Words

My life is filled with words. When I was training to be a minister, a close friend and mentor told me that ministry is done almost entirely through words: preaching, writing, reading, studying, and talking with people—these are the main things a pastor/priest does. Now, as an aspiring academic, I find the situation really isn't too different. Teaching, research, and writing all have to do with putting thoughts into verbal form.


What's more, as a teacher and scholar (and to a lesser degree, when I was in ministry), I'm utterly responsible for my words. Being in the humanities, people will frequently challenge my use of a particular word or phrase, and entire scholarly arguments can be built upon what a single word means. So, not without reason have I become a little anxious about what I write and say. 


The result is that I am extremely self-conscious about any sort of verbal communication I allow to get out from my mind to anyone else. It causes me no small anxiety to publish an essay, or read a paper at a conference, or give a lecture. 


It might surprise you, then, that I have a blog at all. If I get worked up about other people hearing my thoughts, then why, dear reader, would I want to let you read them?

Monothetic and Synthetic Thinking

Recently, I read an essay by Wendell Berry entitled "The Two Minds" (in The Citizenship Papers, Counterpoint Publishers, 2004). In it, he describes two mindsets that exist in our world: the Rational Mind and the Sympathetic Mind. I won't rehearse the entirety of his argument here, but he essentially says two things:  First, the Rational Mind tries to break things down to simple problems and provides simple solutions that are widely applicable—and I think he means "simple" as "not many sided" more than "simplistic" or "facile." The Sympathetic Mind, on the other hand, recognizes complexity of systems in a particular place, and considers solutions that account for this complexity in that place, but which may not work elsewhere. The second thing he says is this: the Rational Mind is the dominant mind of politicians, businesspeople, and academics; the Sympathetic Mind is most fully realized in farmers and participants in local, regional economies.


The essay is, not unexpectedly, both jarring and encouraging. Berry characteristically points out many of the ways in which our culture continues hurtling toward its own demise, all for the sake of money or comfort or any other vice you can name. More importantly, he shows how the intellectual and social leaders of our society—and I, like Berry, am primarily talking about American society—continue to undermine the fabric and well-being of that society through their complicity in propagating the Rational Mind and its ill effects.


It should be clear that I have a great deal of respect for Berry. I take issue, however, with his choice of terms for the binary pair. While I certainly agree that rationality alone can't and won't adequately address problems either at a global or local scale, it is also true that sympathetic thinking can't tackle the issues, even at a local scale, without the aid of reason. In other words, we need a sympathetic rationality.


Let me step back a minute, though, and offer an alternative to Berry's terms (after the jump).

On Post-Christian Biblical Scholarship

Many I've the posts I've written so far have been expressions of things I already think. This post is different, though, because I think I actually have to write it in order to understand better what in fact I do think. It's about the hard work of making hunches and intuitions into an articulation of coherent thought, a task easier said than done.


I'm struggling to figure out how exactly to continue to do biblical scholarship as an ex-, or rather, post-Christian. (I say "post" because, while I no longer remain a Christian, I'm very much aware of the ways in which I continue to be shaped by my Christian upbringing.) The struggle has to do primarily with a perceived (and possibly actual) lack of models. 


In my experience as a graduate student, I've seen basically three kinds of biblical scholars. The summaries of these three types, given after the jump, are not intended to be biting criticisms, but only to indicate some of my discomfort with each of them.