestling with how to engage the political for well for over two thousand years, sometimes as a minority amid a dominant non-Christian culture, other times as the majority, and at still other times somewhere in between. Politics is inevitably about how different people live well together, but given human finitude (our knowledge is limited) and human fallenness (we are selfish by nature), we don’t always agree on what living well together looks like. Even when we do agree, we have a hard time doing it. On this side of eternity, we will always wrestle with how to live together, and we will never completely get it right. In fact, this reality is what makes civic hospitality so necessary. One perennial temptation in the face of stubborn 22
October 2023
Christian Educators Journal
differences is to fence off our common living space from those who are different. Christian hospitality makes possible a different posture by acknowledging genuine (and at times difficult!) differences but equipping us to make space for others, following the God who in his grace has made space for us.
Commonality and Difference Second, Christians should acknowledge the sometimes perplexing dynamic of our fundamental commonality with our neighbors who don’t share our faith and the radical differences between us. Simply, as human beings we have a common nature insofar as God has created all of us in his image. There are many shared goods—think sanitation, education, nutrition, security—that every human being needs in order to flourish and that every political order should provide or make possible. At the same time, as Christians, we are citizens first of a different kingdom (Heb. 11:14–16), a “chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation” (1 Pet. 2:9). Some of our beliefs and practices will, and should, raise eyebrows, though hopefully for good reasons rather than bad (Matt. 5:16). This combination of commonality and difference makes sharing our common spaces both challenging and rewarding. It is challenging because we must work to charitably understand where others are coming from while living out the particular callings we have as Christians. God’s call for us to extend hospitality to others is a specifically Christian duty to love others beyond the more comfortable confines of our Christian community. In this way, hospitality is a sort of bridge between the particular (Christian) and the common (all human beings as image bearers).
We must work to charitably understand where others are coming from while living out the particular callings we have as Christians.
Rational, Emotional, and Relational Human Nature Third, our human nature matters for how we learn. As human beings we are rational creatures. But we are not just that. We are also emotional creatures, for whom the heart matters as well as the head. While we have all met people who may lean more toward one of those distinctives than the other, we are both thinking and feeling creatures. We are also relational beings, meant to live and learn in community. We Christians know that from the witness of Scripture. “It is not good for the man to be alone,” God declares in Genesis 2:18. But one can know this even apart from Scripture, as we see in the Greek philosopher Aristotle’s reminder that we are social creatures equipped with the capacity to speak and reason about the good life. Too often we can emphasize one of these features and neglect the importance of another. In doing so, we undermine the education we need to become more virtuous—in this case, learning to acquire the virtue of civic hospitality. Why does undermining one feature of our nature make learning virtue harder? Our rational, emotional, and relational nature means we need both “head” knowledge and “heart” practice, and we need to acquire both with other people, with fellow students and wise teachers. You do not learn how to drive a car just by reading the instruction manual. It will help to study the principles of safe driving and to cognitively understand how the gas and Christian Educators Journal
October 2023
23
We are both thinking and feeling creatures. We are also relational beings, meant to live and learn in community.
(Psalm 139:14)—we ought to be very curious about the full range of human experience. We want to learn about people who are very different from ourselves. . . . We ought to want to know what makes our fellow citizens tick, why they think and act the way they do, how they have formed their deepest loves and loyalties. To learn civility in the public square is one important way to satisfy a healthy curiosity about what is “genuinely human.” (60)
“We ought to want to know what makes our fellow citizens tick, why they think and act the way they do, how they have formed their deepest loves and loyalties.”
This is the world of the first century, and it sounds a lot like the polarization of our twenty- first-century world.
Paul and the Patterns of This World I began this essay describing one of my student’s distaste for the apostle Paul, but I like the prickly apostle. I think if we took the time to do a little hermeneutics to understand the world of the apostle Paul, we would be a bit more hospitable toward the man, and in turn, he would teach us all a bit about hospitality. Paul knew a world marked by deep division: political oppression, economic disparity, sexual exploitation and promiscuity, ethnic divisions, and religious in-fighting. He wasn’t just an observer of this world, he was often the victim of its harshest realities. He was accused of distorting and misrepresenting the gospel from his fellow Christians, he was beaten by religious opponents, and he was imprisoned by the political authorities. This is the world of the first century, and it sounds a lot like the polarization of our twenty-first-century world. It’s against this backdrop that we are to hear Paul’s words: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Rom. 12:2). In contrast to the worldly, divisive, and polarizing patterns of this world, Paul gives us a picture of what a God-transformed life could look like (Rom. 12:9–21). It is a way of life that recognizes the gifts in others; honors and is devoted to one another; is patient, generous, and empathetic; seeks harmony and peace; and is willing to associate with outsiders. In short, it is a life that practices hospitality (Rom. 12:13).
Works Cited Civic Hospitality Project. “Jesus at the Table.” civichospitality.com/lesson/ hospitality/jesus-at-the-table/. Mouw, Richard J. Uncommon Decency: Christian Civility in an Uncivil World. IVP Books, 2010. Thiselton, Anthony. Why Hermeneutics? An Appeal Culminating with Ricoeur. Cascade Books, 2019. Virkler, Henry. Hermeneutics: Principles and Processes of Biblical Interpretation. Baker Academic, 2007. Mark VanderWerf (MDiv, MEd) teaches Bible at Grand Rapids Christian High School where he also serves as chaplain. Previously, he taught history and literature at Calvin Christian High School in Escondido, California. He is an ordained minister in the Christian Reformed Church. 34
October 2023
Christian Educators Journal
Don’t Be a Jonah KELLI BOENDER
A
s a teacher in a Christian high school—and a social studies teacher at that—I have found the past few years a little tough politically. No matter your content area, you may have experienced one of these situations in some form: You give a few minutes for students to present about the news each week and ask for their input on recent stories. A student raises his hand and asks if you are “woke.” A parent reaches out to you about a list of content you are teaching in US History and wants to discuss it at parent-teacher conferences. A relative goes on a political rant on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or the like and tags you in it. A student hands in a reflection paragraph based on a class period and the paragraph is full of politically driven imagery that is not really connected to the class, but they clearly have drawn their own connections about class materials. The reflection ends with “my teacher is so biased.” You can fill in your own scenario here. As an educator, I know that many of us instantly dread these situations and spend the next twenty-four hours obsessing about them, weaving a narrative about the home of this student or relative, preparing our talking points, and really doing all we can to win the conversation. We engage in an “us versus them” type mentality that mirrors our collective culture. We may think about “them” as proverbial losers for allowing this narrative to be their reality and feel superior for our approach. Maybe you draft an email that breaks down point by point why they are wrong and circulate it among your colleagues. Or maybe you freeze. You melt. You collapse in your classroom. You avoid talking to the student or person who raised the situation. You hide. You don’t tell anyone about it and adopt a “woe is me” victim attitude. Or maybe you spend the next twelve hours telling everyone you come across in your building about the situation, building a coalition of people who will most definitely be on your side, and it’s a gossip fest. For most of us, reactions to these types of situations are negative—at least at the outset. I would guess you lose sleep, cry to your spouse or a friend, or question your identity as a teacher. Maybe your reaction is none of these emotions I have listed above—you feel like you did a great job defending your point and sleep well at night knowing you won that argument. I’m not sure that any of these reactions are hospitable because they reveal self-pity, self-righteousness, and some contempt. Christian Educators Journal
October 2023
35
We engage in an “us versus them” type mentality that mirrors our collective culture.