What are the stressors of working in higher education today? In Habits of Hope several authors describe how your writing, teaching, conversations with colleagues and students, embracing diversity in pedagogy, can each be deliberate expressions of your calling as an academic. You will receive tools to practice hope in the varied aspects of your job. You will also receive a vision of incorporating the specifics of your work within an integrated Christian framework of vocation.   As folks who aren’t satisfied with the status quo and look with hope to God’s future, we can embody Christian hope in the particularities of our work.

Discussion Guide

 

Chapters 1-2

1. When you look at your life in academia, what do you encounter that drains hope?

2. What is your response to thinking about “Education as a work of the resurrection?” (page 19) “And that learning might spiritually require the sort of losing one’s life in order to find it that Christ promises as the condition of discipleship?” (page 20)

3. Consider the writer’s personal example of giving a synopsis of his department’s core curriculum and explaining how this informs his course. (pages 22-25) How does the idea that studying truth is possible — in various forms in our different fields of study — because Christ himself is truth incarnate give you hope? If you are in a secular institution, how might this hope look different?

4. Read the two paragraphs on page 31 delineating why Christian education is hard these days, but how challenges can be opportunities. How do you respond to these thoughts? (Some of the problems may be evident in secular institutions as well, or can be experienced by Christian faculty in secular settings)

5. What do you think of the author’s definitions of "faith," "learning," and "integration" (page 32)? Does this help you to think about your subject area in a new or deeper way?

6. Consider the example of Lewis Smedes discovering God to be much bigger than he had imagined through what he was exposed to through specific content in a classroom (page 33). Are there ways you have been broadened in your understanding of God because of your field of study?

7. What is one way you see your field of study in relation to God, its Creator & Redeemer?

8. Since Jesus is Lord of all aspects of our lives, how can his Lordship be reflected in our academic work?

9. What do you think about the challenge of thinking Christianly about our fields of study, when we have been trained in our disciplines for several years from a secular perspective?

10. Note the time intensive nature of Wheaton’s measures to help their faculty think deeply about their field of study from a Christian perspective. If you are in a Christian institution, what similar resources do you have? If there is a lack of resources, what ideas could be adopted? If you are in a secular institution or lack community with other Christian scholars, how can you train yourself to think Christianly about your discipline? What resources would you appreciate from WSAP?

11. In what way did the Integration chapter help you think hopefully about your own work? What are some ideas you want to revisit?

Chapters 3-5

1. What is conversation? Does everyone view words the same way? What do you think are the ingredients of a good conversation? 

2. What is your response to the following? “Our great educational challenge…the very technology we use for communication leaves us less eager and able to engage in quality conversation.” (page 56) 

3. What are your thoughts on how the negative norms of social media interactions have crept into how people interact in face-to-face conversations?

4. Which of the following ideas on cultivating generative conversations resonated with you? What are a couple of practices you want to intentionally adopt to your own lifestyle? (pages 58-64)   

a. Keep it real — face to face conversations, b. Give it time — unhurried, c. Actively listen, d. Ask open ended questions to get to know the person, e. Avoid invective and unnecessary provocation, f. Ditch your phone, g. Read widely and well, h. Practice epistemic humility, i.  Be mindful of interruptions

5. What would it look like to promote the flourishing of ALL people? (page 75) How might God be inviting you/us to partner with him in helping all people flourish through our work? Who will benefit from your work?

6. Read the last paragraph of page 67. How has DEI been operating in your institution during the time you’ve been there? In what ways do these DEI practices resemble or differ from the inclusive excellence outlined by the writer? What concerns do you have in the current spotlight on DEI?

7. With respect to diversity, the writer raises the role of exoticism, where churches may think about foreigners abroad differently to foreigners at home. i.e. more welcoming vs less welcoming. How do you respond?

8. The writer says that God desires our increasing maturation, that he reveals his relationship to us in a progressively intimate way – from prophetic, to adoptive to paternal. He describes the process to grow in maturity as Reading the words of God in Christ, in Creation and in Scripture.

a) How do you respond to the idea that spiritual growth is related to learning to read these logoi well?

b) In order to do our work of writing and teaching, we need to read. How does giving primacy to these Words of God, accessed through Reading, help us to think about our own reading in new ways — whether for work or pleasure?

Chapters 6-7

1. How did the writing chapter encourage you in your own writing — either in how you think about it, or in thinking back to a specific writing project, or in re-motivating you to think about some writing you’ve been wanting to pursue?

2. To what extent do you enjoy your own writing? And to what extent is it laborious?

3. Are there new ways you are beginning to appreciate the Biblical writing genres of history, prophecy and poetry?

4. Are there "presumed worlds of kings" that you need to subvert with your writing? What might be versions of reality propagated by the powerful in society /your field of study that you are being called to challenge with your writing?

5. “The goal of ChatGPT is to spit out a product and remove the writer from the process.” How do you respond?

6. What ideas for teaching writing as a hopeful activity resonated with you? (pages 109-11) Anything you want to try out in a class?

7. What do you think about the teacher/student community deliberately practicing values in the class — e.g. practicing humility in the lab (pages 127-128)? What are your own experiences of creating classroom/lab cultures of seeking one another’s good?

8. What do you think about these "mild failures of virtue"/“routine capitulations to the stresses of the teaching environment”? (pages 114- 115)

a) If you come to class with something that really matters to you and students reject it, you will feel devastated.

b) Let’s settle for getting through this — commiserating with the students that the content is boring but necessary.

c) Let’s settle for content coverage.