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{"id":62265,"date":"2024-02-13T01:08:26","date_gmt":"2024-02-13T06:08:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/?p=62265"},"modified":"2024-01-22T16:40:32","modified_gmt":"2024-01-22T21:40:32","slug":"wendell-berry-on-teaching-the-bible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/2024\/02\/13\/wendell-berry-on-teaching-the-bible\/","title":{"rendered":"Wendell Berry on Teaching the Bible"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

$\"\"$ <\/a><\/p>\n

Wendell Berry\u2014 Kentucky poet laureate, author, teacher of English literature<\/p>\n

\u201cThe interesting question here is\u2026whether a book that so directly offers itself to our belief or disbelief can be taught as \u2018literature\u2019.\u00a0 It clearly cannot be so taught except by ignoring \u2018whatever else it may be\u2019 which is a very substantial part of it. The question then is whether it can be adequately or usefully taught as something less that it is. The fact is that the writers of the Bible did not think that they were writing\u2026.\u2019literature\u2019. They thought they were writing the truth, which they expected to be believed by some and disbelieved by others. \u2026That it could be taught by a teacher uninterested in the question of its truth is not conceivable\u2026.There is now an embarrassment about any statement that depends for confirmation upon experience or imagination or feeling or faith, and this embarrassment has produced an overwhelming impulse to treat such statements merely as artifacts, cultural relics, bits of historical evidence, or things of \u2018aesthetic value\u2019.\u00a0 We will study, record, analyze, criticize, and appreciate. But we will not believe, we will not in the full sense know. The result is a stance of \u2018critical objectivity\u2026This may be said to work. as a textual mechanics, but it is not an approach by which one may know any great work of literature\u2026.Thus if teachers aspire to the academic virtue of objectivity, they must teach as if their subject has nothing to do with anything beyond itself\u2026.Objectivity in practice, means that one studies or teaches one\u2019s subject as such, <\/em>without concern for its relation to other subjects or to the world\u2013 that is without concern for its truth.\u2014-<\/p>\n

Wendell Berry \u2018The Loss of University\u2019<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"