2022: a year in two parts

My year could be divided roughly in two parts. Between January and early August, I had at least ten essays published in various venues, plus a book, a few podcasts, and reviews in academics journals. During that time I gave a number of presentations and also wrote a peer-reviewed journal article that was published later in the fall. But since the start of the fall semester, it’s been pretty quiet.

The reasons why are many. Two are professional; the others are related to family, health, and travel. First, I submitted my application for tenure and promotion in late September, so I spent August and September on that. Second, I completed the revisions and endnotes for a new book manuscript, which I submitted in early December. On the personal side, our house got hit with Covid a third time in ten months in late summer, followed by some other health issues with our kids. Thankfully, all of that is behind us now. But it meant that every waking second not sleeping, teaching, revising the manuscript, or applying for T&P was spent caring for the family. Oh, and did I mention we’re in the middle of a move? I’m told those are stressful, too.

It was a good year, though. I found out last week that I have officially received both tenure and promotion, which is a relief. The book is in the hands of the publisher. I’ve recorded two podcasts due out in the next couple months. I’m working on not one but two books due in the next thirty months. And I’ve got a bunch of smaller pieces in process of being published or set to be written this winter and spring. More on that in a coming post.

For now, here’s a list of publications, presentations, and interviews from my year.

Podcasts

The Liberating Arts (Liberal Learning for Life, 25 April 2022). A short interview on the liberal arts and education I recorded way back in May 2021.

The Doctrine of Scripture (Mere Fidelity, 26 April 2022). My first bona fide theology podcast, with the lovely guys at Mere Fi, covering my first book.

Faith, Politics, Ecology, and Despair (The Arts of Travel Podcast, 19 June 2022). A somewhat random, challenging, but invigorating conversation about Wendell Berry, ecology, left politics, and Christian faith.

The Bible as the Church’s Book (Crackers and Grape Juice, 8 July 2022). A conversation about my second book with another OG faith-and-theology pod.

Essays

Grace upon Grace (Comment, 13 January 2022). The first of two pieces this year on gratitude to God. This is the synthetic one, locating gratitude in Christian theological grammar.

Jewish Jesus, Black Christ (The Christian Century, 25 January 2022). A long-simmering essay—the magazine’s cover story!—first drafted in August 2020.

Marked by Death (First Things, 2 March 2022). A short liturgical reflection for Ash Wednesday.

The Question of the Conquest (Christianity Today, 21 March 2022). A review of Charlie Trimm’s book about the conquest of Canaan. My favorite opening to something I wrote this year. And apparently the ninth most-read book review on CT’s website this year!

Unlearning Machines (Comment, 24 March 2022). A long review essay of Audrey Watters’ latest book, reflecting on Ed Tech and digital’s long mission to colonize education of every kind. This or the next essay were, I think, the best things I wrote this year, though it felt like no one happened upon this one. So be it.

Can We Be Human in Meatspace? (The New Atlantis, 2 May 2022). An even longer review essay, this time of Andy Crouch’s latest book. It sparked a whole series of exchanges, on Twitter, on blogs, and on email, with Alan Jacobs, with Jeff Bilbro, with Andy himself. All were gracious and kind. A blast to participate, and a fun and worthwhile book to kick it all off.

Another Option for Christian Politics (Front Porch Republic, 4 July 2022). A short piece proposing, somewhat tongue in cheek, one more saint as a substitute for the Benedict Option. My first for FPR.

The Ruins of Christendom (Los Angeles Review of Books, 10 July 2022). A review essay of Stanley Hauerwas’s latest book on Hauerwas and politics. I promised to come under 2,000 words, and I kept my word. This one pairs well with the next piece.

The Church in the Immanent Frame (First Things, 14 July 2022). A shorter review of Andrew Root’s book on the crisis of church decline in the West. So much of Root’s diagnosis is apt, but I took modest issue with what I perceived to be a kind of resignation to social and cultural norms and presuppositions the church not only need not accept, but will assuredly outlast.

Response to Alastair Roberts (Theopolis, 11 August 2022). A long response to Alastair’s own long engagement with my second book. He then replied to my reply. Just wonderful.

Academic

Review of Edwin Chr. van Driel, Rethinking Paul: Protestant Theology and Pauline Exegesis (Modern Theology, online 2022). This one was published early-access online in February, though only now is it in print, in the January 2023 issue of the journal. It’s a superb and thought-provoking book, so I’m glad the editors gave me some real space to engage it in the review.

The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context (Eerdmans, May 2022). The book! My second. My second overall, that is, and my second on the Bible. But my first written, in a sense, since it’s a major revision of my dissertation, initially completed in May 2017. So happy to see this out in the world. Originally $50, then $25. Now down to $20 on the Bezos site. Go buy it today!

Is Scripture a Gift? Reflections on the Divine-Ecclesial Provision of the Canon (Religions, Fall 2022). This one was a labor of love, though emphasis on labor. My second piece related to gratitude to God, albeit focused on the canon, in a sort of experimental key. Not sure the whole thing holds together, but I’m confident the pieces work. And it was a pleasure canvassing the literature on the gift.

Talks, Lectures, Presentations

“The Word of the Lord: Reading Scripture in and for Christ’s Body,” CSART Public Lecture, Abilene, TX, February 15, 2022. Link to video here.

“Hearing the Word of the Lord,” Intersection Webinar: Siburt Institute for Church Ministry, April 12, 2022. Link to video here.

“Response to Reviews of The Doctrine of Scripture,” Christian Scholars’ Conference, Nashville, TN, June 8, 2022. The CSC devoted a session to my first book. They met in person, but alas, I wasn’t able to be there. So I Zoomed into the session, listened to the papers, then gave my response via Zoom. They could actually see and hear me! No tech snafus! An academia miracle.

“Tradition and Liturgy for Churches of Christ,” University Church of Christ, August 24, 2022. A two-part presentation on sacred tradition, liturgy, and the role of Christian doctrine in hearing and reading Scripture. There’s nothing quite like committed CoC laypeople in a Wednesday night class. You rise to their level, not the other way around.

“Reading Scripture with the Church,” University Church of Christ, August 31, 2022. The aforementioned part two.

“Preaching for Martyrs in Training,” Summit Lectureship, Abilene, TX, October 14, 2022. A chat with some CoC preachers about the state of the church, Gen Z, and the power of preaching for the spiritual formation of an illiterate and uncatechized generation.

“The Word of the Lord,” Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest, Abilene, TX, October 19, 2022. A happy visit to the local Episcopal parish—they’re like CoC-ers, only their potlocks include wine and Compline. I talked about the Bible. They were a rapt audience. It was lovely.

“Knowing Christ,” ACU Commencement Address, Abilene, TX, December 16, 2022. This one was a surprise. Last May, at commencement ceremonies, I was shocked and overwhelmed to receive the award—voted on by the students!—of Teacher of the Year. (Here’s the write-up by the student newspaper and ACU’s magazine, respectively.) One of the honors of the award is that the TOTY give the December commencement address later the same year. So here I am, in all my glory, giving a charge to the December 2022 graduating class of ACU; I’m introduced around 1:02:00 and I finish the speech around 1:14:00. Enjoy:

Twitter and Thomas à Kempis

I’ve been on Twitter for nearly nine years. For the last three of those years I’ve wondered whether I should stay on, and I’ve gone back and forth. I quit for a few months while keeping my account active before returning in the spring of 2020, then took another big break that summer. Since fall 2020 I’ve stayed more or less consistent with a few self-defined rules for my Twitter usage:

1. The app is not on my phone.

2. I don’t scroll.

3. I don’t reply to tweets.

4. I don’t like tweets.

5. I look at half a dozen accounts daily or weekly, using them as RSS feeds.

6. I use my own account exclusively to share news about or links to my work.

This has been a winning formula the last 18 months. The first five are alike easy enough and simple enough to stick to, and following them has meant my Twitter usage has been both minimal and healthy, all things considered.

That said, the intentionally and insistently self-promotional aspect of #6 has begun to wear on me. On one hand, my Twitter profile has unquestionably been a boon to my writing career and whatever small profile I have among a few like-hearted readers. I’ve met genuine friends on there, and folks have bought my books after finding me on Twitter. On the other hand, can relentless flashing neon lights, operated by me, endlessly reiterating just how great I and my work are … can that possibly be good for the soul?

This morning I was reading Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. Here is the second chapter of the opening book, reproduced in its entirety:

Every man naturally desires knowledge; but what good is knowledge without fear of God? Indeed a humble rustic who serves God is better than a proud intellectual who neglects his soul to study the course of the stars. He who knows himself well becomes mean in his own eyes and is not happy when praised by men.

If I knew all things in the world and had not charity, what would it profit me before God Who will judge me by my deeds?

Shun too great a desire for knowledge, for in it there is much fretting and delusion. Intellectuals like to appear learned and to be called wise. Yet there are many things the knowledge of which does little or no good to the soul, and he who concerns himself about other things than those which lead to salvation is very unwise.

Many words do not satisfy the soul; but a good life eases the mind and a clean conscience inspires great trust in God.

The more you know and the better you understand, the more severely will you be judged, unless your life is also the more holy. Do not be proud, therefore, because of your learning or skill. Rather, fear because of the talent given you. If you think you know many things and understand them well enough, realize at the same time that there is much you do not know. Hence, do not affect wisdom, but admit your ignorance. Why prefer yourself to anyone else when many are more learned, more cultured than you?

If you wish to learn and appreciate something worthwhile, then love to be unknown and considered as nothing. Truly to know and despise self is the best and most perfect counsel. To think of oneself as nothing, and always to think well and highly of others is the best and most perfect wisdom. Wherefore, if you see another sin openly or commit a serious crime, do not consider yourself better, for you do not know how long you can remain in good estate. All men are frail, but you must admit that none is more frail than yourself.

These words nailed me to the wall. Or rather, if I may be permitted the severity of the expression, to the cross. Can any serious Christian read this passage and approve of spending even ten seconds of a day cultivating and curating a Twitter profile dedicated to nothing whatsoever except self-promotion? St. James advises that not many of us become teachers, “for you know that we who teach shall be judged with greater strictness” (3:1). What of those of us who proclaim our surpassing wisdom, our eloquent wit, our impressive pedigree, our latest important publication to the world? In an infinite scroll of self-regard and pride?

I’ve never used one of the penitential seasons to fast from Twitter, but I may do so this Lent. I may begin sooner than Ash Wednesday. My inner PR rep tempts me against this, urging me to consider that I have a book to sell this April, a profile to maintain, readers to woo and buyers to court. What self-indulgent nonsense. God help me if my insecurities and anxieties keep me on a website I know in my heart is wicked, on whose platform I continuously proclaim without shame my pride and self-importance to the world in a doom loop of frustrated desire, hoping beyond hope “to appear learned and to be called wise.”

As Thomas says just one chapter earlier, the whole aim of Christian faith is to study the life of Christ and thence to pattern one’s own life on his. What better time to get started than now? “Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor 6:2); “you know what hour it is, how it is full time now for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed; the night is far gone, the day is at hand. Let us then cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us conduct ourselves becomingly as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (Rom 13:11-14).

With St. Paul and with St. Augustine, we all say: Amen.

The endorsements are in for The Church’s Book!

My second book, The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context, will be published on April 26. That’s just three months away—fourteen weeks from Tuesday, if anyone’s counting. And if you are, pre-order it today! From Eerdmans, from Amazon, from Bookshop … wherever you prefer.

I first pitched the idea for this book to my doctoral advisor ten years ago this month. I finished the eventual dissertation in 2017, five years ago. And after what feels like ten thousand paper-cut edits—not to mention garden shears–sized snips in between machete-hacking cuts—the book is ready to be released into the world. Going into the Christmas break, the revisions were approved; the manuscript was typeset; the indexes were complete. Since then I’ve been waiting for the last piece of the puzzle, namely the endorsements. And they came in this week!

Without further ado, then, here are the blurbs. If you, like me, swoon in disbelief, know that you are not alone.

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“How we understand the church determines how we understand Scripture. Brad East grounds this basic claim in a detailed examination of three key heirs of Barthian theology—Robert Jenson, John Webster, and John Howard Yoder. The corresponding threefold typology that results —church as deputy (catholic), church as beneficiary (reformed), and church as vanguard (believers’ church)—offers much more than a description of the ecclesial divides that undergird different views of Scripture. East also presents a sustained and well-argued defense of the catholic position: church precedes canon. At the same time, East’s respectful treatment of each of his theological discussion partners gives the reader a wealth of insight into the various positions. Future discussions about church and canon will turn to The Church’s Book for years to come.”
— Hans Boersma, Nashotah House Theological Seminary

“Theologically informed, church-oriented ways of reading Scripture are given wonderfully sustained attention in Brad East’s new book. Focusing on Karl Barth and subsequent theologians influenced by him, East uncovers how differences in the theology of Scripture reflect differences in the understanding of church. Ecclesiology, East shows, has a major unacknowledged influence on remaining controversies among theologians interested in revitalizing theological approaches to Scripture. With this analysis in hand, East pushes the conversation forward, beyond current impasses and in directions that remedy deficiencies in the work of each of the theologians he discusses.”
— Kathryn Tanner, Yale Divinity School

“In this clear and lively volume, Brad East provides acute close readings of three theologians—John Webster, Robert W. Jenson, and John Howard Yoder—who have all tied biblical interpretation to a doctrine of the church. Building on their work, he proposes his own take on how the church constitutes the social location of biblical interpretation. In both his analytical work and his constructive case, East makes a major contribution to theological reading of Scripture.”
— Darren Sarisky, Australian Catholic University

“If previous generations of students and practitioners of a Protestant Christian doctrine of Holy Scripture looked to books by David Kelsey, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Kevin Vanhoozer as touchstones, future ones will look back on this book by Brad East as another. But there is no ecclesially partisan polemic here. This book displays an ecumenical vision of Scripture—one acutely incisive in its criticism, minutely attentive in its exposition, and truly catholic and visionary in its constructive proposals. It has the potential to advance theological discussion among dogmaticians, historians of dogma, and guild biblical exegetes alike. It is a deeply insightful treatment of its theme that will shape scholarly—and, more insistently and inspiringly, ecclesial—discussion for many years to come.”
— Wesley Hill, Western Theological Seminary

“In the past I’ve argued that determining the right relationship between God, Scripture, and hermeneutics comprises the right preliminary question for systematic theology: its ‘first theology.’ Brad East’s The Church’s Book has convinced me that ecclesiology too belongs in first theology. In weaving his cord of three strands (insights gleaned from a probing analysis of John Webster, Robert Jenson, and John Howard Yoder), East offers not a way out but a nevertheless welcome clarification of where the conflict of biblical interpretations really lies: divergent understandings of the church. This is an important interruption of and contribution to a longstanding conversation about theological prolegomena.”
— Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

“For some theologians, it is Scripture that must guide any theological description of the church. For others, the church’s doctrines are normative for interpreting Scripture. Consequently, theologians have long tended to talk past one another. With unusual brilliance, clarity, and depth, Brad East has resolved this aporia by arguing that the locus of authority lay originally within the people of God, and thus prior to the development of both doctrine and Scripture. And so it is we, the people of God, who are prior, and who undergird both, and thereby offer the possibility of rapprochement on that basis. East’s proposal is convincing, fresh, and original: a genuinely new treatment that clarifies the real issues and may well prepare for more substantive ecumenical progress, as well as more substantive theologies. This is a necessary book—vital reading for any theologian.”
— Nicholas M. Healy, St. John’s University

“All of the discussions in this book display East’s analytical rigor and theological sophistication. As one of the subjects under discussion in this book, I will speak for all of us and say that there are many times East is able to do more for and with our work than we did ourselves. . . . I look forward to seeing how future theological interpreters take these advances and work with them to push theological interpretation in new and promising directions.”
— Stephen E. Fowl, from the foreword

2021 recap: the blog

This was a banner year for the blog, for the simple reason that after 15 years of blogging I finally own my own turf. I’d been blogging on Google’s Blogger/Blogspot since spring 2006, but in June of 2021 my personal website (this very one) went live, and I moved over four years’ worth of posts from Resident Theologian (itself a successor to Resident Theology, my blog of nine years that I maintained during Master’s and doctoral work). That transition is marked by the distribution of posts: I wrote only 14 before June 12, and from then through year’s end I wrote 82, for a total of 96. That’s the most I’ve blogged since 2011, when I had 100 posts. That’s a lot of writing “on the side.” If I were to keep up the pace from the second half of the year, it would amount to a new post every two and a half days. And while I’ve partly stayed on mission—i.e., “mezzo blogging”—I’ve also written some rather huge posts.

Oh well. I’ve had a lot to say.

Given all that writing, I’d like to take a page from my friend and colleague Richard Beck’s long-running blog and do a rundown of the best, or at least my favorite, posts from the year, especially those you might have missed.

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10. On miscellaneous matters: aliens and Christian faith; Zuckerberg and the meta mafia; Enneagram anthropology; dreams and prayers; the secular spirit of Roger Scruton; biographies of theologians; Jordan Peterson, humor, and despair; the theology of C. S. Lewis; and a bit of nitpicking with Freddie deBoer’s anthropology.

9. On popular culture: Bezos Ad Astra; interpreting The Last Jedi; and, God help me, an MCU viewing order.

8. On art more generally: the catholicity of art; whether artists must be our friends; the fiction of P. D. James; and the heavenly vision of Piranesi.

7. On biblical scholarship: keeping up with the latest scholarship and writing in the subjunctive mood.

6. On the Bible and theology: a test for your doctrine of Scripture; anthropomorphism and analogy; heresy and orthodoxy; for angels; against theological fads.

5. On the state of the church in America: in tatters; slowly dying; and locally defectible.

4. On the (dis)contentment of affluent twentysomethings today who nevertheless need Jesus—and who feel the Ache for him, whether they know it or not.

3. On teaching the faith: (re)construction and deconstruction.

2. On life in the university: diverse academic vocations; emotional support in academia; authority in the classroom; and teaching a 4/4: office hours, tradeoffs, publishing, and freedom.

1. On podcasts: namely, why you should quit them.

2021 recap: reading

Ten years ago I cracked 150 books in a year; ever since, it’s been around 100 annually, give or take a few in either direction. Heading into 2021 I wanted to up that number—which felt just stuck—as much as I could. I met my minimum goal (I’m currently sitting at 120), along with some of my strategic goals, but I’m hoping to crawl back to 150 in 2022. Some of the successful strategies this past year that I hope to continue:

• Adding audiobooks to my regimen.

• Cutting out podcasts altogether.

• Reading less online.

• Reducing TV viewing.

• Keeping up an ongoing mix of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and academic works.

I didn’t crack the audiobook nut until March, nor did I drop podcasts until the fall (when a tsunami of work and illness and family commitments overtook my extra time), plus I was working on finalizing the proofs for not one but two books from May to November. Looking ahead to 2022, at the level of mere numbers, if I were to average 11 books per month during the two academic semesters and 16 books per month during the four summer months, that would come to 152. It’s doable, y’all! I’m going to make it happen. One year from today my reading recap for 2022 will be nothing but a Tim Duncan fist pump GIF.

And now, some of my favorites from the year, with scattered commentary.

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Rereads

5. George Orwell, Animal Farm

4. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

3. C. S. Lewis’s nonfiction. Some comments here.

2. G. K. Chesterton’s nonfiction. Some quotes and remarks here.

1. C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia. I read all seven once as an 18- or 19-year old. The re-read (via Audible) was glorious. My favorite used to be Dawn Treader, and I had low memories of Caspian and Horse, few memories of Last Battle, and no memories of Silver Chair. Now my definitive ranking: 1. Silver Chair 2. Last Battle 3. Dawn Treader 4. Magician’s Nephew 5. LWW 6. Horse & His Boy 7. Prince Caspian. In truth none of them are bad, and Horse would be higher if its weird and indefensible religious, racial, and cultural stereotypes weren’t so interwoven in the story. As for Lion, if it weren’t the first or so foundational or so iconic, I’d rank it last. I used to think Caspian was the one bad egg, but now I think it’s no longer bad, just the seventh best. But it’s Puddleglum and Underland for the win.

Poetry

5. W. H. Auden, Early Poems

4. John Updike, Endpoint and Other Poems

3. Molly McCully Brown, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded

2. Franz Wright, selected volumes. Every year I re-read Wright’s best collections (Beforelife, Martha’s Vineyard, God’s Silence, Wheeling Motel), and every year he remains my favorite.

1. R. S. Thomas, Collected Poems. This year, though, I re-read Thomas’s best volumes (running from Laboratories of the Spirit up to Mass for Hard Times) for the first time in a decade, and he overawed me once again. The master.

Graphic novels

3. Gene Luen Yang, Boxers & Saints. Recommended. Go in not knowing anything, and read both back to back.

2. Art Spiegelman, Maus. A classic for a reason.

1. Craig Thompson, Blankets. This one walloped me.

Fiction

8. Patrick Hoffman, Every Man a Menace. Taut, brutal, surprising, and to the point. In other words, the best sort of crime fiction.

7. P. D. James, Death of an Expert Witness. You know I had to include the Queen.

6. Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

5. G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill. Orwell and Huxley are the standard scribblers of the dystopian future; what if Chesterton (Notting Hill) and Lewis (That Hideous Strength) were added to that duo? At least one result: the realization that wit and style, not to mention religious vision, don’t have to be excised from the genre.

4. Jamie Quatro, Fire Sermon

3. Charles Portis, True Grit. As promised, this one’s perfect.

2. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace

1. Susanna Clarke, Piranesi. Charming and enrapturing from the first sentence to the last. I wrote about it here.

Nonfiction (popular)

11. James Clear, Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results & Cal Newport, A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

10. Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth

9. Jesse Singal, The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills. I wrote about it here.

8. Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World

7. Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

6. Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style. If you love style guides, as I do, this one might move to the top of your list, as it did mine.

5. Abigail Tucker, Mom Genes: Inside the New Science of Our Ancient Maternal Instinct & Ross Douthat, The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery. These belong together, both because their authors are married and because they tell parallel stories: about science, about knowledge, about family, about marriage and parenthood and children and illness. I wrote about Douthat here and included a nugget from Tucker here.

4. Andrew Sullivan, Out on a Limb: Selected Writing 1989–2021. A whirlwind tour of one of the most socially and politically influential public intellectuals and writers of my lifetime. A sort of chronological testament to that influence; you see the nation changing as time goes by in these essays.

3. Dwight Macdonald, Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain

2. E. H. Gombrich, A Little History of the World. Delightful. I wrote about it here.

1. Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays. A book that could change your life. As I read it in early 2021, I wondered why Kingsnorth wasn’t a Christian, or at least why he didn’t take serious Christian thinking and writing as a worthy interlocutor. Then he converted.

Nonfiction (scholarly)

5. Audrey Watters, Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning. Watters is the very best; my review of her book is forthcoming in Comment.

4. Jason Blakely, We Built Reality: How Social Sciences Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power. My review here.

3. Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left; Culture Counts; How to Be a Conservative. This year I read some of Scruton’s classics. I wrote about how they struck me as surprisingly but essentially secular here.

2. Matthew Rose, A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right. Required reading for the present moment. Get on it.

1. Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction. I’d never read a full-bore history of the Civil War. My mistake. This is the one. Magnificent.

Christian (popular)

5. Richard Beck, Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age

4. Rowan Williams, The Dwelling of the Light: Praying with Icons of Christ

3. Peter Leithart, Baptism: A Guide to Life from Death

2b. Eve Tushnet, Tenderness: A Gay Christian’s Guide to Unlearning Rejection and Experiencing God’s Extravagant Love. I can’t count how many times this book brought me to tears. Why? Because Tushnet has the preternatural ability to force her readers to come to terms with just how much Jesus loves them. She is a treasure.

2a. Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep. Christianity Today was right to crown it the book of the year. My review here.

1. Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection. First published in the late 1960s, a book that cannot be categorized by genre or style, a true N of 1. Buy it, read it, love it.

Theology (on the recent side)

5. Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini: Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation

4. Jean-Luc Marion, Givenness and Revelation

3. Timothy P. Jackson, Mordecai Did Not Bow Down: Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and Christian Supersessionism. My review here.

2. Eugene F. Rogers, Jr., Blood Theology: Seeing Red in Body- and God-Talk. My review here.

1. Paul Griffiths, Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar & Regret: A Theology. Now that Jenson has passed, there is no living theologian I take greater pleasure in reading or learning from—or being provoked by—than Griffiths. He never fails to make you think, or to re-think what you thought you thought before.

Theology (less recent)

5. François Mauriac, What I Believe

4. Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom

3. Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture. All Christian undergraduates should read this book, certainly those who already know they are interested in the life of the mind.

2. Oliver O’Donovan, Begotten or Made? I sometimes wish this little book had a different title, because it obscures both its subject matter and its relevance. Tolle lege.

1. Michael Ramsey, The Resurrection of Christ: An Essay in Biblical Theology. A model of succinct, stylish, substantive, scripturally normed, academically informed, and theologically rich writing. I want every book I write to be patterned on this minor classic.

A taxonomy of academic vocations

A couple weeks back I wrote more than 12,000 words on the experience of teaching a 4/4 load as a professor while also trying to publish (and, if possible, live an ordinary life). Consider this post a coda to that four-part series.

Spending five years at Yale for my PhD was, in numberless ways, a blessing. But one of the few ways in which it was not was in its formation of my (and presumably others’) sense of what it means to inhabit the academy. To be an academic, I learned, was to be a top-flight scholar whose publications are not only numerous but significant: the sort of work that changes the field, that sets the terms of debate going forward. To be anything other than this is to fail at the academic calling, to fall short of the high ideals of serious scholarship.

It goes without saying that this vision of the intellectual life is a lovely and admirable one for a few. It is reserved for only a few for at least three reasons: because almost all academics are not at Ivy League schools; because for certain articles and books to be conversation-shapers and game-changers most publications cannot be; because most of us are simply not possessed of that rare combination of intelligence, upbringing, education, talent, discipline, health, and ambition necessary to produce polymathic scholarship. Hence, for the rest of us mere mortals—which means very nearly every working professor today, minus a fortunate handful—some other vision of the intellectual life must suffice.

Happily, one of the many gifts of teaching at my current institution has been an education in the diversity of academic vocations. It turns out there are more ways than one to inhabit the university. Here’s my own personal taxonomy.

NB: These are in no particular order; none are mutually exclusive; plenty of academics encompass more than one, though I doubt many, if any, do all eight well.

1. Scholar

The ideal and stereotype: the professor in her study, surrounded by stacks upon stacks of thousands of books, master of a dozen languages, slowly producing multi-volume works of guild-defining scholarship. Less ideal-typically, an academic in this mold lives for the work of the library; she considers it her number-one job, and organizes her life around it. Her principal academic aim is to make a contribution to her discipline.

2. Researcher

It seems simultaneously defensible and worthwhile to distinguish the scholarly labors of the humanities from those of the sciences. The way I’ve realized I do that mentally is by the word “research.” Obviously research can describe anything, including literary and textual research. But for lack of a more targeted term, I’ll reserve “scholar” for an academic-publisher in the humanities mold and “researcher” for an academic-publisher in the sciences mold. For the truth is that both the work and the product of each are almost entirely distinct, a disciplinary extension of C. P. Snow’s “two cultures.” When colleagues in the sciences describe their work in the lab, or on Amazon Mechanical Turk, or what they read, or what they write, or how they present at conferences, or the role of numbers and spreadsheets and studies in their day-to-day work—it sounds like we have different jobs. That’s because we do. “Research,” for me, names what the folks in STEM do with their time, alien though it may be to this theologian.

3. Writer

Academics are not usually writers, whether or not they write on the regular. In fact, most academics are poor writers, and many, if not most, academics hate writing. I speak from experience, which being anecdotal may be a small sample size, but I’m confident that it is representative. All you have to do is open a book published by an academic press, and you’ll see as quickly as you can read how boring, plodding, ugly, and jargon-laden the prose is. I’ve known very few academics, moreover, who like to write. But occasionally one likes to write; even more occasionally that writing isn’t bad. Since you can produce scholarship and engage in research without either of those things being true of you, and since you can be a good writer without being an especially good scholar or researcher, I think setting aside “writer” as a separate vocation is more than warranted.

4. Teacher

This one’s a given. Most academics teach, though far too many neither enjoy it nor are especially good at it. Check that: more are good at it than you might suppose. That’s part of the problem with imagining that Yale and Harvard, Chicago and Notre Dame are the norm, and the rest are the exception to the rule. (And those institutions contain lots of wonderful teachers, too!) So strike through that cynical reflex of mine. Most academics teach, and many, many of them both excel at it and find great fulfillment in it. What they don’t enjoy is the 70-hour work weeks, the professional precarity, the high teaching loads, the huge class sizes, the unreasonable expectations, the consumer mentality applied to students, the gutting of non-job-related course subjects, the collective societal presumption against the meaningfulness of their work, the condescension toward their work by uber-scholars—and so on. Nevertheless, it is true that some professors are not teachers by vocation but only by necessity.

5. Mentor

This is one I had some sense of during doctoral studies, given the role of advisors in dissertations, but I’ve had a front-row seat observing quality mentorship at my current institution—and let me tell you, it is a calling unto itself. Where I teach mentoring might be personal and spiritual in addition to being professional or academic, but that’s only a reminder that “academic” is not a distinct compartment in a fragmented life but seamlessly integrated into the whole of a young person’s maturing sense of identity, beliefs about the world, and hopes for the future. For many students, mentorship makes all the difference. It’s what makes this or that college, this or that professor special. If I were a department chair, and I could choose between a quality scholar who was a super mentor, on one hand, and a super scholar who was a “fine” mentor, on the other, I would opt for the former without a second thought. Good mentors trail behind them all manner of secondary virtues that invariably benefit their academics neighbors, both within the classroom and without.

6. Practitioner

Here think of all those majors in the contemporary university that are taught by what those students majoring in that field want to become: nurses, teachers, PTs, OTs, social workers, ministers, journalists, even businessmen. Often (though not always) these professors and instructors worked for years, maybe decades, as a professional before returning to college in order to train the next generation. It can’t be emphasized enough that these fields and their faculty are the reason academia is still afloat today. In my experience, most (but, again, not all) faculty in these areas do not understand themselves as “academics” in the way that many “scholars” (see above) are trained or socialized to do. To the extent that the ideal-type of the tweed-jacketed philosophiae doctor with his dusty library volumes and German-language poetry and career-spanning articles on erudite topics still exists, often as not practitioners neither desire it nor exemplify it nor feel intimidated by it. Practitioners are doers who train still more doers, and in general they are making the world a better place, and are constitutionally unimpressed by your transparent attempts at prestige. And rightly so.

7. Administrator

There is nothing less sexy in academia than administration, at least to purists of the scholar or teacher type, but like practitioners, administrators make the world go round. Working for a good chair or dean means your life, all things being equal, is a dream; working for a bad chair or dean, accordingly, is bound to become nothing short of a nightmare. Furthermore, many academics both enjoy the work of administration and are gifted at it. I have friends and colleagues around the country who are clearly meant for administration, and unless it would make them miserable, their going that route makes life possible as well as happier for the rest of us. Sometimes administration is a burden suffered for a time, out of duty or need. But the calling exists, it is an academic calling, and we should all be grateful for those who accept it.

8. Intellectual

Not every academic is an intellectual, and vice versa. What do I mean by that? By “intellectual” here I mean to refer to someone for whom the life of the mind is her central preoccupation, a preoccupation that takes the form of mental curiosity, wide learning, voracious reading, affection for big ideas, desire for debate, love of history, and the pleasures of disciplinary promiscuity. To be an intellectual means making time for the mind, which means making time for texts (print or digital). Not every intellectual produces, but every intellectual consumes: which is to say, takes in what she can, when she can, as often as she can. An intellectual may or may not be a hedgehog, but she is always a fox; she knows many things, or seeks to do so, and for their own sake. Intellectuals make up a higher percentage of academics than the ordinary populace—that’s a matter of self-selection—but if you are not yourself an academic you might be surprised by how many academics are not intellectuals in the sense here stipulated. You might then be inclined to interpret that observation as an indictment. It need not be, however. The point of laying out this taxonomy is precisely to call into question our widely shared assumptions of who or what the ideal-typical academic is or ought to be. There are many ways of inhabiting the academy; we need all of them; there is no prima facie reason to suppose any one of them is essentially superior to any of the others. The sooner some of us learn that lesson (and it took me some time, as I said at the outset), the better our common work is liable to be.

Teaching a 4/4: freedom

This is the fourth and final post in a series of reflections on what it means to be a scholar in the academy with a 4/4 teaching load. The first discussed the allotment of one’s hours in a 4/4 load; the second identified the unavoidable tradeoffs that come with either having a family or serving at a particular kind of institution; the third offered a series of tips and strategies for 4/4 profs who want to make, foster, and protect the time necessary for reading and writing. This fourth and last post is a companion to the third, discussing in broader terms some of the gifts and opportunities afforded by serving at a teaching-heavy university as well as having a time-demanding family life outside of work.

Let’s say you accept my terms and agree that it’s possible to find the time to publish while teaching a 4/4. Still, you reply, that doesn’t make the high teaching load good; the load remains a hindrance to research, only a hindrance that can be (partially) overcome.

There are two things to say to this. First, teaching isn’t a hindrance. Nor is it just your job. Teaching is a calling. If it’s not your calling, you might want to get out of the game. As I’ve repeated throughout this series, research is a component of and companion to teaching; the job is twofold, a balance or dance. You don’t teach in order to write. You teach and you write; that’s the scholarly life.

Second, a high teaching load isn’t solely a set of challenges for research by comparison to positions in the scaling heights of the ivory tower: the Ivy League, the R1 state schools, the super-rich private universities whose research operations are a well-oiled machine. A high teaching load, which is usually a function of serving at an institution with less prestige, less money, less power, and so on, also presents unique opportunities for your research.

How so?

First, by taking the pressure off. I cannot put into words the relief I have felt every day on my job not having to publish or perish. Note well: I’m still publishing. But there is no one peering over my shoulder, no one nudging and shoving me toward some invisible finish line extending forward ahead of me, always within sight but never within reach. The sheer benefit to one’s mental health makes it worth a positive mention. When I compare notes with friends who work in The Big Leagues, their jobs sound claustrophobic, stultifying, enervating, depressing. Like a panic attack waiting to happen. Who wants that?

Second, by taking the pressure off what I’m supposed to write. Three months ago my first book was published. I first drafted it two years ago, in the fall of 2019. Would I have written that book, the way that I wrote it, were I at a different, more research-heavy institution? Answer: Not on your life. And it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. I couldn’t be prouder of it. But the spirit that breathes across its pages, a spirit I trust you can sense as a reader, is the spirit of freedom. I wrote exactly what I believed to be true, in the style I thought most apt to the content. The book is what I wanted it to be. Never, not in a million years, would I have done that had an administrator been breathing down my neck, asking me when my Next Big Book would be coming out, and with what university press, and on what topic, and written with what level of dense and unreadable prose. I didn’t write to make a splash. I wrote what was burning up my insides, what was begging to come out. And you know what? If the book ends up making any kind of splash, it’ll be because I wrote from passion and desire, not from administrative pressure or T&P criteria. And praise God for that.

Third, of a piece with an overall reduction of pressure is a broader freedom to pursue interests as they arise. In the last five years I have somehow, by God’s grace (and editors’ largesse), become a person who writes essays and criticism for magazines on wide-ranging topics that include but are not limited to my scholarly expertise in theology. I’m going to say it again: I could not and would not have done that at an Ivy or R1 institution. Why? Because their incentive structures do not care about such writing. But you know what? Alan Jacobs is right: Literary journalism (a term he takes from Frank Kermode) is a lot harder to write than peer-reviewed journal articles. Not only that, doing so makes you a much better writer, doubly so if you have no training as a writer and the only writing you cut your teeth on was inaccessible, jargon-heavy academic “prose.” Working with editors from The Point and The Los Angeles Review of Books and The New Atlantis and The Hedgehog Review and Commonweal and First Things and Comment and elsewhere has made me an immeasurably better writer than I was before I started, indeed than I ever would have been had I never tried my hand at such writing. Thank God, then, too, that I’m here at ACU and not at some soul-destroying publish-or-perish elite place that doesn’t care one whit whether you write well or whether what you write is read widely, only whether the right number of PRJAs is checked on the T&P portfolio. No thanks.

Fourth, my entire “research profile” bears the imprint of this pressure-free vocational freedom afforded by working at a teaching-heavy institution. On one hand, my third book (beginning to draft next month!) is a 25,000-word popular work on the church meant for lay audiences. Would I have signed that contract elsewhere? Probably not. On the other hand, my fourth book (not due for a few years) is a similarly popular work, longer and more detailed, however, on the proper role of digital technology in the life of churches and their ordained leaders. I’m currently reading my way into being able to write about that topic; I’ve also just finished a pilot course teaching on the same. Are you sensing a theme? My writing habits have followed an unplanned and undirected course these last few years; or rather, I have allowed those habits to follow desires that sprang up organically from my reading and teaching, and my institutional location not only permitted but encouraged that process. I can tell you, my conversations with colleagues at other institutions do not report a similar story.

Fifth, I have learned to accept my reading and writing limits in (what I take to be) a healthy way. I’ve always loved a moment that comes early in Wallace Stegner’s novel Crossing to Safety; the narrator is speaking of his early days as a college prof:

I remember little about Madison as a city, have no map of its streets in my mind, am rarely brought up short by remembered smells or colors from that time. I don’t even recall what courses I taught. I really never did live there, I only worked there. I landed working and never let up.

What I was paid to do I did conscientiously with forty percent of my mind and time. A Depression schedule, surely—four large classes, whatever they were, three days a week. Before and between and after my classes, I wrote, for despite my limited one-year appointment I hoped for continuance, and I did not intend to perish for lack of publications. I wrote an unbelievable amount, not only what I wanted to write but anything any editor asked for—stories, articles, book reviews, a novel, parts of a textbook. Logorrhea. A scholarly colleague, one of those who spent two months on a two-paragraph communication to Notes and Queries and had been working for six years on a book that nobody would ever publish, was heard to refer to me as the Man of Letters, spelled h-a-c-k. His sneer so little affected me that I can’t even remember his name.

Nowadays, people might wonder how my marriage lasted. It lasted fine. It throve, partly because I was as industrious as an anteater in a termite mound and wouldn’t have noticed anything short of a walkout, but more because Sally was completely supportive and never thought of herself as a neglected wife—“thesis widows,” we used to call them in graduate school. She was probably lonely for the first two or three weeks. Once we met the Langs she never had time to be, whether I was available or not. It was a toss-up who was neglecting whom.

Early in our time in Madison I stuck a chart on the concrete wall of my furnace room. It reminded me every morning that there are one hundred sixty-eight hours in a week. Seventy of those I dedicated to sleep, breakfasts, and dinners (chances for socializing with Sally in all of those areas). Lunches I made no allowance for because I brown-bagged it at noon in my office, and read papers while I ate. To my job—classes, preparation, office hours, conferences, paper-reading—I conceded fifty hours, though when students didn’t show up for appointments I could use the time for reading papers and so gain a few minutes elsewhere. With one hundred and twenty hours set aside, I had forty-eight for my own. Obviously I couldn’t write forty-eight hours a week, but I did my best, and when holidays at Thanksgiving and Christmas gave me a break, I exceeded my quota.

Hard to recapture. I was your basic overachiever, a workaholic, a pathological beaver of a boy who chewed continually because his teeth kept growing. Nobody could have sustained my schedule for long without a breakdown, and I learned my limitations eventually. Yet when I hear the contemporary disparagement of ambition and the work ethic, I bristle. I can’t help it.

I overdid, I punished us both. But I was anxious about the coming baby and uncertain about my job. I had learned something about deprivation, and I wanted to guarantee the future as much as effort could guarantee it. And I had been given, first by Story and then by the Atlantic, intimations that I had a gift.

Thinking about it now, I am struck by how modest my aims were. I didn’t expect to hit any jackpots. I had no definite goal. I merely wanted to do well what my inclinations and training led me to do, and I suppose I assumed that somehow, far off, some good might flow from it. I had no idea what. I respected literature and its vague addiction to truth at least as much as tycoons are supposed to respect money and power, but I never had time to sit down and consider why I respected it.

Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim’s Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else—pathway to the stars, maybe.

I suspect that what makes hedonists so angry when they think about overachievers is that the overachievers, without drugs or orgies, have more fun.

My wife just about spit out her coffee when she read that for the first time. She could relate. But part of the point, aside from the sheer dictatorial vision required to devote all the time one has to what one wants to achieve, is that hour-counting and hour-assigning is not a way of disregarding limits. It’s a way of admitting them and working within them.

For me, those limits bear less on writing than on reading. I’m a fast writer but a turtle-slow reader. I’ve never known someone who reads regularly, for work or for pleasure, who reads as slowly as I do. What that means is that I have to make choices. Here are two choices I’ve had to make that, upon reflection, have made me a better scholar—or at least a practicing scholar, whatever my merits; someone who’s in the game, not on the sidelines.

One choice was to accept that my reading would never be comprehensive. That’s an obvious thing to say, but you might be surprised by how few academics accept it in their heart of hearts. And it’s true, I’ve known one or two polymaths who genuinely seem to have read it all. But that ain’t me. Not even in a single area, not even in a subtopic of subtopic of a subtopic, like the doctrine of Scripture, about which I’ve now written two books. What I’ve not read vastly outweighs what I’ve read. That truth (and it is a truth) can be paralyzing or liberating. I’ve chosen to let it be liberating. Read what I can and write what I’m able, and if people find it of any use, God be praised; if not, then I guess I didn’t meet the magical threshold of “enough, though not everything.” Naturally you don’t want such self-allowance to avoid total comprehensiveness to slide into a permission to be lazy, to avoid covering all one’s bases. Yet the point stands: it’s never enough; let that be enough. Get on with it and do your work, in acceptance that someone someday will read what you’ve written and point out the text you should have cited. It’ll happen. Be grateful they pointed it out to you. You can take the time to read it for the next thing you write!

The second choice followed from the first. If I wasn’t going to be an independent scholar or research professor who reads 1,000 pages a day (as I’ve heard the encyclopedic Wolfhart Pannenberg did, before writing a book by dinner time), then I might as well broaden my reading to include both academic works far from my area of research and books (old or new) acclaimed for their insights, their impact, or the beauty of their prose. Not only has this practice proved a revolution in my reading habits, and for the better. It has made me a far better academic, scholar, writer, and teacher. Why? Because what I read and know is more than a mile deep and an inch wide. I try to read the dozen or two dozen annual “biggest books,” whether trade or academic, that get press in the NYRB or NYTBR or New Yorker or elsewhere. I read political philosophy and biblical studies and philosophy of science and social science and critical theory and memoirs and novels and collections of essays. Sometimes I review them. I don’t do this reading only at home. I do it in my office. It’s part of my scholarly labor. At this point I’d feel irresponsible if I stopped. It’s helped me resist the siren song of becoming a hedgehog, or a hedgehog alone. In the few areas on which I publish in academic journals, I am a hedgehog: ecclesiology, bibliology, Trinity. But otherwise I’m a fox, reading and writing on as many topics and authors and books as I can lay my hands on.

And I’m telling you: Not only would I not have done that were I not teaching a 4/4. It wouldn’t even have occurred to me. It wouldn’t be possible. The material conditions don’t encourage it, at least for pre-tenure faculty, at least most of the time. Usually they actively block or prohibit it.

That’s why I’m happy where I am. That’s why I don’t resist my high teaching load. That’s part of what makes teaching a 4/4 not just “not as bad as you think,” but (apart from the teaching, which is itself fun and rewarding and good work) a surprisingly conducive environment for research and publication. If you can make and guard time for it, it might actually turn out to be better than it would have been were you elsewhere. Who would have thought?

*

I’m not quite done, though. Consider the following something of a coda.

In the second post in this series I discussed not just institutional but personal and familial tradeoffs. So I want to add a word here about how and why having a rich life beyond work, full of bustling households bursting with children as well as friends, neighbors, churches, sports leagues, and community service, is not only good—being far, far more important than publishing—but, perchance, itself a boon to your academic work.

Here’s the nutshell version. Having something to come home to makes the work you do during the day meaningful, even when it doesn’t always feel like significant work. I never ask myself the question, Why am I even doing this? What’s it all for? That’s not because I think my writing will outlive me. It certainly will not. It’s because having four children who don’t know and don’t care that Dad’s an author (not to mention a wife whose stated marital purpose in life is to be unimpressed with me) puts my work into perspective. The souls for whom I am responsible are not only worth more than the straw that is my writing and teaching. They are a reminder that my job, though a vocation, is also, well, a job. More than a job, perhaps, but not less than one. It pays the bills and puts food on the table. That’s a worthy thing in its own right. And given that I do what I love with a flexible schedule that more than pays the bills, the truth is that I’ve got it made in the shade, professionally speaking. I’m employed, in a time of precarity, anxiety, uncertainty, and fear. What’s not to be grateful for?

Furthermore, as I briefly alluded to in the second post, having a family does important motivational and boundary-setting work, if you’ll let it. I don’t choose not to bring work home with me. That choice is made for me by my children. I can’t be working while driving them to basketball or picking them up from school or attending church or cooking dinner or singing them to sleep. And when they’re finally in bed, should I be a good husband and spend time with my wife, or each and every night march to my office to get a few more hours in? The question answers itself.

Here’s the irony, if it counts as one. Having fewer hours in the office and stronger boundaries between work and home—having, in a word, both more and more fixed limits on one’s time—can have the unexpected effect of supercharging what work time you have. Because I know I have to accomplish X, Y, and Z in only three or 12 or 20 hours, then I don’t have a choice (there’s that freedom in unchosen commitments theme again): I’m just going to have to get it done in the time I have, because once I clock out, the work is finished in any case. What such expectations within limits produce, at any rate in me, is a singularity of vision that crowds out all the usual distractions and detours and time-sucking routes of avoiding work. No Slack, no Twitter, no Facebook, no Instagram, no Gmail, no Messages, no WhatsApp, no nothing. Turn Freedom on or the internet off; kill your inbox or set your phone in another room. Whatever it takes, read the book or write the essay or fix the draft or review the submission or complete the grant or prepare the lesson or grade the papers. Just do it. The only time you have is now. Take advantage of it.

My anecdotal experience in doctoral studies confirms this dynamic. Especially when ABD, my single friends—some of them, I should say, some of the time—had many a day like the following: sleep in (that is, relative to my 6:07am baby-crying human alarm), check email and social media, drag themselves to a coffee shop, work for an hour or two, meet a friend for a late lunch, work a little more, grab drinks at a bar, then work into the wee hours of the night. Their self-report would then describe such an experience as “working all day”—not without some self-awareness, but all the while underwritten by a mixture of disappointment, frustration, and resentment at the lack of some objective structure or set of involuntary strictures organizing their time.

By comparison I often had exactly four total daytime hours in which to get the same amount of work done (sharing, as I did, childcare with my wife; stipends rarely stretch so far as to cover daycare or nannies). And so I did the work in the time I had. I didn’t have another choice. Would I have been as efficient had I been in their shoes? No way. It was the inflexible limits placed on my time that forced my hand. And I’m grateful they did.

The same dynamic obtains beyond the PhD, if you’re fortunate enough to have a tenure-track gig. Limits aren’t the enemy. They’re the secret sauce of happiness. Once accepted, or even befriended, they might just help you publish.

Even while teaching a 4/4.

Teaching a 4/4: publishing

This post is the third in a series on what it’s like to teach a 4/4 load as a university professor and, conditions permitting, how to flourish while doing so. I’ve laid out the allotment of office and home hours devoted to work by a typical 4/4 prof (tl;dr: 50-60 on average, to prep, teach, grade, mentor, sponsor, serve on committees, and reply to emails); I’ve explained why there are inevitable tradeoffs involved, both at the personal and familial and at the institutional level. For many 4/4 teachers, scholarship is next to impossible without transgressing what ought to be a hard and fast division between work life and home life.

Nevertheless. I promised in the opening post that, at least for some of us, at least in certain circumstances, scholarship remains possible even with a 4/4 load. Not that everyone wants that—many college instructors live exclusively to teach; they do the other stuff only when they must—but if you’re someone who does want it, but doesn’t know how to do it, or even whether it’s possible, I’m here to say that it is. In this post and the next one I’ll be sharing what I’ve learned, for whatever it’s worth.

I want to come at the question from two angles. The first is pure logistics: What habits, hacks, and strategies work to protect one’s time and to dedicate what remains of it to scholarship? The second is more philosophical: What does a 4/4 load mean for one’s scholarship—how, counterintuitively, might teaching outside of ultra-elite research-heavy contexts benefit one’s scholarship, providing opportunities and even gifts unavailable in those more superficially “research-friendly” contexts?

I’ll save the introspection for the next post. First comes tactics.

*

By way of beginning, permit me a Cal Newport moment. I owe you some mention of my bona fides, since I’m about to offer some advice. As I write it is Finals Week in the fall 2021 semester, which means it is exactly halfway through my fifth year teaching full-time as a tenure-track Assistant Professor: nine total semesters across four and a half years. Here’s what I’ve produced in that time (beginning summer 2017, when I arrived in Abilene, and counting only what I’ve written during that time, whether already published or currently scheduled for publication—i.e., I’m not counting anything I did before I arrived or that I’m contracted to do but have yet to get around to):

• one edited book;

• two authored books;

• five peer-reviewed journal articles;

• 28 essays (this sort of thing);

• 10 book reviews;

• six conference/paper presentations.

Not counting the presentations, the approximate word count of my writing output (also not counting this blog, I suppose) comes to about 400,000. That in turn comes to 7,500 or so per month, or ~1,800 per week, or (getting granular) just under 400 words per workday (assuming I’m not writing on Saturday or Sunday).

I should add, too, that during the time in question I received five grants (four internal to ACU, one external) and one award (for teaching). The total number of courses I’ve taught is 40: four per semester for nine semesters, plus one overload semester and three summer courses online.

That’s a lot, I know. You might be wondering, reasonably, whether the first two posts in this series were a bit of hot air, since I seemed to suggest that 4/4 profs don’t have time for anything else but being the best teachers they can be. And for many, that’s true. My first year here that was all I could handle, too. If I was in the office, I was prepping for class or grading assignments or meeting with students—full stop. But since then I’ve slowly found ways of creating and guarding the time necessary to do what I love and feel called to do: namely, read and write theology for both academic and popular audiences.

Here are some of the tricks I’ve learned to make sure I could do just that. Maybe they’ll help you as well.

1. Have a good boss.

Yes, granted, this one’s out of your control. But it might still be something of a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for finding time to publish. My chair understands that research is a top priority for me. For that reason he has worked to make my life as conducive as possible to reaching that goal, within the limits that both he and I work under. Five things in particular have been a lifesaver in this area, and my chair is the reason for all of them.

First: Teaching multiple sections of the same course. Instead of teaching four truly different classes in a semester, in other words, I teach two distinct courses, each of which is offered twice in the same semester, in two sections. I’m still in the classroom 12 hours a week, but I’m only preparing lesson plans for half that.

Second: Stacking sections back to back, at the same time every day. I teach every afternoon, Monday through Thursday, either 1:30–4:30 or 12:00-3:00. That kind of regularity is crucial for sectioning off the rest of my time into a single bundle, rather than in scattered bits and pieces throughout the day. Plus, stacking sections of the same course back to back means I’m able simply to press “repeat” on the same material, rather than having to artificially separate (in time and in my mind) what are identical class meetings.

Third: Keeping me off major committees, at least at first. My chair waited until my third year to put me on a committee that demanded real time from me; he waited until my fourth year to put me on a genuinely time-intensive committee. In truth I didn’t even know he was doing this until a year ago. Every faculty member has to do committee work, and rightly so, but that doesn’t mean you need to jump into the deep end your first or second year. Delaying my serious committee involvement until I got my sea legs under me made all the difference; at that point I had learned how to manage my time, and it wasn’t a burden when it came.

Fourth: Class size. Now, this one is more ambiguous by nature. During my first three years part of my load included large, lecture-heavy freshmen survey courses; since then I’ve taught exclusively upper-level electives that center on discussion, with class size capped at 25 or 30 students. I include this as a boon because it’s what I like to teach, and a satisfied me-as-teacher is unquestionably a productive me-as-writer. The through-line there is a straight one. But smaller classes are not necessarily less demanding than larger ones. In fact the latter are often easier and more convenient to grade: quizzes and exams, on top of PowerPoint-heavy firehose-lectures. Whereas the former usually involve loads of writing assignments, which call for extensive feedback and time-intensive grading. For me, though, the tradeoff is worth it, and my chair kindly permitted me to ease out of the bigger courses in order to take on the smaller ones I preferred.

Fifth: Get creative. My spring load entails four courses, but one of them is a week-long intensive the second week of January, before the semester starts. That opens up my daily and weekly time during the semester even more. Last spring I layered my remaining three semester-long classes back-to-back-to-back on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which meant I had zero teaching requirements on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I felt like a new man. It was a slog the other two days of the week, but it was worth it. I’ve even considered teaching a short course in May as well, following the end of the semester, which would cut down my spring semester-long courses to two. Every college and department has different ways of finagling these things. Look into it. Run it by the boss. Not only might she agree to it; she might think it’s a good idea.

2. Be an excellent teacher.

This bit of advice might sound odd or out of place, but it’s crucial. You will not succeed at publishing at a teaching-heavy institution if you aren’t doing your first job well. Put differently, you cannot allow yourself to think about research until you are satisfied that you are doing a quality job in the classroom. How do to that is a question for another day. But it’s a requirement for 4/4 profs. That’s what they pay you for, and if you’re not succeeding there, you’re in for a world of hurt.

3. Just say no.

This is the first and nonnegotiable rule for writing with a 4/4 load. You have to think of your job as consisting of two and only two things: teaching and research. Everything else—literally, everything else—is either tertiary or an obstacle in your path.

Professors receive requests, whether from students, colleagues, or administrators, every single day on the job. In my experience professors rarely say no to these requests. It is hard to decline an invitation, not least one that is flattering, or that seems to come from real need, or that might benefit one’s students or institution. Yet if your highest priority (after being a good teacher) is securing consistent and reliable time for research, you must be ruthless here. Say no to every ask. Every. Single. One. Just say no. Don’t speak at that event; don’t sponsor that organization; don’t attend that meeting; don’t join that book club; don’t register for that webinar; don’t foster that initiative; don’t explore that opportunity. Don’t do any of it. You can’t, not if you want to do meangingful scholarship. There are only so many hours in the day.

I have a standing agreement with my chair: I will do whatever he needs me to do; his wish is my command. But if it’s a request and not an order (a soft ask, not a hard one), the answer is no. Not because I’m not a team player—I am, or try to be—but because the articles and books won’t write themselves, and after teaching, they’re my priority.

Some departments and institutions welcome this sort of clear boundary-setting, and some don’t. Again, you need good, trustworthy bosses who say what they mean and mean what they say, and who value the scholarship you hope to produce. Doubtless much of the time the “just say no” approach has to be leavened with occasional yeses as well as rhetorical massaging; one can’t be front and center with it all the time. The strategy remains essential in any case. Your time won’t guard itself.

(Reality check: Do I actually do this? Do I follow my own advice, take my own medicine? To a large degree, yes, I do. But also no: At least twice a week the second half of this semester, for example, I had meetings with students who wanted to discuss their futures, their faith, or theological questions. Even in cases like these, though, I try to be strategic: I either meet first thing, at 8:00am sharp, so I can still guard a chunk of office time for work; or I meet in the late afternoon on a Friday, the better to get work done earlier in my one day with no classes. Besides meeting with and mentoring students, I’ve variously hosted twice-monthly theology discussion groups in my home, had students over for lunch after church, spoken at Honors events, that sort of thing. Sometimes you just have to say yes: whether the compulsion is internal or external, you find yourself nodding in reply. Just this week I was a liturgist in our music department’s annual Vespers service; before Covid hit, I now recall, I gave an invited lecture to a psychology class(!) on sexual minorities(!!) regarding sexual morality(!!!) from both philosophical and Christian perspectives(!!!!). (Those exclamation points should tell you how out of my depth I felt that day.) So no, the honest answer is that I don’t always and in every instance say no. But I try to as a rule, especially when the ask is purely optional and doesn’t seem urgent. And when I say yes, I do so knowing that it means a tradeoff with research; just as there’s no such thing as a free lunch, there’s no such thing in the academy as a yes to X without an accompanying no to Y. That’s life.)

4. Be disciplined with technology, especially email and LMS.

Your laptop is a black hole. When it is open—even when it is in the same room as you—your work time is inexorably sucked down into an abyss. The same goes for your smartphone, especially if it has your email on it. (Right this moment, take your email off your phone. That’s an order.) Our devices do not aid or enable our work as professors. Nine times out of town, they stand in the way.

If you are in the humanities like me, then it is fundamental that you gain the upper hand on your technology. In particular, you need long, long stretches of time in which neither your phone nor your laptop is close to hand, much less open or on. One little trick I do, when I’m in a good zone with research, is begin my day with reading. Specifically, I do not open my laptop, much less check my inbox, until lunch time or later. I arrive at my office; do my morning devotion; change chairs to sit elsewhere than my desk-and-laptop-writing-station; leave my laptop and phone out of reach, over there, on the far side of the office; open a book (or three), and read as long as I’m able to before other work demands necessitate putting it down.

Remember that computers are an innovation in the professor’s office. Not long ago—within living memory!—one’s office contained books, paper, and pens. It’s not weird to read for hours on end. That’s your job. Again: How are you supposed to write about what you’ve read, if you never read in the first place? Do the reading by making time for it, and make time for it by not letting your inbox (or Twitter, or Messages, or Canvas) control what you do, when you do it.

Speaking of Canvas, I’ve written elsewhere about foregoing a Learning Management System. That means, too, that I’m not umbilically connected to a device at all times. If your university or department will let you do it, try going LMS-free one semester as an experiment. For me, it’s meant one less thing to worry about, which in this case means one less digital box to check at all times of the day.

(Here’s a hack on top of a hack: How to preserve all that morning time for reading and/or writing so as to be able to stop just before class starts? Here’s what I do. One or two weeks before the semester begins, I prepare the first month’s worth of classes in toto: I outline the lectures, draft the discussions, print the quizzes, etc. Then I gather them together into their respective folders, so that all I need do on the day of teaching is open the folder and plug and play. I do the same thing, once that first month is behind me, every Friday in advance of the following week. That way, when the afternoon classes of Monday through Thursday arrive, I’m entirely prepared, and don’t have to do a lick of lesson prep or printing or other tasks the morning before I teach. When I’ve got this down to a science (and until this fall, when by voluntary choice I had a new course prep, I’d gotten into a good rhythm), then I can count on two to four or more hours in my office, leading up to teaching, that I can devote to reading or writing as I see fit.)

5. Carve out space and time for reading and writing free from interruption.

Related to the previous point, it is a necessity to have a physical space in which one can work for hours-long stretches with the reasonable expectation that no one will interrupt unless it is very important. For me, that’s my office—my happy place, which is to say, where my books are. For others that’s the library or a coffee shop, or home alone. The point is that you need that rare combination of quiet and sustained runs of sharp focus (what Newport calls “deep work”) for publications to materialize. Wherever and whenever that is—for me, it’s in my office, in the mornings, prior to inbox and lesson prep and printing and teaching—find it, make it the sun around which the rest of your work schedule orbits, and guard it with your life.

In a word: Practice being unavailable. It makes a world of difference.

6. Treat time off from semester teaching as a full-time research job.

I teach 32 weeks a year, including Finals Weeks. That leaves 20 weeks when I’m not teaching. I take off one week for Thanksgiving, two weeks for Christmas, one week for spring break, and two weeks during the summer. Already you, like me, should realize how fortunate a professor’s schedule is. That’s six weeks off out of 52! That’s a full month and a half! That’s European vacation levels! What’s to complain about?

Nothing, is the answer. Absolutely nothing. Remember, this post (this series of posts) is not about how hard the academic life is. It’s about how to make time for research while teaching a 4/4 load. And we already established that family life and personal happiness are more important than academic success; obviously I could choose to work, part- or full-time, during those weeks I take off. But should I? Not unless I have to.

Even taking six weeks off per year, that leaves 14 weeks in which I’m not teaching or spending time with my family. And do you know what I do during each and every one of those 14 weeks? Read and write. That’s it. I don’t lighten my summer schedule, unless childcare or other duties interpose themselves. No one’s checking in on me; no one’s asking me to come to the office. But I do. Every day I arrive at the office around 8:00am and every day I leave around 4:00pm, having read and written, read and written, read and written, until my brain hurt and my fingers ached.

In the first post I stuck up for profs using their summer hours well, though I admitted that we aren’t always the most efficient bunch. Here’s where I’ll speak directly to my fellow academics. You and I both know what a summer week can look like, especially a week when you’re “working.” It’s sort of a throwback to doctoral days. Slow to start, quick to finish, lots and lots of time on social media, or chasing down unimportant leads and tangent lines unrelated to research, or meeting with colleagues for long lunches, or just generally letting the hours slip by without doing much of substance at all. That’s fine, in itself. You’re not on the clock. But if your #1 goal is using what time you have to publish quality work, then it’s not fine. You are on the clock, even if that clock exists only inside your own head.

Treat your weeks not teaching as though your full-time job, for which you will be held accountable, is research, and act accordingly. Then see what happens after a few years.

Postscript: If your finances permit and your chair doesn’t mind, don’t teach summer courses. I taught three summers in a row then decided, in concert with my wife, to forego the extra money henceforth. The extra pay was nice, but it didn’t serve my goals. If I wanted to focus on publishing, even a three-week online class was a distraction; the time and attention it sucks from you is surprising.

7. Accept your limits while setting clear, achievable goals.

In the next post I’ll say more about the limits I have in mind. But for now the thing to acknowledge is that, even if you manufactured four hours per day for your scholarship—and that would be an astonishing amount during a four-class semester—that is a paltry number by comparison to the big leagues. It’s nothing compared to your grad school days. That many hours should get you in sight of reading an okay amount and even actually doing some writing. It is unlikely, however, to get you in sight of what you wish you could accomplish, that is, the kind of scholarly expectations to which you seek to hold yourself. At this point you have a choice to make. Either you can do the work you’re able to achieve in the time you have, or you can wish you had more time and never get anything out the door. It’s your call, but I suggest you opt for the first.

If you do, you need concrete goals. Is it one peer-reviewed article every 12-18 months? Is it two reviews per academic calendar? Is it a book by the time you go up for T&P? Is it a poster presentation (not my wheelhouse, mind you) every year at your guild’s annual conference? Is it a collaborative grant-funded venture that stretches over five years and yields two to four co-written articles? Whatever your goals, you need to identify them, write them down, and hold yourself to them, or at least to what you can control (i.e., writing and submitting the pieces; whether they’re accepted is up to someone else). As time goes by, you can adjust the reasonableness of your goals up or down, depending on your success. Don’t aim for the moon, but don’t let that be an excuse to do little more than keep staring at your own shuffling shoes, either. I’m willing to hazard that you’re capable of accomplishing more than you think, especially if you haven’t been able to publish much at all so far in your 4/4 teaching career.

But before turning in the next post to bigger-picture reflections on research and writing with a high teaching load, here’s one last all-important tip:

8. Type fast.

No joke, I sometimes think being a very fast typist is half the battle. It doesn’t hurt if you suffer from incurable logorrhea, as by now you know I do.

Teaching a 4/4: tradeoffs

In the last post I laid out what a typical work week looks like in terms of one’s allotment of hours while teaching a 4/4 load at a university. In this post I want to compare that to institutional contexts on the other end of the spectrum. Such a comparison shows rather straightforwardly what sort of tradeoffs are involved, from an institutional perspective, when professors are asked to teach more or fewer courses; in this case, tradeoffs concerning quantity and quality of publication.

Before I do that, though, I want to talk about a different set of tradeoffs. These tradeoffs aren’t about what a university asks of you. They’re about what you ask of yourself, or rather, what you want for your life.

I got married midway through my senior year in college, and beginning in my PhD program my wife and I had four children in six years’ time: from the beginning of my second year in doctoral work to the beginning of my second year teaching as a professor. Being a husband and a father in one’s 20s and 30s while earning a doctorate then teaching at the university level is, shall we say, a different experience than doing those things while being a single person without children. The key word there is “different,” which isn’t (yet) a term of judgment. I know single people in doctoral programs who eventually dropped out due to listlessness and lethargy, and I know folks in a position similar to mine (spouse, young kids) who powered through for the simple reason that they were always on the clock and thus were forced to use their time wisely. So in and of itself the difference between the two stations in life doesn’t tell us which is “harder” or “easier” for the academic life.

Having said that, the fact is undeniable that a person who is neither a parent nor partnered has, in general, far fewer limits on her available time than a person who is both. I knew and still know people, both grad students and tenure-track (or tenured) profs, who work 12 hours a day in the office, most weekday evenings, and full days on the weekend. That’s 70-90 hours per week, if you’re counting. The work never stops. There’s always another book to read, another article to review, another draft to revise, another lecture to attend. Such persons are quite literally secular monks. But instead of ora et labora, it’s sola labora (or, I suppose, solus labor): work, work, work, all day, every day, world without end, amen.

Thus the “pure” academic life. No wonder the old Oxford dons were so often bachelors. No wonder the founders of the university were priests and monks!

The upshot is obvious. A scholar who has 70-90 hours available per week to devote to her scholarship, and who does thus devote it, is in an entirely different position than a scholar who does not, owing to the latter’s duties to her family (not to mention to her church, her neighbors, and so on). Whether or not it is wise or live-giving to work 12-15 hours per day every day of the week for months on end, it’s what many do, and are able to do, given their circumstances. And academics like myself who lack that monastic allotment of time can either accept the profound gap between us or kick against the goads. Phrased more sharply, we can pretend that we are equally disposed to produce equally superb scholarship, or we can decide not to deceive ourselves. I suggest we opt against self-deception.

I’m going to write in the fourth post in this series about the flip side of this acceptance: that there are opportunities, gifts, and blessings precisely for scholarly work that come from being a person with a family or from teaching a 4/4 (or both). But the prior condition of realizing those possibilities is the unqualified recognition that the lay life, as it were, pales in comparison to the monastic in terms of sheer hours in the day available for scholarship. Them’s the facts. And that’s before we get to differences between institutions.

But before exploring those differences, there’s an important point buried in these comparisons. That point we may phrase as a question: What do you want? Better put, what should you want? Rare is the happy workaholic academic. I can’t count the number of secular monastic super-scholars I know who are immiserated, depressed, joyless souls from top to toe. That’s not because they’ve resisted the call of the bourgeois life. It often is because they know nothing but The Work, and The Work doesn’t satisfy the heart.

Life is about tradeoffs, in other words, and being the most successful possible academic one can be will almost certainly demand that you give up something not only that you want, but that you should want, if you would be happy. I would like to be happy. That means I’m content with the choices that led me to where I am today. I’m glad I’m a married father of four teaching a 4/4 in a university setting that doesn’t suck my soul right out of my body. But I also refuse to lie to myself. I would likely be a “better” scholar, measured by output and erudition, if I lacked the many limits and duties my family places on my life. Would I trade the latter to gain the former? Never.

Besides, limits and duties are (not paradoxically, but given a certain set of assumptions, unexpectedly) the source and ground of true happiness. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you stop looking to cut them out of your life in order to serve the shapeshifting, exacting, and altogether death-dealing idols of Work.

*

Okay. One set of academic tradeoffs concerns the family, or life beyond work more generally. Another is institutional context. Time to compare like with unlike.

Consider a standard course load for a professor at an Ivy League university. Such a person (pre- and post-tenure) teaches a 2/2, often to small cohorts of graduate students in seminar-style classes that meet once weekly; she further takes a mandatory year-long sabbatical every three or four years, precisely in order to produce the sort of scholarship expected of her, given her status as a tenure-track (or tenured) professor at Harvard or Yale or Princeton. She also regularly receives grants and scholarships from either within or without the university that fund course releases and external sabbaticals and visiting professorships: these in turn alleviate teaching and administrative responsibilities.

Now consider my own situation. I teach four courses a semester, some of which have 20-30 students, some of which have 50-60. (One semester I taught an overload, five courses, and I had about 220 students. We also had a newborn, our fourth child. That semester’s sort of hazy, now that I think of it . . .) These students are mostly gen-ed undergraduates, not tight cohorts of committed Master’s or doctoral students. Moreover, sabbaticals must be applied for and approved; they apply to one semester rather than a full academic year; and one becomes eligible to apply only after having received tenure, in one’s seventh or eighth year at the university.

One response to this comparison might be to suppose I’m comparing quality of situations. But I’m not. I’m deliriously happy in my job. And as I said above, I know a lot of miserable people in Ivy League institutions. Whether it’s the pressure to Be The Best, or the stifling atmosphere of competition and production, or the sword of Not Getting Tenure hanging over the necks of junior faculty, or the Byzantine institutional politics of the Ivies, or what have you, the amenities and affordances of teaching-light, research-heavy professorships are not there to make you happy (in fact, the effect may well be the opposite); they are there to get you to publish. Better: they’re there to make the institution that pays you look good. They’ve a prestigious reputation to uphold, after all.

So we’re not asking which institution is a better work environment. We’re comparing material conditions and incentives for producing high-quality research. And I trust you can see with your own eyes what’s staring us in the face: namely, that to ask professors with a 4/4 load to produce scholarship anywhere close to the level of professors at Ivy League institutions is downright absurd. Looking at the two institutional contexts side by side, we might be inclined to judge them two different jobs.

But the comparison need not be merely between a small Christian liberal arts school in west Texas and a comparatively ancient and ultra-rich Ivy League college in New England. Consider a friend of mine who works at a large R1 school a few hours down the road in Texas. Every fall he teaches one undergraduate course and one Master’s course. In the spring he teaches no classes at all. His primary job, though he is neither tenured nor a research professor nor does he hold an Endowed Chair in Something or Other, is to research and publish. And research and publish he does. All the dang day. You wouldn’t believe his output. Or maybe you would, since you know how little else he has to do with his time.

The point, at the risk of belaboring it, is not to compare apples and oranges as though they were the same fruit. It is to point out that the fruits we invariably compare in academia are apples and oranges. My friend plainly inhabits a different profession than I do. He is something like a patron-supported independent scholar, contingently connected to an institution that happens to be called a university, for which he occasionally teaches a class or two. I, on the other hand, am a workaday teacher of undergraduate college students who, when he can spare a minute, finds the time to read a book and even to scribble a little on the side.

My friend has a good life and a good job. I have a good life and a good job. But our equally good jobs are not the same job. They are both good, but they are different jobs. That’s the point.

And there’s no problem in that difference. The problem comes if and when, and only if and when, someone supposes that my friend’s job should be my job, too, while expecting me to continue doing my original job all the while. In a word, the problem comes if and when I’m expected to work two jobs instead of one—not least when, as I documented in the last post, that first job tends to spill over from the office into the evenings and weekends of life beyond work. After working 50-60 hours per week teaching a 4/4, where is such a person to find the time to add a second full-time job, which is to say, the job of producing first-rate academic scholarship?

I may sound as though I’m speaking in the first person here, but as I will share in the next post, I’m not describing my own situation. I’m fortunate to work in and for an institution that understands that no one teaching a 4/4 can be an Ivy League or research professor at the same time. Those to whom I report evaluate teaching, service, and collegiality first and scholarship second; everyone understands the pressures of teaching and grading and mentoring and sponsoring and the rest. The expectations, accordingly, are reasonable, which is why I’m grateful not only to work here but to be heading into the year of my T&P submission with little to no anxiety.

But so far as I can tell, among 4/4 profs at large I’m one of the fortunate few. I’m the lucky one. Not everyone works in a healthy, mutually supportive, non-dysfunctional—and Christian!—institution. And even in such institutions, the built-in expectations, pressures, and incentives can work against one flourishing and finding promotion rather than buoying and supporting one in that journey. “Punishing” and “brutal” are two words one often hears in conversations about such environments. There’s a reason folks are fleeing academe. Why not just work a boring nine-to-five with benefits and regular hours, without having to bring it home with you?

Most, I take it, are just trying to endure. That’s why I’m writing two more posts in this series. The imagined audience for the first post was graduate students and administrators wondering what it’s like to teach a 4/4; for this second post, administrators and trustees as well as fellow 4/4 teachers. The third and fourth posts, though, are together targeted directly at those friends and colleagues teaching a 4/4 (whether now or in the future), either at the beginning or in the middle of their tenures(!) in such positions, who are wondering how to make the time for research. Having cast a somewhat bleak or at least stark vision of the 4/4 life, I want to make good on the promise that it need not be the academic purgatory—or inferno—it’s so often made out to be. It’s possible to read and to write, to produce quality scholarship. It really is. But just as institutions make tradeoffs in what they offer faculty, given what those institutions want from their faculty, so in your own work and career, you have to be willing to make similar tradeoffs. It all depends on what you want.

Teaching a 4/4: office hours

When I was at Yale and friends were on the job market, every single person I knew considered a 4/4 teaching load—that is, four classes per semester, for a total of eight per academic year—to be a fate worse than death. In fact, most people I knew considered a 3/3 the outer limit of possible professorial sanity, but in itself still an unacceptably punishing load. Since I didn’t even know what a 4/4 was before being informed of its unmitigated misery, I simply assumed they were right. When I accepted a job—a gift from heaven (I do not exaggerate) that delivered what I can describe only as wholesale psychic and existential relief—and that job turned out to be a 4/4, my gratitude was total, but my one question was what the teaching load would mean: for weekly work hours, for work/life balance with young children, for research and publications.

I’m now halfway through my fifth year in that job; next fall I will submit my application for tenure and promotion (“T&P”). I’m here to say four things.

First, I love my job with all my heart; I pinch myself every morning that I get to do what I do. Second, a 4/4 load need not be a personal, professional, or scholarly death knell. Third, a 4/4 load does mean—unequivocally—that you are unable to do things that professors with a smaller load (not to mention other institutional helps) are able to do; there are tradeoffs, and they are unavoidable. Fourth, though, that does not mean your research and publications must be reduced to nil; it means you have to accept other tradeoffs in order to meet your writing goals.

In this post and two three more I’d like to write about what it’s been like for me in this position, what I’ve observed at an institutional and collegial level, and what I’ve learned in terms of achieving my own reading and publishing aims. Across all three posts I’d like to make clear both (a) how and why a 4/4 load can and does suck up so much time that many professors simply and sincerely are unable to do anything beyond teach and (b) how, at least in certain circumstances, it’s possible to make the time for research—or in any case how I’ve done it. In addition, I want to depict just how great the chasm is between teaching-heavy loads with high student-to-teacher ratios, on one hand, and teaching-light loads in institutional contexts that both demand and incentivize high research output, on the other.

In this post I want to offer a snapshot of a week in the life of a 4/4 prof: i.e., what the actual hour-by-hour breakdown is for a typical week in my life, balancing teaching, grading, office hours, committees, meetings, and writing, plus kids, family, church, and friends. Note well, at the outset, that I am presupposing a junior or mid-career faculty member with a young family; I’m not imagining a tenured veteran or empty-nester with retirement on the horizon (though at least some of what I write below would still apply to such a one). I’m writing, too, from and for a humanities perspective; much of what I say will include those in STEM disciplines, but some of it would have to be modified to fit their particular research, teaching, and publication habits (not least the role of lab work and an alternative paradigm of “what counts” for reading and writing—fewer books, in their case, and ten thousand more articles).

*

Let’s start with a 45-hour work week: 8:00am to 5:00pm, Monday through Friday. Now for anyone with young children, that’s already overly optimistic. My wife and I have four children aged three to nine, and we split drop-off and pick-up. So not only am I unable to get to work much before 8am, often I don’t get there until closer to 8:30 and sometimes later. (Timing is dependent on the cooperation of a three-year old, after all.) I also pick up my kids from elementary school at 3:15pm at least twice a week. So now we’re working realistically with about 40 hours—assuming no one is sick that week. (In the fall of 2019, out of 16 weeks of the semester, at least one of our children was sick at least one day in 12 different weeks.) Our home, university, daycare, and elementary school are all within something like a 2.5-mile radius, which means we have next to no commute—but many, many people do.

(When I read super-worker bricklayer’s-son Stanley Hauerwas write about arriving to his office at 5:30am every morning and leaving at 5:30pm every afternoon, I can only ask: Who’s doing pick-up and drop-off? That doesn’t imply injustice. Lots of stay-at-home parents as well as grandparents and nannies aid in such labor, and may do so either out of joy or with compensation. But it does mean, flat out, that a person who can be in his office 12 hours per day without worrying about childcare is in a different professional position than are those who must worry about childcare.)

At any rate, we are working with 40 hours now. Automatically, 12 of those hours are in the classroom. So now we’re down to 28 hours.

Let’s say it takes 90 minutes to prepare for every three hours of class time—which is likely an underestimate—and one hour to grade assignments and provide feedback for every three hours of class time. (We’re also assuming that there’s no G.A. to do menial tasks, though in my experience the estimates I’m using here include help from a G.A.) That’s 10 hours total, which means our available work hours are down to 18.

Now for email. Like all other white-collar work in the U.S., a professor’s inbox is a job unto itself: administrators, colleagues, folks from journals or conferences or other institutions, questions from students, etc. You also, you know, have to eat lunch. So let’s give 30 daily minutes to email and 30 daily minutes to lunch, for a total of five hours per week. Down to 13.

What about committees? Committee work fluctuates—four to seven hours this week, no hours for three weeks straight—but the longer you’re at an institution, the more the committees add up, at least in average terms. So let’s say at least one hour per week, though depending on the department and the person, not least if the person in question has administrative responsibilities (I do not, currently), it may be much more than that. Now we’re to 12.

But everyone has meetings to attend, whether they’re related to committees or not. So we’ll add one or two more meetings per week, each an hour. Down to 10.

(Such meetings might include, for example, mandatory chapel for a religious university such as mine and/or serving as sponsor for a student organization. I once led a voluntary weekly 30-minute “theology chapel” in which anyone could show up for an unguided discussion of twentieth-century theology. Or perhaps your campus, like mine, has a center for teaching and learning that hosts monthly reading groups. These commitments eat up hours, in other words, and the hours add up fast.)

What about students? At my institution we are mandated to have a minimum of seven hours in our office wherein we are available to students, preferably standing office hours rather than by appointment (though that’s been affected by Covid). I know professors who meet with students 5-10 hours per week. But let’s say personal time with students takes just two hours per week. Now we’re at eight.

So here we are. Having intentionally but severely underestimated the time usually allotted to students, emails, meetings, committees, grading, and course prep (for many professors, we’re already down to zero, or rather subzero: students, committees, grading, and prep all add up to another 10-20 hours, easily), we ostensibly have eight hours to work with—that is, assuming it’s not a week when 50 or 100 papers were just submitted, or one of the kids came down with a stomach bug, or a crisis dropped unannounced on the department, or what have you. Eight whole hours, maximum, assuming (also) that you don’t have a new course prep in the semester in question and (like me) you aren’t teaching four discrete courses but only two courses across four sections.

Let me stop and say: This sort of bean-counting isn’t meant to imply that the job is working the professor (me, or him, or her) to death; this isn’t sweatshop labor. The point of laying out the timeline is to make clear what’s left, if anything at all, for serious research and writing. I’m also imagining, for the sake of argument, that one’s time in the office is more or less uninterrupted: sustained, start-to-finish in-office work time. But naturally that’s a figment of this imaginative exercise. Most professors have knocks on the door, calls on the phone, texts on iMessage, and emails in the inbox—many of which are pressing or at least come with the expectation of a swift response—throughout the day in unexpected and inconvenient times. Moreover, class times are usually scattered around: a seminar in the morning, a lecture in the afternoon, that sort of thing. Not to mention that said classes are physically scattered across campus, too: it takes time, after all, to pack up one’s books and notes and trek across the commons to that other building, over there, the one you don’t work in but for some reason teach in.

All of which is to say: Those eight supposedly “free” hours are anything but. They don’t run reliably from 8:00am to 10:00am Monday through Thursday. They consist of random chunks of 20 or 30 minutes, spread throughout the days, adding up (if they do, which is rare) by week’s end.

And here’s the upshot. It takes hundreds upon hundreds (actually, thousands upon thousands) of hours to read the books and articles necessary to write the articles and books that one’s guild, and usually one’s chair and dean, expect out of a professor in order to be a “contributing member” of said guild, not to mention in order to earn tenure and promotion. When, pray tell, is a professor with a 4/4 load with a week’s allotment of hours as I’ve just laid them out supposed to find the time to do all that reading and writing?

In most cases, the time just is not there. In my experience, profs with a 4/4 simply do not do that reading and writing, and thus, quite understandably, do not produce the sort of scholarship expected of them (whether or not they wish they were able to do so). Or rather, if they need to do so in order to keep their job (i.e., to earn tenure by year seven), they do find the time, and you and I both know when they find it.

After hours.

But let me tell you about my week after hours. My kids get out of school at 3:15pm. My wife and I both work. We swap who does pick-up. Every day some child has something: speech path, piano, soccer, basketball, gymnastics. We all have church on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings and small group on Sunday evenings. (I work for a Christian university, mind you, which means they want me doing such things.) Whatever happens to be going on, those kids need a parent present, and that means, at least ordinarily, that no work is being done until they’re in bed: and the oldest has lights out at 9:00pm. We start every morning around 6:00am (showers, clothes, breakfast, backpacks, car—it takes a lot, as you may know yourself). So if I’m to get a decent amount of sleep, it’s bed by 11:00pm, if not sooner. That leaves about two hours each night between bedtime for kids and bedtime for adults. Even aside from cleaning the dishes, picking up toys and dirty clothes, preparing for the next day, packing lunches for the kids (that’s my job: 20 lunches per week, y’all!), my wife and I would, you know, like to catch up a bit. One of us might even occasionally grab drinks with a friend or go see a movie.

In the case of folks like us, then, there just do not exist reliable hours at night to make up work time. And I don’t, mostly. I usually leave work at work, unless that work is also pleasure (reading a book I want to read, writing a blog post [hello], etc.)—though the inbox is always staring me down, especially when a student sends an anxious email at 9:42pm.

The weekends are also largely off limits, except perhaps for an hour or two during nap time on Saturdays. If I want to be a co-parent—and I should, as should you if you have kids—since we’ve got four kids under 10 who need provision and care and love and time and the rest, then the weekend isn’t for work, it’s for family (and church and sports and friends and more: for life, in other words). That means, again, I’m generally not using weekends or nights on weekdays to “make up” for time I lack at work.

But I’m surely in the minority there. Most friends and colleagues I know, whether pre- or post-tenure, speak offhand all the time about “taking work home.” Most work 40-50 hours per week in the office and another 10-20 at home, between nights and weekends. The truth, however, is that most of that makeup work isn’t scholarship. It’s pouring into teaching, grading, and mentorship: the things that make a difference in students’ lives. That’s where all my numbers above really are underestimates, probably by a wide margin. Sometimes teachers are inefficient with their time. But at least as often they just love what they do, which is to say, they love their students and want them to flourish, to get their money’s worth, and then some, from their education.

And recall: I don’t write this to elicit pity for them. Being a professor is a great gig most of the time. It certainly is for me. No, the point is the question lingering over all this hour-mongering: When is the research supposed to happen? Research, let me remind you, that of necessity must be the fruit of hours upon hours of sustained contemplative and meticulous reading, annotation, note-taking, outlining, drafting, revising, submitting, revising again, and publishing.

When’s it supposed to happen then? It is fair to say that, for most 4/4 professors in most circumstances—even under the best conditions, with the best bosses, in the healthiest institutional contexts—the only honest answer is in the negative. That is, there just is no time for quality research for such persons.* And it’s best to recognize and admit that plain fact for what it is than to pretend otherwise.

*You say: Isn’t that what the summer is for? Well, yes and no. Summer is partly for vacation, as for anyone else. It’s also for teaching one or two summer courses, as most professors I know do. It’s also for reassessing and revisiting and regularly revising one’s existing semester classes. It’s also for preparing for that new course you’ve never taught before. It’s also for writing that grant you didn’t have time for during the semester. And also for finishing that committee work that piled up when finals arrived. But, yes, too, summer’s there for jumping into some research. Recall, though, that you’ve barely had time to read a book during the academic calendar, much less to stay on top of the avalanche of publications produced in the last year (or five) in your discipline. The remaining weeks of a summer might provide some time for catching up on the field. It is far from enough—on its own, laughably so—to produce a significant contribution to said field.

Academic support

The academy is often a very lonely place. The work can be grueling, the odds of success long, the competition ferocious, the hours punishing, the pay insufficient, the rewards minuscule, the expectations inhuman, the atmosphere inhumane. Often as not you’re alone with a book or a laptop for hours on end, moved by some inner fire to keep chipping away at an insuperable task, secure in the knowledge that what you are doing will be of almost no significance to anyone, ever, living or unborn. Yet chip chip chip, you press on, pounding the proverbial rock.

I have been fortunate—no, the only word is blessed—to have had a uniformly positive experience in the academy. Four years in undergrad, three years in a Master’s program, six years for the doctorate, and now in my fifth year teaching as a professor. In all that time I don’t know that I can point to a single capital-B Bad experience. Not only did I love the work I was doing, the content I was learning, the classes I was taking, the books I was reading. The programs themselves were all healthy environments for a student to inhabit; or at least, to the extent that they contained dysfunction, the dysfunction was no more pronounced than anywhere else, and rarely if ever affected me.

Indeed I think I can say honestly, without an asterisk or whispered anecdotal aside, that I’ve never knowingly been caught up in, or even mildly been touched by, controversy of the typical academic sort that marks and mars so many institutions of higher education. I might even be able to say that I’ve not yet earned an enemy (or a frenemy?) in the academy. I can think of one or two candidates, but that’s probably projection on my part. No doubt my relative lack of enemies—at least who’ve made themselves known to me!—has much more to do with cowardice and a desire to please than any virtue on my part. (If you Enneagram-diagnose me from afar I swear I will cut you down where you stand.) Further, too, at least a partial explanation for this happy state of affairs is my approach to my studies: put your head down, do the work, get out as fast as you can. But mostly I ascribe it to the institutions of which I was a part. The people one learns from and the people one learns alongside make all the difference.

Nevertheless, even the most blissful academic life includes the ordinary challenges that invariably attend it. One of those is the deafening silence, the dark void, that awaits that momentous day when, after years of work, you release something into the world. That something may be a mere review; it may be an essay or an article; occasionally it is a book. And we all know, wherever we find ourselves on the map or continuum of publication-generation, that there’s nothing quite like the long labor of birthing a little, or not so little, intellectual offspring and stepping forward to share it with the world only to hear … nothing. Not a word. Not a peep. Zilch. Nada. Silence.

Even more than bad reviews, it’s being ignored that crouches in the back of your mind, grinning and holding hands with that other ever-lurking demon of academe, imposter syndrome. It’s why academics go to Twitter like moth to a flame: not only because they’re on screens all day with time to kill (and work to avoid), but because proper scholarship usually takes years to produce and still more years to generate feedback. That sweet, sweet dopamine hit of a like or a retweet or a reply is a lot more rewarding than the alternative.

Apart from a general response to one’s work, critical or laudatory or in between, the other thing we academics desperately yearn for but rarely receive is a wide network of support. Or maybe I shouldn’t put it that way. Many friends and colleagues I know do have such networks, though often at great cost, beyond the campus, and as a result of their own intentional efforts. What I mean to say is that specifically academic networks aren’t in general built for emotional and psychological encouragement. They’re more like one long intellectual boot camp. Your drill sergeant has a purpose, and you’re happy (maybe) that he made you who you are; you couldn’t have done it without him. But you don’t go to him when you need a hug.

This is all a lengthy and circuitous prelude to a very small thing I want to share. My first book was published two weeks ago. Along with book #2 (due next April), it was years in the making. In a very real sense I’ve been working toward this finish line since August of 2003. But initially, when the book came in the mail, it felt anticlimactic. There was no link yet on Amazon, no one in the world knew it existed, and certainly no one else had it in their hands (as I did). I wrote the book for others, not myself. Moreover, if we couldn’t throw a party to celebrate, given the pandemic, and if no one online knew about the thing, and it’s not like it’s a trade book meant to fly off the shelves of the local Barnes and Noble—then what to do? How to make the thing feel real, as a shared or social fact and not my own little private achievement?

So in addition to tweeting about the book once the Amazon link came online, I decided to email blast the world, or at least my world. I emailed news about the publication to—I’m not exaggerating—every friend, every extended family member, every church aunt and grandmother who helped raise me, every colleague and academic acquaintance, and every single former teacher (going back 17 years) whose contact info I happened to still have in my Gmail account. I even added scholars who have influenced me through their writing, but whom I have not met in person, or even online. I left out not a soul.

The response was overwhelming. I won’t get into all the details. But suffice it to say that people I haven’t seen or spoken to in over a decade replied with the warmest, sweetest words you can imagine, and certainly more than I was hoping for. And I’m more than willing to own what I was doing: not so much fishing for compliments as wanting quite literally to share in the occasion with others. I wasn’t surprised when my uncle texted to say he’d bought seven copies to give to friends in Dothan, Alabama. I was surprised when this, that, or another laconic, brainy, preternaturally non-emotive senior scholar gushed in congratulations. A lot of “ah, I remember the first one” and “feels like a birth, no?” and “don’t apologize, this calls for celebration!”

What I’m trying to say, what I keep circling around and not quite landing on, is simply this. It was what I needed. And when it came, I wasn’t prepared for it. The bottom fell out, and what I fell into was bottomless gratitude. It’s a wonderful thing, and wonderful in part because of how rare it is, to have people in this bemusing bizarro world of scholarship on one’s side, popping the cork right alongside you. Like your old drill sergeant giving you a bear hug in a crowded restaurant and lifting you off your feet.

The high wears off. You get back to the grindstone. But for a few days there, I was flying.

An update

I've not written much on the blog these last few months, but I've been busy in the meantime. I'm hoping, though, to get back into my self-imposed charter of "mezzo-blogging," some happy midpoint between tweet-length commentary and full-blown (intimating to find the time for) essays. So here's what I've been up to during my absence, together with what's on my plate for the present and near future.

1. Covid, obviously. Everything hit during our spring break, and students never returned to campus. I've written a few things Covid-related, though I've wanted to find the time to write more. We'll see if I get anything out before school returns.

2. I revised an article for publication in the Journal of Theological Interpretation. It'll come out in the first issue of 2021. It's called "What Are the Standards of Excellence for Theological Interpretation of Scripture?" It's 15,000 words, double the usual limit for the journal. I'm grateful to them for making the exception, and excited to see it appear.

3. I wrote a long review essay of N. T. Wright's Gifford lectures for the Los Angeles Review of Books, where I've written similar pieces before on David Bentley Hart, Patrick Deneen and James K. A. Smith, and Paula Fredriksen. I'm hopeful it will come out this fall. (My editor there, who is supremely gracious, has also extended me some slack on the word count. He's a mensch.)

4. Once the semester was complete—a real endurance test, since both my wife and I teach at ACU, and we had four children 7 years old and under at home with us as we transitioned and taught online—I had 15 weeks ahead of me in which to complete two major book-length projects. The sixth week we took off for a family vacation, and the fifteenth week is full of pre-sessions, meetings, and other "welcome back" activities. So effectively that meant 13 weeks, usually working four days each week, about 6-7 hours per day.

5. The first five weeks were devoted to revising my manuscript (drafted last fall) for The Doctrine of Scripture in the Cascade Companions series. I finished a full penultimate draft, and am very happy with it. I over-shot the word count, though, so this fall I'm going to be working on trimming it down to size. Which, I trust, will only increase its clarity, substance, and readability. I am a fan of small books, but they're harder to write than the larger sort! In any case, it'll be a semester of killing my darlings, all those darn adverbs and dependent clauses cluttering the page.

6. Following vacation, I've given the remaining eight weeks to a revision of my dissertation for Eerdmans, titled The Church's Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context. This one's been a bear, for a few reasons. First, it turns out sentences written by 2015 me are unsatisfactory to 2020 me. So a lot of re-writing. Second, the dissertation-ness of it all. Gotta tear out that academese root and branch. Third, dropping the word count from ~175,000 words to ~140,000. Again, that can only improve the project, but it's been more drudgery than I was anticipating. Writing and even editing has always been a pleasure to me, but this one's been a pain. So be it. I'm grateful for the contracts and the opportunity. Lord willing, both manuscripts will be emailed off by Christmas, and I'll be a free man come January.

7. The next manuscript isn't due till end of year 2022, and that one's the 25,000-word entry in Lexham's "Christian Essentials" series called The Church: A Guide to the People of God. So while I might draft some chapters next summer, most of 2021 will be reading, reading, reading.

8. Having said that, two other short-term projects worth mentioning. One is that I have the privilege of curating a symposium in the journal Political Theology on Karen Kilby's new book, God, Evil, and the Limits of Theology. That should come out late this year, perhaps early next year, depending on the ability of contributors to receive books and get responses out. I won't share the lineup just yet, but just know that when you see it your eyes are going to bug out of your head.

9. The second project is part of a Templeton grant, which I was generously rewarded through Biola University's Gratitude to God project (GTG). I'll be researching and writing on the difference that the doctrine of God makes for a Christian grammar of gratitude. That'll occupy most of my time in 2021. I'm honored to be a part of the project as a junior scholar. I can't wait to meet and learn from those involved in it, especially from other disciplines.

10. Speaking of grants, my home institution, ACU, awards internal grants for faculty research, and I was also fortunate to receive one of those this spring, primarily for my work this summer on turning the dissertation into a book. The grant meant my wife and I could rely on childcare for our youngest two kids this summer, and I could afford to decline teaching a summer course. Lord willing and the creek don't rise, by Christmas 2021 I will have not one but two books published, an article in JTI, an essay in LARB, a symposium in PT, an article in the works from my research on GTG, and maybe some scattershot essays online or in magazines. In the midst of a global pandemic, I'll take it.

11. Otherwise, we've been taking quarantine very seriously. Our kids (as of this coming September, 2, 4, 6, and 8 years old, respectively) have borne the lockdown as well as could be hoped. We've reopened modestly, seeing other families outdoors while social distancing. Besides that, we're mostly just hunkered down and are doing our best to stay sane.

12. I've yet to mention the way in which Covid has rocked and is continuing to rock higher education. That's largely because (a) I still have a job and (b) worrying about it is bad for my mental health. Once I knew I would have a job for AY 2020–2021, I did my best to let go of all the anxieties besetting friends and colleagues around the country, put my head down, and got to work. I've waited to prepare for the fall, for the most part, because it hasn't been clear what exactly the semester would look like. But as of now, the plan is that we will be teaching in person, with students returning one month from now. We're taking all the necessary precautions—mandatory masks, social distancing, hybrid pedagogy, larger classrooms for smaller class sizes, no large gatherings indoors, office hours outdoors or on Zoom, etc., etc.—but the truth is nobody knows what the lay of the land will look like come Labor Day, much less Halloween. We'll be done with residential learning by Thanksgiving, anyway. I don't envy those making these decisions, not least when making alternative choices would mean firing scores of people. Everyone in my orbit here is extending one another a lot of grace. My bosses are the best in the business, and understand what it means to have two children in elementary school and two others in preschool while teaching undergraduates with a 4/4 load in the midst of a pandemic. Few are as fortunate as we are, and I am profoundly grateful to be here, now, even amid so much uncertainty. (Did I mention there's an election in November? And perhaps another mutation of the virus awaiting us in the winter? Oh, and a summer-long nation-wide reckoning with a centuries-old legacy of systemic racism? And protests and riots and institutional upheaval? And an as-yet-unreckoned-with crisis of childcare and education facing us down in the public school system this fall? And, and, and, and ... )

It's been a year, in other words. And we're only halfway through. Lord have mercy on all of us. Blessings on each of y'all in these bewildering and trying times.

Remembering Nama (1921–2019)

My maternal grandmother passed away this afternoon, after nearly 98 years of life on this earth. She was born in Mississippi two and a half years after the end of World War I. She lived through the Great Depression, the second World War, and every other major event you can think of from the last 75 years. She gave birth to seven children and, after losing one in childhood, raised the other six—spread across 21 years—together with her husband, who worked as a mailman. She lived to see 15 grandchildren, 31 great-grandchildren, and four great-great-grandchildren. She was widowed in her early 70s, and never remarried. She suffered the loss of her oldest son in his 70s, but no one else; she outlived the rest.

She was an extraordinary woman in the most old-fashioned of ways. A dutiful wife and stoic mother, a quiet Catholic and yellow-dog Democrat, she believed in loving your family, working hard, and doing what you can, with what you have, while you're able. She took wry pleasure in informing young women who married into the family that "we don't have no crybaby girls in this family." One of her mottoes was "you can't do everything." She loved food, especially seafood, and most of all if she was cooking it for a house full of people.

But probably her favorite thing was simply to be there, in a chair, in the midst of an overcrowded house somewhere in Mississippi (or Austin, Texas, or Dothan, Alabama), just marinading in the hot loud hustle and bustle of a family gathering: kids running to and fro, cooks in the kitchen, grandpas asleep in recliners, a baby crying somewhere, all manner of shouting and laughing, a ballgame on in the background. If you were lucky enough to be there, and you glanced her way, Nama—that's what we called her, Nama—would be still, usually quiet (unless holding court: in which case, watch out), observing, taking it all in, with a small smile on her face.

And think of it: From this one woman's life, from the decades-long outpouring of love that she made her life to be, 57 human lives (and counting) have come forth into this world. Double it for their spouses. Now quintuple it and then some for the friends and in-laws and neighbors and others who've been touched in one way or another, directly or by proxy, by this single soul.

For her part, she was wise enough to sit back, to see it for what it was—a gift you can't force and can only ask for, but when it comes, you don't question it—to say a silent prayer of thanks, and to let it wash over her. She didn't need words for any of that. Her family, just by being there and being who they were, said all that needed to be said.

For such a one, we give thanks to God for a life well lived. May she, then, our beloved Nama, rest in peace; and may she, then, by the grace and love evident in her life across a century's time, rise in glory. Amen.