It's Coming
12/21/2006
In a terrific Op-Ed piece in today's New York Times, Mark C. Taylor, a religion and humanities professor at Williams College, writes that a rise in religious practice among college students is often accompanied by an unwillingness to engage in critical reflection about faith. Taylor notes that he'd been called into a university administrator's office after assigning something by Friedrich Nietzsche (of "God is dead" fame) as a required text. Taylor writes: "A student had claimed that I had attacked his faith because I had urged him to consider whether Nietzsche's analysis of religion undermines belief in absolutes. The administrator insisted that I apologize to the student. (I refused.)"
Obviously I don't know all the details of that interaction, but I would emphasize that Taylor said he wanted the student to consider Nietzsche's analysis—not to accept it uncritically. Indeed, nothing a professor says or assigns should be taken as the final word, and the student's role is to consider these things seriously in her or his own pursuit of truth. In an article some years ago, University of Chicago scholar Jonathan Z. Smith noted that in a college classroom, no idea stands alone. I love that notion and it's a nice encapsulation of my basic approach to higher education. As I write in pretty much every syllabus when I'm teaching:
Have you ever had a real conversation? I don't mean the kind where you do all the talking, or where you can't get a word in edgewise. I don't mean the kind where you're being sold something, or trying to sell. I mean the kind where you really "get lost" in the discussion itself—in the exchange of ideas, the exploring of possibilities—only to then "find yourself" seeing things differently. You've grown. Try to think of your classes here at Dominican as opportunities for conversation—with professors, with students, and with the written and non‑written materials you will be asked to understand and analyze. In this course, the materials and members of the class will be "speaking" to you. They will be asking questions, making claims, making connections, suggest ing a way of being in the world. I hope, of course, that you will be able to comprehend what is being said, and I will do my best to help you. But that isn't enough. In any other real conversation, didn't you do more than just listen passively and understand? Didn't you respond in some way? Didn't you ask questions, raise objections, push ideas in different directions, or relate your conversation partner's viewpoint to what you already knew or had experienced? I'd like to see you do that here. I'd like to see you engage in a semester‑long, written and oral conversation with the ideas introduced in this class.
Many of the best conversations are between perspectives that are truly diverse. That's when some of the deepest learning might occur. And so I affirm deeply one of Taylor's basic points, namely that faculty members must "be confident they will remain free to pose the questions that urgently need to be asked." I agree also with his call for "a genuine dialogue within and among all kinds of belief, ranging from religious fundamentalism to secular dogmatism" as a crucial way forward in an increasingly violent and intolerant world.
I know this may seem naïve as if it assumes a "level playing field" or "equal access" to some comfortable well-fed seminar-style discussion, when in fact there is massive global and local inequality and suffering that keeps so many impoverished and in peril. Yet in fact it is precisely the vision of shared discourse and community across boundaries that can and should inspire our work. Surely those of us (faculty and students) privileged to find ourselves in a university should discern in this a personal calling, regardless of "major" or "career plans." And so, again, how right is our mission at Dominican: to pursue truth, give compassionate service and participate in the creation of a more just and human world.
When I read Taylor's piece today I was reminded why I included Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals alongside Karl Rahner's Foundations of Christian Faith when, a couple of years ago, we developed a list of faculty reading suggestions (here's another list from whole departments). Nietzsche unleashes a devastating critique of Christianity while Rahner constructs what he calls "an intellectually honest justification of Christian faith." Recommending both, precisely both and not just one or the other, I hoped to evoke for students the conditions for the possibility of pursuing—or being pursued by and thus experiencing—truth.
I want students to consider seriously both voices as a practice session for the life of the mind in which one seeks always to elicit and encounter multiple perspectives, to ponder and debate the issues they raise. And so this conversational model of education as a dialogue with possibilities in search of a wider and deeper sense of truth is, in the end, what motivates me professionally as a "university administrator." (It's also why I've been so honored to be affiliated for nearly 20 years now with the Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions, which strives "to cultivate harmony among the world's religious and spiritual communities and foster their engagement with the world and its other guiding institutions in order to achieve a peaceful, just, and sustainable world.")
I realize somewhat ironically how biased this seems—this bias in favor of openness to dialogue. Taylor again: In the 21st century, religious conflict "will be less a matter of struggles between belief and unbelief than of clashes between believers who make room for doubt and those who do not." Again, I agree. And so I ask my students and faculty colleagues, at least in their roles as critical thinkers in a university context, to commit themselves to making room for doubt, a productive doubt that seeks fuller understanding, a doubt that refuses to absolutize our present state of knowledge and practice but instead believes, and hopes, that more is possible and more is required and more is forthcoming. No overblown confidence in our present capacities or understandings. Always an openness to the novel possibilities that lure us on to higher, and higher places. And so, in this season of Advent—and always, really—the Novel is worth hoping for, listening for, discerning. It's coming.
In a terrific Op-Ed piece in today's New York Times, Mark C. Taylor, a religion and humanities professor at Williams College, writes that a rise in religious practice among college students is often accompanied by an unwillingness to engage in critical reflection about faith. Taylor notes that he'd been called into a university administrator's office after assigning something by Friedrich Nietzsche (of "God is dead" fame) as a required text. Taylor writes: "A student had claimed that I had attacked his faith because I had urged him to consider whether Nietzsche's analysis of religion undermines belief in absolutes. The administrator insisted that I apologize to the student. (I refused.)"
Obviously I don't know all the details of that interaction, but I would emphasize that Taylor said he wanted the student to consider Nietzsche's analysis—not to accept it uncritically. Indeed, nothing a professor says or assigns should be taken as the final word, and the student's role is to consider these things seriously in her or his own pursuit of truth. In an article some years ago, University of Chicago scholar Jonathan Z. Smith noted that in a college classroom, no idea stands alone. I love that notion and it's a nice encapsulation of my basic approach to higher education. As I write in pretty much every syllabus when I'm teaching:
Have you ever had a real conversation? I don't mean the kind where you do all the talking, or where you can't get a word in edgewise. I don't mean the kind where you're being sold something, or trying to sell. I mean the kind where you really "get lost" in the discussion itself—in the exchange of ideas, the exploring of possibilities—only to then "find yourself" seeing things differently. You've grown. Try to think of your classes here at Dominican as opportunities for conversation—with professors, with students, and with the written and non‑written materials you will be asked to understand and analyze. In this course, the materials and members of the class will be "speaking" to you. They will be asking questions, making claims, making connections, suggest ing a way of being in the world. I hope, of course, that you will be able to comprehend what is being said, and I will do my best to help you. But that isn't enough. In any other real conversation, didn't you do more than just listen passively and understand? Didn't you respond in some way? Didn't you ask questions, raise objections, push ideas in different directions, or relate your conversation partner's viewpoint to what you already knew or had experienced? I'd like to see you do that here. I'd like to see you engage in a semester‑long, written and oral conversation with the ideas introduced in this class.
Many of the best conversations are between perspectives that are truly diverse. That's when some of the deepest learning might occur. And so I affirm deeply one of Taylor's basic points, namely that faculty members must "be confident they will remain free to pose the questions that urgently need to be asked." I agree also with his call for "a genuine dialogue within and among all kinds of belief, ranging from religious fundamentalism to secular dogmatism" as a crucial way forward in an increasingly violent and intolerant world.
I know this may seem naïve as if it assumes a "level playing field" or "equal access" to some comfortable well-fed seminar-style discussion, when in fact there is massive global and local inequality and suffering that keeps so many impoverished and in peril. Yet in fact it is precisely the vision of shared discourse and community across boundaries that can and should inspire our work. Surely those of us (faculty and students) privileged to find ourselves in a university should discern in this a personal calling, regardless of "major" or "career plans." And so, again, how right is our mission at Dominican: to pursue truth, give compassionate service and participate in the creation of a more just and human world.
When I read Taylor's piece today I was reminded why I included Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals alongside Karl Rahner's Foundations of Christian Faith when, a couple of years ago, we developed a list of faculty reading suggestions (here's another list from whole departments). Nietzsche unleashes a devastating critique of Christianity while Rahner constructs what he calls "an intellectually honest justification of Christian faith." Recommending both, precisely both and not just one or the other, I hoped to evoke for students the conditions for the possibility of pursuing—or being pursued by and thus experiencing—truth.
I want students to consider seriously both voices as a practice session for the life of the mind in which one seeks always to elicit and encounter multiple perspectives, to ponder and debate the issues they raise. And so this conversational model of education as a dialogue with possibilities in search of a wider and deeper sense of truth is, in the end, what motivates me professionally as a "university administrator." (It's also why I've been so honored to be affiliated for nearly 20 years now with the Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions, which strives "to cultivate harmony among the world's religious and spiritual communities and foster their engagement with the world and its other guiding institutions in order to achieve a peaceful, just, and sustainable world.")
I realize somewhat ironically how biased this seems—this bias in favor of openness to dialogue. Taylor again: In the 21st century, religious conflict "will be less a matter of struggles between belief and unbelief than of clashes between believers who make room for doubt and those who do not." Again, I agree. And so I ask my students and faculty colleagues, at least in their roles as critical thinkers in a university context, to commit themselves to making room for doubt, a productive doubt that seeks fuller understanding, a doubt that refuses to absolutize our present state of knowledge and practice but instead believes, and hopes, that more is possible and more is required and more is forthcoming. No overblown confidence in our present capacities or understandings. Always an openness to the novel possibilities that lure us on to higher, and higher places. And so, in this season of Advent—and always, really—the Novel is worth hoping for, listening for, discerning. It's coming.
