Integrite SP-21

VOLUME 19 NUMBER 2

INTÉGRITÉ FALL 2020 Special Issue on Cultivating Virtue in Christian Higher Education Guest-Edited by Julie Ooms

PUBLISHED SEMIANNUALLY BY

MISSOURI BAPTIST UNIVERSITY Saint Louis, Missouri 63141-8698 www.mobap.edu/integrite

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Editor John J. Han, Missouri Baptist University

Editorial Review Board Matthew Bardowell, Missouri Baptist University Todd C. Ream, Taylor University C. Clark Triplett, Missouri Baptist University

Advisory Board Bob Agee, Oklahoma Baptist University & Union University Jane Beal, University of La Verne Andy Chambers, Missouri Baptist University Matthew C. Easter, Missouri Baptist University Arlen Dykstra, Missouri Baptist University Hyun-Sook Kim, Yonsei University Darren J. N. Middleton, Texas Christian University Janice Neuleib, Illinois State University

Editorial Assistants Emma King

Melissa Lawrence

Aurora McCandless

Webmaster Erin Roach

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal (ISSN 1547-0474 and 1547-0873) is published in spring and fall by the Faith & Learning Committee and the Humanities Division of Missouri Baptist University, One College Park Dr., St. Louis, Missouri 63141. Published both online <http://www.mobap.edu/ integrite/> and in print copy, the journal examines historical, philosophical, theological, cultural, and pedagogical issues related to the integration of Christian faith and higher learning. All submissions are critically reviewed for content and substance by the editor and the editorial review board; in some cases, scholars in specific fields are invited to evaluate manuscripts. The opinions expressed by individual writers in this journal are not necessarily endorsed by the editor, editorial board, or Missouri Baptist University. Intégrité (pronounced IN tay gri tay) is a French word translated into English as “totality,” “integrity,” “honesty,” “uprightness,” or “integration.” Publication of the print edition of Intégrité has been made possible by funding from Missouri Baptist University.

SUBMISSIONS: Submissions of scholarly articles, short essays, review articles, book reviews, and poems are welcome. Send your work as an e-mail attachment (Microsoft Word format) to the editor, John J. Han, at john.han@mobap.edu. We accept submissions all year round. For detailed submission guidelines, see the last two pages of this journal.

SUBSCRIPTIONS & BOOKS FOR REVIEW: Intégrité subscriptions, renewals, address changes, and books for review should be mailed to John J. Han, Editor of Intégrité, Missouri Baptist University, One College Park Dr., St. Louis, Missouri 63141. Phone: (314) 3922311/Fax: (314) 434-7596. Subscription rates: Individuals $10 per year; institutions $20 per year.

An additional shipping fee ($5-15 per year) is charged for international subscription.

INDEXING: Intégrité is listed in the Southern Baptist Periodical Index and the Christian Periodical Index.

Volume 19, Number 2, Fall 2020 © 2020 Missouri Baptist University. All rights reserved.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Volume 19

Number 2

Fall 2020

Special Issue on Cultivating Virtue in Christian Higher Education Guest-Edited by Julie Ooms, Ph.D. CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 3

Julie Ooms

ARTICLES 8

Intellectual Humility as the Pathway to Interdependent Learning in Christian Higher Education Kyle A. Schenkewitz

20

The Grading Curve and the Moral Ascent: A Virtue-Centered Approach to Improving Student Scores D. Glenn Butner, Jr.

34

Is There a Virtue in This Text?: Reading Well through Interpretive Community Zachary Beck

44

Why Christian Higher Education Exists: A Case for Introducing the Liberal Arts in First Year Seminars Steven A. Petersheim

BOOK REVIEWS 63

Alan Jacobs. The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis Reviewed by Rachel B. Griffis

68

Aimee Byrd. Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: How the Church Needs to Rediscover Her Purpose Reviewed by Julie Ooms

72

Kristin Kobes Du Mez. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation Reviewed by Matthew Bardowell

76

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

78

CALL FOR PAPERS AND BOOK REVIEWS

Julie Ooms 3

Introduction Julie Ooms

This past, pandemic-complicated semester, one of my Honors students called Socrates a “soulful Greek philosopher” in a paper about the purpose of argument and thinking. I love this endearingly awkward little phrase; I know exactly what she means. Socrates, as a philosopher and interlocutor, was deeply concerned with the soul—both his own and others’—and whether it was allied to virtue or ensnared in vice. In the Gorgias, Socrates argues that no human work can be truly an art, can truly advance truth and justice, unless it first considers how and whether it affects the shape and welfare of the human soul. Thus, the makeup artist, whose work only enhances the surface appearance, merely performs a knack; the gymnastics instructor, whose work actually strengthens the body and renders it more beautiful, practices an art. The rhetorician, who seeks to persuade others for reasons of political expediency rather than truth, performs a knack, and twists the soul; the philosopher, whose first concern is the truth, practices an art, and perfects the soul by training it in the pursuit and practice of virtue (27).

Teaching, rightly viewed, is not a knack but an art. Instructors at Christian institutions of higher education must be, at root, concerned with the shaping and welfare of our students’ souls. We are committed not only to training them in skills but to shaping them in their pursuit of virtue toward “deeper moral reflection and self-examination,” as Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung writes in Glittering Vices (10). But our commitments are often at odds with the spirit of our age, a spirit that emphasizes what is expedient over what is true and encourages students to pursue successful lives as if they are the same as good ones. This phenomenon is hardly new, or even phenomenal (Socrates’ dialogue partners, in the Gorgias and elsewhere in Plato’s work, articulate similar views).

What should give us pause (at the very least) is how often Christians— particularly Christian institutions of higher education—lose sight of the pursuit of virtue in order to pursue success.

Last year, a month or two before the reality of the COVID-19 set in for Americans (and American higher education), I interviewed David Kinnaman, the president of Barna, about current trends in Christian higher education for an article on “The Promise and Paradox of Christian Higher Education” for Christianity Today. His research has shown that Christian students and parents do not differ much from nonreligious students when it comes to the reasons they choose to come to college and where they choose to attend. Rather than being drawn to Christian higher education because it will help them strengthen their faith, seek truth, or take classes in a variety of subjects from professors committed to the integration of faith and learning, they are instead eminently, understandably, and mercilessly practical. Higher education is, for them, motivated primarily by earning potential and leadership opportunities; their imagined future is that of the successful wage-earner. And while there is nothing

4 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal wrong with wanting to find meaningful work that will afford one the ability to provide for oneself and one’s family (as well as pay back one’s student loans), the limits of this imagined future are far narrower than those many instructors in Christian higher education want their students to envision.

It is easy, and may even seem necessary, however, to allow economic expediency to sideline the pursuit of virtue, particularly as Christian higher education institutions face extreme pressure to somehow grow enrollment or else close their doors. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased this pressure. In an article last updated on August 10, 2020, Liam Adams reported for Christianity Today that “evangelical colleges and universities have eliminated more than 230 faculty and staff positions,” most citing the pandemic in addition to other “ongoing financial concerns.” One of these eliminated positions belonged to a graduate school classmate of mine, Jeffrey Bilbro, who was fired after teaching for eight years (and earning tenure) at Spring Arbor University in Michigan. Eric Miller writes at Mere Orthodoxy that, if Bilbro’s firing was somehow the sad result of financial necessity, it is also emblematic of a dangerous, scandalous, worldly, even vicious (as opposed to virtuous) kind of thinking: Whatever goods those [capitalist] arrangements have delivered, they do not include the cultivation of minds that reach toward the triune God, that know themselves only in relation to God, and that see all in light of an ancient garden, a coming Jerusalem, and a towering cross. Such coordinates are gone, replaced by algorithms and stock shares and plastic cards and sleek screens: touchstones of what we might call the market mind—in a decidedly jejune use of the term.

The market mind is not the Christian mind. And it’s the market mind that students come to college to gain (whether they want to or not), and for one obvious reason: They believe they need it.

That is why “The market made me do it” has become the excuse that covers every sin, whether it’s voting for a candidate or tearing up the earth or terminating the tenure of an unusually talented, devoted, accomplished professor.

Failure to consider economic realities, and failure to steward the financial resources Christian colleges and universities are given, is a failure of wisdom, and a failure to exercise virtues like temperance and prudence. But giving oneself— and the institution one serves—over to what Miller calls “the market mind” is to allow one to be shaped by forces often antithetical to the overarching purpose of the Christian higher education institution—in other words, to act viciously, not virtuously.

At the same time that Christian higher education is going through both an identity and an economic crisis, the way many Christian educators consider the integration of faith and learning has shifted quite emphatically toward the very kinds of character-shaping, virtue-cultivating practices that a “market mind” toward higher education cannot hope to encourage. Bilbro himself, a product,

Julie Ooms 5 like me, of Christian higher education from undergrad through graduate school, responded to his own firing with a spirit of hope, contrasting this implicitly with a market mind: Even those of us who have—or who had—the privilege of earning a paycheck for learning and teaching have always done our real work for love, not money. In being dispossessed of external rewards, I have been reminded that, as [Zena] Hitz demonstrates, “contemplation in the form of learning” is a human good open to all, not just professional professors.

Bilbro’s argument is evidence not just of his own thoughtfulness but of the learning communities that shaped him: communities, like those I have been blessed to have been a part of and hope to provide for my students, that regard learning not merely (or even primarily) as an accumulation of marketable skills but as a practice that forms our character and guides us in the cultivation of virtue.

This practice is one of love, “an appetite for learning,” as Paul Griffiths notes, characterized by “closer cognitive intimacy with creatures understood exactly as creatures, which is to say as gifts from the Lord, knowable and lovable exactly as such” (109).

And so, it seems, we stand at a sort of intellectual crossroads. That, or we find ourselves in a position of having to make oil and water mix if Christian institutions of higher education are to continue to speak, and cultivate students who will speak, into whatever cultural zeitgeist we find ourselves within. In one vessel is oil: not only the dangers of the “market mentality” (and its prevalence among our students and their parents) but the very real financial, enrollment, pandemic-related, and other difficulties that make such a mentality seem so inevitable. In the other is water, what many of our institutions agree is the larger purpose of Christian higher education: the moral formation of students’ souls toward virtue and the service of the Lord. Such formation, we hope, will undergird, not be undermined by, each student’s approach to the marketable skills he or she must necessarily develop.

I cannot produce a successful emulsion in these brief pages. Neither, I should note, can any of the four authors whose articles follow this introduction.

Together, however, our individual explorations of how virtue can be cultivated in Christian higher education can help develop new—and remind us of old—recipes.

At the very least, they can help us articulate again and again the formative nature of education, the art (not knack) of teaching, and the “soulful” nature of our interactions with our students, our colleagues, and our own disciplines.

Kyle A. Schenkewitz’s article opens this issue. In it, he discusses the importance of intellectual humility as a guiding virtue for the academic community, specifically for teachers and students in Christian higher education.

His exploration of intellectual humility begins with its history and ends with an emphasis on how it fosters interdependence between students and teachers, both of whom foster and model intellectual humility for each other in the classroom and in the broader world.

6 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal D. Glenn Butner provides another explicitly pedagogical argument in his study of grading curves. Butner argues that retroactive curves, which allow students to improve their scores over time, help students cultivate virtue because they foster habits that not only give students better study skills but can cultivate a deeper love of learning. Butner’s framing of retroactive curves as aids in the formation of virtuous habits (rather than the development of pragmatic skills alone) can help instructors in all disciplines reframe their own grading practices.

Moreover, they can equip instructors to help their students reframe their study habits in ways that align more explicitly with the greater, deeper purposes of Christian higher education.

Zachary Beck’s article discusses the pitfalls, as well as the significance for Christians, of reading—not just of reading, or of choosing what to read, but of learning how to read. Borrowing both from Church fathers and from ReaderResponse theory, Beck argues that Christian readers must be trained in virtue by the interpretive communities in which they live, communities grounded in the Church (and in their churches) as well as the classroom, before they engage in interpretation of texts. How we read, Beck argues, is as important, if not more important, than what we read; the texts we read can help us cultivate virtue within ourselves only if we approach those texts as readers already steeped in communities that have shaped and continue to shape us in virtue.

Steven Petersheim’s article returns readers to the overarching concerns of what the identity of the Christian institution of higher education has been and will be. Will we reduce our institutions to credentialing programs, he asks, or will we keep to the essential task of offering something both deeply Christian and unique in the broader landscape of higher education? Petersheim ultimately argues that Christian colleges and universities are uniquely suited to help students engage questions of life purpose and meaning. Such institutions, he proposes, should offer first-year seminars that provide students with a holistic vision for their education and, in doing so, give them a framework for not only developing but valuing intellectual virtues in the context of Christian community.

We live and teach in challenging times. Truly, calls to refocus the gaze of Christian higher education on the cultivation of virtue, first, and on the development of marketable skills as only one outgrowth of virtuous habits of mind and body, are difficult to justify when the continued existence of many of our institutions is under threat. But it is essential to recognize that these very circumstances make such a refocus more, not less, important, and not only for those tempted by the “market mindset.” Those of us who might be tempted to think primarily in esoteric terms rather than pragmatic ones, as well, can be brought back down to earth through the cultivation of virtue in our classrooms and ourselves. Our habits of mind and of body, cultivated both inside and outside of the classroom, help us and our students to be more “soulful,” and to act virtuously in all of life, for our own spiritual growth and the welfare of our neighbors.

Julie Ooms 7 Works Cited Adams, Liam. “Hundreds of Positions Eliminated at Evangelical Colleges and Universities.” Christianity Today, 10 August 2020, https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2020/august/christian-collegecuts-bethel-harding-john-brown-cccu.html, accessed 19 October 2020.

Bilbro, Jeffrey. “Going Dark.” Breaking Ground, 29 September 2020, https://breakingground.us/goingdark/?fbclid=IwAR1rk9Uti5nWnaaFzNZLOJ0iPIXCqeae-UqpthifcCbZlNTtwZ1vVmk9gc, accessed 19 October 2020.

Griffiths, Paul J. “From Curiosity to Studiousness: Catechizing the Appetite for Learning.” Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith & Learning, edited by David I. Smith and James K. A. Smith, Eerdmans, 2011, 102-122.

Konyndyk DeYoung, Rebecca. Glittering Vices. Brazos, 2009.

Miller, Eric. “The Market Made Me Do It: The Scandal of the Evangelical College.” Mere Orthodoxy, 23 September 2020, https://mereorthodoxy.com/market-made-scandal-evangelicalcollege/?fbclid=IwAR3VXNS0ABXTHl35fXUOM71YDWdYOq24QC_HXxQI2t2woPRzVpDU1cJAA, accessed 19 October 2020.

Ooms, Julie. “The Promise and Paradox of Christian Higher Education.” CT Creative Studio, 20 April 2020, https://www.christianitytoday.com/partners/higher-education/promiseand-paradox-of-christian-higher-education.html, Christianity Today, accessed 19 October 2020.

Plato. Gorgias. Translated by W. C. Hembold, Prentice-Hall, 1997.

8

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 19, No. 2 (Fall 2020): 8-19

Intellectual Humility as the Pathway to Interdependent Learning in Christian Higher Education Kyle A. Schenkewitz Mount St. Joseph University Cincinnati, OH Trevor Hurd, a recent college graduate, reflected that he was “taught to challenge nearly every assumption and adopt an attitude of intellectual humility that encourages a pragmatic approach to life that is likely to be fruitful for years to come” (Hurd). Wishfully, I would like to think that my Introduction to Philosophy course was part of his experience, especially the development of intellectual humility. Regardless of my personal impact, Hurd’s emphasis on intellectual humility within the academic community is an explicit reference to a value that is often only implied. In this essay, I will argue that intellectual humility is a virtue ideally situated to the college learning environment and one that must be modeled and practiced as part of students’ academic growth in the intellectual community. First, I will examine the primary philosophical depictions of intellectual humility. I will then explore the specific role intellectual humility can play in a Christian perspective on interdependent education and growth in knowledge.

Finally, I will demonstrate how intellectual humility and interdependent learning can shape course learning objectives and enhance pedagogical techniques in institutions of Christian higher education.

Intellectual Humility as a Virtue Intellectual humility is one of several intellectual virtues. A virtue, generally, is an excellent trait of human character. For Aristotle, virtues are either moral or intellectual. An intellectual virtue is an excellence in wisdom and understanding (23). Roberts and Wood define them as “acquired bases of excellent intellectual functioning...” (Intellectual Virtues 60). Jason Baehr connects several intellectual virtues to beneficial qualities of learning that can “help students learn to ask good questions (curiosity), take up alternative standpoints (open-mindedness), notice important details (attentiveness), take intellectual risks (intellectual courage), and persist in the face of intellectual challenges (intellectual tenacity)” (“Introduction” 4). Intellectual humility, as an intellectual virtue, must be an essential aspect of an excellent thinker. Intellectual humility is characteristic of a person who is well-formed in their cognitive process. In contemporary philosophy, three prominent depictions of intellectual humility stand out. However, following the critique of Hill, Dunnington, and

Kyle A. Schenkewitz 9 Hall, I also want to press forward with a more distinctly Christian conception of intellectual humility.

The first view, put forward by Roberts and Wood, characterizes intellectual humility as low concern for status or self-importance. Citing the examples of Jesus of Nazareth and G.E. Moore, they characterize the motivation of humility as “an unusually low concern for status coordinated with an intense concern for some apparent good” (Intellectual Virtues 241). In an earlier essay, Roberts and Wood contrast humility to arrogance and proposed that humility “is a disposition not to make unwarranted intellectual entitlement claims on the basis of one’s (supposed) superiority or excellence” (“Humility and Epistemic Goods” 271). In their account, the virtue of humility is opposed to numerous other virtues as well, including vanity, conceit, and pretentiousness (258). Humility itself does not connote epistemic goods, but fosters “intellectual ends when it is conjoined, in a personality, with other epistemic virtues” (271). In their estimation, “The humble intellectual–that is, the one who lacks to an unusual extent the impulses of vanity, arrogance, domination, self-complacency, and the like–will have a special freedom and suppleness of action and judgement that promote his or her epistemic ends” (279). For Roberts and Wood, intellectual humility is characterized by a lack of a number of vices that stem from an elevated view of oneself.

The second view, from Whitcomb, Battaly, Baehr, and Howard-Snyder, centers intellectual humility upon the owning of one’s limitations. These authors distinguish between proper pride and proper humility, whereas “proper pride is having the right stance towards one’s strengths; humility is having the right stance toward one’s limitations. Intellectual humility, then, is having the right stance towards one’s intellectual limitations” (8). Their article discusses the ways in which one’s intellectual limitations must be “owned” by each individual. The intellectual humble person must navigate between the intellectual vides of being arrogant and being servile. Intellectual Humility accords a measured confidence in one’s knowledge and beliefs. The humble person maintains “a disposition to be aware (even if just implicitly) of one’s limitations, for them to come to mind when the occasion calls for it” (8). In owning one’s intellectual limitations, the person with intellectual humility develops a “dispositional profile” in which she believes and accepts her limitations, is able to admit those limitations to others when appropriate and may experience regret without hostility concerning her limitations (8-10).

In the third view, Ian Church identifies his perspective as the Doxastic Account of Intellectual Humility and defines it as “the virtue of accurately tracking what one could non-culpably take to be the positive epistemic status of one’s own beliefs” (427). His account is a response to “serious worries” he identifies in the low concern for status and the limitations-owning accounts above (415). In Church’s view, the intellectually humble person is self-critical with regard to the tenacity with which she holds her beliefs and, to the best of her ability, attempts to find the mean between intellectual vices of arrogance and servility. More recently, Church has explored the ways in which his view of Intellectual Humility affects religious beliefs and commitments. On his view, being intellectually humble does not necessitate being conciliatory, but “someone

10 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal can be intellectually virtuous, intellectually humble without suspending belief in the face of peer disagreement; someone can be intellectually humble while being dogmatic and uncompromising in one’s religious beliefs” (“Intellectual Humility and Religious Belief” 229-230). Church attempts to place intellectual humility and religious belief in a constructive tension such that one’s beliefs remain firm while one also recognizes and respects the challenge of difference.

In response to the three views presented above, Hill, Dunnington, and Hall contend that the philosophical discussion concerning the essence of intellectual humility has ignored an important religious component. Their critique is centered upon the ways in which religious dimensions, such as the Christian notion of dependence on God, need to be included in accounts of intellectual humility.

They demonstrate how “a Christian theist might experience the three predominant markers of intellectual humility found in the philosophical literature–low status concern, owning of limitations, and proper beliefs–in distinctive ways” (199).

They draw from Dunnington’s work on Augustine to elaborate how intellectual humility takes on a specific “grammar” based upon one’s religious commitments and, in Augustine’s case, is characterized by glad intellectual dependence on God. Each of the views outlined above seems to grasp an essential quality of intellectual humility and each provides avenues for fruitful educational benefits.

With Roberts and Wood, I affirm that intellectually humble person does not seek knowledge to gain fame or glory. Likewise, with Whitcomb, recognition of one’s limitations is vitally important. With Church, I too want to affirm a confidence in one’s beliefs, especially when one has evaluated one’s beliefs as fully as humanly possible. Intellectual humility allows students to maintain their views and remain persons of conviction while also being open-minded and receptive to the beliefs of others. The intellectually humble person recognizes their limitations and embraces the effects of learning beside others. The intellectually humble person understands that their own beliefs will change because of this experience, but such change is not necessarily a contradiction. Learning beside different others may deepen, strengthen, and more fully integrate one’s beliefs in an everwidening understanding and appreciation of the world we inhabit. The intellectually humble person recognizes that he may be mistaken or misinformed on some area of knowledge or belief and, being disabused of this error, may result in a more coherent and consistent perspective.

As a Christian believer and teacher in Christian higher education, I am inclined to follow Hill, Dunnington, and Hall’s suggestion to adopt the philosophical definitions above as markers of humility that are rooted in a deeper truth about human beings, our creatureliness. Roberts and Wood signal this centrality as well, stating, “Because of the belief that we are creatures of a loving God, we are encouraged to stress our dependence and thus our interdependence in a way that Aristotle, for example, does not” (Intellectual Virtues 67). Intellectual humility, in a Christian context, stems from our creatureliness. Because we are created by God our status-seeking already has a limit, our limitations are already evident, and our ultimate beliefs are of a transcendent divine being. As creatures we depend on God for our very being, but we also depend on other creatures for our physical and intellectual flourishing. A learning community that is formed in

Kyle A. Schenkewitz 11 Christian intellectual humility acknowledges both our human createdness as a shared starting point that reinforces the interdependent nature of our intellectual growth.

Intellectual Humility in a Christian Perspective As a virtue, intellectual humility should exhibit the markers of low concern for status, owning of limitations, and well tracked attitudes towards one’s beliefs, but in a Christian context intellectual humility also affects how and why one learns. In my own Christian tradition, the Book of Common Prayer contains a prayer for schools and colleges that illustrates the aim of Christian higher education: O Eternal God, bless all schools, colleges, and universities, that they may be lively centers for sound learning, new discovery and the pursuit of wisdom; and grant that those who teach and those who learn may find you to be the source of all truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen (824). In this prayer, learning, discovering, and pursuing are the central activities of education, but the motivation is for each individual in the institution to see all truth as rooted in God. For Christian institutions of higher education, making these aspects of the academic life explicit can help clarify method and purpose of learning in community. Building on the example of Jesus and Augustine, I will explore how intellectual humility in a Christian perspective provides a framework to understand ourselves as creatures who are dependent upon others for knowledge, the conditions in which we can appropriately seek knowledge, and the proper end of our knowledge as love for God and God’s creation.

Christian higher education is motivated, at least historically and nominally, by the ethos established in the person of Jesus Christ. The humility of Jesus’ life was not a servile existence. Even from a cursory reading of the Gospels, Jesus lived a life that was firm, assertive, bold, decisive, self-possessed, and even confrontational. Jesus modeled Christian intellectual humility in living a life of confidence and conviction that was motivated by love. Jesus’s life and actions were founded on his understanding of the dual command to love one’s neighbor and to love God. Sometimes loving our neighbor is expressed as a desire to understand the plant and animal life of our ecosystem. Sometimes loving our neighbor is a study of the sociological and economic effects of political decisions. Loving our neighbor can be expressed through the development of new vaccines and therapies for diseases. In a learning community, we can love our neighbors by helping them appreciate perspectives that differ from their own or respectfully questioning their assumptions. As educators, we know that intellectual growth and improvement is stimulated by challenge. When debate and struggle are tempered with intellectual humility, they become an essential part of the learning process and illustrate how our learning requires interaction with others. If an institution of Christian higher education is modeled on the humility of Jesus, then the learning communities it fosters seek a knowledge of creation that is also grounded in love of God.

12 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Jesus is described in Philippians 3 as one who “humbled himself.” In the incarnation, Jesus, the creating Word of God, humbled himself and took on the form of a servant to engage with the world of his own creation. Following Roberts and Wood, the humility of Jesus is marked by low concern for his status and a willingness to be with creation and redeem creation. Jesus exemplifies a humility that engages with creation to know and be known by creation. Norman Wirzba states, “God became a human creature so that in Jesus God could show us how to better imagine and fully become creatures ourselves” (23). To be a Christian is to follow Jesus in the way of humility, a humility that is deeply engaged in the world. Christian humility becomes intellectual humility when we begin with the knowledge that we ourselves were created to know both the created world and the Creator.

In college courses, students and teachers gather to meet and explore creation and creaturely life together. We learn about mathematics, biology, business, and religion as elements of our created world. If we acknowledge the created nature we share with our objects of study, we can relate to them anew as fellow creatures that are loved and redeemed by God. The world around us becomes our neighbor and our teacher. As we grow in knowledge of God’s creation, we grow in the knowledge of the God of creation. We depend on the heavens to continue to declare the glory of God (Psalm 19:1) so that we might come to a deeper understanding and appreciation of both the heavens and God’s glory. Christian intellectual humility attends to the created world as God’s own, as reflective of God’s love, and as intended to be known and loved as such.

In his Confessions, Augustine further exemplifies how Christian intellectual humility is centered on human creatureliness and our desire to know and love God. Augustine’s Confessions are an autobiographical prayer to God in which we read about the young bishop’s life, education, and conversion. The narrative structure of Confessions is a wandering soul seeking rest in knowledge about himself and the world around him. Much like today’s college students, Augustine was searching for a truth that could integrate all of his acquired knowledge and experiences. Eager to learn and grow, Augustine looked for meaning in his intellectual accomplishments only to find those experiences unfulfilling. Augustine was educated in rhetoric, spent time in the Manichean religious sect, and read Neoplatonic philosophy. His search finally led him to Christian faith and an understanding of God as the ground of all being. Augustine introduced his Confessions with a reflection on the truth in which he could rest, “Or should I say, rather, that I should not exist if I were not in you, from whom are all things? Yes. Lord, that is the truth, that is indeed the truth” (5).

Recognizing the truth of his created nature reframed all of Augustine’s knowledge and intellectual pursuits. This framework situates the intellectually humble student as one of God’s creatures seeking God’s truth among God’s creation. In Christian higher education, the foundation of our knowledge and being in God is an essential starting point for our academic endeavor to study creaturely life.

For Augustine, one must first learn to love God as the beginning and end of all life and knowledge before one can love the objects of knowledge appropriately. Intellectual humility reorients our desire for knowledge and keeps

Kyle A. Schenkewitz 13 it firmly fixed on our telos, the God of all truth. In Book 10 of Confessions, Augustine recalled his investigation of the created world in search of the ground of his being. In a poetic interlude, he questioned the earth, the sea, the creatures, and the heavenly bodies. From each, he learned that they are not God but were made by God. By investigating creation, he learned of the Creator. In investigating himself, he came to know himself as a creature, dependent upon God. His knowing and loving the world around him lifted his intellectual gaze to the One beyond creation (270). As a Christian convert, he had found the end of his searching and the One toward which all his knowing and learning was driven.

In an ideal learning community guided by Christian intellectual humility, students connect with one another as creatures with a shared appetite for knowledge. Their collaborative search of creaturely life has love of God as its true end. Craig Boyd investigated how Augustine differentiated his notion of virtue from the Roman view of his day. For Augustine, the difference was the end which it sought. Boyd states, “The only morally virtuous end at which we should aim is the love of God. All other motives are morally deficient” (250).

This notion fits well with Augustine’s recollection of seeking God in the world of creatures only to be redirected inward to find God in himself as a being created by God. In this sense, even as we grow in knowledge of the world around us, we come to greater knowledge of ourselves and the God who is the source of our being. Augustine’s intellectual efforts led him to the foundation of knowledge, but he also knew how easily his love for God can be misdirected toward God’s creation.

Augustine was very clear about the ways in which our desire for knowledge and love of self can distract and disorient us. The created world could also lead to an inappropriate love of creation, one that supplants love for God and one that centers upon a love for one’s own glory or acquisition. In Book 10, Augustine explained how the senses can lead to “concupiscence of the mind, a frivolous, avid curiosity.” Here he described curiosity in a very specific and vicious sense, quite different from the way we might use it today. Citing 1 John 2:16, Augustine called curiosity a “concupiscence of the eyes” because “firsthand information” about the world comes through the eyes and “the eyes are paramount among the senses in acquiring information” (311). We might note here the cognitive dimension of curiosity as a vice. For Augustine, curiosity acquired information about the world in such a way that it “masquerades as a zeal for knowledge and learning” (311). He further described this desire as “a lust to experience and find out” (312). Curiosity’s end, as Augustine understood it, is the obtaining of knowledge for the sake of the self. Curiosity is the pursuit of knowledge devoid of intellectual humility. In James K.A. Smith’s recent book On the Road with Saint Augustine, he explains that “Curiosity, for Augustine, is not the spirit of inquiry we prize and encourage; rather, it is a kind of quest for knowledge that doesn’t know what it’s for–a knowing for knowing’s sake, we might say, or perhaps more to the point, knowing for the sake of being known as someone who knows. For Augustine. The reason I want to know is an indicator of the sort of love that motivates my learning” (143-44). When our knowing

14 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal arises from a pursuit of glory, or a failure to recognize our dependence on others, or is held too tenaciously, we make an idol of our knowledge.

While Augustine portrayed the pursuit of knowledge without intellectual humility, Paul Griffiths, also drawing from Augustine, aptly describes the virtuous contrast. He distinguishes between two different types of intellectual appetite, curiositas and studiositas. Griffiths uses the term “intellectual appetites” to describe the innate desire to know. A person’s intellectual appetites can be formed through careful catechesis or training. These appetites “can be formed or deformed, shaped into something elegant and orderly or warped into something ugly and chaotic” (112). While curiositas is a malformed intellect that seeks to own what it knows, studiousitas, being well-formed, attends to its knowledge as a gift (20). The studious person’s intellectual appetite “is rooted in wonder and had intimacy with some creature or ensemble of creatures as its end. Knowledge, in turn, on its Christian construal, is a particular kind of intimacy between one creature and another” (125). This intimate connection of knowing another creature “is an intensification of their shared creaturely intimacy as participants in God” (130). The studious person resists gathering knowledge as a possession because she recognizes a kinship with the objects of knowledge. The studious person acknowledges in the other a “more fundamental participation present in the order of being—participation in God, that is—shared by knower and known” (131). Intellectual humility that is rooted in the createdness of all things understands that our knowledge is not ours to own but is God’s. We may freely participate in knowing God’s creation, but we must also know it as God’s creation. Creation is offered to us as a gift in which we may participate and grow in knowledge and love, but our knowledge and love must ultimately be directed to God, the giver of all good things. For teachers in Christian higher education, we give away knowledge as a gift to our students. Yet, the giving away of this gift is a sharing in which both student and teacher interact intimately with another (58).

This gift, when properly received, leads us back to love of Creator and creature alike. On this model, the vocation of Christian education regards knowledge of creation as a gift of interdependency between creatures and the Creator. Christian educators can then utilize this conception of intellectual humility in course construction and implementation.

Practical implications of Intellectual Humility in Christian Higher Education Intellectual humility in a Christian perspective acknowledges the limited and creaturely nature of our humanity and pursues knowledge with the goal of a deeper and more intimate understanding of God. Intellectual pursuits are never solitary enterprises but are grounded in our creaturely dependence on others to grow in knowledge. Intellectual humility forms groups of students into learning communities in a collaborative search for truth. It trains students to recognize their own limited perspective and system of beliefs as integral to the learning of others and to share their understanding with measured confidence. Instruction of intellectual humility in higher education learning communities must be intentional

Kyle A. Schenkewitz 15 and explicit and its benefits must be evident. Still, how can this conception of education inform what teachers do in the classroom? How can a better understanding of intellectual humility shape courses and enhance pedagogy? In this section of the paper, I will discuss how intellectual humility shapes the learning outcomes, objectives, and activities of my courses. I will also illustrate how I incorporate intellectual humility in the classroom to build an interdependent learning community that promotes intellectual growth.

Course learning outcomes are the backbone of a college course. The weekly learning objectives and activities students complete should be building blocks toward the learning outcomes for the course. These learning outcomes must be measurable, concrete, and specific. Developing course learning outcomes that focus on intellectual humility can enable teachers to imbed intellectual humility in the very structure of their course, emphasize intellectual humility as a regularly occurring objective, and build assignments and activities that incorporate intellectual humility. For instance, consider the following course learning outcome for a course on Environmental Ethics at a Christian college: Students will compare their own religious or philosophical perspective with the Christian notion of creation and engage in constructive dialogue with others whose perspective may differ. This learning outcome has active and measurable verbs to assess student learning. It features a concrete and specific context in which this learning objective is to be fulfilled. It also engages students in the practice of intellectual humility by making the Christian notion of creation central to the objective and emphasizing that a student’s perspective must be in conversation with others.

In order to fulfill this outcome, I employ a peer-review learning objective that is structured around critical engagement with the written work of others. I employ peer review to guard against the potential vice of curiositas and help students to see their academic work as adding their unique perspective to a larger conversation. My guidelines for peer review of papers includes the following criteria: “Asking critical questions, offering support, helping clarify, and pushing back on unstated assumptions are all characteristic of a good response. Do so gently and with respect and care to help improve the thinking and learning of our philosophical community.” With these guidelines in place, I create an environment where students put their best analytical work forward and expect a response that will challenge them. As an author, students begin to recognize that their work on a topic is limited to their own perspective and experience and that there will always be more questions to be answered and other perspectives to consider. As a peer responder, students learn to read with the desire to understand others, but also to help make their partner’s thoughts and ideas clearer and well defined. At each stage the student pairs are focused on helping one another become better students and writers. Each student’s focus shifts from being solely concerned about their research project and must include the work of their neighbor. Each author is then required to incorporate their peer’s response into their final paper. Perhaps they have a new facet to include or an objection to refute. Students work collaboratively with others to strengthen one another’s work, even amid disagreement.

16 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Students in my courses should be very comfortable with peer review and response because they are engaged in online discussion forum activities that require interaction with their own posts as well as replying to the posts of others.

Each week I assign a discussion question related to our week’s reading schedule.

After students have posted their response, they are required to reply to two peer posts. These replies have the following rubric expectations: Replies fully engage in the perspective of others with analysis and critique that respectfully expands or builds upon their initial post. These interactions instill a sense of communal discussion because students know that others will be reading and replying to their posts. In order to complete the cycle, I also require each student to reply back to two peers’ comments on their original post. I want students to have the opportunity to better define their own ideas or make clarifications, but I also want them to be able to defend their stance. Intellectual humility involves knowing one’s limitations, but it also includes an appropriate level of confidence in one’s perspective and an ability to defend one’s views. I have yet to encounter bullying or dismissal of peer ideas in these online discussions. Students have tended to be uncritical with their peers’ posts and prefer to embrace and support one another. I have had to encourage a higher level of scrutiny and analysis in these peer interactions. Overall, my students have been very keen to interact in civil discussion online.

Beyond my course outcomes, objectives, and activities, I also utilize intellectual humility in my face to face interactions with students. I want my courses to be collaborative learning environments where students learn from one another and me as we delve into reading and discussing religion and philosophy texts. Along the way, I have realized that some of the intellectual habits I expected students to utilize in my courses needed to be explained and modeled.

For instance, in my recent Philosophy of Religion course, I struggled to motivate my Christian students to read texts supporting atheism, my skeptical students to read accounts of mystical religious experience, and my religiously conservative students to wrestle with portrayals of God that push beyond the theological boundaries of confirmation class. I addressed this situation by organizing a short lecture on the skill of reading with charity. My explanation of the Golden Rule of Reading, “read others as you would like to be read,” helped students consider each text as written by an author with her own unique perspective, agenda, and historical and philosophical context. Charitable reading requires students consider a text’s strongest and most credible arguments, not merely seek to find and exploit the weakest link in the reasoning. Charitable reading assumes each text we read has something to teach us, even if it is only a better conception of our disagreement with the author. Only after such an intentional and disciplined reading would my students be ready to offer a critique and response to our readings. This direct explanation of what I had previously assumed of my students allowed them to better grasp how they should engage with the course material. It also clarified the goal of our class discussions. As we conversed about these texts in class, we were not gathered just to express our own opinions about religion and the divine, but we were learning to listen to the questions these authors had posed as well as the answers they had to offer through their writing.

Kyle A. Schenkewitz 17 We were learning to follow arguments from their premises to their conclusions.

We were learning to analyze and critique texts based upon our individual understandings. We were each bringing our own interpretations and responses to the classroom for comparison and dialogue. We were practicing intellectual humility as a learning community that recognizes how the unique contribution of each author and each student adds to our collective learning. We were recognizing our dependence on one another for the flourishing of our intellectual life. Students whose intellectual activity has been shaped by intellectual humility are equipped to appreciate the beliefs of others and share their own with confidence.

Finally, in a college classroom, especially in religion and philosophy courses, a student’s personal beliefs are continually at work in their interpretation and analysis of texts and ideas. The diversity of views encountered in a classroom can be daunting for many students. In their course reading, discussion, and research, students interact with ideas that may conflict with their own deeply held beliefs. While these experiences can be unsettling, intellectual humility can empower students to explore new ideas and information, to remain open to opposing viewpoints, and to imagine new ways to integrate what they learn into a more accurate understanding of the world. In my experience, when students become receptive to an opposing viewpoint, they often come to a better understanding of their own position. For example, in my Ethics course my students must construct an argument that addresses an issue like euthanasia or legalization of drugs. As they gather resources, I encourage them to consider arguing in favor of the position they would normally oppose, the position counter to their own belief. Without fail, the students willing to walk in the shoes of their opponent report feeling they have a better grasp of the issue, can relate better to someone whose position differs from their own, and are more confident in holding and sharing their beliefs. They understand that being open to an argument or viewpoint does not entail adoption. These students also recognize their dependence on different perspectives to their intellectual growth. In a learning community trained in intellectual humility, challenging one’s beliefs about the world allows students to further explore why they hold certain beliefs and how to integrate new knowledge and experiences into their own belief structure. The result can be a more resolved and resilient system of beliefs and illustrates the importance of respectful encounters with a diverse curriculum.

Intellectual humility can enhance a student’s intellectual growth by encouraging them to seriously consider ideas with which they disagree and to appreciate views that differ from their own.

Conclusion Intellectual humility is an essential virtue for Christian higher education.

In the Christian tradition, especially in Augustine, the way in which a person regards knowledge and the objects of knowledge is vitally important. For Augustine, all human knowledge begins with our own created nature, examines

18 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal the world of creation, and flourishes into love for God. Because all knowledge is rooted in the giftedness of creation, knowledge must be held with a certain type of love that is tempered by humility. Because all truth and all being stems ultimately from God, all knowledge and truth ultimately points back to God. Thus, for Augustine, our comportment with respect to what we learn dictates how we understand our relationship to that knowledge and how it is regarded by the knower. In a Christian context, intellectual humility orients both one’s desire for knowledge of creation and the knowledge itself toward a love for God and a renewed love for creation. Intellectual humility can profoundly shape how we conceive of Christian higher education and how we teach our courses.

Acknowledging our createdness can allow teachers to shape their classrooms into an interdependent venture of individuals with distinct perspectives. It can instill respect for the experiences and contributions of others. Intellectual humility can also redirect students away from self-centered ambition and back toward their role in the classroom as peer learners. Returning briefly to my Philosophy of Religion course, when I taught my students to read charitably, I was providing them a set of practices to habituate, like reading to understand another’s perspective and avoid making caricatures of arguments. I was also creating a space for them to bring their charitable readings of the text into conversation with their similarly trained peers. The habit of charitable reading was training in intellectual humility.

These students were learning to treat both text and peers as gifts of knowledge.

These gifts, when properly received, ultimately lead them back to love of Creator and creature alike.

Works Cited Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by W. D. Ross. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Augustine of Hippo. The Confessions of Saint Augustine of Hippo. Translated by Maria Boulding. Ignatius Press, 2012. _______. “Introduction: Applying Virtue Epistemology to Education.” In Intellectual Virtues and Education: Essays in Applied Virtue Epistemology. Edited by Jason Baehr. Routledge, 2016, pp. 1-17.

Boyd, Craig A. “Pride and Humility: Tempering the Desire for Excellence.” In Virtues and their Vices. Edited by Kevin Timpe and Craig A. Boyd.

Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 245-268.

Church, Ian M. “Intellectual Humility and Religious Belief.” Journal of Psychology and Theology, vol. 46, no. 4, 2018, pp. 219-242 _______. “The Doxastic Account of Intellectual Humility.” Logos & Episteme, vol. 7, no. 4, 2016, pp. 413-33.

Dunnington, Kent. Humility, Pride, and Christian Virtue. Oxford University Press, 2019.

Episcopal Church. The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church: Together with

Kyle A. Schenkewitz 19 the Psalter or Psalms of David According to the Use of the Episcopal Church. Seabury Press, 1979.

Griffiths, Paul J. Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar. The Catholic University of America Press, 2009.

Hill, Peter C., Kent Dunnington, and M. Elizabeth Hall. “Glad Intellectual Dependence on God: A Theistic Account of Intellectual Humility.”

Journal of Psychology and Christianity, vol. 37, no. 3, 2018, pp. 194-204.

Hurd, Trevor. “Wartburg Helped Me Challenge My Assumptions.” Wartburg College website, Accessed June 14, 2020, https://www.wartburg.edu/trevor-wartburg-helped-me-challenge-myassumptions/.

Roberts, Robert C., and W. Jay Wood. “Humility and Epistemic Goods.” In Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology. Edited by Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski. Oxford University Press, 2003, pp.

257-280. ______. Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology. Oxford University Press, 2007.

Smith, James K. A. On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts. Brazos Press, 2019.

Whitcomb, Dennis, Heather Battaly, Jason Baehr, Daniel Howard-Snyder.

“Intellectual Humility: Owning Our Limitations.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 94, no. 3, 2017, pp. 1-31.

Wirzba, Norman. From Nature to Creation: A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World. Baker Academic, 2015.

20 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 19, No. 2 (Fall 2020): 20-33

The Grading Curve and the Moral Ascent: A Virtue-Centered Approach to Improving Student Scores D. Glenn Butner, Jr. Assistant Professor of Theology and Christian Ministry Sterling College

Though commonly used, the grading curve remains a controversial aspect of assessment in higher education due to its effects on the learning process and student/teacher relationships. Typically, a grading curve is used in one of two circumstances. In the first, a curve is meant to combat grade inflation on assignments or tests in courses where a significant percentage of students attain a high score. Redistributing scores across a wider range fights against grade inflation, but the outcome is sure to hurt student satisfaction, reducing grades to a rare commodity instead of indexing them to concept and skill mastery, and distracting students from mastery of a subject by causing them to focus on comparisons with peers instead (Lang 141; Breese 108–9). The second use of curves is meant to solve the opposite problem, providing an opportunity for more students to pass a class in circumstances where a significant percentage have done poorly on a large assignment or test. However, increasing scores by using a norm-referenced grading curve has been shown to reduce students’ sense of selfefficacy and motivation, while widespread poor performance in an assignment or exam is likely to suggest that the professor should change expectations or teaching methods (Haley; Lang 141). Admittedly, in some circumstances a professor has reasonable expectations for learning outcomes that assessment is gauging, yet the class may perform poorly as a whole to the extent that there is pressure on the professor to reduce expectations to unreasonably low levels, in which case a norm-referenced curve may be more appealing.

This article proposes an alternative to using a norm-referenced curve and to lowering learning outcome expectations in contexts where student performance across the class is poor due to factors not obviously related to faculty methods or expectations. In such circumstances, a method I have come to call a retroactive curve may be a viable alternative. Retroactive curves are characterized by three features: 1) retroactive curves increase the score of an assignment based on performance on future assignments of a comparable nature; 2) they are optional, requiring students to “opt in” through some mechanism; and 3) the preferred mechanism for opting in to a retroactive curve is some form of remedial instruction or exercise that addresses the problems leading to poor performance in the assignment to which the curve will apply. Retroactive curves are not curves in the sense that they distribute student scores in the entire class along a bell curve, but they do curve the scores of an individual student over the course of the

D. Glenn Butner 21 semester based on improved performance. I will argue that retroactive curves are pedagogically effective, but more importantly that when properly deployed these curves better meet the objective of forming intellectual and moral virtues in accordance with the goals of Christian higher education.

With discussions of faith and learning increasingly emphasizing the role of practices in the classroom (Smith and Smith, Teaching and Christian Practices; Smith, On Christian Teaching), it is important to consider not only the pedagogical effectiveness of a retroactive curve, but also the ways that such curves may play a role in spiritual or moral formation. Here, virtue ethics is a particularly beneficial dialogue partner, so I will use Thomas Aquinas, Stanley Hauerwas, and Alasdair MacIntyre to explore aspects of virtue theory that will both inform the best practice of using a retroactive curve and help to identify aspects of a retroactive curve that may be amenable to developing intellectual and moral virtues. I will begin the article by outlining the basics of the retroactive curve, the circumstances that prompted me to develop such a curve, and limited statistical data concerning their success. Then, I will move to an analysis of the ethics of the retroactive curve by considering the curve in connection with habits, narratives, and community as components of virtue formation.

The Retroactive Curve I first developed the retroactive curve at Sterling College, a small, Christian liberal arts institution with a required theology and Bible core curriculum. Sterling draws a wide range of students, some quite serious about their faith, and others who know virtually nothing about Christianity, some with a strong academic foundation, and others who are ill-prepared for a college classroom. The retroactive curve was first implemented in a 100-level general education class, Introduction to Old Testament, with a total of fifty-four students enrolled between two course sections. Most students were first year students in their first semester, and the many who were ill prepared for college or who had no personal faith or religious engagement quickly appeared to conclude that they had no hope in the course. The course was during my first semester of teaching in a small Christian liberal arts context, and partly due to these factors, I had found that students struggled more than anticipated on my first midterm in comparison with students at the larger research institution where I had used a similar midterm previously. I did not find the learning goals unreasonable, and I did not want to lower my expectations for fear of failing to provide substantive content for the many who were academically gifted or more serious about their own faith commitments. I saw no obvious pedagogical mistakes that I could correct, nor were any identified in peer review or when I sought feedback from students.

Therefore, I implemented a simple version of the retroactive curve with the intent of providing students hope of still passing the class. I worried that a normreferenced curve would communicate that my test was too difficult and would undermine students’ motivation to succeed, as research has indicated (Haley; Ambrose et al. 76–80), but I hoped that a retroactive curve would help students

22 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal build the proficiencies that they needed to master content while providing them with a reasonable path toward success in the class.

When I returned the midterm, students were informed that their midterm grade would improve based on their performance on the next midterm according to the pattern outlined in table 1. In this instance, I offered to raise the first midterm score matching it to the second midterm, within limits (i.e., a student scoring a 50 and then a 90 would be marked in the gradebook as having a 75 and 90). To be eligible to participate in the curve, students were required to complete additional worksheets with practice exercises and to turn in an exam wrapper which I allowed them to fill out during the class when I returned the first midterm.

Table 1 FIRST EXAM SCORE: F D C-, C, C+ B-, B, B+ A-, A

CURVE ON FIRST EXAM IF SECOND EXAM IS HIGHER: Match second exam (limit: 75) Match second exam (limit: 80) Match second exam (limit:85) Match second exam (limit:90) Match second exam (limit: 95) If both scores are above 95, I will change two reading quizzes to a 100.

This exam wrapper required students to reflect on what they could do to improve their performance on the next exam and also gave them an opportunity to provide feedback on how I was teaching, since part of the problem could have been my pedagogical mistakes. The sheet also provided an opportunity for students to share whether they wanted to meet in person to discuss any of the ideas they shared in the exam wrapper (see appendix).

There was a demonstrable difference between the twenty-three students who chose to participate in the curve by completing the remedial worksheet and exam wrapper and those who did not participate. The average score of the participants increased by 1.5 points out of 100, but the average decreased among non-participants by 6.5 points. Moreover, 56.5% of students participating in the curve improved or maintained their score, while only 37.5% of non-participants improved or maintained their score. Half of curve participants whose scores decreased did so by five points or less, while only 20% of non-participants scores dropped by such small numbers. Factoring in that six of ten curve participants whose scores decreased in midterm two had an A or A- on both the first and second midterm, this data seemed promising enough to continue the experiment.

I had two leading possible interpretations of the data. First, it may be that students who participated in the retroactive curve were those who were most motivated to succeed in the class and would have outpaced non-participants under any circumstances, retroactive curve or not. This hypothesis did not seem to fit the data. Many of the A students actually dropped in score due to a few difficult questions that stumped most of the class, and several who participated in the

D. Glenn Butner 23 curve still got an F, suggesting the possibility of continuing insufficient effort at least among these students. Most of the largest increases in score came from students who performed at worse than C level on both tests. This led me to a second interpretation: it may be that the retroactive curve was helping students improve in concept and skill mastery, but this improvement was somewhat offset by other factors. Perhaps the second midterm was more difficult than the first, or the students had not had enough time to make necessary improvements, or the curve did not provide enough support to maximize benefits from the curve. I chose to focus my efforts on the third possibility.

With moderate success in hand, I sought to expand the retroactive curve. I offered the same improvement in score on the second midterm to students who improved their final exam grade. I showed students the data from the first midterm, demonstrating with data the benefits of working to improve their abilities and scores. Students were still required to complete an exam wrapper after the second midterm and remedial worksheets to benefit from the curve, but they were also now required to visit me during office hours for a personalized plan on how to improve their learning. Many students exceeded the minimum requirement here, scheduling several office visits. For that reason, I also offered an optional, supplemental secondary review session for the final exam late one afternoon for any interested students. If working with students was paying off, then the improvement in score for students using the curve between the second midterm and final should continue and perhaps amplify in comparison with the results of the curve between the first and second midterm.

The data on the final exam was even more promising. Students who participated in the curve process improved their final exam scores in comparison with the second midterm by an average of 6.4 points, whereas those who did not participate in the curve decreased their final exam scores in comparison with their second midterm by 1.5 points. The net change between the three exams for students opting into the curve was an improvement of 7.9 points, while those who did not participate dropped in score by 8 points. The average score on the final exam for curve participants in the retroactive curve was a high C+, and no participant failed to earn the C- course grade that is necessary to pass a general education course at Sterling College. Perhaps most striking, though, was the impact that the curve had on a student who had opted not to participate in the curve offered between the first and second midterm, during which time his score dropped from a C- to a D-, and he showed little engagement elsewhere in the course. Once he was convinced with data that effort was paying off for other students, he participated in the curve between the second midterm and final exam, even exceeding required office visits, scoring a B+ on the final exam and raising his course score to passing.

Since my success in this course, I have implemented several versions of the retroactive curve in different classes (and will be sharing aspects of these experiments later in the article). Curve points awarded, requirements for opting into the curve, and frequency of summative assessment are all possible variables that can be changed, so the curve can be tailored to the needs of a particular faculty member and/or course. My colleagues took note and implemented

24 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal variants of the same curve with positive results. For example, Tim Gabrielson deployed the curve in an Introduction to New Testament course taught to thirtynine students with a similar three-exam semester schedule. To participate in this curve, students were required to complete an exam wrapper, based on which he scheduled meetings with students as he deemed them necessary. No remedial worksheet was required to opt into the curve. Students who participated in the curve had a net gain of 7.3 points between the first exam and final exam, while students who did not participate in the curve gained 4.1 points between the two exams. Notably, only 15% of students opting into the curve saw a decline in score between the first midterm and the final, while 38% who did not participate in the curve declined in score. The difference here is apparent, but not as marked as the difference in my pilot classes. This may be due to a decline in remedial work (no worksheet was required and not all students met with the professor), or the numbers could be skewed because one of thirteen students who did not participate in the curve saw an increase of twenty points between the first midterm and final through independent work on their own. I will remark further on factors that may lead the curve to be successful throughout the paper, but at present it should be clear that there is some pedagogical benefit to deploying a curve of this nature. Now, it remains to consider the way a retroactive curve relates to ethical questions of moral formation.

A Retroactive Curve and Moral Formation While ensuring that students have a pathway to success in concept and skill mastery is important, arguably moral and intellectual formation remains an even higher goal in a Christian liberal arts setting. This is where the retroactive curve far exceeds the benefits of a typical norm-referenced curve, because the former can be situated into the habits, narratives, and communities necessary for moral and intellectual formation in virtue in a manner that norm-referenced curves cannot. I turn now to consider the retroactive curve and moral formation in the context of three aspects of virtue theory.

Virtue and Habit Few theologians within the tradition have as extensively explored the concept of virtue as has Thomas Aquinas, a perennial source of insight for Protestants and Catholics alike. Aquinas understands virtue as a particular kind of habit, where habit is defined as an acquired disposition toward good or ill (I-II, Q. 49, A. 2). All habits, Aquinas explains, are oriented toward an end, a telos (I-II, Q. 49, A. 2), but the virtues are those habits oriented toward the perfection of a thing’s nature (I-II, Q. 55, A. 1). A virtue, then, is a disposition toward the good end toward which a thing’s nature is directed by virtue of the divine plan for creation. Virtue can be further subcategorized in a number of ways. Colleges and universities should be concerned both with intellectual virtues like wisdom, science, and understanding and moral virtues like temperance, courage, and

D. Glenn Butner 25 justice. As we shall see, both kinds of virtues are helpful dispositions to orient the learner toward the telos of knowledge. The theological virtues of faith, hope, and love are dispositions that are only possible through the supernatural aid of God’s grace, but the cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude can be attained without direct divine intervention. Those intellectual virtues that are oriented toward goods knowable through human reason can also be obtained through habitual human action (Aquinas I-II Q. 63, A. 2).

Aquinas’s explanation of virtue as acquired habit helps us understand certain moral and intellectual features of learning. A principles-based approach to learning might advocate certain maxims like “it is important to study well for tests,” or “good students prioritize studying over partying.” A given student in a class may accept both principles without thereby being able to successfully balance study and recreational activities, or without studying well. Thomist moral philosophy typically explains such failures in terms of the practical syllogism, a nearly instantaneous, subconscious, and unevaluated form of syllogistic reasoning that governs the daily decisions of moral agents (Westberg 39-41). The practical syllogism begins with the major premise, a moral maxim like “it is important to study well for tests.” A minor premise would then specify a particular circumstance and judgment at hand, for example “re-reading the textbook is studying well.” The conclusion follows: “I should therefore re-read the textbook.” Of course, the practical syllogism is subconscious and rapid, so few if any students would be aware that this sort of syllogistic judgment is being made.

Nevertheless, Thomists maintain that such reasoning lies behind many daily activities and decisions.

The practical syllogism is governed by virtue, particularly the moral virtue of prudence and the intellectual virtue of wisdom. Wisdom, referring to the habit of making good judgments or choices (Aquinas, II-II Q. 45 A. 2), and prudence, which names the cardinal virtue that disposes us to make judgments and actions that accord with our natural telos, are active in filling out the major and minor premises of the practical syllogism. In this case, prudence and wisdom must discern which moral maxim ought to apply in a given situation (Gilson 234). For example, a student who knows that she ought to prioritize studying over partying may also know that she ought to be a good friend. Which major premise should be selected when she is invited to a party with a socially insecure friend who seeks her company? After all, in this circumstance prioritizing studying may not always coincide with being a good friend. Even if a judgment is rightly made that the circumstance should require studying over supporting an anxious friend at a party, the moral virtue of temperance is necessary to restrain the desire to enjoy the company of friends and instead prepare for an imminent exam. Likewise, a student who accepts the major premise that it is important to study well will still require prudence, wisdom, and the intellectual virtue of understanding applied to how learning works in order to fill in the minor premise. In the above example, the minor premise of “re-reading the textbook is studying well” is in fact a flawed premise, as evidence-based studies suggest that re-reading is not a significantly successful study strategy (Brown et al. 14-16). These examples demonstrate that

26 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal a student with the right intention, principles, and motivation may still fall short in their academic pursuits if they lack certain critical moral and intellectual virtues.

This exploration of the virtues as acquired habits bears directly on the comparison between a norm-referenced curve and a retroactive curve. Both curves may be used to raise student scores to meet the institutional or personal desire to pass a certain number of students in a class. Pedagogically, the normreferenced curve does not clearly aid student learning. Most importantly, though, the retroactive curve can more easily aid in the development of the virtues necessary for academic success. A norm-referenced curve does not require students to acquire the habits necessary to reach the necessary competencies that a class is seeking to provide. It merely distributes points indiscriminately. On the other hand, by requiring students to opt into participation by completing certain requirements, a retroactive curve can foster the development of these habits under the right circumstances. Here, I find mandatory student meetings an important component of the retroactive curve. I have deployed versions of the curve that require students to meet with me and versions of the curve that do not. When my teaching or writing commitments, or the size of the class, prohibit me from meeting with all students, I have also required meetings with the office of student success. In each instance, personalized meetings can explore decisions, study strategies, and habits that may foster the acquisition of virtue or eliminate it.

Having identified concrete steps for a student to take, which may include changes in study habits from ineffective methods, seeking tutoring, or increasing the time spend studying, to name only three examples, the impetus then falls on students to implement and practice these changes, thereby building those habits that are constitutive of the virtues, among a number of technical skills.

Of course, I do not mean to imply that the development of virtue is easy or formulaic. There was a student in my pilot class for the retroactive curve who met with me on several occasions. We discussed changes in study strategies and notetaking methods to increase understanding of what forms of studying work, and I spent time trying to instill temperance, in case lack of restraint needed to focus on studying was the problem. By the end of the class, we still had not met the objectives she had set for herself and which she was achieving in other subject areas. However, I was able to continue this process with her in a later class until she reached her desired goals and apparently manifested virtues like wisdom, prudence, temperance, and perseverance. Growth in moral and in intellectual virtue takes time. Another student in the same pilot class still failed the course. I had this student on three other occasions in various courses, and by the fourth occasion the student was in reach of an A for his final grade in the course.

Instead, the student calculated his current score and decided not to even try the final paper, recognizing that he would still earn the necessary C-. Faculty support and effort through retroactive curves do not guarantee that virtue formation will be complete or without setbacks. After all, faculty themselves likely continue to need development in their own moral and intellectual formation. Despite this, indexing improvement of score to improvement in the quality of work in the course, does foster an environment where the acquisition of virtue is central to the curve itself.

D. Glenn Butner 27 As a final note on retroactive curves and virtue formation, I should mention that I have explored several formats of the retroactive curve in an attempt to maximize its efficacy. In an upper level general education course, I tried for several semesters to offer a curve without any requirements to opt in, believing it was more important to dedicate time to younger students in entry level classes and lacking time to meet individually with all students. I had hoped the incentive of improving scores retroactively would motivate student growth, but I generally did not see improvement of the magnitude that I found in my pilot course or in other courses with a similar curve structure. To the extent that grades are evidence of development in virtue (which is quite debatable), this raises suspicion that the retroactive curve is less effective without requiring remedial tasks or direct support to opt in. Somewhat more successful was a course-wide customized remedial requirement without individual meetings. One semester I noticed that a general education course was doing a poor job on taking notes and on reading quizzes, suggesting the need for remedial work in both areas. Students were therefore required to submit course notes and notes on readings on exam day to benefit from the curve. This version seemed more effective pedagogically, but still inferior to the retroactive curve with personalized meetings. I have also attempted to increase the frequency of curve opportunities. In a 100-level general education course one semester I offered seven quizzes rather than three exams.

Recognizing the benefit of interleaved practice, the spaced repetition of studying and practicing certain content that increases retention (Brown et al. 49–50, 64– 65), I put a review short answer on each quiz covering content from a previous quiz and increased scores on that previous quiz based on improvement in the short answer question. This forced interleaved review seemed to help some students in concept mastery, but the number of students who repeatedly failed review questions of this sort suggests to me that the underlying development in virtue required personal contact. No doubt some readers of this article (provided I am at all convincing) who try to use a retroactive curve will find their own variations that are more effective than those I have explored.

Virtue and Narrative Where Aquinas highlights the role of habit in virtue formation, Stanley Hauerwas has explored the role of narrative. Remarking on Lawrence Kohlberg’s effort to correct weaknesses in Aristotle and Aquinas, Hauerwas noted early in his career that “What we need is not a principle or end but a narrative that charts a way for us to live coherently amid the diversity and conflicts that circumscribe and shape our moral existence” (Community of Character 144). This narrative helps to establish our unity of self, allowing us to balance conflicting roles that we may possess in different situations. In the example of a student who has to choose between the principles of being a good friend and prioritizing studying over partying, narrative may play a decisive role. Does the student interpret her situation in the narrative of larger vocational goals or in the narrative of her social status and responsibilities? Hauerwas deems narrative particularly important for Christians. He argues that the discipline of ethics after Kant was oriented around

28 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal rules and principles that could be rationally deduced and defended, but there was no place in such contexts for the practices of the Church or the narrative of God’s redemptive acts of salvation (Hauerwas and Wells 34). A retrieval of narrative in ethics makes the biblical story as liturgically performed in the church both relevant and central to ethical formation, but ignoring narrative marginalizes theology. As Hauerwas and Pinches remark, “Jesus did not say if you are to be a follower of his you must develop those virtues that will make you a morally impressive person. Rather he said, ‘Come and follow me’” (29).

Hauerwas develops his ethical perspective with a different context and narrative in mind. He is after something far more grandiose than a grading curve in a general education classroom: “Our freedom is dependent on our having a narrative that gives us skills of interpretation sufficient to allow us to make our past our own through incorporation into our ongoing history” (Hauerwas 144).

The narrative in mind is the narrative with which we make sense of our entire lives, the stories we use to “locate ourselves in relation to others, our society, and the universe” (Hauerwas 148). Ideally, a Christian will situate this narrative within the even larger narrative of “what Christ did, and what God did in Christ,” that “shapes and inspires disciples to go and do likewise” (Hauerwas and Wells 37). Recognizing the scope of the narrative Hauerwas considers, we should be careful not to diminish excessively his intent. Yet, given that Hauerwas himself is prone to use metaphors like laying brick to describe the small, repetitious actions that build character within the larger narrative of our lives, even smaller aspects of our human experience like a grading curve may influence what narratives we need to develop virtue in a much larger scale.

A comparison of the narratives inherent and implied in the normreferenced and retroactive curves again reveals the preferability of the latter. The risk of a norm-referenced curve is that it communicates to students that they do not have the potential to succeed. Instead, they indicate that the instructor has an institutional, contractual obligation to ensure certain pass rates in a class. Such a narrative may produce the desired outcomes in terms of grade distributions, but at great cost. Student motivation is fundamentally goal-oriented, and while some students may have “work avoidance” goals in which a student’s goal is to avoid investing time and effort needed to gain competencies (Ambrose et al. 70–72), in my admittedly limited experience far more students are interested in learning.

Sadly, an interest in learning does not automatically result in a student meeting learning objectives, hence the need to address curves. The problem with a normreferenced curve that merely distributes grades along a bell curve is evident in its effect on student expectancies, “the belief that specific actions will bring about a desired outcome” (Ambrose et al. 76), and especially efficacy expectancies, “the belief that one is capable of identifying, organizing, initiating, and executing a course of action that will bring about a desired outcome” (Ambrose et al. 77).

Because norm-referenced curves communicate that students are not expected to attain a high score but will be given one administratively, students are not led to expect reward for effort and see limited correlation between practice and mastery.

On the contrary, the expectancy is to “game the curve,” simply aiming for superiority over others in the class rather than seeking to improve current skills or

D. Glenn Butner 29 concept mastery. Norm referenced curves diminish efficacy expectancies, and when student efficacy is low, students tend to have low motivation (Ambrose et al. 80).

In contrast with norm-referenced curves, retroactive curves increase efficacy expectancies and thereby motivate students to work harder and to continue to engage in the class. This pedagogical benefit can easily be supplemented with narratives oriented toward virtue formation. When I explain the retroactive curve after the first exam, I am always careful to explain the intellectual virtues as acquired through practice. I then situate the retroactive curve in the context of a narrative about higher education as a form of moral and intellectual development to the glory of God, explaining how the curve is designed to provide students an opportunity to pursue this end. The logic behind allowing some students who perform poorly on an initial exam the opportunity to finish with solid scores comparable to students who did well on all three exams may be unclear. Some students may find such a curve unfair, though I have had none express this to me. Here the parable of the workers (Matt. 20:1–16) can help shape the narrative. In the parable, even those who arrive late to work still receive one denarius, the equivalent of a living wage that was necessary for their basic needs, the same wage earned by those who worked all day. Like this parable (which certainly was not intended to address grading curves), the retroactive curve may similarly provide students the possibility of reaching a basic score needed to advance, provided that they meet learning objectives by the end of the course. I have balanced this opportunity to meet basic needs if work is only satisfactory at later stages in the class by capping the retroactive curve at a C for a student who failed the first midterm, so that there is some means of distinguishing those who have performed at superior level throughout the course.

All have a chance to pass, some are rewarded for using their talents more effectively.

Virtue and Community Alasdair MacIntyre explores the connections between virtue and our social situation in community, further illuminating the nature of virtue formation.

MacIntyre notes that intentions are to be evaluated in the context of a setting and timespan—our interpretation of an action is modified as we consider immediate or long-term goals, and as we consider the action in different contexts (206-208).

Considering immediate and long-term goals relates to the above discussion of narrative: does a student consider work in the class in terms of the short-term goal of passing a class, the more future-oriented perspective of career preparation, or the goal of virtue formation that will occupy a lifetime? The question of context, though, has so far been underdeveloped in this article, but its consideration is a final necessary step toward evaluating the retroactive curve and virtue formation.

Questions of context are essential in MacIntyre’s mind for distinguishing virtue from skill. MacIntyre argues that “someone who genuinely possesses a virtue can be expected to manifest it in very different types of situation” (205).

The virtue of prudence, for example, should manifest not only in decisions about

30 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal how to balance study responsibilities with other commitments, but in navigating workplace ethics, the use of personal finances, and family relationships, to name only a few situations. A professional skill, on the other hand, does not necessarily translate to such a wide variety of circumstances. The translatability of virtues across contexts requires a united narrative that makes sense of a person’s life in total, but we must also recognize that selfhood is “correlative.” By this, MacIntyre means that our narrative intersects with the narratives of others, such that “[we] are part of their story, and they are part of [ours].” This intersection creates the possibility that we “can always ask others for an account” of our fidelity to the narrative we are inhabiting (MacIntyre 218). The Christian who is shaped by a narrative of discipleship following Christ will be evaluated within the narratives of their parents, friends, colleagues, and classmates, an evaluation (conscious or otherwise) that considers whether the role appropriate for a disciple is being fulfilled in the context of family, friendship, work, or higher education.

This correlative aspect means that virtues must translate across various roles into different contexts. Virtue is not only suited to a person’s particular role in one context, but in all contexts. Conversely, the professional skill of managing supply chain software, for example, does not obviously translate to any specific skill in a family setting. If a moral agent’s self-narrative centers on such professional skills, there is likely to be fragmentation of identity in a form that may impede clear pursuit of a goal, hence much recent discussion on the fragmentation and fragilization of identity (Taylor; Maalouf; etc.).

A norm-referenced curve seems more likely to nourish skills than virtues.

When used to raise the scores of students who perform poorly on tests, normreferenced curves may even conceal a course’s failure in fostering the development of professional skills. The skills of knowing how to pass a particular professor’s exams or how to game the system and reach the desired grade by landing at the right point on a curve relative to other students are not skills that apply beyond that context or that suit any long-term goal. While virtues like prudence, temperance, perseverance, and understanding certainly may prove beneficial in these contexts, a norm-referenced curve reduces the likelihood that they are required to score well in a course and may actively suppress their development for the reasons discussed above.

In contrast, the retroactive curve can be crafted to foster the development of virtues that will manifest in a variety of contexts and roles within a community.

As I have deployed it, the retroactive curve is linked to other pedagogical tools like an exam wrapper or visit to office hours that require self-reflection and correlative accountability. Simply put, the retroactive curve assumes and requires an interpersonal dimension that is lacking in norm-referenced curves. While grades are automatically changed in a norm-referenced curve without any need for a student to engage a wider learning community, the practices of exam wrappers, mandatory office hour visits, and supplementary study groups all convey the expectation that intellectual virtues require learning communities.

These requirements for opting in to retroactive curves provide an opportunity to explain to students the communal nature of virtue formation. Further, the communal aspects of a retroactive curve will be most successful when the

D. Glenn Butner 31 foundation has already been laid to establish a community of learning. For example, in general education courses where I anticipate using a retroactive curve, I also require all students to visit my office hours during the first two weeks, since students exposed to office hours at such an early stage are more likely to return. Similar required participation in study groups, campus tutoring, or library tutorials can further the necessary concept of community. When requirements for opting in to the retroactive curve are personalized to particular students, the roles of professor and student are also highlighted in a manner that makes the contextual manifestation of virtues more obvious. Here again, we see evidence of the superiority of a retroactive curve on virtue formation, though perhaps less pointedly than in terms of habit and narrative.

The Grading Curve and the Moral Ascent Though assessment is only one small component of course design, and enrollment in courses one small dimension of a student’s life, virtue ethics compels a Christian professor to consider all practices in the classroom as potentially contributing to the moral and intellectual formation of students. When analyzed in relation to habit, narrative, and role in the community, a retroactive curve appears considerably more likely to foster the development of such moral and intellectual virtues as perseverance, temperance, prudence, wisdom, and understanding while having the added benefit of improving learning outcomes.

This is not to say that there is no room for improvement in designing retroactive curves; for example, the versions discussed here do not necessarily foster the development of virtue in students that perform above average early in the course.

As in moral development, there is always room for pedagogical improvement.

Nor do I intend to ignore the possibility that some students may be prompted toward improvement in virtue by the experience of failure in a class. Curves of any sort will be inappropriate in some contexts, and the retroactive curve remains only one pedagogical tool among many. Yet, it is the only tool of any worth that I have developed, and so I share it in hopes that it may serve in other contexts and in other forms as faculty seek to fulfill one telos of Christian higher education: fostering moral and intellectual virtue in a classroom setting.

32 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Appendix: Sample Exam Wrapper The following elements make up the standard exam wrapper I use after midterm exams. When filled out in class, best results occur when best practices for studying and course participation are displayed to the class on Power Point during the time allotted to complete the exam wrapper.

Name: Are you pleased with your exam score? (circle one) Yes _____

No

What can you do to improve your exam score on the second exam? (Consider study strategies, work during the course, effort in reading, test taking strategies, etc.)

Are any of these areas something you would like to meet with me about? (circle one) Yes ____ No If you answered yes, circle what you wrote above that you would like to meet about. I will contact you to arrange a meeting.

What can I do to better prepare you for the next exam?

D. Glenn Butner 33 Works Cited Ambrose, Susan A., Michael W. Bridges, Michele DiPietro, Marsha C. Lovett, and Marie K. Norman. How Learning Works: 7 Research–Based Principles for Smart Teaching. Jossey-Bass, 2010.

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, revised edition, 5 vols. Christian Classics, 1948.

Breese, Clyde W. “On ‘Grading on the Curve.’” The Clearing House, vol. 50, no. 3, 1976, 108-10.

Brown, Peter C., Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel. Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014.

Gilson, Étienne. Moral Values and the Moral Life: The System of St. Thomas Aquinas. Translated by Leo Richard Ward. B. Herder, 1941.

Haley, James. “To Curve or Not to Curve? The Effect of College Science Grading Policies on Implicit Theories of Intelligence, Perceived Classroom Goal Structures, and Self-efficacy.” Ph.D., Boston College, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:104165.

Hauerwas, Stanley. A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic. University of Notre Dame Press, 1981.

Hauerwas, Stanley, and Charles Pinches. Christians Among the Virtues: Theological Conversations with Ancient and Modern Ethics. University of Notre Dame Press, 1997.

Hauerwas, Stanley, and Samuel Wells. “Why Christian Ethics Was Invented.”

The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, edited by Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells. Blackwell, 2004.

Lang, James M. On Course: A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching. Harvard University Press, 2008.

Maalouf, Amin. In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong.

Translated by Barbara Bray. Penguin, 2007.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 2nd ed., University of Notre Dame Press, 1984.

Smith, David I. On Christian Teaching: Practicing Faith in the Classroom.

William B. Eerdmans, 2018.

Smith, David I., and James K. A. Smith, eds. Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith & Learning. William B. Eerdmans, 2011.

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Harvard University Press, 2007.

Westberg, Daniel A. Renewing Moral theology: Christian Ethics as Action, Character and Grace. Intervarsity Press, 2015.

34 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 19, No. 2 (Fall 2020): 34-43

Is There a Virtue in This Text?

Reading Well through Interpretive Community Zachary Beck East Texas Baptist University

As an English professor at a Baptist university that is unabashed in its framing of learning within Christian faith, I want to train my students to think about literature from a Christian perspective. I teach Critical Theory, a course required for all English majors and education majors who specialize in English.

On the first day of class, I teach my students that a critic is first and foremost a reader and that to be a student and critic of literature is to be a student of reading well. But my students quickly encounter perhaps the central question for a Christian reader of literature: to adapt the well-known church song, will they know we are Christians by what we read or how we read?

Most students enter my class having defined their identity as Christian readers by their reading of the Bible—what they read. Certainly, Christians have long been recognized as “people of the book,” especially after the Reformation rallying cry of Sola Scriptura. This rallying cry also reveals that many Christian readers find identity as much in the Sola as in the Scriptura—they will know we are Christians by what we don’t read. As Christians we embrace the Bible as the word of God that teaches us about the character of God and our relationship to him. St. Paul writes to Timothy, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tm. 3:16-17, ESV). Conversely, non-scriptural texts must be regarded with suspicion, for they may mislead the Christian reader with false teaching or worldly wiles. Thus, St. Augustine bemoans the waste of his youth studying classical literature: “I was forced to memorise the wanderings of Aeneas— whoever he was—while forgetting my own wanderings; and to weep for the death of Dido who killed herself for love, while bearing dry-eyed my own pitiful state, in that among these studies I was becoming dead to You, O God, my Life” (Confessions I.XIII.20). Augustine’s parents and teachers applauded his mastery of literature and rhetoric when they should have mourned his ignorance of the one true God. While Paul’s commendation of the Scriptures and Augustine’s grief over his benighted soul are true, they do not present the full picture. In his treatise On Christian Doctrine, Augustine argues that non-scriptural texts—even works by pagan authors—can contain valuable truths; he refers to these truths as the Egyptian gold that the Israelites plunder in their escape from bondage (II.40.60).

This observation would suggest that how a Christian reads these texts—how one

Zachary Beck 35 separates the gold from the dross—is more important than what the text is. In the Book of Acts, the Ethiopian eunuch appeals to the apostle Philip, “How can I [understand what I am reading], unless someone guides me?” (Acts 8:31a). The Scriptures equip Christ-followers, but they also need guidance in how to receive that equipping. Similarly, Paul is not urging Timothy for the first time to read the Scriptures; he is reminding Timothy of the lessons he has taught him. Those lessons will emerge for Timothy when he turns to the Scriptures in Paul’s absence because Paul has set up a framework for how to read the Scriptures through his long, fruitful discipleship of Timothy. Even with God’s word, the “Good Book,” readers cannot ignore how to read well.

In the introductory chapter to her excellent book On Reading Well, Karen Swallow Prior presents two different perspectives on what to read. She quotes Puritan theologian Richard Baxter, who seems to favor greater discrimination in one’s choice of reading: “It is not the reading of many books which is necessary to make a man wise or good; but the well reading of a few, could he be sure to have the best” (17). By contrast, in his Areopagitica, John Milton argues for “promiscuous” reading: “Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger, scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason?” (Quoted in Prior 15). Prior seems to side with Milton on what to read, based on her own experience: [B]y reading widely, voraciously, and indiscriminately, I learned spiritual lessons I never learned in church or Sunday school, as well as emotional and intellectual lessons that I would never have encountered within the realm of my lived experience. Most importantly, by reading about all kinds of characters created by all kinds of authors, I learned how to be the person God created me to be. (14) Prior credits “reading widely, voraciously, and indiscriminately” for shaping her as a person and a Christ-follower. Yet she argues that “it is not enough to read widely. One must also read well. One must read virtuously” (15). Thus, the Christian reader cannot focus solely on what to read; she must also consider how to read.

Prior is convinced that literature can act as a school of virtue. The reader immerses herself in the story and vicariously experiences alongside the characters moral deliberation and action, which helps readers develop their own virtues: “Just as water, over a long period of time, reshapes the land through which it runs, so too we are formed by the habit of reading good books well” (19). But if readers do not have a sense of how to make virtuous judgments before coming to the text, how can they be sure to make the right judgments as they read? What if the text’s author is very talented aesthetically but bankrupt morally? Will the reader be led astray morally through an enjoyable aesthetic experience?

36 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Prior argues that these problems are overcome by literary language, which “is virtuous in and of itself, and it figures forth virtue in the reader as well” (26).

She attributes this inherent virtue of literary language to a transcendental quality of polysemy: Words carry resonances that spill beyond the bounds of logic and even conscious thought. [Graham] Ward says of literary texts that “their acts of naming and our acts of reading” cannot but conjure the possibilities of transcendence, “particularly when we attend to experience rather than dictionary definitions, as either a writer or a reader.” The fullness of literary language echoes meaning—and reminds us that there is, in fact, meaning. (22) This transcendence would seem difficult to verify beyond the testimony of the individual reader. Indeed, Prior does not maintain the stance of literary language’s transcendental goodness, arguing that “[l]literature is birthed from our fallenness” and that “the desires that are cultivated by books…can pull us toward the good life—or toward false visions of the good life (as Gustave Flaubert shows in romance-reading Emma Bovary)” (26). In attempting to protect the moral value of reading good books well, Prior locates virtue within the text but has difficulty providing a convincing account of how virtue could be located there.

This difficulty can be avoided through a greater emphasis on the first step in the cultivation of virtue—training.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle declares “that none of the moral virtues is implanted in us by nature, for nothing which exists by nature can be changed by habit” (1103a). People do not possess the virtues naturally, according to Aristotle; therefore, he believes that “to be a competent student of what is right and just…one must first have received a proper upbringing in moral conduct” (1095b). A person must learn about the virtues before she can act virtuously. Yet knowledge about the virtues, although necessary, is not sufficient for a person to be virtuous: “[M]ost men do not perform such [virtuous] acts, but by taking refuge in argument they think that they are engaged in philosophy and that they will become good in this way. In so doing, they act like sick men who listen attentively to what the doctor says but fail to do any of the things he prescribes” (1105b). Talking about virtue does not make one virtuous. For example, a philosophy professor may be able to explain to his students what prudence is but then make numerous imprudent decisions in his personal life.

Knowledge of the virtues must be put into action, and that action must become habitual. Aristotle compares virtuous action to other practical skills: [W]e acquire [the virtues] by first having put them into action, and the same is also true of the arts. For the things which we have to learn before we can do them we learn by doing: men become builders by building houses, and harpists by playing the harp.

Similarly, we become just by the practice of just actions, self-

Zachary Beck 37 controlled by exercising self-control, performing acts of courage. (1103a-b)

and

courageous

by

Not only does Aristotle emphasize action with regard to being virtuous, he applies rigorous criteria when assessing whether an action is virtuous or not: “first of all, he must know what he is doing; secondly, he must choose to act the way he does, and he must choose it for its own sake; and in the third place, the act must spring from a firm and unchangeable character” (1105a). A person’s action can be judged virtuous, claims Aristotle, only when that person has voluntarily chosen the action, knowing that the action is virtuous and for the sake of its virtue; furthermore, this knowledge and love of virtue must be woven into the person’s moral fiber. Thus, to be virtuous, a person first has to learn what virtue is and then intentionally practice virtue until virtuous actions become second nature to her, out of her love for virtue.

It would seem that Milton’s promiscuous reading would not aid a reader’s growth in virtue, unless she comes to the texts with an understanding of virtue already in order to discern truth from error. Nor would a reader be able to follow Baxter’s advice to choose the best books to read without either the knowledge of what to look for within them or a virtuous person telling the reader which texts to read. But even in the latter situation, the reader with a reading list in hand from her virtuous friend would be like the Ethiopian eunuch who needs a guide for understanding. The what is insufficient for Christian readers; they also need the how, which they gain through community.

In his work Is There a Text in This Class? Fish argues that meaning is not inherent within a text but rather is made of a text by the members of a particular community reading it within a particular context. A well-known example from his book is the list of linguists’ names Fish put on the blackboard for one class, which he then identified as a poem for analysis in the class immediately following, which covered “English religious poetry of the seventeenth century” (Fish 322). From this anecdote Fish observes, “It is not that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic qualities” (326). In other words, Fish’s students successfully interpreted the names on the blackboard as a poem, first, because Fish had told them it was a poem and, second, because they had been trained—by Fish and by numerous other people since they were young—that a poem has a certain set of qualities. So when these students are told by their professor that a poem is on the board, they see it as a poem and derive meaning from how they see it. According to Fish, “Indeed, these categories are the very shape of seeing itself, in that we are not to imagine a perceptual ground more basic than the one they afford…. To be in the situation (this or any other) is to ‘see’ with the eyes of its interests, its goals, its understood practices, values, and norms, and so to be conferring significance by seeing, not after it” (334).

But what if Fish had not told his students that the list of names on the board was a poem? Fish would argue that his students would have attributed to the list whatever significance would be most appropriate to their community and situation at that moment. Perhaps they would have read it as a list, or perhaps

38 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal they still would have read it as a poem, even without Fish’s prompting. Either way, the students would attribute some meaning to the names on the board as soon as they saw it, even if that meaning were “group of words that is unfamiliar but might be important to me.” For, as Fish points out in a different chapter, “one is [not] trapped forever in the categories of understanding at one’s disposal (or the categories at whose disposal one is), but that the introduction of new categories or the expansion of old ones to include new (and therefore newly seen) data must always come from the outside or from what is perceived, for a time, to be the outside” (314-315). Rather than questioning the presence of meaning, Fish is simply questioning its location, moving it out of the text and into a community of readers.

The presence of meaning is never in dispute, and the reader can never not take an interpretational stand: “[T]here is never a moment when one believes nothing, when consciousness is innocent of any and all categories of thought…”

(319-320). Yet when a reader is deeply immersed within a community, or when a community is widely pervasive, “the meanings they enable seem ‘naturally’ available and it takes a special effort to see that they are the products of circumstances” (309). For example, if a reader is in a community that already agrees upon what virtues are, how to get them, and why one should practice them, then she could readily agree with Prior that “[l]iterature embodies virtue…by offering images of virtue in action and…by offering the reader vicarious practice in exercising virtue…” (15). It may seem like literary language “is virtuous in and of itself, and it figures forth virtue in the reader as well” (26), but just like Fish’s students who interpret the list of linguists to be a seventeenth-century religious poem, Prior’s readers can successfully interpret novels and short stories as exhibiting virtues, first, because Prior has told them these literary works contain virtues and, second, because they have been trained to recognize virtue and find it desirable.

Readers may think that I am questioning the presence of virtues or offering a moral relativism; like Fish, however, I do not wish to question the presence of virtues but to relocate them out of the text and into the reading community. Donald G. Marshall describes how reading has always been a communal act, evident in how we acquire the ability to read: It is obvious that we have learned to read and that means that we have been taught by others…. Much more than learning to decode marks on a page, we were learning what reading various texts in various ways could do for us: inform, entertain, provoke thought…. We have internalized an activity that retains at every point the traces of its social origin. (76) Marshall points out that learning to read includes learning to interpret and that such learning is a communal activity: “Interpretation—the process by which we know our neighbour’s mind—is what we seek in all our social and spiritual relations…. Every act of interpretation aims ‘at an ideal event,—the spiritual unity of community.’ Interpretation thus reveals its ethical and religious

Zachary Beck 39 significance” (82). Thus, not only do we learn from our interpretive community what lists and poems are, we also learn what virtues are and why we should pursue them. Yet Marshall observes that modernity has transformed reading into a solitary, individualistic activity: “[T]he picture of the isolated self reading and attempting to understand a single text, so that reference to other readers comes in only after individual understanding has been achieved, is deeply ingrained in all of us” (71).

Solitary reading as a means to moral truth has Cartesian underpinnings. In his Discourse on Method, René Descartes surmises that the proper apprehension and acquisition of knowledge must be sought in solitude, “resolving to search for no knowledge other than what could be found within [himself], or else in the great book of the world” (5). Notice that Descartes refers to the world as a “great book,” but he believes it is one to be perused by the private reader. Through his reading of the world around him, Descartes seeks to divest himself of the assumptions put on him by his membership in interpretive communities: “I learned not to believe anything too firmly of which I had been persuaded only by example and custom; and thus I little by little freed myself from many errors that can darken our natural light and render us less able to listen to reason” (6). He resolves to use his own “natural light” to discern unimpeachable truth: “[M]y entire plan tended simply to give me assurance and to cast aside the shifting earth and sand in order to find rock or clay” (16). Thus he forms his foundational epistemology, his first philosophy, when he finds an ideal solitude: “[T]he onset of winter detained me in quarters where, finding no conversation to divert me and fortunately having no worries or passions to trouble me, I remained for an entire day shut up by myself in a stove-heated room, where I was completely free to converse with myself about my thoughts” (6-7). Crucial to this picture, both for Descartes and for its implications for our current assumptions about reading, is the necessity of freedom, not merely from distraction or interruption—which every reader longs for—but from “example and custom” and “the many errors that can darken our natural light” (5).

Before continuing my discussion, I want to clarify that what has been described above is Descartes’s method for discerning foundational truth— reality—in order to build a clear-eyed philosophy based on unquestionable, objective knowledge rather than custom, prejudice, or guesswork. This method does not reflect his perspective on reading, which actually is communal: he holds that “the reading of all good books is like a conversation with the most honorable people of past ages, who were their authors, indeed, even like a set conversation in which they reveal to us only the best of their thoughts…” (3). For Descartes, reading itself is a conversation which he entered into within the communal setting of school as one of the “academic exercises with which we occupy ourselves.”

Notice also that reading is a cultural handing-down of the “best thoughts” of “the most honorable people of past ages”; Descartes says that he has “been nourished on letters since [his] childhood” (3).

The communal nature of reading and the gradual accretion of knowledge over time are weaknesses of reading in Descartes’s eyes. In spite of the venerability Descartes grants to the great tradition of Western letters, he turns

40 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal away from them: “[A]s soon as age permitted me to emerge from the supervision of my teachers, I completely abandoned the study of letters” (5). He abandons reading because he cannot find within the great philosophers the complete certitude he deems necessary for an accurate perception of reality: Concerning philosophy I shall say only that, seeing that it has been cultivated for many centuries by the most excellent minds that have ever lived and that, nevertheless, there still is nothing in it about which there is not some dispute, and consequently nothing that is not doubtful, I was not at all so presumptuous as to hope to fare any better there than the others; and that, considering how many opinions there can be about the very same matter that are held by learned people without there ever being the possibility of more than one opinion being true, I deemed everything that was merely probable to be well-nigh false. (5) Dissatisfied to be constrained by his community and the people who had shaped it before him, refusing to join any other community because each suffers from the same constraints, Descartes relies on his own supposed intellectual sovereignty: “And thus I thought that book learning, at least the kind whose reasonings are merely probable and that do not have any demonstrations, having been composed and enlarged little by little from the opinions of many different persons, does not draw nearly so close to the truth as the simple reasonings that a man of good sense can naturally make about the things he encounters” (7-8). Thus, when confined to a toasty room by himself on a wintry day in Germany, Descartes prefers to consult his own mind for foundational truth rather than a good book.

The Western assumption of a reader as an isolated, free agent can lead the Christian reader to neglect communal learning as an essential element in the pursuit of truth, whether that be the cultivation of virtue in Prior’s case or the establishment of first principles in Descartes’s case. In other words, it is not sufficient that Descartes was exposed to literature in his formative years but that he was nourished: he read under “the supervision of [his] teachers” (5). When Descartes enters that oven-heated room to meditate on first philosophy, he believes that his is a solitary, sovereign mind when really it has been molded by, and is under the influence of, his family, his teachers, his cultural experiences—in short, his community.

Similarly, Prior may praise her prodigious reading for teaching her “spiritual lessons [she] never learned in Sunday school, as well as emotional and intellectual lessons that [she] would never have encountered within the realm of [her] lived experience” (14), but those lessons gained through reading were not learned in a vacuum. She is able to grasp spiritual lessons through her voracious reading because she went to church and Sunday school. She is able to grow emotionally and intellectually because the realm of her lived experience forms the scaffolding that she can use to build on her mental edifice. Later in her introduction, Prior acknowledges, “Our actions, our decisions, and even the very perceptions we register in our consciousness have been primed by the larger

Zachary Beck 41 story—of our family, our community, our culture—in which we imagine ourselves” (27).

If the reader is isolated and must discover virtues inherent within the text, then what to read becomes the more pressing question. We should follow Richard Baxter’s advice, hoping to get our hands on the best books available, but the question remains how one chooses those books. If the reader is discipled in the virtues by her community, then how to read takes precedence. We can enter the world of any text with a framework of virtues already in place and gain moral knowledge from the immersive experience through the act of interpretation.

Readers steeped in virtue, enmeshed in their community, can be promiscuous readers, as John Milton prescribes.

To return to my students in Critical Theory, my goal is to transform them from solitary Christian readers defined by what they read or don’t read into a community of Christian readers defined by how they read. This transformation is crucial not just because the literary vocation demands wide reading but also because the world bombards them with all manner of texts for all manner of purposes. Christian readers cannot focus exclusively on what to read because they live in a media-saturated world, which requires a strategy for reading from a perspective of faith. As Robert Scholes observes, “Students should learn to read a range of texts, from various times and places, in various genres and media, in ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of textuality…. That students who graduate in English should be excellent readers, ready to encounter unfamiliar texts, to situate them, interpret them, and criticize them—these are the goals of an English education with respect to the consumption of texts” (118, 119). In my class, we analyze genres of “high” literature, such as novels, short stories, and poems, but we also consider “low” forms as well, such as children’s books, scenes from movies, and advertisements.

But the analysis of texts as a Christian interpretive community cannot simply be a determination of which texts align with Christian values and which do not. If the interpretive process stopped there, it would be little better than once again determining what to read, because the texts that did not meet “Christian standards” would not receive deeper analytical attention. Scholes points out that a similar kind of textual discrimination can take place in English departments in which “high” texts are treated with reverence and “low” texts are ignored. Rather, “[g]ood reading involves reading every text sympathetically, trying to get inside it, to understand the intentionality behind its composition. It also involves reading every text unsympathetically, critically—but the sympathetic has to come first or the critical reading is impossible” (118). The moral formation that Prior sees in reading literature comes through such a sympathetic reading: “Our desires as human beings are shaped by both knowledge and experience. And to read a work of literature is to have a kind of experience and to gain knowledge” (21). The reader can be drawn into a textual world and vicariously face the same challenges, dilemmas, revelations, and triumphs of the characters in the text. Such a sympathetic immersion can happen even with a product advertisement: the reader can see the desires the advertiser is trying to evoke and make moral judgments about them.

42 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal This sympathetic reading finds its parallel in the evangelical missionary investing her life in the people with whom she shares the gospel. The sympathetic Christian reader adopts St. Paul’s strategy to “become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings” (1 Cor. 9:22-23). In my Critical Theory class, I speak of different theoretical approaches as lenses. When students don the deconstructive, Marxist, or postcolonial lenses, they can see different aspects of a text emphasized. The survey of contemporary literary theory actually promotes sympathetic reading on two levels: immersion in the text to be analyzed and consideration of the values that frame the critical lens as well as what is at stake in the textual encounter. At the beginning of the semester, students “adopt” a short story to work with for the duration of the course. With each critical approach we examine, they put on those lenses to interpret their short story. By the end of the semester, when they have to write a longer critical research essay on their adopted story, they have gained an intimate knowledge of it by reading it from many different perspectives.

Once we have practiced the sympathetic reading of texts using various critical lenses, we are able to submit our reading experiences to Christian reflection—how does the reading experience move beyond mere sympathy to an act of redemptive love? Here the community of readers plays an important role.

Our class is not merely a meeting of colleagues; we are also a fellowship of believers who can help one another bring our faith to bear on the texts. I guide my students through the different theoretical perspectives, pointing out ways that these seemingly atheistic approaches have a place in God’s economy. For example, we look at how Jesus uses deconstructive techniques when responding to the Pharisees’ legalism and how the Israelites’ forty years of wandering in the desert exemplifies Homi Bhabha’s concept of unhomeliness. We discuss what it means to be a Christian interpretive community and why it is important for such a community to read “immoral” texts like Fifty Shades of Gray. It is imperative that Christians, and all readers steeped in virtue, not only read all sorts of books but also discuss them together. The purpose of the critical act is to facilitate the instruction and delight of readers in one’s community, so restoring the communal dimension to reading is crucial. After all, Aristotle’s treatment of virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics serves as the groundwork for his political theory: we learn how to be virtuous so that we can live together in community.

I agree with Karen Swallow Prior that “[t]hrough the imagination, readers identify with the character, learning about human nature and their own nature through their reactions to the vicarious experience” (21). But to make the most of that vicarious experience, readers have to constantly return to the actual experience of living in community. They first must be trained in virtue by the community. Then they must practice sympathetic reading, discerning the intentions of the text before making a moral pronouncement. Finally, they must share what they have learned through their reading about the virtues and refine their interpretive strategies within their community. Just as Christians should be recognized wherever they go by how they love others, so also should a Christian’s

Zachary Beck 43 reading practices be shaped by the communal pursuit of loving God and neighbor.

They will know we are Christians by how we read, rather than by what we read.

Works Cited Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, translated by Martin Ostwald. Prentice Hall, 1999.

Augustine. Confessions, 2nd edition, translated by F. J. Sheed, edited by Michael P. Foley. Hackett, 2006. _______. On Christian Doctrine, translated by D. W. Robertson, Jr. Prentice Hall, 1958.

The Bible. English Standard Version. Bible Gateway. Bible Gateway/Crossway, 2016.

Descartes, René. Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, translated by Donald A. Cross. Hackett, 1998.

Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Harvard University Press, 1980.

Marshall, Donald G. “Reading and Interpretive Communities.” The Discerning Reader: Christian Perspectives on Literature and Theory, edited by David Barratt, Roger Pooley, and Leland Ryken. Baker Books, 1995, pp. 69-84.

Prior, Karen Swallow. On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books. Brazos Press, 2018.

Scholes, Robert. “A Fortunate Fall?” Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature, 2nd edition, edited by David H. Richter. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000, pp. 111-119.

44 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 19, No. 2 (Fall 2020): 44-62

Why Christian Higher Education Exists: A Case for Introducing the Liberal Arts in First Year Seminars Steven A. Petersheim

When I enrolled in college for the first time, I expected to be inducted immediately into a rich study of “the best that has been thought and said,” under the tutelage of scholars who were daily delving deep in the intellectual treasures of the past and present.1 I hoped to venture far out into the life of the mind to explore things I had thus far only glimpsed or imagined. As an Amish child and first-generation college student who had been home-schooled for high school, I did not have a close network of experienced peoples to prepare me for what was to come. I relied heavily upon what I had learned in books, where I had encountered great thinkers and writers who inspired me to relish the goodness, beauty, and truth to be found in the world around me even while alerting me to the evil, ugliness, and deception waiting to sweep me up as well. The world of higher education was a tantalizing riddle that I eagerly wished to unravel. I enrolled in college to enter more deeply into the imaginative and intellectual life of the mind to be found in the great expanse of humanity across time and space as well as in the present. Here I would seek out answers to all of my questions and observations about the great big world around me.

But it was not until I began taking literature classes that I finally found some of the mind-bending, soul-feeding discussions I had been expecting from higher education. One professor in particular evoked the big questions about reality, the meaning of life, human purpose, the belief structures of society and civilization, human flourishing, truth, and God. A self-avowed atheistic Jew whose practical agnosticism showed itself in the questions he asked as well as in his observation of Passover despite his lack of belief, Dr. Schlegel renewed my desire for deeper knowledge and understanding of the human condition. His study of literature as a site of engagement with the big questions of life captured my imagination and engaged my intellect, and he eventually convinced me to add English as a second major though I had very little sense of what I might do with an English degree at the time. I only knew that the texts and conversations in literature classes whetted my appetite for greater understanding of the ultimate meaning of human life.

Unfortunately, undergraduate students typically have too few opportunities or experiences that inspire them to pursue ultimate questions that arise from the kind of deep thinking and learning traditionally encouraged by the liberal arts. Yet the whole project of higher education begins to crumble when its basis in the liberal arts is seriously undermined. No longer is college a place of holistic learning for many students; it is simply a hoop to be jumped through

Steven A. Petersheim 45 before gaining full-time employment. Many institutions of higher education have turned their attention almost exclusively to measures of job placement upon graduation rather than emphasizing the educational experience itself. Yet if it is reduced to a credentialing program for specific jobs, a college education offers little more than vocational training with a few odd classes tacked on and with a higher cost in time and money. The focus on job preparation being touted by public and private institutions as well as by other voices in our students’ lives can make it seem a daunting task to inspire students with the big picture of a liberal arts education. But it is an essential task in a Christian institution attempting to offer something unique and truly valuable in the landscape of higher education.

Some institutions are better positioned than others to address such questions of life purpose and meaning. Having taught and been taught in both public and Christian institutions, I believe that Christian liberal arts institutions and programs are uniquely situated to provide a holistic experience that regularly engages such questions. Yet the holistic vision of learning offered by the Christian liberal arts cannot merely be tacked onto the end of a college education when students have already settled into a routine and have their sights set on a degree as their ticket to the next stage of life. In light of these observations, I propose that we introduce the liberal arts in a first-year-seminar that inducts students into college life by engaging them directly in the study of a Christian rationale for the liberal arts and higher education. While such a seminar cannot be the only component of a Christian liberal arts education, it can set the tone for valuing the development of the intellect and imagination in the context of a Christian community.

Promises and Problems of the Liberal Arts As we consider the role of the liberal arts in Christian education, it is worth remembering how the liberal arts came to be. Traditionally, the project of higher education was focused on the study of theology as the key to understanding the mysteries of this world and the world to come. As “the queen of the sciences” (or, of learning), theology was the starting point for consideration of the world at large. The liberal arts were conceived of as branches of learning extending from the trunk of theology. In the western world, theology was intertwined with classical thinking of the ancient world to develop a study of the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy), which was itself built upon the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric). Sociologist Richard Roberts describes the secularization of learning and society as “the long and sometimes torturous relinquishment of the central role of theology” and suggests that in modern secular society “sociology understood in terms of ‘grand theory’ may plausibly be viewed in a certain sense as the successor to theology as ‘queen of the sciences’” (190). Whether or not sociology is taken to be the new “queen” of learning, having a common source of ultimate understanding did—and in some cases still does—provide the framework for a coherent understanding of the world.

46 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal In Renaissance Europe, the trivium was modified into the study of the humanities with the addition of more specialized areas of study such as history and poetry, and the liberal arts eventually became roughly synonymous with the humanities.

The quadrivium also expanded, but remained centered on mathematics and the sciences. Even today, the arts and sciences serve as the basis for many institutions of higher education in America—whether or not they consider themselves liberal arts institutions. The democratization of education over the past two centuries in America and elsewhere has brought to a large swath of society what had long been considered an elitist undertaking, descending from the classical artes liberales, or “arts” for the “liber-ated” free man and citizen possessed of sufficient goods and time for such an endeavor.2 With the democratization of higher education, however, the kind of training linked directly to a job was added to the project of higher education alongside other training programs such as apprenticeships, guilds, trade schools and vocational schools, or direct training by an employer.

“What can you do with that degree?” This simple question has become more trenchant as the distinctive role of colleges and universities have moved to include more professional schools and a more job-related rationale for their educational programs. This question also belies a conception of higher education as a utilitarian and consumerist undertaking. It is utilitarian because it is focused primarily on the usefulness of the degree. It is consumerist because it is focused on financial impact of the degree that is received rather than on the educational capacities that are shaping the student as a whole person. Most often this question is asked of students pursuing a degree in programs dedicated to delivering a liberal arts education.

Despite changes between traditional and modern concepts of education, there is much continuity as well. Whether in the manner of the symposia of ancient Greece where a speaker or performer engaged his audience through public talks or presentations or in the similitude of medieval scribes laboring over manuscripts in scriptoriums, we continue to follow some of the learning practices and areas of study that preceded us. As Andrew Delbanco notes, “sometimes old [educational ideas], such as the Socratic idea that learning is a collaborative rather than a solitary process, can take new form. That is what happened when the Christian idea of monastic community evolved into the idea of college as a place where students live as well as learn together” (53). Such an interlinked perspective of learning and living has remained integral to the liberal arts with its holistic perspective of the learner in her world. Colleges and universities today continue to find ways to house, share, study, and apply the learning of those who have come before us.

In contradistinction to more comprehensive universities that offer all kinds of training, liberal arts colleges are largely dedicated to the pursuit of learning for its own sake. Learning is an end in itself. To become an educated person is a worthy object. As opposed to training in the professions or in trades, the liberal arts inculcate a view of intellectual work as its own end rather than as a means to an end. This point was made in the nineteenth century by John Henry Newman,

Steven A. Petersheim 47 who notes that “liberal knowledge, which stands on its own pretentions, which is independent of sequel, expects no complement, refuses to be informed (as it is called) by any end, or absorbed into any art, in order duly to present itself to our contemplation” (81). Over a century later, David Breneman similarly described liberal arts colleges as “single-purpose institutions, with no rationale for their existence beyond their capacity to educate undergraduate students.”3 In a more recent scathing critique of the ways higher education has been abandoning its roots in the liberal arts, Anthony Kronman of Yale University notes that the liberal arts accentuate “questions of meaning and purpose that transcend the narrowly vocational” and view education as a good in itself: “It is not preparation for this job or that, for one career rather than another. It is preparation for the ‘job’ of living, which of course is not a job at all” (41). Further, Kronman declares, “a liberal arts education, and the humanities in particular… give young people the opportunity to put themselves—their values and commitments—into a critical perspective. They help students gain some distance, incomplete though it must be, on their younger selves and to get some greater traction in the enterprise of living the lives they mean to live and not just those in which they happen by accident to find themselves” (147).4 Another former Ivy League educator critiques the ways upper-tier institutions of higher education have been failing in their educational mission, pointing to the “second-tier” liberal arts college as the place where “college is still college,” where “teaching and the humanities are still accorded pride of place,” and where students can still expect a “mind-expanding, soul-enriching experience” of education” (Deresiewicz ). What these descriptions of the liberal arts share is the conviction that education is a holistic experience of personal development rather than a means of specific job-training. Learning itself is good.

But this relish of learning itself does not mean there are no benefits other than learning itself. The skills that are learned—often referred to as “soft skills” or “transferable skills”—include critical and creative thinking, communication skills, people skills, problem solving, research skills, office skills, leadership skills, and more. Wellesley College, a long-established liberal arts college, describes its value by noting that “disciplined thinking, refined judgment, creative synthesis, and collaborative dynamic…are not only crucial to developing [students’] leadership abilities, but are habits of mind that will serve them well throughout their lives, and be primary contributors to their success” (“The Value”).

Similarly, the liberal arts student at Princeton is promised: “you will learn to read critically, write cogently and think broadly…. A liberal arts education challenges you to consider not only how to solve problems, but also trains you to ask which problems to solve and why, preparing you for positions of leadership and a life of service to the nation and to all of humanity” (“What Does Liberal Arts Mean?”).

Underlying this statement and many others like it in the promotional materials of institutions that showcase the liberal arts is the belief that being an adept learner will make students’ lives more meaningful and their work more outstanding— regardless of what vocation they pursue.

In his book-length study on why students do and should choose the liberal arts, Mark William Roche describes the skills obtained as follows: “the ability to

48 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal listen, analyze, weigh evidence, and articulate a complex view” (52). In addition to honing their critical and creative skills, Roche points to the higher level of cultural literacy gained by liberal arts students as a direct benefit of liberal arts study: “Familiar with the enduring achievements of diverse cultures, the liberal arts graduate is at home in a world of ideas” (52). Reading and discussing a wide variety of enduring texts and ideas gives students the wherewithal “to communicate clearly, think critically, and solve complicated problems; the capacity to draw on a breadth of knowledge while patiently focusing on appropriate details; the savvy to appreciate difference, complexity, and ambiguity; and the desire to continue to learn are all fostered in the liberal arts setting” (5253). Students are guided through the process of cultivating learning skills and increasing cultural literacy in a liberal arts environment.

Many liberal arts schools also promote the development of citizenship values, whether seeing their students as leaders or engaged citizens who are committed to the common good. The Association of American Colleges & Universities describes its main purpose in terms of “excellence in undergraduate education in service to democracy.” One private liberal arts college president highlights the goal of liberal arts colleges “to prepare students not only for lives of thought and work but also for lives of civic engagement” (Wiewel). This focus on civic engagement often takes the form of service learning and correlates with a link between liberal arts and civic engagement that has been uncovered by a National Endowment for the Arts study. According to this study, one’s dedication to civic engagement correlates strongly with one’s dedication to literary reading, the kind of reading that is emphasized in liberal arts programs.5 In terms of personal development, communication skills, problem-solving skills, and civic engagement, then, learning is good and has good consequences.

In recent years, however, the number of liberal arts degrees have decreased—dramatically, in some cases. One study found that between 2007 and 2016, the liberal arts and humanities saw decreases of around 15% (philosophy and religious studies) to 25% (history); during the same period the number of degrees awarded in all majors increased by 31% (Schneider and Sigelman 5). In light of such developments, administrators have repeatedly suggested that the liberal arts need to be cut from the curriculum or at least reconstituted within the curriculum. The University of Wisconsin offers a telling example of how universities are responding to such shifts. Once considered a leading proponent for the liberal arts, the University of Wisconsin system has seen its liberal arts mission at risk ever since the legislative events of 2015. As Adam Harris observed in The Atlantic, this was the year when the governor’s office issued a budget proposal that failed to mention the “search for truth” that had long been the ground of the liberal-arts-based “Wisconsin Idea,” issuing instead a statement about the obligation of higher education to “meet the state’s workplace needs.”

While this wording was revised amid public outcry, recent restructuring plans at Stevens Point campus indicates that there has indeed been a decreased commitment to the liberal arts in the UW system. In response to announced budget cuts, liberal arts majors such as geography, French, and history were to be eliminated despite strong criticism. Lee Willis, chair of the history department,

Steven A. Petersheim 49 spoke for many in the liberal arts when he said, “I feel like the liberal arts are sort of being asked to line up behind job preparation…rather than studying the liberal arts for the liberal arts’ sake as a public good” (Harris). Greg Summers, the environmental historian turned provost who presided over these planned changes, took a different view. For him, the proposed elimination of liberal arts majors was not about the elimination of the liberal arts. Summers argued that through the general education program, the liberal arts would play a “much broader and more vital role” than the majors had.6 While the planned cuts were since abandoned, this change of course only happened after voluntary retirements and a reduction in the number of faculty and staff as a number of them found new jobs elsewhere.

Later it was reported that these projected cuts had not been “about financial exigency” as much as about “Stevens Point trying to position itself as a destination campus ahead of projected enrollment declines across Wisconsin” (Flaherty). What this story suggests is that while budget problems may indeed provide the public rationale for eliminated programs, the actual reasons may be different. In part, the lack of administrative support for the liberal arts may be a response to changed public perceptions about the role of higher education—a shift in focus from the formation of well-educated, well-rounded citizens to the production of credentialed individuals.

The secular academy may well be responding to the fissures in American public life, where polarizing views have gained the ascendancy and militate against any agreement on what constitutes the common good. Such fragmentation of society has surely made it more challenging to formulate and maintain a coherent and compelling mission. The university, it is often said, has become a multiversity. And while such a concept at first glance may seem to be full of the rich diversity of human experience, it has too often devolved into silos of learning or tribes of identities that do not even attempt to find a unifying vision for the project of higher education as a common good. Fields of learning have become the domain of experts, with the result that the liberally educated student is frequently sidelined by the rise of a new autocrat—the expert. Liz Coleman, former president of a private liberal arts college in Vermont, relates her experience of meeting with educators from Eastern Europe and Russia when the Soviet Union dissolved and these educators turned to the liberal arts as a vision for transforming their institutions from sites of propaganda into sites of true education. With chagrin she realized that the Western educators gathered in the room as advisors for these newly free educators had lost much of the vision for higher education as a common good of society. And much of this loss she traces to a changed focus. Over and against the holistic development of the student for the good of society that once animated higher education in the West, she noted that many colleges and universities were focused on the production of technical but disinterested experts who engage in arcane areas of research. “This brew— oversimplifications of civic engagement, idealization of the expert, fragmentation of knowledge, emphasis on technical mastery, neutrality as a condition of academic integrity—is toxic,” Coleman claims, “when it comes to pursuing the vital connections between education and the public good, between intellectual integrity and human freedom, which were at the heart of the challenge posed to

50 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal and by my European colleagues.” This departure from the traditional aims of higher education suggests the failure of a vision of the common good. In Coleman’s view, the so-called death of the liberal arts is the result, not the cause, of changed perceptions of the role of higher education in America.

Despite the clamor surrounding the end of the liberal arts, issuing in ominous titles such as “The Liberal Arts May Not Survive the 21st Century,” the sense of crisis about the future of the liberal arts is not new. In a study of the state of liberal arts colleges conducted in the early 1990s, David Breneman claims that the “private liberal arts college stands out as one of American society’s greatest success stories,” but he also finds that the literature on the future of the liberal arts college “portrays a nearly unbroken history of concern for its survival” (1). In an article aptly titled “The Continuous Death and Resurrection of the Liberal Arts,” Norman Jones reviews the literature on the history of the liberal arts and delivers a similar verdict: “The death of the ‘liberal arts,’ however defined, is a motif of lament in American higher education. It became a popular leitmotif in the late nineteenth century.” Given that the “crisis” of the liberal arts and the “crisis” of the humanities have been with us for such a long time, perhaps it is time to recognize not only that the liberal arts are resilient but also that they may be more essential than the nay-sayers realize. But these findings also indicate that constant vigilance is required—that there is a perennial need to reiterate the value of the liberal arts study in a world that needs it so much and seems to value it so lightly.

Some colleges have taken a completely different approach. Rather than shedding themselves of the liberal arts, they have fully committed themselves to the project of forming well-educated citizens through the liberal arts. St. John’s College in Annapolis and Santa Fe offers an intriguing example. Offering one rigorous program of study, St. John’s immerses all students in the liberal arts.

Founded in 1696 as “King William’s School,” a “free” school in the colony of Maryland, St. John’s was rechristened when chartered by the new state of Maryland in 1784. In 1937, “the New Program” was launched, and it remains to this day as the basis of the single program of study at St. John’s. The college describes its program as follows: “At the heart of St. John’s College undergraduate program is a liberal arts curriculum focused on the most important books and ideas of Western civilization. Following a reading list that includes many Great Books, all classes are conducted seminar-style, with faculty facilitating the discussion. Our liberal arts undergraduate program is a truly comprehensive education that is perhaps the most rigorous in America” (St. John’s Undergraduate Program”). Also called “the most contrarian college in America,” St. John’s offers an education that Walter Sterling, dean of its second campus in Santa Fe, describes in these winsome terms: “Education should prepare you for all of your life. It should make you a more thoughtful, reflective, selfpossessed and authentic citizen, lover, partner, parent and member of the global economy” (Bruni). St. John’s is not without its criticisms, even by those who are dedicated to the liberal arts. It is true, for example, that by focusing on a canon of Western civilization, St. John’s is limiting their scope of inquiry. But even if the St. John’s model may need some tweaking, its very existence shows that it is still

Steven A. Petersheim 51 possible to shape a curriculum on the idea of delivering the best education possible rather than simply responding to market concerns.

The Virtues of the Christian Liberal Arts The study of the liberal arts is particularly suited to Christian institutions of higher education that emphasize the integration of faith and learning. Such integration is a key concept woven into the mission statements of many such colleges and universities, and it is generally connected to the idea that all truth is God’s truth and is worthy of study. Christians are called to learn not only for the sake of learning and its intrinsic rewards, or even for the public good (i.e. “civic engagement”) but also because developing the intellect and contributing to the common good are ways of bringing glory to the God who gave us our minds and organized the world in a rational sense, arrayed in all the beautiful diversity of his image-bearers in the world. Yet it is not enough to call simply for some integration of faith and learning or to tout a general belief that God is the author of truth in all of its guises. The Christian liberal arts must develop a thoroughly Christian ethos that knows why the liberal arts are specially suited to Christian faith. The virtues of the liberal arts must coincide with the virtues of Christian faith. And it is my contention that they can do just that in several particular ways—first by pursuing the great questions in relation to the ultimate source of truth and second by inspiring virtuous thought and action.

Any campus asking questions of ultimacy is of course forced beyond simplistic thinking about which questions are more significant in an immediate situation. For there is no ultimate that is more ultimate than the God who is the foundation of Christian thought. What is less apparent in the literature is the role of the liberal arts in cultivating virtue. Critical thinking is a much-celebrated intellectual virtue of the liberal arts. And it is certainly cultivated through the liberal arts. But it is not enough. Roche points to the capacity of a liberal arts experience to help students “develop virtues, build character, and gain a sense of vocation, the moral and social purpose of education” (Roche 102). Among the reasons for choosing a liberal arts education Roche offers two related items: “cultivating intellectual and practical virtues” and “forming character.”7 By Roche’s reckoning, we do not rest in the contemplation that higher education invokes but instead we move from contemplation to action—from the liberal arts to the practical arts. Roche accepts Newman’s claim that contemplation is the chief immediate outcome of a liberal arts education, but notes that “only the practical intellect can address problems, such as abject poverty, that challenge human dignity and awaken our sense of duty. Students are called away from the contemplative to the active life, from college to work, in order to address their most basic needs, to develop further through experience, to participate in shaping the world, and to aid in the welfare of others” (51). Like the intellectual virtues, the practical virtues bear witness to what kind of person one is.

Reading great texts and questions of the past and present can spark one’s participation in the liberal arts. “The literature and philosophy of earlier eras can

52 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal teach us specific virtues that have been neglected in the present but which represent alternatives to the contemporary world. Certain virtues are more prominent in given historical circumstances than in others. Reading older works reminds us of virtues that are less visible today but still of great value” (141).

Whether reading of the courage and perseverance of the Odysseus on his journey home, or of the faithful friendship of Sam McGee in The Lord of the Rings, literature of other times and places can indeed show us the value of virtues in a new way. But we may also critique a character or writer for his flaws and still appreciate his virtues. We may find some of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s treatment of race lacking in Uncle Tom’s Cabin while still being struck by the lessons of humility her characters give us.

The intellectual virtues are not so far removed from the virtues of character as we might suppose. After all, the life of the mind inevitably feeds the life of action. “For the ancient Greeks,” Roche observes, “education was not only about cognition but also about longing, motivation, and inspiration as well as attaining self-knowledge and developing virtues” (112).

The values of citizenship, for example, lead to virtuous action rather than remaining a matter of contemplation.

Careful thought and discussion lay the groundwork for understanding what it means to be a good citizen, but virtuous action is necessary if citizenship is to become a reality.

The Christian virtues—especially the virtue of charity—add an intensity to the Christian student’s call to virtuous action. Drawing on Pope John Paul, Roche argues that “Love, the highest of all virtues, is embodied in the most elevated form of learning, the love of wisdom, which is often attained in ‘trusting dialogue,’ that is, in a context of social and intellectual friendship” (Roche 114).

As the chief Christian virtue, “charity” is an essential part of Christian education. For the Christian, the virtue of charity does not simply modify or reform the project of education. Alasdair MacIntyre describes charity as something “of which Aristotle knew nothing,” adding further that “Charity is not of course, from the biblical view just one more virtue to be added to the list. Its inclusion alters the conception of the good for man in a radical way; for the community in which the good is achieved has to be one of reconciliation…. Every particular view of the virtues is linked to some particular notion of the narrative structure or structures of human life.” MacIntyre postulates further that in the Christian scheme of life, as opposed to Aristotle’s ahistorical scheme, “a central genre is the tale of a quest or journey. Man is essentially in via. The end which he seeks is something which if gained can redeem all that was wrong with his life up to that point” (174-75). Informed by the virtue of charity, the ethos of service afforded by the Christian liberal arts offers more than that available simply through a commitment to an ideal of justice or another of the classical virtues.

By introducing charity into the project of learning, the relationships between learners and teachers may be transformed from an exchange of goods to a commitment to each other that is not measured in the language of commerce.

The charitable teacher offers her best to the student and to God even if the student never reciprocates, and the charitable student offers his best to the teacher and to God even if the teacher never reciprocates. We are all on a journey, in via of

Steven A. Petersheim 53 learning, and charity makes it possible to aid others in the journey rather than simply undertaking it on your own. It is also an act of charity to extend forgiveness and an active hope of restoration toward those who have worked against the common good. While the hope inspired by charity attends to the person in the moment, it is eschatological rather than being tied to the temporal alone. This removes the utilitarian tendencies of even the most noble of the classical virtues, with often unspoken obligations of reciprocity on the part of the offending party.

Roche decries a culture in which developing “smart” graduates is the goal.

“Is that enough? Aren’t they missing something essential? Religious universities may be freer about engaging issues of formation, but formation is not a question of religion. Regardless of an institution’s affiliation, the overarching question is: are we developing only brains or also persons?” (110). Being smart is not enough. Even serial killers are “smart enough” to figure out how to commit their crime repeatedly without being caught. Only if intelligence is linked to virtuous character development can we feel sure that our learning is for healthy selfdevelopment and the common good. Roche points to the virtues involved in an honest and intense search for truth: To search for truth is to be engaged in a variety of character virtues. The decision to pursue all evidence even if it should contradict or weaken one’s initial claims is a mark of honesty and integrity. To think an issue through to the point where all angels have been explored and every ramification considered requires discipline and perseverance. A willingness to abandon previous beliefs in the light of more compelling evidence presupposes a capacity for flexibility and self-overcoming and can readily lead to gratitude to others for helping one along in one’s intellectual and moral journey. Taking intellectual risks by exploring paths that have not yet been trodden and thereby sacrificing a much simpler and safer existence is, likewise, a form of civil courage. Patience and striving are both fostered when I recognize that, despite my best efforts to date, my tentative answers to a given puzzle remain inadequate, and I must continue to delve further. (Roche 111) Yet even if we are convinced of the need to incorporate virtue training in our classes, how would we go about doing so? Roche suggests including virtue formation within the course goals. “A science class might stress some of the virtues of character, such as honesty and integrity, discipline and perseverance, modesty and teamwork, that will be developed in the course of exploring a topic as part of a research team” (166). It would take little adjustment, in many cases, to align at least some of our course objectives with associated virtues. Including virtues in our course objectives would solidify them in our minds and make them evident to our students.

A Christian liberal arts college might seem exempt from the threats that face their secular counterparts. For when Christianity is integral to one’s learning,

54 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal we might ask, isn’t learning part of one’s ongoing spiritual development regardless of one’s future career? Furthermore, isn’t the Christian willing to sacrifice material goods for the sake of spiritual goods? But Christian liberal arts colleges have not been immune to the pressures faced by other liberal arts colleges and programs. Some of them are every bit as dependent on the goodwill of donors as their more secular peers are. And many donors today earmark their funding for special projects or initiatives with greater visibility rather than simply giving for the cause of education. Some Christian liberal arts institutions, rather than mounting a serious defense of the liberal arts in Christian education, have changed their message to fit the increasingly consumerist culture that permeates American life today. In 2020, for example, more than 200 faculty and staff found their jobs being eliminated at evangelical colleges and universities, with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic listed as one of multiple financial reasons for these cuts (Adams). But the financial reasons given may not be the primary problem. As in the Wisconsin case, the problem may arise from a failure to sustain the liberal arts mission that is part of its DNA of these institutions. Jeffrey Bilbro, one of the tenured faculty whose position as a faculty member in the department of English is being eliminated, notes, “In my experience, there’s not a straight line between financial pressures and cuts to liberal arts curriculum and programs. But many administrators fixate on certain numbers or goals to the exclusion of a university’s fundamental mission.” While logistical concerns do need to be addressed if an institution is to survive, when logistical matters take precedence the mission of a Christian institution of higher education is compromised. In its simplest terms, the mission of a Christian liberal arts college is to provide a bona fide Christian education which is clearly enabled through a liberal arts model—arguably the best model for a holistic Christian education.

A 2018 study by the Cardus Institute revealed that graduates from Christian colleges and universities care more than graduates of other institution about getting a job that “directly helps others” and care less about getting a wellpaying job. Daniel Silliman described this study by saying it “suggests religious schools should emphasize distinctives.” According to Albert Cheng, a professor of educational reform at the University of Arkansas, many Christian schools who “are under pressure to defend their value to both donors and prospective students…make their case in terms of economic impact and spend a lot of tie defending the economic value of a college education but don’t consider other factors.” A majority of students at Christian colleges said they chose “the religious mission mattered to them and functioned in their study” (Silliman).

What this suggests is that a college’s Christian liberal arts mission should play a primary role in advancing their appeal to donors and students and those who send them. Roche recalls his own deliberate mission-related choice of college: “My own decision to attend a small liberal arts college was driven by a desire to be in an environment where I could have many discussions that would allow me to develop a capacity for argument, a mastery of the spoken word, and a deeper understanding of the great questions” (Roche 56-57). But whether the student is motivated before or after enrolling in a college, the Christian liberal arts college

Steven A. Petersheim 55 owes it to their potential and actual students to share the rich vision for learning that flows from the liberal arts and Christianity.

Inducting Students into the Study of Liberal Arts Even if we are convinced that the liberal arts fit well with the mission of a Christian college, the question of how and when to engage students in the liberal arts remains a question. Several methods of implementation in Christian liberal arts institutions are typical—thesis or capstone projects, extracurricular options, and the First Year Seminar. While all of these approaches may indeed contribute to the liberal arts program, the First Year Seminar provides a natural starting point at the very beginning of a student’s college career. The typical first-year seminar is all too often seen as a boring and tedious requirement that professors are required to teach, it actually offers a tremendous opportunity for getting students to begin to understand how vital it is to build a self, not just a career. First-Year Seminars that combine an introduction to college life with an introduction to college writing and all that it entails provide an excellent opportunity for students to begin exploring the Christian liberal arts promptly and intentionally. Once established, this approach to learning can create a working rationale from which students can work through their learning experience. Such a course also provides an opportunity for infusing the intellectual virtues with a purpose for learning that includes and transcends the individual. If we awaken and enhance a love of learning within students by combining the pursuit of wisdom with the formation of purpose upon a student’s entry to college, we lay the groundwork for a coherent college education regardless of students’ areas of study.

One excellent resource for helping students consider the liberal arts approach to learning at a Christian college is a volume of essays titled Liberal Arts for the Christian Life, assembled and published in 2012 to celebrate and continue the passion for the liberal arts of retiring professor Leland Ryken at Wheaton College. This text is directed toward students, with professors in the liberal arts sharing personal stories and advice to the Christian college student.

Like Stanley Hauerwas’s “open letter to young Christians on their way to college,” this collection of essays invites Christian students into the world of higher education and gives them counsel in how to make the most of their time in college.8 In the lead essay, which began as a chapel address in 1984 that was titled “The Student’s Calling,” Ryken states what Hauerwas also urges upon students—that the student’s calling is to be a learner. “During your college years,” Ryken writes, “being a student is your vocation. That occupation involves more than studying, but studying is by definition its main ingredient” (21-22). In the First-Year Seminar that also serves as a first-year writing course titled “The Great Conversation” at Gordon College where I currently teach, we lead students in discussions rising from the pages of this book and others. It has proven an excellent resource in my classes and elicits conversations that often exceeds my expectations as students dig into the big ideas that are raised by the essays in this book.

56 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Beginning with Leland Ryken’s essay, which appears between the preface and introduction of the book, my students are immediately enthralled by his idea of “the student’s life as a Christian calling” (15). Students have consistently related how much it comforted them to read Ryken’s caution that we “need to stop making students feel guilty about being in a period of preparation” and how much he challenged them with the words directed at them: “The quality of your education is your choice to make” (20, 22). Invariably, however, another student would remind them that he also gives a reason for comprehensive education that is not merely job-focused, either when he quotes Martin Luther’s statement that education can make us “fit for everything” or when he claims that an educational grounding in the liberal arts “prepares people to do well in all that they might be called to do in life” (18-19). This essay provides an excellent entry point for these discussions, whether discussing Jeffrey Greenman’s consideration of what it means to be a faithful student or Sharon Coolidge’s contention that “as your liberal arts education is a step in the process of becoming the person God wants you to be, so learning well is a step in discovering who you are and learning what it means to be a precise and mature thinker” (141). The conversation sparked by Ryken’s essay is continued in the essays of the book. From Professor Jeffry Davis’s essay on “The Countercultural Quest of Christian Liberal Arts” to liberalarts-educated financier John Augustine’s reflection on “Learning for a Lifetime,” these essays speak directly to the undergraduate student in a Christian liberal arts college. This book engages students in the great conversations of the past through discussions of timeless thoughts and writings of Christian thinkers and writers such as St. Augustine, John Milton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, C.S. Lewis, Henri Nouwen, and many others.

One of the most meaningful units in my First Year Seminar consists of discussions from and about the Civil Rights movement. Drawing on texts such as Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and Fannie Lou Hamer’s speech “We’re On Our Way,” we examine how these leaders used Christian principles and rhetorical strategies to argue for justice for black people in segregated America. We also read and share stories of racial injustice to help us think through the issues further. While any liberal arts college is interested in such timeless values as justice, a Christian liberal arts approach to justice offers the opportunity to consider a particularly Christian vision of justice. At Gordon College, we draw upon the “Shalom Statement” adopted by the college for our understanding of Christian justice. Defined as “a right ordering of relationships and actions resulting in the affirmation of human dignity and the flourishing of community,” shalom designates more than peace, as in the absence of conflict; it is an ideal toward which we aspire and our efforts for justice aim to rectify injustices that result from a failure to live according to “the biblical reality of the Imago Dei, the fact that we are all created in God’s image, and as such are worthy of dignity and respect as persons.”9 Injustice for one is injustice for all. This sense of shalom is linked to Cornelius Plantinga’s description of shalom as a “webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight.” After noting that we are in a fallen state of affairs on planet earth, Plantinga turns to Christian education as a response to our unfortunate distance

Steven A. Petersheim 57 from this shalom: “That’s what Christian higher education is for. It’s for shalom.

It’s for peace in the sense of wholeness and harmony with the world. It’s for restoring proper relationships with nature and other humans and God, and teaching us to delight in the wonders of creation that remain.”10 By discussing a Christian view of justice, we shift the focus from our own personal or local frameworks to think about the larger picture of justice from God’s perspective of all of us as his beloved creations in a fallen world that he originally created and pronounced “good.” We think about what we might to do bring shallow to ourselves and others who are not experiencing shalom.

Many of my students quickly tune in to such discussions, adamantly participating and clearly relishing our consideration of questions that really matter. But one course at the beginning of a student’s college life is not enough to inculcate the values of the liberal arts or to help them develop the ability to “think Christianly.” But I have been surprised by how quickly some of them have tuned in to these discussions, relishing with delight questions that some of them knew they had at the beginning and others realized their souls were responding to as we went along. The approach outlined by Roche at the University of Notre Dame is helpful for applying the liberal arts approach to a larger project. He describes the sophomore-level “College Seminar” in the following terms: In addition to focusing on the development of students’ oral skills, each College Seminar addresses a great question that students approach by engaging classical and contemporary works in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. In my version of the course, students explore the topic ‘Faith, Doubt, and Reason.’ They read works in philosophy and theology and literature, they attend theater performances, they discuss great films by directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Woody Allen, they visit the campus art museum, and they read sociological studies of the beliefs of America’s youth and analyses of politics and faith in America today. The range of questions that can be explored, all focusing on this nexus of themes, helps students develop the ability to think bigger thoughts and ask broader questions. They understand, in ways that faculty members have forgotten, that the great questions cannot be parceled out to individual disciplines. (68).

Such a rich component of a liberal arts education could be incorporated into students’ first-year experience or saved for a follow-up experience part-way through their program.

Other components of a student’s liberal arts education may also contribute to their holistic experience as students at Christian colleges and universities.

Service learning courses or projects, for example, may be shaped with Christian virtues in mind. In many honors programs, the most significant part of a student’s undergraduate college experience comes in the form of a thesis or final project that draws on the individual student’s learning and academic interests. Some college departments also offer capstone courses to give students an opportunity to

58 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal develop and celebrate their learning as well. In a liberal arts institution, it would make good sense for these final projects to be designed to incorporate or reflect back on the student’s learning from a liberal arts perspective. In a Christian institution, final projects could also provide students the opportunity to reflect on how their Christian values in a liberal arts context have developed their intellectual and moral virtues and proclivities.

As in the case of all robust learning conditions, a variety of experiences is necessary if a student is really to appreciate and integrate the values of Christianity and the liberal arts. The first-year seminar, however, offers an irreplaceable opportunity for inducting them into this world before their experiences of college become weighed down with other ways of thinking about it. Since a liberal arts approach and a Christian understanding of the world are receding in the public consciousness, greeting students at “the door” of their university experience to usher them immediately into the world of the Christian liberal arts is essential if they are to elude the siren call of power-hungry materialist ways of being in this world.

Conclusion: Continuing the Promise of the Christian Liberal Arts This is no time to back away from a commitment to the liberal arts.

Indeed, it may fall to Christian liberal arts colleges and universities to carry along this rich cultural tradition if it fails in other institutions. We are teaching students for life, preparing them for a variety of possible vocations that spring from a Christian intellect rather than training them only for one or two jobs that may not even exist anymore upon graduation. In order to function as actual sites of higher education, our colleges and universities must provide rich engagement with the higher questions that have continued to be asked by students and thinkers throughout history and into the present.

When the liberal arts fade from the curriculum, the project of higher education itself changes, often devolving into vocational training, economic and ideological considerations, or some combination of these. In a college landscape that values expediency and a return on college investment, it is past time to reembrace the exceptional qualities of Christian liberal arts institutions and programs. This is not to say that vocational training plays no part in higher education or that finances should be ignored. Instead, a liberal arts college places lesser emphasis on these concerns and greater emphasis on learning itself as something with intrinsic value. Within the framework of the liberal arts, education is a primary—not a secondary—good. Unfortunately, the high sticker price of many liberal arts schools makes it impossible or at least foolish to ignore the financial burden that accompanies the project of higher education. But the primary goals of a liberal arts college or university have to do with becoming broadly educated and developing a holistic approach to learning and living.

Without a grounding in the liberal arts, it is hard to justify the value of college in any way that is not ultimately reduced to economic considerations. For the

Steven A. Petersheim 59 Christian college student, education is an induction into a life of learning rather than just a path to a degree.

In a country whose workforce is dominated by young professionals who lack purpose and struggle for meaning, the Christian liberal arts can offer a refreshing alternative. This kind of education prepares students to serve not just themselves as they enter the workforce, but to serve a God who is actively seeking to restore and redeem the world through his people. While it is important to introduce students to the liberal arts in first year seminars, this will be of limited value without a strong vision for the Christian liberal arts that is apparent to all proponents of the university—including faculty and staff, administrators and board members, donors and students, freshmen and seniors. Articulating and supporting such a vision may renew a commitment to a robust education committed to a student’s holistic development that seeks to integrate rather than divide the branches of learning. For in a Christian liberal arts institution, the purpose of our learning is not limited to vocational training or even civic engagement, important as these may be. The higher purpose of our learning is to know and participate in the goodness, beauty, and truth of the world into which God has placed us.

Notes 1

Unfortunately, I would not even hear—much less debate—Matthew Arnold’s phrase until many years later.

2

Bruce Kimball notes that education in classical times was not available to women or slaves but was reserved for those free citizens who could “participate in governing the city-state, and..the freedom, or leisure, to study, which is afforded by possessing wealth through some fortunate set of circumstances…. The idea of education was therefore constituent in the concept of the free, or liberal citizen” (270).

3

David W. Breneman, Liberal Arts Colleges: Thriving, Surviving, or Endangered? (Washington DC: Brookings Institute, 1994), 4.

While I do not wholly agree with Kronman’s suggestions that the research ideal and political correctness are to blame for the failure of vision in many institutions of higher education, nor with his suggestion that embracing secular humanism as a quasi-religion is the way forward, he does offer a poignant diagnosis of the problem of purpose facing higher education.

4

“For literary readers, the volunteer rate is 43%—nearly 3 times greater than for non-readers” (“The Arts and Civic Engagement”).

5

Summers added, as justification: “Too many general-education programs rely on courses that are introductions to liberal arts majors even as they reenroll primarily 6

60 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal nonmajors. This double duty leaves the majority of students wondering why they must take such classes and hoping only to ‘get them out of the way.’… Our aim at UW Stevens Point is to fix this problem, to look beyond a set of majors that serve roughly 6 percent of our students and ask how the disciplines of the liberal arts can better educate everyone” (Summers).

These are the chapter titles of Roche’s book Why Choose the Liberal Arts?

(Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame Press, 2010).

7

See Stanley Hauerwas, “Go with God: An Open Letter to Young Christians on their Way to College,” First Things, November 2020. https://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/10/go-with-god 8

For the full statement, see “Shalom Statement” at https://www.gordon.edu/shalom.

9

10

Plantinga has written about this in various places. His words here are taken from “Educating for Shalom: Our Calling as a Christian University,” Calvin University, https://calvin.edu/about/who-we-are/our-calling.html.

Works Cited “About AAC&U.” Association for American Colleges and Universities, Washington DC, https://www.aacu.org/about. Accessed June 2020.

Adams, Liam. “Hundreds of Positions Eliminated at Evangelical Colleges and Universities.” Christianity Today, 10 August 2020, https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2020/august/christian-collegecuts-bethel-harding-john-brown-cccu.html.

“The Arts and Civic Engagement: Involved in Arts, Involved in Life.”

Washington DC: National Endowment for the Arts, Second Reprint, 2007, https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/CivicEngagement.pdf.

Bilbro, Jeff. “Re: Your Job.” Message to Steven Petersheim. 1 Sept. 2020. Email.

Bruni, Frank. “The Most Contrarian College in America.” The New York Times, 11 September 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/11/opinion/contrarian-collegestjohns.html.

Breneman, David W. Liberal Arts Colleges: Thriving, Surviving, or Endangered?

Washington DC: Brookings Institute, 1994.

Davis, Jeffry, and Philip G. Ryken, eds. Liberal Arts for the Christian Life.

Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012.

Delbanco, Andrew. College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2012.

Steven A. Petersheim 61 Deresiewicz, William. “Don’t Send Your Kids to the Ivy League.” The New Republic, 21 July 2014, https://newrepublic.com/article/118747/ivyleague-schools-are-overrated-send-your-kids-elsewhere.

Flaherty, Colleen. “Cuts Reversed at Stevens Point.” Inside Higher Ed, 11 April 2019, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/04/11/stevens-pointabandons-controversial-plan-cut-liberal-arts-majors-including-history.

Harris, Adam. “The Liberal Arts May Not Survive the 21st Century,” The Atlantic, 13 December 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/12/the-liberal-artsmay-not-survive-the-21st-century/577876.

Hauerwas, Stanley. “Go with God: An Open Letter to Young Christians on their Way to College.” First Things, November 2020, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/10/go-with-god.

Kimball, Bruce. Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education, Expanded ed. New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1995.

Kronman, Anthony. Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. New Haven: Yale UP, 2007.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue, 3rd ed. Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame Press, 2008.

Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University. 1852. Edited by Frank M. Turner. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996.

Plantinga, Cornelius, Jr. “Educating for Shalom: Our Calling as a Christian University.” Calvin University, https://calvin.edu/about/who-we-are/ourcalling.html. Accessed May 2020.

Roberts, Richard H. Religion, Theology, and the Human Sciences. New York: Cambridge UP, 2002.

Roche, Mark William. Why Choose the Liberal Arts? Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame Press, 2010.

Schneider, Mark, and Matthew Sigelman. “Saving the Liberal Arts: Making the Bachelor’s Degree a Better Path to Labor Market Success.” American Enterprise Institute, February 2018, https://www.aei.org/wpcontent/uploads/2018/02/Saving-the-Liberal-Arts.pdf.

“Shalom Statement.” Gordon College, https://www.gordon.edu/shalom.

Accessed March 2020.

Silliman, Daniel. “Christian College Grads Care More about Helping, Less About Money.” Christianity Today, 11 February 2020, https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2020/february/cardus-studychristian-college-university-difference.html.

“St. John’s Undergraduate Program.” St. John’s College. https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate. Accessed March 2020.

Summers, Greg. “The Liberal Arts and the Meaning of a University.” Inside Higher Ed, 2 April 2018, https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/04/02/why-universitywisconsin-stevens-point-plans-eliminate-certain-traditional-liberal .

62 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal “The Value of a Liberal Arts Education,” Wellesley College. https://www.wellesley.edu/about/missionandvalues/valueliberalarts.

Accessed March 2020.

“What Does Liberal Arts Mean?” Princeton University, Undergraduate Admission, 2020. https://admission.princeton.edu/academics/what-doesliberal-arts-mean Wiewel, Wim. “The Case for the Liberal Arts in a Time of Crisis.” The New Republic, 27 May 2020, https://newrepublic.com/article/157845/caseliberal-arts-college-coronavirus-crisis.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

63

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 19, No. 2 (Fall 2020): 63-75

Book Reviews Jacobs, Alan. The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 256 pages, $29.95.

Reviewed by Rachel B. Griffis

In the last decade, Alan Jacobs has written several thoughtful and accessible books that explore cultural, intellectual, political, and moral issues pertinent to educators and their work with students. For example, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Oxford, 2011), articulates the challenges twenty-first century readers face not only in the age of the internet but in a society that prioritizes practicality and productivity at the expense of delight and rest.

How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds (Currency, 2017) connects the incorrigible rancor pervading many conversations, in both public and private spheres, to insufficient thinking. In this pithy book, which was named one of “10 Books to Read the Summer Before College” in 2019 by Christianity Today, Jacobs provides strategies for fostering a sharp, charitable mind and generous modes of communication.

In The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis, Jacobs again broaches serious questions that reflect the current cultural terrain of many Western countries, though this book does so by looking backward, to the conclusion of World War II. He focuses on work produced by five Christian intellectuals—Jacques Maritain, W.H. Auden, C.S. Lewis, Simone Weil, and T.S. Eliot—at this significant moment in Western civilization. Jacobs notes that these thinkers “believed that they had a responsibility to set a direction not just for churches but for the whole of society,” and that each was completing or in the midst of projects that explored this responsibility in 1943, when the outcome of the war was clear (xi). Maritain and Auden both gave notable lectures, “Education at the Crossroads” by the former and the latter, “Vocation and Society.” Lewis also gave the lectures that would become The Abolition of Man, Weil was working on The Need for Roots, and Eliot had recently finished writing the concluding piece of Four Quartets, “Little Gidding.” By discussing these five thinkers alongside one another, Jacobs highlights the significant questions and concerns that preoccupied Christian intellectuals who witnessed significant cultural shifts of which the twenty-first century academy is an inheritor, particularly those related to learning, morality, politics, and civic life.

64 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal The Year of Our Lord 1943 contains seven chapters, a Preface, an Afterward, and two sections not specifically designated as chapters: “Dramatis Personae: September 1, 1939,” which immediately follows the Preface, and “Interlude: Other Pilgrims, Other Paths,” placed between the fifth and sixth chapters. The Preface and “Dramatis Personae” both provide groundwork regarding historical and intellectual context as well as biographical information on the five thinkers around whom the book is centered. The “Interlude” section contains vignettes on additional figures from the Christian tradition who accomplished significant work or notable feats during and near the end of World War II, including Dorothy Day, the founders of the Koinonia Farm, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Graham Greene, and Eric Liddell.

The first two chapters introduce conversations and establish context for the moral and intellectual issues that became progressively important to Maritain, Auden, Lewis, Weil, and Eliot as they observed the cultural forces and assumptions that led to the horrific events of their time. The title of Chapter One, “Prosper, O Lord, Our Righteous Cause,” alludes to the pragmatic and patriotic perspectives both in the church and academy that troubled the dramatis personae of the book. It is a phrase from a prayer Lewis heard and subsequently critiqued in a letter to his brother, stating, “I see no hope for the Church of England if it allows itself to become just an echo for the press” (11). Similarly, Auden was taken aback when he went to a movie in New York and heard the audience shouting, “Kill them!” each time Polish people made an appearance (5).

Accordingly, Jacobs discusses influential educators of the early and mid-twentieth century, such as John Dewey, Mortimer Adler, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and Karl Mannheim, and how their ideas facilitated and challenged the distressing events Lewis and Auden witnessed in church and at the movies, as well as broader manifestations of these events elsewhere.

Chapter Two, “The Humanist Inheritance,” speaks to the book’s subtitle, Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis. Jacobs concludes the first chapter by arguing that the figures covered in his project insisted on the centrality of literature to education, a move that placed them each in a position to interact with the tradition of Christian humanism. In Chapter Two, then, Jacobs discusses concepts of humanism beginning with the Renaissance and its development over time. He focuses particularly on Maritain’s work, who engaged the concept most directly and published Integral Humanism in 1936, which asserts that twentieth century declensions of humanism were indefensibly anthropocentric, and thus he was critical of the perspective that depicts “human nature as closed in upon itself or absolutely self-sufficient” (42). In this chapter, Jacobs also discusses Weil and Auden, who, unlike Maritain, did not believe humanism could be extricated from “secularization” or “comfortable optimism” (49). Nevertheless, Jacobs states that the subjects of his book “are engaged in projects of thought that arise from the humanist movement” and “share the conviction that this restoration [of Western civilization] will not be accomplished only, or even primarily, through theology as such, but also and more effectively through philosophy, literature, and the arts” (50).

Book Reviews 65 Chapter Three, “Learning in War-Time,” details specific examples of public intellectuals’ approaches to civic life which were colored by war. Jacobs summarizes Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Christian realism,” which has little in common with Christian humanism, while outlining Auden’s response to, and discomfort with, Niebuhr’s perspective, particularly his involvement in politics. This chapter also discusses several of Auden’s poems in order to demonstrate his internal struggle with demonic forces and disparate ideologies available for coping with evil, such as nationalism, individualism, and Freudianism. Lewis also makes an appearance in this chapter along with glosses of various writings that highlight Lewis’s thinking about his role as a Christian public intellectual in a time of crisis. Jacobs notes that “He became expert in using storytelling as a form of cultural critique, and always with the war as a backdrop,” referring to The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and Lewis’s initial work on The Chronicles of Narnia, which would be completed in the decade following the war (61-62).

Chapters Four, “Demons,” and Five, “Force,” explore the book’s subjects’ various delineations of moral and intellectual evils in the Western world as well as causes and implications of those evils. In Chapter Four, Jacobs describes contemporary demons that concerned Auden, Eliot, and Lewis, particularly those associated with industrialism, science, technology, power, and force. Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, for example, interrogates the Christ Child’s challenge to King Herod’s vision in ways that reflect Auden’s concerns with prevalent assumptions about life, such as “the machine,” “the militaryindustrial complex” and “force” (85). Lewis’s space trilogy, similarly, depicts the morally problematic vision of conquest and control underlying many scientific and technological developments. Chapter Five gives extensive space to Weil’s thinking and her interpretation of force in the Iliad, a story she calls “the purest and the loveliest of mirrors” (93). Jacobs additionally details Weil’s rationale for promoting the teaching of significant literary works of the past as well as her affront of humanism for “thinking that man can get [truth, beauty, liberty, and equality] without grace” (98). The other figure highlighted in this chapter is Eliot, who composed three of the Four Quartets during the war. Jacobs subsequently analyzes “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding” to show how these poems “revise and decenter the typical impulses of patriotism,” which Eliot locates as an impediment to a moral society (108).

Jacobs names Chapter Six, “The Year of Our Lord 1943,” and refers to it as “the pinnacle of the narrative,” as he expounds on the projects his five thinkers were undertaking around the time of the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 (xix). This chapter most clearly emphasizes the book’s engagement with significant questions about humanism and education, drawing out the subjects’ concern that the Allies would save the West from fascism only to deliver them to a different kind of servitude. This servitude is a technocratic society that values human beings for their economic output and an approach to education that produces technicians, discarding the tradition of liberal learning in Western civilization. As Jacobs puts it, “the argument that entrusting technocracy with our salvation is a recipe for winning the war while losing the peace” (158). Jacobs’s

66 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal gloss of Weil’s writing effectively expresses and summarizes what many of his subjects broadly believed was the duty and contribution of education to society.

He writes that Weil was “calling for an education that trains the sensibility and affections at least as seriously as it attends to the mind” (164). After “the climactic year 1943,” however, Jacobs notes that Weil was dead and the surviving four figures had turned their intellectual energies elsewhere, ostensibly conceding that their efforts to support Christian humanistic education was a lost cause (xix).

In Chapter Seven, “Approaching the End,” the author traces Maritain’s, Auden’s, Lewis’s, and Eliot’s thinking as their focus on education shifted and waned. Though they were still critical of the West’s growing regard for science and technology, their work on the issue became less urgent and pointed. In Eliot’s case, he articulated a vision for education with elitist overtones that many educators have subsequently found distasteful and exclusive. Auden’s account of his introduction to Harvard president James Bryant Conant, who was laboring to develop the university into an institution that would prioritize science and technology, indicates that he was resigned to having an “enemy” relationship with such educators (195). As Jacobs laments, “The coming decade would see, with its increasing emphasis on the scientist as the shaper of human destiny, and the decline in influence of Christian intellectuals such as the ones described in this book, that the postwar world sought and believed in heroism—but not a heroic humanism” (190). The Afterward, “Stunde Null,” discusses Jacques Ellul, author of The Technological Society, and a figure whom Jacobs considers an intellectual descendant of the conversations Maritain, Auden, Lewis, Weil, and Eliot engaged during the war. As he concludes the book, Jacobs reiterates what he shows in Chapters Six and Seven, that his subjects’ “prescriptions were never implemented, and could never have been: they came perhaps a century too late, after the reign of technocracy had become so complete that none can foresee the end of it while this world lasts,” a harrowing ending indeed (206).

The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis is an incredibly creative and compelling project, drawing together prominent figures from the Christian intellectual tradition who barely interacted with one another but nevertheless participated concurrently in articulating significant questions about education and society for both their time and beyond. The book’s weaknesses are primarily stylistic and organizational. Although Jacobs prepares the reader for his organizational scheme by stating that he emulates filmmaker Orson Welles by moving fluidly between figures and subsequently expanding and contracting his focus in each chapter, this approach is less impressive on the page than the screen. Further, Jacobs states that a “full accounting” of his subjects and the pertinent topics at hand “would need to be a thousand pages long,” yet this limitation undoubtedly contributes to the hurried pace and cursory perspective of much of the book (xvi). Freestanding quotations are copious as are quotations that fill the majority of paragraphs while missing explanation and interpretation.

Admittedly, Jacobs’s task is to chronicle a specific intellectual history rather than to prove a thesis, but his narration often lacks direction and occasionally appears to be without purpose.

Book Reviews 67 Despite its stylistic and organizational shortcomings, The Year of Our Lord 1943 is an important book for Christian intellectuals, especially educators, to read. As he concludes, Jacobs asserts that “If ever again there arises a body of thinkers eager to renew Christian humanism, they should take great pains to learn from those we have studied here” (206). What Jacobs consequently accomplishes with this project is to provide a starting point for educators to draw upon particular questions, theories, practices, and texts that are not only relevant to Christian learning in the twenty-first century but emerge from a historical context that should inform future work in this vein. The figures covered in this book asked expansive and perceptive questions about the ends of education and the reach of Christianity in ways that will inspire readers, in turn, to reflect on the current state of the liberal arts and the role of core curriculum in various institutions, among other considerations. In this book, Jacobs refers on multiple occasions to St. Augustine’s understanding of virtue as ordo amoris, which is “the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind or degree of love which is appropriate to it” (137). By bringing his audience into contact with Maritain, Auden, Lewis, Weil, and Eliot, Jacobs offers readers their own opportunity to have their affections ordered and formed as they internalize the ideas and perspectives of thinkers who cared deeply about Christian humanistic learning and their responsibility to a flourishing society.

68 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Byrd, Aimee. Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: How the Church Needs to Rediscover Her Purpose.

Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2020. 240 pages, $18.99.

Reviewed by Julie Ooms

The intense and largely groundless backlash Aimee Byrd has received for Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood is proof enough of the significance of its claims. Byrd’s book, even if one glances at its title alone, is set up as a response and corrective to the biblical manhood and womanhood movement, as theorized in John Piper and Wayne Grudem’s Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (whose title Byrd aptly alludes to in her own), institutionalized in the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, but most importantly as heretically theologized in the novel “Eternal Submission of the Son” trinitarian doctrine put forth by Grudem and others. Not only is her book a strong, well-sourced, and robust critique of this movement, it also provides a fierce, thoroughly biblical defense of every Christian’s need for discipleship and responsibility to be an active, equal participant in and witness to the faith, regardless of gender.

Byrd begins her book by analyzing a short story, commonly found in syllabi for American literature courses (it’s in mine) but otherwise not well known, entitled “The Yellow Wallpaper” and written in 1892 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The story is “a brilliant and disturbing exploration of the effects patriarchal attitudes and constrictions have on female psychosynthesis” (Byrd 15) in which the narrator, suffering from postpartum depression, is prescribed a “rest cure” by her doctor (and husband) that utterly fails to cure her and instead drives her mad. The narrator hallucinates a woman creeping behind the bars of the yellow wallpaper in the room where she is confined, gradually losing her mind.

Byrd takes this image, used in the story as a symbol of confining gender stereotypes that trap us, confuse us, and madden us, and uses it herself to “appeal to the reader to look at the yellow wallpaper of the church and do something about it” (19). She describes “the church’s yellow wallpaper” as “much of the current teaching on so-called ‘biblical manhood and womanhood’” that is “stifling the force of the biblical message and strangling the church’s witness and growth” (19). Throughout the rest of the book, she revisits this metaphor repeatedly to “peel and reveal” the church’s yellow wallpaper to uncover extra- and unbiblical teachings about gender and to articulate new (and, often, old) patterns for flourishing.

That these patterns for flourishing are not twenty-first century developments but based in robust understanding of both biblical and traditional texts is evident in Byrd’s organization of the book: the book’s three sections all focus on recovery. Byrd begins with “Recovering the Way We Read Scripture,” continues with “Recovering Our Mission” as the Church, and closes with “Recovering the Responsibility of Every Believer.”

Book Reviews 69 In her first section, Byrd addresses the question of whether or not the Bible is a patriarchal text whose aim is the subjugation of women, a question posed with hostility by many feminists and answered with a mostly unreserved “yes!” by patriarchal Christians. Byrd addresses both responses to this question by first critiquing the ways the Bible is packaged and sold (at least in the Western world) and next revealing the Bible as a cohesive story containing both “gynocentric” (female-centered) and “androcentric” (male-centered) texts and voices. She argues, first, that attempts to package the Bible in “woman-friendly” ways—wrapping Scripture in pink or teal or floral covers, including different articles and devotional aides in “men’s” and “women’s” Bibles that disciple men and women into gender stereotypes more than into imitating Christ, among others—only reinforces the belief that the Bible does not speak to all people, but that “there is a men’s version and a woman’s version [of God’s Word] to read” (41). “Offering two versions of Scripture,” though it may be a lucrative marketing strategy, “separates and isolates our devotion time, ignores our likenesses, and misses all the important nuances in our distinctions” (41). These nuances are already evident in the words of Scripture itself, Byrd goes on to argue. She proposes—with ample biblical and scholarly evidence—that female (gynocentric) voices are interwoven with male (androcentric) voices through Scripture, often challenging and/or making fuller the male-centered stories we would expect from a text whose books, though divinely inspired, were all written by men living in deeply patriarchal cultures where women’s voices were often silenced. The books of Esther and Ruth; the story of the Hebrew midwives’ resistance in Exodus; Hannah’s prayers and Mary’s Magnificat; Deborah’s work as a judge and the testimony of the women at Christ’s tomb: these and other gynocentric texts, Byrd argues, interact with androcentric ones in Scripture to show “the coactivity of men and women serving together as servants of God,” which should “fortify our congregations in a biblical understanding of brotherhood and sisterhood in God’s household” (92). Byrd is adamant about the “true complementarity of the sexes” but equally adamant that this complementarity requires not strict hierarchy but mutual influence between men and women, a mutual influence that provides a fuller picture of Scripture and of the Church.

Byrd’s second section addresses the discipling work of the Church more specifically. The first chapter of this section is a direct critique of the brand of complementarianism taught by the CBMW, with particular focus on the Eternal Submission of the Son (ESS) trinitarian doctrine, largely regarded outside CBMW as heretical. Byrd critiques the foundation of CBMW’s complementarianism, the “factioned and fractioned discipleship” that makes authority and submission the ontological centers of maleness and femaleness, respectfully (116), and shows how this myopic definition of gender leads logically to an eschatology whose primary question about the new heavens and the new earth is whether and how these gender-specific roles will persist into eternity (117). Instead, Byrd argues that there is robust biblical defense for a “reciprocity of male and female contributions” in the Church, and that the focus of Scripture from Genesis to Paul is “unity and reciprocity. There are no implications of male/female distinction

70 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal being authority and submission” (116). This “unity and reciprocity,” Byrd goes on to argue, should shape how the Church disciples men and women to learn with and from each other as co-laborers for the Gospel. Failure to emphasize reciprocal, mutually influencing and influenced femininity and masculinity in the Church, Byrd writes in this section’s concluding chapter, has and will continue to result in women’s discipleship being farmed out to parachurch organizations instead of it being rightly embedded in church life and within the framework of shared creeds, confessions, liturgy, and church governance.

In her final section, Byrd moves from a discussion to the Church at large to a discussion of every believer’s responsibility in the Body of Christ, and she begins with a searing discussion of how the myopic, role-based view of gender she critiqued in the second section actually misreads the biblical narrative, particularly the ways in which Jesus and Paul elevated and worked with women.

Byrd walks a thin line between CBMW’s brand of complementarianism and what she names an “egalitarian error” of denying distinctions between male and female, arguing that both fall into similar traps: “[L]ists [of acceptable church roles] promoting complementarian hierarchy also fall into the egalitarian error they are trying to prevent—they fail to demonstrate what is distinctly valuable and meaningful about the woman’s contribution” (204).

Such “fractional complementarity” “fails to address the dynamic of communion between the sexes or where we are headed” (205). She closes the book with examples of women in the early Church (among them Phoebe, who delivered Paul’s letter to the Romans, and Macrina, Gregory of Nyssa’s sister) whose work as co-laborers with men displayed “the common mission of handing down the faith to the next generation and the active traditioning that involves,” entreating readers to promote the same commitment to common mission in their churches.

I mentioned at the beginning of this review that Byrd received considerable (and considerably misogynistic) backlash for this book, and that the strength of the backlash emphasizes the significance of her argument. This book’s significance and relevance, however, is not defined by the negative response to it: the book stands as a thorough, robust, theologically rigorous, profoundly convincing and (I hope) convicting argument about the excesses of the most well-known and influential source of complementarianism, at least within white American evangelicalism. Byrd, herself convicted of a robustly biblical complementarianism (though she actually rejects the term in the text of her book because of its associations), deftly critiques the excesses of complementarianism while avoiding the excesses of egalitarianism. This critique, among many other things, leads to one of the most impactful points of the entire book: that the contemporary Church, in an effort to resist second-wave feminism, retreated not to Scripture but to the errors of both the recent past and the centuries’ old past, when the early Church fathers allowed their views of women to be influenced not first by Scripture but by Aristotle.

Beyond the substance of Byrd’s argument, however, there is the evident depth and breadth of her theological knowledge. Byrd herself is a laywoman whose theological training is the result of the investment and encouragement of her church, and her book is clear fruit of this training. In addition to her analysis

Book Reviews 71 of Scripture (and of various CBMW publications), Byrd brings in Church fathers, biblical scholars and commentators, sermons, and Pope John Paul II, among others, to support her arguments. The overall impression is of someone who crafts her theological arguments with careful study and a net cast both widely and with discernment. To deny such a student of the Word and the tradition influence in the Church beyond “casseroles and babysitting skills” (70) is at best foolish, and at worst a denial of the “coed endeavor” of “testifying to and passing down the faith” (70).

My quibbles with Byrd’s book are relatively few. One of them lies less with her argument and more with her overreliance on rhetorical questions as a rhetorical strategy. Whole paragraphs at times are made up of such questions— for example, the paragraph on pages 204-205 is made up of nine questions and two statements, and it is not an isolated incident of this strategy. Her questions often pierce to the heart of the issue under consideration, but the flood of questions rather than a more balanced stream of questions and argumentative statements detracts from her argument’s strength. To the reader more inclined to disregard Byrd (or to mock her in a comment thread on a social media site), this rhetorical strategy could look like petulance. My other quibble is with the (necessarily, I think) limitedness of the book’s scope. Because it is a response to and critique of another book and the movement it symbolizes, Byrd must spend much of her time peeling away the “church’s yellow wallpaper” and has less space to reveal the better pattern for the Church she proposes here.

Overall, however, Byrd’s book is a strong and necessary critique of the excesses of complementarianism and the harm they have done in the Church.

Though aimed more at an educated popular audience than an academic audience, Byrd’s book is robustly sourced enough to be included in a theology course at the college or seminary level. I regard this book as necessary reading for both male and female students in biblical studies or theology, particularly if their goal is to work in some capacity as church leaders in the churches (largely those in white, conservative American evangelicalism) most impacted by the theology Byrd critiques. A Church that is not fully appraised of the dynamic “unity and reciprocity” between the two sexes God created as co-laborers and necessary allies is one that stifles half her members and severely weakens them all.

72 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Kobes Du Mez, Kristin. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2020. 356 pages, $28.95.

Reviewed by Matthew Bardowell

Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne is a challenging read. It is challenging not because it is hard to follow; on the contrary it is a remarkably lucid and compelling account of American evangelicalism. It is challenging because the story Du Mez tells is deeply convicting to anyone who has spent time in evangelical circles. Central to the efficacy of Du Mez’s thesis is the narrow scope she sets for her historical analysis. Her sights are squarely set on American evangelicalism, which Du Mez defines perhaps more narrowly than those who associate themselves with that group would assume. Evangelical culture, for Du Mez’s purposes, describes those within the protestant movement in the U.S. that arose out of the 1940s and 1950s revival of “muscular Christianity” (11). Du Mez urges readers to reckon with the corrupting influences that American culture has upon Christianity as it is embodied by evangelicals. Du Mez describes this manifestation of Christianity as “a historical and cultural movement, forged over time by individuals and organizations with varied motivations—the desire to discern God’s will, to bring order to uncertain times, and, for many, to extend their own power” (14). Focusing on this group of American Christians yields subtle insights into the movement’s compromises, frailties, and failures.

As Du Mez moves from the 1950s to the present, her account is animated by an uncanny ability to identify a series of representative moments that characterize particular periods within evangelicalism. In each chapter, Du Mez shows, with stunning coherence, that for American evangelicalism “the ‘good news’ of the Christian gospel has become inextricably linked to a staunch commitment to patriarchal authority, gender difference, and Christian nationalism, and all of these intertwined with white racial authority” (6-7). This is likely to be a rather troubling claim, and yet Du Mez’s historical analysis makes it hard to dispute. One of the insidious attitudes that has woven its way into American evangelicalism, according to Du Mez, is the notion of the culture war.

Within this martial framework, Christians adopt an oppositional posture toward the secular world. Secularism is contrasted with the church with respect to certain cultural issues that trigger contempt or disdain. In the hands of various personalities within the evangelical movement, these cultural issues can be wielded to galvanize the fear of evangelicals as a group. The result is something akin to a cult a personality that coalesces around individuals who have proven to be thought leaders in the culture war. Often, these thought leaders are rather remote from evangelicals’ personal lives. This analysis leads to one of Du Mez’s foundational propositions. Namely, that American evangelicals are shaped to a greater degree by the liturgies of cable news, talk radio, and Christian media than they are by the congregants of their local church and their own pastors. Indeed, Du Mez observes that “a few words preached on Sunday morning [do] little to

Book Reviews 73 disrupt the steady diet of religious products evangelicals consumed day in, day out” (8).

The evangelicalism Du Mez treats in this book, therefore, represents “a potent mix of ‘gender traditionalism,’ militarism, and Christian nationalism” (11).

As I have already mentioned, one prominent trait of this brand of evangelicalism its attachment to personalities. In today’s parlance, we might call these personalities “celebrity pastors,” but, while celebrities are something of a common denominator throughout the seventy-year period Du Mez examines, they are not always pastors. Indeed, the one recurring personality that wields a particular influence in Du Mez’s account is the actor after whom she names part of this book: John Wayne. Wayne, the star of such films as The Searchers and The Green Berets, represents the figure of American masculinity that has woven its way into American culture so completely that there has been almost no sector of American life that it has not touched. The “embodiment of rugged, allAmerican masculinity,” John Wayne cast a shadow over popular culture, foreign policy, and the church as well (56). It is perhaps unsurprising that the boundaries between Wayne the man and Wayne the fictional character became blurred. Du Mez illustrates one notable instance of this blurring in Ron Kovic’s memoir Born on the Fourth of July. Du Mez observes the disconnect between the many people who, like Kovic, enlisted to fight in the Vietnam War because of John Wayne’s heroic film characters. This influence stands in stark contrast to Wayne the man who “secured a deferment in order to avoid serving” (56). It was this fictional representation of male heroism that made its way into the church and into the hearts of generations of its leaders.

One of the striking things Du Mez observes is how Wayne’s symbolic masculinity pervaded the culture of American evangelicalism to such a degree that it led to shifting views about authority and the role of America in God’s sovereign plan for the Church. Thus, patriarchal authority and nationalism combined to enshrine a distinctly American set of Christian values. These values gave rise to various figures within the evangelical movement who propagated them across the nation. Du Mez understands the rise of the Christian right within this framework and shows how people such as Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell wielded their power in politics to become political kingmakers, thus aggregating more political power for evangelicals who would become a voting bloc future politicians must court if they are to have electoral success. This observation is not new it itself, but Du Mez’s achievement in rehearsing the history of the Christian right is to explain some of its puzzling developments within a framework that draws them all together. The reader will see, for instance, the common thread that runs between the martial metaphors so often deployed in evangelical circles and the socially conditioned metaphors for patriarchal authority and feminine submission. Du Mez’s analysis impresses upon the reader a sense of how our modern understanding and application of those ideas has been circumscribed by cultural attitudes that adulterate them.

In subsequent chapters, such as “Tender Warriors,” “No More Christian Nice Guy,” and “Holy Balls,” Du Mez presents case after case of Christian celebrity pastor advancing an account of the gospel steeped in the bravado and

74 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal nationalism of the John Wayne figure. The picture she paints is deeply unpleasant. It is a picture of American evangelicalism fashioned in our own image—a portrait of self-worship. In the concluding chapters, Du Mez presents the inexorable consequence of such self-worship: destruction. The chapter titled “Evangelical Mulligans: A History,” details the long, sad account of the way such culturally compromised visions of Christian authority wreak havoc on the lives of its adherents and inflict pain upon the flock entrusted to their care. The examples are numerous, and I will not name them here, but the conclusion, as Du Mez presents it, is that “a ‘cultlike culture’ led to a culture of corruption, including ‘pedophilia, violence, defamation of the innocent to protect the guilty . . . [and] defiance against lawful authority” (288). While it would be easy to understand individual instances of such abuse as one person’s moral failing, the evidence Du Mez articulates makes it difficult for the reader to accept this conclusion. She has laid the groundwork too well and the cases fit within the framework so tidily.

Certainly, these cases represent individual moral failures, but such failures were exacerbated by a culture that enabled them. Godly sorrow and true repentance run counter to the adulterated, John Wayne version of masculinity, and, as a result, the failure to restore the sinner and care for those sinned against perpetuates the abuse.

One of Du Mez’s more controversial claims is that the distortions of the gospel presented in the book are motivated by a desire to protect the conservative view of patriarchal authority. Readers may resist this claim. They may believe that the traditional gender difference that leads to conservative patriarchal authority is simply Biblical manhood and womanhood. Additionally, Du Mez’s argument does not rule out the option that such a flawed understanding of patriarchal authority is the effect of the distortion rather that its cause. For those who identify with either of these concerns, chapter 9—“Tender Warriors”—will prove instructive. Here Du Mez explores the emergence of complementarianism and egalitarianism as critical theories that enter into the evangelical sub-culture.

In this chapter, the reader sees Du Mez’s skill at demystifying terms that so often seem hallowed within evangelicalism. She shows how such concepts react to and are conditioned by their own historical and rhetorical circumstances.

One notable instance of this is Du Mez’s analysis of the claim Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware make in their 2016 statement issued from The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood about the relationship between the second and the first person of the Trinity. According to Du Mez, Grudem and Ware claim that the Son is eternally subordinate to the Father, and they do this for the purpose of propping up their argument for complementarianism (298). In this example, Du Mez shows that some prominent figures within evangelicalism are all too ready to disregard centuries of Christian orthodoxy concerning the relations of the Trinity to buttress a contemporary argument about gender relations. In light of such evidence, it is difficult to maintain one’s skepticism about Du Mez’s claim that such ideas are set forth to advance a particular view of patriarchal authority. This theological innovation—the assertion that the Son is subordinate to rather than coequal with the Father—certainly seems to have been motivated by the narrow interests of the culture war.

Book Reviews 75 What is most impressive about Du Mez’s argument is its explanatory power. Everything—the abuses by leaders, the metaphors we have embraced, the willingness to jettison principles for proximity to power—all of it is of a piece.

This cohesiveness is in large part the appeal of Du Mez’s analysis. It was particularly fascinating to read this book contemporaneously with the campaigns for the U.S. general election. Many of the positions evangelical thought leaders took in various publications leading to the presidential election aligned so completely with Du Mez’s cultural critique that it made Jesus and John Wayne seem less like analysis than prognostication. The statements issued in recent months by Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham, and others reveal the same pattern of logic and the same metaphorical framework that Du Mez presents here, gleaned from her study of the past seven decades. I began by saying that the book is a challenging read. I would like to end by noting that those who accept the challenge will be rewarded with a clear-eyed and coherent account of the way American culture has influenced the evangelical movement over the past seventy years. While readers may be dismayed to realize the ways American culture has influenced our faith rather than the other way around, Du Mez’s account is illuminating and reveals avenues for reform and repentance.

76 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Notes on Contributors Matthew R. Bardowell <Matthew.Bardowell@mobap.edu> is Assistant Professor of English at Missouri Baptist University, where he teaches British literature, world literature, and composition. His research centers on Old Norse and Old English literature as well as the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien, and his recent scholarship engages questions concerning emotion and aesthetics. His work appears in Renascence, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Mythlore, and The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters. Bardowell holds a Ph.D. in English from Saint Louis University.

Zachary Beck <zbeck@etbu.edu> was born and raised in Cocoa, Florida, right across the Indian River Estuary from Kennedy Space Center. He attended the University of Florida for his Undergraduate and Master’s Programs, and he received his Ph.D. from Baylor University with a specialty in American Modernism. His research interests lie in American literature, modernism, and Christian literary theory. For his dissertation, he examined the decline of virtuous friendship in the novels of Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. He has presented papers that treat the theories of Roland Barthes, Ngugi wa Thiango, and Jean Baudrillard from a Christian standpoint.

Glenn Butner <Glenn.Butner@sterling.edu> is Assistant Professor of Theology and Christian Ministry at Sterling College (KS), where he also directs the honors program. He specializes in social ethics and systematic theology, the subject of his studies during his PhD at Marquette University. His first book, The Son who Learned Obedience: A Theological Case Against the Eternal Submission of the Son (Pickwick, 2018), will soon be followed by Trinitarian Dogmatics (Baker, 2022). He and his wife have two children and are expecting a third.

Rachel B. Griffis <Rachel.Griffis@sterling.edu> is an Assistant Professor of English at Sterling College. She teaches writing and literature courses and serves as Director for the Integration of Faith and Learning. Additionally, she is a book review editor at International Journal of Christianity & Education, and she is on the editorial board for Kansas English. She is also a contributor at The Liberating Arts, an online platform that hosts conversations on the significance of the liberal arts. Her writing has appeared in Studies in American Indian Literatures, Christianity & Literature, Christian Scholar’s Review, Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Teaching American Literature, and elsewhere.

Julie Ooms <Julie.Ooms@mobap.edu> is Associate Professor of English at Missouri Baptist University. She received her Ph.D. in English from Baylor University in 2014, focusing on twentieth century war literature. Her current research focuses on Christian practices for teaching reading and the crossroads of religion and secularism in 20th century American fiction. She has published articles on the writing of Tim O’Brien, J.D. Salinger, and Sylvia Plath in

Notes on Contributors 77 Renascence, Journal of the Short Story in English, Christian Scholar’s Review, and Plath Profiles.

Steven A. Petersheim <Steven.Petersheim@gordon.edu> is an adjunct professor of English at Gordon College on the North Shore of Massachusetts. His most recent book is Rethinking Nathaniel Hawthorne and Nature: Pastoral Experiments and Environmentality (Lexington Books, 2020). He has also published numerous articles on teaching and learning, nineteenth-century and ethnic American literature, and more. Since 2008, he has taught a variety of firstyear seminars and other courses at Baylor University, Indiana University East, and Gordon College. He earned his Ph.D. in English from Baylor University in 2012. Currently, he is pursuing his M.Div. at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary in preparation for further work in the church as well as the academy.

Kyle A. Schenkewitz <Kyle.Schenkewitz@msj.edu> is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Mount St. Joseph University. He earned a Ph.D. in Historical Theology at Saint Louis University, a Master of Theological Studies at Candler School of Theology at Emory University, and a Master of Arts in Philosophy at the University of Southern Mississippi. He specializes in the ascetical and spiritual traditions of early Christian monasticism with particular interest in conceptions of health and healing in late antiquity. He has previously published Dorotheos of Gaza and the Discourse of Healing in the Monastic School of Gaza and “Encountering the ‘Saracen’ Other: Anastasios of Sinai and the Arab Conquest.” His interest in building community and fostering discipleship shapes his scholarship, teaching, and work in the church.

78 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Call for Papers and Book Reviews

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Published Semiannually by the Faith & Learning Committee and the Humanities Division of Missouri Baptist University St. Louis, Missouri 63141-8698 Intégrité (pronounced IN tay gri tay) is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal on the integration of Christian faith and higher learning. Founded in the fall of 2002 with the Institutional Renewal Grant from the Rhodes Consultation on the Future of the Church-Related College, it is published both online and in print copy. Interested Christian scholars are encouraged to submit academic articles and book reviews for consideration. Manuscripts should be sent as e-mail attachments (Microsoft Word format) to the editor, John J. Han, at john.han@mobap.edu.

Articles must be 15-25 pages, and book reviews must be 4-8 pages, both double-spaced. Articles should examine historical, theological, philosophical, cultural, and/or pedagogical issues related to faith-learning integration. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: • • • • • • • • •

the current state and/or future of the church-related college history of Christian liberal arts education Christianity and contemporary culture a Christian perspective on multiculturalism and diversity service learning academic freedom in a Christian context implementation of Christian truths in academic disciplines Christian education in the non-Western world global Christianity.

Articles must engage in faith-learning issues or controversies in a scholarly, critical manner. We generally do not consider manuscripts that are merely factual, devotional, or sermonic. Due dates are March 1 for inclusion in the spring issue and September 1 for the fall issue.

Articles are expected to be research-based but must focus on the author’s original thought. We typically do not consider articles that use more than twentyfive secondary sources; merely present other scholars’ opinions without

Calls for Papers & Book Reviews 79 developing extended, thoughtful analysis; and/or use excessive endnotes. Direct quotations, especially lengthy ones, should be used sparingly.

Considering that most Intégrité readers are Christian scholars and educators not necessarily having expertise on multiple disciplines, articles and book reviews must be written in concise, precise, and easy-to-understand style.

Writers are recommended to follow what William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White suggest in The Elements of Style: use definite, specific, concrete language; omit needless words; avoid a succession of loose sentences; write in a way that comes naturally; and avoid fancy words.

For citation style, refer to the current edition of MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. Articles should include in-text citations in parentheses, a list of endnotes (if applicable), and an alphabetical listing of works cited at the end of the article. Book reviews need only page numbers in parentheses after direct quotations.