Higher education

Review: A Sacred Journey

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A Sacred Journey, Paul Nicholas Wilson. Bloomington, IN: WestBow Press, 2021.

Summary: A practical description the journey toward faithful Christian presence in secular institutions.

Many Christians do not enjoy the privilege of working for Christian employers. Working in a secular context, they neither want to ignore the rules and expectations of their workplace, nor leave their faith at the front door. The world of higher education is no exception.

Paul Nicholas Wilson has lived in that world for over 40 years and believes that a kind of “muscular” faithful presence is the proper approach to walking the line between living out a Christian life in the workplace and respecting that workplace. Before taking us on a journey into the practicalities, he offers a narrative of his own journey from his conversion through his academic career at the University of Arizona. He touches on his self-disclosures on the first day of class, his office decor, his association with Christian ministries on campus, his service in classroom and curriculum design, and support of public outreach efforts. He concludes that most important are personal acts of public faithfulness, community with other Christ followers, and a seamless integration between his faith and vocation on campus.

He then uses a travel analogy to offer practical insights on the journey of faithful presence. He discusses the roadway of higher education, both the common grace of God coming through various cultural goods as well as “road hazards” like apatheism, idolatries, tribalism, and the quest for money. He warns of the danger of dualism, the strategy of separating one’s personal faith from one’s work altogether. Sometimes, this is motivated by a misperception that any form of faith expression is illegal. Wilson offers a helpful chart and discussion of what one can, probably should not, and definitely should not, do.

Instead of dualism, Wilson advocates for integration of faith and discipline, marshalling the support of a number of Reformed thinkers. Then, over several chapters, he takes us through a “Gospel Positioning System” for the journey centered on the Triune God and a core of basic beliefs about creation, the fall, redemption, and restoration. He then elaborates the journey of faithful presence first by commending the character of Christ, the fruit of the Spirit, all of this worked out in our vocations.

He offers trenchant warnings about speech in a setting rife with speech. His honesty about the challenges he faced in dealing with professional gossip was refreshing. He challenges scholars to excellence in their work and in all of life. He offers a simple rubric for evaluating research efforts:

  • Why now?
  • So what?
  • Who cares?
  • Done well?
  • Well done?

He advocates for collaboration, especially with graduate TA’s, helping them develop their skills as well as enhancing the classroom experience for students. Finally, all this creates a platform in which a faculty member can pursue “public goods and positive externalities”–serving the common good through advising, departmental service, and sharing resources, including funding. All of these offer the context in which respectful personal and public witness can be shared respectfully and forthrightly.

Wilson concludes with a word for churches and seminaries. He contends that these rarely recognize and affirm the sacredness of secular vocations, and center ministry around the congregation itself rather than the work on congregants in the world.

James Davison Hunter’s ideas of “faithful presence” hold a strong attraction for many academics I know. Yet sometimes, I feel this becomes little more than “niceness.” What Wilson does is flesh out faithfulness in character and the specific deeds of professors in teaching, research, and service. He makes a strong appeal that one cannot do this alone but only in community. And he challenges the dualism often unwittingly supported by churches that confines a Christian’s ministry to personal and church contexts rather than affirming workplaces as worship places.

This is a valuable resource that I’d love to see get into the hands of every Christian faculty member, staff person, and administrator on campus. It would make a great book for discussion in groups, offering mutual encouragement to put into practice the precepts found here.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Power Women

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Power Women, Edited by Nancy Wang Yuen and Deshonna Collier-Goubil, Foreword by Shirley Hoogstra. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2021.

Summary: Fourteen women who are both mothers and academics write about how they navigate these callings as women of faith.

Women in the academic world face a unique challenge. The biological clock and the tenure clock are synchronized. The critical years for child-bearing and for career advancement coincide. One’s faith community and cultural background further complicates this challenge with sometimes conflicting values around parenting and career advancement. Many women choose one over the other. Others, like the women in this volume, believe both callings to be important for them, and write about the ways they have cared for their families and continued to pursue their academic callings. Through all of this runs an underlying theme of continue to nourish their own souls and to practice good self-care.

The contributions are organized into four parts: navigating academia, navigating motherhood, navigating multiple callings, and navigating support. In the first part Maria Su Wang describes how she carves out time for research with young children, sharing some of the scriptural reflections that have shaped her choices. Stephanie Chan offered a unique perspective on the synergy of parenting and work (lullaby and syllabi) and how each may enrich the other. Teri Clemons talks about the misperceptions that exist about maternity leave and its importance, including how much time bonding with a child and recovery can take. She urges women (and men) to avail themselves of all the leave institutional and state policies allow. Yiesha L. Thompson closes out the section discussing the unique situation of adjunct professor moms. the special pressures and choices they must make, and ways administrators may offer appropriate support. .

The second section on navigating motherhood begins by asking just what is meant by being a “good” mother. Christine Lee Kim discusses the mixed messages mothers must negotiate and identifies good questions to identify those messages and describes her own process of working through these. Ji Y. Son identifies the double whammy working moms face of being disadvantaged both at work and home and suggests a recategorization that gives women grace by considering herself a “female dad.” Jean Neely describes her struggle with the imposter syndrome and how thinking of God as loving mother as well as father has transformed her spiritual life and how being a mother has deepened those insights.

Part three could be intimidating in its discussion of navigating multiple callings. Jenny Pak describes the juggling acts of the multiple callings of pastor’s wife, mother, and professor. Jennifer McNutt takes it a step further. She is a pastor, professor and mom of three. Yvana Uranga-Hernandez describes taking on homeschooling as a professor mom. For all, these are only possible as they reflect the singular pursuit of Christ and have the support of spouses, extended family, and the wider community.

That sets up the discussions in part four, navigating support. Deshonna Collier-Goubil speaks of her experience as a young widow of assembling a support network. Joy Qualls describes the choice she and her husband made for her to be the primary breadwinner while he managed the household as a stay-at-home dad. Doretha O’Quinn draws on her mentoring expertise to discuss how professor moms may mentor each other and also gets very practical about her own practices of self-care.

The chapters mix personal narrative and academic research. They are honest and practical. Their experiences demonstrate a variety of ways women have approached navigating the callings of mom and professor. While they are amazing in how much they accomplish, worthy of the “power women” label, their stories also reflect the importance of good institutional policies, including leave and tenure policies that do not disadvantage women, and the value of support from spouses, extended family, and a wider community, and lots of grace! This is a valuable work for men to read, to understand how they may be appropriate allies.

The women in this volume represented significant diversity of ethnicity, academic discipline, and life experience. What is missing are women in STEM fields and more women from secular universities (only one contributor is). That said, there is so much wisdom that may be extrapolated into these situations. I’ve worked with many graduate women who wonder whether it is possible to honor God as they pursue both motherhood and academic callings. These narratives offer a resounding “yes” as well as honest and practical models of how that is possible.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

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The ministry with which I serve recently hosted a conversation with four of the contributors to this work that may be viewed on YouTube.

Review: The End of College

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The End of College, Robert Wilson-Black. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2021.

Summary: A history of the creation and development of religion departments between 1930 and 1960 as a shift occurred from church affiliated colleges to research universities on the German model, with different aims serving a wider constituency.

Others, including George Marsden and Julie A. Reuben have chronicled the history of the modern university, including the shift from religiously based colleges to the modern secularized, research-oriented university. What makes this work by Robert Wilson-Black distinct is its account of how institutions that had their roots in the college model handled this shift with its decentering of religion, and in particular, Christianity from its role in university life. In particular, a solution resorted to was the creation of religion or religious studies departments. And yet these lived in a tension between encouraging the religious life and offering an academically rigorous program of study.

This shift represented an effort to preserve something of the college model in a much-changed environment. The college model existed to form mostly Protestants of an upper- or upper-middle class origin in the outlooks and moral character that would prepare them for useful participation in both the church and civil society. Both in terms of chapels and curricular content, religious ideas permeated the curriculum. The shift in higher education from colleges to universities represented a broadening of the constituency served to a much more diverse body in terms of class, gender, race, and religious background–a shift from college for the elite to university for the masses, especially after World War 2. Also the shift was from subjective belief and moral formation to scientific “objectivity.”

Wilson-Black’s treatment focuses on the Ivy League schools like Princeton, Columbia, Yale, Harvard, and the U of Pennsylvania as well as other nationally recognized education leaders from Oberlin to University of Chicago to Stanford dealt with these changes. Each chapter focuses in on a particular school and key figure during a particular period in the thirty years or so covered by this work.

He explores the variety of challenges that were faced. These included the relation between departments and any kind of chaplaincy that remained. A tension that arose in this relationship was advocacy versus instruction. While religion departments certainly affirmed the importance of religious faith in life, they steadily moved away from advocacy, even where their curriculum was still heavily shaped by Christian subjects and themes. There was also the pressure to develop religious studies into an intellectually respectable discipline, “objectively” dealing with the phenomena and role of religion in life. The formation of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) reflected this trend.

The question arose of whether one must be religious, or alternatively not religious to teach this subject well. With the increasing diversity of religious backgrounds of students as well as students who would self describe as humanist or atheist, religious studies began to morph into comparative religion. Some places, like University of Chicago affirmed the exploration of ultimate questions, but did not wish to confine this to a single department. Also, many of these schools offered divinity school programs at the graduate level, and questions arose about how religion departments, that may also develop graduate programs but served undergraduate educational aims would relate to the divinity schools.

The approach of focusing on particular developments at a particular school which reflected broader issues and trends helped make this book very concrete and up close in its history, while also reflected the ways the teaching of religion were differentiated in various contexts and time periods. The work also helps me understand my encounters with religious studies as a fervent young Christian at a state university in the 1970’s. In retrospect, I see it reflected instruction in mainstream scholarship, whether it be the histories of major religious bodies in the U.S. or the critical theories about authorship and composition of the New Testament of the time (I don’t recall that we ever actually were assigned to read the New Testament). At the time I found it disappointing and found far more encouragement to my faith from my campus Christian community and publications of college-oriented Christian publishers like InterVarsity Press and Christianity Today, which had intellectual heft to many of its articles.

Now I understand it better, recognizing both the remnants of the idea that religious understanding is important in one’s education and the effort to be academically rigorous rather than advocating for a faith. There is a critical value of both understanding one’s own faith well (a matter often sadly neglected by our churches in the catechesis of younger members) and understanding and respecting other faiths. Sadly, in many places religious studies seemed to be taken over by the skeptics or even cynics, where advocacy for a belief system or even the encouragement of the formation of one’s own beliefs was replaced by deconstruction of belief systems. I suspect many programs consequently dug their own graves with this approach.

These reflections suggest to me that a good follow up project for this work is what has happened with regard to the teaching of religion as an academic subject in universities in the time since the 1960’s. I note that one of those who endorses this work is Eboo Patel whose work in fostering interfaith understanding and collaboration through the Interfaith Youth Core reflects a continuing interest in religious belief, both the clarifying of one’s own beliefs and the building of mutual understanding and respect with those of others. I like how this author has approached the telling of this story and would love to see it carried forward.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher through Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Identity in Action

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Identity in Action, Perry L. Glanzer. Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian University Press, 2021.

Summary: Addresses the various different identities college students must negotiate and proposes a model of Christian excellence in these various identities.

College students must negotiate a variety of identities in their campus experience. Race, sexual orientation, and gender identity are the object of much public focus. But there are also a number of other identities one engages in everyday life that are no less real–academic work, friends and family, romantic relationships, one’s stewardship of time, talents and resources including one’s own body, and one’s civic identity. With all this, the question comes of how to juggle or prioritize these identities–all are important to who we are as persons.

One of the assertions the author makes is that colleges and universities offer little help in figuring this stuff out. For the author, Christ is central to this matter of identity, and this work assumes people who are Christ followers. He contends that Christ followers are new creations, restored from the sin and brokenness of human rebellion. He beautifully uses Fantine’s words to Cosette about her and her prostitute mother from Les Miserables: “She has the Lord. He is her Father….In his eyes you have never been anything but an innocent and beautiful woman.” But our identity is more than a “me and Jesus” thing. We are part of Christ’s body, and Glanzer considers this our most important human identity, and a place that forms us in loving virtue.

All of this lays the basis for what he advocates as “identity excellence” in our various roles. Subsequent chapters of the book work this out in our various identities with neighbors, our work as students, as friends, with enemies, as men or women, in romantic relationships, in stewarding our bodies and time, in the use of God’s gifts of money and possessions, in our race and ethnicity, and our loyalties to family and country. From work in collegiate ministry, I would agree that these are among the top student concerns.

The chapter on being a good neighbor helps ground other chapters on dealing with friends and enemies and focuses on how one may be excellent, regardless of the behavior of others. I did find it surprising that he would take on the matter of enemies. Yet this seems important because there is an idealism that denies the possibility of having enemies and leaves one ill-prepared when this arises. The counsel on stewardship, beginning with one’s body and his words about alcohol abuse on campuses and its connection with sexual assault is worth heeding.

I was more mixed in reading the chapters about “ladies” and “gentleman” and about romantic relationships. While I would affirm the emphasis on character and Christ-likeness, and challenging campus hook-up culture with chaste behavior toward one another and old-fashioned “dating,” I was concerned about the focus I saw on lingering gender stereotypes, for example “the strength, ambition, and character of men” versus “feminine beauty and the splendor of God’s glory.” This was more evident in the chapter on romance:

“A real man on campus must have the courage to be counter-cultural. He must use his strength wisely and pursue a woman with patience, self-control, and agape love. The true woman scandalously withholds her love for the man noble and faithful enough to win it. She must demonstrate confidence in God’s love to sustain her in the midst of the desire to be loved, and she must demonstrate patience and self-control as she develops a romantic friendship” (p. 140).

I’m thankful that the author calls for patience and self-control on the part of both. At the same time the man is described as one who “pursues” who has “strength” and “courage” while the woman “withholds” as she is being pursued, she needs to be sustained by God’s love in her “desire to be loved.” I think many women who have struggled with patriarchy in the church would be fearful that this counsel is setting them up for a patriarchal marriage.

I’m also surprised that these chapters seem to act as if LGBTQ+ students do not exist when approximately 20 percent of Harvard and Yale students identify as LGBTQ+ and 11 percent of students at Christian colleges identify as non-heterosexual. Needless to say, for the Christian student who does not identify as heterosexual or cisgender, the silence of this book speaks loudly. Granted, almost anything that might be said may be contentious, but some word for these students seems necessary in a book on identity.

There are a number of good things in the chapter on race. In particular, the author traces his own growing racial awareness, the way both the country and the church are implicated in race. He cites his own institution of Baylor as an example of systemic racism in its historic discrimination against black students. However in moving so quickly to the avoidance of bitterness, the practice of forgiveness, and holding up the example of a black man who joins and serves in a white church, I suspect many students of color will be put off. Where is there room for godly anger at four hundred years of oppression, where is the unqualified repentance by the white church for the ways we are implicated in that oppression, and where is the counter example of whites submitting to black leadership?

The work concludes with the question of how we deal with conflicting priorities between our identities. I appreciate that the author didn’t offer a formula but urged the pursuit of faithfulness to Christ, attention to his words, and being yielded to the leading of the Holy Spirit, in community with other Christians. While we would like a GPS or a formula, what Glanzer describes rings true with experience. There is much wisdom like this throughout this work, my critique of several chapters notwithstanding. It may save the student who wants to follow Christ much grief and position that student for great growth and delight in the person he or she is discovering themselves to be through the critical years of college.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: From Research to Teaching

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From Research to Teaching: A Guide to Beginning Your Classroom Career, Michael Kibbe. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2021.

Summary: A practical guide for those transitioning from graduate research to teaching, focusing on what teachers must do and must know.

One of the basic premises about going to graduate school is that you learn a lot about a little. This is especially so with the Ph.D. in which one delves deeply into a mere sliver of knowledge no one has really studied before. It is absolutely intriguing–the ultimate detective story. It is also utterly humbling, because you realize the limits of human knowledge. Every sliver is like this. One of the things you likely will not learn a lot about is teaching. Universities often have special departments designed just to help faculty learn how to teach. For most faculty, that is a big part of what they do.

Michael Kibbe has given us a very practical guide to making the transition from graduate researcher to teacher. And I mean practical. This is one of the clearest and most concise books I’ve seen on this subject. This is the simplicity on the other side of complexity. One recognizes that there is a lot of thought, theory, and practice packed into these pages on a very simple framework.

First, Kibbe addresses what teachers must do. He begins with their preparation before setting foot in the classroom. You wouldn’t think this comes first, but he urges people to “finish the job” and publish the dissertation while it is fresh. He urges the reading of books on pedagogy, applying one’s research skills to this new world. He stresses the importance of mentors who know how to train teachers and will push you. Finally, there is the work of class prep. He suggests each term to expand a session or group of sessions into a whole course.

Then there is the work in the classroom. He suggests thinking of sessions in terms of parts of a story you are telling. You also have to plan a good ending, or as he calls it, “land the plane.” He thinks that every great teacher has a signature–something that makes them memorable. My high school math teacher’s signature was Harvey, the invisible rabbit who he would engage during lectures. You see, I still remember forty-five years later! Another way of emphasizing story is to know the center, and keep moving toward it. The work isn’t done when the class is though. The work is done with reflection after the class in which one writes down immediately one’s observations, particularly what didn’t go well and follows up on it and then takes sabbaths, because you are not God.

The second part of the book addresses what teachers must know. They have to know their mission, the center, and how they will get there, or method. He unpacks what this looks like for him. Good teachers know their students–their names, the places they eat and live, and what we learn about them, written down after meetings so we remember. Without getting weird, he urges pursuing them, especially if they are not getting taught, challenging them, and helping them set realistic expectations. In the same chapter, he urges knowing our families, and offers very wise counsel for relating with one’s spouse. We must also know our limitations and have peers, people not in our discipline, and others who won’t let us dominate the room. We also must know our power, that the most effective teachers can also do the greatest damage. He warns about the dangers of social media: slander, the gullibility even of the educated for clickbait, and self-promotion.

Besides what you know and what you do, he includes appendices for how to use you dissertation in the classroom (one class, where you help people see how deep the rabbit hole can go), for graduate schools to incorporate training in pedagogy, and finally one on great teaching resources our students need us to read, our admins need us to read, and ourselves need us to read.

In lively, even imperative terms, Kibbe lays out the work in which teachers must be engaged for a lifetime. He suggests that aside from publishing the dissertation, we are never done with the other things (and woe to us if we think we are or become indifferent to them). Contrary to the subtitle, this is not just for beginning one’s classroom career. Rather, Kibbe offers us core practices for a lifetime that will enrich both us and our students. This book is a little gem!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Dreaming Dreams for Christian Higher Education

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Dreaming Dreams of Christian Higher Education, David S. Guthrie (Foreword by Bradshaw Fry; Afterword by Eric Miller). Beaver Falls, PA: Falls City Press, 2020.

Summary: A collection of presentations given over a twenty year period on realizing the dream of Christian higher education by a leader in Christian higher ed.

I’ve worked for more than four decades in collegiate ministry in public university settings. My colleagues and I have wrestled with the task of seeing students formed in Christ: in character, formational practices, witness and service, in intellect, and the pursuit of their callings. Often, one has the sense of working across the grain of the social, institutional, and intellectual context of the public university. I’ve sometimes dreamed of what it might be like to attempt this work in the Christian college context, one that I think would embrace our aspirations with a context aligned with those aspirations.

David S. Guthrie has dreamed similar dreams over several decades of ministry and academic leadership in the Christian college context. He’s served as a professor, student life director, and an academic dean. This book collects presentations given over this period in which he sets forth his own thinking articulating both what is mean by “Christian higher education” and how that might be pursued as an academic institution. Many of these were given during Guthrie’s time at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, a small college in the Reformed tradition located northwest of Pittsburgh.

The opening presentation is on the idea of a Christian college, acknowledging the disenchantment with efforts at student transformation, at intellectual integration, and the shortcomings of the ideals of a liberal arts education as a vehicle for this student transformation. Guthrie explores the barriers of the wider academic context, the institutional structures of a school including departments and majors, and the wider context of anti-intellectualism in evangelicalism.

The second presentation articulates critical tasks for the project of Christian higher education. He puts forth three:

  1. Helping students to see more and see more clearly, more clearly. This is about Christian perspective and the continuities and discontinuities of that perspective with wider cultural perspectives.
  2. Helping students discern the times and know what to do. In another presentation, Guthrie writes about educating for godly wisdom.
  3. Helping students to understand calling and vocation. In contrasts to societal careerism, Christian education grounds students in a vision of their own lives and service in the light of God’s kingdom.

These two presentations ground the remaining essays in this volume. He argues for a much more integrated curriculum than simply a collection of gen-ed requirements connecting Christian thought with the different academic disciplines. Elsewhere he leans into the issue of student context and argues for grounding codes of conduct with a priority on student learning and on the Christian convictions at the core of the institution. He addresses student life and the need for those working in this area to prioritize their own professional development.

Perhaps one of his most prophetic talks was on academic leadership, particularly amid the pandemic. Drawing on the work of Ernest Boyer, he articulates the crises of presidential succession, wrong-headed leadership, lack of leadership, and confusion about the goals of higher education. He commends prioritizing good communication, keeping problems in perspective, staying well-informed, taking time to be creative, and having an inspired vision. For institutions he calls for curricular coherence, educating for the common good, teaching excellence, strong campus community, and equality of opportunity.

I found myself wondering as I came to the close of the book, what progress Guthrie had seen from his own efforts. I wish there had been an essay on his Geneva years, what they accomplished or failed to accomplish, what they learned. Perhaps that time is still too close. While he does not explicitly answer that question, he contends that he keeps dreaming, while also lamenting the lack of a theology of culture among many faculty, the embrace of silver bullets rather than substantive curricular change, the persistence of standard disciplinary and departmental structures, among others. He concludes with Nicholas Wolterstorff’s description moving beyond the historic isolation from culture in the early Christian college movement and more recent emphasis on Christian scholarship to a focus on what it means to be Christians in society.

Guthrie’s presentation offers an overview of the writing on and discussion of higher ed issues of the last thirty years. Reading between the lines, I suspect that Guthrie has seen the vision of higher education realized among many students and colleagues while the wider institutions of Christian higher education remain relatively unchanged or even in greater peril. I think that is both why Guthrie has not stopped dreaming and why he laments. Institutions need to look at the results they are achieving and ask how those reflect their structures, and as Guthrie discusses in one essay, the lack of a compelling institutional “saga.” This is an important book for all of us who dream of a new day of Christian scholarship and recovery of faithful Christian presence in the world of higher education.