Religious Faith in the Academy
Session Organizer: David Shane Wallace
Dept. of English , Louisiana State University
3044 Wyoming Street , Baton Rouge, LA 70802
dwall12@lsu.edu

Transforming the Language of Faith Based Analysis in the Composition Classroom

Faith is a fundamental facet of who our students are, and who we are as instructors. Even those who claim to be agnostic or atheistic are still making a spiritual claim which affects the environment of the classroom. Yet traditionally, educational institutions ignore this reality, forcing students, and often instructors, to assume coerced neutrality on the subject. This artificial construct is perhaps meant to stifle conflict; however, to deny the importance of faith can be as damaging to the writing process as to deny the unique voices that gender and race provide. One primary presumption and cause for the dismissal of topics which include faith is that students cannot move beyond simplistic, emotional writing when communicating those ideas. However, students can produce faith-based analysis through careful consideration of audience, an understanding of politicized semiotics, and awareness of the legal system and the culture that produced it. Assigning a carefully sequenced progression of essays which allow student-chosen topics within broad areas of issue based content, specifically constitutional issues and resulting policies, permits students to distance themselves from some of the intensely personal aspects of religion, and apply their beliefs to the workings of the larger society using sound rhetorical methods. As students move through the sequence of essays, they gravitate toward analysis of the worldview which most interests them.

Laurie Smith
St. Louis University
smith16@slu.edu

“Misericordia veritatis”: On the Faithful Teacher in the Dominican Tradition

The General Chapter of the Order of Preachers (the Dominicans) at Providence, 2001, produced a document titled, “Misericordia veritatis.” This document outlines the Order’s intellectual heritage (Aquinas, et. al.) and describes current challenges to the notion of the truth. It also suggests how the intellectual heritage of the Order can be harnessed to confront destructive postmodern trends: subjectivism/relativism and nihilism. Friars of the Order are called upon to work especially within the academy as ministers of the “compassion of truth,” teaching in their respective academic fields as both agents for and sites of the truth as a form of compassion. Using Aquinas, this paper will briefly lay out the Dominican vision of the faithful teacher and then move on to suggest concrete ways that teachers might present themselves as “ministers” of the compassion of truth. Augustine’s profound acknowledgment of self-awareness and ignorance–“I have become a question to myself”–will be offered as a starting point for any teacher wishing to be faithful in the classroom. As a teacher of American literature, I am particularly interested in demonstrating how the Dominican tradition of teaching the compassion of truth applies to the teaching of literary texts.

fra. David Philip N. Powell
Blackfriars Hall/Oxford University
neripowell@yahoo.com

Making It Matter: The American Romantics and Religion in the Present Tense

I try to teach the American Romantics as they wrote—as if Truth exists, no matter how ultimately inaccessible, and assuming that any intimation of the truth must pass the test of being potentially true for everyone—for each and all. The paper I am proposing will consider the difficulties, dangers, and rewards of teaching the American Romantics as the religious revolutionaries they were. I find that Emerson's and Walt Whitman's optimistic religious skepticism and Emily Dickinson's darker variety still serve the purpose they did when they were written: They put discussions about religion on the common ground of subjective experience rather than doctrine, but without the meaningless and ubiquitous cop-out "We all have our own (vacuum-sealed, heat-and-serve) beliefs" These authors allow students to find common ground not in the doctrines they subscribe to, but in the conditions common to any subjectivity: consciousness within the material world; all the irreplaceable conjunctions of time, place and circumstance that shape identity; mortality; and the delusion or intimation that we do not quite fit within any of these limitations.

Nancy Mayer
Northwest Missouri State University
nmayer@mail.nwmissouri.edu

The Scholar as Believer: The Conundrum of the Religious Folklife Researcher

In the past twenty years, scholars have come to view ethnographies as productions and creations and have recognized that sometimes they are skewed. Following the example of William Wilson, among others, scholars are now beginning to study religious folklore from an “insider” status, such as myself with Pentecostal studies and Reinhold R. Hill with Mormon folklore, highlighting areas which we deem neglected or misinterpreted. Insider ethnographies are studies conducted by those who are a part of a folk group before and after a research project.

In the same way that the roles of outsider ethnographers have been analyzed, the roles of insider ethnographers need to be scrutinized as well. Although insiders have a legitimate voice, being an insider ethnographer is not easy nor without its challenges. By examining ethnographies and essays by Zora Neale Hurston, my own work, Reinhold R. Hill, and others, I will illustrate that this role of insider ethnographer is one that is highly complex and one that results in those who have conducted research from an insider perspective having to formulate an identity that is both hybrid and liminal.

Kenneth R. DeShane
Middle Tennessee State University
kdeshane@mtsu.edu