Living Inside The Bible (belt)

Living inside the Bible (Belt): teaching, preaching, and practice

In her article “Living Inside the Bible (Belt)” Dr. Shannon Carter candidly assesses her own limits of tolerance for “traditional conservatism through which evangelical Christianity resonates seems to embrace familiarity above all else, representing difference not as a benefit to embrace and learn from but as a threat to overcome” (572). While other academicians have argued to incorporate students’ faith into the rhetorical situation and offset it by creating and using tension as a means to critically analyze the way their faith can connects with other discourses, Carter suggests using rhetorical dexterity, “an approach that trains writers to effectively read, understand, manipulate, and negotiate the cultural and linguistic codes of a new community of practice (Lave and Wenger) based on a relatively accurate assessment of another, more familiar one” (574). Although the academy can be hostile to persons of faith and persons of faith can be hostile to the academy, Carter argues that rhetorical dexterity may reconcile the one with the other instead of requiring students to replace their faith with the ideology of the academy and thus avoid the pitfall of a “defensive rather than reflective” discourse. Practically speaking, Carter not only argues for this in her article but practices rhetorical dexterity by example in her pedagogy as evidenced in her students’ writings. Carter’s students are clearly comfortable with expressing and critically analyzing their faith. (573) By providing these students this kind of noncombative and non-hostile environment, they can engage more readily in the discourse and avoid such negative situations as Carter articulates from one of her student’s experiences in another classroom: “Once I turned in a paper in which I used Biblical passages as an argument. I failed. After meeting with the teacher, I got the feeling that the reason I failed came directly from my choice to quote the Bible. I did nothing but remove the quotes and my paper received an “A.” Even in a personal opinion paper, I was not allowed to use evidence that appealed to me. I am outraged by this incident to this day.” This is quite a different situation to the rhetorically dexterous one that Carter fosters:

Dr. Shannon Carter’s article “Living Inside the Bible (Belt)” identifies the “disconnect between the academy and religious faith” and offers a practical response to bridge that gap; rhetorical dexterity .

Living inside the Bible (Belt): teaching, preaching, and practice

“One-Page Analysis: Up until now, I have conducted eight interviews and acquired more than six sets of fieldnotes, all from CSO meetings and Bible studies, or fieldnotes on the interviews. I have one last interview scheduled for Monday, November 30, 2009. With the culmination of this interview, I think I will have enough information to draw some striking conclusions. Some recurring themes that I have already picked out include the misconceptions about the Catholic faith from a non-Catholic and Catholic point of view. The source of faulty information seems to come from uneducated Catholics. Catholics are the ones presenting the faith to other denominations. If Catholics are uneducated and present their faith incorrectly, they are giving false impressions to other people that judge our religion. People may not want to become a part of Catholicism because they have seen how Catholics act and don’t want to be a part of that activity, when in fact, that isn’t what Catholicism is about at all. huge theme that I see over and over again is the need for entertainment. This stems mostly from nonCatholic people, but even one Catholic I interviewed found the mass boring.... Interviewing these people was very fun because for thirty minutes to two hours I got to get in their world and mindset. Diversity is everywhere, and I think my project shows a wide range of religious diversity. I interviewed Father George, and that was very interesting. The parish of St. Joe’s is old and the origin fascinated me. It started when a railroad came through Commerce, then known as Cowhill. Once the population started to develop, one of the families that came here for the railroad decided the town needed to have mass, and so the mother opened her home for masses. A priest would come in from other towns, and a small community of people would gather in this home. The masses would grow and then subside, depending on what was going on with the town. In 1955, a building was set up on Cooper and Monroe as the Catholic (574) church. It became a parish with a full-time pastor in 1979, and new renovations have just been completed for the new circular structure. I thought this history was interesting. From a small home to a church, and still growing. Next, I need to interview Dr. Joe Webber, campus minister for St. Joe’s. I have this interview set up for Monday, November 30. I think he will give me the final insights I need to draw strong conclusions. He is studying to become a deacon, so he is very wise in knowledge of the church. I am excited for the results of this interview. I also need to code my entire research portfolio one last time before I sit down to make a first draft. This will freshen my memory of all the information I have collected and help me to put my thoughts into words. After the interview, I will begin to draw conclusions and find a way to present those in an orderly fashion for my final project.”

“I believe rhetorical dexterity may be of more immediately practical value to students as it explicitly asks them to think of literacy in terms more conducive to maintaining both their faith-based and their academic literacies without being required to substitute one for the other” .

Living inside the Bible (Belt): teaching, preaching, and practice

Moreover, within this framework students can more readily identify the appropriateness of their faith-based opinions and ideas within the rhetorical construct. “Because we are concerned with practices that replicate the community, as well as with the community as a whole, it is useful to examine evangelical Christianity as both a community and an activity system. According to this theoretical framework...using the Bible as evidence for a personal opinion paper (as Alex has) may be understood as unacceptable when evaluated by the communities of practice associated with the academy, but as completely acceptable and even mandatory when evaluated by those associated with their faith” (581). Carter also addresses the problems that arise when students posit arguments from an evangelical perspective within the academy. “While I accept a more liberal worldview as ultimately more conducive to values like pluralism and equality, it is important to examine the ways in which a more conservative, faith-based worldview may, in fact, coexist with the endstages of cognitive development as articulated via William Perry’s model: relativism and commitment” (583). By acknowledging appropriateness and literacies based upon the situation, social or rhetorical, we can deter potential conflicts from escalating and inhibiting the affective filter in the classroom. Additionally, as Carter states, “By treating academic literacies as a dynamic sign system and academic discourse as an experience in overlapping communities of practice, I might have taught James to develop the flexibility and awareness he needed to negotiate the increasingly complex literacy contexts he might encounter throughout his college career, without sacrificing that “primary sense of selfhood” he derived from his Bible” (588). Teaching students to thoroughly explore context and evaluate their own ethnocentric backgrounds can help them to articulate their viewpoint to the reader who may or may not have the same literacy history. Finally, through the prac(578). tice of negotiating “the multiple, rapidly changing literacies” students develop “a deeper understanding of the way literacy lives in a particular context—among the people who reproduce themselves through a particular set of literate practices (time-based, situation-based, agent-based)” (592). By moving into the written and communicative practice of rhetorical dexterity students are able to approach different literacy practices from a position that neither judges those practices nor engages in them but rather observes and seeks to understand those practices for what they are and may prepare them for other studies, perhaps even a study in ethnography.

“Understanding literacy as social rather than alphabetic, situated rather than universal, and multiple rather than singular requires writers to consider themselves to be simultaneously literate and illiterate in a number of different contexts”