Sterling College

Education:

Ph.D. Humanities (Literary Studies), 2006
University of Texas at Dallas.
Dissertation : Perplexed by Joy: Sensucht in C. S. Lewis’s Pagan Works:
Spirits in Bondage (1919) and Dymer (1926).
Dissertation Director: Frederick Turner (D.Phil. Oxford).

M.A. English Literature, 2000
California State University, Pomona.

B.A. Sociology/Bible, 1984
Azusa Pacific University, Azusa CA.

Areas of Academic Interest:

-The Literary Origins of Courtly and Romantic Love.
-The Great Books.
-Interdisciplinary junctions of literature, theology, philosophy, and history.
-CS Lewis and the Inklings (particularly Tolkien and Charles Williams).
-Wallace Stevens.
- Dante Alighieri.
-Romanticism and Modernism (particularly in poetry).
-The History of Ideas.

Academic Papers Presented:

1. “The Tribe with the Greatest Story Survives” Southwest Regional Conference
on Christianity and Literature, Azusa Pacific University, March, 2001.

2. “Charles Williams, Dante, and The Sacramentalization of Romantic Love”
Southwest Conference on Religion and Language, April 2004.

3. “George Steiner and the Gap between Theology and the Humanities”
Southwest Conference on Religion and Language, April 2006.

Teaching Awards:

Whose Who Among American Teachers (1998).
Belmont High School, Los Angeles CA.

Personal:

Born and raised in South Africa (1959- 1977).
Immigrated to the United States (1977).
Short-term missionary to Japan (1986/87), India (1990), and
Turkey (1992/93).
Married to Laurel (1990) with three sons:Caleb, Micah, and Josiah

My Philosophy of Education

Having lived for 17 years under Apartheid, I finally heard the question that had been simmering—inchoate--inside me for years:

How can men come home from their day’s butchery and falsehood to weep over Rilke or play Schubert?

George Steiner, a Jew, speaks of the Holocaust. But as a white South African his question haunted me. And like Steiner, it was not the “butchery” which disturbed me as much as the “Rilke”—the obscene co-existence of beauty and brutality within the same space-time fabric; the fact that someone could be moved by the same poet as I, could experience the same emotions of sadness and joy, yet still have the capacity to wrench pain from the lips of a fellow human being. Growing up in the “dark ages” of 1970’s South Africa, I have slept, eaten, and worshipped next to this strange ability to cordon off the humanities from humanity.

It is Steiner’s agonizing question that first goaded me on to a serious study of the humanities---specifically the “Great Books” and their effect on us. As an evangelical Christian I had always been disturbed by my own white tribe’s efficiency in hitching their ox-wagons directly onto the book of Exodus, and driving out the black Canaanites from their Promised Land. And I longed to plumb the depths of the hermeneutical wells both Christians and pagans drank from. But it was Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth century French mathematician, who helped me to see the mathematical incongruence behind Steiner’s essential presupposition---that the humanities ought to have humanized us. In his Pensees he writes:

The Christian religion then teaches men these two truths; that there is a God whom men can know, and that there is a corruption in their nature which renders them unworthy of Him…and it is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own wretchedness, and to know his own wretchedness without knowing the Redeemer who can free him from it.

There are two truths in Pascal’s universe: God and corruption. (Or conversely, if you prefer, no God and no corruption). There is a mathematical purity here: take away God, and you take away the very concept of corruption, because without a Creator our “sub-creations”(the Humanities) have no moral authority to declare anything corrupt. That being understood, Pascal continues to show how our deep sense of wretchedness proves the high probability of God’s existence: a rather compelling theodicy of evil. The world exists, he concludes, "to teach men both their corruption and their redemption." Everything in nature "displays the proofs of these two truths."(#555.

It is an equation which sums up the essence of my own Christian journey, in which I have discovered that the more my depravity overwhelms me, the more the other side of the equation kicks in; Forgiveness and Mercy become sweeter and sweeter. And herein, I began to realize, lies the true “humanizing” power of the humanities: not in protecting us from depravity, but in exposing it in us. We have this cancer of evil deep within us, and yet we yearn—inconsolably and relentlessly—for some sort of purity we never seem capable of achieving. This stubborn yearning is, I think, the most remarkable thing about humankind. We are depraved; yet we yearn for purity. We don’t just rebuild after wars—we weep; we paint, we write stories, we build memorials. Perhaps we are, as both Sidney and Tolkien believed, “sub-creators” imitating our Creator. There is hope in the humanities---because though it can show us only one side of Pascal’s equation (our depravity), it can prepare and “en-hungers” us for the other.

If literature then has the power to “humanize” us in the true Pascalian sense of that word; how then shall we teach? Parker J Palmer describes the humanities as a dangerous thing that either lessons or increases our humanity--but seldom leaves us unchanged. When depravity is exposed, yearning is triggered. If we therefore remain untouched by great books we are better off not having read at all. All education---but perhaps especially the humanities--- is therefore infused with an awesome responsibility: we must be changed by what we learn and by what we teach. A teacher is a professor, a word which Parker reminds us originally means "one who professes a faith,” who is being in some way transformed by her subject. And the faith I profess as a literature professor is that the Word still underwrites the words I teach.

My Spiritual Journey

I was raised in a fervently Pentecostal family in Cape Town, South Africa. My father was a pioneer church planter, helping to establish the Assembly of God denomination among the “colored” or mixed races of the Cape. Our Christianity was fervent, aggressively evangelistic, and very sectarian. Every Sunday afternoon we canvassed the streets for our weekly revival service that night. When the Jesus Movement hit Cape Town in the early 70’s, my father was out in the Indian Ocean baptizing hundreds of long-haired hippies, and planting a Pentecostal church in a dying Lutheran cathedral downtown.

At the age of thirteen I was sent off to boarding school, where I encountered persecution for being a Christian for the first time in my life. My Pentecostal exuberance very quickly cooled down to a more mainstream nominality. But my short stint of Christian moderation came to a sudden end after listening to a wild-eyed ship’s captain preaching about Eric Liddell: the man who sacrificed his 100-meter Olympic heat because it was on a Sunday. I was utterly inspired, and committed myself from then on to a radical sold-out brand of Christianity that very naturally invited a fresh onslaught of persecution from my peers.

Since those early heady days, God has gently guided me all the way around to the very opposite end of the Christian “amphitheater,” and helped me to see his redemptive drama from the high Anglo-Catholic balcony---a view of Christianity I always saw as petrified, rote, and fleshless. But what I found instead, was a re-connection to almost two thousand years of lost family history; an experience of Christianity awaited me which was rooted in a stubbornly Augustinian/Chestertonian/Lewisian orthodoxy, distilled from hundreds of generations of saints and martyrs (my huge cloud of missing family members described in Hebrews). Yet I still look fondly back at my defiantly sectarian Pentecostal days---it instilled within me a Christianity that was activist, boldly counter-cultural, and passionately evangelistic (much of which I still retain). But rejoining the old mother-church (Episcopalian in my case) has given me a strange joy and humility I have never experienced in my faith before: like Frodo Baggins, I find myself caught up in a salvation drama far bigger, stranger, puzzling and more beautiful than I ever imagined it to be. Christianity is now out of my control; it tosses me around; I am a far smaller part of a far larger Drama than I ever imagined before.

Regarding my “personal” (what a strange sounding little word that has become!) beliefs, I could never imagine a Christianity not intimately connected to the Apostle’s Creed. I believe evangelical Christianity is rooted in this creed and that our agreement on this most orthodox of creeds can and should supersede our disagreements on anything else.