Communicating Faith

Part 4. Higher Education

part 4 Higher Education The following three chapters focus on the university as a setting for communicating faith (and for communicating about faith). Two concentrate on pedagogical considerations, while one advocates a particular line on the complex and contested relations between theology and religious studies. In “Plasticity, Piety, and Polemics,” Sullivan suggests three desirable qualities or features of teaching that seek, respectively, to highlight and hold together three different priorities. First, there is the task of reaching out to students and inviting them into active engagement with the material of study. Second, there is the responsibility that teachers have of adequately representing the religious traditions, in such a way that their distinctive nature and demands come across clearly. Third, there is the duty to promote critical questioning and acknowledgment of the contested nature of religious claims (contested within, between, and beyond religious traditions). Living traditions persist, despite continuity, as unfinished, still developing responses to the world around them, and displaying the capacity to reach fresh interpretations of what they are about and what they entail. There is an echo here of the triple dimensions of rhetoric, of pathos, ethos, and logos. Sullivan’s advocacy of plasticity on the part of the teacher offers a way of identifying with and addressing the pathos of students, their interests and concerns, their perspectives and priorities. Without this, they experience no connection with the act of teaching. His reminder to teachers that, as trusted representatives of a tradition and as stewards of a discipline, they should seek to do justice to that way of life and those ways of thinking, 181 182 Higher Education finding out and acting (a quality described here as “piety”), bringing out the demands it makes on learners and adherents, might be interpreted as a concern with the logos or central messages(s) of a faith tradition. His emphasis on polemics serves as a mechanism for promoting independent, critical, discerning responses among students—an appropriate ethos in the classroom , facilitating a shift in attention away from the authority of the teacher toward the need for authentic responses, whether commitment or rejection, on the part of students. Aquino deepens this pedagogical exploration by proposing ways to help students to move back and forth between the personal and communal dimensions of faith and to consider material being studied in both religiously specific and more secular ways. He thereby shows how bridges can be built between claims to authority by teachers and traditions and a desire for authenticity and ownership on the part of students. Promoting the capacity to make judgments is key here. Aquino plots a path that links the nurturing of intellectual virtues with personal formation. At the same time, he brings into conversation thick and thin commitments—that is, tradition-specific , comprehensive, and integrated ways of thinking and those that seek to avoid reliance on particular beliefs and practices and to appeal to the widest possible constituencies. He demonstrates how, in mediating between the conflicting demands of authority and autonomy, the teaching of theology and philosophy in a university can make a valuable contribution to the emergence of communities of informed judgment. His chapter provides a philosophical underpinning for the pedagogical ideals outlined by Sullivan, especially offering a way of linking piety and polemics, an intellectual integrity that is compatible with religious fidelity. D’Costa, too, is seeking ways to facilitate an engagement at the university that opens up access to both intellectual integrity and to religious fidelity , with these envisaged as partners rather than as opponents. Defining theology as an ecclesial activity, faith seeking understanding, he explores the complex and uneasy relationships that have developed between theology and the newer discipline of religious studies. Articulating a position informed by Roman Catholic perspectives, D’Costa examines prevailing assumptions that influence the position taken by scholars on the relative position of these academic neighbors. Both offer windows into faith, but from different vantage points, with different goals and employing different tools. No discipline can be properly understood without reference to its own his- Higher Education 183 tory, and all histories reveal a power struggle. “Windows into Faith” offers an interpretation of that history and an insight into tussles about authority and power. Although on his own admission controversial, D’Costa’s version of the relationships between theology and religious studies casts light on some of the issues at stake, and it deserves serious consideration. Two documents from Pope John...