While I was originally drawn to Composition Studies partly because of the way student-centered (by which I mean interactive and flexible), constructivist, and process pedagogies fit with my Christian sensibilities, the journey of trying to integrate my spirituality with my studies has been both frustrating and rewarding. As such, I want to share that journey with other Christian students who may be endeavoring to find connections between their faith and their studies.

I have always been interested in exploring how my faith and several pedagogical and theoretical approaches reflect and relate to one another. Despite the significant differences among various theories, and between those theories and Christian faith, I've found several ways for them to be compatible at various points. I have also begun to uncover ways that faith may shed interesting light on scholarly work, especially in terms of what it means to have a religious identity within the university. I enjoy theoretical work in general for its creative and intellectual stimulation, and also for its pedagogical value. While I think it is important for Christian graduate students to be conversant with various theories and to understand their historical contibutions to Composition, I am also aware of the pressures Christian students may face. Because their faith makes them different in an environment where postmodern perspectives are common, it is important to not overlook the difficult subject position they must learn to navigate. Also, the negative stereotypes about Christianity are so deeply ingrained in society that one feels their painful influence even in the midst of good circumstances, especially in an academic setting. The process of learning to navigate Christian faith and academics is not always negative, but can be as inspiring as it is challenging. It is an opportunity to grow in faith by examining how and why our beliefs and views matter.

While I recognize that postmodern and poststructuralist perspectives are often viewed as antithetical to religion, these theories are only partly so; when reformulated in alighnment with the posibility of the Divine, these theories can invite us into a richer depth of understanding faith. For example, while as a Christian I cannot accept the postmodern rejection of truth, I can value it because it reminds us of the need for compassion as we seek to understand and relate to others, and it can help us to understand the difficulties and tensions that exist in the contact zone between religious students and secular institutions and ideas. It also might be considered as allied with faith against the naturalism of modernism and associated with creative or alternate textual structures, such as hypertext. As a result, I am less apt to see religion and these theories as diametetrically opposed-- their tensions and overlappings and paradoxes and puzzles are delightfully more complex than that! There are lessons to be learned from establishing a dialogue between faith and theory. As I have journeyed, I have begun to encounter others along the way whose vision of Christian faith in relationship to theory has sometimes echoed, and sometimes encouraged, my own.

Addressing the Gap
Lizabeth A. Rand in "Enacting Faith: Evangelical Discourse and the Discipline of Composition Studies" addresses the marginalized feeling many persons of faith may experience when stereotyped by others within English Studies:

Our own discourse at times trivializes and misrepresents faith-related expression…. Many of these [religious] scholars contend that postmodernists ignore religious identity; thus, in the name of "diversity" an entire subculture is often silenced. In "Singing and Preaching: Christians in Writing," for instance, James Calvin Schaap explains that his graduate school experience led him to believe that antagonism toward religious faith is the only form of "bigotry" not banned from the classroom. . . . He … asserts that religion should be considered a difference along with identity markers such as race and sexual orientation. (350-1)

Like Rand, I argue for the religious identities of both students and scholars to be taken more seriously. This site represents my attempt to articulate some of the connections I see among Christian faith, theory, and pedagogy. I've allowed my language to adopt a register that is partly academic and partly more personal and religious, since I am interested in the way that hearing the rhythms of theory articulated in the language of my own faith affects the way the ideas work together. Overall, I advocate a rhetoric of compassion, of stepping into other contexts to try to understand as best as possible the people and traditions with which one is interacting.

I recognize that similar dialogues are important for people other faiths and other backgrounds as well, since stereotypes or lack of understanding are unfortunate wherever they occur, no matter who is the object of them. However, my focus for this site is on the interplay of theory and pedagogy with my own faith because it is what I can best speak to, and I know there are others out there who share these concerns.

Please read this text with the following considerations in mind: My approach is exploratory as I make an attempt at articulating connections between faith and theory: I am still examining and considering the theory/faith interactions that I discuss, and I am intrigued by obseving my own unfolding of thoughts and rhetoric around this issue (I at first found myself drawing on common tropes used in contemporary Christian rhetoric, but quickly realized some of the metaphors got in the way more than helped to clarify my exploration). I am not, at this point, attempting to conform these ponderings to the conventions of academic discourse, but instead am allowing ideas to emerge out of non-academic discourse since part of my goal is to show the process of how these connections are formed. This text is also not static, but is in a perpetual state of revision. This is, after all, a journey.

If you would like to discuss issues related to Christianity, Composition, and Rhetoric, I invite you to send me a note by email. I may set up a forum if enough people express an interest.