(Ir)religiosity

N.T. Wright on the desire to keep one foot in the academy and one foot in the local church:

When I was at seminary in my early twenties having graduated I remember talking to one of my advisors about my desire to do both pastoral work and scholarship and the advisor saying very firmly ‘well, you’re going to have to choose which you want.’ And I thought then and think now thirty-five years later that he was wrong, that I have been right to combine the two. And it has meant at times living on the fault line between two tectonic plates, but that is part of the deal as far as I’m concerned. I think both the church and the academy have suffered from the disjunction. I think it’s important that some people at least get to that particular place of pain, which is a place of, as it were, cultural pain....I sit in a study at home where the great portrait on the wall is J.B. Lightfoot, who was one of most famous ever bishops of Durham and also one of the five leading intellectuals in Europe of his day. He embodies the fact that you should be bringing this stuff together. And that is an incredible model to have day by day.    (ht)

This resonates with me just about as much as anything could I suppose.  I am constantly thinking, discerning, and reevaluating where exaclty my vocational calling lies post-school (whenever that is!).  Only recently am I coming to this realization that it lies in both academia and the local faith community.  Practically, I’m not real sure how that works, there is a certain degree of tension there, but I think it’s a healthy kind of tension.  And I’m more than willing to thing outside the box about how the looks in reality.  For now, its very comforting to know that I am not alone.

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To create good participants in the current system:

Schools should be focusing on [the capacity to communicate effectively or to cooperatively solve problems], as well as ethical reasoning. Wall Street’s meltdown, linked to shady lending practices, reveals the moral bankruptcy of huge segments of the market. Yet political leaders now urge our children to quietly fill-in bubble tests, seeking only to become productive cogs in a broken wheel.

I’ve been thinking about pedagogy this past week and the downfalls of various methods of teaching and testing.  It reminds me of a Paulo Freire quote I ran across a while back.  I cannot for the life of me remember where it came from.

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

That is inspiring however it is at the same time discouraging to see institutions and educators who continue to foster the present system(s).