knowledge : mackenzian

January 10, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

What earns credibility

Close-up of grey beach rocks with green grasses interspersed. — Photo credit: Susana Fernandez

Ethos is one of the three classical types of argumentative proofs or modes. The other two, logos and pathos, deal with logical and emotional reasoning, respectively.

Ethos isn’t primarily about whether a claim makes sense within its context or conforms to a community’s beliefs about the world, although someone who can’t be relied on to make what their community recognizes as sense or use that community’s symbolic language won’t be deemed credible.

Ethos is about a speaker’s character, reputation, and authority, so of course a community’s standards for what makes a reputation “meritorious” are relevant.

These factors apply to theology as much as they do to any other domain. For theologians, there’s also more to account for.

“Consensus among theologians,” a Catholic professor once told John J. McNeill, “is not a matter of counting heads. It is a question of those who have understood and made operative in their theology the developments in biblical studies and those who have not.”

The professor, William Thompson, was reviewing one of McNeill’s first book manuscripts, and affirmed him for integrating the latest biblical, sexuality, psychological, and pastoral research into his discussions of church teachings and their impact on church members.

In theology as in every other field, members of the discipline have the responsibility of staying current and helping to build new knowledge with the community so that their statements have a truly solid foundation.

Not all theology does that, but when it doesn’t, it shows.

Back in 1989, Mary Hunt looked closely at missives from the office of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), and challenged their studied distance from and trivializing ignorance of the lives of the people they discussed.

We usually begin with philosophical abstractions, then discern their theological ramifications. We conjecture about the ethics involved. If there is any time left over, we do something about it, calling it practical theology… Rewards go to those who stay at some remove from the problem in order to ‘think objectively’ about it. We quote each other profusely when we write about it, anxious to shore up our distant wisdom with someone else’s.” —Mary E. Hunt

Sociologists and anthropologists now take for granted that researchers have to talk to the people they’re studying to learn much about their lives. But in many faith communities, theologians can still operate for decades as if they don’t have to.

For those who study the ultimate and people expected to comply with their conclusions, it’s an unhelpful position to take.

If there’s a theologian in your life and you love them a lot, encourage them to break the pattern and wrestle with what they learn when they do.

August 30, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Admitting our limitations

Photo: Steven Wei, Hong Kong: a view of tightly spaced apartment high-rises from the ground up. — Every apartment in this complex offers a different view of the world. Photo: Steven Wei

Few things are more difficult than to see outside the bounds of your own perspective—to be able to identify assumptions that you take as universal truths but which, instead, have been crafted by your own unique identity and experiences in the world. We live much of our lives in our own heads, in a reconfirming dialogue with ourselves. Even when we discuss crucial issues with others, much of the dialogue is not dialogue: it is monologue where we work to convince others to understand us or to adopt our view.” —David Takacs, “How does your positionality bias your epistemology?” ¹

There’s no way to progress in business or in life without admitting one’s limitations.

When we build community with others, when we ask questions we can’t answer, when we seek out counselors, consultants, advisers, and mentors, we’re acknowledging that we’re finite, neither perceive nor understand all on our own, and need other people to move forward. By connecting with others, sharing with others, and learning with others, we can offer others what we do perceive and also draw from the perceptions others bring with them.

That’s how growth happens: us contributing to our environment and accepting feedback and nourishment from it; us being willing to communicate more deeply with the people in our environment.

We are limited. And we are different: an eye is not a hand; a head is not a foot.
This is not a calamity but an opportunity if a world of limited and partially-perceiving people can learn to engage one another with respect and care.

You have to first be aware that your positionality might bias your epistemology before you can conceive of a more equitable world, before you can listen to understand, before you can admit other voices and other ways of knowing the world around you. And you have no choice but to continuously examine these connections if you want a fair, pluralistic society and an enlightened, expansive view of the planet around you—and this should be a major part of what education is about.” —David Tukacs

That’s education at it’s best, and learning at its core.

Thanks to Tami Minear Martinez (via Facebook) for sharing this quote. Tukacs writes in the NEA Higher Education Journal (2003) about his approach to teaching communal listening and learning through classes at California State University Monterey Bay. [Back to text: ◄]

July 18, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Wisdom requires action

At the Justice Conference in Chicago last month, local minister Rev. Harvey Carey provoked peals of laughter from attendees when he talked about people going from conference to conference, writing great ideas in their notebooks, going home mountain-top high, and then never applying those insights to their lives or work.

I laughed too, in the key of “What do you know about my life”?

In December last year, as part of my year-end audit, I banned myself from conference travel and business training—books, webinars, and web-courses—until I had recovered from FY 2015 and was practicing principles I’d already learned.

So I tracked Creating Change 2016 from a distance, sent goodwill to my peers at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, kept busy working locally, and bought nothing.

My bank account loved me for it. And I created room to rest, digest, and build/rebuild in ways that make sense for me.

Graphic and web branding specialist Brittany Melton (@xobritdear) advises early-stage freelancers and professional bloggers to do likewise: let aggressive marketing pass them by, and not over-invest in supplemental training during any period when they need to focus instead on implementing core practices. It’s core practices that will sustain us long term.

When we instead over-consume resources, we risk talking about doing, talking about planning, planning to do, planning to plan, and building up an amazing stockpile of planners; we meet with world-changers and are so inspired by their speech and example, but somehow we close the book, course, or conference, and routine life never changes.

This is such a waste of good resources, and there are better ways to operate. In an article on expressive and other regular forms of writing, Gregory Ciotti shares the psychological case for consistent action:

In both emotional intelligence and in hard sciences like mathematics, writing has been shown to help people communicate highly complex ideas more effectively. Writing helps eliminate ‘it sounded good in my head’ by forcing your hand; brains forgive fuzzy abstractions, prose does not. —Gregory Ciotti, July 15, 2016

So

Audit yourself. We’re in the third quarter of the year now. More importantly for me, whatever your schedule is, I’m in the third quarter of my year. I still have projects open that I thought I’d have completed in April. I have two proposals hanging in the ether. And there are eight books in various states of partly-read on my desk right now.

Regaining balance in the midst of a non-stop schedule has two equally essential parts: (1) insisting on stops and pauses and Sabbaths and weekends, so that life is no longer non-stop; and (2) committing to steady action that can clear commitments in a reasonable time.

Learn to force your own hand. I organized and took classes at a week-long intensive this time last month, and wrote my insights down immediately. I didn’t want to wait a month or more; I wanted to receive, evaluate, digest, and implement.

Because I know what it can be like. “So excited” becomes “Woah, look at all these emails I missed” and “Let me catch up with that” becomes “Remember that class? Great, distant memory.”

Wisdom requires more of us. Honor what you’re learning by doing something with it.