Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith and Learning
This book is a collection of essays by various faculty members in which they describe their experiences linking a particular Christian practice to their classroom pedagogy. For example, one college professor sought to incorporate the Christian dimensions of hospitality into her classroom, thereby challenging the traditional professor-student relationship. Another experimented with the concept of religious reading in a German literature course. Students were to approach the literary texts with the expectation that moral demands would be put on them and that they would be transformed as a result. Whether the successes and disappointments chronicled here will be of interest or even applicable outside the world of Christian higher education remains to be seen. Collectively, these essays do beg several important questions: What is the humanist role of higher education? Should colleges and universities be moral academies that teach specific common values? Are we well served by only a consumerist approach to education? --Christopher McConnell