All together now: social media is bad for reading

We don’t have to mince words. We don’t have to pretend. We don’t have to qualify our claims. We don’t have to worry about insulting the youths. We don’t have to keep mum until the latest data comes in.

Social media, in all its forms, is bad for reading.

It’s bad for reading habits, meaning when you’re on social media you’re not reading a book. It’s bad for reading attention, meaning it shrinks your ability to focus for sustained periods of time while reading. It’s bad for reading desires, meaning it makes the idea of sitting down with a book, away from screens and images and videos and sounds, seem dreadfully boring. It’s bad for reading style, meaning what literacy you retain while living on social media is trained to like all the wrong things and to seek more of the same. It’s bad for reading ends, meaning you’re less likely to read for pleasure and more likely to read for strictly utilitarian reasons (including, for example, promotional deals and influencer prizes and so on). It’s bad for reading reinforcement, meaning like begets like, and inserting social media into the feedback loop of reading means ever more of the former and ever less of the latter. It’s bad for reading learning, meaning your inability to focus on dense, lengthy reading is an educational handicap: you quite literally will know less as a result. It’s bad for reading horizons, meaning the scope of what you do read, if you read at all, will not stretch across continents, cultures, and centuries but will be limited to the here and now, (at most) the latest faux highbrow novel or self-help bilge promoted by the newest hip influencers; social media–inflected “reading” is definitionally myopic: anti-“diverse” on principle. Finally, social media is bad for reading imitation, meaning it is bad for writing, because reading good writing is the only sure path to learning to write well oneself. Every single writing tic learned from social media is bad, and you can spot all of them a mile away.

None of this is new. None of it is groundbreaking. None of it is rocket science. We all know it. Educators do. Academics do. Parents do. As do members of Gen Z. My students don’t defend themselves to me; they don’t stick up for digital nativity and the wisdom and character produced by TikTok or Instagram over reading books. I’ve had students who tell me, approaching graduation, that they have never read a single book for pleasure in their lives. Others have confessed that they found a way to avoid reading a book cover to cover entirely, even as they got B’s in high school and college. They’re not proud of this. Neither are they embarrassed. It just is what it is.

Those of us who see this and are concerned by it do not have to apologize for it. We don’t have to worry about being, or being accused of being, Luddites. We’re not making this up. We’re not shaking our canes at the kids on the lawn. We’re not ageist or classist or generation-ist or any other nonsensical application of actual prejudices.

The problem is real. It’s not the only one, but it’s pressing. Social media is bad in general, it’s certainly bad for young people, and it’s unquestionably, demonstrably, and devastatingly bad for reading.

The question is not whether it’s a problem. The question is what to do about it.

So you want to get a PhD in theology

I’ve been asked for advice about how to apply to doctoral programs in theology for more than a dozen years. I’ve had the goal, that whole time, of writing up a blog post that I could share with people when they ask. I’ve always found a way not to write it, though, at least in part because the ideal post would be either vanishingly short or impossibly long. In the latter case, a short book. In the former case, a simple sentence:

ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE

Is it possible to split the difference? I think, at long last, I’m going to try. At the very least, I owe it to the students who meet with me each year with the question in mind, as well as the readers who email me regularly asking the same thing. If I do end up saying something useful to them, perhaps I can put it in writing here.

So let’s do it. The format won’t exactly be FAQ, but I’ll frame my advice in response to perennial queries—twenty in total.

NB: I’m not advising folks interested in English or engineering. I’m speaking to students interested in theology of some kind, or at least a theological discipline. The further one’s field is from Christian systematic theology, the less likely my advice applies. I’m also assuming a Christian interlocutor. Plenty of my answers will still apply to a nonbelieving applicant, but those are the folks who come to me, those are the folks likeliest to pursue Christian theology, and those are the folks who share my reasons and goals for becoming a theologian. Reader beware.

*

1. Should I apply to a PhD program in theology?

Only God knows, but here are some pointers:

• Ask yourself why you’re drawn to it. A sweet job? Love for God? Like being a pastor, but for brainy types? Because you like to read? Because you feel called to it, as in, this is why God put you on planet earth? Let me tell you now: The first four answers aren’t good enough.

• Here are two related questions that can help in discerning an answer to the larger question. (a) Would you be happy that you spent 6-10 years of your life earning multiple graduate degrees in theology even if you never became a professor? Alternatively: (b) Even if you never pursued graduate studies in theology, would you nonetheless find ways to “be a theologian” (read theology, write it, teach it, talk about it with others) in your spare time, outside of your civilian day job? If your answer is an unqualified and emotional Yes! to both questions, then a PhD might be for you. If a No to either, much less both, then don’t do it.

• How are your grades? Have multiple professors pointed you to doctoral studies? If your grades aren’t top of the class and/or your professors seem not to have noticed you, there may be extenuating reasons, but in general it means a PhD is probably not for you.

2. How hard is it to get into a PhD program?

Pretty hard, though I’m assuming that you mean (a) a high-quality program that’s (b) fully funded. The thing to understand is that, at the best of times, applying to programs is a crapshoot. I got into my program, an Ivy, on my first round of applications (and not via the wait list)—the very same year that nine other programs turned me down. (A few of those did put me on the wait list; one program whittled down the applicants to two others and myself. I was the odd man out; they admitted the other two. I’m still friendly with both!) There’s just no formula for this, much less logical predictability.

You need to know, at any rate, that you will be going up against dozens (occasionally hundreds, at least on the job market) of other applicants, all of whom will have impressive degrees from impressive institutions and loads of experience—even, these days, with a filled-out CV and publications. Them’s the odds.

3. Where should I apply?

That depends. For theology specifically, lists of the best American programs generally include Yale, Notre Dame, Chicago, Princeton Seminary, Duke, Emory, Vanderbilt, Catholic University of America, Saint Louis University, Marquette, SMU, Baylor, Fordham, Boston University, Boston College, Dayton—in something like that order, depending on one’s specific field and areas of interest. I think it’s fair to say the first half dozen or so are typically thought of as the top tier or cream of the crop.

(I should add: These things aren’t especially controversial in ordinary conversation among academics; after all, the rankings reveal themselves in how hard it is to be accepted, funding, stipends, who gets job interviews, and who gets the jobs themselves. Prestige and symbolic capital are by definition unequally distributed. At the same time, it’s a bit awkward to put in black and white, because academics are as a rule fiercely competitive, deeply ambitious, and insecure. But I said I’d try to be helpful, and that means honesty, so there you go.)

Some schools I left off the list:

• British universities: Oxford, Cambridge, Aberdeen, St Andrews, et al. Excellent programs, but not on this continent!

• Canadian schools, like Toronto or McGill. Both likewise excellent.

• Harvard, which so far as I know does not have a PhD in Christian theology. Harvard Divinity School does, I believe, have a ThD, just like Duke Divinity School (which is in addition to Duke University’s PhD in theology via its religious studies department). For those new to all this … yes, it’s complicated.

• Religion programs like Princeton University (≠ Princeton Theological Seminary), the University of Virginia, Brown, Rice, and the University of Texas. (There are others!) Typically these may be excellent programs for Old or New Testament, for church history, for philosophy, and so on, but not for theology. Princeton and Virginia are exceptions; they don’t necessarily produce systematic theologians, but they are happy to produce scholars of religion, philosophy, and ethics who are not allergic to theology; who, even, are theologically literate, informed, and conversant. Mirabile dictu!

• Evangelical schools like Fuller, Wheaton, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Dallas Theological Seminary, and the various Baptist seminaries. These programs include excellent scholars and wonderful programs, albeit with two drawbacks. First, a doctoral degree from these schools almost always means that you will be hired “back” at them. In other words, an evangelical PhD means an employer pool of evangelical schools. That’s not a dealbreaker for plenty of folks, since many would like to be hired by such schools and/or have no interest going elsewhere. But forewarned is forearmed, etc. Second, many (most? all? I don’t know the numbers) of these programs are not fully funded. That means you, the doctoral student, will have to pay for the privilege of being a student out of pocket or via loans. That’s a tough row to hoe without a job—or with a job that doesn’t pay much—awaiting you at the end of five or six years. Compare that with, for example, Yale’s PhD students, who are fully funded for six full years and receive an annual stipend of around $40,000 and have access to free health care in the Yale New Haven hospital system. You can see how at a certain point it’s apples and oranges. No salary cap means the Yankees always have the best roster.

• Primarily or exclusively online programs. Speaking only for myself, but speaking frankly, I would advise against this—which is distinct from advising against programs that facilitate part one’s degree being completed long distance. Certain prestigious and well-funded schools have a long track record of doing just that.

I hope that gives you a reasonable lay of the land.

4. How do you or anyone else know all this?

Gossip. The epistemology of academe is gossip. It’s the only way anyone knows anything about anything.

5. How should I choose where to go?

Well first, you don’t choose anyone, they choose you. But from this direction, too, it’s a crapshoot. If you have the time and the money, apply to five or ten or fifteen programs! Cast the net wide and see if you catch anything. Beyond that, there are different schools of thought, and none of them is “right.”

(a) Some advise that you find a particular scholar and apply to where she or he is so that you can work with her or him.

(b) Some advise that you go where your particular sub-field of study is thriving, whether it’s Barth or von Balthasar, classical theism or practical theology, christology or critical theory.

(c) Some advise that you say yes to the most prestigious school that admits you, no matter what.

(d) Some advise that you put your ear to the ground and head to the school with the reputation for the healthiest environment for student flourishing. (For example, for decades Chicago has been known as the program that will take the longest to finish while taking the most out of you. It also has meant that those who do finish are assumed to be mega-scholars bound for greatness. Like an eight-year medical residency for a certain kind of surgical specialist. It’s all about tradeoffs.)

What do I think? Depends on the applicant, her prior studies, her major field, her interests, who lets her in, and so on. My purely anecdotal two cents is that I’d lean in the direction of a combination of (c) and (d), with less emphasis on (a) or (b). I applied to my doctoral program almost on a whim, and got in knowing next to nothing about the culture or the professors or their expertise. If you had given me a certain kind of lowdown in advance, I would have expected to be an odd fit. And yet my time as a PhD student was pure bliss, more or less. So I’m weary of supposing anyone can know, prior to arriving, whether a program is a good fit. You see the fit after you unpack your boxes! But that’s just my story. You should take all these factors into account.

6. Are there really no jobs in academic theology anymore?

Yes and no. Yes, there are jobs and there always will be, in some form. No, they really are shrinking, and fast. You’d be surprised at the number of Apple and McKinsey employees with PhDs in religion.

7. Whenever this comes up, I hear race and gender mentioned. These really do matter—myth or fact?

Fact. In this country, theology and adjacent disciplines (religion, philosophy, ethics, Bible) have been a white man’s game for a very long time. Accordingly, over the last half century seminaries and religion departments have been responding at two levels: PhD students and tenure-track posts. Even still, the fields of Bible and theology remain some of the most male-dominated in the American academy, alongside philosophy, economics, and physics. Most others have reached relative parity or have swung the other way, gender-wise.

What that means for you is, yes, you will have priority as an applicant if you are a woman or person of color. If that’s you, great! Let it put a little wind in your sails, though don’t let it give you undue confidence; you’ve still got to beat out tons of other folks. If that’s not you, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t apply, but neither should you go in naive. This is simply the way things are, like it or not. Don’t get pouty. I can tell you right now, that will ensure you never advance one inch in this world.

8. You mentioned “tenure-track” posts. I’ve heard that phrase but don’t know what it means.

“Tenure-track” (TT for short) jobs are the most coveted gig for academics. In a word, it signals long-term job security. Non-TT jobs are likelier to pay less or involve higher teaching loads or be nixed when budget cuts appear on the horizon. Tenure track means that you will begin without tenure, but around year six or seven you will “go up” for tenure. This means you will apply to your university to receive tenure (plus promotion—hence “T&P”). This comes with a change of rank (Assistant to Associate Professor) and a raise, usually, but the real thing you get is the other t-word: tenure. You’re now, in a sense, employed for life. (Not really, but this is big picture.)

Tenure functions in theory to protect your free speech as an intellectual. You can study, think, write, and speak whatever you believe to be true or worthy of investigation, and nobody can fire you for having “wrong” ideas or “bad” politics. Now this is an ideal with many asterisks and exceptions. Nevertheless it’s not an empty gesture. It does have teeth. For that reason you have to be granted it; it’s not automatic. Depending on your institution, your application will weight things differently: research, teaching, collegiality, service. Ivy League schools are notorious for being stingy here, lower-tier schools less so. But everywhere occasionally (or more than occasionally) denies professors T&P. If you don’t get it, you finish out your year (or two), and then you have to leave. Yes, it’s that brutal.

9. Say I’m still interested. What should I do to try to get into a program?

Depends on when and where you are in the process. If you’re in high school, as opposed to finishing your second Master’s degree, my advice will be different. But here are some things worth doing:

• Learn languages. Master at least one language beyond your native tongue. If you can manage learning one ancient language and one living foreign language, you will automatically be a strong candidate.

• Study something relevant in college, whether that be religion, Bible, history, philosophy, ethics, theology, linguistics, or classics.

• Get a 4.0 GPA, in both college and Master’s programs.

• Form relationships with your professors. Not only will this begin to induct you into the world of academia, it will grease the wheels for the letters of recommendation you’ll eventually ask them to write for you. Also, just as academic epistemology is gossip, academic training and hiring is nothing but networks. It’s all in who you know.

• Study hard for the GRE, and ideally take it more than once. I’m convinced that I made the cut at Yale because the committee at that time culled applications on the front end with a hard GRE cut-off score. Some programs don’t care, but others do.

• Learn your field. Follow down footnote rabbit trails, ask professors for recommendations—try to get a sense of the hundred or so most prominent names in your sub-area of theology, and if possible start reading their work!

• Read everything. And I do mean everything. The memory that comes to mind is sitting in bed after my wife had fallen asleep, aged 22 or 23, and reading William Cavanaugh’s Torture and Eucharist. No one assigned it to me. I don’t know how I happened upon it. I was just reading it because I felt I should, out of pure interest.

• Reach out to professors elsewhere. Email them, see if they’ll chat by phone or Zoom, ask if they’ll meet you at AAR/SBL. No joke, the summer before I applied to programs, I physically mailed letters to professors there. Many of them replied!

• Go to AAR/SBL. That’s the annual conference for the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion, held in tandem the weekend before Thanksgiving each year. My first time, as a Master’s student, was a revelation. I met people there (circa 2010) I’m still friends with—for example, my now colleague Myles Werntz!

• Visit the schools you plan to apply to. As you’re able, obviously. I took a little road trip myself; I was able to visit Duke, UVA, and Vanderbilt. Worth it!

• Ask a professor to review your materials, especially your statement of purpose and CV.

• Have a community of support. Not entirely something you can control, but necessary all the same. Application season is brutal. My household had a lot of tears before the happy email arrived in my inbox.

• Pray. I saved the most important for last…

10. I’ve heard horror stories. Is a PhD program bound to wreck my marriage and suck my soul while making me work 100-hour weeks and hate my life?

No. At least, that’s not inevitable. There are programs that function like law school or medical school. But even then, you usually retain a great deal of agency and responsibility for your time allocation. In my view, most (not all) programs permit a disciplined student to get his work done while continuing to function as a healthy person with family, friends, church, and a life outside the library. Granted, I do know people who would reject that proposition. Either way, it is not a foregone conclusion that you must decide between what matters most and your degree. No way.

11. What about my faith? Can a PhD draw me closer to Christ rather than “deconstruct” or diminish or steal my faith?

Yes! It can. That’s exactly what it did for me. But it’s good to ask this question and to be aware of the danger. There are people for whom doctoral studies challenged, complicated, revised, and sometimes destroyed their faith. Perhaps that was bound to happen at some point. Some people, though, just may not be cut out for a PhD, at least in religion.

In any case, your faith will not emerge from your studies unchanged. And here, as elsewhere, naivete is the enemy. You will read books by atheists and anti-Christians and members of other religions and representatives of views you find risible, heinous, or dangerous. You will have professors who repudiate all that you hold dear. You will have teachers who claim to be Christian who openly reject or even mock beliefs and behaviors you supposed nonnegotiable for any confessing Christian. You need to have a spine of steel even as your mind is open to learning new ideas and being challenged by what you’ve never considered. Does that describe you? Or does it frighten you? Your answer matters a great deal for whether you should pursue a PhD.

12. What does a PhD program actually entail?

Briefly: Two years of classes, one year of comprehensive exams (“comps,” written and oral), two or three years of writing a dissertation. Comps test your mastery of basic topics and texts in your field. A dissertation is, basically, a book based on your special area of research, led and read and assessed by a committee of three to five professors, headed by a single professor, called your “advisor.” Your “defense” of the dissertation is usually when you “become a doctor,” namely, by undergoing oral examination by the committee and defending your writing, your arguments, and your research “live”—sometimes with an audience! It’s a stressful day, to say the least. For those who pass, and not all do, the catharsis is overwhelming.

13. What’s the point of a PhD, anyway? How should I think about it?

Opinions differ. Some say: To become an expert in one specific thing, perhaps the world’s most informed expert. I say: To become a theologian. That is, to sit at the feet of masters, to apprentice yourself to them, as to a trade, to be inducted into what it means to be a member of the guild, to learn the grammar and habits that make a theologian a theologian. And thence and therein to learn some concrete expertise.

14. Is the quality of one’s doctoral training really convertible with an institution’s money and prestige?

No. Some of the most brilliant scholars I know and learn from got PhDs in out-of-the-way programs or unpretentious institutions; indeed, some of the world’s greatest minds and writers are effectively autodidacts. Don’t fall for the cult of credentials and gatekept expertise. It’s a game. If you want to be a professor, you have to play it. That’s it.

Now, money and prestige don’t count for nothing. They’re often a proxy for a certain quality floor, along with a certain quality ceiling. You’re rarely going to get a poor education at a top-5 school. And the degree will always count for something.

15. Suppose I get in somewhere, and I’m wondering how to flourish. Any tips?

Here are a few:

• Put your head down. You’re there to learn. Study, study, study. Then study some more.

• Set limits and boundaries. One guy I knew treated his studies like a job: he worked from 8:00am to 5:00pm, then he stopped and spent time with his family. Not for everyone, but incredibly useful for some.

• Don’t waste your time. Don’t read online. Delete all your social media accounts. Focus entirely on what you’re there to learn. Some doctoral students “work all day” without getting anything done: Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok see to that, not to mention the New York Times, the Atlantic, and Jacobin.

• Develop good habits now. They’ll stay with you in whatever future employment you find.

• Just as before, devote time to forming relationships and mentorships with your professors.

• Begin networking not just within your institution but outside of it, whether professors or fellow students.

• Don’t try to make a name for yourself yet. Don’t tweet. Don’t write for a popular audience. Don’t, for the most part, publish in scholarly spaces—unless your advisor gives you the thumbs up, and it’s work you think is A-quality, and it’s likely to matter for job applications. If you’re gong to have an academic career, there will be time enough for publishing. Now’s the time for input, not output.

• Learn how to do two things: (a) read for long, uninterrupted stretches of time and (b) write a certain daily word count. Learning how to skim and how to type fast are also useful skills. Best of all, learn how to take quality notes and to organize them in relation to your research and writing goals. These will serve you for a lifetime.

• Keep learning languages. I can’t emphasize this enough: Languages are the secret sauce of theology (and the humanities generally). If you have two or four or six or more, you’re gold. If you’re stuck in no man’s land with one, or 1.5, or a bunch you can only half-read, you’re at a serious disadvantage—for jobs and for your scholarship. Mastering languages pays dividends!

• Listen to your advisor. She knows best.

• Pray. Not a joke! Better to keep your soul than to lose it and gain the whole world. Focus on what matters most, even in a time of stress and compressed study. Focus on God, church, spouse, children, friends, life. It keeps things in perspective. (Also not a joke: Drop out if this isn’t for you. There’s no shame in it if the alternative is ruin.)

16. Any other tips?

Yes, one: Don’t be a jerk. It is not your job to police the opinions or beliefs or politics of fellow students, much less professors. You don’t have to announce yourself in every seminar as the expert or True Believer on whatever topic. Drop the show. Be a normal human. Keep your own counsel. Be collegial. Even if the people around you espouse crazy things, it is not your job to set them straight. It’s your job to get a degree. Do it.

17. Say I make it to the job market, dissertation finished and PhD in hand. What then?

Not much to say here. Apply widely, prepare to move cross-country even as you prepare for nothing but rejections, and keep up those prayers.

18. What about the dissertation itself?

Not every program, not every advisor, and not every dissertation allows this, but in general I think you should write the dissertation as though you are already under contract with a publisher for a book. Write it as a book, that is, not as that unique and uniquely unreadable genre, “dissertation.” Or at least write toward the eventual book.

That, by the way, is what often happens. Your “first book” is the dissertation, in revised form. Not always, not for everyone. But ideally for many, perhaps most. Sometimes it’s chopped up into journal articles. Sometimes it remains background for the next research agenda. How you approach it matters, though, for what it eventually becomes, or is likely to become.

There’s a balancing act to aim for here. You don’t want the dissertation to try to do everything. You don’t want to swing for the fences and decisively answer the biggest question facing the field. On the other hand, you don’t want it to be so niche, so remote, so granular that no one cares. This also touches on the “faddishness” of one’s dissertation topic, its relative “timeliness” or “sexiness” as an academic subject. Sometimes a fad will get you a job; sometimes it will ensure your perpetual obscurity.

I say: Focus on the perennial topics, questions, and figures. They’ll never go away, even if they’re not in fashion for a time. (Miroslav Volf once gave me the advice that Jürgen Moltmann gave him: Always do two things as a theologian. Take up the ultimate questions humans always ask, and do so through engagement with Scripture. That’s what it means to be a theologian, and it doubles as ensuring you’ll never be irrelevant.)

A final addendum: The one thing doctoral programs routinely fail to do is train their students to teach, even as the one thing they never fail to do is train their students to write awful prose. At to the first: Seek out opportunities to teach, and seek to T.A. (be a teaching assistant) for professors who are good in the classroom. Having said that, the best way to become a better teacher is sheer repetition, and you’re unlikely to get that until you have a job, and the truth is that few schools will hire you based on your already being a good teacher. So, in terms of tradeoffs, focus on research and finishing the dissertation, not teaching.

As to the second, then: It’s near impossible not to pick up bad writing habits in a PhD program, for the simple reason that most academics are bad writers, and most academic writing is meant not to be readable but to impress a small circle of experts with jargon, quotations, and footnotes. I suppose the best way to resist bad prose during doctoral studies is by reading poetry, novels, and literary essays on the side throughout one’s time. Another way is to read major scholars in other fields who write for highbrow general-audience publications like NYRB, NYT Magazine, The New Yorker, The Point, LARB, Harper’s, First Things, and elsewhere. Many academics never unlearn their bad writing habits, and for those who do, it takes years. Just knowing going in that your dissertation will be poorly written, no matter how hard you try, is to put you ahead of the curve.

19. What about jobs? Which should I plan on applying to?

All of them!

Besides that answer, which is true, I’ll add that TT academic posts are typically differentiated by “teaching load”: in other words, how many classes you teach per year (or per semester). If you’re at an R1 University (a level-1 research school), then you’re likely to teach a 2-2 (two courses per semester), with generous regular sabbaticals for research. If you’re at an R2 or R3, you’re likely to teach a 2-3 or 3-3. If you’re at a new R3 or teaching university or community college, you’re likely to teach a 3-4 or 4-4 or even 5-5.

A couple years back I wrote a four-part, 12,000-word series on what it’s like teaching with a 4-4 load. Spoiler: Not a fate worse than death! But depending on where you earn your PhD, you might be told that it is. I won’t say much more here except that the mindset that supposes any job outside of R1 or Ivy isn’t worth taking is deadly. Don’t indulge it, and exorcise that demon if it possesses you at any time during your studies.

20. What about serving the church?

Well, isn’t that the right way to end this.

Christians study theology because of the living God, in obedience to Christ’s command to love the Lord with all our mind. We become theologians to serve the mission of his people in the world. Our knowledge, such as it is, exists to his glory and the advance of his kingdom. It certainly does not exist to advance our ambitions or careers.

You do glorify God through academic theological writing, even when such writing is not obviously or directly “applicable” to or “accessible” by ordinary believers in the pews. I can’t say more here to defend that claim—we’re wrapping this post up!—but it’s true. Trust me for now.

More important, it’s crucial to approach the question of pursuing a PhD as an exercise of love for God and service to the church. That will guide you as a lodestar throughout your academic adventures (or misadventures). If this is what God has called you to, so be it. It might involve suffering; it’s likely to involve professional wandering; it’s certain to involve uncertainty. Offer it to Christ; put it in his service. He’ll use it, one way or another. Expect that use to involve a cross, even if the trajectory of your career looks “successful” from the outside or after the fact.

But if he’s not calling you to this, that’s okay too. Don’t do it just because. Discernment works only if it’s possible to hear a No and not just a Yes. Prayer enters at this point for a final time. If the job of the doctoral candidate is study, study, study, the job of the disciple is pray, pray, pray. Prayer will carry you through, whichever path you end up on.

Let’s say, then, that my advice is not for the PhD-curious to abandon all hope. Abandon all false hope, yes. But hope is not optimism. As for pursuing an academic career, put it this way: With mere mortals this may be impossible, but with God all things are possible—even getting a PhD in theology.

How do you spend your time in the office?

A couple years back I wrote a long series of posts reflecting on what it’s like to teach a 4/4 load, how to manage one’s time, how to make time for research, and so on. Recently a friend was mentally cataloguing how he spends his hours in the office, both for himself and for higher-ups. So I thought I’d work up a list of ways academics use their time in the office. I came up with twenty-five categories, though I’m sure I’ve overlooked some. The hardest part was thinking about scholars outside of the humanities (you know, people who work with “hard data” in the “lab” and create “spreadsheets” with “numbers”—things I’ve only ever heard of, never encountered in the wild). Here’s the list, with relevant glosses where necessary, followed by a few reflections and a breakdown of my own “office hours”:

• Teaching (in the classroom or online)

• Grading

• Lesson prep

• LMS management (think Blackboard, Canvas, etc.)

• Writing

• Reading

• Supervising (a G.A. or doctoral student, or providing official hours toward licensure)

• Experiments/lab work

• Data collection/collation/analysis

• Meetings with students

• Meetings with colleagues

• Emailing

• Phone calls

• Admin work

• Committee work

• Para-academic work (blind reviewer, organizing a conference panel, being interviewed on a podcast, etc.)

• Vocational work (say, seeing clients as a therapist or making rounds at the hospital)

• Church work (preparing a sermon or curriculum)

• Family duties (paying bills, ordering gifts, taking the car to the shop, leaving early to pick up kids, staying home with a sick child)

• Loafing (hallway chats, office drop-ins, breeze-shooting)

• Eating (whether alone or with others)

• Devotion (prayer, meditation, silence and solitude)

• Social media (call this digital loafing)

• Filler (walking, parking, shuttle, etc.)

• Other (this is here, lol, so you don’t have to think about questions like “how much time per semester do I spend in the restroom?”)

Now suppose you are (a) full-time faculty with responsibilities in (b) teaching, (c) research, and (d) service, and that a typical work week is (e) Monday through Friday, 8:00am to 5:00pm, spent in an office. That comes to 45 hours. How do you spend it in a given semester? That’s a factual question. It’s paired with the aspirational: How do you wish you spent it?

Answers to both are going to vary widely and be dependent on discipline, institution, temperament, desire, will, gifts, talents, interests, and job description. The chair of a physics department with 2/2 teaching loads will spend her time differently than an English prof with a 4/4 load and no administrative duties. So on and so forth.

Here’s how my time breaks down in an average week this semester (numbers after each category are estimated average weekly hours spent on that activity):

• Teaching – 9

• Grading – 1

• Lesson prep – 2-3

• Writing – 3-6

• Reading – 10-15

• Meetings with students – 1

• Meetings with colleagues – 0-1

• Emailing – 3-5

• Committee work – 0-1

• Para-academic work – 0-1

• Church work – 0-1

• Family duties – 6

• Eating – 1-2

• Devotion – 1

• Other – 1

• LMS management, supervising, lab work, data collection, phone calls, social media, loafing, vocational work, admin work, filler – 0

Check my work, but I think the numbers add up: at a minimum, these activities come to 38 out of 45 hours, with an unfixed 7 hours or so in which to apportion the remaining 16 in variable ways, given the week and what’s going on, what’s urgent, etc.

Now for commentary:

• Note well what’s in the “zero hours” category: admin work, social media, supervising students of any kind (including in a lab), and LMS management. Anybody with duties or habits along these lines will have a seriously different allotment of hours than I do.

• Notice what’s low in my weekly hours: email (which I wrote about yesterday), grading, meetings of any kind, and in general duties beyond teaching and research. On a good week, 30 of my 45 hours are spent teaching, reading, and writing. That’s not for everyone—nor is it a viable option for many—but it’s the result, among other things, of how I organize and discipline my time in the office. Teaching, reading, and writing are the priority. Everything else is secondary.

• Well, not quite. Notice what’s (atypically?) high: family duties. I drop off our kids at school every morning, which means I sit down at my desk no earlier than 8:00am, sometimes closer to 8:30am. At least twice (often thrice) per week I leave around 3:00pm to pick them up, too. So if we’re thinking of the standard “eight to five office day,” that’s an average of at least five hours weekly that I’m not in the office. That’s not to mention dentist and doctor appointments, the flu, stomach bugs, Covid, choir performances, second grad programs, and the rest. Not everyone has kids, and kids don’t remain little forever, but this is worth bearing in mind for many faculty!

• (Addendum: I am—we are—fortunate to have an employer and a type of job that permit the sort of flexibility that doesn’t require us paying for a babysitter or childcare after the school bell rings. That’s a whole different matter.)

• Because I’m piloting a new class this semester, I’m teaching only three courses for a total of nine hours. Typically it’s four courses totaling twelve hours. In that case, in the absence of a new prep I wouldn’t have two to three hours weekly devoted to lesson planning. Once I’ve taught a class a few times, it’s plug and play. In other words, if this were describing my semester a year ago, teaching would have twelve hours next to it and lesson prep would have zero.

• I should add, while I’m thinking of it: Sometimes my reading goes way down when a writing project is nearing a deadline or in full swing. Neither of those things is true at present, so I’m doing more reading than writing this semester. But sometimes the numbers there flip flop, and I’m writing 15+ hours weekly and reading only 3-5 hours, if that.

• My institution requires generous office hours for students to come by and talk to their professors. I keep those hours but encourage students to set up meetings in advance, whether in person after class or by email. That way I won’t randomly be gone (at home with a sick kid, say, or in a committee meeting), and we can both be efficient with our time. I’ve mentored students in the past, which involved more of a weekly time commitment. At the moment I probably meet with two or three students per week, usually for 15-30 minutes each. But I know that not only here at ACU but elsewhere there are professors who give five, ten, or more hours each week to meeting with students. So, once again, there’s the question of decisions, priorities, institutional expectations, personal giftedness, and tradeoffs.

• I’ve already mentioned two of the three great timesucks for professors: email and social media. Both threaten to rob academics of hours of time they could otherwise be using on what they love or, at least, what’s important. I gave my advice yesterday for how to resist the lure of the inbox. The cure for social media is simple: Just delete it. It can’t steal away your time if it quite literally does not exist for you.

• The third great timesuck is loafing. This isn’t a temptation for academics alone, but for any and all office workers. Who wouldn’t prefer to shoot the breeze with coworkers in lieu of putting one’s nose to the grindstone? To me, this is purely and simply a personal decision. Loafing is not only fun, but life-giving. Many office jobs aren’t endurable without a healthy dose of loafing. You can often tell the relative health of an office by the nature and extent of its occupants’ shared loafing. So don’t hear me knocking loafing. It’s a kind of social nutrient for office work. In its absence, the human beings who make up an office can wither and die. Having said that, when I say it’s a “decision” I mean to say, on one hand, that it’s active, not passive (one has agency in loafing—a sentence I hope I’m the first to have written); and, on the other, that it involves tradeoffs. I’ve loafed less and less over the years for the plain reason that I realized what loafing I did inevitably meant less reading and writing (not, mind you, less busywork or email or grading or meetings: those, like death and taxes, are certain and unavoidable features of the academic life). And if the equation is that direct—less loafing, more research—then given my priorities and the tradeoffs involved, I decided to do my best to cut it out as much as I could.

• Not much else to add, except that, when I can avoid them, I don’t do “work lunches.” I’m sure the portrait painted here is sounding increasingly, even alarmingly, antisocial; the truth, however, is that every hour (every minute!) counts in a job like this one, and you have to be ruthless to find—by which I mean, make—time for what you value. I like my job. I would read and write theology in my spare time if I weren’t a professor. So I don’t want to waste time in the office if I can help it.

My latest: no to AI in the pulpit

I’m in Christianity Today this morning with a piece called “AI Has No Place in the Pulpit.” It’s in partial response to a CT piece from a few weeks ago about the benefits of using AI in pastoral work. A couple sample paragraphs from the middle of the article:

Pastors are students of God’s Word. They are learners in the school of Christ. He teaches them by the mouths of his servants, the prophets and apostles, who speak through Holy Scripture. There is no shortcut to sitting at their feet. The point—the entire business—of pastoral ministry is this calm, still, patient sitting, waiting, and listening. Every pastor lives according to the model of Mary of Bethany. Strictly speaking, only one thing is necessary for the work of ministry: reclining at the feet Jesus and hanging on his every word (Luke 10:38–42).

In this sense, no one can do your studying for you. I’ll say more below about appropriate forms of learning from professional scholars and commentaries, but that’s not what I have in mind here. What I mean is that studying God’s Word is part of what God has called you to do; it’s more than a means to an end. After all, one of its ends is your own transformation, your own awesome encounter with the living God. That’s why no one can listen to Jesus in your stead. You must listen to Jesus. You must search the Scriptures. This is what it means to serve the church.

Read the whole thing! And thanks to Bonnie Kristian, among others, for commissioning and sharpening the piece in editing.

A.I. fallacies, academic edition

ChatGPT is here to stay. We should get used to it.

Why? I’m not used to it, and I don’t plan on getting used to it.

ChatGPT is a tool. The only thing to do with a tool is learn how to use it well.

False. There are all kinds of tools I don’t know how to use, never plan on using, and never plan to learn to use.

But this is an academic tool. We—

No, it isn’t. It’s no more an academic tool than a smart phone. It’s utterly open-ended in its potential uses.

Our students are using it. We should too.

No, we shouldn’t. My students do all kinds of things I don’t do and would never do.

But we should know what they’re up to.

I do know what they’re up to. They’re using ChatGPT to write their papers.

Perhaps it’s useful!

I’m sure it is. To plagiarize.

Not just to plagiarize. To iterate. To bounce ideas off of. To outline.

As I said.

That’s not plagiarism! The same thing happens with a roommate, or a writing center, or a tutor—or a professor.

False.

Because it’s an algorithm?

Correct.

What makes an algorithm different from a person?

You said it. Do I have to dignify it with an answer?

Humor me.

Among other things: Because a human person—friend, teacher, tutor—does not instantaneously provide paragraphs of script to copy and paste into a paper. Because a human person asks questions in reply. Because a human person prompts further thought, which takes time. ChatGPT doesn’t take time. It’s the negation of temporality in human inquiry.

I’d call that efficiency.

Efficiency is not the end-all, be-all.

It’s good, though.

That depends. I’d say efficiency is a neutral description. Like “innovation” and “creativity.” Sometimes what it describes is good; sometimes what it describes is bad. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which, at least at first.

Give me a break. When is efficiency a bad thing?

Are you serious?

Yes.

Okay. A nuclear weapon is efficient at killing, as is nerve gas.

Give me another break. We’re not talking about murder!

I am. You asked me about cases when efficiency isn’t desirable.

Fine. Non-killing examples, please.

Okay. Driving 100 miles per hour in a school zone. Gets you where you want to go faster.

That’s breaking the law, though.

So? It’s more efficient.

I can see this isn’t going anywhere.

I don’t see why it’s so hard to understand. Efficiency is not good in itself. Cheating on an exam is an “efficient” use of time, if studying would have taken fifteen hours you’d rather have spent doing something else. Fast food is more efficient than cooking your own food, if you have the money. Using Google Translate is more efficient than becoming fluent in a foreign language. Listening to an author on a podcast is more efficient than reading her book cover to cover. Listening to it on 2X is even more efficient.

And?

And: In none of these cases is it self-evident that greater efficiency is actually good or preferable. Even when ethics is not involved—as in killing or breaking the law—efficiency is merely one among many factors to consider in a given action, undertaking, or (in this case) technological invention. The mere fact that X is efficient tells us nothing whatsoever about its goodness, and thus nothing whatsoever about whether we should endorse it, bless it, or incorporate it into our lives.

Your solution, then, is ignorance.

I don’t take your meaning.

You want to be ignorant about ChatGPT, language models, and artificial intelligence.

Not at all. What would make you think that?

Because you refuse to use it.

I don’t own or use guns. But I’m not ignorant about them.

Back to killing.

Sure. But your arguments keep failing. I’m not ignorant about A.I. I just don’t spend my time submitting questions to it or having “conversations” with it. I have better things to do.

Like what?

Like pretty much anything.

But you’re an academic! We academics should be knowledgeable about such things!

There you go again. I am knowledgeable. My not wasting time on ChatGPT has nothing to do with knowledge or lack thereof.

But shouldn’t your knowledge be more than theoretical? Shouldn’t you learn to use it well?

What does “well” mean? I’m unpersuaded that modifier applies.

How could you know?

By thinking! By reading and thinking. Try it sometime.

That’s uncalled for.

You’re right. I take it back.

What if there are in fact ways to use AI well?

I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?

You’re being glib again.

This time I’m not. You’re acting like the aim of life, including academic life, is to be on the cutting edge. But it’s not. Besides, the cutting edge is always changing. It’s a moving target. I’m an academic because I’m a dinosaur. My days are spent doing things Plato and Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas and John Calvin spend their days doing. Reading, writing, teaching. I don’t use digital technology in the first or the third. I use it in the second for typing. That’s it. I don’t live life on the edge. I live life moving backwards. The older, the better. If, by some miracle, the latest greatest tech gadgetry not only makes itself ubiquitous and unavoidable in scholarly life but also materially and undeniably improves it, without serious tradeoffs—well, then I’ll find out eventually. But I’m not holding my breath.

Whether or not you stick your head in the sand, your students are using ChatGPT and its competitors. Along with your colleagues, your friends, your pastors, your children.

That may well be true. I don’t deny it. If it is true, it’s cause for lament, not capitulation.

What?

I mean: Just because others are using it doesn’t mean I should join them. (If all your friends jumped off a bridge…)

But you’re an educator! How am I not getting through to you?

I’m as clueless as you are.

If everyone’s using it anyway, and it’s already being incorporated into the way writers compose their essays and professors create their assignments and students compose their papers and pastors compose their sermons and—

I. Don’t. Care. You have yet to show me why I should.

Okay. Let me be practical. Your students’ papers are already using ChatGPT.

Yes, I’m aware.

So how are you going to show them how to use it well in future papers?

I’m not.

What about their papers?

They won’t be writing them.

Come again?

No more computer-drafted papers written from home in my classes. I’m reverting to in-class handwritten essay exams. No prompts in advance. Come prepared, having done the reading. Those, plus the usual weekly reading quizzes.

You can’t be serious.

Why not?

Because that’s backwards.

Exactly! Now you’re getting it.

No, I mean: You’re moving backwards. That’s not the way of the future.

What is this “future” you speak of? I’m not acquainted.

That’s not the way society is heading. Not the way the academy is heading.

So?

So … you’ll be left behind.

No doubt!

Shouldn’t you care about that?

Why would I?

It makes you redundant.

I fail to see how.

Your teaching isn’t best practices!

Best practices? What does that mean? If my pedagogy, ancient and unsexy though it may be, results in greater learning for my students, then by definition it is the best practice possible. Or at least better practice by comparison.

But we’re past all that. That’s the way we used to do things.

Some things we used to do were better than the way we do them now.

That’s what reactionaries say.

That’s what progressives say.

Exactly.

Come on. You’re the one resorting to slogans. I’m the one joking. Quality pedagogy isn’t political in this sense. Are you really wanting to align yourself with Silicon Valley trillionaires? With money-grubbing corporations? With ed-tech snake-oil salesmen? Join the rebels! Join the dissidents! Join the Butlerian Jihad!

Who’s resorting to rhetoric now?

Mine’s in earnest though. I mean it. And I’m putting my money where my mouth is. By not going with the flow. By not doing what I’m told. By resisting every inch the tech overloads want to colonize in my classroom.

Okay. But seriously. You think you can win this fight?

Not at all.

Wait. What?

…

You don’t think you can win?

Of course not. Who said anything about winning?

Why fight then?

Likelihood of winning is not the deciding factor. This is the long defeat, remember. The measure of action is not success but goodness. The question for my classroom is therefore quite simple. Does it enrich teaching and learning, or does it not? Will my students’ ability to read, think, and speak with wisdom, insight, and intellectual depth increase as a result, or not? I have not seen a single argument that suggests using, incorporating, or otherwise introducing my students to ChatGPT will accomplish any of these pedagogical goals. So long as that is the case, I will not let propaganda, money, paralysis, confusion, or pressure of any kind—cultural, social, moral, administrative—persuade me to do what I believe to be a detriment to my students.

You must realize it’s inevitable.

What’s “it”?

You know.

I do. But I reject the premise. As I already said, I’m not going to win. But my classroom is not the world. It’s a microcosm of a different world. That’s the vision of the university I’m willing to defend, to go to the mat for. Screens rule in the world, but not in my little world. We open physical books. I write real words on a physical board. We speak to one another face to face, about what matters most. No laptops open. No smartphones out. No PowerPoint slides. Just words, words, words; texts, texts, texts; minds, minds, minds. I admit that’s not the only good way to teach. But it is a good way. And I protect it with all my might. I’m going to keep protecting it, as long as I’m able.

So you’re not a reactionary. You’re a fanatic.

Names again!

This time I’m the one kidding. I get it. But you’re something of a Luddite.

I don’t reject technology. I reject the assumption that technology created this morning should ipso facto be adopted this evening as self-evidently essential to human flourishing, without question or interrogation or skepticism or sheer time. Give me a hundred years, or better yet, five hundred. By then I’ll get back to you on whether A.I. is good for us. Not to mention good for education and scholarship.

You don’t have that kind of time.

Precisely. That’s why Silicon Valley boosterism is so foolish and anti-intellectual. It’s a cause for know-nothings. It presumes what it cannot know. It endorses what it cannot perceive. It disseminates what it cannot take sufficient time to test. It simply hands out digital grenades at random, hoping no one pulls the pin. No wonder it always blows up in their face.

We’ve gotten off track, and you’ve started sermonizing.

I’m known to do that.

Should we stop?

I think so. You don’t want to see me when I really get going. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.

Who are young Christians reading today?

The question above was posed to me recently. What the speaker meant was: What living authors are brainy/serious/mature 15-25-year olds reading today?

I’m not sure I have an answer.

My first answer: They aren’t reading. At least, most Christians in this age range aren’t reading anything at all, much less thoughtful theology or rich spiritual writing.

My second answer: They aren’t reading, because if they are “consuming content” along these lines, it’s via YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Spotify. They’re listening, watching, and scrolling, no doubt. The question then becomes: To whom? To what? Is any of it good? Or is it all drivel? But that’s a question for another day.

My third answer: A few of them—the ones actually reading real books, good books, cover to cover—are just reading the old classics many of us were fed at the same age: Lewis, Chesterton, Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard, Barth. Maybe Saint Augustine or Saint Thomas or Saint Athanasius or Julian of Norwich. Maybe, at the outer limits, Simone Weil or Saint John Henry Newman or Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Maybe Ratzinger! Or John Stott or J. I. Packer. Not sure, to be honest. But those of my students who do walk in the door having read something have usually read Lewis or one of the other usual suspects.

Having said all this, the original question remains unanswered. Are there living authors that have genuine influence on this crowd, minute and dwindling as the crowd may be?

The only name that came to mind as a surefire answer was John Mark Comer. Beyond him, I’m simply not sure. It seems to me there is not a John Piper of this generation (granting that Piper is still with us, and still exerting some measure of influence)—someone who is read widely, loved and hated, discussed constantly, an ever-present “voice” mediating a determine set of doctrines or ideas or practices or what have you.

Maybe Tim Keller. But the pastors and laity I know who read Keller are all my age or (typically) older. I don’t know if his name makes waves among the youth; maybe, but I doubt it.

So who else? Note that I’m not asking about which “names” make waves—there are plenty of popular influencers and pastors and speakers and YouTubers and podcasters. I’m talking about authors whose books are read by 15-25-year old American Christians with a head on their shoulders, who are serious about their faith in an intellectually curious way.

Other names: Tish Harrison Warren? Esau McCaulley? Dane Ortlund? Robert Barron? Jemar Tisby? Nadia Bolz-Weber? Carl Trueman? Peter Leithart?

I don’t know, y’all. I should add, I suppose, that I don’t mean which books have sold the most from the “Christian inspirational” genre. I’m talking about heady, demanding, theologically rigorous works addressed to a popular audience but not silly, superficial, or dumbed down.

I’m open to the answer being that what I have in mind—namely, books written by bona fide authors possessed of expertise, style, and substance—is not how Christian high schoolers and college students today are being reached or even growing in their faith. Though I will admit to my skepticism that it is possible for us to raise a generation of intellectually, spiritually, and theologically mature Christians who do not, at some point, deepen their faith and understanding in this way.

Time will tell, I suppose. But I do invite additional suggestions. I teach college students, after all, but the sample size is small; I only have one classroom for anecdotal observation, and the students who walk in don’t represent everyone. What are others seeing?

Ethics primer

There are two sets of fundamental distinctions in ethics. The first concerns the kind of ethics in view. By my count, there are four such:

First is descriptive ethics. This is, as the name suggests, ethics in a descriptive mode: it does not propose what is good or evil, what actions to pursue or avoid, but rather offers an account, meant to be accurate but not evaluative, of what individuals, groups, religions, or philosophies believe to be good or evil, etc.

Second is metaethics. This is a philosophical approach to ethics that takes a bird’s-eye view of the very task and concept of ethics, asking what is going on when we “do” ethics. If first-order ethics is the exercise of practical reason in real time on a daily basis by ordinary people, and if second-order ethics is critical rational reflection on the reasoning processes and resulting behaviors embodied in those daily habits of moral living, then metaethics is third-order ethics: critical rational reflection on what we’re up to when we engage in second-order reasoning about first-order living. Metaethics asks questions like, “What does the word ‘good’ have in common as between its use in, e.g., Thomist and Kantian discourses?” Or: “Is all second-order ethics ineluctably teleological?” So on and so forth.

Third is normative ethics. This is the second-order ethics mentioned above: critical rational reflection on what the good life consists in and what behaviors conduce to it. Put differently, normative ethics is prescriptive; it wants, at the end of its labors, to arrive at how you and I should live if we would be good persons. The mood or mode of normative ethics is the imperative (though not only the imperative): Thou shalt not murder, steal, lie, covet, and what not. Only rarely does anyone but academics do metaethics or descriptive ethics. More or less everyone does normative ethics, at least in terms of making appeals to concrete traditions of normative ethics on appropriate occasions: faced with a hard decision; helping a friend work through a problem; teaching a child how to behave; etc.

Fourth is professional ethics. This is the code of conduct or statute of behaviors proper to a particular profession, institution, job, business, or guild. It is a contingent set of recommendations for what makes a fitting or excellent member of said sphere: If you would practice law/medicine/whatever, then you may (not) do X, Y, Z … It is important to see that professional ethics is a derivative, secondary, and belated species of ethics. It is derivative because its principles stem from but are not synonymous with normative ethics. It is secondary because, when and where it requires actions that are (normatively) wrong or forbids actions that are (normatively) right, a person “bound” by professional ethics not only may but must transgress the lines drawn by his or her professional ethics, in service to the higher good required by normative ethics. By the same token, much of professional ethics consists of “best practices” that are neither moral nor immoral, but amoral. They aren’t, that is, about right or wrong in themselves, only about what it means to belong to this or that career or organization. Finally, professional ethics is belated in the sense that late modern capitalism generates byzantine bureaucracies beholden to professional ethics not as a useful, if loosely held, revolving definition of membership in a guild, but instead as hidebound labyrinths by which to protect said members from legal liability. In this way professional ethics partakes of a certain mystification, insofar as it suggests, by its language, that persons formed by its rules and principles will be good or virtuous in character, whereas in truth such persons are submitting to a form of ideological discipline that bears little, if any, relationship to the good in itself or what makes for virtuous character.

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Having made these distinctions, we are in a position to move to a second set. The following distinctions concern the difference between morality (which is what ethics proper, or normative ethics, is about) and other terms or concepts we are prone to confuse with morality. By my count there are five such:

1. Morality and legality. This is the difference between what one ought to do and what one is permitted by law to do. So, e.g., it is morally wrong to cheat on your spouse, but in this country, at this time, adultery is not illegal. Or consider Jim Crow: “separate but equal” was legal for a time, but it was never moral. If a black person jumped into a public swimming pool full of white people, he did nothing wrong, even if the police had a legal pretext by which to apprehend or punish him.

2. Morality and freedom. This is the difference between what one ought to do and what one is capable of doing. E.g., when I ask student X whether it is morally permissible (or “ethical”) for student Y to cheat on an exam, eight times out of ten the answer is: “He can what he wants.” But that’s not the question. No one disputes that he, student Y, “can do what he wants.” I’m asking whether, if what he wants is to cheat on an exam, that action is a moral one, i.e., whether it is right or wrong.

3. Morality and convention. This is the difference between what one ought to do and what one’s community (family, culture, religion) presupposes one ought to do. If I ask, “Is it right for person A to perform action B?” and someone answers, “Well, that’s the sort of thing that’s done in the community to which person A belongs,” the question has not yet been answered. Cultural assumptions are just that: assumptions. They may or may not be right. Ancient Rome permitted the paterfamilias of a household to expose a newborn infant who was unwanted or somehow deemed to be defective. But infanticide is morally wrong, regardless of whether or not a particular culture has permitted, encouraged, and/or legalized it. That is why we are justified in judging the ancient Roman practice of exposure to be morally wrong, even though they could well have responded, “But that’s the sort of thing that’s done here by and among us.”

4. Morality and beliefs-about-morality. This is the difference between what one ought to do and what people think one ought to do. In other words, no one is morally infallible; each of us, at any one time, has and has had erroneous ethical beliefs. This is why, from childhood through adulthood and onward, to be human is to undergo a lifelong moral education. It is likewise why it is intelligible for someone, even in midlife or older, to say, “You know, I used to believe that [moral claim] too; but recently my mind was changed.” This distinction also makes clear that relativism is false. It is not morally right for a serial killer to murder, even if he genuinely believes it is good for him, the serial killer, to do so. It is wrong whatever he believes, because murder is objectively wrong. The truth of murder’s wrongness is independent of his, your, or my beliefs about murder. If it is wrong, it is wrong prior to and apart from your and my agreement with its wrongness—though it is certainly desirable for you and I to come to see that murder is objectively wrong, and not merely wrong if/because we believe it to be wrong.

5. Morality and behavior. This is the difference between what one ought to do and what people actually do. No one believes human beings to be morally perfect; further, no one believes human beings to be perfectly consistent in the application of their moral convictions. E.g., whether or not you would lie in such-and-such a situation does not (yet) answer whether or not it would be right to do so. My students regularly trip up on this distinction. I ask: “Would it be morally justified for you knowingly to kill an innocent person in order to save five innocent persons?” They say: “I guess I would, if I were in that situation.” But as we have seen, that isn’t an answer to my question. The question is not whether you or I would do anything at all, only whether the behavior in question is morally right/wrong. Jews, Christians, and Muslims are doubly committed to the importance of this distinction, between we believe that all human beings are sinners. Our moral compass is broken, and although we may do good deeds, our proclivity runs the other direction: to vanity, pride, selfishness, sloth, self-loathing, lust, envy, deceit, self-justification. If that belief about human sinfulness is true (and it is), then on principle we should never suppose that what anyone would do in a given situation, real or hypothetical, reveals the truth of what one ought to do. The latter question must be answered on other grounds entirely.

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In my experience, these two sets of distinctions, if imbibed thoroughly or taught consistently, make a world of difference for students, Christians, and other persons of good will who are interested in understanding, pursuing, and deliberating on what makes for good, ethical, or moral human living. If we agreed on them in advance, we might even be able to have a meaningful conversation about contested ethical matters! Imagine that.

The vanity of theologians

The love of God in Christ is the model of all good theological work. That is Barth's basic thesis: “If the object of theological knowledge is Jesus Christ and, in him, perfect love, then Agape alone can be the dominant and formative prototype and principle of theology.” Yet who among us would claim to consistently meet this standard? It is one thing to agree that teaching ought to be an act of self-emptying love on behalf of students, but quite another to teach that way. And while each of us falls short of this ideal in our own ways, Barth draws our attention to an especially corrosive vice that commonly infects us. The illness presents as, among other things, an excessive concern for our reputations; a morbid craving for praise; a narcissistic pretentiousness combined with insecurity; a relentless desire to outdo our colleagues and to broadcast our accomplishments; a loveless envy when others succeed; and a gloomy anxiety about our legacies, about how people will remember and evaluate us when we're dead. The vice, of course, is vanity, and Barth considers it a menacing threat to theologians.

To put it simply, Barth thinks a vain theologian is an embodied contradiction of the gospel and the very antithesis of Jesus Christ himself. And he doesn't care how obvious this is. Barth doesn't care that making fun of self-important theologians is by now a tired cliché. He knows that vanity disables us, and because of that he is willing to sound the alarm. And we would do well not to evade his critique by dismissing it as moralistic or judgmental or whatever. . . .

It is tempting to interpret passages like these as nothing more than Barth's way of deflecting the ocean of praise that was being directed at him toward the end of his life. He was, after all, the most famous theologian in the world. When he traveled to America to give the first five lectures in Evangelical Theology, Time magazine put him on its cover. Or perhaps one sees in these statements a tacit admission that Barth did not always manage to live up to his own standards, and that is certainly true. But Barth is aiming these passages at us too, and only an instinct for self-protection would lead us to think otherwise. Because if he wasn't troubled by our desire for greatness, he wouldn't aggressively remind us that we are nothing more than “little theologians.” He wouldn't criticize us for being more interested in the question “Who is the greatest among us?” than we are in the “plain and modest question about the matter at hand.” If he wasn't worried about the way we inflate ourselves by demeaning our rivals, he wouldn't ask why there are “so many really woeful theologians who go around with faces that are eternally troubled or even embittered, always in a rush to bring forward their critical reservations and negations?” And he wouldn't keep reminding us that evangelical theology is modest theology if he wasn't distressed by our immodesty—by the serenely confident way we make definitive pronouncements, even as we theoretically agree that all theological speech is limited and subject to revision. You don't write passages like the ones in this book unless you are concerned by how easily theologians confuse zealous pursuit of the truth with zealous pursuit of their own glory. It would not be far off to say that Barth's examination of this theme is something like a gloss on Jesus’s claim that you cannot simultaneously work for praise from God and praise from people. You can seek one or the other, but not both.

It is important to see that Barth is not taking cheap shots at theologians here. Yes, he is giving us strong medicine, but he is giving it to us because he thinks vanity turns us into the kind of people whose lives obscure the truth people who make the gospel less rather than more plausible. We cannot, of course, make the gospel less true. God is God, and the truth is the truth, and nothing we do can change that. But Barth understands the role that the existence of the community plays in both the perception and concealment of truth. “The community does not speak with words alone,” he writes. “It speaks by the very fact of its existence in the world.” There's what we say, and then there's who we are, and who we are says something.

And the connection with teaching is obvious. We believe that God sometimes uses flawed and sinful people like ourselves to make himself known. Since those are the only kind of people there are, those are the kind God uses. But how compelling could it possibly be for our students to hear us say, for example, that the Christian life is a life of self-giving that conforms to Jesus Christ's own life, or that the church lives to point away from itself to its Lord, when at the same time they see us carefully managing our CVs, ambitiously seeking acclaim and advancement, and morbidly competing with one another in exactly the same cutthroat ways that people in every academic discipline compete with one another? It doesn't add up. Arcade Fire is right: it’s absurd to trust a millionaire quoting the Sermon on the Mount. And it’s no less absurd for students to trust vain theologians when they talk about a crucified God. 

I know this is not everyone's problem. Some readers don't need to hear this. They struggle with other vices. But anyone who has read the Gospels knows that Jesus goes out of his way to address this problem. Speaking specifically about teachers, he says, “They do all their deeds to be seen by others. . . . They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats . . . and to be greeted with respect . . . and to have people call them [teacher]. . . . [But] the greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted” (Matt. 23:1–12). In Luke 14 Jesus tells his disciples that following him requires giving up their possessions, and for many of us, the possession we covet most, the thing we cling to like greedy misers, is our reputation.

—Adam Neder, Theology as a Way of Life: On Teaching and Learning the Christian Faith (Baker Academic, 2019), 64-70

What do I want for my students?

I teach theology to undergraduates. That means, on one hand, that I’m not teaching them a skill. Many professors pass on a set of concrete skills meant for a job or some other professional activity: how to interview a client; how to detect a speech impediment; how to parse a verb; how to mix solutions. Not me. That’s not what theology is about.

On the other hand, I’m not teaching my students a discrete collection of facts, such that they might memorize them and, having done so, be assessed for their (or my) success. To be sure, theology contains facts—the date of the seventh ecumenical council, the name of the angelic doctor, the location of the crucifixion—but these are not the point of theology; they are necessary but relatively unimportant elements along the way.

Moreover, nine out of ten students register for a class with me because it is part of a menu of courses they are required to take. In other words, they’re with me because they have to be, not (necessarily) because they want to be. I cannot assume either prior knowledge or present interest.

Finally, professors should be honest with themselves. Whatever a student learns from me, she will almost certainly forget within five to fifteen years. No student is going to see me at a restaurant in 2035 and say, “Dr. East! Chalcedon! Theotokos! St. Cyril and the Tome of St. Leo!” Even if they did, they wouldn’t remember what those words meant. It would be an impressive student who did.

I imagine it’s hard for some teachers to accept this. Why teach if they’re going to forget it all?

Well, to contradict myself for a moment: I remember verbatim a line from a professor in a course on teaching my senior year of college. He said: Learning is what you remember when you’ve forgotten everything you were taught. (Or something like that.) That is, you do take something with you, even if you forget all the facts and figures. So what is that something?

The answer will vary based on the teacher and the topic. Here’s mine.

My principal task as a teacher of theology is the act of exposure. I want to expose my students, usually for the first time, to the Christian theological tradition. I want to show them that it exists, that it makes a claim on their lives, that it is of crucial importance to understanding God, and that it is supremely intellectually interesting. If I do nothing else whatsoever, and students walk out of my classroom having imbibed those lessons, I will have succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.

Put from a different angle, and more simply, my goal is for students to understand—or at least to see a visceral instance of someone who believes—that God matters. There is nothing more important than God, nothing more interesting, nothing more vital, nothing more imperiously imposing, nothing more existentially significant.

Further, I want my students to see that the person in front of them not only believes this to be true but has staked his life on it. More, that this person is morally and intellectually serious and—for this very reason, not in spite of it—believes it to his core. In other words, having taken me, no student will be able to say, for the rest of his or her life, that he or she never met an educated, intelligent, committed Christian adult. I’ve got all the credentials. I’ve got the knowledge. In worldly terms, I’ve got the goods. Not the goods that matter, mind you—like the fruit of the Holy Spirit or the cardinal virtues or any meaningful sign of holiness—but the goods that the world cares about. The Ivy PhD, the books and articles, the whatever other superficial symptoms of success that are meant to impress on social media and dust jackets.

If the students listen to my teaching, then they will know that the point about the gospel is that these things don’t matter. They are means to other ends, often little more than filthy lucre and in any case full of temptations—not least to seek after prestige or to be impressed with one’s own resume. Nevertheless, one thing they communicate is that the person bearing them cannot be dismissed as a country bumpkin or a dime-a-dozen fundie. Even if I’m wrong, it’s not because (as they say) I haven’t done the reading. No student finishes a semester with me and thinks I haven’t done my homework. That’s the one thing I make sure to rule out.

In that sense, then, I use what’s to hand as a tool for amplifying what I’ve judged to be most important for them to hear. For the most part, they won’t remember the grammar of orthodoxy as I’ve tried to spell it out for them. What they’ll remember is that there is such a thing as orthodoxy. And whether or not they were raised on it in their home church, now they can’t claim ignorance: it exists, it’s grand, it’s rich and wide and deep—the sort of thing one might give one’s life to, as their (somewhat excitable and quite strange) professor seems to have done and (even stranger) seems to think they should, too.

My courses, in a word, remove plausible deniability. They can’t say they weren’t told. Through sheer relentless heartfelt passion, energy, and love, I give all that I have and use all that I know to show forth the truths of the gospel of God. The assignments aren’t onerous, but the reading is. I want to saturate them in the wisdom and beauty of the doctors and saints and martyrs of the church. (I want them, secondarily, to imagine that reading might be a habit worth acquiring.) I want them to see themselves in the writings of the tradition, by which I mean, I want them to see the Christ they already know in the words of ancient and unknown forebears. They knew Christ, too! Perhaps, as a result, they might have something to teach us of Christ in the here and now.

More than anything, I want my students to see in the sacred tradition of the church what Rilke saw in the torso of Apollo: A peremptory and inescapable word from beyond, addressing them by name: You must change your life.

That’s what I want for my students. I want them to know Christ, and to keep on knowing him for the rest of their lives. They can do that while eventually, or even quickly, forgetting all I ever said. And that would be just fine with me.

Christian ethics

This spring semester I’m piloting a course in theological ethics for upper-level students at ACU. Wednesday this week wrapped up our fourth week as well as part 1 of the course. To begin the work of synthesis I wrote up a series of ten theses on Christian ethics and distributed copies to the class. Here’s what I wrote:

1. Christian ethics pertains to followers of Christ.

2. The community of Christ-followers is the church.

3. The church is thus the context, audience, and agent of Christian ethics.

4. Christian ethics is for “the world” in the sense that those outside the church are invited to visit and to join the church; but the church does not expect the world to live according to Christian ethics.

5. The church is the teacher of Christian ethics; the Spirit’s pedagogy or “moral epistemology” is housed there.

6. The vehicle or living source of the church’s teaching is its sacred tradition, governed and normed by Holy Scripture, inspired and guided by the Holy Spirit.

7. Human beings develop good character, or virtue, through belonging to the common life of the church, which is centered on the corporate worship of God.

8. If ethics is about flourishing as a human being, then it follows that knowing and worshiping God is the height of human flourishing; our final end is friendship with God.

9. Virtuous character in community is ordered by and to imitation of an ideal or exemplar; in the case of the Christian community, the one truly human being worthy of imitation is Jesus Christ: he is the pattern or paradigm of “the good man.”

10. In sum, therefore, Christian ethics is about:

    1. journeying in and with the life of the worshiping community of the church toward the eternal life of the triune God;

    2. learning the moral life in humble obedience to the church’s teaching;

    3. developing good character over time and through practice by the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit;

    4. and, ultimately, being conformed to the image of Christ.

A taxonomy of academic vocations

A couple weeks back I wrote more than 12,000 words on the experience of teaching a 4/4 load as a professor while also trying to publish (and, if possible, live an ordinary life). Consider this post a coda to that four-part series.

Spending five years at Yale for my PhD was, in numberless ways, a blessing. But one of the few ways in which it was not was in its formation of my (and presumably others’) sense of what it means to inhabit the academy. To be an academic, I learned, was to be a top-flight scholar whose publications are not only numerous but significant: the sort of work that changes the field, that sets the terms of debate going forward. To be anything other than this is to fail at the academic calling, to fall short of the high ideals of serious scholarship.

It goes without saying that this vision of the intellectual life is a lovely and admirable one for a few. It is reserved for only a few for at least three reasons: because almost all academics are not at Ivy League schools; because for certain articles and books to be conversation-shapers and game-changers most publications cannot be; because most of us are simply not possessed of that rare combination of intelligence, upbringing, education, talent, discipline, health, and ambition necessary to produce polymathic scholarship. Hence, for the rest of us mere mortals—which means very nearly every working professor today, minus a fortunate handful—some other vision of the intellectual life must suffice.

Happily, one of the many gifts of teaching at my current institution has been an education in the diversity of academic vocations. It turns out there are more ways than one to inhabit the university. Here’s my own personal taxonomy.

NB: These are in no particular order; none are mutually exclusive; plenty of academics encompass more than one, though I doubt many, if any, do all eight well.

1. Scholar

The ideal and stereotype: the professor in her study, surrounded by stacks upon stacks of thousands of books, master of a dozen languages, slowly producing multi-volume works of guild-defining scholarship. Less ideal-typically, an academic in this mold lives for the work of the library; she considers it her number-one job, and organizes her life around it. Her principal academic aim is to make a contribution to her discipline.

2. Researcher

It seems simultaneously defensible and worthwhile to distinguish the scholarly labors of the humanities from those of the sciences. The way I’ve realized I do that mentally is by the word “research.” Obviously research can describe anything, including literary and textual research. But for lack of a more targeted term, I’ll reserve “scholar” for an academic-publisher in the humanities mold and “researcher” for an academic-publisher in the sciences mold. For the truth is that both the work and the product of each are almost entirely distinct, a disciplinary extension of C. P. Snow’s “two cultures.” When colleagues in the sciences describe their work in the lab, or on Amazon Mechanical Turk, or what they read, or what they write, or how they present at conferences, or the role of numbers and spreadsheets and studies in their day-to-day work—it sounds like we have different jobs. That’s because we do. “Research,” for me, names what the folks in STEM do with their time, alien though it may be to this theologian.

3. Writer

Academics are not usually writers, whether or not they write on the regular. In fact, most academics are poor writers, and many, if not most, academics hate writing. I speak from experience, which being anecdotal may be a small sample size, but I’m confident that it is representative. All you have to do is open a book published by an academic press, and you’ll see as quickly as you can read how boring, plodding, ugly, and jargon-laden the prose is. I’ve known very few academics, moreover, who like to write. But occasionally one likes to write; even more occasionally that writing isn’t bad. Since you can produce scholarship and engage in research without either of those things being true of you, and since you can be a good writer without being an especially good scholar or researcher, I think setting aside “writer” as a separate vocation is more than warranted.

4. Teacher

This one’s a given. Most academics teach, though far too many neither enjoy it nor are especially good at it. Check that: more are good at it than you might suppose. That’s part of the problem with imagining that Yale and Harvard, Chicago and Notre Dame are the norm, and the rest are the exception to the rule. (And those institutions contain lots of wonderful teachers, too!) So strike through that cynical reflex of mine. Most academics teach, and many, many of them both excel at it and find great fulfillment in it. What they don’t enjoy is the 70-hour work weeks, the professional precarity, the high teaching loads, the huge class sizes, the unreasonable expectations, the consumer mentality applied to students, the gutting of non-job-related course subjects, the collective societal presumption against the meaningfulness of their work, the condescension toward their work by uber-scholars—and so on. Nevertheless, it is true that some professors are not teachers by vocation but only by necessity.

5. Mentor

This is one I had some sense of during doctoral studies, given the role of advisors in dissertations, but I’ve had a front-row seat observing quality mentorship at my current institution—and let me tell you, it is a calling unto itself. Where I teach mentoring might be personal and spiritual in addition to being professional or academic, but that’s only a reminder that “academic” is not a distinct compartment in a fragmented life but seamlessly integrated into the whole of a young person’s maturing sense of identity, beliefs about the world, and hopes for the future. For many students, mentorship makes all the difference. It’s what makes this or that college, this or that professor special. If I were a department chair, and I could choose between a quality scholar who was a super mentor, on one hand, and a super scholar who was a “fine” mentor, on the other, I would opt for the former without a second thought. Good mentors trail behind them all manner of secondary virtues that invariably benefit their academics neighbors, both within the classroom and without.

6. Practitioner

Here think of all those majors in the contemporary university that are taught by what those students majoring in that field want to become: nurses, teachers, PTs, OTs, social workers, ministers, journalists, even businessmen. Often (though not always) these professors and instructors worked for years, maybe decades, as a professional before returning to college in order to train the next generation. It can’t be emphasized enough that these fields and their faculty are the reason academia is still afloat today. In my experience, most (but, again, not all) faculty in these areas do not understand themselves as “academics” in the way that many “scholars” (see above) are trained or socialized to do. To the extent that the ideal-type of the tweed-jacketed philosophiae doctor with his dusty library volumes and German-language poetry and career-spanning articles on erudite topics still exists, often as not practitioners neither desire it nor exemplify it nor feel intimidated by it. Practitioners are doers who train still more doers, and in general they are making the world a better place, and are constitutionally unimpressed by your transparent attempts at prestige. And rightly so.

7. Administrator

There is nothing less sexy in academia than administration, at least to purists of the scholar or teacher type, but like practitioners, administrators make the world go round. Working for a good chair or dean means your life, all things being equal, is a dream; working for a bad chair or dean, accordingly, is bound to become nothing short of a nightmare. Furthermore, many academics both enjoy the work of administration and are gifted at it. I have friends and colleagues around the country who are clearly meant for administration, and unless it would make them miserable, their going that route makes life possible as well as happier for the rest of us. Sometimes administration is a burden suffered for a time, out of duty or need. But the calling exists, it is an academic calling, and we should all be grateful for those who accept it.

8. Intellectual

Not every academic is an intellectual, and vice versa. What do I mean by that? By “intellectual” here I mean to refer to someone for whom the life of the mind is her central preoccupation, a preoccupation that takes the form of mental curiosity, wide learning, voracious reading, affection for big ideas, desire for debate, love of history, and the pleasures of disciplinary promiscuity. To be an intellectual means making time for the mind, which means making time for texts (print or digital). Not every intellectual produces, but every intellectual consumes: which is to say, takes in what she can, when she can, as often as she can. An intellectual may or may not be a hedgehog, but she is always a fox; she knows many things, or seeks to do so, and for their own sake. Intellectuals make up a higher percentage of academics than the ordinary populace—that’s a matter of self-selection—but if you are not yourself an academic you might be surprised by how many academics are not intellectuals in the sense here stipulated. You might then be inclined to interpret that observation as an indictment. It need not be, however. The point of laying out this taxonomy is precisely to call into question our widely shared assumptions of who or what the ideal-typical academic is or ought to be. There are many ways of inhabiting the academy; we need all of them; there is no prima facie reason to suppose any one of them is essentially superior to any of the others. The sooner some of us learn that lesson (and it took me some time, as I said at the outset), the better our common work is liable to be.

Deconstruction

My post on Thursday generated a lot of responses, many of which were positive. One mostly mild but nevertheless negative reaction was a defense of the concept of deconstruction, seeing in my post an unfair diminishment of what for many has proven to be both a necessary and a healthy process of growth in faith and repudiation of false or destructing teaching.

That’s fair. The piece I wrote was a blog post, shot off on little more than a whim. The point of it was less why deconstruction is bad, more why my friends and colleagues who presuppose that my main task in the classroom is deconstructing my students’ beliefs are dead wrong. I didn’t intend the post as an entry in the Deconstruction Wars—God forbid—which I find to be simultaneously vicious, vacuous, and largely pertaining to highly specific sub-cultures in American evangelicalism. The soldiers in these wars seem insistent on refusing to listen or understand one another. And since I’m not enlisted in either this or any intra-evangelical war, I don’t think of what I write as ever anything more than observations from a friendly outsider who lives in, if not enemy territory, than a sort of foreign land.

Having said that, in the hopes of clarifying where I was coming from in my post and offering some of those observations, here’s my two cents on that ill-famed and contested word, “deconstruction.”

*

Deconstruction is just a word. It’s not a technical term. Like every ordinary word, you know its meaning by the way people use it. To be sure, people don’t use it in identical ways, but those ways are nonetheless quite similar, and one or two primary meanings rise to the top of common usage.

By way of comparison, consider transubstantiation. That is a technical word. It has a prescriptive meaning however you or anyone else uses it correctly. Why? Because it was a term of art invented for a purpose: to give a name to whatever it is the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church believes (which is to say, teaches) occurs in the eucharistic rite, following the fourth Lateran Council and as developed by St. Thomas Aquinas and the Council of Trent.

Deconstruction is not like that. Unless you’re exegeting Derrida—and here’s the part where I remind you that exegeting Derrida gives you quite a bit of (shall we say) hermeneutical latitude—deconstruction is not a piece of jargon, a technical word, or a term of art. Its meaning is not determined by any magisteria of which I am aware, and that includes Christian Twitter. What it means is how it means in the natural discourse of those who deploy it. Which means, in turn, that to say, “D doesn’t mean X, D means Y,” is only a rather implausibly dogmatic way of saying, “I use D differently than you do,” which is itself just a way of saying, “I would prefer to restrict the use of D to mean Y instead of X.” The first phrasing sounds like a statement of grammatical fact, and thus a sort of rebuke; the second is mere description of difference of usage; the third is a normative claim, supportable by argument if one is in a mood to supply it.

It is perfectly defensible to opt for the third phrasing. That’s part of how the meaning of contested terminology gets sorted out. The second phrasing is a way of making disagreement intelligible, though it doesn’t move the needle of the conversation one way or the other. The thing to avoid is the first phrasing. There is no eternal dictionary definition on hand to which one may refer in parsing and correcting others’ usage of deconstruction. So it’s not only silly to bang one’s fist on the digital disk, insisting, flush-faced, that the word doesn’t mean X because it only means Y. It’s false.

The good news is, when faced with a novel word trailing behind it a range of possible meanings, we can hash out together how we think we ought to use the word, and why. That’s worth doing in this case, since deconstruction is very much a feature of The Discourse today. Even if we only establish distinct meanings that different people use in various contexts for diverse purposes, we might understand one another better, which is a worthy goal in itself.

*

I’m not going to try to settle what we all ought to understand by deconstruction. That’s a fool’s errand in any case. I do want to make a few remarks on the wider cultural trend the term names and why I said about it what I did in my original post.

Lest I be at all unclear, there are many, many people for whom deconstruction describes a crucial part of their spiritual formation in which they divested themselves of wicked or false beliefs or practices and learned to amend or replace those beliefs or practices with true or life-giving ones. To the precise extent that that experience is what is meant in general by deconstruction, then it is obvious to me that deconstruction is both necessary and good, a work of the Holy Spirit worth celebrating and commending. And I personally know folks, both college students and friends in mid-life, who fit this description and who unquestionably needed such an experience—if, that is, they or their faith were going to survive.

At the same time, I do not think this is the only experience named by deconstruction. And if I’m honest, I do not think it is the primary one, common though it may be.

The primary one is what I named in my post on (re)construction:

The form is the thing: deconstruction is a style. Deconstruction is a mode of being, a moral, social, and spiritual habitation in which to dwell, for a time or indefinitely. Deconstruction says: I’m unlearning all that I ever thought I knew—usually about the Bible, Christian teaching, Jesus, faith, or some charged element therein. Deconstruction in the imperative says: You must unlearn what you have learned. And what you have learned, you learned from an authority in your life, namely a parent, a pastor, a church, a school, a mentor, a sibling, an aunt, a grandmother, a coach, a friend. Which means, at least as the message is received, that you must unbind yourself from the wisdom of such authorities; you must accept me, your teacher, as an authority above your inherited authorities, and defer to my learning over theirs.

This, as I hope is evident, is foolish, self-serving, and manipulative pedagogy. But it is the regnant pedagogical mode not only for professors but for every would-be influencer, life coach, self-help writer, and podcaster on the market, doubly so if they purport to be an expert on matters spiritual. And the content (i.e., the catechesis) matches the form (i.e., the pedagogy): nothing concrete whatsoever. Generic therapeutic self-affirmation clothed in whatever the latest HR-approved, capital-appropriated progressive cause happens to be. Goop gone wild; woke goop. De-toxined crystals against toxic positivity, VR social justice in the metaverse, and oh by the way click here for your subscription to the weekly newsletter from Deconstruction, Inc, it’s only $39.99/month.

Granted that I allow myself to get carried away there a bit (though forever and always you must credit me, I demand it, for “woke goop”), the basic point stands. Deconstruction today has become a sort of brand with which a certain class of evangelicals and exvangelicals would like to be identified. It has been transformed into a commodity that confers upon the person a particular social status, a status apt to those who have passed an invisible threshold of salary, graduate degrees, and political opinions. That status we may call “not disreputable.” To be disreputable is to be associated with the wrong people, in this case the people who raised you or the people you worship with, people who lack in the extreme the right status and the right opinions. Deconstruction™ provides permission structures for you either to hold such people at arm’s length or to renounce all their ways and works. You need not be associated with them, because (you now realize) you are unlike them. And the prompt for such realization is deconstruction.

At this point I will repeat: Is this all that deconstruction is, for anyone and everyone? No! I just said above that it is altogether something different for plenty of folks. But is it also this, namely the influencer-mediated mass phenomenon of Insta-trademarked social and spiritual status marked above all by the public signaling of newly disavowed disreputable and offensive beliefs and associations (or, as it happens, newly acquired reputable and inoffensive beliefs and associations)? Yes, it is. And I don’t know that I could believe you were being honest if you denied it.

*

There’s a third style of deconstruction worth mentioning, and its complexity is found in its unstable placement between the two I’ve already described. It’s this one that I was largely after in my original post, because it’s the one I see my students most susceptible to at this stage in their lives. Recall: I’m not a pastor. I’m a professor. My responsibility is the classroom, not the sanctuary. But because I teach at a Christian university and I have students of every major in my classes, it is part of my charge to teach on this or that aspect of Christian faith and theology in such a way that I am forming my students in the truth of the gospel as an outworking of the academic task.

Among the ways by which one can approach that charge, I identified two. One is deconstruction, the other is (re)construction. Deconstruction as a pedagogical mode treats students as ill-formed fundies in need of a sort of intellectual transfusion: my wisdom replacing their corrupted upbringing. I cannot put into words my contempt for this style of teaching. It is self-aggrandizing nonsense. It spits on students’ families and communities of origin. It presumes to know in advance that they come from ignorance and stupidity, whereas I represent knowledge and enlightenment.

This is an abject and risible failure of the high calling of teacher.

When I say I don’t deconstruct in the classroom, this is what I mean. I don’t set myself in opposition to all that my students have ever known or trusted, asking them to place their faith in me instead. That doesn’t mean I abjure my authority or expertise. It just means teaching does not have to be contrastive to be successful. It doesn’t have to involve evacuation of the contents of students’ minds before learning can begin. It certainly does not require covertly incepting students such that they learn from the professor that, to be an educated person, they must actively distrust the very source of their life: their parents, their churches, their neighbors and coaches and mentors—in short, everyone they’ve ever loved.

Let me give a concrete example. I am explicit in my classroom that I hope to make an anti-Marcionite of every one of my students. I suppose I could do that by telling them, in so many words, that their churches are just the very worst for instilling in them, intentionally or not, a tacit skepticism of Israel, Israel’s scriptures, and Israel’s God. Why, though? Why must I engage in “them bad, me good” to make my point? Instead, among other things, what I say is: Think through the logic of your commitments, which are by and large the commitments of your churches and families. Do they believe the Bible is the word of God? Is the Old Testament in the Bible? Do they believe the God and Father of Jesus Christ is the God of Abraham who created the world? So on and so forth. It’s not hard at all for them to see, and quickly, that they and their communities are already committed to not being Marcionite. The subtle question then becomes, Where and how and why did they imbibe the assumption, however deep-seated, that the Old Testament is a second-class citizen in Holy Scripture? And that’s when we get cooking.

Do you see? You could describe what I’m doing there as deconstructing my students’ Marcionite beliefs. Is that really necessary though? Because you could equally describe it as building up (and grounding) my students’ antecedent but largely implicit beliefs about the unity of God, God’s people, and God’s word. And if what I’m after here is a choice between alternative pedagogies, then the latter is not only a superior description of what is happening. It is a guide to the “how,” the style and sensibility, of my teaching. It shapes my approach and governs my words. It reminds me, constantly, that I’m in the business of building, not tearing down—all the while allowing that building sometimes involves rebuilding, or removing this slat for that one, or securing walls or foundations in a more reliable way, and so on. The end is the edifice, which is why St. Paul calls for edification. That end has an aim or goal, then. It also implies a terminus, a destination, a point of completion. Ultimately that completion is in God’s hands, in God’s time, and arrives only after death. Keeping the end in mind, though, helps the teacher, or at any rate this teacher, from supposing that the construction project is aimless or without guidance, a wholly human endeavor in the philosophically constructivist sense: something we do, on our own for our own purposes, since of all things the measure is man.

In the world of education, especially academia, it can be tempting to believe that Protagoras is right. But he’s not. And my worst fear for my students is that they will be seduced by the most childish of all the deconstructions on offer, namely, that there are no answers, only questions, that deconstruction is a journey without a destination, that faith is only faith so long as you don’t believe in anything in particular, that what the gospel is good for is reinforcing what makes me comfortable and never demanding of me risk or loss, suffering or sacrifice, or (horror of horrors) disreputability.

I want my students to know Christ, the living Christ who is both more beautiful and more terrible than they’ve ever imagined. That means training them to ask good questions, and it certainly means crucifying their (and my) expectations of what may be true of God, what may be true of us, and what the true God may truly ask of each of us. If the result for my students is deconstruction in the good and proper sense, then so be it: you’ll get no protest or complaint from me. But if the result is the loss of Christ, if the result is an endless voyage away from God into the false self fashioned for them by the postmodern merchants of identity (whose god is their stomach, which is to say, Mammon), and if they call that deconstruction—then I don’t want anything to do with it. Such deconstruction will find no ready welcome in my classroom, only hostility and refusal.

Like everything that can be used well or poorly, then, deconstruction may be judged by its fruits. If it gives us Christ, we ought to welcome it. If it does not, we ought to turn it away. If sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t, then we ought to judge case by case. At the very least, we should know in advance the good it is capable of doing and judge it accordingly. If by and large it fails to do that good, doing it only on rare occasions, then we are justified in viewing deconstruction as a general cultural trend to be something worth lamenting and resisting. And if I’m wrong, if the bad sorts of deconstruction outlined above are the exception to the rule, then God be praised: he’ll have proven me a fool again, and not for the last time.

(Re)construction

There’s a lot of talk these days about deconstruction. I’m often asked how I approach deconstructing my students’ beliefs in the classroom; it’s typically a given not only that I do it but that I ought to do it, that it’s part of my job description.

I do not deconstruct what my students come into my class believing. I don’t as a point of fact and I don’t on principle. Why?

Not because my students lack beliefs worth giving up (which, by the way, we all do, all the time). I’ve written elsewhere about what I call theological demons that demand exorcising in this generation of Bible-belt students. So it’s true in one sense that I identify and criticize particular beliefs that (I am explicit) I want my students to reject.

But that isn’t what people mean by deconstruction, either in form or in content. The form is the thing: deconstruction is a style. Deconstruction is a mode of being, a moral, social, and spiritual habitation in which to dwell, for a time or indefinitely. Deconstruction says: I’m unlearning all that I ever thought I knew—usually about the Bible, Christian teaching, Jesus, faith, or some charged element therein. Deconstruction in the imperative says: You must unlearn what you have learned. And what you have learned, you learned from an authority in your life, namely a parent, a pastor, a church, a school, a mentor, a sibling, an aunt, a grandmother, a coach, a friend. Which means, at least as the message is received, that you must unbind yourself from the wisdom of such authorities; you must accept me, your teacher, as an authority above your inherited authorities, and defer to my learning over theirs.

This, as I hope is evident, is foolish, self-serving, and manipulative pedagogy. But it is the regnant pedagogical mode not only for professors but for every would-be influencer, life coach, self-help writer, and podcaster on the market, doubly so if they purport to be an expert on matters spiritual. And the content (i.e., the catechesis) matches the form (i.e., the pedagogy): nothing concrete whatsoever. Generic therapeutic self-affirmation clothed in whatever the latest HR-approved, capital-appropriated progressive cause happens to be. Goop gone wild; woke goop. De-toxined crystals against toxic positivity, VR social justice in the metaverse, and oh by the way click here for your subscription to the weekly newsletter from Deconstruction, Inc, it’s only $39.99/month.

So no. As far as I can help it I don’t add my voice to the deconstruction chorus. What do I do instead then?

I build. Which is to say, I construct, or reconstruct. It’s all foundations, floor plans, building permits, and fashioning of pillars in my classroom. We don’t tear down an inch, not if I can help it.

The reason is simple. My students don’t have anything to deconstruct. Deconstruction implies the razing of a building, the demolition of a house. But for the most part, my students don’t walk into my classes with mental palaces furnished in gold, granite, and crystal. All too often, their faith is a house of cards. One gust of wind, one gentle puff of air will knock it down. I’m not interested in that. Not only am I not teaching at a state school in a religion department. I’m a Christian theologian, a teacher in and for the church. It’s my business to fortify, to strengthen, to secure, and to ground their faith—not to tear it down. Deconstruction is a razing, as I said, but I’m in the business of raising homes to live in. I want sturdy foundations and load-bearing walls. I want to build houses on the rock.

Because the storm is coming. It’s already here. I’m given students who for the most part believe already, or want to believe. What I do is say: Guess what? It’s true. All of it. You can trust what you’ve been taught, though you may not have been given the resources to explore the how or the why or the what-for. But Jesus really is God’s Son; he really did rise from the dead; he really is the Lord and savior of the cosmos. And from there it’s off to the races: church history, sacred tradition, ecumenical councils, creedal formulas, saints and doctors, mystics and martyrs, doctrines and dogmas and the rest.

Not one word is meant to undermine the faith they brought with them to the course. It’s meant to bolster and stabilize it. The unmaskers and destabilizers, the Deconstructors™ with all their pomp will be knocking on the doors of their hearts soon enough. I’m doing what I can in the time that I have to reinforce and buttress their defenses, so that when the time comes they are ready. Not because I want them to live free from risk; not because I want them to avoid hard questions. On the contrary. I’m usually the first to raise some of those hard questions on their behalf. But I don’t pretend that it’s better to leave questions untouched than to seek truth by answering them; I don’t model for them the faux profundity of the hip philosopher who hides his actual convictions while interrogating everyone else’s unfashionable ones.

On that day, fast approaching, when my students find themselves facing an unexpected question or challenge to their faith, instead of thinking, “My deconstructing professor was right: this Christian thing is a sham,” they might think instead, “I’m not sure what the answer is here, but the way my theology professor acted, I bet the church has thought about this before; I should look into it.” I want my students to learn the reflex, at the gut level, that there’s a there there, i.e., there’s something to be looked into—not merely something to be walked away from.

That’s why I don’t deconstruct. My classroom is a construction site. Day and night, we’re building, building, building, world without end, amen.

Teaching a 4/4: freedom

This is the fourth and final post in a series of reflections on what it means to be a scholar in the academy with a 4/4 teaching load. The first discussed the allotment of one’s hours in a 4/4 load; the second identified the unavoidable tradeoffs that come with either having a family or serving at a particular kind of institution; the third offered a series of tips and strategies for 4/4 profs who want to make, foster, and protect the time necessary for reading and writing. This fourth and last post is a companion to the third, discussing in broader terms some of the gifts and opportunities afforded by serving at a teaching-heavy university as well as having a time-demanding family life outside of work.

Let’s say you accept my terms and agree that it’s possible to find the time to publish while teaching a 4/4. Still, you reply, that doesn’t make the high teaching load good; the load remains a hindrance to research, only a hindrance that can be (partially) overcome.

There are two things to say to this. First, teaching isn’t a hindrance. Nor is it just your job. Teaching is a calling. If it’s not your calling, you might want to get out of the game. As I’ve repeated throughout this series, research is a component of and companion to teaching; the job is twofold, a balance or dance. You don’t teach in order to write. You teach and you write; that’s the scholarly life.

Second, a high teaching load isn’t solely a set of challenges for research by comparison to positions in the scaling heights of the ivory tower: the Ivy League, the R1 state schools, the super-rich private universities whose research operations are a well-oiled machine. A high teaching load, which is usually a function of serving at an institution with less prestige, less money, less power, and so on, also presents unique opportunities for your research.

How so?

First, by taking the pressure off. I cannot put into words the relief I have felt every day on my job not having to publish or perish. Note well: I’m still publishing. But there is no one peering over my shoulder, no one nudging and shoving me toward some invisible finish line extending forward ahead of me, always within sight but never within reach. The sheer benefit to one’s mental health makes it worth a positive mention. When I compare notes with friends who work in The Big Leagues, their jobs sound claustrophobic, stultifying, enervating, depressing. Like a panic attack waiting to happen. Who wants that?

Second, by taking the pressure off what I’m supposed to write. Three months ago my first book was published. I first drafted it two years ago, in the fall of 2019. Would I have written that book, the way that I wrote it, were I at a different, more research-heavy institution? Answer: Not on your life. And it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. I couldn’t be prouder of it. But the spirit that breathes across its pages, a spirit I trust you can sense as a reader, is the spirit of freedom. I wrote exactly what I believed to be true, in the style I thought most apt to the content. The book is what I wanted it to be. Never, not in a million years, would I have done that had an administrator been breathing down my neck, asking me when my Next Big Book would be coming out, and with what university press, and on what topic, and written with what level of dense and unreadable prose. I didn’t write to make a splash. I wrote what was burning up my insides, what was begging to come out. And you know what? If the book ends up making any kind of splash, it’ll be because I wrote from passion and desire, not from administrative pressure or T&P criteria. And praise God for that.

Third, of a piece with an overall reduction of pressure is a broader freedom to pursue interests as they arise. In the last five years I have somehow, by God’s grace (and editors’ largesse), become a person who writes essays and criticism for magazines on wide-ranging topics that include but are not limited to my scholarly expertise in theology. I’m going to say it again: I could not and would not have done that at an Ivy or R1 institution. Why? Because their incentive structures do not care about such writing. But you know what? Alan Jacobs is right: Literary journalism (a term he takes from Frank Kermode) is a lot harder to write than peer-reviewed journal articles. Not only that, doing so makes you a much better writer, doubly so if you have no training as a writer and the only writing you cut your teeth on was inaccessible, jargon-heavy academic “prose.” Working with editors from The Point and The Los Angeles Review of Books and The New Atlantis and The Hedgehog Review and Commonweal and First Things and Comment and elsewhere has made me an immeasurably better writer than I was before I started, indeed than I ever would have been had I never tried my hand at such writing. Thank God, then, too, that I’m here at ACU and not at some soul-destroying publish-or-perish elite place that doesn’t care one whit whether you write well or whether what you write is read widely, only whether the right number of PRJAs is checked on the T&P portfolio. No thanks.

Fourth, my entire “research profile” bears the imprint of this pressure-free vocational freedom afforded by working at a teaching-heavy institution. On one hand, my third book (beginning to draft next month!) is a 25,000-word popular work on the church meant for lay audiences. Would I have signed that contract elsewhere? Probably not. On the other hand, my fourth book (not due for a few years) is a similarly popular work, longer and more detailed, however, on the proper role of digital technology in the life of churches and their ordained leaders. I’m currently reading my way into being able to write about that topic; I’ve also just finished a pilot course teaching on the same. Are you sensing a theme? My writing habits have followed an unplanned and undirected course these last few years; or rather, I have allowed those habits to follow desires that sprang up organically from my reading and teaching, and my institutional location not only permitted but encouraged that process. I can tell you, my conversations with colleagues at other institutions do not report a similar story.

Fifth, I have learned to accept my reading and writing limits in (what I take to be) a healthy way. I’ve always loved a moment that comes early in Wallace Stegner’s novel Crossing to Safety; the narrator is speaking of his early days as a college prof:

I remember little about Madison as a city, have no map of its streets in my mind, am rarely brought up short by remembered smells or colors from that time. I don’t even recall what courses I taught. I really never did live there, I only worked there. I landed working and never let up.

What I was paid to do I did conscientiously with forty percent of my mind and time. A Depression schedule, surely—four large classes, whatever they were, three days a week. Before and between and after my classes, I wrote, for despite my limited one-year appointment I hoped for continuance, and I did not intend to perish for lack of publications. I wrote an unbelievable amount, not only what I wanted to write but anything any editor asked for—stories, articles, book reviews, a novel, parts of a textbook. Logorrhea. A scholarly colleague, one of those who spent two months on a two-paragraph communication to Notes and Queries and had been working for six years on a book that nobody would ever publish, was heard to refer to me as the Man of Letters, spelled h-a-c-k. His sneer so little affected me that I can’t even remember his name.

Nowadays, people might wonder how my marriage lasted. It lasted fine. It throve, partly because I was as industrious as an anteater in a termite mound and wouldn’t have noticed anything short of a walkout, but more because Sally was completely supportive and never thought of herself as a neglected wife—“thesis widows,” we used to call them in graduate school. She was probably lonely for the first two or three weeks. Once we met the Langs she never had time to be, whether I was available or not. It was a toss-up who was neglecting whom.

Early in our time in Madison I stuck a chart on the concrete wall of my furnace room. It reminded me every morning that there are one hundred sixty-eight hours in a week. Seventy of those I dedicated to sleep, breakfasts, and dinners (chances for socializing with Sally in all of those areas). Lunches I made no allowance for because I brown-bagged it at noon in my office, and read papers while I ate. To my job—classes, preparation, office hours, conferences, paper-reading—I conceded fifty hours, though when students didn’t show up for appointments I could use the time for reading papers and so gain a few minutes elsewhere. With one hundred and twenty hours set aside, I had forty-eight for my own. Obviously I couldn’t write forty-eight hours a week, but I did my best, and when holidays at Thanksgiving and Christmas gave me a break, I exceeded my quota.

Hard to recapture. I was your basic overachiever, a workaholic, a pathological beaver of a boy who chewed continually because his teeth kept growing. Nobody could have sustained my schedule for long without a breakdown, and I learned my limitations eventually. Yet when I hear the contemporary disparagement of ambition and the work ethic, I bristle. I can’t help it.

I overdid, I punished us both. But I was anxious about the coming baby and uncertain about my job. I had learned something about deprivation, and I wanted to guarantee the future as much as effort could guarantee it. And I had been given, first by Story and then by the Atlantic, intimations that I had a gift.

Thinking about it now, I am struck by how modest my aims were. I didn’t expect to hit any jackpots. I had no definite goal. I merely wanted to do well what my inclinations and training led me to do, and I suppose I assumed that somehow, far off, some good might flow from it. I had no idea what. I respected literature and its vague addiction to truth at least as much as tycoons are supposed to respect money and power, but I never had time to sit down and consider why I respected it.

Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim’s Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else—pathway to the stars, maybe.

I suspect that what makes hedonists so angry when they think about overachievers is that the overachievers, without drugs or orgies, have more fun.

My wife just about spit out her coffee when she read that for the first time. She could relate. But part of the point, aside from the sheer dictatorial vision required to devote all the time one has to what one wants to achieve, is that hour-counting and hour-assigning is not a way of disregarding limits. It’s a way of admitting them and working within them.

For me, those limits bear less on writing than on reading. I’m a fast writer but a turtle-slow reader. I’ve never known someone who reads regularly, for work or for pleasure, who reads as slowly as I do. What that means is that I have to make choices. Here are two choices I’ve had to make that, upon reflection, have made me a better scholar—or at least a practicing scholar, whatever my merits; someone who’s in the game, not on the sidelines.

One choice was to accept that my reading would never be comprehensive. That’s an obvious thing to say, but you might be surprised by how few academics accept it in their heart of hearts. And it’s true, I’ve known one or two polymaths who genuinely seem to have read it all. But that ain’t me. Not even in a single area, not even in a subtopic of subtopic of a subtopic, like the doctrine of Scripture, about which I’ve now written two books. What I’ve not read vastly outweighs what I’ve read. That truth (and it is a truth) can be paralyzing or liberating. I’ve chosen to let it be liberating. Read what I can and write what I’m able, and if people find it of any use, God be praised; if not, then I guess I didn’t meet the magical threshold of “enough, though not everything.” Naturally you don’t want such self-allowance to avoid total comprehensiveness to slide into a permission to be lazy, to avoid covering all one’s bases. Yet the point stands: it’s never enough; let that be enough. Get on with it and do your work, in acceptance that someone someday will read what you’ve written and point out the text you should have cited. It’ll happen. Be grateful they pointed it out to you. You can take the time to read it for the next thing you write!

The second choice followed from the first. If I wasn’t going to be an independent scholar or research professor who reads 1,000 pages a day (as I’ve heard the encyclopedic Wolfhart Pannenberg did, before writing a book by dinner time), then I might as well broaden my reading to include both academic works far from my area of research and books (old or new) acclaimed for their insights, their impact, or the beauty of their prose. Not only has this practice proved a revolution in my reading habits, and for the better. It has made me a far better academic, scholar, writer, and teacher. Why? Because what I read and know is more than a mile deep and an inch wide. I try to read the dozen or two dozen annual “biggest books,” whether trade or academic, that get press in the NYRB or NYTBR or New Yorker or elsewhere. I read political philosophy and biblical studies and philosophy of science and social science and critical theory and memoirs and novels and collections of essays. Sometimes I review them. I don’t do this reading only at home. I do it in my office. It’s part of my scholarly labor. At this point I’d feel irresponsible if I stopped. It’s helped me resist the siren song of becoming a hedgehog, or a hedgehog alone. In the few areas on which I publish in academic journals, I am a hedgehog: ecclesiology, bibliology, Trinity. But otherwise I’m a fox, reading and writing on as many topics and authors and books as I can lay my hands on.

And I’m telling you: Not only would I not have done that were I not teaching a 4/4. It wouldn’t even have occurred to me. It wouldn’t be possible. The material conditions don’t encourage it, at least for pre-tenure faculty, at least most of the time. Usually they actively block or prohibit it.

That’s why I’m happy where I am. That’s why I don’t resist my high teaching load. That’s part of what makes teaching a 4/4 not just “not as bad as you think,” but (apart from the teaching, which is itself fun and rewarding and good work) a surprisingly conducive environment for research and publication. If you can make and guard time for it, it might actually turn out to be better than it would have been were you elsewhere. Who would have thought?

*

I’m not quite done, though. Consider the following something of a coda.

In the second post in this series I discussed not just institutional but personal and familial tradeoffs. So I want to add a word here about how and why having a rich life beyond work, full of bustling households bursting with children as well as friends, neighbors, churches, sports leagues, and community service, is not only good—being far, far more important than publishing—but, perchance, itself a boon to your academic work.

Here’s the nutshell version. Having something to come home to makes the work you do during the day meaningful, even when it doesn’t always feel like significant work. I never ask myself the question, Why am I even doing this? What’s it all for? That’s not because I think my writing will outlive me. It certainly will not. It’s because having four children who don’t know and don’t care that Dad’s an author (not to mention a wife whose stated marital purpose in life is to be unimpressed with me) puts my work into perspective. The souls for whom I am responsible are not only worth more than the straw that is my writing and teaching. They are a reminder that my job, though a vocation, is also, well, a job. More than a job, perhaps, but not less than one. It pays the bills and puts food on the table. That’s a worthy thing in its own right. And given that I do what I love with a flexible schedule that more than pays the bills, the truth is that I’ve got it made in the shade, professionally speaking. I’m employed, in a time of precarity, anxiety, uncertainty, and fear. What’s not to be grateful for?

Furthermore, as I briefly alluded to in the second post, having a family does important motivational and boundary-setting work, if you’ll let it. I don’t choose not to bring work home with me. That choice is made for me by my children. I can’t be working while driving them to basketball or picking them up from school or attending church or cooking dinner or singing them to sleep. And when they’re finally in bed, should I be a good husband and spend time with my wife, or each and every night march to my office to get a few more hours in? The question answers itself.

Here’s the irony, if it counts as one. Having fewer hours in the office and stronger boundaries between work and home—having, in a word, both more and more fixed limits on one’s time—can have the unexpected effect of supercharging what work time you have. Because I know I have to accomplish X, Y, and Z in only three or 12 or 20 hours, then I don’t have a choice (there’s that freedom in unchosen commitments theme again): I’m just going to have to get it done in the time I have, because once I clock out, the work is finished in any case. What such expectations within limits produce, at any rate in me, is a singularity of vision that crowds out all the usual distractions and detours and time-sucking routes of avoiding work. No Slack, no Twitter, no Facebook, no Instagram, no Gmail, no Messages, no WhatsApp, no nothing. Turn Freedom on or the internet off; kill your inbox or set your phone in another room. Whatever it takes, read the book or write the essay or fix the draft or review the submission or complete the grant or prepare the lesson or grade the papers. Just do it. The only time you have is now. Take advantage of it.

My anecdotal experience in doctoral studies confirms this dynamic. Especially when ABD, my single friends—some of them, I should say, some of the time—had many a day like the following: sleep in (that is, relative to my 6:07am baby-crying human alarm), check email and social media, drag themselves to a coffee shop, work for an hour or two, meet a friend for a late lunch, work a little more, grab drinks at a bar, then work into the wee hours of the night. Their self-report would then describe such an experience as “working all day”—not without some self-awareness, but all the while underwritten by a mixture of disappointment, frustration, and resentment at the lack of some objective structure or set of involuntary strictures organizing their time.

By comparison I often had exactly four total daytime hours in which to get the same amount of work done (sharing, as I did, childcare with my wife; stipends rarely stretch so far as to cover daycare or nannies). And so I did the work in the time I had. I didn’t have another choice. Would I have been as efficient had I been in their shoes? No way. It was the inflexible limits placed on my time that forced my hand. And I’m grateful they did.

The same dynamic obtains beyond the PhD, if you’re fortunate enough to have a tenure-track gig. Limits aren’t the enemy. They’re the secret sauce of happiness. Once accepted, or even befriended, they might just help you publish.

Even while teaching a 4/4.

Teaching a 4/4: publishing

This post is the third in a series on what it’s like to teach a 4/4 load as a university professor and, conditions permitting, how to flourish while doing so. I’ve laid out the allotment of office and home hours devoted to work by a typical 4/4 prof (tl;dr: 50-60 on average, to prep, teach, grade, mentor, sponsor, serve on committees, and reply to emails); I’ve explained why there are inevitable tradeoffs involved, both at the personal and familial and at the institutional level. For many 4/4 teachers, scholarship is next to impossible without transgressing what ought to be a hard and fast division between work life and home life.

Nevertheless. I promised in the opening post that, at least for some of us, at least in certain circumstances, scholarship remains possible even with a 4/4 load. Not that everyone wants that—many college instructors live exclusively to teach; they do the other stuff only when they must—but if you’re someone who does want it, but doesn’t know how to do it, or even whether it’s possible, I’m here to say that it is. In this post and the next one I’ll be sharing what I’ve learned, for whatever it’s worth.

I want to come at the question from two angles. The first is pure logistics: What habits, hacks, and strategies work to protect one’s time and to dedicate what remains of it to scholarship? The second is more philosophical: What does a 4/4 load mean for one’s scholarship—how, counterintuitively, might teaching outside of ultra-elite research-heavy contexts benefit one’s scholarship, providing opportunities and even gifts unavailable in those more superficially “research-friendly” contexts?

I’ll save the introspection for the next post. First comes tactics.

*

By way of beginning, permit me a Cal Newport moment. I owe you some mention of my bona fides, since I’m about to offer some advice. As I write it is Finals Week in the fall 2021 semester, which means it is exactly halfway through my fifth year teaching full-time as a tenure-track Assistant Professor: nine total semesters across four and a half years. Here’s what I’ve produced in that time (beginning summer 2017, when I arrived in Abilene, and counting only what I’ve written during that time, whether already published or currently scheduled for publication—i.e., I’m not counting anything I did before I arrived or that I’m contracted to do but have yet to get around to):

• one edited book;

• two authored books;

• five peer-reviewed journal articles;

• 28 essays (this sort of thing);

• 10 book reviews;

• six conference/paper presentations.

Not counting the presentations, the approximate word count of my writing output (also not counting this blog, I suppose) comes to about 400,000. That in turn comes to 7,500 or so per month, or ~1,800 per week, or (getting granular) just under 400 words per workday (assuming I’m not writing on Saturday or Sunday).

I should add, too, that during the time in question I received five grants (four internal to ACU, one external) and one award (for teaching). The total number of courses I’ve taught is 40: four per semester for nine semesters, plus one overload semester and three summer courses online.

That’s a lot, I know. You might be wondering, reasonably, whether the first two posts in this series were a bit of hot air, since I seemed to suggest that 4/4 profs don’t have time for anything else but being the best teachers they can be. And for many, that’s true. My first year here that was all I could handle, too. If I was in the office, I was prepping for class or grading assignments or meeting with students—full stop. But since then I’ve slowly found ways of creating and guarding the time necessary to do what I love and feel called to do: namely, read and write theology for both academic and popular audiences.

Here are some of the tricks I’ve learned to make sure I could do just that. Maybe they’ll help you as well.

1. Have a good boss.

Yes, granted, this one’s out of your control. But it might still be something of a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for finding time to publish. My chair understands that research is a top priority for me. For that reason he has worked to make my life as conducive as possible to reaching that goal, within the limits that both he and I work under. Five things in particular have been a lifesaver in this area, and my chair is the reason for all of them.

First: Teaching multiple sections of the same course. Instead of teaching four truly different classes in a semester, in other words, I teach two distinct courses, each of which is offered twice in the same semester, in two sections. I’m still in the classroom 12 hours a week, but I’m only preparing lesson plans for half that.

Second: Stacking sections back to back, at the same time every day. I teach every afternoon, Monday through Thursday, either 1:30–4:30 or 12:00-3:00. That kind of regularity is crucial for sectioning off the rest of my time into a single bundle, rather than in scattered bits and pieces throughout the day. Plus, stacking sections of the same course back to back means I’m able simply to press “repeat” on the same material, rather than having to artificially separate (in time and in my mind) what are identical class meetings.

Third: Keeping me off major committees, at least at first. My chair waited until my third year to put me on a committee that demanded real time from me; he waited until my fourth year to put me on a genuinely time-intensive committee. In truth I didn’t even know he was doing this until a year ago. Every faculty member has to do committee work, and rightly so, but that doesn’t mean you need to jump into the deep end your first or second year. Delaying my serious committee involvement until I got my sea legs under me made all the difference; at that point I had learned how to manage my time, and it wasn’t a burden when it came.

Fourth: Class size. Now, this one is more ambiguous by nature. During my first three years part of my load included large, lecture-heavy freshmen survey courses; since then I’ve taught exclusively upper-level electives that center on discussion, with class size capped at 25 or 30 students. I include this as a boon because it’s what I like to teach, and a satisfied me-as-teacher is unquestionably a productive me-as-writer. The through-line there is a straight one. But smaller classes are not necessarily less demanding than larger ones. In fact the latter are often easier and more convenient to grade: quizzes and exams, on top of PowerPoint-heavy firehose-lectures. Whereas the former usually involve loads of writing assignments, which call for extensive feedback and time-intensive grading. For me, though, the tradeoff is worth it, and my chair kindly permitted me to ease out of the bigger courses in order to take on the smaller ones I preferred.

Fifth: Get creative. My spring load entails four courses, but one of them is a week-long intensive the second week of January, before the semester starts. That opens up my daily and weekly time during the semester even more. Last spring I layered my remaining three semester-long classes back-to-back-to-back on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which meant I had zero teaching requirements on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I felt like a new man. It was a slog the other two days of the week, but it was worth it. I’ve even considered teaching a short course in May as well, following the end of the semester, which would cut down my spring semester-long courses to two. Every college and department has different ways of finagling these things. Look into it. Run it by the boss. Not only might she agree to it; she might think it’s a good idea.

2. Be an excellent teacher.

This bit of advice might sound odd or out of place, but it’s crucial. You will not succeed at publishing at a teaching-heavy institution if you aren’t doing your first job well. Put differently, you cannot allow yourself to think about research until you are satisfied that you are doing a quality job in the classroom. How do to that is a question for another day. But it’s a requirement for 4/4 profs. That’s what they pay you for, and if you’re not succeeding there, you’re in for a world of hurt.

3. Just say no.

This is the first and nonnegotiable rule for writing with a 4/4 load. You have to think of your job as consisting of two and only two things: teaching and research. Everything else—literally, everything else—is either tertiary or an obstacle in your path.

Professors receive requests, whether from students, colleagues, or administrators, every single day on the job. In my experience professors rarely say no to these requests. It is hard to decline an invitation, not least one that is flattering, or that seems to come from real need, or that might benefit one’s students or institution. Yet if your highest priority (after being a good teacher) is securing consistent and reliable time for research, you must be ruthless here. Say no to every ask. Every. Single. One. Just say no. Don’t speak at that event; don’t sponsor that organization; don’t attend that meeting; don’t join that book club; don’t register for that webinar; don’t foster that initiative; don’t explore that opportunity. Don’t do any of it. You can’t, not if you want to do meangingful scholarship. There are only so many hours in the day.

I have a standing agreement with my chair: I will do whatever he needs me to do; his wish is my command. But if it’s a request and not an order (a soft ask, not a hard one), the answer is no. Not because I’m not a team player—I am, or try to be—but because the articles and books won’t write themselves, and after teaching, they’re my priority.

Some departments and institutions welcome this sort of clear boundary-setting, and some don’t. Again, you need good, trustworthy bosses who say what they mean and mean what they say, and who value the scholarship you hope to produce. Doubtless much of the time the “just say no” approach has to be leavened with occasional yeses as well as rhetorical massaging; one can’t be front and center with it all the time. The strategy remains essential in any case. Your time won’t guard itself.

(Reality check: Do I actually do this? Do I follow my own advice, take my own medicine? To a large degree, yes, I do. But also no: At least twice a week the second half of this semester, for example, I had meetings with students who wanted to discuss their futures, their faith, or theological questions. Even in cases like these, though, I try to be strategic: I either meet first thing, at 8:00am sharp, so I can still guard a chunk of office time for work; or I meet in the late afternoon on a Friday, the better to get work done earlier in my one day with no classes. Besides meeting with and mentoring students, I’ve variously hosted twice-monthly theology discussion groups in my home, had students over for lunch after church, spoken at Honors events, that sort of thing. Sometimes you just have to say yes: whether the compulsion is internal or external, you find yourself nodding in reply. Just this week I was a liturgist in our music department’s annual Vespers service; before Covid hit, I now recall, I gave an invited lecture to a psychology class(!) on sexual minorities(!!) regarding sexual morality(!!!) from both philosophical and Christian perspectives(!!!!). (Those exclamation points should tell you how out of my depth I felt that day.) So no, the honest answer is that I don’t always and in every instance say no. But I try to as a rule, especially when the ask is purely optional and doesn’t seem urgent. And when I say yes, I do so knowing that it means a tradeoff with research; just as there’s no such thing as a free lunch, there’s no such thing in the academy as a yes to X without an accompanying no to Y. That’s life.)

4. Be disciplined with technology, especially email and LMS.

Your laptop is a black hole. When it is open—even when it is in the same room as you—your work time is inexorably sucked down into an abyss. The same goes for your smartphone, especially if it has your email on it. (Right this moment, take your email off your phone. That’s an order.) Our devices do not aid or enable our work as professors. Nine times out of town, they stand in the way.

If you are in the humanities like me, then it is fundamental that you gain the upper hand on your technology. In particular, you need long, long stretches of time in which neither your phone nor your laptop is close to hand, much less open or on. One little trick I do, when I’m in a good zone with research, is begin my day with reading. Specifically, I do not open my laptop, much less check my inbox, until lunch time or later. I arrive at my office; do my morning devotion; change chairs to sit elsewhere than my desk-and-laptop-writing-station; leave my laptop and phone out of reach, over there, on the far side of the office; open a book (or three), and read as long as I’m able to before other work demands necessitate putting it down.

Remember that computers are an innovation in the professor’s office. Not long ago—within living memory!—one’s office contained books, paper, and pens. It’s not weird to read for hours on end. That’s your job. Again: How are you supposed to write about what you’ve read, if you never read in the first place? Do the reading by making time for it, and make time for it by not letting your inbox (or Twitter, or Messages, or Canvas) control what you do, when you do it.

Speaking of Canvas, I’ve written elsewhere about foregoing a Learning Management System. That means, too, that I’m not umbilically connected to a device at all times. If your university or department will let you do it, try going LMS-free one semester as an experiment. For me, it’s meant one less thing to worry about, which in this case means one less digital box to check at all times of the day.

(Here’s a hack on top of a hack: How to preserve all that morning time for reading and/or writing so as to be able to stop just before class starts? Here’s what I do. One or two weeks before the semester begins, I prepare the first month’s worth of classes in toto: I outline the lectures, draft the discussions, print the quizzes, etc. Then I gather them together into their respective folders, so that all I need do on the day of teaching is open the folder and plug and play. I do the same thing, once that first month is behind me, every Friday in advance of the following week. That way, when the afternoon classes of Monday through Thursday arrive, I’m entirely prepared, and don’t have to do a lick of lesson prep or printing or other tasks the morning before I teach. When I’ve got this down to a science (and until this fall, when by voluntary choice I had a new course prep, I’d gotten into a good rhythm), then I can count on two to four or more hours in my office, leading up to teaching, that I can devote to reading or writing as I see fit.)

5. Carve out space and time for reading and writing free from interruption.

Related to the previous point, it is a necessity to have a physical space in which one can work for hours-long stretches with the reasonable expectation that no one will interrupt unless it is very important. For me, that’s my office—my happy place, which is to say, where my books are. For others that’s the library or a coffee shop, or home alone. The point is that you need that rare combination of quiet and sustained runs of sharp focus (what Newport calls “deep work”) for publications to materialize. Wherever and whenever that is—for me, it’s in my office, in the mornings, prior to inbox and lesson prep and printing and teaching—find it, make it the sun around which the rest of your work schedule orbits, and guard it with your life.

In a word: Practice being unavailable. It makes a world of difference.

6. Treat time off from semester teaching as a full-time research job.

I teach 32 weeks a year, including Finals Weeks. That leaves 20 weeks when I’m not teaching. I take off one week for Thanksgiving, two weeks for Christmas, one week for spring break, and two weeks during the summer. Already you, like me, should realize how fortunate a professor’s schedule is. That’s six weeks off out of 52! That’s a full month and a half! That’s European vacation levels! What’s to complain about?

Nothing, is the answer. Absolutely nothing. Remember, this post (this series of posts) is not about how hard the academic life is. It’s about how to make time for research while teaching a 4/4 load. And we already established that family life and personal happiness are more important than academic success; obviously I could choose to work, part- or full-time, during those weeks I take off. But should I? Not unless I have to.

Even taking six weeks off per year, that leaves 14 weeks in which I’m not teaching or spending time with my family. And do you know what I do during each and every one of those 14 weeks? Read and write. That’s it. I don’t lighten my summer schedule, unless childcare or other duties interpose themselves. No one’s checking in on me; no one’s asking me to come to the office. But I do. Every day I arrive at the office around 8:00am and every day I leave around 4:00pm, having read and written, read and written, read and written, until my brain hurt and my fingers ached.

In the first post I stuck up for profs using their summer hours well, though I admitted that we aren’t always the most efficient bunch. Here’s where I’ll speak directly to my fellow academics. You and I both know what a summer week can look like, especially a week when you’re “working.” It’s sort of a throwback to doctoral days. Slow to start, quick to finish, lots and lots of time on social media, or chasing down unimportant leads and tangent lines unrelated to research, or meeting with colleagues for long lunches, or just generally letting the hours slip by without doing much of substance at all. That’s fine, in itself. You’re not on the clock. But if your #1 goal is using what time you have to publish quality work, then it’s not fine. You are on the clock, even if that clock exists only inside your own head.

Treat your weeks not teaching as though your full-time job, for which you will be held accountable, is research, and act accordingly. Then see what happens after a few years.

Postscript: If your finances permit and your chair doesn’t mind, don’t teach summer courses. I taught three summers in a row then decided, in concert with my wife, to forego the extra money henceforth. The extra pay was nice, but it didn’t serve my goals. If I wanted to focus on publishing, even a three-week online class was a distraction; the time and attention it sucks from you is surprising.

7. Accept your limits while setting clear, achievable goals.

In the next post I’ll say more about the limits I have in mind. But for now the thing to acknowledge is that, even if you manufactured four hours per day for your scholarship—and that would be an astonishing amount during a four-class semester—that is a paltry number by comparison to the big leagues. It’s nothing compared to your grad school days. That many hours should get you in sight of reading an okay amount and even actually doing some writing. It is unlikely, however, to get you in sight of what you wish you could accomplish, that is, the kind of scholarly expectations to which you seek to hold yourself. At this point you have a choice to make. Either you can do the work you’re able to achieve in the time you have, or you can wish you had more time and never get anything out the door. It’s your call, but I suggest you opt for the first.

If you do, you need concrete goals. Is it one peer-reviewed article every 12-18 months? Is it two reviews per academic calendar? Is it a book by the time you go up for T&P? Is it a poster presentation (not my wheelhouse, mind you) every year at your guild’s annual conference? Is it a collaborative grant-funded venture that stretches over five years and yields two to four co-written articles? Whatever your goals, you need to identify them, write them down, and hold yourself to them, or at least to what you can control (i.e., writing and submitting the pieces; whether they’re accepted is up to someone else). As time goes by, you can adjust the reasonableness of your goals up or down, depending on your success. Don’t aim for the moon, but don’t let that be an excuse to do little more than keep staring at your own shuffling shoes, either. I’m willing to hazard that you’re capable of accomplishing more than you think, especially if you haven’t been able to publish much at all so far in your 4/4 teaching career.

But before turning in the next post to bigger-picture reflections on research and writing with a high teaching load, here’s one last all-important tip:

8. Type fast.

No joke, I sometimes think being a very fast typist is half the battle. It doesn’t hurt if you suffer from incurable logorrhea, as by now you know I do.

Teaching a 4/4: tradeoffs

In the last post I laid out what a typical work week looks like in terms of one’s allotment of hours while teaching a 4/4 load at a university. In this post I want to compare that to institutional contexts on the other end of the spectrum. Such a comparison shows rather straightforwardly what sort of tradeoffs are involved, from an institutional perspective, when professors are asked to teach more or fewer courses; in this case, tradeoffs concerning quantity and quality of publication.

Before I do that, though, I want to talk about a different set of tradeoffs. These tradeoffs aren’t about what a university asks of you. They’re about what you ask of yourself, or rather, what you want for your life.

I got married midway through my senior year in college, and beginning in my PhD program my wife and I had four children in six years’ time: from the beginning of my second year in doctoral work to the beginning of my second year teaching as a professor. Being a husband and a father in one’s 20s and 30s while earning a doctorate then teaching at the university level is, shall we say, a different experience than doing those things while being a single person without children. The key word there is “different,” which isn’t (yet) a term of judgment. I know single people in doctoral programs who eventually dropped out due to listlessness and lethargy, and I know folks in a position similar to mine (spouse, young kids) who powered through for the simple reason that they were always on the clock and thus were forced to use their time wisely. So in and of itself the difference between the two stations in life doesn’t tell us which is “harder” or “easier” for the academic life.

Having said that, the fact is undeniable that a person who is neither a parent nor partnered has, in general, far fewer limits on her available time than a person who is both. I knew and still know people, both grad students and tenure-track (or tenured) profs, who work 12 hours a day in the office, most weekday evenings, and full days on the weekend. That’s 70-90 hours per week, if you’re counting. The work never stops. There’s always another book to read, another article to review, another draft to revise, another lecture to attend. Such persons are quite literally secular monks. But instead of ora et labora, it’s sola labora (or, I suppose, solus labor): work, work, work, all day, every day, world without end, amen.

Thus the “pure” academic life. No wonder the old Oxford dons were so often bachelors. No wonder the founders of the university were priests and monks!

The upshot is obvious. A scholar who has 70-90 hours available per week to devote to her scholarship, and who does thus devote it, is in an entirely different position than a scholar who does not, owing to the latter’s duties to her family (not to mention to her church, her neighbors, and so on). Whether or not it is wise or live-giving to work 12-15 hours per day every day of the week for months on end, it’s what many do, and are able to do, given their circumstances. And academics like myself who lack that monastic allotment of time can either accept the profound gap between us or kick against the goads. Phrased more sharply, we can pretend that we are equally disposed to produce equally superb scholarship, or we can decide not to deceive ourselves. I suggest we opt against self-deception.

I’m going to write in the fourth post in this series about the flip side of this acceptance: that there are opportunities, gifts, and blessings precisely for scholarly work that come from being a person with a family or from teaching a 4/4 (or both). But the prior condition of realizing those possibilities is the unqualified recognition that the lay life, as it were, pales in comparison to the monastic in terms of sheer hours in the day available for scholarship. Them’s the facts. And that’s before we get to differences between institutions.

But before exploring those differences, there’s an important point buried in these comparisons. That point we may phrase as a question: What do you want? Better put, what should you want? Rare is the happy workaholic academic. I can’t count the number of secular monastic super-scholars I know who are immiserated, depressed, joyless souls from top to toe. That’s not because they’ve resisted the call of the bourgeois life. It often is because they know nothing but The Work, and The Work doesn’t satisfy the heart.

Life is about tradeoffs, in other words, and being the most successful possible academic one can be will almost certainly demand that you give up something not only that you want, but that you should want, if you would be happy. I would like to be happy. That means I’m content with the choices that led me to where I am today. I’m glad I’m a married father of four teaching a 4/4 in a university setting that doesn’t suck my soul right out of my body. But I also refuse to lie to myself. I would likely be a “better” scholar, measured by output and erudition, if I lacked the many limits and duties my family places on my life. Would I trade the latter to gain the former? Never.

Besides, limits and duties are (not paradoxically, but given a certain set of assumptions, unexpectedly) the source and ground of true happiness. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you stop looking to cut them out of your life in order to serve the shapeshifting, exacting, and altogether death-dealing idols of Work.

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Okay. One set of academic tradeoffs concerns the family, or life beyond work more generally. Another is institutional context. Time to compare like with unlike.

Consider a standard course load for a professor at an Ivy League university. Such a person (pre- and post-tenure) teaches a 2/2, often to small cohorts of graduate students in seminar-style classes that meet once weekly; she further takes a mandatory year-long sabbatical every three or four years, precisely in order to produce the sort of scholarship expected of her, given her status as a tenure-track (or tenured) professor at Harvard or Yale or Princeton. She also regularly receives grants and scholarships from either within or without the university that fund course releases and external sabbaticals and visiting professorships: these in turn alleviate teaching and administrative responsibilities.

Now consider my own situation. I teach four courses a semester, some of which have 20-30 students, some of which have 50-60. (One semester I taught an overload, five courses, and I had about 220 students. We also had a newborn, our fourth child. That semester’s sort of hazy, now that I think of it . . .) These students are mostly gen-ed undergraduates, not tight cohorts of committed Master’s or doctoral students. Moreover, sabbaticals must be applied for and approved; they apply to one semester rather than a full academic year; and one becomes eligible to apply only after having received tenure, in one’s seventh or eighth year at the university.

One response to this comparison might be to suppose I’m comparing quality of situations. But I’m not. I’m deliriously happy in my job. And as I said above, I know a lot of miserable people in Ivy League institutions. Whether it’s the pressure to Be The Best, or the stifling atmosphere of competition and production, or the sword of Not Getting Tenure hanging over the necks of junior faculty, or the Byzantine institutional politics of the Ivies, or what have you, the amenities and affordances of teaching-light, research-heavy professorships are not there to make you happy (in fact, the effect may well be the opposite); they are there to get you to publish. Better: they’re there to make the institution that pays you look good. They’ve a prestigious reputation to uphold, after all.

So we’re not asking which institution is a better work environment. We’re comparing material conditions and incentives for producing high-quality research. And I trust you can see with your own eyes what’s staring us in the face: namely, that to ask professors with a 4/4 load to produce scholarship anywhere close to the level of professors at Ivy League institutions is downright absurd. Looking at the two institutional contexts side by side, we might be inclined to judge them two different jobs.

But the comparison need not be merely between a small Christian liberal arts school in west Texas and a comparatively ancient and ultra-rich Ivy League college in New England. Consider a friend of mine who works at a large R1 school a few hours down the road in Texas. Every fall he teaches one undergraduate course and one Master’s course. In the spring he teaches no classes at all. His primary job, though he is neither tenured nor a research professor nor does he hold an Endowed Chair in Something or Other, is to research and publish. And research and publish he does. All the dang day. You wouldn’t believe his output. Or maybe you would, since you know how little else he has to do with his time.

The point, at the risk of belaboring it, is not to compare apples and oranges as though they were the same fruit. It is to point out that the fruits we invariably compare in academia are apples and oranges. My friend plainly inhabits a different profession than I do. He is something like a patron-supported independent scholar, contingently connected to an institution that happens to be called a university, for which he occasionally teaches a class or two. I, on the other hand, am a workaday teacher of undergraduate college students who, when he can spare a minute, finds the time to read a book and even to scribble a little on the side.

My friend has a good life and a good job. I have a good life and a good job. But our equally good jobs are not the same job. They are both good, but they are different jobs. That’s the point.

And there’s no problem in that difference. The problem comes if and when, and only if and when, someone supposes that my friend’s job should be my job, too, while expecting me to continue doing my original job all the while. In a word, the problem comes if and when I’m expected to work two jobs instead of one—not least when, as I documented in the last post, that first job tends to spill over from the office into the evenings and weekends of life beyond work. After working 50-60 hours per week teaching a 4/4, where is such a person to find the time to add a second full-time job, which is to say, the job of producing first-rate academic scholarship?

I may sound as though I’m speaking in the first person here, but as I will share in the next post, I’m not describing my own situation. I’m fortunate to work in and for an institution that understands that no one teaching a 4/4 can be an Ivy League or research professor at the same time. Those to whom I report evaluate teaching, service, and collegiality first and scholarship second; everyone understands the pressures of teaching and grading and mentoring and sponsoring and the rest. The expectations, accordingly, are reasonable, which is why I’m grateful not only to work here but to be heading into the year of my T&P submission with little to no anxiety.

But so far as I can tell, among 4/4 profs at large I’m one of the fortunate few. I’m the lucky one. Not everyone works in a healthy, mutually supportive, non-dysfunctional—and Christian!—institution. And even in such institutions, the built-in expectations, pressures, and incentives can work against one flourishing and finding promotion rather than buoying and supporting one in that journey. “Punishing” and “brutal” are two words one often hears in conversations about such environments. There’s a reason folks are fleeing academe. Why not just work a boring nine-to-five with benefits and regular hours, without having to bring it home with you?

Most, I take it, are just trying to endure. That’s why I’m writing two more posts in this series. The imagined audience for the first post was graduate students and administrators wondering what it’s like to teach a 4/4; for this second post, administrators and trustees as well as fellow 4/4 teachers. The third and fourth posts, though, are together targeted directly at those friends and colleagues teaching a 4/4 (whether now or in the future), either at the beginning or in the middle of their tenures(!) in such positions, who are wondering how to make the time for research. Having cast a somewhat bleak or at least stark vision of the 4/4 life, I want to make good on the promise that it need not be the academic purgatory—or inferno—it’s so often made out to be. It’s possible to read and to write, to produce quality scholarship. It really is. But just as institutions make tradeoffs in what they offer faculty, given what those institutions want from their faculty, so in your own work and career, you have to be willing to make similar tradeoffs. It all depends on what you want.

Teaching a 4/4: office hours

When I was at Yale and friends were on the job market, every single person I knew considered a 4/4 teaching load—that is, four classes per semester, for a total of eight per academic year—to be a fate worse than death. In fact, most people I knew considered a 3/3 the outer limit of possible professorial sanity, but in itself still an unacceptably punishing load. Since I didn’t even know what a 4/4 was before being informed of its unmitigated misery, I simply assumed they were right. When I accepted a job—a gift from heaven (I do not exaggerate) that delivered what I can describe only as wholesale psychic and existential relief—and that job turned out to be a 4/4, my gratitude was total, but my one question was what the teaching load would mean: for weekly work hours, for work/life balance with young children, for research and publications.

I’m now halfway through my fifth year in that job; next fall I will submit my application for tenure and promotion (“T&P”). I’m here to say four things.

First, I love my job with all my heart; I pinch myself every morning that I get to do what I do. Second, a 4/4 load need not be a personal, professional, or scholarly death knell. Third, a 4/4 load does mean—unequivocally—that you are unable to do things that professors with a smaller load (not to mention other institutional helps) are able to do; there are tradeoffs, and they are unavoidable. Fourth, though, that does not mean your research and publications must be reduced to nil; it means you have to accept other tradeoffs in order to meet your writing goals.

In this post and two three more I’d like to write about what it’s been like for me in this position, what I’ve observed at an institutional and collegial level, and what I’ve learned in terms of achieving my own reading and publishing aims. Across all three posts I’d like to make clear both (a) how and why a 4/4 load can and does suck up so much time that many professors simply and sincerely are unable to do anything beyond teach and (b) how, at least in certain circumstances, it’s possible to make the time for research—or in any case how I’ve done it. In addition, I want to depict just how great the chasm is between teaching-heavy loads with high student-to-teacher ratios, on one hand, and teaching-light loads in institutional contexts that both demand and incentivize high research output, on the other.

In this post I want to offer a snapshot of a week in the life of a 4/4 prof: i.e., what the actual hour-by-hour breakdown is for a typical week in my life, balancing teaching, grading, office hours, committees, meetings, and writing, plus kids, family, church, and friends. Note well, at the outset, that I am presupposing a junior or mid-career faculty member with a young family; I’m not imagining a tenured veteran or empty-nester with retirement on the horizon (though at least some of what I write below would still apply to such a one). I’m writing, too, from and for a humanities perspective; much of what I say will include those in STEM disciplines, but some of it would have to be modified to fit their particular research, teaching, and publication habits (not least the role of lab work and an alternative paradigm of “what counts” for reading and writing—fewer books, in their case, and ten thousand more articles).

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Let’s start with a 45-hour work week: 8:00am to 5:00pm, Monday through Friday. Now for anyone with young children, that’s already overly optimistic. My wife and I have four children aged three to nine, and we split drop-off and pick-up. So not only am I unable to get to work much before 8am, often I don’t get there until closer to 8:30 and sometimes later. (Timing is dependent on the cooperation of a three-year old, after all.) I also pick up my kids from elementary school at 3:15pm at least twice a week. So now we’re working realistically with about 40 hours—assuming no one is sick that week. (In the fall of 2019, out of 16 weeks of the semester, at least one of our children was sick at least one day in 12 different weeks.) Our home, university, daycare, and elementary school are all within something like a 2.5-mile radius, which means we have next to no commute—but many, many people do.

(When I read super-worker bricklayer’s-son Stanley Hauerwas write about arriving to his office at 5:30am every morning and leaving at 5:30pm every afternoon, I can only ask: Who’s doing pick-up and drop-off? That doesn’t imply injustice. Lots of stay-at-home parents as well as grandparents and nannies aid in such labor, and may do so either out of joy or with compensation. But it does mean, flat out, that a person who can be in his office 12 hours per day without worrying about childcare is in a different professional position than are those who must worry about childcare.)

At any rate, we are working with 40 hours now. Automatically, 12 of those hours are in the classroom. So now we’re down to 28 hours.

Let’s say it takes 90 minutes to prepare for every three hours of class time—which is likely an underestimate—and one hour to grade assignments and provide feedback for every three hours of class time. (We’re also assuming that there’s no G.A. to do menial tasks, though in my experience the estimates I’m using here include help from a G.A.) That’s 10 hours total, which means our available work hours are down to 18.

Now for email. Like all other white-collar work in the U.S., a professor’s inbox is a job unto itself: administrators, colleagues, folks from journals or conferences or other institutions, questions from students, etc. You also, you know, have to eat lunch. So let’s give 30 daily minutes to email and 30 daily minutes to lunch, for a total of five hours per week. Down to 13.

What about committees? Committee work fluctuates—four to seven hours this week, no hours for three weeks straight—but the longer you’re at an institution, the more the committees add up, at least in average terms. So let’s say at least one hour per week, though depending on the department and the person, not least if the person in question has administrative responsibilities (I do not, currently), it may be much more than that. Now we’re to 12.

But everyone has meetings to attend, whether they’re related to committees or not. So we’ll add one or two more meetings per week, each an hour. Down to 10.

(Such meetings might include, for example, mandatory chapel for a religious university such as mine and/or serving as sponsor for a student organization. I once led a voluntary weekly 30-minute “theology chapel” in which anyone could show up for an unguided discussion of twentieth-century theology. Or perhaps your campus, like mine, has a center for teaching and learning that hosts monthly reading groups. These commitments eat up hours, in other words, and the hours add up fast.)

What about students? At my institution we are mandated to have a minimum of seven hours in our office wherein we are available to students, preferably standing office hours rather than by appointment (though that’s been affected by Covid). I know professors who meet with students 5-10 hours per week. But let’s say personal time with students takes just two hours per week. Now we’re at eight.

So here we are. Having intentionally but severely underestimated the time usually allotted to students, emails, meetings, committees, grading, and course prep (for many professors, we’re already down to zero, or rather subzero: students, committees, grading, and prep all add up to another 10-20 hours, easily), we ostensibly have eight hours to work with—that is, assuming it’s not a week when 50 or 100 papers were just submitted, or one of the kids came down with a stomach bug, or a crisis dropped unannounced on the department, or what have you. Eight whole hours, maximum, assuming (also) that you don’t have a new course prep in the semester in question and (like me) you aren’t teaching four discrete courses but only two courses across four sections.

Let me stop and say: This sort of bean-counting isn’t meant to imply that the job is working the professor (me, or him, or her) to death; this isn’t sweatshop labor. The point of laying out the timeline is to make clear what’s left, if anything at all, for serious research and writing. I’m also imagining, for the sake of argument, that one’s time in the office is more or less uninterrupted: sustained, start-to-finish in-office work time. But naturally that’s a figment of this imaginative exercise. Most professors have knocks on the door, calls on the phone, texts on iMessage, and emails in the inbox—many of which are pressing or at least come with the expectation of a swift response—throughout the day in unexpected and inconvenient times. Moreover, class times are usually scattered around: a seminar in the morning, a lecture in the afternoon, that sort of thing. Not to mention that said classes are physically scattered across campus, too: it takes time, after all, to pack up one’s books and notes and trek across the commons to that other building, over there, the one you don’t work in but for some reason teach in.

All of which is to say: Those eight supposedly “free” hours are anything but. They don’t run reliably from 8:00am to 10:00am Monday through Thursday. They consist of random chunks of 20 or 30 minutes, spread throughout the days, adding up (if they do, which is rare) by week’s end.

And here’s the upshot. It takes hundreds upon hundreds (actually, thousands upon thousands) of hours to read the books and articles necessary to write the articles and books that one’s guild, and usually one’s chair and dean, expect out of a professor in order to be a “contributing member” of said guild, not to mention in order to earn tenure and promotion. When, pray tell, is a professor with a 4/4 load with a week’s allotment of hours as I’ve just laid them out supposed to find the time to do all that reading and writing?

In most cases, the time just is not there. In my experience, profs with a 4/4 simply do not do that reading and writing, and thus, quite understandably, do not produce the sort of scholarship expected of them (whether or not they wish they were able to do so). Or rather, if they need to do so in order to keep their job (i.e., to earn tenure by year seven), they do find the time, and you and I both know when they find it.

After hours.

But let me tell you about my week after hours. My kids get out of school at 3:15pm. My wife and I both work. We swap who does pick-up. Every day some child has something: speech path, piano, soccer, basketball, gymnastics. We all have church on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings and small group on Sunday evenings. (I work for a Christian university, mind you, which means they want me doing such things.) Whatever happens to be going on, those kids need a parent present, and that means, at least ordinarily, that no work is being done until they’re in bed: and the oldest has lights out at 9:00pm. We start every morning around 6:00am (showers, clothes, breakfast, backpacks, car—it takes a lot, as you may know yourself). So if I’m to get a decent amount of sleep, it’s bed by 11:00pm, if not sooner. That leaves about two hours each night between bedtime for kids and bedtime for adults. Even aside from cleaning the dishes, picking up toys and dirty clothes, preparing for the next day, packing lunches for the kids (that’s my job: 20 lunches per week, y’all!), my wife and I would, you know, like to catch up a bit. One of us might even occasionally grab drinks with a friend or go see a movie.

In the case of folks like us, then, there just do not exist reliable hours at night to make up work time. And I don’t, mostly. I usually leave work at work, unless that work is also pleasure (reading a book I want to read, writing a blog post [hello], etc.)—though the inbox is always staring me down, especially when a student sends an anxious email at 9:42pm.

The weekends are also largely off limits, except perhaps for an hour or two during nap time on Saturdays. If I want to be a co-parent—and I should, as should you if you have kids—since we’ve got four kids under 10 who need provision and care and love and time and the rest, then the weekend isn’t for work, it’s for family (and church and sports and friends and more: for life, in other words). That means, again, I’m generally not using weekends or nights on weekdays to “make up” for time I lack at work.

But I’m surely in the minority there. Most friends and colleagues I know, whether pre- or post-tenure, speak offhand all the time about “taking work home.” Most work 40-50 hours per week in the office and another 10-20 at home, between nights and weekends. The truth, however, is that most of that makeup work isn’t scholarship. It’s pouring into teaching, grading, and mentorship: the things that make a difference in students’ lives. That’s where all my numbers above really are underestimates, probably by a wide margin. Sometimes teachers are inefficient with their time. But at least as often they just love what they do, which is to say, they love their students and want them to flourish, to get their money’s worth, and then some, from their education.

And recall: I don’t write this to elicit pity for them. Being a professor is a great gig most of the time. It certainly is for me. No, the point is the question lingering over all this hour-mongering: When is the research supposed to happen? Research, let me remind you, that of necessity must be the fruit of hours upon hours of sustained contemplative and meticulous reading, annotation, note-taking, outlining, drafting, revising, submitting, revising again, and publishing.

When’s it supposed to happen then? It is fair to say that, for most 4/4 professors in most circumstances—even under the best conditions, with the best bosses, in the healthiest institutional contexts—the only honest answer is in the negative. That is, there just is no time for quality research for such persons.* And it’s best to recognize and admit that plain fact for what it is than to pretend otherwise.

*You say: Isn’t that what the summer is for? Well, yes and no. Summer is partly for vacation, as for anyone else. It’s also for teaching one or two summer courses, as most professors I know do. It’s also for reassessing and revisiting and regularly revising one’s existing semester classes. It’s also for preparing for that new course you’ve never taught before. It’s also for writing that grant you didn’t have time for during the semester. And also for finishing that committee work that piled up when finals arrived. But, yes, too, summer’s there for jumping into some research. Recall, though, that you’ve barely had time to read a book during the academic calendar, much less to stay on top of the avalanche of publications produced in the last year (or five) in your discipline. The remaining weeks of a summer might provide some time for catching up on the field. It is far from enough—on its own, laughably so—to produce a significant contribution to said field.

Be the teacher

It’s an old line: When asked about the experience of teaching, a teacher replies that he learned more from the students than they learned from him. One can understand the impulse, and why the answer endures as a kind of proverb or cliché: it’s an expression of humility; it resists the impression of the master dispensing Knowledge from on high; it conjures a classroom in which student and teacher collaborate together in the search for knowledge; it appeals to our democratic sensibilities; it might even tickle our know-nothing instincts, dormant though they may be. In truth, the answer might be little more than a deflection. What teacher wants to say outright, “Yes, I’m a fantastic and knowledgeable teachers and my students are lucky to have me”?

Nevertheless. I want to call bunk on this nonsensical and finally destructive reflex.

To begin, it is usually (not always) a false modesty and thus a false humility on display. No teacher worth her salt really believes her students have more to teach her than vice versa. If that were true she wouldn’t be a teacher in the first place. It would amount to vocational malpractice. You are a teacher because you have something to teach. If you don’t, then you should probably consider another profession.

Moreover, such a view misunderstands the nature of the student. The student is not already equipped, albeit awaiting something like activation. The student is a learner, and a learner needs to learn. The teacher is both the facilitator and the source of that learning. The teacher possesses something the student lacks, and it is her special privilege to help the student to come into possession of it, too. In that way there is an egalitarian element to teaching: what one communicates is not thereby lost; when you teach me and I learn, we both have knowledge that, before, you had and I did not. That is one of the beauties of teaching and learning, namely that there is no competition intrinsic to it. You and I can both know X equally and fully, and neither suffers as a result. It’s zero sum.

But precisely because knowledge is a shared or common good in this sense, when one lacks it he really lacks it. The relationship between a teacher and a student, then, is not equal from the start. It is unequal. That is what makes the teacher a teacher and the student a student. “Inequality” here has nothing to do with worth or value; nor does it have to do with everything that might count for knowledge, only with the particular type or range of knowledge in question. I have a friend who builds energy-efficient homes from scratch. In the realm of building energy-efficient homes, he is the master and I am the apprentice. (Better: I’m a flat zero.) The roles are reversed in the realm of theology. If we were to suppose otherwise, it would be sheer pretense.

Imagine a chemistry class in which the teacher claimed to learn more from the students than she taught them. Is such a claim even intelligible? Perhaps, at a stretch, there is an equivocation here: she means to say that she has learned about some other matter—life, or the resilience of this generation of students, or the lovely array of diverse backgrounds and cultures represented in the classroom. That’s as may be, but it’s not germane to the point. For she is a chemistry teacher. She teaches chemistry to students who need to learn it. That there are other or additional exchanges of various forms of knowledge happening alongside the chemistry-teaching is at once a happy fact and irrelevant to the question of whether she, the teacher, is teaching them, the students, the subject of which she is an expert. If she isn’t, we’ve got a problem.

I detect at least two anxieties here. One is a fear of authority, wedded to or underwritten by doubt about expertise. We wonder whether expertise really exists (does that imply some people are smarter than others? that some are better educated than others? than some simply know more than others, and always will?), but even if it does exist, we doubt whether it can be wielded with authority in a way that avoids abuse. For if abuse is endemic to the exercise of authority, better to deny or abolish the latter than to provide unwitting cover for the former.

The second anxiety belongs to the humanities. That is to say, most of us would admit that a chemist or a geologist or an epidemiologist(!) knows his stuff, and the stuff he knows is stuff we don’t. But for academics outside the STEM fields, there is a widespread suspicion—a simmering low-grade feeling—that what we trade in is not so much knowledge as it is, well, opinions and ideas clothed in jargon. So that, in a strong sense, we don’t have anything to teach our students. In which case they have as much to teach us as we them. After all, if it’s contested readings all the way down, who’s to say they won’t propose a reading as good as, or better than, ours?

I’m not an English professor, so I won’t comment on why language and literature should see itself as a true disciplina or Wissenschaft akin to biology or mathematics. My minimal point is that, even in those disciplines that most explicitly and critically practice and foster the arts of interpretation (and, spoiler, no human inquiry, however empirical, is exempt from these arts), the teacher has something to hand on to her students, and she should do so with gusto. If she had nothing, she could not and would not be a teacher. As it stands, she does and she is, and so her posture should be one of confident authority, not false modesty. Students learn when we know what we are doing and do it without apology. They do not learn when we pretend to lack what they so desperately need.

I sometimes wonder whether the abdication of pedagogical authority is rooted in a false diagnosis of “students these days.” As though they already know what they need to know; or, if they do not, then their exquisitely sensitive egos can’t stand the suggestion that they need to learn what they don’t know. Neither is true, at least in my experience. My students don’t think they know everything already. Almost to a person, they are eager to admit how little they know, and how much they want to learn. That doesn’t mean they simply take my word for it (nor should they). But no one’s egos are being bruised when I teach them as one whose training has prepared him to teach theology with some measure of authority (an authority that is relative in more than one respect: relative to their other courses in theological subjects; relative to their courses in other disciplines; relative to the teachings of the church; relative to the testimony of Holy Scripture; relative, ultimately, to God, the source of all knowledge and the supreme authority). On the contrary, my students lean forward in their seats. They see from my own passion for the material, first, that this thing matters; second, that it is substantial, hefty, neither thin gruel nor small beer; and third, that it is therefore worth desiring for its own sake. It stands apart both from them and from me: it’s the thing I keep pointing toward, gesturing at, like the finger of the Baptist. It’s real, it’s good, and it’s worth knowing—precisely because they only barely glimpse it, at least at first.

That’s the magic. That’s what can happen when you’re in the classroom and you’ve got something to teach folks who are ready to learn. Be the teacher, and the rest falls into place.

A Christian university

What makes a Christian university Christian? Phrased differently, what’s the difference between a Christian university, a “Christian In Name Only” university, and a post-Christian university?

A friend put that question to me recently. I won’t answer in substantive terms (i.e., the sort of beliefs and practices that make a claim to being Christian “truly” Christian). But here’s a stab at a formal answer, in zigzag order.

1. A post-Christian university is one that was founded as a Christian institution, or still technically contains an element of Christian identity (for example, through the presence of an ineliminable but terribly embarrassing seminary on campus), but otherwise exists for all intents and purposes as if none of that were true, or at least that it exists solely in the distant past. Such a university does not advertise itself as Christian, does not encourage its faculty to profess Christian faith or to perform piety in the classroom or with students, and when and where appropriate publicizes its non-Christian bona fides through student life, faculty scholarship, courses offered, and issues and causes supported.

2. A Christian university is the inverse of a post-Christian university (or vice versa). Its Christian identity is up front and center; that is why a family or student would desire attendance there, and the university actively seeks to elicit such desire on that basis. The faculty is entirely or mostly Christian (confirmed through local church membership or the signing of a statement of faith); the staff and administration are as well; the curriculum reflects and incorporates biblical and theological teaching, just as student life does the same with holistic spiritual formation. Chapel is sometimes required and nearly always offered in some form. Professors are encouraged to be involved in students’ lives beyond the classroom and are expected to make their faith known in the classroom through various means (prayer, personal stories, connecting the faith to their discipline). A Christian university’s employees would, in general, affirm the statement that, granting the diversity of doctrinal convictions and moral and political opinions across campus, the institution as a whole is sincerely and legitimately working toward a common end: the formation of mature Christian adults ready to enter the world of work and family with as much knowledge, skills, and faith that the university could impart.

3. A CINO university is somewhere in between these two options, and invariably on a journey from the second to the first. (The transition only happens in one direction.) A CINO university maintains the trappings of its former Christian identity without the full force of its institutional muscle behind it. Its administration largely, though not wholly, lacks either personal faith or the institutional desire to make faith central to the university’s mission. Vestiges of the old way remain—a semblance of chapel, certain curricular oddities, a seminary or religious studies department—but no one quite knows what to do with them (and that includes their members): they are neither resented nor beloved, just there. A CINO university absolutely continues to permit and, at times and in certain departments, solicit and encourage the presence of faith in the classroom, or the integration of faith and learning. But many departments discourage and even look down on this as sub-scholarly practice, bad pedagogy, and/or coercive religious imposition. Above all a CINO university has the feel of a certain momentum, a wind at the back of those key figures leading the charge away from “Christian” toward “post-Christian,” while a small but noble band of resisters—call them reactionaries if you want—fights tooth and nail to preserve the “Christian” as long as possible. But most of this latter group’s allies sees the futility of their cause and can’t quite bring themselves to expend the sort of energy required to support them; best to keep one’s head down and do one’s work. Which, to be sure, they are left perfectly free to do, including if that work is explicitly Christian, theological, or contrary to the moral or cultural zeitgeist. That’s part of what makes the university CINO and not (yet) post-Christian.

In any case, that was, or rather is, my answer to my friend’s question. No doubt the definitions are fuzzy, and real-life cases would either split my terms or call for the overlap of a Venn diagram. But that’s how the situation appears to me at the moment.

The adventure of history

This week I’ve been listening to Ernst Gombrich’s A Little History of the World on Audible. I’ve had it on my shelf for a while but I decided it might be good in audio form. I was right: it is wonderful. I’m a little over halfway through, and it’s been sheer pleasure. Since the original German edition of the book is nearly a century old, it’s been translated into dozens of langues, and the English version came out to wide acclaim almost 20 years ago, I take for granted that I have nothing new to say about the glories of this happy wee volume. But listening this week did bring one thought to mind that’s possibly worth sharing: Gombrich has something to teach us about what it means to tell history as a cultural and pedagogical practice.

God help me from wading into the treacherous waters of recent debates over how we do history, in general and in the classroom. But, if I am going to get wet, let me at least avoid wading and just dip a toe or two in from above.

Here’s Gombrich’s lesson, in all its simplicity: For all its many faults and crimes, errors and sufferings, human history is an adventure. And if you don’t tell it as an adventure, you’re doing it wrong. Why? For two reasons.

First, because unadventurous history is boring—one damn thing after another—and no one, not adults and certainly not children, wants to hear about ancient people in faraway lands doing one damn thing after another. Besides, history isn’t boring, so to make it boring is the hard thing, the perpetual own goal of perhaps the most fascinating subject in the world. In this case, the straight route is the best: make the telling as absorbing as the thing itself.

Second, history should be told as an adventure because nearly everyone and everything (and every time and every place) in history is, by comparison to those who are learning or studying history and their immediate surrounding contexts, different—foreign, alien, strange, exotic: all the words you’re supposed to avoid. And what Gombrich succeeds at most, besides making history both accessible and exciting, is rendering the difference of his subjects to such a degree that, no matter what he is talking about, it sounds attractive, appealing, unimaginably magnificent.

Already by the book’s midpoint, for example, Gombrich has discussed China, India, Greece, Rome, Persia, Israel, and the Arabs, as well as Confucius, Lao Tzu, the Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Aristotle, and Muhammad. Guess what? Every single one of them shines like the sun. Gombrich constantly poses rhetorical questions to the reader, ostensibly a child of 10 or 12 years, questions like “Isn’t that wonderful?” or “Don’t you think that’s marvelous?” or “What must it have been like to be there?” or “Beautiful, don’t you agree?” We hear of a sage’s austere simplicity or a general’s peerless courage or a prophet’s irresistible charisma or a governor’s prudent planning, and we nod along with sympathetic understanding. Even when he is recounting what might appear to modern ears as immoral, cruel, or bizarre, Gombrich maintains a light touch, asking the reader, whether explicitly or implicitly, Why might he have done that? Why might others have celebrated it? Can you imagine living at such a time? What unintended benefits redound to us? There isn’t a high horse in sight. Gombrich knows that history is human, and he never lets you forget that the cultures and peoples and individuals and actions recounted in history are wholly of a piece with you and me, today, because we here and now, like they then and there, are human through and through. That means deception and violence and pain, even as it means glory and love and virtue, too. Above all, in the wide sweep of historical perspective, it means realizing the incalculable debt we owe to our forebears, none of whom we can thank, but a few of whom we can come to know, if belatedly. Mathematics from Arab scholars, architecture from Roman builders, theater from Greek dramatists, justice from Jewish prophets, compassion from Christian preachers, manuscripts from cloistered monks: the gifts keep on stacking up, one on top of another. A child, upon closing this book, apart from wanting to learn more more more about all this fascinating material, will feel in her heart nothing so much as bottomless gratitude, rooted in an unquestionable conviction that the ancients are simultaneously entirely different from her and yet the very same.

That is how history should be taught, or it seems to me. Critique follows understanding; deconstruction follows the building of sturdy foundations. In a word, everything turns on affection. Speaking for myself, as I listen to each chapter coming to a close, it is affection more than anything that wells up in me—at times to the point of tears.