Gift, Reception, and the Substantiality of the Other
Robert Bishop, Ph.D., Professor of Physics and Philosophy; John and Madeleine McIntyre Chair of Philosophy and History of Science
Authority and the other bulked large in our CACE seminar, “Performing Identity, Authority and Community.” From our classrooms, to James Baldwin’s “Where the Grapes of Wrath are Stored”–discussing problematic ways Hollywood treats Black and female actors, scriptwriters, and directors–to August Wilson’s “The Ground on Which I Stand ”–arguing why only black actors and directors should be able to perform his plays–questions about the authority to tell others’ stories and how to honor the other as particular persons of substance loomed in every discussion.
For instance, Baldwin critiques how screen writing gets translated into the medium of film in such a way that Black and female characters and roles get transmuted into stereotypes that will play well to the widest commercial audience. Yet, this process reduces the particularity of the characters to universal–uniform–types that may serve the studio’s bottom line but treat the characters as homogenized tropes losing the substantiality and individuality of the person the screenwriter was trying to bring to life. Does Hollywood have the authority to tell these stories in such one-dimensional ways, let alone the authority to tell others’ stories at all?
The classroom is where these issues hit home for many of us. What does it mean to be an authority figure there? Are we able to tell the stories of and advocate for those who are other than us? Time with my friends and colleagues in this seminar sharpened my thinking about the troubled concept of authority. Surely, there is a sense in which I have authoritative voice in the classroom: I’ve studied the class materials, along with myriad supporting sources, far longer and with more depth than my students. Nonetheless, authority doesn’t seem to me to be the only or even the best way to frame conversations about the classroom and pedagogy.
Every fall I teach Colin Gunton’s The One, the Three and the Many (1993). In the final chapter, Gunton discusses how gift and reception are at the heart of human being as relational, being-as-communion, and that trinitarian self-sacrificial love is at the heart of gift-reception (e.g., John 3:16-17; Philippians 2:1-13). The idea that gift-reception is fundamental to who God is and that the giving is asymmetrical–the receiver cannot give anything comparable in return1 --has had me thinking about gift-reception as an alternative to an authority framework for teaching. The CACE seminar helped me bring several thoughts together about authority, the other, and the classroom.
My expertise, preparation, and life experience are gifts that I give to my students; they cannot respond in kind. Self-sacrificially, am I giving them the gift of what the authors we’re reading say–with all the challenges of listening to and grappling with them? Or am I giving my students me, taking the spotlight off the authors and turning it on what I’m doing? Do I love the authors, texts, topics, and concepts deeply enough to hold them loosely so that these others can speak for themselves in their own contexts? Do I love my students enough to self-sacrificially give them the opportunity to own their learning? Am I enabling a translation of these materials that does minimal violence to the authors’ intentions so students can receive what the authors have to say with the least amount of distortion? Am I enabling my students to become faithful translators of these materials to others outside the classroom?
Speaking of gifts, am I able to count the cost of giving students something they may find challenging to receive? Am I willing to receive my students’ gifts of insights I hadn’t seen or thought, push back against authors I admire, interpretations I haven’t encountered before? Am I open to learning from them?
These are the kinds of questions the CACE seminar brought to life for me as I’m rethinking issues of authority, the other, and the stories being told in the classroom, and how this reframing should shape my pedagogy and interactions with students as I strive by the Spirit’s work to love them and the texts self-sacrificially.
1The Father gives his only Son into the hands of sinful humans; Jesus lays down his life for those very humans; Jesus’ humanity as well as all of creation are perfected and given to the Father by the Spirit (Gunton 1993, fn 12, p. 225).