thinking, teaching, work, tension, the past

yesterday i had a conversation with my sister about the process of recovering from the well-meant, but damaging, fundamentalism that infused parts of our upbringing. we were talking particularly about the influences that shaped our teen years, when youth group leaders and christian adults all around us sought to equip us for college by training us for intellectual combat against our professors-to-be, the minions of militant liberalism, socialism, feminism, relativism, post-modernism, etc. we went to sunday school classes and training camps with this exact goal (and when i think about the financial stress some of these camps put on my parents and the sacrifices they made to provide us with this training, i feel so bad).

time in the academy showed that the sort of proofs and arguments we were trained to use not only didn't persuade anyone else, they began from the wrong premise altogether and, when used, succeeded only in marginalizing us. in fact, against the odds we fell pretty hard for the life of the mind and came to feel drawn to the academy vocationally.

it also became clear that a person could love academics without signing some political deal with the devil, left or right.
and yet, parts of this old training stuck.

even after out-growing the alarmist, combative fundy-ism of our youth, we discussed being deeply haunted by the idea that a christian couldn't possibly teach literary theory at a secular university. and really be doing god's work. my sister is working on resolving this tension. it's causing her no small amount of pain, to think that the thing she loves and wants to do, teach literature, is somehow displeasing to god. she knows its a false dichotomy. but the echoes of those old ideas persist (being a missionary=good, being an academic=bad). the tension forces her to look hard at her ideas about god, and that's good, productive work. she said, i feel god being gentle with me while i'm thinking about this.

(a word in defense of my parents here. my dad's a right-wing nutter about some things, but he also has a healthy sense of rebellion (he's a biker now - you should see him) and always encouraged us to question everything. even when it leads to occasional brawls (immigration, the role of government and gender issues being the hot topics) at family holidays. my mom has a powerful sense of the moral right-ness or wrong-ness of things that could have devolved into a specific kind of controlling craziness, but is tempered by a good sense of humor and a deliberate cultivation of joy. i do not blame them for the wrong-headedness of james dobson or the summit. and i love them for being proud and supportive of our academic pursuits and our struggles to learn and grow.)