Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts

Friday, May 31, 2019

Teaching American History, Trusting Jesus

This is a "final reflections" email I sent to all my students after the conclusion of the semester. I know at least three (out of 65) actually read it, so I'll call that a teaching victory.


All,

This is the time of year I reflect on my teaching and think about, you know, the stuff I wish I'd done differently. So I'm gonna do that, and you're gonna read it. (Just kidding. You can go ahead and click that little trash can icon up there if you'd like.)

My major concerns always have to do with whether I've really upheld goodness, truth, and beauty for you to pursue. I'm not sure.

And part of the problem is that I simultaneously believe three things that are at least in tension with each other and may in fact be mutually exclusive:
  1. The "American experiment in self-government" is rooted in some fundamentally good, true, and beautiful insights that are worth preserving and upholding.
  2. Slavery and other forms of exploitation are inextricably interwoven into American history, such that it is hard to argue that there is any part of American history that hasn't been in some way affected.
  3. And then a third, sort of out-there one: the Western liberal (using the term broadly) Enlightenment-based ideal of a value-neutral, religious-commitment-free space (on which the American experiment is based) is a lie. There are no religiously neutral spaces; the secular state is not a neutral arbiter of religion but is itself a combatant (and a dominantly successful one) in religious conflict. (See the attached argument from William Cavanaugh--come for the invigorating take on the falsely named "Wars of Religion"; stick around for the part where he compares American government to a mafia protection racket.)
My overriding conviction always is that the Church -- which, as St. Paul repeatedly says, is the Body of Christ -- is the one community that should "relativize" all others. That is, all other loves find their rightful place and expression as they are brought into relation with Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus, all loves inevitably become disordered, distorted, and destructive. Anything you pursue to give your lives meaning, purpose, and happiness apart from Jesus will eventually crumble into ash.

So your duty as Americans is indeed to love your country, just as you should love your family and friends. The problem is never -- could never be -- too much love. But it can be disordered love. Or it can be hatred or selfishness falsely masked as love. (That's why "love is love" can only mean something if you know what "love" actually is...) So your overriding duty is to find what loving America looks like when it's brought into relation with the fundamental commandment to love Jesus.

And I should say that bringing things into relation with Jesus is not a matter of hard things becoming easy. The whole "God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life" line is true, so long as we remember that that "wonderful plan" might look quite a bit different than the wonderful plan we have for our own lives. Ten of the twelve disciples were martyred, after all.

The Christian life is cross-shaped. Jesus invites you into a real death to self, but it's through that dying to self that you find life -- and that, actually, you find yourself. The Collect for the Monday of Holy Week puts it well:

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And that's the promise. You will suffer in this life, one way or another. Walking in the way of the cross means uniting your sufferings to Christ, who will never leave you nor forsake you (Heb. 13:5), so that when you suffer, you do so with hope and even, dare I say, joy (1 Thes. 4:13-18).

Best,
Fr. Perkins

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Teaching History, Confronting Suffering (Part 2 of 2)

Read Part 1 here.

Sometimes God tells you why you’re suffering or have suffered. He parts the clouds and speaks. That’s certainly possible, and I believe that it happens.

I believe, too, that God’s grace can work itself out in suffering and violence. Flannery O’Connor, more than anyone or anything else, has expanded my sense of how God’s grace operates amidst evil. In certain ways her stories have operated as a kind of commentary on Biblical violence for me, causing me to reconsider what God is up to in stories I have known since earliest childhood. In fact, there are some times when I want to say to her, “No, Flannery, God cannot work in this. This is too much.” I won’t get into it because it’s frankly too difficult to discuss, but there’s a moment at the end of one of her stories where the devil rapes a boy, and God ends up using that as a means of grace. I am deeply uncomfortable with that. But then I am equally uncomfortable saying, “No, God cannot come into this situation. It’s too gritty and nasty for him.” We serve a God, after all, who has entered into human wickedness and fully experienced its consequences.

Although I firmly believe that God works through suffering and evil, and I know that he sometimes condescends to reveal why we suffer, I remain skeptical of attempts to piece out concrete and digestible explanations for suffering. I am hesitant to do it with my own suffering, and I absolutely refuse to do it with the suffering of others. O’Connor can do it in a story with fictional characters, where she is essentially assuming the omniscience of God, but I would feel an impulse to slap anyone who decided to do the same with an abuse victim. The prophets can do so because God has divinely revealed his will to them, but I am very skeptical when people try to explain God’s prophetic purpose in, say, the First World War.

Sunday, August 19, 2012

Teaching History, Confronting Suffering (Part 1 of 2)

I have never prayed for patience. Scripture says that suffering produces patience, so praying for patience is praying for suffering, and I’ll do without patience if it means I get to do without suffering. Nevertheless, despite studiously avoiding such a prayer, I found myself in the midst of a good deal of suffering this year. In the introduction to The Gospel According to Job, Mike Mason describes my situation fairly well:
A few years ago I went through a difficult time. Never mind what the problem was. It was nothing compared to the trials of Job. In fact, it was nothing at all compared to the sufferings of many of my neighbors right there on the quiet street where I lived. But pain is pain, and suffice it to say that my pain was enough to drive me to my knees, totally defeated, half-crazy at times, and crying out for relief. Month after month the battles raged on, thick, dark, agonizing. I prayed, but somehow prayer did not “work.” Usually nothing at all worked, except lying low and gritting my teeth until, for reasons entirely obscure to me, the straightjacket of oppression began to loosen a little—at least enough for me to get on with my life for another day or so before the screws tightened again. What else could I do? How was I to fight this? In retrospect I can see that a large part of my anguish was rooted in the fact that there really was nothing I could do to control what was happening to me. I was absolutely helpless, and it is this, perhaps, that is the soul of suffering, this terrifying impotence. It is a little taste of the final and most terrifying impotence of all, which is death.
I have thought about Job and his endurance, and as my own little drama went on, I wondered if God wasn’t producing patience in me despite my reluctance. As if to confirm this, it seemed that everything I read—in Scripture and elsewhere—directly spoke of waiting on the Lord. I felt as though I were in my own personal Lenten or Advent season. And so I waited, and I hoped that my season of waiting would lead to an Easter or Christmas.

Thursday, March 1, 2012

When my students borrow a pencil or pen, I make them leave me a shoe in exchange. It's pretty hard to forget your shoes, although just yesterday one of my students did just that.

On Tuesday I gave out tests to the poor little darlings. I didn't require a shoe that day. It seems a bit cruel to make a child take a test without one of their shoes.

I lost more pencils and pens that day than I did in the whole seven weeks preceding it.