Professing Christ

By Integratio Press

At a time when Christian voices in higher education are facing increased persecution and marginalization, the Christian authors of this collection who teach in public universities share their faith-learning integration journeys including their practical, theoretical, and biblically based strategies for teaching, administration, and doing researc

• Language: English
• Publisher: Integratio Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9780999146347

Book preview

Acknowledgments

This book is a labor of love. It was made possible by numerous unseen contributors.

We are grateful for the unbroken line of disciples who have shared with us Jesus the Christ and the culture of Christianity in all its manifold beauty. In the same spirit of forming disciples in the next generation of the Academy, we share this volume.

We thank our own academic mentors who trained us and modeled for us the process and production of academic pursuits. Del Tackett and Chris Leland introduced me (Jonathan) to thinking Christianly during the early days of the Focus on the Family Institute. I (Robert) was introduced to such thinking by the faculty at Regent University and others like Clifford G. Christians, Quentin Schultze, Paul Soukup, Robert Webber, and Em Griffin, to name only a handful, whose work guided me as a young graduate student and still today.

Additional thanks to our thousands of students and colleagues over the past two decades across multiple institutions who shared stories, struggles, and examples that refined our thinking about faith-learning integration and challenged us to dig deeper and go farther.

We are grateful to our chapter authors who positioned themselves as Christian in public institutions of higher learning. They courageously shared—and some of them for the first time—their experiences and strategies of faith-learning integration. We also benefitted personally from numerous offline conversations with them about the importance of this project which helped to shape it and spurred us onward and upward.

Thanks to Mark Noll for his insightful Foreword that provides an important context for this book. Tim Muehlhoff’s terrific Preface reflects on the strategies presented in this book from his current position as a professor in Christian higher education and his former positions as a graduate student at an R1 institution and as a campus minister for Cru (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ).

Spring Arbor University’s library staff (Elizabeth Walker-Papke, Karen Parsons, Kami Moyer, Susan Panak, and Robbie Bolton) provided research support at key points of the project. Laura Lee Groves served as our primary copyeditor and John Muether completed the index. Two doctoral students (Lakelyn Taylor, University of Central Florida, and Samuel J. Taylor, Ohio University) reviewed the manuscript and provided helpful feedback. Another student, Sara Driediger, from Trinity Western University, did a final proofread of the page proofs and managed to catch errors that the rest of us missed. Excellent job, one and all!

And thanks to Kayla Williamson (www.kayla-williamson.com) who designed an engaging cover that captured the feel of our book. Carol O’Callaghan tackled the interior design and layout of the book with gusto and a commitment to excellence. She demonstrated real joy in the process. More praise for excellence on both of these fronts. Finally, thanks to our wives (Breanne and Rebekah) and other family members who endured the years of planning, discussing, writing, and editing with us. They graciously provide space for us to work in our already over-crowded schedules.

Jonathan Pettigrew / Phoenix, Arizona

Robert H. Woods Jr. / Pasco, Washington

Contributors

Steven A. Beebe is Regents’s and University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Communication Studies at Texas State University. He served as Chair of the Department of Communication Studies for twenty-eight years and Associate Dean of the College of Fine Arts and Communication for twenty-five years. Dr. Beebe has served as President of the National Communication Association. He is author or co-author of fourteen books, more than sixty articles and book chapters, and 160 conference papers. His most recent book is C. S. Lewis and the Craft of Communication (Peter Lang).

Ryan S. Bisel is Professor of Organizational Communication in the Department of Communication at the University of Oklahoma. He has authored more than thirty communication and management articles on topics related to leadership communication and behavioral ethics. His book, titled Organizational Moral Learning: A Communication Approach (Routledge), was honored with two book-of-the-year awards from the National Communication Association.

Dennis D. Cali is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences at the University of Texas at Tyler. He is the recipient of the Louis Forsdale Award for Outstanding Educator in the Field of Media Ecology; the President’s Scholarly Achievement Award at the University of Texas at Tyler; and the Media Ecology Association’s Top Paper Award for his essay on The Sacramental View of Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and James Carey, which appears in the Explorations in Media Ecology journal. He is also the author of Mapping Media Ecology: Introduction to the Field (Peter Lang), two other books, and numerous scholarly articles in communication journals. As a hobby, he trains dogs in competitive obedience.

Clifford G. Christians is Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois, Ur-bana-Champaign. Christians is the former director of the Institute of Communications Research and chair of the doctoral program in communications. He has been a visiting scholar in philosophical ethics at Princeton University, a research fellow in social ethics and a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago, and a PEW fellow in ethics at Oxford University. He was a Charles H. Sandage Distinguished Professor, has won six teaching awards, and is a faculty member in the Fulbright Specialist Program. His research is in the philosophy of technology, communication theory, and media ethics. He serves on the Editorial Boards of two dozen academic journals, is the former editor of Critical Studies in Media Communication and of The Ellul Forum, and currently serves as the Executive Publisher of Media Ethics. His work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Romanian, Portuguese, Ukranian, Mandarin, and Korean.

Terri Lynn Cornwell teaches communication at Virginia University of Lynchburg, a Christian Historically Black College and University (HBCU) in Lynchburg, VA. She has also taught at several other private and public universities in Virginia, Ohio, and Michigan. She was a legislative director in the U.S. Congress and has current research interests in international adoption and Christian missionaries. She is skilled in Nonprofit Organizations, Editing, Public Speaking, and Media Relations. She is a commissioned pastor for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

Samuel Ebersole is Professor Emeritus of Communication at Colorado State University-Pueblo. He has been teaching television production since 1984. For his work with NBC Sports in their coverage of the 1988 Summer Olympic Games, Ebersole was awarded two Emmy awards. He joined CSU-Pueblo’s Mass Communications department in 1990 and for five years served as a television producer and director for KTSC-TV, the PBS affiliate serving southern and western Colorado. He has been a NATPE Faculty Fellow, an International Radio & Television Society Fellow, a Berglund Center for Internet Studies Fellow, and a recipient of the Stephen H. Coltrin Award for Excellence in Communications Education. His areas of interest and expertise are media effects, television documentary, audience research, and social media.

Geraldine E. Forsberg teaches in the English department at Western Washington University. She is a specialist in media ecology and cultural studies. Her writings examine how media influence our thinking and behavior. She currently writes on the relationship between faith and the communication theories of media scholars Jacques Ellul, Marshall McLuhan, and Neil Postman. Her doctoral dissertation completed at New York University later became a book titled Critical Thinking in an Image World: Alfred Korzybski’s Theoretical Principles Extended to Critical Television Evaluation. She has published numerous scholarly articles and reviews in the Journal of Communication and Religion and Explorations in Media Ecology. She serves on the Board of Directors for the International Jacques Ellul Society and Second Nature, an online journal for critical thinking about media and technology. She also serves as a Faculty Fellow with Faculty Commons, the faculty ministry of Cru (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ).

John R. Katsion is Associate Professor of Communication at Northwest Missouri State University. He has been teaching at the university level for over twenty-seven years. Over the summers he loves to preach to fourth-to-sixth graders at junior camps. He also produces a weekly podcast called Baldhead Bible Podcast where he shares his approach to preaching and teaching from the Bible. His research interests are in the areas of visual rhetoric, speech pedagogy, rhetoric of music, and the rhetoric of popular and religious culture.

Douglas L. Kelley is Professor of Communication Studies in the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and a Lincoln Professor of Applied Ethics at Arizona State University. His study titled The Communication of Forgiveness is the seminal piece of research on the communication of forgiveness that launched two decades of work focusing on various forgiveness processes. Professor Kelley is the recipient of the Bernard Brommel Award for Outstanding Research or Distinguished Service in Family Communication and the Centennial Professor Award at Arizona State University. He teaches relationship-based courses and conducts workshops in the community on forgiveness and reconciliation, marital and family communication, conflict processes, relational communication (including intimacy and love), and inner-city families.

Thomas M. Lessl is Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia. He has taught at the University of Wisconsin, and at the University of Georgia since 1985. His research examines various patterns of communication that have enabled science to build a professional and public identity in the modern period. He is especially concerned with narrative patterns that modern scientific culture has appropriated and adapted from western religion for such purposes. His book Rhetorical Darwinism: Religion, Evolution, and the Scientific Identity was named the book of the year by the Religious Communication Association in 2012. The Religious Communication Association also named him scholar of the year in 2014.

Tim Muehlhoff is Professor of Communication at Biola University where he teaches classes in conflict resolution, apologetics, gender, and family communication. He earned his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For over thirty years he served with Cru (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ) in the campus ministry, short-term missions (Kenya, Russia, Lithuania), and with Keynote as a trainer for The Comm Lab—a center that trains Cru staff, pastors, and lay people in evangelistic speaking and apologetics. For the past twenty years Tim and his wife, Noreen, have been frequent speakers at Family Life Marriage Conferences. Tim currently is co-director of the Winsome Conviction Project which seeks to reintroduce civility and compassion into how we disagree in the public square. Tim is the co-host of the Winsome Conviction Podcast. His book Winsome Persuasion: Christian Influence in a Post-Christian World (with Biola University professor Rick Langer) received a merit award from Christianity Today’s 2018 Book of the Year Awards in the category of apologetics/evangelism. His newest book, Winsome Conviction: Disagreeing without Dividing the Church (with Rick Langer) explores conflict between fellow Christ-followers.

Mark Noll recently retired as the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, having previously served as Professor of History and Theological Studies at Wheaton College. His teaching included courses on American religious and intellectual history, the Reformation, world Christianity, and Canadian history. He has written and edited numerous books, most recently including Evangelicals: Who they Have Been, Are Now, and Could Be (with George Marsden and David Bebbington, Eerdmans, 2019). Additional books include In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life (OUP, 2015); From Every Tribe and Nation: A Historian’s Discovery of the Global Christian Story (Baker Academic, 2014); Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind (Eerdmans, 2011); and Clouds of Witnesses: Christian Voices from Africa and Asia (co-written with Carolyn Nystrom, IVP, 2011). He has also served on the editorial boards for Books & Culture and Christian History, and as co-editor of Library of Religious Biography for Wm. B. Eerdmans. In 2006 he received the National Endowment for the Humanities medal at the White House. Dr. Noll currently lives in Wheaton, Illinois, with his wife, Maggie.

Richard K. Olsen is currently serving as department chair at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He has taught many classes for the department and has also participated in the Honors Scholar program. His research projects are typically rhetorical/critical analyses of popular culture artifacts. He has authored entries in an encyclopedia of popular culture and sport and published research on MTV, the NBA Draft, the television show Desperate Housewives, and the popularity of SUVs, among others. He also actually enjoys productive committee work and serves on several committees within his department and across campus including the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. He has facilitated communication training and been a keynote speaker for numerous off-campus groups. When he is not working, he enjoys making music with his bandmates, playing basketball, and most importantly, trying to be a husband and dad that is worthy of the family he has been blessed with.

Brittany L. Peterson is Associate Professor in the School of Communication Studies and the Director of eLearning for the Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University. Her research agenda focuses on the communicative construction of membership in organizations. Much of her work to date has focused on defining and understanding the construct of involuntary membership within the context of a total institution and exploring the nuances of high stakes volunteering. Her scholarship also investigates stigmatized members to understand the lingering effects of their enduring membership with an eye toward empowerment, agency, and ownership. She is also the recipient of several teaching awards. In her free time, she enjoys being outside and hiking with her husband, Steve, and their two children, Pax and Prayli. She is a self-professed foodie and an avid Packers fan.

Jonathan Pettigrew is Associate Professor at Arizona State University who is dedicated to promoting health and preventing problem behaviors. His work bridges academic disciplines and communities working to promote positive youth and family development. He has led research that includes developing culturally appropriate intervention programs, studying how interventions are implemented, and analyzing program outcomes. He has worked on National Institutes of Health-funded projects and served as principal investigator on a Department of State-funded project to reduce substance use and violence among youth in Nicaragua, Central America. He is an affiliated scientist with Arizona State University’s REACH Institute. He has published a book on how social support is communicated between stepfathers and adolescent stepsons, as well as a number of research articles that appear in the Journal of Adolescent Research, American Journal of Community Psychology, Health Education, and Prevention Science. He is an avid outdoorsman who loves taking adventures across the globe with his wife and five children.

Deanna D. Sellnow is Professor of Communication in the Nicholson School of Communication and Media at the University of Central Florida. Her research focuses on strategic instructional communication in a variety of contexts including risk, crisis, health, and online settings. She has conducted funded research for the United States Geological Survey, Department of Homeland Security, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She has also collaborated with agencies such as the International Food Information Council about food security across the globe. She has published her work in numerous refereed articles in national and international journals, as well authored or co-authored several textbooks including Effective Speaking in a Digital Age, Communicate!, and The Rhetorical Power of Popular Culture.

Elizabeth Spradley is Professor at Stephen F. Austin State University. She completed her PhD in health communication at Texas A & M University and has embarked on an academic career aiming to blend interests in power, conflict, health, organizations, and family. In addition to working on several research projects and teaching courses in group, interpersonal, and health communication, she serves on the editorial board for The Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.

R. Tyler Spradley is Professor of Communication at Stephen F. Austin State University. He is the Jim Towns Endowed Professor of Mentoring. In addition to serving as the Leadership Minor and Certificate Coordinator, he teaches courses in leadership, organizational crisis management, group communication, organizational communication, and conflict management. His primary research agenda centers on the communicative constitution of organizing, materiality and discourse, and innovation in high reliability organizations.

Helen M. Sterk is Professor and Head of the Department of Communication at Western Kentucky University since 2011, and has taught at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her research uses the rhetorical training she received at the University of Iowa and applies it to issues as varied as mother-daughter relationships, gender and physicality, birthing narratives, and religion and gender. How people integrate faith with their varied life experiences is a consistent theme of her work. She is the co-author and co-editor of seven books and the author of multiple journal articles and book chapters. She edited the Journal of Communication and Religion and served as the President of the Religious Communication Association.

Mark A. E. Williams is Professor of Communication at California State University-Sacramento and has been teaching since 2003. His areas of interest include religion and rhetoric, as well as premodern perspectives and the role religion plays in education. As an award-winning teacher and scholar, he loves introducing his students to the works of the ancients and how they can help us address many of today’s moral, political, and spiritual crises. He spends his summers at Oxford University in the archives as he researches his latest book on religion, rhetoric, and education. Before making the transition to higher education, he served in the United States Army. He and his wife—a real-life rocket scientist—have two children and a dog.

Robert H. Woods Jr. served as Professor of Communication and Media at Spring Arbor University for nearly twenty years. He currently serves as the Executive Director of the Christianity and Communication Studies Network (CCSN) (www.theccsn.com), a network providing resources and training on faith-learning integration in the field of communication. He has served as the President of the Religious Communication Association (RCA), and was named Scholar of the Year by RCA in 2013. His recent book co-authored with Kevin Healey (University of New Hampshire), titled Ethics and Religion in the Age of Social Media: Digital Proverbs for Responsible Citizens (Routledge, 2019), received the 2020 Book of the Year Award from RCA. You can learn more about Robert and his work here: www.roberthwoodsjr.com.

Foreword

The book you hold in your hands is as inspiring as it is insightful. For Christian academics of whatever discipline, the inspiration comes from realizing how the Christian faith has measurably, demonstrably, and creatively shaped the work of a wide array of communication professors who teach and research at secular institutions of higher learning. The insight comes from the many different ways in which they have undertaken that effort. Christian readers who are not professors should find this work almost as encouraging.

To be sure, the contributors are not starry-eyed. They recognize that the modern American Academy is regularly indifferent and often hostile to professors of traditional religious belief. Some of them have experienced slights, and occasionally worse, for their Christian stance, which is indicative of the militant persecution that has transfixed some sectors of the contemporary social media. Their stories also reflect the stresses and strains endemic in the modern Academy. They have had difficult students, there have been tensions with colleagues and administrators, they have worked under the pressure of publish or perish. Yet although the authors are realistic about themselves and the contemporary university environment, the mood of the book is bracingly positive. In many different ways, and with the Divine help they acknowledge (also in different ways), this book records the reality of how salt is preserving, and light is shining in the worlds they inhabit.

A notable feature of the book is the striking range of Christian traditions represented. Differences are of course important when considering Baptists, Mennonites, Catholics, Presbyterians, independents, and others. But for the purpose of active faith on modern secular campuses, those differences mean far less than a shared desire to honor God and live faithful Christian lives. Almost as striking as the broad ecumenicity of the contributors is the diversity of institutional means through which they are expressing their faith. Besides a great deal of one-on-one and informal engagement with students, some are sponsors of the student Christian organizations on their campuses, some take part in faculty fellowships, and some are members of national Christian organizations. Almost all seem to enjoy appropriate organizational ties with other believers in their field.

I am also struck that many of this book’s contributors report having found productive lives as active believers in local churches along with their work on campus. For some years after I published The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind in 1994, I received letters, phone calls, and then emails from Christian academics with quite a different story. On campus these ones felt isolated because of their faith; in local churches they were suspect because of their academic positions. They wondered how they might bridge the gap between their two worlds. In this book, by contrast, you will encounter far less of that double alienation and many more instances of individuals for whom secular and sacred callings work in harmony.

Calling is in fact a key theme of the book. A prominent feature of many chapters is the confidence that God is responsible for the human ability to communicate, that God dignifies the study of human communication, and that divine guidance has led these professors to take up their tasks. The chapters also offer a fair bit of reflection on other theological themes, as well as on matters of educational theory. The great strength of the book, however, is the wealth of examples it provides for how to operate faithfully in modern academia.

Many of the chapters specifically address the challenge of respecting the pluralism of the modern university while maintaining personal religious integrity and a positive Christian witness. There are many examples of fruitful interchanges with students, fellow faculty, and administrators where bearing witness has come naturally. I was particularly impressed by several of the chapters written by individuals with experience—sometimes long experience—as department chairs. From decades in academia, I know how much my own path was smoothed by remarkably helpful chairmen and chairwomen. It is, therefore, especially rewarding to hear from those who have undertaken the sacrifices and shouldered the responsibilities of leading a department. (How is a department chair like the maintenance staff at a graveyard? You have numerous people under you but none of them ever listen.)

Most of all, and most importantly, this book provides a cornucopia of examples for how the professoriate can become a dignified avenue of forthright Christian existence. Many authors describe the importance of mentors. Sometimes mentorship has meant guidance from PhD supervisors who were themselves believers, but sometimes also encouragement from those who were not. Mentors in the flesh are obviously important, but so too mentorship from the past and from the page. Contributors here have obviously learned much from the canonical authorities in their field, beginning with Aristotle. But they have also benefited from a long line of mentors in the Christian tradition like Saint Augustine, Saint Francis, and C. S. Lewis. They have also gone to school on modern Christian voices in their profession like Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Ellul, Parker Palmer, and Walter Ong.

Alongside much wisdom about mentors and mentoring, the book is chock-full of creative examples for how to set up and teach courses. It is an equally rich resource for how to pursue meaningful scholarship while attending carefully to students and not neglecting civic and religious opportunities beyond the campus. For both teaching and scholarship, but also for service and administration, the watchwords seem to be context specific, integrative, and with Christian values particularly in view, incarnational.

The authors themselves use many different phrases to explain how they go about their tasks. Here is only a partial list, but a list that indicates the creativity and depth to be found in the chapters: