How was your sabbatical?

From January 1 until June 1, I was privileged with a sabbatical from my work at Calvin College.  The purpose of this sabbatical, as I understand it, was to allow some space for me to read, write, reflect, and rest, and to prompt some fresh thinking for my work and scholarship.  So that's what I worked on.  I  spent time at home, in coffee shops, and most inspiring, at the headquarters of ICCF.  I read several institutional histories from colleges and universities with faith commitments - places like Augsburg, Baylor, Calvin, DePaul, Gordon, Gustavus Adolphus, Messiah, Notre Dame, Pepperdine, Valparaiso, Whitworth, Wheaton, and others.  I wrote lots of notes on these stories, and I've gotten well along on a draft of a plenary lecture I am scheduled to give at the 22nd annual Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts in October.  I was at home to say goodbye to my kids in the morning as they headed off to school, and I was often home when they've arrived back home from school.  We visited a nice beach and state park in South Carolina as a family for spring break, and we went with friends to see Monticello and the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.  I met a few students for breakfast every Wednesday morning, and I reconnected with dozens of friends from whom we were disconnected for the fall semester - over coffee or at one of Grand Rapids' wonderful beer pubs.  I organized, with some neighbors, a potluck Memorial Day picnic in our backyard, and was thrilled when nearly 50 of us gathered last week Monday.  And as the sabbatical time turned back into the normal routine, as May turned to June, I was, appropriately, in the middle of a national conversation about faith-based higher education and service-learning, at Messiah College in Pennsylvania - with colleagues and students from Calvin, and from around the country. 

Now I have been back at work for one week.  During that week I spent several hours each day in a faculty workshop on "Christian Engagement with People from Other Faith Traditions."  We read from J.H. Bavinck and Diane Obenchain (our seminar leader), Andrew Walls, and E. Stanley Jones, among others.  We talked about missions, and about inter-faith dialog and service.  It was inspiring and thought-provoking.  I also worked with four students and my colleagues in the Student Life Division, the Student Development Unit, and the Service-Learning Center, to get things unpacked, to hear about the year I missed, and to move into the summer with new energy, new rhythms of work and study, and a fresh vision for the work of connecting Calvin College with a host of service-learning and community engagement partners from around the city and around the country, and increasingly, from places where we send students for study abroad opportunities around the world.

I am encouraged by my work, my study, and my rest.  I see evidence of a growing host of people who understand what Wendell Berry means by affection, and who are spending their considerable intellectual, creative, and spiritual passions on building systems, institutions, families, communities, schools, and organizations that give witness to a coming kingdom of hope - a world turned right-side up.  This host includes, among many others, the Association for a More Just Society, the New Horizons Foundation, *culture is not optional, and ICCF - the Inner City Christian Federation, in Grand Rapids.

Thanks, Calvin College, for the gifts of this past year, including five months in Budapest and other places in Europe.  And for the rest of this winter and spring, and the hope of the summer and academic year that lies ahead. 

It all turns on affection

Wendell Berry’s 2012 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities earlier this week was titled: “It All Turns on Affection.” 

You can find it here, and while it is long, it is worth the time it will take to read:

http://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/wendell-e-berry-lecture

In it he tells stories and offers some explanation for the times we live in – stories of his family’s land, an explanation of what an economy really is, and stories of what happens when people, over time, disconnect their “light within” from their practices, their business, their learning and their economies.  These are tragic stories, difficult explanations, and they only leave a very thin thread of hope for humanity.  But Berry very intentionally and very clearly leaves room for hope.  And for that I am grateful.

The hope that Wendell Berry offers and imagines comes from people he calls “stickers.”  For Berry, borrowing from his mentor and teacher Wallace Stegner, stickers are people who settle in and “love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.”  He paints a picture of his family over the past several generations, and its relationship with a particular local landscape and its challenges and beauty.

My sense is that what this “poet, essayist, novelist, farmer and conservationist” is saying to me in my daily work and life is that things are connected, and it matters that we learn to love the world and all that is in it.  When we have forgotten affection, or how to care for the whole, we have brought tragedy and destruction, violence and poverty on ourselves and our world.  I think he is right here.  And I think I am to keep working on helping people figure out how to care – to plant seeds of affection in my own heart and in the lives of others.

Thanks Wendell Berry and all of my co-laborers in this field of affection.

Indeed, as Berry concludes, “this has not been inevitable.  And we do not have to live as if we are alone.”

Two eyes - one crying, one smiling

As our family was  leaving Budapest last month, my friend Zoltan Monos shared this Hungarian saying with me: "Egyik szemem sír, a másik nevet" (~My one eye is crying, the other is smiling).  This is an apt description of our readjustment to life in Grand Rapids.  Many thanks to Zoltan, and to other generous and hospitable Hungarians (and some Americans, Kenyans, and others as well!) for making our five months abroad life-altering and positive.  Here Zoltan and I are outside a favorite cafe, Morricone's, last August.

My days lately have been spent reading and reflecting in a beautiful new spot, here at the headquarters of the Inner City Christian Federation, a top-notch housing organization working to provide beautiful and affordable quality housing in Grand Rapids.

I don't think there are any easy answers to the question "How was your semester in Hungary?" but we are grateful for all the interest, and for the time to ponder.  We are also grateful for the on-going involvement we have with the students from our semester.  Last night at our home, in addition to sixteen of our Hungary students,  we welcomed also Akos Molnar,  a Hungarian student who has spent January as a transfer student at Calvin. 

Moving forward, my sabbatical time from January through May is, and will be occupied with questions about how learning takes place, particularly in college and university settings, and what connections there are between co-curricular activities like community service-learning and students' intellectual and faith development.  I've just finished re-reading my 2004 doctoral dissertation, and am excited to return to the quest linking movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with today's reality in higher education.  Recent experiences in Europe make the task more complicated, but more interesting as well.

One of the poems we read in class during the fall semester, Healing, by Wendell Berry, concludes with these two stanzas, and I find them intriguingly relevant to my current project:

VIII

There is finally the pride of thinking oneself without teachers.

The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner.

In ignorance is hope. If we had known the difficulty, we would not have learned even so little.

Rely on ignorance. It is ignorance that teachers will come to.

They are waiting, as they always have, beyond the edge of the light.

IX

The teachings of unsuspected teachers belong to the task, and are its hope.

The love and the work of friends and lovers belong to the task, and are its health.

Rest and rejoicing belong to the task, and are its grace.

Let tomorrow come tomorrow. Not by your will is the house carried through the night.

Order is the only possibility of rest.

–from Wendell Berry’s Healing, in What Are People For?