Teaching an online class

Here's what I have learned in teaching an online, graduate level summer class for 10 weeks:

  1. There's a lot of prep work. Since it is all online and condensed into 10 weeks, there is a lot of work for both students and the teacher. Everyone is surprised: wait, that's due next week?
  2. We use Adobe Connect for classtime, and it's worth driving to campus for this with business class internet service (fortunately, I live 12 minutes from campus). Asynchronous internet speed (where your download speed is 10 times your upload speed) doesn't work well with 9 people in a virtual classroom with video streaming for everyone. As the host, you need synchronous, business class internet service.
  3. It's very rewarding to focus on one class. Instead of teaching 4 classes, I get to focus on one set of material, one group of students, and one larger theme. It's going deep instead of broad.
  4. Checking email often is vital. There are lots of problems with tech support, and you have to be available and kind.
  5. Dedicated, conscientious students work well in this environment. I'm not so sure how it would work with traditional undergraduates.
  6. It's rewarding to return to books and material I haven't read in 15 years. I see my notes, I see the highlights, but I don't remember reading it. But I sort of do remember, in a vague way. It's sort of like meeting your old self, on a foggy day.
  7. John Wesley was a very interesting person and thinker.

What Unites America

One of the interesting bits of studying American religious history is the ongoing question of what unites America. The American Experiment has been an odd and interesting one, where diverse colonies found themselves united into one nation. Yet what holds us together into a United States?

Early on, it was Protestantism that united the colonies. The sense of not being under Catholicism or a monarchy was a powerful notion. Protestantism was something bold and liberating, and it gave an identity (even if it was an identity by negation, that we were not Catholic). This notion of being a Protestant nation continues today as Protestants dominate America with about 51% of the US population. There are also popular ideas about America being founded by Christians on the basis of Biblical principles, and this perspective shares in that Protestant mindset. America being a Protestant nation comes, in part, from England and the dominance of the Anglican church (which has mostly seen itself as Protestant). We also see America's Protestantism in the anti-Catholicism of the last two centuries, when Catholics were discriminated against for being un-American ("No Irish allowed" signs, for example).

Wedded to notions of American Protestant Christendom is the idea of republicanism, that we are a nation without a monarchy; instead, we are a government for and by the people. Catholicism is part of Europe with its kings, emperors, and bishops, while Protestantism is for democracy. This is why we debated the place of Catholics in America for a good two centuries. America is a place for people who value freedom. These ideas morph in the twentieth century into our opposition against communism and the Cold War. What united America then was a common faith in God and democracy, while the Russians were atheist and communist. In such a world, Protestants find themselves building bridges with Catholics and Jews in a common faith in God and America.

This common faith has deep roots. Benjamin Franklin wanted to promote a common civic morality and faith that revered God, ethical living, and the nation. For President Eisenhower, we had a need for a faith in faith, to believe in something as a common ground. We were a Judeo-Christian nation, made of up of Jews, Catholics, and Protestants who stood together against the forces of evil. We believed in ourselves and the power of being the last, best hope on earth, as Abraham Lincoln had said (and fought to keep true in the Civil War).

The many wars in American history show how it is war that brings us together. We were born in a Revolution, purified in ongoing wars of the 1800s and then the Civil War, and proved our global dominance in the twentieth century's World Wars. Wars have been a way to prove our devotion to our nation and its ideals of freedom, democracy, and its own special place in the world.

What makes American history so interesting is its many subtleties. We are dominantly Protestant, yet Catholics outnumber any single Protestant denomination. The Protestants that populated America were quite diverse; Quakerism and Anglicanism are nearly two different religions. Catholics and Jews have been here from the beginning (although in small numbers, at least in the early decades of the Union). We are now richly diverse ethnically and religiously, yet still see the dominance of Christianity in our beliefs, history, and way of life. We are secular by law but religious in outlook and practice. We have had almost no religious wars or persecutions on our soil (the Mormon War is one exception). We have been a tolerant nation, broadly speaking, yet slavery and racism are a constant dark theme to America. What unites the many peoples of America given our diversity, history, and divisions?

The search for a United America continues.

What Stanley Hauerwas Dislikes

After reading and thinking about Stanley Hauerwas’s *Without Apology,” I know understand dislikes, with great intensity, the following:

  1. A domesticated gospel. The Christian gospel is never to be confused with worldly, secular, or political ideals, or some sort of bourgeois lifestyle. The gospel must be taken on its own terms, in all its strangeness. For Hauerwas, the gospel demands a creative, engaged pacifism.
  2. Generalities and theories. Hauerwas is deeply suspicious of universals, since they invite violence and manipulation. As a good Aristotelian, ethics is oriented around character, habit, disposition, and action, not theorizing. People and particulars save, not universals such as “loving the world” or “citizen of the world.” He rejects sweeping generalizations as areas of deception, hypocrisy, and violence. He doesn’t even like atonement theories, as these escape the scriptural basis (which presents no singular atonement theory) and the particulars of human living.
  3. Manipulations. Many of the words and phrases we bandy about today hide power games. Hauerwas cites things such as the President of the United States as the leader of the free world, leadership studies (as if there is one kind of generic leadership for all things; this masks our scorn of authority, which only leads to greater manipulations) or being called an “intellectual” (“a kind of self-indulgence as the result of the assumption that they do not need to justify what they do,” p. 152).

Teaching Hauerwas to undergrads has been challenging, as they are bewildered by his ideas. They are also bewildered by a small book of sermons, as a lifetime of textbooks means they don’t know how to master prose without headings, sections, vocabulary, and so on.

But I’d rather set the bar high; at least Hauerwas is provocative and interesting. As Hauerwas himself notes, "you cannot become friends with an author by reading half a dozen pages" (p. 153).

Stanley Hauerwas' Without Apology

I enjoy using Stanley Hauerwas in the classroom, as he is provocative and interesting for different types of students – those with no religious background, and those with a fairly typical (that is, bland) Protestant background. His writing style is fairly direct and clear, which is helpful for undergrads. As one of America's premiere theologians, his is an important voice to encounter. Since most students have given very little thought to issues of war and peace, a strong pacifist is a great path into raising those issues, along with religion, politics, and culture.

I had previously used War and the American Difference in the classroom, but I found it too challenging and disjointed for the students. This semester I'm trying Without Apology. As a collection of sermons, it is a non-threatening book in its size and words. Hauerwas has written these sermons for the ear, so they are more straightforward in structure and expression. Furthermore, each is a short piece, so it is easy to read one or two and then come back to them later (there's not a larger sustained argument to hold in one's mind).

Without Apology deals less with issues of war and pacifism than one might have thought, but as they are sermons Hauerwas is rightfully grappling with scripture passages instead of forwarding his theological positions. The book does feel somewhat disconnected, as did War and the American Difference, and the fact that both are collections of earlier writings cannot be erased.

I find myself deeply sympathetic with Hauerwas' homiletical approach. He has no time for historical background or the historical critical method; rather, he wants a direct encounter with the scriptural world. He is an existentialist who assumes that the same issues confronting the Biblical characters are the same issues confronting us today. Hauerwas avoids the easy outs that minimize the scriptures, such as pointing to the historical antiquity or the gulf of modernity (which a surprising number of preachers do in various ways). Hauerwas also assumes that God is present, which is something oddly missing in much current Protestant worship. I see many of our churches in their Sunday worship talking more to each other, explaining and announcing and joking around, than actually presuming and encountering the presence of God. To assume that God is present in our worship seems rather obvious, but it's often not, and yet what could be more profoundly true in the Christian life?

It remains to be seen what the students make of it all.