Making and Marking Time

Turning Seasons in Academia

If I’m being honest, some unseemly-large percentage of the reason I make my home in higher education is the rhythm of time. I love having my life and work tied to ebbs and flows of the academic year, with intense periods of labor punctuated by more relaxed and fallow times of rest and reflection. I love the ritual and pomp of it all, even if the pomp can be—well—pompous. There’s something delightful about the ways of making and marking time in academia, the setting-apart of seasons for learning and study, the liturgical movement through moments and years. There is a valuable intentionality that comes from noticing and saying out loud, in community, that our lives are structured together, toward a common purpose of cultivating knowledge and wisdom.

I feel this most strongly in August. The school where I teach, the Iliff School of Theology, is one of the rare institutions that uses the quarter system, so we don’t start classes for another few weeks. But in mid-August, something in me begins to feel restless. Decades of starting school in the second or third weeks of August have trained my body to expect new beginnings and broadened horizons this time of year. It’s still just as hot as it was a few weeks ago, and summer is still in full force, but in my head something switches to fall, and all that the season implies.

I remember very clearly being a freshman at Mars Hill College (now Mars Hill University), the small school where I did my undergraduate work. I was never someone who was reluctant to leave home and go away to school; I relished it. Those middle weeks of August 1996 were a magical time for me, full of modest adventures that felt enormous at the time: choosing what and when to eat, meeting new people and making new friendships, deciding which classes I wanted to take. One evening just before courses were scheduled to begin, all the freshmen were invited to a convocation, held in the school’s largest auditorium. I remember two things about that convocation especially. First, I remember the booming notes of the pipe organ that startled everyone in attendance. The organ was in the balcony, so no one had warning that the first piece was about to start, and it was the loudest and fullest music I had ever heard. Second, I remember the moment the faculty processed in, wearing regalia, and took their seats. I knew very few of them at that point, though many would become dear to me as teachers and friends. But watching them enter the auditorium, I understood something about myself and what I wanted from my life.

At Iliff, our convocation has moved to the fifth week of the quarter, in the middle of October, to accommodate the schedules of our many hybrid students who won’t be on campus until then. So the quarter’s beginning is marked by other shifts, some subtle and some dramatic. The emails begin to increase in frequency, and those emails in turn begin to scatter meetings across the calendar for September and October. Plans for the annual faculty retreat begin to circulate. Some committees begin their work. Summer writing projects suddenly receive an uptick in attention, in a push to finish things up before the term begins. Syllabi have to be posted, so students can find their books.

This fall I’m teaching two classes. One of them is called Introduction to the History of Christianity, and it’s a course I share with my colleague who is a historian of medieval Spain; usually he and I each teach a section or two of the course every year. It’s the introductory class in history, required of most masters students, and it has the ambitious and probably impossible task of covering twenty centuries of the history of Christianity in ten weeks. Like most introductory courses in theological education, this class does two things at once. It’s an overview of a lot of topics, timelines, and important figures, laying groundwork for further study in history and helping students situate themselves and their traditions within (or outside of) the big picture of Christianity. But the other the class does is more important; like most introductory courses, this class also hammers away at the foundations of what students think they know. For folks who have grown up within a Christian tradition, it’s easy to romanticize Christianity or think of it as an uncomplicated good. But any survey of Christian history will show, and quickly, that Christianity has brought a lot of suffering and destruction into the world. You can’t do the history of Christianity without doing histories of colonialism, religious war, slavery, genocide, racism, and persecution. You can’t arrive at something like the Westminster Confession or the Nicene Creed without the active work of empires and armies, and students often end up wrestling with their own embeddedness and complicity in atrocities past, present, and future. There is much redeeming and redeemable in the history of Christianity, but a course like this one is equally about paying attention to the harm that has been wrought by the same theologies and ecclesiologies so many of us hold dear. It can be a difficult course.

The other course I’m teaching this fall is an introduction to the book of Acts. I started teaching Acts in the fall of 2019 as a way to think about it carefully myself, in preparation for a book I was working on (which hopefully will be out sometime in the next year or so). Acts is often overlooked, between the gospels and Paul, but I have come to see it as a fascinating expression of Christian self-understanding in a period when that self-understanding was still coalescing and changing. In my class we focus on gender, power, and embodiment in Acts, so we use a lot of feminist and postcolonial readings. As it turns out, Acts is absolutely full of places where these things matter a lot. You can hardly turn a page without encountering descriptions of difference, exertions of imperial and religious power, geographical and cultural claims, and stark descriptions of how people are used by each other and by divine figures. Luke (the anonymous author who most scholars agree wrote both the gospel of Luke and the book of Acts) is famous for focusing on both politics and gender, and in Acts these themes run rampant, making it a good lens into the past and an even better mirror for the present.

This is what I really love about teaching: almost without regard to the specific subject matter at hand, teaching and learning are about looking at yourself in a mirror made up of someone else’s experiences and ideas. Teachers do that for students, students do it for teachers and for each other, and perhaps most significantly for the kinds of things I teach, we see and encounter ourselves in voices from the past as mediated by thoughtful and attentive scholars. Something like the story of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 or the letter Eusebius wrote back to his congregation from the Council of Nicaea can help us understand ourselves and the traditions we live. It’s as much about knowing yourself as it is about knowing the past.

It's mid-August, so I’m feeling the buzz in the air and the anticipation. I’m trying to finish syllabi and wondering what my students will be like. I’m getting the emails about fall convocation and putting it on my calendar; I’m trying to tidy up those summer writing projects. Soon enough it will all turn into work to be done, to committee assignments and too much to accomplish, but for now I’m enjoying feeling the seasons shift, turning slowly from summer to fall and drawing my attention to the intentionality of learning something new. The rhythm has brought me back around again, to a moment of renewing our work together.