Inclusive Practices to Cultivate Listeners
In the previous part, we discussed how formative practices might create both a reading community and a reading process that subverts distraction. In this chapter, we turn to the ways in which such practices can form a reading community that similarly disrupts hostility through the practice of listening. The vice of hostility has been for some time a major feature of American public life. Those of us who have lived through the 2016 and 2020 election cycles, not to mention the increasingly politicized COVID-19 pandemic, hardly need proof of this claim. Our book clubs, small groups, and churches often, and regrettably, are sucked into this same hostility, and despite the ivory-tower stereotype suggesting that academic institutions are detached from everyday life, places of education also find themselves in the midst of hostile debates. Two recent examples of such hostility are the contentious disputes over whether institutions should require COVID-19 vaccinations of their students and the incredibly polarized conversations regarding the teaching of critical race theory.1 Though the vitriol over these particular topics may fade over time, seasoned educators are hard-pressed to remember a time when hostility over certain hot-button issues did not exist. For example, I (Griffis) spoke recently with a biology professor at a Christian institution who told me that fifteen years ago she received multiple calls a year from parents and board members expressing concern over whether she was teaching evolution in her classes. As of 2021, it had been several years since she received such an inquiry. We suspect that the people compelled to make such calls are now directing their attention toward history and English teachers who assign Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois and have come under suspicion as critical race theorists. The reading list is therefore not only the catalyst for hostile dialogue but a practice often employed to maintain the status quo and exclude voices we deem unworthy of our attention.
These hostile disputes touch on a historic and standing reality surrounding reading (and particularly the teaching of reading) that is key to this chapter: building a reading list and curating texts is itself a formative practice that conveys our assumptions about who and what is worthy of preservation, attention, and admiration. Further, the hostility that characterizes conversation about reading lists and the curation of texts reveals deeply disturbing, unchristian perspectives that largely go unquestioned and unchecked in our culture: the insistence that my list and my tradition deserve the place of privilege. A glance at the comments on any online article or blog post shows how so many of us find unbearable the act of listening to someone with whom we disagree or whose experience we do not understand. But these perspectives regarding worthy reading material are deeply opposed to the way of Christ, which John the apostle articulates when he writes, “Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him” (1 John 3:15). In this chapter, then, we propose that as we accept and challenge the canon and build inclusive reading lists, we need to seek out and wrestle with nuanced voices, rather than those filled with passionate intensity but ultimately incapable of tolerating other views. While building a reading list is an activity perhaps most habitually practiced by teachers and leaders in reading spaces, we urge all readers, including students and individual readers, to become familiar with where the reading lists you encounter come from and to consider how they are forming you. We must cultivate practices of reading that aerate soil in both mind and heart that is fertile for the doctrine of self-giving, humble, Christlike neighbor-love, which is at the center of the gospel, to grow. We therefore encourage all members of reading communities to avoid culture wars and to focus on what is important: the intellectual and spiritual formation of our students, our book group members, our fellow congregants, and ourselves. The classroom, the book club discussion, or the small group meeting can, with the judicious and humble application of inclusive practices, become spaces that do not reinforce hostile norms but rather cultivate attitudes of listening, humility, hospitality, and community. As we think beyond the act of choosing the “right” texts and embrace a more holistic approach to reading practices, our reading communities can become training fields wherein all are formed not toward exclusivity, hostility, and combativeness but toward empathy, charity, and humility.
Theological and Cultural Considerations
The Tenuous Practices of Canon-Making
“Why do I have to read this?”
As teachers of text-based courses that make serious demands of students’ willingness to delve into a text, we find this question familiar. It’s a good question. Answering it—and answering it persuasively—is difficult. And our ability to answer it is complicated further by the often polarized, entrenched ways we hear and read others answer this and a related question: “What should we be reading?”
The answer to what is worth reading can seem like a personal one, often made by individuals browsing library shelves or the new offerings of an online bookseller; in fact, however, we are usually choosing from someone else’s curated list of recommendations. Who that someone is can vary. For instance, students read texts that their teachers select; for many teachers, though, the choice of what to read and the definition of what is worth reading are in many ways decided for them, not only by department chairs or division heads or by state or institutional curriculum standards but by the available texts. We write, of course, of the critical editions and textbook anthologies, published by Norton or Oxford or Pearson Longman or others, made readily available to instructors by deals between publishers and campus bookstores, or by departmental fiat, or by the sometimes-startling generosity with which some publishers distribute unsolicited desk copies. It is from books like these that most teachers develop their reading lists. And, just as crafting individual course reading lists is itself a practice in which all teachers participate, so too is the collective effort to curate texts “worthy” of being passed along to the next generation. The centuries-long rituals of readers and scholars to preserve and share what we most commonly call the canon have, all along, been practices. And the practice of canon-making is hardly limited to the classroom and the course syllabus: a book club, for example, may appeal to a bestseller list, to a library or bookstore’s recommendation, or to a Bookstagram or BookTok influencer to choose the text of the month, while the leader of a Bible study is likely influenced by his or her particular church tradition to gravitate toward certain works, old and new. The practice of canon-making is everywhere.
The practices of creating and of questioning a literary canon provide simultaneous stability and instability for members of reading communities who want to cultivate wisdom, deepen their capacity for empathy, and develop a generous and discerning view of history. Indeed, most scholars who take the practice of canon-making seriously are clear-eyed about its potential problems. For example, Susan V. Gallagher and Roger Lundin devote an entire chapter of Literature through the Eyes of Faith to “the value and limits of the classics,” stating that while “studying the canon allows us both to reject our culture’s incorrect ideas and to learn from its wisdom,”2 we must also acknowledge that “we may find some works in the canon to be harmful and discover that other good gifts of literature have been excluded.”3 In the appendices to their seminal How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren practice canon-making, or perhaps canon-reinforcing, with their own recommended reading list, one that, they acknowledge, “contains only Western authors and books” and “may be charged with being prejudiced against some authors” but that, they argue (with no little boldness; one even might say arrogance), “will not differ very significantly if everyone concurs seriously in the aim of making up a reading program that is worth spending a lifetime on.”4 We should note that their list of 137 writers includes only two women, Jane Austen and George Eliot. Harold Bloom curates a similarly white and Western list in his How to Read and Why, though his includes more diversity of gender as well as both Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison. Thomas C. Foster, whose book How to Read Literature like a Professor strikes an interesting, and largely successful, balance in tone between staid professor and avuncular book club leader, also ends his book with a reading list, which is the most diverse of the lists mentioned here, containing classic texts as well as books by women and multiethnic authors. He also recognizes that to teach people to read involves telling them what they should read: “What all these works have in common is that a reader can learn a lot from them. . . . You won’t, if you read these, magically acquire culture or education or any of those scary abstractions; nor do I claim for them . . . that they are better than works I have not chosen. . . . All I would claim for these works is that if you read them, you will become more learned. That’s the deal.”5
The rationale Foster provides for his reading-list curation practices brings to light one of the primary goals of canon-making: the texts we select reflect what we envision as the purpose of reading itself. Foster, along with declaring that his list will help readers “become more learned,” also promises that they “will have a good time, mostly.”6 Bloom, in the tradition of the very canonical Socrates, envisions reading as a life of self-examination. Adler and Van Doren’s methods privilege readers seeking to deepen their capacity to understand rather than to simply accumulate facts.7 Gallagher and Lundin’s approach to the canon emphasizes truth and beauty: we should read any text, they state, “to expand our vision of reality, to hear the voices of our neighbors and the truths they speak, to appreciate aesthetic excellence.”8 Alan Jacobs, in Breaking Bread with the Dead, extends the possibility of peace as he recommends the reading of old books. He writes, “To open yourself to [the texts of] the past is to make yourself less vulnerable to the cruelties of descending into tweeted wrath . . . [and to] realize that you need not obey the impulses of this moment—which, it is fair to say, never tend to produce a tranquil mind.”9 We affirm the various purposes for reading put forth by Foster, Bloom, and others, though we want to emphasize another purpose vitally needed in our social context: the subversion of hostility and development of empathy, charity, and humility.
The Hostility of Ideological Purity and the Worldview Approach
Hostility, while endemic to human history, takes a particular form in our age of rapid-fire social media hot takes, when the provocative, hyperbolic, and conspiratorial travels faster and farther than the humane, the measured, and the factual. As we discussed in chapter 1, instead of curating for wisdom, for understanding, for beauty, or even for pleasure, our and our neighbors’ most common reading material is curated by algorithm for what will most quickly and surely grab our attention. Quite often, what most quickly ensnares us is outrage—the feeling that we are misunderstood, maligned, or abused by some heinous other whose position would taint us if we tried to understand it. An example of this ensnaring outrage from the realm of reading-list curation is a provocatively titled article in the Wall Street Journal from late 2020, “Even Homer Gets Mobbed,” which expresses outrage at the efforts of grassroots education organization (and hashtag with significant Twitter activity) Disrupt Texts.10 Disrupt Texts describes itself as “a crowdsourced, grass roots effort by teachers for teachers to challenge the traditional canon in order to create a more inclusive, representative, and equitable language arts curriculum that our students deserve”;11 the Wall Street Journal article characterizes it as “an effort to deny children access to literature” and as having an “ethos [that] holds that children shouldn’t have to read stories written in anything other than the present-day vernacular,” particularly if those stories espouse various hateful -isms, such as racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, ableism, and so forth.12 The article demands, of course, that we choose a side.
But before we are stirred to outrage in favor of disrupting or clinging to beloved canonical texts, we must recognize that to some extent we engage in similar lines of thinking and that our reading practices may be shaped by a similar orientation toward outrage and reactionary thinking. For all its concern with disruption, Disrupt Texts (not to mention the Wall Street Journal) is also, like Adler and Bloom and W. W. Norton & Company, in the business of recommending what we should be reading. However, their practices of canon-making are noticeably aimed at cultivating a different kind of reader, one motivated not by beauty, enjoyment, the cultivation of understanding, or the possibility of a tranquil mind, but by a desire for purity: to expose oneself only to the right ideas and to think only the right thoughts. And our critiques of either organization’s motivations must recognize the resonances between their purposes and those of persons who practice the kinds of well-meaning but ultimately aesthetically impoverished censorship of the arts common in many Christian circles. A donor may object to a Christian college’s production of Into the Woods because it includes references to adultery; a student may refuse to read the Odyssey not because of its racism, sexism, or violence but because its characters worship—and often are—pagan gods; a Christian college’s library staff may be required to put a special label inside each book whose content is not in keeping with the institution’s definition of the Christian worldview; an instructor may hesitate about teaching a text solely because of the profanities used by its characters, as the likelihood that some of her students’ parents chose which films were “safe” for their children to watch based on similar criteria is high. All of these examples answer the question “Should we read this?” with strenuous objections that have, at their source, a burning, usually well-intentioned desire for ideological purity. They are motivated, in other words, by a desire to produce readers who think the right ideas, who choose texts based on their adherence to an often increasingly narrow set of doctrines about how the world should be.
An extreme example from the world of Christian higher education is what Cedarville University termed its “biblically consistent curriculum” policy. In 2017, Christianity Today reported on this curriculum policy and of Cedarville’s other efforts to double down on its “conservative Christian” identity, describing the policy as “applying the ‘whatever is pure’ line from Philippians 4:8 (as well as several other passages directing Christian living) to materials assigned in departments like English, art, and communications. The biggest targets: swear words, graphic violence, sexual nudity, and other erotic content.”13 Kate Shellnutt writes that the “Philippians 4:8 policy represents the perennial ‘in the world, but not of it’ debate, where Cedarville—like many similar schools—attempts to draw a line between meaningful, edifying cultural engagement and material that compromises the university’s Christian standards.”14 The Philippians 4:8 policy is a statement of commitment to ideological purity. At the same time, however, the policy fomented distrust and tension between faculty and administration, and it could rightly be interpreted as more consistent with a desire to brand Cedarville as thoroughly “conservatively Christian” than with a commitment to meaningful and challenging Christian higher education. Such worldview-focused struggles between maintaining a faithful Christian identity and avoiding the cliff of fundamentalism are common among Christian educational institutions, including our own.
Other conservative arguments about what to read take a more nuanced shape when we move away from questions of institutional branding and conflicts between administration and faculty to focus on scholars’ work. For example, in a 2017 article for First Things, Elizabeth Corey critiques intersectionality, which she describes as assuming “without question—indeed, with pride—that the primary purpose of higher education is political indoctrination allied with progressive political activism.” She levels against this assumption her own assertions about the purposes of education: “If identity and historical disadvantage aren’t the only subjects, then the classroom must allow for something besides activist politics—perhaps a refuge from consumer culture, a time away from the world’s pressing problems, a place to become familiar with works of genius and moral depth. . . . Intersectionality, however, sees disinterested inquiry as an illusion fostered by those who already possess social power.”15 Corey appropriately rejects the overt politicizing of education, and she is not alone in her argument about the value of disinterested inquiry.16 But she fails to acknowledge that many academic traditions—not to mention workplaces, churches, and other spheres of influence—have excluded women and minorities under the guise of such disinterestedness, and that disinterestedness itself is often politically informed.
A less overtly combative example is David Lyle Jeffrey’s essay for the Christian Scholars’ Review blog in May 2021, “Advice to Christian Professors of Literature.” Jeffrey, like Corey, articulates a problem we recognize and are more than sympathetic to: the focus of late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century English departments on political theories and advocacies more than on literature, which has resulted in impoverished curricula and the steady demise of robust literature departments. “In too many classrooms, professors are obliged to talk about the issues, not about the texts,” Jeffrey observes. But Jeffrey goes further, stating that such issues as “gender studies, culture studies, race studies, and the like, with their preferred alternative canon of writings about victimhood and ever-expanding advocacies,” cannot substitute for the literary canon, “not because these issues are not socially important, but because only rarely have they produced (at least to this point) great works of primary literature.”17 The literary canon Jeffrey champions thus risks cultivating readers and teachers not only in the practices of disinterested inquiry and appreciation of beauty but in ignoring the very social, political, and cultural realities into which every text—“great” or not, studied in the classroom or not—is necessarily written.
Fundamentally, if well-meaningly, conservative Christian arguments about what we should read—like Cedarville’s policy—redefine what is essentially branding as faithfulness to a Christian worldview. This branding represents an attempt to replace deep, thoughtful Christian inquiry with the unquestioned adoption of ideology. Although our examples here have been drawn from the world of Christian higher education, the pressure to unquestioningly adopt certain ideologies appears in many other contexts, from churches to debates on social media platforms; we expand further on this in chapter 4. To agree with such arguments and adopt the reading practices implicated by them is to view texts primarily as vehicles of ideology, without thought of what else reading involves. Arguments like Corey’s and Jeffrey’s, while they take seriously what reading is (or can be) and reject ideological indoctrination as a purpose of education, come from a position of assumed ideological detachment they prize even as they misunderstand its limits. In their attempts to reinvigorate the commitment of Christian educators in the humanities to truth, beauty, and the resonances of common human experiences and moral questions across time and space, arguments like these ignore or simply do not recognize the ways in which their authors are shaped by culture and experiences—at least not in the politically charged ways contemporary activists are concerned with pointing out. There is, it seems to us, quite a gulf between viewing texts as vehicles for “right” or “wrong” ideologies and recognizing that authors, texts, and readers alike are shaped by historical and cultural forces that often, perhaps inevitably, include oppressive ideology.18
The desire for ideological purity shows just how often our practices of selecting texts are shaped by the hostility endemic to online discourse—a hostility that appears not only in spaces related to academia but also within church, friend, and family groups. Jeffrey Bilbro, in a 2021 essay for Front Porch Republic, mourns the expansive reach of this desire: “Friends and acquaintances across the political and cultural landscape seem to have fallen down one wormhole or another. Writers and thinkers I admire have been pulled toward some ideological narrative, and their rigorous logic put in the service of an ever-narrowing sense of reality.”19 Admittedly, some of such writers’ and thinkers’ arguments are more nuanced and, when they mean to stir up controversy, are often more interested in “good trouble” than in generating maximum clicks. Nevertheless, writers, scholars, and teachers on both sides of the conservative/progressive divide tip their hands to show similar commitments to ideological purity that are as well-meaning as they are ultimately harmful. Further, there are many limits and dangers to this “both sides” kind of framing, one of them being the fallacious suggestion that truth or goodness always lies somewhere in the middle of extremes or that moderate positions are somehow more virtuous, measured, thoughtful, or moral. Bilbro provides a good reason why this framing is significant: “Why does this ‘both sides’ framing matter? Because the diagnosis determines the prescription. If the problem is those people over there, then the solution may be more fact checking, various forms of censorship or silencing or canceling, or really anything that would bring about victory for the ‘right’ side. But if . . . the problem is the polluted ecology of our digital public square and the insane logical circles this ecology fosters, then those targeted solutions won’t be sufficient.”20
As we curate texts and create reading lists, we must recognize that texts themselves are more than just transmitters of ideology. Worldview-based approaches, be they Christian or cultural Marxist, are flawed because, in assuming that texts exist primarily to promote ideology, they distract us—and even divorce us—from practices that actually make us better Christians and better advocates for justice. Such approaches, on their own and shallowly applied, can teach members of reading communities that some aspects of reality are not to be contended with but rather treated as though they do not exist because we’d rather they did not. Zena Hitz aptly characterizes this problem as a “corruption of learning by politics and political goals” that usually takes one of two forms. Either “intellectual institutions tend to establish or maintain social hierarchies, or what are fashionably called structures of power” if they direct “the life of the mind . . . toward money and status”; or a thirst for justice ironically suppresses “the egalitarian community of learning” and reduces itself “to a set of rules for the use of language or for which opinions can be expressed,” finally “protecting a hierarchy in the end not obviously different from the one that prompted the revolution” in the first place.21 While Hitz’s language focuses on educational institutions, readers in many types of communities must contend with the ways in which a focus on ideology can distract us from formative practices.
In addition, a worldview or primarily ideological approach can create students and instructors, citizens and worshipers, who see virtue and goodness as primarily something they think; they think the right political or religious thoughts and believe the right religious and political doctrines. But, as James K. A. Smith writes, “It’s not that we start with beliefs and doctrine and then come up with worship practices that properly ‘express’ these (cognitive) beliefs; rather, we begin with worship, and articulated beliefs bubble up from there.”22 So what are we to do, as members of reading communities who recognize the importance of theological, literary, and other traditions, who work within established canons and with “classic” texts, but who simultaneously recognize the ways in which those traditions have marginalized or harmed people or reinforced lies?
Practice-based approaches to choosing and teaching texts—here, the practice of listening, which leads to virtues like empathy, humility, and, yes, justice—work to reorient the accepted paradigm of hostility in academic contexts and beyond. Thus, we propose that we choose texts, and that we guide others to practice encountering texts, not just as ideological frameworks to be contested but as neighbors to be listened to. As we practice listening, our reading communities will be doing something profoundly countercultural. “Our intellectual culture prizes destruction over edification, a thrill of superiority over deep encouragement, and the reinforcement of factional loyalties over common ground,” Hitz writes.23 Anyone who has ever participated in a Twitter debate, any teacher who tries to help his or her students understand an author’s argument before critiquing, and, indeed, any teacher-scholar who has presented at an academic conference and endured the Q&A afterward, has seen this culture in action. Learning to listen as the practice of charity, of respectful critique, and of empathy helps subvert this intellectual culture and cultivate justice in each reader’s heart.
Selecting Texts in a Hostile World
Whether as students or teachers, many of us encounter (or have encountered) the practice of text selection within the world of education—a world that often functions as a microcosm of our larger hostile society. A much-discussed hostile practice is institutional bias that treats the white, heterosexual, able-bodied, and neurotypical student as the default. Academic policies tend to benefit privileged students of European descent. Christian institutions, with an emphasis on a Christian intellectual tradition full of white writers—often with specific ideas about what worship, preaching, and biblical interpretation look like—actively contribute to this insidious hostility toward underrepresented students. As a result, our classrooms often become hostile places for minority-culture students. Majority-culture students, on the other hand, receive no encouragement to question their perceptions of what is normal.
Canons and reading lists reinforce this institutional and systemic hostility through the messages they send about what reading material is worthy of our time and attention. The repeated practice of assigning white authors and stories about white characters often conveys the problematic notion that having a white body and living according to Euro-American culture is the normal, legitimate human experience.24 Promoting an exclusive canon, thus, is a vicious, not a virtuous, practice, one that dismisses nonwhite stories and perspectives and elevates the texts produced by and about Euro-Americans. Children’s literature scholar Nancy Larrick pointedly locates the morally problematic consequences of this practice when she states, “Nonwhite children are learning to read and to understand the American way of life in books which either omit them entirely or scarcely mention them.” On the other hand, she adds, “The white child learns from his books that he is the kingfish. There seems little chance of learning the humility so urgently needed for world cooperation, instead of world conflict, as long as children are brought up on gentle doses of racism, through their books.”25 Larrick’s argument is not only significant for children’s literature but for secondary and postsecondary humanities education more broadly. An exclusive canon is harmful to all students, at every level of the curriculum, and its harms will follow readers outside of the classroom and into adulthood, as they make reading lists for themselves and their communities.
The stories we tell ourselves about history also shape the ways in which we have imagined, and do imagine, ourselves and others. For example, in the second edition of his book Myths America Lives By: White Supremacy and the Stories That Give Us Meaning, Richard T. Hughes tells a story about how his views about American myths changed because of a challenge from James Noel, a Black scholar who told Hughes he had forgotten the “most important of all the American myths, . . . the myth of white supremacy.”26 Hughes discovered his ignorance of what, as he explains later, other Black scholars and the consistent “testimony . . . from slave days until now” were well aware of: “that the Myth of White Supremacy is the primal myth in American life and history, and that to tell this story in any other way would be to speak untruth.”27 He then revised his work to reflect his enlarged perspective of the myth of white supremacy, and its bearing on his research, and published the second edition of the book. Hughes, like Jeffrey, views learning, particularly Christian learning, as dedicated to the pursuit of truth. However, Hughes recognizes that the pursuit of truth is bound to the context from which we seek it and that his own pursuit was inevitably constrained by his position as a white man in a society influenced by white supremacy. This is not as much about ideology as it is an acknowledgment of human limits. We think, for example, of Alexander Pope’s poem An Essay on Man, where Pope, articulating the idea of a great chain of being, describes the scope and limits of human ability to know:
Then say not man’s imperfect, Heaven in fault;
Say rather, Man’s as perfect as he ought:
His knowledge measured to his state and place;
His time a moment, and a point his space.28
Acknowledging that we are all bound by time, by our cultures, and by the prejudices of those cultures and recognizing that such constraints are part of understanding ourselves and history are both an antidote to hostility and a way of seeking after truth.
Reading history that challenges our assumptions about the past, for example, can help us imagine ourselves as we are and keep us from imagining others as we ought not to. Although there are many books on historical topics published every year that provide such challenges to their readers, one particularly contentious topic of late is the slave trade and America’s complicity in white supremacist systems and ideologies. Scholars like Jemar Tisby and Ibram X. Kendi, in their books The Color of Compromise and Stamped from the Beginning, respectively, help us read the past in a fuller way by tracing the history of racism in the American church and of the very concept of “race” and racial hierarchy as it was developed to justify the enslavement of Africans and European imperialism, among other things. Consider, too, the goals of the 1619 Project, inaugurated in August 2019, the four-hundredth anniversary of the first record of enslaved Africans arriving on North American shores: “to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”29 What may seem to be a primarily ideological aim really dovetails with Tisby’s and Kendi’s purposes, as well as with Hughes’s, as all four recognize the significance of how a story is told and whether the stories prioritize truth seeking. Hughes explains that Noel’s challenge helped him to see “stories that transformed vice into virtue, that recast criminal behavior as Christian charity.”30 The second edition of his book, consequently, aims to offer a more truthful account of American myths—one that presents vices as they are. Though they are not above critique, reading works such as Tisby’s, Kendi’s, or Hughes’s, or exploring the resources in the 1619 Project, can expand our understanding of the past, providing us with new insights about the stories we have internalized.
Listening as Empathy
And so, how do we answer that good question, “Why do I have to read this?”
When I (Ooms) open my world literature course each semester, I begin with a passage by John Donne. In “Meditation XVII,” Donne writes:
No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.31
Together, my students and I walk through the passage. What does it mean, I ask, that “no man is an island entire of itself”? What does it mean that “any man’s death diminishes me”? What does it mean to consider that “I am involved in mankind”?
To help us answer these questions, we read another quotation, this one from James Baldwin. In a 1963 interview with Life magazine, Baldwin articulated the profound possibility for human connection made possible through empathetic reading. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read,” Baldwin said. “It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.”32 We can better understand ourselves, in other words, the more we understand how much we are “involved in mankind.” Baldwin’s earnest words about the ability of texts to connect us to each other and to human beings in the past is clear-eyed, and just as much about how the voices of others can unsettle us as it is about how they can make us feel understood.
Donne’s and Baldwin’s words suggest another passage from Baldwin’s writings about a similar sort of tension. In Notes of a Native Son, a work of simultaneous great artistic value and grave political concern, Baldwin closes his meditations on his father’s death and its coincidence with race riots in Detroit in June 1943 this way:
It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength. This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair.33
What Baldwin articulates here is impossible from a stance that prizes ideological purity, that sees others and the stories they tell as vehicles for “right” or “wrong” ideas. The insistence on ideological purity is opposed to charitable reading, which David I. Smith describes as “avoiding quick dismissal and cheap disdain, resisting the ego satisfaction of allowing a text only to confirm one’s prejudices, and seeking the good in a text, choosing its truths over its defects.”34 Instead, Baldwin’s demonstrated ability simultaneously to accept the reality of who human beings are and to rail against the injustices they have wrought requires the willingness to listen carefully, to empathize, to possibly be hurt, and quite likely to change. Such willingness is costly. One of the consequences of the injustice Baldwin describes is that it sometimes may be more costly for some than for others. By adopting reading practices that help us all learn to listen, however, we can recognize these costs and understand the importance of our willingness to pay them.
Cultivating Listeners: Practices and Examples
Imagining Voices of the Past as Neighbors
We can practice listening not just for new information but for moments of recognition and humanity that resonate across history. As we engage with problematic texts from the past, we can use communal metaphors to denote past thinkers and writers to form our imaginations in virtuous ways. Selecting such metaphors may be particularly the responsibility of teachers and other discussion leaders; if you are a student or a member of a discussion group, we encourage you to pay attention to the language your leaders and peers use to talk about characters and writers from the past. The metaphor of the long-dead writer as “neighbor,” as one with whom we might “break bread,” and other metaphors that humanize the creators of texts we read, are essential practices to cultivate listeners and subvert hostility. This practice of using humanizing metaphors to listen to the past is largely drawn from Jacobs’s generous and astute guide to encounters with the past through books, Breaking Bread with the Dead. He asserts, “Reading old books is an education in reckoning with otherness; its hope is to make the other not identical with me but rather, in a sense, my neighbor.”35 The title of the book therefore encourages readers of dead authors to imagine themselves sitting at a table with their ancestors, “learning to know them in their difference from” and “likeness” to us, remembering that the “author is not a guest at our table; we are a guest at hers.”36 By using communal metaphors to describe our reading lists and to guide our discussions with other readers, we become charitable listeners not only to the past but to the “other” who is fundamentally different from ourselves.
Listening to texts from the past with neighborly charity—texts that some may view as too problematic and others as simply too old to be relevant—is not an easy task. Fortunately, this trouble with the past is not limited to our present. In his 1851 novel The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne describes a young character Holgrave and his troubles with the past when he desires that “the . . . Past is to be torn down, and lifeless institutions to be thrust out of the way, and their dead corpses buried, and everything to begin anew.” Hawthorne’s narrator, however, provides a gloss that tempers Holgrave’s impulses: “His error lay, in supposing that this age, more than any past or future one, is destined to see the tattered garments of Antiquity exchanged for a new suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork; in applying his own little life-span as the measure of an interminable achievement; and, more than all, in fancying that it mattered anything to the great end in view, whether he himself should contend for it or against it.”37 I (Ooms) teach this novel regularly, and as a recent class was discussing it, one of my students drew our attention to this passage. She read it aloud for us, and afterward she exclaimed, “I feel like this could have been written just yesterday,” emphasizing in particular Holgrave’s desire to tear down the “rotten Past” and rebuild everything anew. Holgrave’s spirit is indeed the spirit of our age—but it is also the spirit of a much earlier age (not to mention a particularly American spirit, regardless of time period). My student’s recognition of herself in Holgrave is a step toward seeing him as a neighbor. And it is an act of listening to Hawthorne as a fellow human being, not as the bigoted product of a benighted age or even as the unassailable author of profound classics. She has found what Jacobs (referencing Patrocinio Schweickart) calls a “utopian moment”: “a moment when something deeply and beautifully human emerges from that swamp of” whatever problematic ideology is also inherent in the text.38
The House of the Seven Gables is full of such problems: racist gingerbread cookies, patriarchal social mores, the erasure of Native peoples and of their right to land possession, some spectacularly bad Puritans. Yet, even as my student recognized those problems, she also saw in Hawthorne’s book something of herself—something that moved her. Hawthorne’s image of the patchwork garment being gradually mended is one she returned to again and again that semester, in class discussions and in papers. Jacobs, drawing on Schweickart, calls this reading in a sort of double fashion: “You don’t silence the part of you that sees the problems with the book, its errors, its moral malformations; neither do you silence the part of you that responds so warmly to that ‘utopian moment.’”39 In silencing neither their misgivings nor their warm responses, readers engage in a profound act of listening to the past. They refuse, as Hawthorne’s authorial voice advises Holgrave, to apply their “own little life-span[s] as the measure of an interminable achievement,”40 instead wrestling with the text as one might with a friend with whom one strongly disagrees but to whom one nonetheless extends charity over a meal or coffee.
Listening to texts with charity should engender not only charity but respect for what their otherness can teach us—how the older, sturdier pieces of the patchwork suit, to extend Hawthorne’s metaphor, can show us how our new fabrics may be less durable or more prone to fraying. As Jacobs writes, our encounter with the past as an “other” is good for us, and he goes so far as to suggest that “any significant increase in personal density is largely achieved through encounters with un-likeness.”41 For example, I (Ooms) teach the writing of two late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century feminist writers, Judith Sargent Murray and Mary Wollstonecraft, in my world literature course. If you have read Murray and Wollstonecraft before, you know that at least some of their work argues for equality of education for women. Some of my students, especially the women, are enthusiastic about these readings; they, having experienced and witnessed sexism and misogyny in their lives, immediately regard Murray and Wollstonecraft as earlier voices whose ideas are echoed by my students’ thoughts and feelings. Others of my students, however, do not so much object to Murray’s and Wollstonecraft’s arguments as they regard them as unnecessary. I still remember a student pointing out the fact that women outnumbered men in our classroom by a long shot, and our class was being taught by a woman with an advanced degree. He may as well have said outright that we do not need arguments for women’s education anymore—at least not in the global West. At issue here, however, was not primarily whether a particular feminist argument was or was not necessary. Instead, what did each group of students’ engagement with the text say about how they were listening charitably? The former group were inclined to collapse the centuries between themselves and their contexts and those of the texts; the latter were inclined to stretch those centuries. The former students so resonated with the texts, the latter so distanced themselves from them, that ironically neither were willing to listen to Murray and Wollstonecraft in their unlikeness to themselves.
For very different reasons, neither group gave the text any authority over how they might consider their own circumstances or the purpose of education, an idea at the pulsing heart of Murray’s and Wollstonecraft’s arguments. My students, many of them raised in Protestant denominations still rehashing decades-old arguments about gender roles, and all of them earning college degrees in a society that equates college degrees with wage-earning potential and not much else, are quick to connect Murray’s and Wollstonecraft’s arguments to those they are used to hearing about women and their place within or outside of the workplace. This tendency is understandable, but it demonstrates my students’ resistance to sitting at Murray’s and Wollstonecraft’s tables and genuinely considering their arguments on their terms. Neither Murray nor Wollstonecraft assumes a connection between education and wage-earning labor. Rather, both connect education to the cultivation of reason and virtue. Reading Murray and Wollstonecraft in order to learn from them—listening to them with charity—encourages my students to suspend their assumptions about the purposes of education in order to understand and break bread with the other. When we, as readers, can similarly suspend our preconceived notions and listen charitably, we recognize a dead author as our neighbor.
Considering Multiple Viewpoints
Listening with charity to texts from the past not only deepens readers’ awareness of complexity but gives them opportunity to practice affirming different answers without insisting on a single legitimate interpretation of a text. I (Ooms) include Mark Twain’s novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on my reading list in an upper-level American Literature class. This book is considered a pillar of the American literary tradition; it is also a source of much controversy, particularly where its presentation of race and racism are concerned. As a result, the book has been both banned from schools for being racist and celebrated by other readers as being powerfully antiracist. In the anthology from which I teach, the editors have included a section entitled “Race and the Ending of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” designed to introduce students to this controversy from multiple viewpoints and from different decades, the earliest from 1953 and most recent from 2011.42 These curated texts not only present a series of viewpoints but practice a specific approach to reading that allows for the existence of multiple viewpoints in the first place. Most significantly, however, these curated texts help me and my students understand our responses to texts as part of an ongoing series of conversations rather than a final arrival point at a particular “correct” ideological perspective.
The selections I read with my students articulate different—often divergent—perspectives without insisting that the tensions among them be resolved. This reading experience can be disorienting, especially when the essays are read together as one reading assignment, which is, alas, a hardship I inflict upon my students. A 1953 essay by Leo Marx, for example, lambasts Huck Finn’s ending as “a farce,” though “the rest of the novel is not,” because of the way the ending treats Jim’s character and the seriousness of his bid for freedom.43 Other essays argue that, however seriously the novel might seem to take the immorality of slavery, it does not treat Jim’s humanity with the same seriousness, placing him in “the all too familiar [realm] of white fantasy in which blacks have all the humanity of Cabbage Patch dolls”;44 still others argue that the opposite is true, one stating that Twain’s “portrayal of Jim contradicts every claim presented in [Thomas] Jefferson’s description of ‘the Negro.’”45 Each perspective provides students with an opportunity to engage with a different critique of Twain’s novel, and my students—not without a little discomfort—have said in our discussions how their experience reading these essays involves not a little mental whiplash. “I think I agree with all of them,” one student said. What she meant, really, was that she understood how each author had come to his or her conclusion and found that each author’s argument was well rooted in a text the student had recently and closely read herself. Even the authors with whom she was most inclined to disagree made points that couldn’t be easily refuted, and none of even the most critical authors allowed outrage or chronological snobbery to outrun the care with which they read Twain’s words.
Reading these various critiques of Huckleberry Finn allows us to critique the novel with others in a way that is simultaneously aware of the book’s flaws while cognizant of how good readings might also diverge sharply from each other. It is unsurprising, then, that the essay with which my students most resolutely agree is one less about staking a particular ideological claim and more about promoting a kind of reading. In her 1996 “Introduction to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Toni Morrison describes her attempt to “track the unease” the reader, particularly the adult reader, often has with this novel, and to “learn in so doing the nature of my troubled relationship to this classic American work.”46 She concludes, finally, that reading to critique requires the ability to recognize when a text requires its reader to persist in discomfort: “For a hundred years, the argument that this novel is has been identified, examined, waged and advanced. What it cannot be is dismissed. It is classic literature, which is to say it heaves, manifests and lasts.”47 Our practices of reading to critique, we must recognize, do not end with us, just as they did not begin with us. By considering ourselves in relation to a long line of readers, we can learn from our neighbors in the (distant or recent) past how connection and disagreement can coexist without heightening into hostility.
Avoiding Chronological Snobbery and Listening to the Past Challenge the Past
Texts from the past are, as we note above, not best seen as packaging for ideology but as opportunities to listen to authors and characters as our neighbors. However, if we listen without critique, especially to texts so valorized and mythologized that they have had indelible negative effects on our society that can be felt by the present, we may harm ourselves and others. One might assume that this would be the point where we would cease listening to the past and encourage our students and neighbors to practice speaking back to it. Instead, we encourage more listening, and, perhaps counterintuitively, we ask readers to dig more deeply into the past rather than assume a position of judgment from their seats in the present. One way in which many readers likely already do this is by diversifying what they read, from their personal reading lists to their syllabi, purposefully including texts from a variety of perspectives and written by people of different races, ethnicities, and genders. Another is, of course, to remove some texts out of our reading diets altogether, a practice many instructors at least are likely already used to as, with the approach of each term, we are confronted with the limits of the semester’s weeks and the vastness of what we wish we and our students could read. We suggest a third practice, one that can easily exist alongside these two and one also broadly applicable to different kinds of reading communities: read texts that are contemporary to each other and that challenge each other.
This third practice remedies some of the arrogance with which we might be tempted to view what we may perceive as the less-enlightened past. One of the strongest arguments against the kind of activism represented by organizations like Disrupt Texts is that it assumes a position of chronological snobbery: we in the enlightened present can judge the past for its sins. “Chronological snobbery” is, of course, C. S. Lewis’s idea. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis writes:
In the first place [Owen Barfield] made short work of what I have called my “chronological snobbery,” the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find out why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also a “period,” and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.48
This impulse to judge the past, while rooted in a desire for justice, is unproductively punitive at best. At worst, it blinds us to our own sins and the ways in which we will be judged by a future that will just as inevitably see us with its own chronological snobbery. As Jacobs argues, “Nobody thinks about everything; nobody can think about everything; our cognitive limitations are such that there will always be a great many topics that we will take no real thought over, but will simply believe what the people around us, for the most part, believe.”49 In a word, the practice of chronological snobbery blinds us to the humanity of those who lived and wrote before us by emphasizing only the rot of the past, just as an uncritical valorizing of the past blinds us to anything but its comparative sparkle.
We can develop productive, justice-oriented critiques of texts without sliding into chronological snobbery. One way we suggest doing this is by allowing the past to critique itself—by reading texts that are contemporary with each other and that directly address each other. When we do this, we recognize that the impulse toward justice is not a development of an enlightened present, but rather a voice calling in the wilderness repeatedly through time. One such voice is Bartolomé de Las Casas, a contemporary of Christopher Columbus. When I (Ooms) teach some of Columbus’s letters, I also assign some of Las Casas’s writings. Las Casas in his youth was a Spanish soldier who participated in the brutal colonization of the Native peoples of the Americas; later, however, he was convicted of the evil effects of the Spanish conquest, joined the Catholic priesthood, and spent the rest of his life advocating for the rights of Native Americans. In his An Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies, Las Casas writes:
On the island Hispaniola, which was the first, as we said, wherein the Christians entered and began the devastations and perditions of these nations, and first destroyed them and wiped the land clean of inhabitants, these Christians began to take women and children of the Indians to serve them and use them ill. . . .
The Christians would smite them with their hands and strike them with their fists and beat them with sticks and cudgels, until they finally laid hands upon the lords of the villages. And this practice came to such great temerity and shamelessness and ignominy that a Christian captain did violate the wife of the greatest king, the lord of all the island.50
Shortly after, Las Casas describes scenes of uncontrolled, cruel carnage against the Natives by those he repeatedly calls “the Christians.”
My students and I compare Las Casas’s depictions of “Christian” behavior with the declaration of divine conquest Columbus delivers to Ferdinand and Isabella in his “Letter of Discovery”: “So that, since Our Redeemer has given this victory to our most illustrious king and queen, and to their renowned kingdoms, in so great a matter, for this all Christendom ought to feel delight and make great feasts and give solemn thanks to the Holy Trinity with many solemn prayers for the great exaltation which they shall have, in the turning of so many peoples to our holy faith, and afterwards for temporal benefits, for not only Spain but all Christians will have hence refreshment and gain.”51 Reading these texts together allows us to recognize, first, that arguments in the name of justice for the oppressed are not only twenty-first-century concerns; they are perennial human concerns, and we cannot look back on the past from a position of enlightened judgment.52 Second, allowing texts from the past to critique each other helps us understand that the people of the past, just like those in the present, held and voiced a plurality of views. Third, and perhaps most importantly, listening to the texts of the past critique and challenge each other discourages us from dismissing the atrocities of the past with a wave of the hand and a “Well, they didn’t know better back then.” As Las Casas’s words and activism show, at least some knew better. And Columbus and Las Casas were both Europeans, Spaniards; we can assume Native persons colonized by Spain or other European powers would have required no conversion experience or “wokeness” to recognize their victimization. Listening to voices from the past thus forms us to be more humble and more charitable to texts—and, hopefully, to each other.
Pairing Contemporaneous Texts with Modern Commentary
In combination with the practice of comparing historical texts with contemporary techniques, a judicious and humble use of modern critiques can also be a helpful practice when building a reading list. I (Roberts) attempted this combination of past and present critique in an upper-level literature class on the Romantic period (British and American writers, 1767–1867). This class includes readings on disability and ableism, a topic that may be part of many disciplines or historical studies. I freely admit that I am new to conversations both historical and modern about ableism and disability; however, inspired by one of the textbooks I consulted while planning the class and by a unit on social reform throughout the early nineteenth century,53 I curated a day of readings that allowed for discussion and reflection on both historical and modern perspectives on disability and ableism.54 This class required us to humbly listen to historical perspectives on ableism, helped along by a more familiar, modern text as a framework.
In preparation for the class day, I asked students to read the following texts:
Before we discussed the literary texts assigned for the day, I spent a little extra time on our opening prayer, beginning with an excerpt from “A Liturgy for Disability” by Stephanie Tait, which was published in February 2021.56 I chose this brand-new text for two reasons: first, I knew that both I and my students would benefit from guidance on how to approach the topic of disability and ableism, and second, Tait’s piece includes biblical quotations that I knew would make a connection with my students and would add perspective to our discussion, such as a prayer to God to
. . . Teach us like you did
Moses, saying, “Who has made man’s
mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or
seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?”57
I doubt my students felt anxious about this discussion, but I did, and I appreciated the moment to be grounded and guided by Tait’s words as we began class. I also wanted her voice to bring us into the class conversation to remind us that we can confront and critique “the sin of ableism” wherever we find it—in historical texts as well as in our current world.58
In addition to Tait’s modern text, I then introduced discussion with a set of paired historical texts. The students had read Lamb’s essay “On the Danger of Confounding Moral with Personal Deformity” before class; I paired this text in class with a famous Romantic poem by Lord Byron: “She Walks in Beauty.”59 This poem describes a beautiful woman, but the speaker insists that the woman’s outward beauty (“The smiles that win, the tints that glow,” line 15) reflects her inward beauty (“A mind at peace with all below, / A heart whose love is innocent!,” lines 17–18). This attitude, commonplace in love poetry of many eras, provided us with an entry point to Lamb’s essay, which discusses how descriptions of criminals often emphasize their physical ugliness as if we are trying to make their moral character match their physical appearance. Byron’s poem and Lamb’s essay, then, provided a nice critique of one another and established some foundational principles for our discussion as we moved on to Hume (who emphasizes that the world is as we perceive it, without much attention to what might befall someone whose senses don’t allow them to perceive the world as others do), Lewis (who writes from the perspective of a war veteran who has been abandoned by his lover and must beg for money in the streets), and Robinson (whose speaker wonders about the fate of a mentally ill subject).
While this discussion was centered on historical texts, I was surprised at the number of current-day applications that my students brought up on the subject of disability and ableism. While we were discussing Lamb’s “On the Danger,” for instance, one student pointed out that the phenomenon Lamb points out is still in effect: when criminals are discussed in the news, we often see their mug shots, the least flattering picture possible. Another student who is passionate about mental health reacted positively to Robinson’s “The Maniac,” finding it a fascinating portrayal of a historical attitude toward mental illness and drawing some comparisons and contrasts to modern attitudes toward mental health. In addition to these remarks in the moment, some students referenced these texts in later class writing. At the end of the unit on social reform, students had to write their own “Vindication of Human Rights” (modeled, of course, on Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men and Vindication of the Rights of Woman, of which we read excerpts on other class days); several of them included references to these writers. One student decided to focus his entire essay on disability and ableism; in addition to references from these Romantic writers and some modern applications, he also quoted some of the Bible passages from Tait’s “Liturgy,” notably the passage from Exodus (“Who has made man’s mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the LORD?” [Exod. 4:11 ESV]).
By pairing historical texts not only with each other (most specifically in the Byron/Lamb contrast) but with a current voice (Tait’s “Liturgy”) and personal reflection, this relatively compact class discussion became a space to critique the sin of ableism as well as to learn humbly about both historical and recent aspects of disability. Although this was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of incorporating disability issues into a humanities classroom, this model of paired historical and modern texts, along with personal reflection (which for my students seemed to follow naturally from the readings) gave us an opportunity to learn and grow by listening to not only the voices of history but also voices from today like Tait’s, reminding us that we have not evolved beyond ableism and that, as Christians, we must subvert such prejudices wherever we find them. Reading widely—a topic we return to in the next chapter—can thus form us toward empathy and justice.
Concluding Reflection on Listening Practices
Among ourselves, we disagree about some ways in which listening and critique take shape in our own practices as we develop reading lists for our students. For example, in one of our conversations about this topic, we discussed Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Chinua Achebe’s essay “An Image of Africa.” One of us maintained that, after reading Achebe’s essay, she had decided not to include Conrad’s novella in any future syllabi, while another said she would still teach Conrad’s novella, but only alongside Achebe’s essay. Our own disagreement illustrates both how difficult and how significant the relationship between listening and critique is whenever we approach a text, particularly if that text is simultaneously objectionable and given a place of honor in a literary, theological, or other canon. Learning to practice listening, thus, is inseparable from learning humility, a practice that can cultivate in us greater empathy not only for others but for ourselves.
SUMMARY of SUGGESTED PRACTICES
REFLECTION and DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. For one summary among many regarding COVID-19, see Kafka, “Vaccination Dilemma.” For a summary of the fraught relationship between education and critical race theory, including a list of efforts by states to ban its teaching from K–12 education, see Ray and Gibbons, “Why Are States Banning Critical Race Theory?”
2. Gallagher and Lundin, Literature through the Eyes of Faith, 105.
3. Gallagher and Lundin, Literature through the Eyes of Faith, 106.
4. Adler and Van Doren, How to Read a Book, 339.
5. Foster, How to Read Literature, 308.
6. Foster, How to Read Literature, 308.
7. Adler and Van Doren, How to Read a Book, 6–7.
8. Gallagher and Lundin, Literature through the Eyes of Faith, 111.
9. Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead, 9.
10. Gurden, “Even Homer Gets Mobbed.”
11. “What Is #Disrupt Texts?,” https://disrupttexts.org/lets-get-to-work/.
12. Gurden, “Even Homer Gets Mobbed.”
13. Shellnutt, “Whatever Is Pure.”
14. Shellnutt, “Whatever Is Pure.”
15. Corey, “First Church of Intersectionality.”
16. See, for example, Hitz, Lost in Thought. Hitz spends considerable time on the “uses of uselessness” and the roots of the love of learning in leisure. See also, of course, chapter 6 of the book you are presently reading.
17. Jeffrey, “Advice to Christian Professors of Literature.”
18. Worth noting here is the work of conservative-leaning Christian scholars who are leery of critical race theory, particularly with reference to such theories’ ties to Marxist thought, but who are simultaneously emphatic about the existence and persistence of racism and other evils in American history and particularly in the church. See, for example, Prior, “Don’t Believe in Systemic Racism?” See also Fitch’s critique of Tim Keller’s discussion of justice in Fitch, “Tim Keller, David Fitch, and Justice.”
19. Bilbro, “Staying Sane in a Mad Time.”
20. Bilbro, “Staying Sane in a Mad Time.”
21. Hitz, Lost in Thought, 163.
22. J. K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 69–70.
23. Hitz, Lost in Thought, 204.
24. Bell, Storytelling for Social Justice, 18, calls such dominant narratives “stock stories.” Bell discusses how to balance stock stories with “counter-storytelling” (3), including attention to narratives of resistance and transformation (20).
25. Larrick, “All-White World of Children’s Books,” 63.
26. Hughes, Myths America Lives By, 3.
27. Hughes, Myths America Lives By, 10.
28. Pope, Essay on Man, lines 69–72.
29. 1619 Project homepage, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html.
30. Hughes, Myths America Lives By, 11.
31. Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 108–9.
32. Baldwin, “Doom and Glory,” 89.
33. Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 114–15.
34. D. I. Smith, “Reading Practices and Christian Pedagogy,” 45.
35. Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead, 27, 36.
36. Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead, 34. See also Liu, “Reading Generously.”
37. Hawthorne, House of the Seven Gables, 179–80.
38. Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead, 82.
39. Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead, 82.
40. Hawthorne, House of the Seven Gables, 180.
41. Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead, 31.
42. Lester, “Excerpt from ‘Morality and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’”; Marx, “Excerpt from Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling, and ‘Huckleberry Finn’”; Morrison, “Excerpt from ‘Introduction to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’”; D. L. Smith, “Excerpt from Huck, Jim, and American Racial Discourse.”
43. Marx, “Excerpt from Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling, and ‘Huckleberry Finn,’” 306.
44. Lester, “Excerpt from ‘Morality and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,’” 307.
45. D. L. Smith, “Excerpt from Huck, Jim, and American Racial Discourse,” 309.
46. Morrison, “Excerpt from ‘Introduction to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,’” 313.
47. Morrison, “Excerpt from ‘Introduction to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,’” 314.
48. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 114. See also Lewis, introduction to The Incarnation of the Word of God, 6, where he considers texts as an ongoing conversation that readers must enter with humility: “If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said. Remarks which seem to you very ordinary will produce laughter or irritation and you will not see why—the reason, of course, being that the earlier stages of the conversation have given them a special point. In the same way sentences in a modern book which look quite ordinary may be directed ‘at’ some other book.”
49. Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead, 47.
50. Las Casas, “Excerpt from An Account,” 68.
51. Columbus, “Letter of Discovery,” 64.
52. Indeed, the challenge some contemporary Native American Christians raise with regard to colonialism rhymes with that of Las Casas. Jemar Tisby, in his book How to Fight Racism, 72, describes how Mark Charles, a man of Navajo and Dutch descent, responded to a Columbus Day celebration, repeating the statement “You cannot discover lands already inhabited” to the people gathered. He repeated the statement more and more loudly until, Tisby writes, “eventually one of the participants grabbed Charles’s arm and roughly escorted him away saying, ‘You’re not welcome here.’”
53. On other days in this unit, we discussed texts on slavery and racism, suffrage and women’s rights, and the French and American Revolutions.
54. The textbook that inspired this day is Black et al., The Age of Romanticism (vol. 4 of The Broadview Anthology of British Literature), which has a section on disability containing the above readings and many others. The textbook I used for the rest of the class is Newman, Pace, and Koenig-Woodyard, Transatlantic Romanticism.
55. Happily for my planning, all of these texts are available on Project Gutenberg or Google Books. I also provided students with an optional link to some excellent talks on the deaf author Harriet Martineau (https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/events/events/harriet-martineau-online-talks-for-uk-disability-history-month.aspx); if I teach this day again, I plan to include her “Letter to the Deaf” on the reading list. Having chosen an open-access text format for the class, I had some trouble finding a good text to make available to my students.
56. Tait, “Liturgy for Disability,” 78–82.
57. Tait, “Liturgy for Disability,” 79; the quotation is from Exod. 4:11 CEB.
58. Tait, “Liturgy for Disability,” 82.
59. Gordon, “She Walks in Beauty,” 602–3.