Several years ago I discovered the most helpful little book on academic writing I’d ever seen.  It’s called They Say, I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing.  I loved the book for the ways it simplified–through the use of basic templates–how academic writing at its best, works.

My freshmen could read it and apply the concepts right away in their essays. The results were almost immediate as they began practicing the art of “starting with what ‘they say’” as a way of setting up what “I say”–that is, framing your own argument as a response to what others have said or might say.

I adopted the book solely because I thought it would help my students write better essays.  And it has.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that something deeper was perhaps subtly being communicated to my students through the book–something I’m guessing I responded to unconsciously when I first read it.  What the book actually encourages is the practice of virtues of humility and charity.  I listen to (or read) what others are saying; I summarize as clearly as I can what they say, playing the empathetic “believing game,"; and only then do I respond.

I think the authors of the book mean to encourage liberal minded civil discourse, and I’m certainly with them.  We need that.  But what I’ve come to recognize is this: civil discourse isn’t enough for me and for my Christian students.  Ours is a higher calling.  We must read and write lovingly.

Alan Jacobs' book A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love is a wonderfully dense, insightful book that I take is, in part, a call to charitable academic discourse.  It’s subtly that, and it’s also more than that.  Jacobs' suggests that if the great commandment includes loving neighbor as self, then as readers (or listeners) we may well have a responsibility to treat the books we read and their authors as neighbors.  “Love your neighbor as yourself,” right?  And who is my neighbor?

Perhaps it’s that book (or poem, or blog, or chapel address) or that author (or speaker) I’m inclined to think doesn’t really have that much to offer me.

What might reading and interpretation look like when governed by the law of neighbor love?  And what might my less than charitable or dismissive responses to some of the texts or authors I’ve read (or speakers I’ve heard) suggest to me about how far I have to go as a disciple of Christ who desires to be perfected in love?

Jacobs' book is well worth the effort it takes to read, and it is one I will come back to again over the years.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves. (re-read)

One of my favorite passages from the book.

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable.  Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken.  If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal.  Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.  But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change.  It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.  The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.  The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell. 

I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God's will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness.  It is like hiding the talent in a napkin and for much the same reason "I knew thee that thou wert a hard man."  Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become, even in the natural loves, more careful of our own happiness.  If a man is not uncalculating towards the earthly beloveds whom he has seen, he is none the more likely to be so towards God whom he as not.  We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour.  If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.
 

Dog-Heart by Diana McCaulay

“For when she was hardly more than a girl, Miss Minnie had gone away to teacher’s college and prepared herself to teach by learning many cunning methods that she never afterward used.  For Miss Minnie loved children and she loved books, and she taught merely by introducing the one to the other.”

-Wendell Berry, “A Consent”

He slips out the backdoor of his office and into the movable stacks.  Most employees have but one way in and one way out of their offices.  His office, in the bowels of Bowen, has a second doorway out and directly into the literature section of the library–into a large room with the highest concentration of books of anywhere on campus.

Were he a poet there might be a metaphor to work here.  Sometimes he likes to shut the main door to his office and crack open the door into the library to let in its cooler air.  Perhaps in a magical realist story, more than just cool air would work its way into his modest, windowless office when he opens this door to another world. 

Libraries have always enchanted him.  He walks past a stack of books a hundred times without noticing, then the hundred and first time some book title captures his eye, and if he is not careful (and why should he be?), he finds himself standing for a half hour cracking open a book cover, inhaling its cooler air, transported to another world.

One day the library will likely claim the faculty offices in the northeast corner of its building, and the English department will be relocated elsewhere.  This will be a sad day for him–the day he loses his windowless office with its secret passageway into a world of worlds.