![]() ![]() (My son, currently a college freshman who just completed this course, assured me this is still the case.) Sadly, sometimes instructors feel the same way. For most, the course is a hoop-jumping throwaway class groaningly endured for the sake of raising scores on college papers-even at Christian colleges. The biggest hurdle I faced that semester and all the years that followed-indeed, it’s one all writing professors face-is a tendency to devalue composition. My own limitations weren’t the only challenge. But even then, I knew something was missing. My greatest concern, in teaching, was my students’ intellectual formation. What did the Christian faith have to say about the teaching and study of writing in a setting rocked by protests and deconstructed through postmodernism? I knew of no resources and no such conversation.Īs the lone person of faith in my cohort, I devised an answer: In a culture immersed in the paradox of subjectivity as the only objective truth, I saw myself as a truth-warrior, a missionary for critical thinking. ![]() As a Christian, though, I was on shakier ground. I had written papers, student-taught, and questioned my professors. I wasn’t clueless: I’d completed a yearlong apprenticeship that included cutting-edge readings in composition and educational theory. Here is my main complaint: Where was this book when I first needed it 35 years ago? (But that is uncharitable and selfish.) Within the first chapter, I was transported back to the University of Oregon and teaching my first freshman comp class, where I stood before my skeptical students, sweaty hands behind my back. How do Christians reclaim language and writing in such a world? As people of faith, called to love God and neighbor, might we write according to another rhetoric, another syntax, another grammar-the “grammar of faith”? If so, how might that happen inside the walls of academia and in the dreaded and much-maligned college composition class? Three Core Concepts Though the book has a clear target audience-professors and students of writing within academia-its message is vital in an uncivil world where argument often means war, public and private discourse divides, and words are wielded as weapons. Which means your words must embody what the book’s authors call “the distinctive Christian understanding of love, which used to go by the name ‘charity’ in English.” Fortunately, while love covers a multitude of sins, I don’t need an extra measure of charity to respond enthusiastically to this artful volume by Richard Hughes Gibson and James Edward Beitler III, both professors of English at Wheaton College. How do you write a review for a book titled Charitable Writing? Charitably, of course.
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