As I mentioned Sunday (see “Beginning this week: ‘Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda: Reflections on the First Years of Teaching’”) the Wabash Center has launched a blog where every Tuesday a professor of religious studies and/or theology will share some insights from their early years in the vocation. The first post is written by Lisa M. Hess of United Theological Seminary. It is titled, “We’re Not in Kansas (or Cambridge) Anymore”. I plan on interacting with this post and many of the other ones of this blog as a person interested in entering the teaching vocation someday.
In Hess’ post she writes about embracing one’s place as a teacher, realizing that the ideals held as a student likely won’t come to fruition as a professor. A teacher needs to learn how to work within the institution who hired them. The most interesting point she made had to do with hired by an institution in an undesired location.
I confess that this is one of my greater fears. Everyone who knows me is aware that if I could chose any one place in the world to spend the rest of my life it would be San Francisco, California. I spent most of my first twenty-seven years in the Bay Area. I have dreamed of returning the last three. Now if I lived somewhere like Paris, France, or Rome, Italy, or even New York, New York, it is possible that I could adapt without day dreaming about the day I go home. San Antonio, Texas, is not a place where I want to live. I am comfortable for now. I am learning how to make the most of my time here. Yet there isn’t a day that passes where I can comfortably entertain the idea of living here the rest of my life.
Yet if I continue to my march toward doctoral work, and toward someday being employed as an educator, then the reality remains that my return to the Bay Area is unlikely. I won’t be qualified enough to teach at Stanford University or UC Berkeley. I am not “conservative” enough to earn one of the few full time jobs at Western Seminary in the Bay Area. I don’t have any affiliation with traditions of some of the other evangelical schools in the area (save Fuller Theological Seminary, but then we return to the problem of qualifications). If I return to the Bay Area it may be as an educator, but it will be in an ecclesial context, not an academic one.
I wonder how likely it is that my “dream job” (teaching New Testament and/or early Christianity somewhere) will be in a desired location. I doubt it. I fear I will have to chose between a place I want to live or a vocation I want to hold. It is unnerving.
I wonder, if you are an educator who lives in an undesired location, how have you adapted? Have you adapted? Hess advocates being the type of person who doesn’t spend their time looking for a greener pasture. Have you been able to do that?
January 24, 2013 at 2:16 pm
Brian, I could write a long chapter or 2 about the issues you raise here. I do think, given we in the US generally have the resources (even if relatively “poor”) to move to where we’d like, that living location and environment is high on the satisfaction-in-life category… enjoying life! Balancing it with DOING what one most loves is often tough, for sure! Usually, something has to give. But I’d not “give in” without some planning and attempt toward “the best of both worlds”.
As to where you’ll fit adequately in a seminary or Univ. somewhere, I doubt you can be that sure at this stage. I know you have a lot of formal theology already and have thot deeper than most of your age and edu. level, in my experience (as I’ve implied before). So it may be that you are fairly settled in positions, alliances, etc. BUT you are apparently only 30 or so. In my own case and it seems a growing number, I was also double-master’s-degreed and had been an apologist of some depth for a few years by age 30, and very immersed in Evangelical institutions and “world”.
However, at about 40, feeling the need to broaden and get high quality PhD work, I went to Claremont and was there 4 part-time years. It was not during but actually after this experience (with mostly progressive profs but one or two not-so-much, and a mix of students all along the conserv-liberal spectrum) that I came to believe the Evangelical system of theology, worldview, etc. (all interlinked) was fatally flawed at key points (tho certainly not without merits and positives). In other words, I was nearly 45 before making a major paradigm change, and not due to any severe lack of exposure earlier (tho Claremont was a new kind and depth of broader exposure). I won’t go on re. myself, but just add that I know and know OF many pastors who either have left ministry due to changed paradigms or have continued where they were while keeping hidden what the depth of their doubts were, or their more “liberal” positions they thought would not fly in their congregations. All that to say, again, that you might indeed find more latitude in where you’d fit, or fit in a somewhat different place, post-PhD, than you now think.
January 24, 2013 at 5:09 pm
Brian, other than preference for location, and hopeful fit based upon political inclinations or denominational considerations, are there other things you’re looking for in considering a position (that might tip the balance). What would be ‘the perfect position’?
With respect to pastoring vs academics, it sounds like you’re considering teaching by way of pastoring simply because your strong preference for location is constrained by an absence of suitable academic positions (given your hopeful fit). If that were not the case, is your preference pastoring or academics?
If finding vocation is an exercise in compromise, of sorts, are there not other options (thinking out of the box, something like academics in the humanities, vice seminary say, or other possibility)?
January 24, 2013 at 5:58 pm
I was recently challenged to hold fast to the “why” of who I am and hold much more loosely to the “What and How.” Simple but sage advice I think.
January 24, 2013 at 6:00 pm
I was recently challenged to hold tight to the “why” of who I am and much more loosely to the “what and how.” Simple, but sage advice I think.
January 24, 2013 at 10:10 pm
You’re asking important questions. Three thoughts:
1. “Vocation” language can lead to considerable disappointment in academic life. The academic job market is far worse than even your most dismal expectations of it. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to pin a notion of vocation to something so chancy.
2. My experience has been a lot like Hess’s. there are a lot of ways my quality of life would be better somewhere other than dreary Northeast PA, but it’s a place to stand, where I can do good work and where I have good friends. I live there somewhat self-alienated, and it makes me invest more of myself in my job than I otherwise might, but I get by. I think often of Booker T. Washington: “Cast down your bucket where you are.”
3. Finally, Mark Schwehn’s “Exiles from Eden” is a good resource for thinking through your questions.
January 25, 2013 at 8:35 am
Howard
My age does limit my ability to project the future on these matters. You are correct that there remains much to rethink and rethink again, so I am sure my views will change on a variety of topics over the years. I think this has been at the forefront of my mind in recent years and it has lead me to hope for hire by an institution with a culture of generosity and flexibility. I am for emphatic debate between faculty members, what I don’t like seeing if when disagreements lead one person to seek for the other person to lose employment. There is a lot of that in evangelical circles right now!
I would like to find some “in-between” where I have one foot in academics and one foot in the region where I live. I want to be invested in a place, with the people of that place, and not just an institution.
Andrew
Personally, I think I am more of a generalist when it comes to my education. In other words, I haven’t entertained the idea of being a professor at a place that is a heavy research institution. I have heard stories about the pressure that mounts when the institute has research as a primary focus. I think I have academic ADHD (as this blog proves), so I can focus on one subject for maybe three years with many, many other subjects on the side, but I couldn’t make a career out of studying just Paul, or just the Gospels, or just this or that. So if I were to find that dream job it would be with an institution that would allow a bit of flexibility as concerns what class I teach, and electives I offer. For example, Michael Barber at John Paul the Great in San Diego tells me how many different classes he gets to teach. I think this is because he is the main biblical literature/theology prof at a school with a smaller program in that area. I think something like that would fit me quite well.
My preference is academics, only because I think pastoring (at least in my context) is demanding in many areas where I am weak: managing finance, managing property, marriage counseling, this, that, the other. If I found a context where pastoring was more about teaching and mentoring, with a strong staff for the other things, I may enjoy it. Who knows?!
Luke
That is good advice. I try to keep that focus, though ten years of schooling in biblical literature and theology, with the prospect of about four more, plus the financial investment involved, sometimes draws my focus back to the “what and how”.
kings
I agree that “vocation” is dangerous language. I think I mean vocation as in sense of gifting, purpose, rather than employment. For example, as a member of churches in San Francisco and Portland I taught the church’s Bible class. I loved it. I was fulfilled. I didn’t earn a dime from either, and I worked a job in a different field during both. I would like for this sense of vocation to partner with what pays me every day, but I don’t know that it will, and I think that is where your warning is good to remember. This is why I have approached potential doctoral work slowly, with caution, and with things like time and expense as factors.
I am definitely challenged to try to make the most of being where I am present. San Antonio has tested this quite a bit, and I know it can get worse than San Antonio. I may have been cursed with growing up in a place in the world where it is far easier to go “down” than “up” (regionally, anyways).
January 25, 2013 at 11:01 am
When I see terms “conservative and “liberal” in theology contexts, I assume the liberal has bigger problems with miraculous events and the conservative sees the text too literally from our cultural paradigm w/o factoring in ancient cultural nuances enough.
Is that how you see the differences generally?
January 25, 2013 at 11:47 am
A couple thots, Brian… and I appreciate being allowed to hear your inner musings. You are either very courageous or some kind of “exhibitionist” (the non-physical sense) to do so… just kidding about the latter… I think you’re entirely appropriate in your discussion and I hope your path emerges with little strain. Now, the thots:
If you tend to be a bit of (or a lot) a pioneer like me, maybe there is a place for you that is neither “local church” nor academic institution. I’ve been involved in a couple, tho only a couple years in one and peripherally at their ending in another… alternate types of education/discipleship “programs” (maybe better, “communities”). The one still going is McKenzie Study Center – Gutenberg College in Eugene, OR. You might have fun looking at what they do, how they do it, if you’ve not. It was quite an adventure being involved near their founding and then moving into the big former- sorority-house they acquired, as resident manager the first year, and teaching some.
I still have some interest, in my “later years”, in similar possibilities of community living (or “proximal” intentional community, with separate residences nearby) combined with educational and healing endeavors. Such things do exist in unique forms, along with your “standard” retreat centers, some of which also might use your interests and skills, without you necessarily living there. I think if you start to “brand” yourself in such an identity and direction now, within a few years you might get the “best of all possible worlds” and perhaps not even need a PhD…. Part of me (not just because of being timed out of completing my PhD) wants to support approaches to good education, scholarly writing, and even research, that basically “goes around” the academic establishment. I think the Internet increasingly provides for that to happen, and is opening new models of education at all levels and in all subjects that is worth investigating and tracking with…. especially for a young and talented person like you, seeking your best place of engagement.
January 25, 2013 at 11:49 am
I don’t think it can be limited to miraculous events, but I don’t know that there is one singular category of “liberal” or “conservative”. These terms are notoriously simplistic, but efforts to arrive at something better have failed, so I use them. Often bibliology seems to be the main dividing line amongst evangelical types. Sometimes other things arise, like Calvinists thinking some Arminians aren’t conservative or biblical in their soteriology, but bibliology and connected hermeneutical paradigms are better candidates for shaping this language.
January 25, 2013 at 12:15 pm
Quick clarification on that last part of previous comment: When it comes to the foundations and most in-depth details of research, I don’t mean a complete “end-around” established academia by any means. It serves an important and often vital function. But I don’t think it needs to hold the near-monopoly and kind of control that it now does, and has for a few centuries. (Probably in all disciplines, but here I refer mainly to those pertinent to religion and theology.) One important case in point is that “psychology of religion” was a highly respected, fast-growing field, actually briefly a separate discipline in its own right, from late 1800s to about 1915. In a big over-simplification, the polarities of “religion” seen as nonrational and “science” as rational may have been the main reason psychology wanted less and less to do with religion as psychology matured and sought “scientific” status; and religion retrenched as well, especially with publication of “The Fundamentals” in that period and the embarrassment of the Scopes trial in 1925.
January 25, 2013 at 12:18 pm
Oops, Brian’s latest response slipped between mine… I was qualifying my OWN comment, not his.
January 25, 2013 at 12:43 pm
Howard
I don’t see myself as a pioneer, to be honest. I think I am most creative within a framework, like a river can be strong with banks. I began my studies because of my concern for the local church, especially Christians struggling to reconcile their faith with the reality around them. I want to work in an academic context because it provides a safe space to do the thinking necessary to assist the church. Often, the church doesn’t provide the very safe space it needs for its own health.
It is possible that someday a “third way” option comes to my attention that would be a good fit. At this juncture I don’t have much drive for it though.