GroshLink

The other day, a faculty member shared how seldom he found reading outside of the classroom, i.e., when it wasn't for a grade.  How does InterVarsity address the countercultural nature of mentoring/apprenticing students into a life of practical reading and contemplation of the divine?  I confess it's hard, except among a small group of students. 

In my own work, prayer, encouragement, and drawing together small learning communities around particular topics (i.e., discussion/conversation groups) have been valuable.  I'm not quite as strong a critique of the One Book reading clubs as John Wilson in his recent Books and Culture article On Eloquence.  This fall I participated in One Community, One Book program which read/discussed The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night.  Several years ago, the whole CMU Grad Fellowship read Deitrich Bonhoeffer's Life Together, watched Hanging on a Twisted Cross, and had a presentation by a Lutheran pastor which drew attention to the importance of Bonhoeffer's writing/actions/death. 

But Wilson's recommendation of Denis Donoghue's On Eloquence looks particularly good and I commend it those with such concerns. A quote from the book/article is given below.

"It has occurred to me, during the past several years as a teacher of English, Irish, and American literature at New York University, that the qualities of writing I care about are increasingly hard to expound." He finds among his students—students who have chosen to study literature—and in "departments of English" more generally a suspicion of or indifference toward the merely "aesthetic" and a preoccupation with moralizing. At the same time, like many academics of his generation, he laments "the premature concentration, even in general education, on the knowledge and capacities necessary for professional careers."

What's interesting, for our purposes, is that in addressing this indifference to eloquence, Donoghue helps us—if we pay attention—to recognize a pervasive tendency in evangelicalism: an overweening earnestness. There is, of course, a time to be earnest, and much that is good in the evangelical tradition reflects this imperative. But how dreary, how deadly, when earnestness loses all sense of proportion.

Note:  For more on the On Eloquence go to the Yale Press' site and Chronicle of Higher Education.