Category: For Chaplains in Higher Ed.

I felt I was watching an exercise in futility.

In an auditorium that seats about 400, 40 students were gathered, maybe 50, and a handful of faculty and staff.  An open meeting had been called to discuss racial tension on campus.  An associate dean for diversity affairs presided at a lectern somewhere way down at the bottom of the bowl, and students lined up at a microphone stand in one of the aisles to speak their hearts out.

Their speeches were articulate, emotional to the point of choking off their words, disrobing their hurt before each other in this mixed gathering of whites and students of color (mostly students of color), males and females (mostly female students).  They enumerated graphically the personal violations that occurred every day, the “microaggressions” and the shunnings in dorms and eating halls.

A parent could not have endured this picture of their children in such pain had they been present.  We adults in the room privately cringed and yet had to project an air of confidence that the community could remedy this travesty of 21st century academia.  Ideas about obligatory orientation week workshops and  major speakers series were lofted into the vacant ceiling.

The futility lay in the homogeneity of the audience–as students sadly complained, it was a gathering of the aggrieved.  These who represented the source of the pain were not present.  It was a case, as usual at such events, of speaking to the choir.  Where were all those blithely ignorant of their missteps and those who stepped slyly on the fringes of black students’ aspirations?  It was not diverse in the one particular way it needed to be.

How could the issue be posed to raise a truly diverse audience?  The presumption of guilt kept the guilty away.  A white participant, I felt guilty and couldn’t find my place to speak.  As the Director of Religious Life, I might be expected to bring a message of hope, but I decided they didn’t need to hear from a representative (broadly speaking) of the problem.  It was their night.

In fact, the students succeeded in ministering to each other.  It was a solidarity event, therapeutic and cathartic.  They left to face another day closer to each other than before.  I left asking myself whether, for all my commitment to civil rights over the decades, it amounted to very much that night.  It was time for me to fill in some blanks.

That was  all before Michael Brown and Ferguson and Black Lives Matter.  Now such campus meetings have much more attendance and effect.  Race is a community issue today as it hadn’t been before.  But I am looking for signs that the white part of campus is organizing to do our own homework on the subject of our privilege in this society, so that we can be present in the public discussions as more informed, willing, and courageous participants.

If there is any way to talk about race in a public forum, it could help if whites were to go back and (re)read, qs I just did this week, one of the first novels in America to record the black experience here, Native Son, a blockbuster by Richard Wright (1940), and to go on reading from there!

Where do such conversations stand on your campus?  Are white students and faculty doing their homework, preparatory to joining in the national dialogue?  What are you reading, and who are you reading it with?

 

Dialogue is the new watchword of our time.  To promote understanding.  To advance education.  To defuse conflict.  To co-exist.

What is the chaplains’ role in fostering dialogue on campus?  What can we as religious leaders on campus do to promote dialogue?

Can we be the convener? the sponsor?  the facilitator?  What would that take?

Leading dialogue presupposes have some creds.  It presupposes being known, and trusted.  It means having a public face, with a public voice, having made a public identity.

That means having made it into the public discourse of the community.  What means have we employed to this end?  How is a public identity established?

Write.  Make your thoughts and reactions to the events on campus known.  And to national events.  Once upon a time, that meant writing a column in the student newspaper.  Today, that might mean to blog, to do a Facebook page, to Tweet.  But the trouble with social media is that it depends on developing a following and that depends on a certain cheekiness and quotability.  Do we have those skills?  Or chuzpah?

Get invited to speak.  Every semester there are panels on public issues.  Do we have contacts on the faculty who would turn to us when a symposium on “Black Lives Matter” takes place?  Or when a panel on DACA students gets put together?

Host.  Create a teach-in.  Most important: be the lead speaker.

Chaplains must take steps to become primary resources, rather than just the supporting cast.

 

 

 

Literacy in civics; literacy about history; literacy of belles-letres.  All of these have won attention in public and higher education lately.  Add to these a call now for religious literacy.  Current events demands it, and educational leaders have found funding for it.

Harvard Divinity School, the American Academy of Religion, the Association of American Colleges and Universities have taken up the challenge laid down by Stephen Prothero in his 2007 book, “Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, and Doesn’t.”  It’s a full-court press.

How do they propose to remedy the widespread ignorance on really basic kinds of information that Prothero documents (names of any Bible characters; the name of Islam’s holy book; names of world religions; the founder of Buddhism, etc.)?

But I might ask, does just knowing the facts about any given religion constitute knowledge that matters–matters to the seeking individual, matters for the peace of the world?

Where is the reference to sacred texts?  Where is the method for engaging with the sacred texts?  Prothero’s “dictionary of religious literacy” at the back of the book runs to over 100 pages and is comprehensive, if cursory.  Admittedly, nobody would take this for his ultimate standard of literacy; it is intended as a fund of basic information.  But what if, in addition to information, there were selections from the sacred texts available with brief introductions?

True, religious texts are challenging, conveyed in ancient rhetoric as they are.  But they are the foundation upon which religions stand, without which there remains a literacy gap.  College chaplains can fill that gap if they get creative about how to get those texts off the written page and onto a public, artistic, stage.

As the great hymn proclaims:

New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth.  –James Russell Lowell.

When Christian denominations began to bump into each other more, college chaplains learned to be ecumenical.  When religions began to bump into each other more, college chaplains learned how to be inter-faith, then inter-religious.  Chaplains who direct offices of Religious Life ensure openness to all faiths; denominational chaplains have learned to co-exist closely with all faiths.

A new learning is in order, given the occasion of growing religious illiteracy in a world where religions now bump into each other sometimes violently.  What role can college chaplains play?

Chaplains can go back to teaching their traditions.  If they take this up, it will have to be without the former doctrinal methods.  It will have to be with a pedagogy that enables students to learn from each other by grappling with the sacred texts, themselves.

How can they do this?  By asking them to perform a text, or some portion thereof.  Take a verse, take it from the page to the stage–in song, in poetry, in mime, in drama.  See how they learn!

 

Here are the trends that tell me campus chaplains have to seize a public stage soon or wither completely away:

• religious chaplaincies have over the last fifty years gradually been moved away from the central consciousness of campus life to the periphery;

• in the course of which, religious chaplaincies have come to emphasize pastoral care, that is, ministry in the private sphere;

• faculty in higher education seem less sure than ever about the college’s stake in students’ personal development;

• and administrators making budget decisions today find that meeting the now widely diversified religious needs of students are expensive and ineffective to them;

• finally, the steeply declining religion department enrolments mean that a gap has opened in the means available to raise religious literacy on campus.

Hence, chaplains, it’s time to go public with your culture work.

I see college chaplains needing to fulfill the role of “culture workers,” in Paolo Freire’s terminology. You are, after all, the custodians of great traditions and our society badly needs you to function as such. 

How?  By giving students the platform, the budget and the permission to engage first-hand with the great issues and the primary texts, to articulate issues or to perform texts.  Let them open up a public space that did not exist before, not around the subject of religion anyway. 

It is what Hannah Arendt called for in celebrating the public arena (The Human Condition, 1958).  It is what Parker Palmer called for when he wrote about encountering difference in others (The Company of Strangers, 1983).  It is what Andrew Delbanco saw when he pointed out the link between religion, properly defined, and democracy (College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, 2002).  It is what Martha Nussbaum meant by calling higher education back to some acknowledgement of soul (Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, 2010).  It is what campus administrators call for when they promote civic engagement.  

But much as we have longed for the public experience, we nevertheless find it elusive.  So here is exactly the ministry that I see awaiting adoption by the religious chaplains: give students the reins.

 

Where is public space to be found?  College students (really, all of us) live in an ocean of private interaction.  We swim from one personal pool to another trying to get into one.  Those already in a pool are trying to keep “unacceptables” out.  Such pools are known as cliques or peer or affinity or identity groups where people live under the judgment of “cool,” making college either a very happy or very lonely place for us, depending on our social acceptability.  Such is the tyranny of the social that we long for someplace else to be truly ourselves.  Hidden in plain sight are opportunities for authentic speech called public events or occasions.  But who would ever have thought that a public arena serves that purpose?  If only we could find one and try it out!  They are missing on campus.