Next summer, I plan on teaching a philosophy and religion class focusing on the concept of “God”. My summer ’23 class, “Philosophy, Religion, and Sacred Texts” asked whether sacred texts could be read as sources of philosophy. It was fun but too broad. When the philosophy/religion class circulates in ’25, I want to narrow the focus. I’ll build on the foundation of the ’23 class but we’ll discuss one unified topic: theisms and atheisms.
Currently, I need to think of creating about 8-10 lessons for that class. Here is my current list of topics, though they’re not settled:
This was of interest to me because I teach high school age, emerging young adults.
Ryan Burge teamed with the people over at the “Freedom from Religion Foundation” to survey “Nones”. They came up with a lot of interest insights, though this is the one that stood out to me. Not surprising at all though. Probably just confirms what we know intuitively. Read the whole post: “We Asked the Nones a Bunch of Questions About Leaving Religion”.
In my last post, I pondered “midlife” and how I feel like I’ve avoided a “midlife crisis” so far. As comfortable as I am, there remains one thing about midlife that I’m trying to comprehend right now: how do we live when our life circumstances can’t/shouldn’t change but we change. My example is a mild one but a real one. This August, I’ll enter my ninth year teaching high school. I’m still very excited about teaching religious studies. I’m even more excited about the possibility of a couple of philosophy courses that I’d like to create over the next couple of years. I’m not as excited about my biblical studies classes.
This may seem odd because I cut my teeth, academically, on the study of the Bible: undergrad, graduate school (2 x’s), Ph.D. All biblical studies related! And when I’m in the classroom, more often than not I enjoy teaching my biblical studies classes. But I don’t enjoy scholarship on the Bible all that much. I’m having a paper presented on my behalf at this year’s Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) (which I’ll miss because the birth of my first child is going to happen around the time of the conference) but when I try to sit down to read and write about John the Baptist, I lack motivation! And I lack curiosity about current trends in the field of biblical studies, in general. The past few years, I get a bit of a spark when I attend the annual SBL meeting, but then when I have time to read afterward, I don’t want to read biblical studies. I want to read philosophy, history, sociology, pedagogy, sometimes even science, but I stare at my biblical studies books with disinterest. I’m part of the Society of Biblical Literature’s Educational Resources and Review Committee and I’m beginning a second term. We’re doing good work and often I enjoy it…but it doesn’t motivate me like it used to. For example, you’d think I’d have all kinds of thoughts about Oklahoma’s state superintendent ordering public schools to offer Bible classes, but I don’t!
When I started studying the Bible, it had a magical quality to it. Literally. I was taught what I’d recognize now as the “doctrine of inerrancy”. The Bible was the direct “Word of God” from heaven, free from error, and the key to eternal life. In the zero sum game of conservative Christian soteriology, there was no object of study more important than the Bible. But I’ve long abandoned both that soteriology and that bibliology. (I remain a Christian, just not that type of Christian.) So, the theological grounding for dedicating all my time to the study of the Bible is missing. Once the Bible is demystified, it becomes an important source of wisdom but not the sole arbitrator of it. In many ways, an ongoing, academic study of the Bible ends up deconstructing its own value unless you retain certain confessional anchors or professional obligations. Now days, I might say something like “all truth is God’s truth” recognizing “truth” can be found outside of the Bible: hence, philosophy, sociology, etc.
Professionally, my study of the Bible matters but it’s not high stakes. In eight years, I’ve taught one student who went on the study the Bible thoroughly beyond high school. A total of one student (out of hundreds!) is on her way to seminary. So, while many students enjoy my biblical studies classes, they don’t seem to value them as much as they do the classes that will matter when it comes to getting them into the college of their dreams or getting them that ideal job. I help my students think critically about their faith (or lack thereof) but since few of my students come from the biblicist subculture in which I was raised, few of them obsess about the Bible like I did around their age. This means I’m ready for most of their inquiries with minimal preparation. My curriculum is set and it hums along quite nicely. In fact, on that front, last year’s classes may have been my best ever!
On the other hand, religious studies continues to have immediate relevance to me and to my students. And even if my students don’t major in religious studies, what they learn in my classes “Religion in Global Context” and “Religion in the United States” remains immediately relevant as it teaches them how to think critically as members of a religiously pluralistic society. The Bible as a smaller circle within the much larger circle of religious studies makes sense to me:
The Bible as a category equal to religious studies doesn’t:
But every year, enrollment is basically equal. So, that tells you that my students and their families value these classes equally. Though this may not be true of all Episcopal schools, my institution values these classes as well. And yes, when I’m teaching them, I see their value. Subjectively and contextually, these classes matter and by enrollment data standards, they matter equally. But personally, I don’t feel the same connection.
So, the problem lies with me. Did I wake up to realize that biblical studies have been boring all along? Unlikely. A bunch of the smartest people that I know are nerds about the Bible (in a good, academic way…not a troubling, fundamentalist way). So, maybe I’ve become a fox?
The Greek poet Archilochus wrote the following: “a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing”. Isaiah Berlin took this statement and made it into an entire book, The Hedgehog and the Fox, mostly about Leo Tolstoy. It’s become something like a personality test over the years. As someone who despises “personality tests” like Myers-Briggs and the Enneagram—mostly because I think Buddhist thought, and similar philosophies that emphasize the fluidity of our persons, make better sense of reality—I want to be cautious with this but it may capture something about me at this stage in my life.
I’ll do what needs to be done to finish that paper so that it can be presented but I’m stuck wondering, what does this mean? My “active” book pile covers topics like Spinoza’s religion, a couple of books on the philosophy of sports and one on the sociology of sports, the dangers of smart phones and social media for kids, an evolutionary history of fathers, a book on philosophy for kids, and more. Notice: nothing on the Bible.
This is due, in part, to the requirements of my job. I got hired to be a generalist, not a specialist. I’ve worked as a generalist, not a specialist. My task hasn’t been “publish or perish” but “teach high schoolers effectively and relevantly”. My curriculum has been shaped by my on the ground experience teaching certain kids in a specific context. John the Baptist gets about 45 minutes of attention in the spring semester. It would’ve been a waste of mental energy to focus on him all the time.
Now that I have a kid of my own on the way, I’m reevaluating what it means for me to be a teacher, presuming that this will be my career by the time they reach high school. If my child becomes my student, what will matter? How will I teach them? What do I really want them to learn? If I’m honest, I want them to be a clear thinker and an honest one. I hope they have a spiritually vibrant life but I don’t wish dogma on them. I want them to be curious and open. I want them to pair wisdom with knowledge. I don’t want them to be dualistic, so I hope they cultivate their bodies as well as their minds. Obviously, I hope they enjoy athletics and/or being in nature as much as they enjoy bookish knowledge. And I hope that whatever YouTube and social media looks like in a decade and a half, I will have taught them to be discerning when consuming content.
With this in mind, the Bible is a small, small slice of the pie of my future parental concerns. If they find the Bible interesting, I hope it’s as a collection of wisdom literature that needs to be read cautiously and carefully and not as a magical book or something to be weaponized. But I doubt that they’ll have my relationship with the Bible because they won’t be raised in a biblicist subculture. These concerns are reshaping me.
I’d like to be a hedgehog again. I want a project. I want to dig deep into a small area of knowledge again. I don’t know what that will be but I sense that my days trying to be a “biblical scholar” are fading and have been for several years now. I doubt that I’ll ever get around to publishing on John the Baptist. That window seems to have closed. Maybe I need to become a fox in order to emerge as a different hedgehog someday. We’ll see.
A few years ago, I read Kieren Setiya‘s book Midlife: A Philosophical Guide. I can’t remember the specific year. It was published in 2017. I’m confident that I read it before I turned 40 in 2022 because I remember having an unfamiliar sense of calm about that birthday—a birthday that I thought would bring a lot of anxiety. I think it’s because I read Setiya’s book. The gift of that book is that it helped me think through what people call a “midlife crisis” without the result being money spent on a motorcycle and a leather jacket. It helped me focused on two important but interrelated realities about midlife: (1) we wonder “is this it?” and (2) we lament the limited pathways that life offers us now in comparison to our youth.
Now, I can’t remember if it was what Setiya wrote that led me to the following insight, or if was just a thought inspired by what he wrote, but I remember doing a mental exercise that was sort of multiverse related. On the one hand, in an almost Stoic sense, I found calm with my place in life by rejecting the possibility that it could be otherwise. I’m not saying that I adopted some sort of determinism, per se, but that “I” would not be “I” without the events that had led me to become who I was. If you change this experience here, that relationship there, this job here, that loss there, then I become a different person. And since I was generally pleased with who I was and what my life was like, the “is this it?” question could be answered, “This is it!” I had to think of what I liked about my life—for example, being married to my wife—and I had to realize that what I have now is due to the paths I took then. Had I gone to a different school, lived in a different city, worked a different job, etc., there are elements of my life as it currently stands that wouldn’t have happened. So, I took solace in the reality that I find my life to be a net gain based on the paths that I took. At the current juncture, I feel like I’ve done good for myself and I’m happy with where I am.
But then I thought back to being a teen, a twenty-something, and even an early thirty-something. The choices were exhilarating, yes, but also anxiety inducing! For example, nostalgia leads me to remember my few years in San Francisco as the most exciting of my life. So much was new! And in a city like that, every neighborhood is interesting and has a story. It’s way more exciting that the current suburbanite life that I live now. But it was stressful. There was a ton of pressure. It could be very depressing. It felt like so many choices were being thrown my way at a pace that I couldn’t maintain. My current life has a lot of routine, predictability, safety, and stability. I like it. Do I miss the energy of my youth? Yes. But I don’t miss the anxiety that came with it.
I don’t know if twenty-something “me” would be thrilled or appalled if I could go back in time to tell him who he would become. Probably, a little of both. But almost 42 year old me looks back and imagines all the paths that I might have taken, and yes, some may have had certain rewards that I lack…but I’m not interested in trading places with a multiverse “me” if he exists!
I realized that this year will be the first year (I think) that I start teaching students who are classified as “Generation Alpha,” according to people who categorize this sort of thing. For example, the “social analyst and demographer” Mark McCrindle organizes Generation Alpha between the years 2010-2024. The logic behind these years is as follows:
“Generational definitions are most useful when they span a set age range and so allow meaningful comparisons across generations. That is why the generations today each span 15 years with Generation Y (Millennials) born from 1980 to 1994; Generation Z from 1995 to 2009 and Generation Alpha from 2010 to 2024. And so it follows that Generation Beta will be born from 2025 to 2039.”
This sort of thing is pretty subjective. In her book Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America’s Future, Jean Twenge offers a more concrete reason for arguing that “Generation Alpha” shouldn’t begin with 2010 but instead 2012. Twenge called “Generation Alpha” “Polars” because they’re born into an era of extreme political polarization. I like Twenge’s name better but also I liked “iGen” better than “Gen Z” and yet it’s clear that “Gen Z” is the more popular label. Anyway, for Twenge, “Gen Alpha/Polars” begins at 2012 because of the following reasons (from pp. 451-452):
Technology: “smartphone ownership crossed 50% in the U.S. between the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013”.
Black Lives Matter: “founded in 2013”; “gained widespread support before the first Polars entered kindergarten”.
COVID: one of the youngest groups to remember the global pandemic as Twenge argues “the time before March 2020 will be only vaguely remembered by those under age 7 at the time”.
I appreciate Twenge’s taxonomy because it provides a rationale like this one. That doesn’t mean “generations” can be found in nature. They’re social constructs of a weaker variety, for sure. But they’re helpful for understand trends and cultural transitions. That being said, they’re fragile. In many ways, when I was younger I shared in the optimism that was characteristic of the mid-2000s Millennial but as I’ve aged I’ve hardened in many ways that might place me among stereotypical Gen X’ers. I was born in 1982, so depending on who you ask, I’m one of the first Millennials. (Twenge marks 1980 as the start for Millennials.) But when I meet people born in the early to middle 90s, I have sometimes felt like there’s no way we’re from the same generational cohort. Often, I relate closer to the slightly older than me Gen X folk in my circles. So, let’s continue to embrace the subjectivity while respecting the effort made by people like Twenge, who organize generations around important methodological markers like major changes in technology (e.g. TV; home appliances; AC; birth control; computers; the Internet; social media) and to a lesser extent, major events (e.g. AIDS epidemic; 9/11; the Great Recession; COVID-19 pandemic).
Maybe I’m teaching Gen Z for a couple more years. Either way, if the sociologists who study this topic are right that in marking generational divisions along lines of about every 15 years or so, then we’re about the experience some transitions in the classroom. As Twenge writes, “generational differences are based on averages,” like how much time someone spends on the Internet or a social media app. Those changes are real and it’s best to be on the look out for whatever is coming next (e.g. the AI revolution?) if we want to be prepared to educate tomorrow’s children.
Several days ago, I was reading James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility. While a book of philosophy, it’s full of aphorisms, including “To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.” With regard to this particular aphorism, he unpacks it with a paragraph that I’ve been chewing on. He writes (p. 19):
“Education discovers an increasing richness in the past, because it sees what is unfinished there. Training regards the past as finished and the future as to be finished. Education leads toward a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward a final self-definition.
“Training repeats a completed past in the future. Education continues an unfinished past into the future.”
I’ve been pondering these statements in relation to my own context. I teach in a school that can be best described as the intersection of several forms of education. We’re not a “military school” but we do have a prominent Corps of Cadets. We’re a religious school but we’re not fundamentalist, sectarian, or exclusive, as we’re grounded in the openness of Episcopal Christianity. We’re a college preparatory school but we’re not a school that grounds itself primarily/only in what happens in the classroom. We value athletics but we’re too small and too private to ever be a factory for D-1 athletes. We have an “Arts and Innovation” department but I wouldn’t characterize us as an art school or a tech school. We value STEM but we’re not myopically STEM based. I mean, we have a daily chapel service and a religious studies requirement to graduate, so I think you get the idea.
In many ways, we try to do too much. But if you knew the school and its context in San Antonio, you’d know that this is package makes sense as a product. The question I ask myself when wanting to move beyond mere consumerism is, “How does it make sense beyond being a product for a particular audience/demographic?” This is where Carse’s comments about education may be valuable.
All schools train students but training isn’t the only goal, or even the primary one, of most institutions of learning. Sure, there are nursing schools, and mechanic schools, and so forth. Their purpose is to train students. The methods are set. Innovation isn’t desired. We don’t want nurses experimenting on patients. I want a mechanic to fix what needs to be fixed when I bring my car to the shop, and I want it done quickly and efficiently. Training is good. In my context—secondary education in a school with middle and upper school divisions—this isn’t why we exist though. We don’t exist merely to train; we exist to educate.
Education can’t be just memorizing facts. Education can’t be just trivia. As Carse said, education “discovers the richness of the past”. This doesn’t mean knowing history for pragmatic, negative purposes (e.g. “avoiding the mistakes of the past”). Or just to do well on an AP exam. Instead, it’s for the purpose of rooting a student. We’re storied beings and we want to be part of something, something bigger than our own individuality. The past doesn’t just provide us with a map toward success or a warning of pitfalls. It invites us into an ongoing, collective project, where our individuality is enhanced by its interconnection with others.
This may sound like I’m talking about teaching history, religion, or philosophy only, but I don’t think this is the case. Algebra can be training but it can be story. What has algebra done for us humans. How did we discover/create it? What great things have we done with it? What great things might we do with it? What is it like to be the type of creatures who can do algebra? What is it like to be part of a species that can use our mind this way to do this type of thinking? This is true of teaching biology, and calculus, and chemistry, and physics.
We can train someone in physics or we can educate them in it. Or, to my area of teaching, we can indoctrinate students in religion or we can educate them about religion. The first assumes finality; the second openness. The first assumes training; the second education. To educate a student about religion isn’t to close off their future, so that their ideas about religion are complete once they get their high school diploma. To educate about religion is to point students to the past, and to contemporary realities, so that they can simultaneously (A) ground themselves in the collective, ongoing exercise of meaning making that we humans call “religion” (even if their path is irreligious, they need to know what it is that they’re departing from) and (B) so that they can be agents in this process going forward into their own shared future. The goal isn’t to memorize who the Prophet Moses is, or the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, or interpretations of the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses of the First Amendment. The goal can’t be to simply “know things”. The goal is to have them critically (i.e. thoughtfully) evaluate and consider these things, asking why their forebears valued these people/concepts, and to ask what we should do with them going forward. Are these the stories we want to identify with? Are these the projects within which we want to ground ourselves? Is this the language of the communities with which we want to associate? If so, how should we understand them, adopt them, and adapt them?
Education takes the narratives, communities, and identities of the past into the future. This includes the good and the bad. The good which we celebrate, recreate, and extend; the bad which we lament, safeguard against, and work to eliminate. This means education isn’t about just “getting a job” but getting a job that feels like it’s part of something bigger and ongoing. It’s not just about “making money” but wisely making money with a purpose/goal for that money, an awareness of our indebtedness to the people who have paved the way for us to make that money, an ethic that asks how much of it we need and what we should do with it, and a reasonableness that remembers our own temporality and interconnectedness so that we don’t fall prey to the disease of greed which when spread too far results in an unsustainable future for us all.
For some, this sort of collectiveness may sound dangerous. It may seem like the type of error that postmodernity has attempted to correct. In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-Françios Leotard spoke of the “postmodern condition” as “incredulity toward metanarratives”. As Ashley Woodward explains, “…metanarratives are understood as totalising stories about history and the goals of the human race that ground and legitimise knowledges and cultural practises”. We may do well to remain generally suspicious of metanarratives. There are many forms of religious dogmatics, nationalisms, and other ideologies that can be dangerous when adopted en masse, especially by the masses! But we do need narratives. We need interconnected narratives. We need narratives that can be linked together with interchangeable parts. And I don’t think the narrative of “training” alone can fulfill us humans. This means that personally, I must ground myself in the narratives of being human, being Christian, being American. We can’t have a view from no where. We can’t start building our identity suspended in the air. Instead, we must become educated in our inherited metanarratives into which we were born while simultaneously taking responsibility for our contribution to what those metanarratives will mean in the present and in the future. The harm of metanarratives can be addressed by accepting them as lacking concreteness; as being dynamic. But abandoning them completely leaves us creating metanarratives out of thin air—metanarratives about the danger of metanarratives which puts us as risk of the worst of unchecked, selfish individualism and nihilism.
With this in mind, I can imagine our Corps of Cadets educating based on their commitment to the values and virtues of discipline, comradely, self-sacrifice, etc., that come from the traditions of military preparation. Our athletics can teach us the same things, pointing back to exemplars, both physical and spiritual. (As a Giants fan, I think of Willie Mays who just passed, and what he meant as an athlete to Black Americans, Americans in general, Giants fans, baseball fans in general, people in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City, etc. In other words, for example, we shouldn’t just teach kids to play baseball but invite them into the story of baseball. I could go on but I think the ideas is clear.) Even in a school like mine that feels like it could be three or four schools rolled into one, the unifying reality that keeps it all rolled together can be this commitment to not merely train but to educate: to prepare students to be surprised; to help them discover the richness of the past; to give them a glimpse of what remains unfinished and in need of work; to invite them into self-discovery; to bridge the past to the present to the future so that students become part of an ongoing human project that aims for the greater good for us all.
In early April, my wife and I received confirmation: we’re going to become parents in November! I’m thrilled, nervous, excited, scared…all of those seemingly oppositional but actually related emotions. I’ve begun to prepare for fatherhood the same way I prepare for most everything: by funding Jeff Bezos’ space program, a.k.a buying too many books on Amazon. I know that reading about parenting won’t make me a good parent but I believe that thoughtful parenting is better than thoughtless parenting, so I’m trying to be thoughtful by reading!
The second book I’ve read in preparation is Mara van der Lugt’s Begetting: What Does It Mean to Create a Child?—the first book was read a while back when I completed Jennifer Banks’ Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth, which I may discuss at a later date. Begetting is an uncomfortable book to read, at times. Van der Lugt discusses the arguments of anti-natalist philosophers, questioning whether bringing a child into the world is an act (or potential act) of harm, especially in light of the uncertainty that accompanies every birth. Every child who comes into this world risks a life of pain and suffering. Our world is full of potential harms. If we don’t have children, that “non-existent being” (if such language makes any sense) isn’t harmed by not existing but existence brings with it the potential of great harm. Related, Van der Lugt asks whether it’s ethical to beget when the child being born can’t consent to existing. In the background, haunting the entire discussion, is climate change. Van Der Lugt challenges potential parents to consider what it means to bring children into a world that could be devastated ecologically but also to consider potentially affluent parents whose children could contribute to our unsustainable consumer practices in a way that could contribute to this potential, impending disaster.
In Part III of the book (“Narratives”), Van der Lugt asks us to critically evaluate our culture’s narratives around reproduction such as doing it because of a personal desire, or the feeling that our “biological clock” is ticking, or that we can’t mature morally without becoming parents, etc. Her main target, at least as I read the book, is the “Entitlement Narrative” where becoming a parent is framed in “wanting and getting and having” language as states in this quote from p. 145:
Begetting: it should be seen as an act of creation, a cosmic intervention, something great, and wondrous—and terrible. Something that should fill us with awe and trepidation, with infinite caution and an awareness of the immeasurable fragility of life, It is not a language of wantingandgetting and having that is needed here—but a language of carrying the finest glass of iron firsts, of fragility as we’ll as responsibility. Not to think that our children owe anything to use, but that we must be prepared, at any point, to be held accountable for their creation.
Van der Lugt works through the reasons given for having children, acknowledging their strengths and exposing their weaknesses; reasons ranging from the need to pass along our genes to the love we have for our partner and/or our potential children. Then she revisits these reasons, helping the reader ask better questions and provide better answers. One of the things I appreciate most about the book is she isn’t pro-natalist or anti-natalist. She’s a philosophical tour guide. For potential parents who want to think deeply about the decision to have children, this is an honest, unflinching book.
When our child is born, I’ll be 42 years old. I say this to point out that even though I didn’t read this book until after my wife became pregnant, I felt more like a concrete exploration of things I’ve considered for many years. We waited to become parents. I’ve had anti-natalist impulses at points; I continue to worry about climate change. The choice to become parents was done “in fear and trembling”. But this book, in spite of the fact that it wouldn’t surprise me if someone read it and then decided not to become parents, made me more secure in my choice, primarily because of some of the things Van der Lugt writes in Chapter 28, “Givenness”. Let me share three key quote that resonated with me and my own philosophy of begetting (from pp. 209 and 2011):
The language is all wrong. We need to get rid—in thought and words—of this idea of entitlement. We need to find a different way to talk about begetting. Something that removes us from the vocabulary of wanting, having, getting, being entitled to, and moves us closer to a concept of fragility and accountability: of bring entrusted with, being responsible for.
What conditions are required in order to bring a new being into the world? Is creation always justified? What are our own responsibilities here, and are we fulfilling them? In deciding to beget a child, surely our first concern should be the good of that future child—before society’s interests, before our partner’s interests, before even our own.
But thinking about begetting in this way need not lead to the decision not to beget at all: it may instead lead to a different conception of parenthood, one that is grounded not in entitlement, but in a sense of utmost responsibility—of being entrusted with something both precious and precarious.
This is the conclusion I reached about a year ago: if I have a child, I owe them everything. They didn’t choose to exist. My wife and I made the choice for them. I’m responsible to do everything possible to help them be healthy, happy, successful, fulfilled, etc. This doesn’t mean raising a spoiled, undisciplined child. Not at all. But it does mean giving my all and recognizing the great weight of responsibility that I’ve accepted. If someone is considering begetting but they don’t feel this great weight, then this book is definitely a required read because begetting is serious.
In my class, “Introduction to the Bible I: The Hebrew Scriptures,” the second movie that I show is The Prince of Egypt(1998). As I said in my post introducing this series on the movies that I show in my classes, I’ll provide brief commentary on the following: (1) why I show the movie; (2) the strengths of the movie for what I’m trying to accomplish; (3) the weaknesses of the movie for what I’m trying to accomplish.
1. Why I show The Prince of Egypt (1998)
The Prince of Egypt is an excellent movie. Full stop. I’ve seen it dozens of times over the past two and a half decades and enjoy it still. The soundtrack is amazing for 90s children (Whitney Houston, Maria Carey, Boys 2 Men) and the voice acting cast is stacked (Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes, Sandra Bullock, Steve Martin, Patrick Stewart, Martin Short, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jeff Goldblum). It tells one of the most important stories of the Hebrew Bible in a memorable way. Honestly, what part of the Hebrew Bible is better known in broader, popular culture than the Exodus narrative? And how much credit should we give this animated film for the probability that it’s the Moses-story.
After reading through the wonderful, but heavy narratives of the Book of Genesis (Abraham and Sarah; Isaac and Rebekah; Jacob, Rachel, Lead, Bilhah, and Zilpah; the Twelve Sons of Israel, especially Joseph), this film provides a little break in what can be a demanding stretch of the semester, especially for students who aren’t used to doing this much reading!
2. The strengths of The Prince of Egypt
As I noted above, it makes the Exodus-narrative memorable. I tell my students that I need them to remember at least three names into adulthood: Abraham, Moses, and David. This helps cement Moses in their memory.
Related, it’s designed so that the main outline of events is easy to track. Just reading Exodus 1-19 doesn’t guarantee this.
It’s fun. I know few people who dislike the movie. Sometimes my students dislike it, but they’re teenagers, so the odds are that I’ll have some who dislike it from a demographic that often dislikes a lot of things!
Even though the video sounds negative (“The Most Successful Animated Failure Ever Made”), I recommend the below video because it shows how excellent a movie The Prince of Egypt was for its time and is even now:
3. The weaknesses of The Prince of Egypt
I ask my students to reflect on how the movie relates to the biblical narrative. One question I want them to consider is whether “cartooning” events like the plagues, especially the death of the first born, undermines the story itself. Some students feel that it does. In a sense, this can be turned into a strength as it provides an opportunity for my students to think about the media they consume, especially when it’s religious and/or mythological in nature.
Some students dislike the singing and dancing when paired with such a serious story. There have been years when I’ve shown Exodus: Gods and Kings instead. That movies avoids the childishness of The Prince of Egypt though it has its own problems. (For example, everyone is white, which is weird for a narrative set in 2nd millennia BCE Egypt. Another is how it tries to naturalize the miracles of Exodus, even presenting Moses as a leading a form of guerrilla warfare. So, there’s aspects of either movie that will trouble any given viewer.)
As always, biblical films rewrite the Bible a bit. The decision to make Moses and Rameses brothers and to make “Pharaoh” into “Pharaoh Ramses” specifically is, well, a decision. Any time students watch biblical movies, they’re bound to intertwine the movie’s version with the Bible’s version in their memories. This leads to a different discussion that I won’t take up here: does this matter? Is the literal narrative of the Bible what students need to know or is the received cultural narrative that originates in the Bible as important?
This being said, if you’re going to be critical of The Prince of Egypt, at least be entertaining about it…like this video!
A decade or so ago, I took a class on “The Greek Fathers”. I found St. Athanasius of Alexandria to be the most fascinating, biographically. I studied St. Basil the Great’s pneumatology closely. My professor made me curious about St. Maximus the Confessor (whose works I’ve not yet given adequate attention). For some reason, St. Gregory of Nyssa didn’t grab my attention.
A lot has changed since then. Presently, Gregory of Nyssa is my favorite ancient Christian theologian. I think he surpasses even Origen of Alexandria. But there’s a reason why these two names are #1 and #2 on my list: their eschatology. I’ll say more momentarily.
Personally, being Christian in the 21st century means living within the tension of knowing that the apocalyptic framework within which Christianity was conceived needs to be abandoned while trying to retain fidelity to what we find in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. This is difficult. There’s part of me that agrees with G.K. Chesterton when he wrote that the problem with Christianity is not that it has been tried and that it failed but that it’s never been tried. If humanity could collectively adhere to the Sermon on the Mount, the Kingdom of God might be here with us now. So far, it appears that we can’t. When I consider the apocalyptic expectation of Jesus’ context, it makes me wonder how much of the Sermon on the Mount can be lived reasonably if an apocalyptic in-breaking shouldn’t be expected.
Christians have wrestled with this since the first and second centuries. Whoever wrote the Second Epistle of Peter shows us that this was a problem early. He addresses those who scoff at Christians asking, “Where is the promise of his coming?” (2 Peter 3:4). His answer, “But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day..The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish but all to come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief…” (2 Peter 3:8-10) Well, it’s been a minute and still there’s been no “Second Coming”. If Christians were concerned back then with what to do with the question of the parousia, how much harder is it for us modern Christians to confess, “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again“.
I hold my theology loosely. I read the Bible and its interpreters as talking metaphorically, symbolically, poetically about the divine. I’m hesitant to interpret theological speak concretely. I hope for the “coming” or “appearance” of Christ, I just don’t know what this means, concretely. Maybe God is the Cosmic Mind from which all reality is derived and maybe we humans are embodied minds (souls), or minds who emerge from bodies, who will be reunited one day with the Cosmic Mind. Maybe “resurrection” means being known and recognized by this Cosmic Mind/God and by other minds so that future “embodiment” is nothing like our biological life now but instead something drastically different sharing only in the reality that we are recognizable, recognized, and able to recognize.
When I imagine death, I don’t imagine it as nothingness. I imagine that if there is a God, and that God’s existence is akin to “Mind” then “Mind” is the highest reality and our minds are united to that Mind. That Cosmic Mind is pure, holy, good. For those who lived saintly lives in our biological existence, their encounter with that Cosmic Mind is experienced as pure goodness but pure goodness that must be continually grown into/united with. For those who lived lives of selfishness, greed, hatred, violence, etc., the Cosmic Mind is experienced as foreign, even dangerous. But in the aeons of our future existence, both saint and sinner grow into continual unity with that Cosmic Mind. Some begin with more openness to the Cosmic Mind (what the doctrine of heaven tries to communicate) and some begin more closed to it (what the doctrine of hell tries to communicate) but all minds are connected to the Cosmic Mind into which we will be continually emerged. (Yes, this thinking comes from Greek theology, especially concepts like theosisand epektasis, but I was introduced to it indirectly through C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce.)
This line of thinking doesn’t deny the importance of this life. We can heed to the warnings of Christ and the Prophets to avoid living destructive lives now. We can speak of judgment, even future judgment. But also it’s aligned with Christian Universalism or the doctrine of universal reconciliation. As I’ve written, I despise and reject the “infernalist” doctrine, so any theologizing that I do will deny that the Divine Mind can be spoken of as “good” if the sentience/minds that they created were created knowing that it would be possible for us to suffer perpetually.
This is where Gregory of Nyssa enters this discussion. I’m not interesting in arguing whether or not he was a universalist in the same way that I’m one. I’m interesting in finding that points in his writing that when followed to their logical conclusion, give us a place to root ourselves as Christian Universalists.
Quoting his sister, St. Macrina the Younger, he says that she said, “..we who are living in the flesh ought as much as possible to separate ourselves and release ourselves from its hold by the life of virtue, so that after death we may not need another death to cleanse us from the remains of the fleshly glue (pp. 75-76).” Here I understand him to mean what I said earlier: that those who live saintly lives have no need/less need to the purification of future judgment but for Macrina/Gregory, the “second death” purifies. As he writes of those who live this life poorly, “…such a man even when he gets out of the flesh is not separated from its experiences” and “the lover of the flesh would doubtless be unable to avoid bringing with them some fleshly odor, This makes their pages more grievous, as their soul has become partly materialized from such an environment (p. 76).” I read this as saying that what we do in our bodies impacts our minds, even if those minds continue after our bodies are dead. Our minds must be healed from the scars of our beastly existence. Gregory gives hope for such healing/purification.
I’ve been saying we are mind that participates in Mind. This is akin to Hindu thinkers who have proposed that we are Atman who participates in Brahman. Gregory says it this way, “…the soul will not received any disadvantage in respect to participation in the good, if it should be freed from these impulses. It will go back to itself and see clearly what it is in its nature, and through its own beauty it will look upon the archetype as if in a mirror and an image. We can truly say that the accurate likeness of the divine consists in our soul’s imitation of the superior Nature (p. 78).” He calls this Divine Mind, “…Itself the nature of the beautiful” (p. 79). In this view, the Cosmic Mind is goodness, beauty, etc. We grow into it.
The “fire” of judgment is a metaphor for the purifying experience of the Divine Mind. Gregory writes “…when evil is consumed by the purifying fire, the soul which is united to evil must necessarily also be in the fire until the base adulterant material is removed, consumed by the fire. Or if the particularly sticky mud is plastered thickly around a rope, then the end of the rope is led through some small space, and some one pulls forcibly on the end of the rope toward the inside, necessarily the rope must follow the one who pulls, but the plastered mud must remain outside the hole scraped off the rope by the forcible pulling (p. 84).” As the Divine Mind attracts us, the evils of our lives fade and fall away. We are purified. We are not destroyed. We are not punished forever. But this happens only in our state after bodily/biological death.
St. Macrina taught Gregory that “the measure of pain is proportional to the quantity of evil in each person” (p. 84) so that “unendurable pain is extended to the length of this whole age” (p. 85) meaning that there’s a seriousness to the purification but the only thing that is destroyed is evil: “the complete annihilation of evil” (p. 87). No human came into existence to suffer or be judged: “Our rational nature came to birther for this purpose, so that the wealth of divine good thing might not be idle.” We exist to be “a container of good things” (p. 87).
This is a sample of what St. Gregory of Nyssa writes. I’ll share more soon. For now, this is a reminder that modern Christians can adopt and adapt the language we inherit, reinterpreting it through the paradigms of our own understanding, yet respecting what we inherit, even language that points to fire, judgment, suffering, punishment can be acknowledge as having value but value only in light of an understanding of the Divine Nature that is worthy of “God”.
In spring of 2016 I received some good news. I had been hired by a local private school known as “TMI – The Episcopal School of Texas”. (Side note: “TMI” doesn’t stand for “too much information” but instead “Texas Military Institute” which is what our Corps of Cadets [think ROTC] is named to this day. Second side note: we’re not one of those military institutes that exists to reform behavior. I know, it’s very confusing branding but it’s an effort to pull together more than 130 years of tradition.) At that point, I had teaching experience but no high school teaching experience. Thankfully, the chaplain at the time who spearheaded my hiring, Fr. Nate Bostain, gave me a chance. Today in spring of 2024, I end my eighth year at “TMI Episcopal” (we opted for the less braggadocios name being that there are many Episcopal schools in Texas).
When I was hired, I was struggling to wrap up my Ph.D. Like many doctoral students, I was petrified by the weak job market I faced. I worried that it was all for nought; I wasn’t going to be able to use my years of study. I remember the relief that I felt when I was hired. I had pay. I had benefits. I could do something with my religious studies degrees! A huge weight was lifted from my chest.
Every year during our school’s baccalaureate service (which we had this morning), we sing a song we call “The School Hymn” but that’s actually named “For the Splendor of Creation”. That first year, as I reflected on how happy I was to be working where I was working, the lyrics hit me particularly hard. Here they are:
For the splendor of creation that draws us to inquire, for the mysteries of knowledge to which our hearts aspire, for the deep and subtle beauties which delight the eye and ear, for the discipline of logic, the struggle to be clear, for the unexplained remainder, the puzzling and the odd: for the joy and pain of learning, we give you thanks, O God.
For the scholars past and present whose bounty we digest, for the teachers who inspire us to summon forth our best, for our rivals and companions, sometimes foolish, sometimes wise, for the human web upholding this noble enterprise, for the common life that binds us through days that soar or plod: for this place and for these people, we give you thanks, O God.
That year the words “for the common life that binds us through days that soar or plod” made me teary eyed. I had a community. They had given an unproven person a chance to teach the subjects that matter to me. Yes, some days were rough, but I was grateful.
I’d be a lying hypocrite to say I’ve felt this way every day the past eight years. But this morning as we sang this song, I was reminded, as I have been reminded for nearly a decade, how elated I was to be given a chance. I’ve sometimes struggled to identify with my institution. I’ve sometimes felt out of place. I’ve sometimes felt disregarded and overlooked. But on the whole, the common life that has brought me together with my colleagues and students has been a life-changer. Whatever our institutional strengths and weaknesses, I see TMI Episcopal as the place that gave me a chance and for nearly a decade the place that has given me academic freedom and trusted me to teach young people religious studies. As we know, the discussion of religion, whether in a church or at the dinner table, can be as fraught as talking politics. That I’ve had the support of our administration, and especially our former chaplain, Fr. Nate Bostain, and current chaplain, Fr. Ben Nelson, means the world to me.
School years are long. Very long. There are days that soar. There are days that plod. On days like today though, when you see the graduating class prepare for college, and you know that you and your colleagues did everything in collaboration with their parents and guardians to prepare them for the world, it feels good. It feels like home. As former students greet you—often the siblings of current graduates who you taught years ago, marking your history with various families—you’re reminded how institutions can be beautiful things, in all their imperfection. You’re reminded how few opportunities we have in our modern society to build long lasting community with people. You’re reminded not to take for granted that sense that you “belong”. Not everyone has that.
TMI could’ve passed me up eight years ago. It didn’t. For that reason, in spite of all my curmudgeonly grumblings from day to day, I’m happy to sing, “For this place and for these people, I give you thanks, O God”!
The blog of Brian LePort 
