Professoring While Christian

When I started this blog, I thought one of the things I’d like to write about was how my faith integrates with my work. Because there are so many understandings, misunderstandings, and caricatures of Christianity out there, I thought that might require a manifesto of sorts to begin with, or at least an exploration for myself of what that integration actually looks like. So here are some initial thoughts about what being a Christian professor and scholar looks like to me. This will be another multi-part post; in fact, as I develop my blogging identity, I think all of my posts will be like that. For this post, I’ll start with some negatives—that is, my ideas of what "professoring while Christian" is not.

First and foremost, I am not secretly or overtly judging people’s behaviors or lifestyle choices. I think this might be the hardest caricature to overcome in the academy, or even the culture at large. The caricature is that Christians are looking down their noses at people, that they think they are better than others, or that they have some secret code that gives them the right to be arbiters of right and wrong. And granted, many Christians seem to embody that caricature. But what being a Christian means to me is that I have come face-to-face with my own failures, inadequacies, and brokenness, and been met with grace rather than condemnation from a loving God. In that perspective, “sin” isn’t something that is a discrete activity, or even something that takes a plural; it is the claiming of my sovereign right over myself that gives me the right to set my own values as a place from which to judge other people. That right is what I willingly gave up when I came to understand that it was what was keeping me from peace, rest, and true freedom. As a Christian, the only righteousness I can claim is that which has been imputed to me by grace. So if I can’t claim self-righteousness, how in the world could I claim any kind of stance from which to judge the righteousness of others? I believe we all need grace—unmerited favor, a loving understanding of our shared brokenness, and forgiveness when we hurt each other as a result of that brokenness—more than anything else.

But maybe most important to my idea of what it means to “professor while Christian” is that I am a teacher, not a preacher or an evangelist. My job as a teacher of children’s and young adult literature is not to convert my students to any particular way of thinking. Instead, my job is to help them examine and interrogate the ways we represent and make meaning in and of our world through language and image. Such examination means digging in to the ideologies that enable and frame those representations. It involves seeking to understand how the big questions—what it means to be human, what our responsibilities are to others and the environment, how we do and should live our daily lives—are engaged in the works under study through both the forms of the works and their messaging. It’s only when we understand the ideologies that underpin the works that we can offer meaningful critiques of the works themselves.

Thoughtful Christianity offers an ideology that is often at odds with other ways of thinking in a secular-scientific culture. In other words, it offers a diverse worldview. At base, it starts with the idea that all people are made in the image of God and have a responsibility to steward and cultivate the earth and its resources (Genesis 1:26-28), but that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23); these two ideas from the basis for a radical view of equity. And while embedded in a Christian worldview is a responsibility to actively seek justice, protect the vulnerable, and rejoice in mercy, there’s no Utopian vision of people, governments, or systems that can make things right. What I try to do in my teaching is present as many of the various ideologies in play in our world today with as much clarity, objectivity, and intellectual rigor as we as a class can muster, so that students can think through and consciously interrogate what they believe and how those beliefs and values determine their focus and influence their interpretations of the texts under study; after all, ideologies are the filters through which we see the world.

Children’s and YA texts have a special role to play in that project, since they present the stories and forms that set those ideological trajectories in motion at a time when people are most vulnerable to unconscious indoctrination rather than conscious interrogation. So one of my goals is to bring indoctrinated values to light so that we are instead claiming and operating out of examined positions. My tagline for this is: My goal is not to get you to think like me; my goal is to get you to think like you.