Sunday, July 15th, 2007Living Inside the Bible (Belt)
Shannon Carter
When evangelical Christian students enter the academy, they often find that its tenets and values conflict with their reliance on the Bible as a source of truth and evidence. A pedagogy of rhetorical dexterity, however, can help construct productive relationships between their religious community of practice and the academy’s.
I’ve known Shannon for many years, and I also know the university at which she teaches and which was the site of this article (I started out as a graduate student there 12 years ago). East Texas IS known as the “Bible belt,” and our students are immersed (no pun intended) in it and its influence when they reach the university. I think Shannon’s approach is instructive in that it doesn’t automatically downplay or disregard our students’ prior experiences but rather asks them to use those experiences to negotiate new rhetorical stances.
Too often in the past I’ve been hesitant to bring my own Christian beliefs into play in the classroom for many of the same reasons Shannon expresses in her article: as a “new” member of this academic community, I didn’t want to be seen as an outsider. Now, I am more open with my students, explaining that their collegiate experience is a good opportunity to do some exploring of their own beliefs, to move beyond “blind” faith and to discover for themselves the foundation(s) that undergird what they believe. This holds for both religious and political beliefs. Many students may balk at first, but those who have tried it, as Shannon’s article points out, have begun to critically examine and shape anew their identities within both their religious and academic communities.
Carter’s essay is an important and welcome addition to growing discussion of religion in composition studies. In recent years, this discussion has shifted away from how do “deal with” students of faith (especially evanegelical Christian faith) to how to value the rich discursive practices (an appropriate term I heard Min-Zhan Lu use recently) they bring with them to the classroom. (Shari Stenberg’s and Priscilla Perkins’ recent essays both move in this direction, as do some of the essay in Vander Lei and cyburz’s recent book). Thus, I was very happy to see Shannon Carter continue to move the discussion along that trajectory.
I was also interested to see that she introduces a student of Pentecostal faith at the end of her essay, and it brought to mind an avenue of this discussion we haven’t gone down. Pentecostals no doubt hold the Bible in high esteem, but they also place significant (in some cases, even greater) emphasis on their relationship with the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. Thus, one way to further nuance this question might be to look at not only how such students live inside the Bible, but also how they “walk with the Spirit,” as some might put it. For many Pentecostals, listening to the Spirit (or being sensitive to its voice) is as important a (literate?) practice as reading the Bible is.
I was reminded of this distinction between Pentecostalism and other versions of evangelicalism when I read Stephen Barrett’s fascinating dissertation (U. of New Hampshire, 1997), “This Gonna Hurt Like Hell: A Pentecostal Enters the Academy.” Christian Smith’s sociological study of evangelicalism also provides a discussion of the ways in which varieties of conservative Christian faith differ from each other.
I appreciated this essay as well, though I am just recently embarking on understanding the conversation about religion in rhetoric and composition studies.
I appreciated that Carter opens her teaching practices up for critical scrutiny, even questioning her commitments to critical pedagogy as a result of considering “the rich discursive resources” that her evangelical students bring to her composition classrooms. I want to raise several questions and comments.
1. One question I have relates to Kintz’s explanation of evangelical Christianity as a “community of practice” in which “Liv[ing] inside the Book […] gives believers a world always already biblically written” (33). Since the title of the essay builds on this idea, I want to probe this idea of “living inside the Bible” further. I was raised and schooled (K-8 and Wheaton College) at evangelical Christian institutions. I question this characterization of how evangelicals — at least in my neck of the northern midwest — engaged with Biblical texts. I would say that the idea is, rather, that the world is “written” by God, and the Bible is the guide for interpreting the world. It is, moreover, a moral compass to guide life in the world. Here I think of a refrain from my childhood and youth (I think this comes from one of the Pauline epistles): the idea is to live “in the world, but not *of* the world.” So to suggest that evangelicals are living “inside the Bible” seems somehow to miss the precise relation among the evangelical community (or sub-culture), the “world”, and the Bible. However, the phrase is very poetic-sounding and it does so richly capture the importance of Biblical interpretation to the evangelical community.
2. I was a bit confused about how the terms “evangelism” and evangelicalism” were used throughout the essay (e.g., in the subheading on page 580). My understanding of these terms is that evangelicalism would be the term to describe evangelicals as a social group, or as a community of practice. Evangelism, on the other hand, would be a term for describing a particular witnessing practice within evangelicalism.
3. For me, this essay raises some of the problems that I believe to be inherent in the “communities of practice” theorizing that was mentioned in Lave and Wenger (1991) and further elaborated in Wenger (1998) and in another book that Wenger co-authored. One of the difficulties within this way of theorizing “evangelicalism” is that persons/authors such as Mark Noll (an eminent evangelical scholar, who is on the faculty in history at Notre Dame University and wrote a book in 2002 that was heralded by the Atlantic as the most important historical work of that year) and Cal Thomas (a trash-talking columnist that I suspect most educated persons, evangelical or not, would cringe to read) get lumped into the same evangelical “community of practice.” And there is something I find problematic in this, which is not so much about Shannon Carter’s essay, but about the very way “communities of practice” (I’ve heard it said, that Jean Lave now groans when she hears this phrase) get conceptualized and operationalized in research and scholarly writing. Clearly this theoretical issues is broader than religion, but for some reason it really comes into focus for me in this essay.
4. Carter proposes that rhetoric, or what she calls “rhetorical dexterity”, could be the way to chart a “third way” or a solution between discourses of liberalism (a world view held dearly by many faculty members) and evangelical Christianity (a world view held dearly by many US students). Sharon Crowley seems to be making a similar argument in her 2006 book, *Toward a civil discourse: Rhetoric and fundamentalism*, though I have just started reading it. This is an intriguing idea for me and I think it needs further systematic empirical, as well as theoretical, explication and documentation.
5. There is a verse in the Bible that captures the idea that Carter seems to be articulating, about the benefits for her students of experiencing a “pedagogy of rhetorical dexterity”:
I Peter 3:15, but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always [being] ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence (from the New American Standard Bible).
This was a Biblical text that evangelical philosopher Jay Wood made central to the introductory philosophy course that I took with him while a student at Wheaton College.
6. In the spirit of recognizing evangelical students’ “rich discursive practices” (introduced by a previous post), I would also suggest that the textual interpretation that is so prized in evangelical circles could – following Brandt – *accumulate* for a student, say an English major or a scholar-in-training in English studies, who has deep exegetical and interpretive practices already quite deeply in place. I think what Shannon Carter does in this essay is to re-frame these ways with words as potential resources to draw upon, when participating in academic discourse(s).
I look forward to moving further into this conversation about religion, rhetoric, and composition instruction.
Mary Juzwik
Assistant Professor of Language and Literacy
Department of Teacher Education
Michigan State University
viewtopic…
John…
âûâîç ìóñîðà êîíòåéíåðîì…
òðàíñïîðòíûå óñëóãè…
Presto Knife Electric Sharpener…
Living Inside the Bible BeltShannon CarterWhen evangelical Christian students enter the academy they […]…
Black Finish Metal Bunk Bed W Futon Desk Chair Cd Rack…
Living Inside the Bible BeltShannon CarterWhen evangelical Christian students enter the academy they […]…
igogogo…
igogogo…
Please log in to post a comment.
