Tag: love

Educating for Friendship

How might my teaching change if I acknowledged that developing a capacity for friendship is a fundamental component of the overall process of learning?

This spring, I took a class on a field trip to the main campus of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, a community of Catholic women whose charism includes a call to live sustainably and work for environmental justice. Some of our course texts highlighted the natural world as an emerging source of spirituality among nonreligious young people in the US, and I wanted students to see that many traditional religious communities find God in nature, too. The question was how today’s “nones” might resonate with, well, nuns.

On a beautiful Saturday in April, we walked the immense campus and heard the Sisters’ attention to the land is rooted in their love of God and all that belongs to God. The following Tuesday, I asked the students what they had learned on the trip. My focus on course content had me looking for evidence of learning in conceptual connections, so when students’ initial responses provided such evidence, I thought “great, objective achieved.” But then someone offered a different sort of comment: “What I really liked is that we were outside walking and talking with each other. I feel like I got to know people. Obviously I’ve seen you guys all semester, but I hadn’t really seen you. Just being together like that is what will stick with me. I learned I should do it more.”

Genuine human connection: another objective achieved! Yet it hadn’t been an explicit objective because, to be honest, the weight I give to conceptual learning often relegates connection and friendship to the periphery. When it happens, wonderful, but it’s not really the goal. How might my teaching change if I acknowledged that developing a capacity for friendship is a fundamental component of the overall process of learning?

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Playing Devil’s Advocate: Vocational Wisdom from The Screwtape Letters

Reading The Screwtape Letters can help us preempt our demons; it can help us see our blind spots and remind us that good things can be traps and seemingly bad things can contain blessings. I’ve found that having students write their own Screwtape letters offers them an eye-opening way of looking at the circumstances of their own lives. Playing devil’s advocate to one’s own vocation is a generative exercise.

In a previous post, I wrote about assigning “Learning in Wartime” in a vocation seminar when COVID first hit. I wrote about how profound that text was for my students and about their moving responses to Lewis’ sermon. Here, I want to describe the next reading I assigned, The Screwtape Letters, which was equally engaging to students, similarly insightful about vocation, and provided them with an essential skill for persisting in the right direction: playing devil’s advocate.

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Dragged Into Vocation

On Palm Sunday, Drag King Jesus was redefining the definitions of glory and majesty in God’s terms, a faithful reframing of reality unto humiliation and death… In the grim turning of events as he made his way into the streets of Jerusalem, Jesus would have nothing left to do but return to the origin of things: back to beauty, back to compassion, descending into the depths to claim this origin.

On Palm Sunday on the streets of Portland, Oregon, two rectors in scarlet chasubles paraded down a sidewalk with their congregants, a bright red wagon, a stuffed llama, palm leaves, and rainbow streamers. With jubilance they sang “Prepare ye the way of the Lord!” to the greyed maritime skies, likely perplexing those they strolled past on their way to the church building. Their throng of color, formality, harmony, and comedy exuded dissonance, but this was the summoning of a divine and subversive power, calling out a cry of relief and possibility. 

The service was held just outside of the church doors that day, the Rev. James M. Joiner preaching. In the opening of his sermon, Rev. Joiner compared the perspective of the horse vs. the donkey when approaching a parade, throwing his body into the gait of each animal—his were excellent donkey impersonations. As he went further into the description of the “king” on the back of the donkey, he described a person who was largely interested in turning the powers of the world on their head, subverting dominance, violence, coercion, and greed. The donkey would be the perfect fit because Jesus had absolutely no interest in looking like anything that screamed “Pax Romana.” Later he noted something else about Jesus via social media—Jesus was a Drag King.

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Vocation and the Apocalypse: McCarthy’s The Road

Cormac McCarthy’s beautiful and harrowing novel, The Road, brings readers to vocational ground-zero, laying bare fundamental questions regarding purpose and meaning.

It would seem that the apocalypse, whether religious or environmental, would lay to rest questions of vocation. But questions of purpose and meaning are front and center in many of the popular post-apocalyptic films and books with which our students are familiar. In fact, the post-apocalyptic genre presents excellent opportunities for thought-experiments that force students to consider the foundations and driving forces of purpose, meaning, and vocation. I do not wish to talk directly about the environment, Anthropocene, or end times and will leave fears about climate change and cultural decay, or, alternatively, hopes for sustainable energy and cultural renewal, to experts in those areas. But environmental concerns as well as cultural anxieties spurred by mass shootings, heightening racial tensions, and immigration-related issues weigh heavily on students’ minds. These anxieties are yet further reasons why teaching vocation via post-apocalyptic film and literature will resonate with students. I also think this genre is valuable because of its capacity to instill deep gratitude and a sense of responsibility for the world that is still there when a student closes a book or when the credits role on a film.

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