Religion and Composition, 1992-2017
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Twenty-Five Years of Faith in Writing: Religion and Composition, 1992-2017 Paul Lynch and Matthew Miller St. Louis University Present Tense, Vol. 6, Issue 2, 2017. http://www.presenttensejournal.org | [email protected] Twenty-Five Years of Faith in Writing: Religion and Composition, 1992-2017 Paul Lynch and Matthew Miller In her (in)famous essay “Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing” (1992), Maxine Hairston complained that composition’s notion of diversity was distorted by a particular political agenda. In the name of “difference,” composition instructors were actually stifling the real diversity that students themselves brought to the classroom: “They are our greatest multicultural resources [ . ] authentic, rich, and truly diverse” (190). Central among these authentic riches, wrote Hairston, was religion: It’s worth noting here that religion plays an important role in the lives of many of our students—and many of us, I’m sure—but it’s a dimension almost never mentioned by those who talk about cultural diversity and difference. In most classrooms in which there is an obvious political agenda, students–even graduate students–are very reluctant to reveal their religious beliefs, sensing they may get a hostile reception. (191) As evidence for her claim, Hairston pointed to David Bleich (1990), who asserted that “religious values collaborate with the ideology of individualism and with sexism to censor the full capability of what people can say and write” (168). Bleich is hardly the only scholar to question the critical and inventive capacities of religious students. Chris Anson once described “dualistic” writers–those prone to seek simplistic, black-or-white answers–as those who “mimic the established dogmas which, etched in stone by Authority [sic], are incontrovertible truths to be memorized like so many lines of sacred text” (335). Though Anson does not insist religious students will perforce think dualistically, his language suggests a causal connection. More recently, Keith Gilyard has written, “I doubt that high- volume creativity is going to flow from fundamentalist or evangelical students. Their religiosity tends not to be of the prophetic, social ameliorative type but the conservative, George W. Bush type” (58). And in her multiple award-winning Toward a Civil Discourse, Sharon Crowley describes a public sphere in which the burden of civil exchange falls on “postmoderns, liberals, and other skeptics [who] can more easily abandon portions of their belief systems than can apocalypticists” (196). Whether and how postmoderns, liberals, and other skeptics cling to their own set of non-negotiable beliefs is a question left unanswered. These comments suggest that Hairston was right to worry that openly religious students might get a hostile reception in the composition classroom.1 Yet the last twenty-five years of research also suggest that Hairston was wrong. Although there is evidence that composition teachers have not always welcomed the assertion of religious values in their classrooms, the scholarship also reveals widespread sensitivity and self-critical awareness. Far from treating religious students with the contempt Hairston predicted, composition instructors have usually taken these encounters as opportunities to interrogate their own assumptions. Bleich 1 is also both right and wrong. Though students’ religiosity does sometimes clash with the norms of academic inquiry, not all religious students find themselves constrained by their faith. Since these dueling assertions were made twenty-five years ago, the field has produced a robust literature on students’ religious beliefs and experiences. The edited collections alone— leaving aside the wealth of journal articles—suggest that composition scholars recognize the important role religion plays in the lives of many of our students–and many of us. The last few years have seen three major works—Jewish Rhetorics: History, Theory, and Practice (2014), Renovating Rhetoric in Christian Tradition (2014) and Mapping Christian Rhetorics (2015)—that now stand alongside several others, including The Spiritual Side of Writing (1997), The Academy and the Possibility of Belief (2000), Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry (2001), Negotiating Religious Faith in the Composition Classroom (2005), and Judaic Perspectives in Rhetoric and Composition (2008). This explosion of research seems to confirm Stanley Fish’s 2005 claim that religion is poised to join, if not replace, race, class, and gender as the central interests of humanistic inquiry. In a seeming echo of Hairston, Fish reminded his readers that, whatever our own interests or beliefs, we should not construe religious students “as quaintly pre- modern or as the needy recipients of our saving (an ironic word) wisdom.” Observing burgeoning interest in religion, Fish asked whether academics were ready for it: “We had better be, because that is now where the action is.” As our bibliography of roughly 200 items reveals, composition has long been readying itself for an encounter with religion. Though religious discourse has presented many challenges to our field’s pedagogical and civic projects, the majority of scholars have refused to dismiss religious concerns and attitudes as mere impediments. Instead, our religious encounters have led to productive rethinking of dominant attitudes and familiar assumptions. More recently, this inquiry has evolved to see religion as a call and a resource for rhetorical invention. The purpose of this essay is to narrate that story, which over the last quarter-century has evolved from dismayed puzzlement to enthusiastic engagement. Our purpose in assembling this bibliography, meanwhile, has been to make those resources as available as possible for teachers and scholars in composition. We hope that this work will be useful for a variety of audiences: established scholars furthering their research agendas, emerging scholars embarking on new projects, and teachers preparing both graduate and undergraduate courses. The Figure of the Religious Student in Composition Hairston’s implied vision of the religious student—reluctant to reveal religious beliefs sensing a hostile reception—would seem at first glance to be belied by the literature. Again and again, compositionists recount stories of religious students who vociferously insist on fidelity to their beliefs, whether or not those beliefs clash with academic expectations. Perhaps the 2 most infamous of these is “Keith,” a Mormon student whose opposition to gay adoption drove Douglas Downs to write the following comment: “Congratulations! You’ve just written the most indoctrinated, close-minded, uncritical, simplistically reasoned paper I’ve ever read!” (39). As Downs admirably admits, the response doesn’t really get better from there. Although we’re not prepared to assert that this is the most famous teacher comment in all of composition, it certainly is the most famous comment in composition scholarship on religion. The frequency with which it is cited suggests the frequency with which our encounters with religious students have felt confrontational. The story of the problematic religious student is told again and again: “the aggressive, usually white, usually male student who creates a disagreeable atmosphere with simplistic references to the Bible and judgmental condemnation of others” (Powers 67). Peter Powers’s description captures the image of a student who has gone by many names in our field: Keith, Clifford, Luke, Thomas, Austin, among others. These students have repeatedly occasioned a feeling described by Juanita Smart: “I reach for the last essay from my Writing About Literature course. But when I read the title, ‘Frankenstein or Jesus Christ?’ my stomach tightens and my feet shift uneasily underneath the chair” (11). Smart reflects on the ways in which discourses, whether religious “or” academic, can construct monsters. But such divisions are not sustainable, even in the paper on Frankenstein and Jesus Christ: “Sandwiched within the borderlines of my student’s writing I discern that portentous prodigality—where the culture’s intolerables, monsters and messiahs, share a mutuality as sacred as it is profane” (18). Vander Lei’s “Where the Wild Things Are” would later pick up on this thread, employing Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s monster theory, along with James Gee’s idea of “figured worlds,” to understand the ways in which religious monsters blunder past the carefully mapped borders of our disciplinary area. Like Smart, Vander Lei insists that the blundering is mutual: academia, supposedly reasoned and dispassionate, prefigures religious discourse as intrusive and disruptive. “Monsters,” Cohen reminds us, “are our children” (qtd. in Vander Lei 82). Heather Thomson-Bunn has also critiqued the literature’s student-as-synecdoche problem (“Empirical” 125). Her empirical studies (2015, 2017) are beginning to move our research in new directions. In spite of the sometimes blinkered view observed by the scholars, the field has largely resisted the temptation to join Richard Rorty in seeing the appeal to religion as a “conversation-stopper.” Instead, we have taken our encounters with religious students as opportunities to reflect on our own commitments to “complexity, proof, detachment, irony,” a list Chris Anderson articulated in his oft-cited “Description of Embarrassment” (12). That short article helped establish the early paradigm for our encounter with religion, a paradigm in which scholars turned their habits of critical thinking