AKMA’s Random Thoughts

A Clarification

On Gerry Gleason’s non-blog (“When is a blog not a blog?”), he observes of me that “ [h]e. . . laments that much of what they have learned instead is more from popular culture than rather than significant knowledge.” Gerry has reason to read what I said as he does, but in the paragraph to which I think he alludes, I deliberately said of my students, “they know more about a whole spectrum of topics than their predecessors, and that’s just fine.”

My lament concerns the extent to which learning that might in the past (for a varying proportion of seminarians, not all) have taken place before seminary, and also learning that would typically have taken place after seminary (the nuts-and-bolts of leadership and administration) now have been squeezed into the three years of seminary education. That leaves me as a teacher of Scripture and Church History less time and less institutional authority to cultivate with students a rich sense of the import of the topics I address. I don’t think that’s the same as what Gerry imputes to me. I view with vivid interest the peculiar and mutable definitions that mark off “high” and “low” culture; I know a lot more about the history of baseball in the twentieth century than of the church in the seventh to nineteenth centuries, and I know way more about rock and roll than about church music (and am candidly happy that way). How many people do you know who can rattle off the starting infield for the 1944 St. Louis Browns?