universities
- They want to know why I continue to be a member of a church in an age when fewer and fewer people find themselves connected to traditional houses of worship or faith communities. (I have written about this in a few places, but you might like what I have written about prayer.)
- They wonder why I am still a professor in a small liberal arts college at a time when students seem disengaged, and when colleges are threatened by political headwinds, rising costs, apparent diminishing returns, and by our own decisions that weaken public opinion against us. (You can see a bit more of what I’ve written about the liberal arts here and here.
- And they wonder why I continue to work towards environmental sustainability in a place that doesn’t seem to value the environment, and where sustainability is viewed as a harmless hobby at best and a threat to business and freedom at worst. (My work focuses on the environmental humanities, and I’ve done a good deal of work in sustainability with my university, with my city, with our local zoo and aquarium, and internationally with organizations like IBM. You might also like this article I wrote about insects on Medium, but be forewarned that it is paywalled.)
- When it comes to faith, I often find others' stories more interesting than my own, and I’m glad to meet others who are seeking the way ahead with humble curiosity even if we use different words to talk about what we’re seeking and what we’re finding. So my calling is not to a building, or to a religion; rather, it feels like a consistent calling to love God and to love my neighbor as myself.
- When it comes to teaching, I have taught every age from pre-schoolers to older graduate students. I love it all. For now, I’m a tenured professor at the highest rank available to me. It took a lot of work to get here, and positions like mine are the envy of graduate students everywhere. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more and more schools eliminate tenure and reduce jobs like mine to some version of the gig economy (these things are already happening steadily around the world.) So if I were to leave this job, I’d be leaving something I probably would never find again. But I don’t feel the calling to comfortable tenure so strongly as I do feel the calling to meaningful teaching that helps others to flourish. So my calling seems always to tug me beyond my faculty office and my assigned classrooms.
- And when it comes to environmental sustainability, I often find myself scratching my head. Why wouldn’t we want to be not just good neighbors but also good ancestors? Why wouldn’t we want to pursue solutions that help people and the planet to thrive while also making sure we all flourish economically? I get it: so many of the solutions offered by environmentally-minded people threaten to cost us more in taxes, or they threaten particular practices or certain sectors of the economy. If someone came for my job or my hard-earned savings, I’d bristle as well. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can make good use of the water we have AND we can make sure those who live downstream have clean water too. We can make good use of our soil without depleting it, and we can do it in a way that boosts profits. Etc. Here my callings all seem to come together: I feel called to help my neighbors — all of my neighbors — flourish, and to love them as myself. And to include as neighbors everything that lives, and everyone who might inherit this earth from me. I’d like my great-great-grandchildren whom I will likely never meet to look back on my life with gratitude.
∞
Why Are You Still Here?
Should you be here? (I like roads like this one.)
Like my previous post, this one begins with a question others ask me fairly often:
“Why are you still here?”
Thankfully, when I hear this question people generally aren’t asking me to leave. Rather, they’re asking why I stay. And they’re usually asking about one of three things:
I have answers for each of these, and they’re all important. My faith matters to me. So does my community, and so does the environment my community inhabits. I want my neighbors to thrive, and that means I want them to live in a place that fosters health for the whole person: physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, and economic. And my idea of “neighbor” is fairly expansive, and it includes all those whose lives are connected to my own, including the lives of other species. Jesus once pointed out that not even a sparrow can fall to the ground without God noticing it. If the sparrows matter to God, then I’d like them to matter to me.
In other words, for me, these three questions people ask me are all related to one another.
I think they’re all also related to my vocation, and to my sense of calling. In some way I feel called to and by God; I feel like teaching is my vocation; and I feel called to be a good steward of all Creation.
Those “callings” are different, but they all also feel like “deep calling unto deep.” I can’t explain them, and I don’t mean to say they’re others' callings as well. But they’re part of who I am, as far as I can tell.
One thing all those callings have in common is that they all seem to be growing:
So my best answer to this question “Why are you still here?” is this: for now, I feel called to be here.
Of course, like I said, my callings all seem to grow.
It may be that soon I’ll find a better way to answer this triple calling I feel, and if so, I hope I won’t hesitate to leave tenure and comfort and my favorite ideas when I find better ones.
Because I believe we are all in this life together, and, as some of my favorite authors have said, “all flourishing is mutual.”
∞
We can begin by directing more funding to universities. We need bright engineers who have the freedom and funds to investigate how to make more efficient solar and wind energy.
We also need bright students in the humanities who will help us form the best policies to make sure we use our technology well. After all, a democracy can live without engineers, but it cannot survive long without reporters, teachers, and lawyers.
We know that money spent on education pays a perpetual dividend to both the person educated and her whole community.
We can also encourage the creation of new and important prizes. Why should we not have more prizes like the Nobel Prizes? And why shouldn't such a proud and wealthy nation fund some of those prizes? You've got the ear of the world for a little while longer. Use that opportunity well, and urge us to put our private funds into prizes for people who advance the causes that matter most to humanity: growing good food, creating and preserving clean water, protecting the species God told us to care for, healing the sick, liberating captives, and making us better producers and consumers of energy.
I am grateful for people who willingly take on the burdens of public office. I don't imagine it is easy. You remain in my prayers.
David
Hope And The Future: An Open Letter To The President
Dear President Obama,
I know you've got a lot on your mind right now, and I don't envy you the burdens of your office. I pray for you often, asking God to give you the wisdom to make good decisions and the strength to carry them out.
I have two requests for you today. The first is, please don't give up on hope. In your first campaign you spoke about hope a lot, and I think you know that meant a lot to people everywhere. We all want hope, especially hope that we feel we can believe in. We will often settle for unreasonable hopes, but we prefer hopes that seem grounded in possibility rather than in wild fantasy. For a while there you sounded like you had both hope and reason for hope. When I think about the office you occupy, I imagine there's a lot that works to rein hope in, to tame hope and to break it. You start out with big ideals, and then everyone reminds you that limited resources will be made to seem even scarcer by partisan quarrels until there's nothing left to spend on dreams. But let me tell you this: we need you to make lots of small decisions, but we also need some big dreams, some reasonable hopes. We need someone who will climb the steps to the bully pulpit and preach a sermon that reminds us of "the better angels of our nature." Don't just make the little decisions; remind us of the great hopes that have lived in our nation.
The second request is related to the first: I'd like you to help us to nurture the reasonable hope that we can find new ways of making energy. There are powerful sermons being preached about building more oil and tar sand pipelines so that the old ways can be maintained. But those are sermons without hope, the sermons of a creed doomed to perish in fire and smoke of its own burning, the platitudes born of a faith in a limited and dwindling resource. They are the cynical homilies of those who pass the collection plate and who think the worst thing they can lose is our regular tithing to the god of petroleum.
We need a reformation in that way of thinking.
Because national security is not just about defending ourselves with bullets and bombs, and it's not just about making sure we have enough oil. In the long run, national security has to mean that we have taken good care of the land, so that it is still worth inhabiting. That, in turn, means we have nurtured our hearts and minds and cultivated our virtue. What, after all, does it profit a nation to gain the world and lose its soul? We are a nation of innovators, not just custodians of the status quo. We began as an experiment, and it is in experimentation and new thinking that our hope now lies.
I know you've got a lot on your mind right now, and I don't envy you the burdens of your office. I pray for you often, asking God to give you the wisdom to make good decisions and the strength to carry them out.
I have two requests for you today. The first is, please don't give up on hope. In your first campaign you spoke about hope a lot, and I think you know that meant a lot to people everywhere. We all want hope, especially hope that we feel we can believe in. We will often settle for unreasonable hopes, but we prefer hopes that seem grounded in possibility rather than in wild fantasy. For a while there you sounded like you had both hope and reason for hope. When I think about the office you occupy, I imagine there's a lot that works to rein hope in, to tame hope and to break it. You start out with big ideals, and then everyone reminds you that limited resources will be made to seem even scarcer by partisan quarrels until there's nothing left to spend on dreams. But let me tell you this: we need you to make lots of small decisions, but we also need some big dreams, some reasonable hopes. We need someone who will climb the steps to the bully pulpit and preach a sermon that reminds us of "the better angels of our nature." Don't just make the little decisions; remind us of the great hopes that have lived in our nation.The second request is related to the first: I'd like you to help us to nurture the reasonable hope that we can find new ways of making energy. There are powerful sermons being preached about building more oil and tar sand pipelines so that the old ways can be maintained. But those are sermons without hope, the sermons of a creed doomed to perish in fire and smoke of its own burning, the platitudes born of a faith in a limited and dwindling resource. They are the cynical homilies of those who pass the collection plate and who think the worst thing they can lose is our regular tithing to the god of petroleum.
We need a reformation in that way of thinking.
Because national security is not just about defending ourselves with bullets and bombs, and it's not just about making sure we have enough oil. In the long run, national security has to mean that we have taken good care of the land, so that it is still worth inhabiting. That, in turn, means we have nurtured our hearts and minds and cultivated our virtue. What, after all, does it profit a nation to gain the world and lose its soul? We are a nation of innovators, not just custodians of the status quo. We began as an experiment, and it is in experimentation and new thinking that our hope now lies.
We can begin by directing more funding to universities. We need bright engineers who have the freedom and funds to investigate how to make more efficient solar and wind energy.
We also need bright students in the humanities who will help us form the best policies to make sure we use our technology well. After all, a democracy can live without engineers, but it cannot survive long without reporters, teachers, and lawyers.
We know that money spent on education pays a perpetual dividend to both the person educated and her whole community.
We can also encourage the creation of new and important prizes. Why should we not have more prizes like the Nobel Prizes? And why shouldn't such a proud and wealthy nation fund some of those prizes? You've got the ear of the world for a little while longer. Use that opportunity well, and urge us to put our private funds into prizes for people who advance the causes that matter most to humanity: growing good food, creating and preserving clean water, protecting the species God told us to care for, healing the sick, liberating captives, and making us better producers and consumers of energy.
I am grateful for people who willingly take on the burdens of public office. I don't imagine it is easy. You remain in my prayers.
David
∞
"Don't Be Afraid To Hire Someone Better Than You."
My latest article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, about the best hiring advice I've ever received.
∞
Mersenne, Education, and Intellectual "Property"
French cleric Marin Mersenne was the academic journal of his day. I have heard it said that in the seventeenth century the saying was "If you want to tell Europe, tell Mersenne."
Hobbes mentions Mersenne several times in his verse autobiography - high praise for a Roman Catholic cleric from someone whose antipathy for the Roman church and its philosophy was both deep and wide. But when Hobbes needed friends during his exile in France, Mersenne was glad to be one of those friends. Mersenne was a friend to all who were engaged in research. He was a living example of that idea of Justin Martyr's that Christians need not fear any books at all, since all the truth they contain belongs to the God who made and sustains it.
He was a friend to Galileo, and he passed Galileo's research on the regular oscillation of pendula along to Huygens in Holland, since he knew Huygens was trying to invent a more regular way of keeping time, leading to the invention of the pendulum clock. He corresponded with Pascal, Gassendi, and Descartes, and what he learned from one he shared with others who could use it.
In his Carnage and Culture, Victor Davis Hanson claims that one of the reasons for technological flourishing in the west is that western cultures treat knowledge as property that can be sold in the marketplace. I can't say whether Hanson's causal inference is correct, but his observation about intellectual "property" is acute.
But alongside it we should add another observation, namely that universities have long been places where ideas are exchanged freely. Yes, students pay tuition, but we also give free public lectures, allow free or inexpensive auditing, etc. What is being sold in the university is not the information but the cost of maintaining a place of intentional colloquy and pedagogy. We aren't selling ideas to students; we are allowing them to join us in the maintenance of a vital institution, and as members of that institution they participate in its life and share in its learning.
Mersenne was not a merchant of ideas but their curator, a steward ushering them to the places they were most needed. He was a gardener who made very few original contributions but who shared the best cultivars he could find with others in whose gardens they could flourish. His approach to knowledge was like that of the church in its earliest years, where "no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common" and goods were "distributed to each as they had need."
Mersenne's model is relevant to our contemporary conversations about the meaning and cost of an education, the value of universities, and the publication of scientific journals. Some money will be needed to maintain these institutions, but we should resist reducing them to market-based enterprises, or valuing their contributions in terms of revenues. There is also the shared work of curiosity, and of desiring to see our neighbors, and their ideas, flourish.
Hobbes mentions Mersenne several times in his verse autobiography - high praise for a Roman Catholic cleric from someone whose antipathy for the Roman church and its philosophy was both deep and wide. But when Hobbes needed friends during his exile in France, Mersenne was glad to be one of those friends. Mersenne was a friend to all who were engaged in research. He was a living example of that idea of Justin Martyr's that Christians need not fear any books at all, since all the truth they contain belongs to the God who made and sustains it.
He was a friend to Galileo, and he passed Galileo's research on the regular oscillation of pendula along to Huygens in Holland, since he knew Huygens was trying to invent a more regular way of keeping time, leading to the invention of the pendulum clock. He corresponded with Pascal, Gassendi, and Descartes, and what he learned from one he shared with others who could use it.
In his Carnage and Culture, Victor Davis Hanson claims that one of the reasons for technological flourishing in the west is that western cultures treat knowledge as property that can be sold in the marketplace. I can't say whether Hanson's causal inference is correct, but his observation about intellectual "property" is acute.
But alongside it we should add another observation, namely that universities have long been places where ideas are exchanged freely. Yes, students pay tuition, but we also give free public lectures, allow free or inexpensive auditing, etc. What is being sold in the university is not the information but the cost of maintaining a place of intentional colloquy and pedagogy. We aren't selling ideas to students; we are allowing them to join us in the maintenance of a vital institution, and as members of that institution they participate in its life and share in its learning.
Mersenne was not a merchant of ideas but their curator, a steward ushering them to the places they were most needed. He was a gardener who made very few original contributions but who shared the best cultivars he could find with others in whose gardens they could flourish. His approach to knowledge was like that of the church in its earliest years, where "no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common" and goods were "distributed to each as they had need."
Mersenne's model is relevant to our contemporary conversations about the meaning and cost of an education, the value of universities, and the publication of scientific journals. Some money will be needed to maintain these institutions, but we should resist reducing them to market-based enterprises, or valuing their contributions in terms of revenues. There is also the shared work of curiosity, and of desiring to see our neighbors, and their ideas, flourish.