Teaching at the Crossroads of Faith and School: The Teacher as Prophetic Pragmatist

What happens at the crossroads where secular education encounters religious faith? Is it a safe passage on different tracks separated by Jefferson’s wall or is it sometimes an existential train wreck? I once jokingly asked a colleague in the small rural junior college where I teach how he, like myself the product of a graduate education in the humanities and a rural culture steeped in evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity, could be a Southern Baptist deacon and at the same time one of the most literate and open-minded members of our faculty. His semi-serious reply was intriguing: “I often thank God that I became a Christian before I got an education.” In this reply I believe my colleague made four implicit claims: 1) His faith is the core of his identity, 2) His education was vital to his personal and intellectual fulfillment, 3) His faith and education often conflicted to the point that one threatened the other, and 4) It was possible to reconcile the two.