In my previous post, I mentioned how I have thought about conversions this quarter. Since it is relevant to my vocation as a scholar and educator, I would like to reflect a little bit on my “intellectual” and “sociopolitical” conversions. I can point to a definitive moment when I had my major moral conversion (see my last post) and also my Christian conversion (at Christian youth event in high school). But for my intellectual and sociopolitical conversions, it is more difficult to nail down. In Donald Gelpi’s book, Committed Worship, he describes his own intellectual conversion:
Then came the day when I realized that I did not believe some of the things one of my professors taught. . . . I finally decided to formulate my own position on the subject. With that decision, I believe, I began to come of age intellectually. [25]
Something like this happened to me a couple of times. In my last post, I mentioned how I was a pretty bad kid in early adolescence. Not only did I cause trouble, but I was a very poor student. My dad told me that I made one of my elementary teachers cry because I was not living up to my potential. That was only the beginning. My academic low point was probably eighth grade (the same year I made my moral conversion).
My mind was truly captured for the first time after I became a Christian at 16 and attended weekly Bible studies. It was the first topic that I was so excited that I actually began to read . . . a lot. I read as much of the Bible as I could and asked lots of questions during the studies. What I didn’t realize was that I was being spoonfed a particular brand of biblical interpretation (some may call it fundamentalism).
Then, when I (barely) made it into college and began my study as a Bible major, I was introduced critical thinking. The Bible was no longer simply an “answer book,” a repository of information at my fingertips, but a complex compendium of documents written in vastly different historical and cultural contexts than my own. My early studies at Messiah nudged me out of my high school fundamentalism. Later, I began to develop the tools to question what my undergraduate professors were telling me.
Like Gelpi, I started to find my own intellectual voice. During this time, I became Anabaptist. Reading Anabaptist literature profoundly affected my intellectual outlook, but I also found that I was not walking in lockstep with all Anabaptists. I eventually found a way to be both committed to my Anabaptist faith and live with tons of intellectual questions.
I won’t go into the whole of my sociopolitical conversion, but suffice it to say that my inquisitiveness led me to question not only theological, historical, or literary ideas, but also present day cultural and societal norms. In turn, I’ve become an activist of sorts, perhaps a mild activist (e.g., I’ve never been arrested for civil disobedience), but I am engaged.
As I connect the dots with another earlier post on holistic teaching, I imagine these are the sorts of stories that I will meet as a pastoral kind of educator. My hope is that I can the kind of guide that my professors have been for me in my intellectual and sociopolitical conversion process.
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