The Humanities and Cultural Engagement — Josh Nisley — Ep. 111

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. I'm here in Pittsburgh with Josh. It's actually been a long time since I've seen you. Last time was overseas. Introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about your formal intellectual training. I believe you just finished your degree, actually. Yeah, I just, just this past month finished my Master's in English from Duquesne University here in Pittsburgh. My formal post-secondary academic journey began at Faith Builders. I finished the teacher apprenticing program there in 2010 and taught for a few years. And I wanted to finish my degree kind of for pragmatic reasons, but I also wanted to explore maybe some different fields. You mentioned talking internationally or interacting internationally.

So that was one area that I kind of wanted to feel out. I actually took a class at George Mason University in Global Studies, just one class, summer class. But then it wasn't working to transfer because of Faith Builders, their accreditation status and all that. So I actually ended up in 2013, I began at Regent University online, was able to transfer most of my work at Faith Builders to Regent. And I chose to do a degree in English primarily for kind of pragmatic reasons, but it was also an area of interest of mine. And I would say, like, as I started the degree program, it was about that time that I began getting a vision for what academics as an Anabaptist could look like.

Most of this was actually spurred by a podcast recommendation from a friend of mine, the Christian Humanist Podcast. I began listening to that, and it's a podcast where three Christian college professors, they just sit together and they talk about whatever texts or ideas that they want to talk about on a kind of week-to-week basis during the semester. And so this really fired my imagination for what faithful scholarship as a Christian, as an Anabaptist, could look like. And it was at this point I began thinking about possibly pursuing graduate education and pursuing like a traditional professor track. But then I got kind of sidetracked and ended up in Israel working in Jerusalem for a humanitarian NGO for three years.

And actually at that point that I finished my undergraduate work in 2016, but I decided to then pursue academics more formally. And so I applied to Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, was accepted on a teaching fellowship, two-year teaching fellowship. Yeah, I just finished that. And it was a great experience, stretching and wonderful in every way. So the big question is, you know, we're talking about, you know, your pursuits in academia and so forth. Why do the humanities and that level of scholarship, why does that matter? And particularly, like, what can an Anabaptist gain from this? One thing for us humanities folks, it's always a little bit hard to answer because we feel like, well, if it's not obvious, you just won't get it, right?

If you have to ask, you know it. No, it's actually a very good question. But if you let's just zoom back a little bit and think about humanities, like where it comes from originally. You know, humanities was initially in the kind of classical education was just a designation to distinguish it from like divinity, like the study of theology or study of God. So, I mean, when we're talking about humanities, we're talking about human kind of human-based knowledge, right? So philosophy, literature, linguistics, history, and then to some degree also like the soft sciences, right? Like anthropology, psychology. So for me, it's really connected to kind of the fundamental, I guess, doctrine that I would root it in would be the doctrine of Imago Dei, of humans being created in the image of God.

And Dorothy Sayers has this really interesting point that she makes in The Mind of the Maker, where she says, well, what are we supposed to make of that? Like the only context, the only clue that we have as to what that means in its context in Genesis is that God is creating, right? And so therefore humans, you know, create. And this is particularly getting into the humanities as, you know, the arts, right? Humans creating things, doing things with stuff, making things, making culture. That's kind of the background. For me, kind of a central kind of guiding verse, if you want to call it a proof text, you can call it a proof text, but is from Psalm 111, where it talks about, "Great are the works of the Lord studied by all who delight in them."

And in the context, it's talking about, you know, the works, the historical works of God that God did for the children of Israel. For me, I see humans as kind of the, you know, in kind of the traditional medieval way of, you know, the crown of creation, right? And with the doctrine of Imago Dei, enjoying a kind of proximity, a close proximity to God. And so therefore, the stuff of human culture worth paying attention to, worth thinking about, wrestling with. Really, the question kind of at the core of all this is, what does it mean to be human? What is the human experience? And like, how have people across cultures and across time wrestled with that, thought about that?

So I think that's kind of the, it's not really specifically Anabaptist, anything Anabaptist about that, right? But that's kind of where I come at it. The question of humanism, one of the things that has really fired my imagination with this is the idea of what Norman Clausen and Jen Zimmerman in this book, The Passionate Intellect, what they call incarnational humanism. Their thesis of this book is that only the incarnation enables a recovery of humanism as the heart of university education, because the incarnation allows us to retain the best elements of the greater humanist tradition and of its postmodern critics without repeating their shortcomings. Human dignity, the dignity of nature, and the interpretive nature of truth become possible without fragmentation or totalization.

And when they're talking there about human dignity, the dignity of creation, but also like truth as interpretation, one of the things that I think we do well to recognize is that, you know, another scary kind of boogeyman, if you will, is postmodernism, right? Well, yeah, yeah. And so, you know, obviously has its problems, especially if you're coming at it from a Christian point of view. It also levels some really good critiques against like enlightenment rationalism, this idea that we can have knowledge as somehow this kind of disembodied rational knowledge. And when the reality is that knowledge and even reason is always mediated through texts. It's always mediated through bodies, through people, through traditions. There is an affective element, an aesthetic element to knowledge that calls into question this ability to access truth from this kind of completely cerebral, detached perspective.

And I don't see that as a threat. I mean, potentially, like the kind of the direction postmodernism takes that is to say, well, then we can't know anything for sure. There, you know, there is nothing that we can know for certain. And so then what you're left with is to deconstruct, you know, everything. You know, it's just about a matter of being ironic and, you know, playing with language and to make it do what you want to do. The alternative to that, I think, is worship and mystery and humility. And I think here again is something that maybe we could bring to the conversation to recognize that we are limited in our understanding of knowledge or understanding of truth.

And that's something I've been thinking about lately is actually the difference between like understanding versus like perceiving. Understanding is like etymologically, I haven't worked this all out, so I'm kind of working it out, you know, as we talk. But like etymologically, it's to stand under or to stand in front of versus perceiving or apprehending as a kind of grasping or kind of taking a hold of. And so when you reach the point of understanding is when you, it's almost like a posture of submission, of standing in front of or standing in kind of unknowing or mystery in some way. And it has an element of worship to it, I think, that I think is missed in like the very, in a more, I guess, a cerebral approach or limiting yourself to that.

Right. I'm kind of all over the map here. Well, that's great though. Like that's really interesting because that's actually one of my considerations. You know, I'm back in college too. And here's these fields of study, these different things that are having massive effects on our culture. And hey, could the Anabaptists, you know, have some responses to this? Maybe we have something to bring to the table too, you know? And I always found that intriguing. So one of the things when we were emailing before this, you had mentioned how academic pursuits, the humanities, there's an intersection between that and cross-cultural engagement. Could you talk about that personally for yourself? How has your academic involvement enabled you in the cross-cultural element?

One of the things that I've noticed, especially with Anabaptists and getting more specifically to Anabaptism, is when we talk about like doing work internationally or working cross-culturally, we do very well, I think, at talking about how to speak in the language of a particular culture that we're trying to communicate with. What this often ends up doing is fostering an appreciation then for that culture's particular idioms, that culture's way of thinking, the stories, the art that has shaped that culture. But I don't see that so much, that kind of attempt being made so much with Western culture, especially Western popular culture. And when I'm talking culture, I'm talking literature, art, music, film, stories, all of that kind of wrapped up into one.

I don't know, I don't really know why this is. I haven't really developed a strong enough thesis. Maybe it's because we see ourselves so much as already a part of that culture that we need to be like countercultural. I think there's a limitation there when we don't try to at least understand, you know, the people around us. We are like countercultural in many ways, right? As I see it, like so far, Anabaptists have taken kind of two steps to culture, two approaches.

One is what I've been talking about, like the counterculture, kind of against culture. It's either kind of irrelevant or marginally useful or dangerous, actually, right? The other approach is kind of complete acculturation, just kind of uncritical consumption. So we either watch movies or we don't watch movies. You know, but we don't, or we either read Harry Potter or we don't read Harry Potter.

I don't see us like thinking very deeply or coherently, like as a culture about how we engage. And so what I would hope to kind of promote for my people is more deliberate participation, kind of, or critical engagement, or at least like an attempt to understand, because first of all, there's a lot of, you know, if I may say it, there is a lot of truth, a lot of goodness, a lot of beauty that's created by people who are not like us, right? I think we see that with, we can see that with like international cultures. I think we're less apt to see it with our own culture. That opening up a bridge for communication, for understanding.

You know, I mentioned I taught first-year writing, and it's amazing to me the level at which my students, so what they're, you know, late teens, early twenties, you know, freshmen coming out of high school, you know, they've been deeply, deeply shaped by, you know, by Harry Potter, by Avengers, you know? And like, frankly, there's like a cultural gap there, you know, as somebody who grew up in a more conservative environment, you know, like there's this kind of a gap there that I completely missed. We might, you could say maybe that maybe it was good that I missed that. Maybe I can show them, you know, maybe it's not worth, you know, getting, having that experience.

But I think we too easily just kind of reject instead of trying to at least understand. Like untangle it. Yeah, if for nothing else, if only for pragmatic reasons, like to understand. I think, you know, there's often more there than what we give it credit for being. But I also realize that might not be, you know, widely shared idea, but it would be something I would at least hope. And especially for our people, I think it's something we have to reckon with. I mean, not to be, I don't like kind of the doomsday approach that, oh, we're just so connected, we're becoming acculturated. But if we're going to have like, you know, mobile technology, access to the internet, whereas in the past, like kind of our countercultural, more conservative groups haven't had access to, you know, mass media, that gap is narrowing.

I would advocate for, I guess, more just more critical engagement with it instead of either kind of the hand wringing that, oh my goodness, what's happening? Or kind of sticking our head in the sand pretending, you know, that we're not being shaped by this because we are. Like, I mean, we really, really are like being shaped by this and especially young people. Yeah. And endeavoring to understand well, maybe. Right. Yeah. Right. And I mean, you're going to be pulled in a direction regardless. Like, you know, you choose the media that you consume, you're going to be pulled, especially in the polarized world, America that we are in right now, you're going to be pulled in one direction or the other.

And I would like to think that we could, you know, have a kind of a third way of maybe critically engaging, offering a different perspective, being thoughtful about it. Yeah. Maybe like participating, engaging, analyzing, thinking through. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't have a lot of easy answers. Like I'm not just saying, I'm not saying, you know, throw open the floodgates and, you know. Like Harry Potter. Or, you know. Well, yeah. Or, you know, but or just immerse yourself in pop culture, right? Right. Yeah. All of that needs to be worked through at a, you know, I think a local community level, you know, in conversation with community and the Holy Spirit, right? But I think we do ourselves a disservice when we cut ourselves off that dramatically from the culture around us.

So going off of that, pivoting a little bit, but what is one piece of literature or something in your studies that you feel has impacted you the most? I am going to go the biblical route. Yeah. Give two examples from the Bible that really have kind of shaped my thinking about culture and engaging culture. Daniel and his friends in Babylon. Oh, yeah.

They are, they are given, you know, their rations and they're given a program of study. You need to learn the language and the literature of the Chaldeans, right? And they come out on the other end of that very, very well studied, you know, three years having studied the language and literature of the Chaldeans. And they're known for their wisdom and their ability to interpret dreams. And obviously it says, you know, this is something God gave them, but they also put it in the work. They're being faithful to the God of Israel.

You know, they're keeping kosher, right? They're in a foreign land, but they're learning and able to use the literature of that culture in meaningful ways. And again, what does this mean for us? That's where the interpretation needs to happen.

The conversation needs to happen. But I think that's something that's kind of just, that biblical story has been powerful for me. But also, and maybe more impacting or more central is Paul's sermon on Mars Hill. And in the course of his sermon, he quotes two separate Greek poets, pagan poets. If I can read it. Yeah, yeah, please. So I have it right here. So Paul here, he's talking about, you know, where God is in the world, in the cosmos. And then in verse 27, yet he is actually not far from each one of us for, quote, in him we live and move and have our being. And that quote there is from a Greek poet.

And then he continues, as even some of your own poets have said, for we are indeed his offspring. Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone and so forth and so on. Oh, yeah. So he's, it's like he's weaving these poets, in a sense, like taking them, taking the wisdom that's there, using it to speak to them in their own idiom and their own way. And it's not just, I don't think it's just, again, it's not just a pragmatic kind of, you know, sales pitch, right? You need to grease the wheels here. Like, you know, I see that as another example of, you know, a faithful believer.

I mean, like the kind of founder of Christianity in some ways, like institutional Christianity, using the wisdom that's there. And, you know, ultimately, I think it comes back to, it's kind of cliché, but, you know, all truth is God's truth, right? So those have been kind of the formative ones for me thinking about specifically like cross-cultural uses of the humanities as well as benefiting personally. So we're going to flip that around then. And because one of the concerns people have is, okay, so we've seen the upside, the cross-cultural engagement, these scriptures you're using. But then they say, well, what about these secular ideologies or maybe, you know, ideologies coming through in literature, art, whatever it is, right, that we don't agree with?

Right. How do we handle that? Yeah. How would you respond to that? Yeah. First, I will say that by almost by definition, the humanities are like secular in the sense that they are like about humans and not about the divine. So like almost by definition, there's a kind of secularism there. But I think what you're talking about is like ideological secularism, like this idea that we can't bring in any kind of, or that like this is the way the world is, right? And this kind of ideological approach. So yeah, I mean, there is a de facto kind of secularism within the university that I think you need to be aware of going into. And sure.

But what I would recommend, I think sometimes it gets overplayed and caricatured. What I would say to somebody who's considering, you know, studying this at the university level is, first of all, root yourself in a faithful community, ideally somebody who, or a community that includes both, you know, academically inclined as well as non-academically inclined people. You don't want to be lonely, but you also need people to kind of, you know, keep you rooted. The other one, another piece of advice would be to, or I guess backing up, like along with that, also like surround yourself with other people within the field, like both from the past and the present. Like one of the things about the humanities that you realize, especially like English literature, you go into it and like most of these people, like especially the older stuff, like most of these people are working within the parameters of a functionally Christian perspective worldview.

So like all of my, like most of my work actually that I did at Duquesne was with like George Herbert, who was a, you know, 17th-century devotional poet and, you know, theology of Lancelot Andrews, who was a pastor during that time. It's not like it's, you know, completely secular. So yeah, surround yourself with people, like I was saying, both from the past as well as the present who have demonstrated like faithfulness in scholarship as well as in like in their Christian faith and their devotional life. And so I was, you know, you know, mentioning like Herbert, George Herbert, John Donne, you know, some of those 17th-century poets that I really found myself, you know, gaining an appreciation for.

Of course, you have like Lewis, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Tolkien, Sayers, kind of that group of British intellectuals that I think our people are usually fairly familiar with. Roger Lundin, he was a professor of English at Wheaton College, wrote some really amazing books that have been influential for me, beginning with the word culture of interpretation. He really gets into these, he really wrestles with like modernism and postmodernism and questions of interpretation, but just from a very deep and rich, you know, Christian framework. It was always helpful for me as I was pursuing having these questions, pursuing these degrees to have kind of a, you know, cadre of people from the past as well as the present, even if you're not like with them, you know, in flesh, to kind of, right, yeah, you know, help you think, you know, in ways.

It's like, I think, I really think thinking happens in community, knowledge happens in community. Like, and again, that's something I think Anabaptists bring to the table is this understanding that we don't like access truth and knowledge very well by ourselves off, you know, with only our brain. And, you know, you pretty much, you're pretty soon to end up in some pretty deep rabbit holes about your questions of like, what can I trust and what do I know and how do I know, right? But if, you know, postmodernism has done any good, it has highlighted the communal nature, embodied nature of truth. And maybe just like referring to these other people that have wrestled through some of these things before.

Right, right. Yeah, that's, yeah, that's a good point. These questions aren't new. You read the Greek philosophers and most of this stuff is just recycled in a different context. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Root yourself in a community, be honest with yourself about what you want. Also ask like, what type of person do I want to become? And that's one of the things that for me has been helpful. And, you know, I look around and like, who do I want to become? Well, you know, there are examples there that are worth emulating.

Be willing to live with tension. Be humble. Don't go into it thinking that you have to immediately destroy every argument that somehow, you know, feels wrong. Be willing to live with that tension. One of the things that I found is that, you know, coming in good faith, you're usually more than welcome, you know, in those, in a more secularized university setting. You know, we have these kind of caricatures, right, of, you know, God's not dead, you know, movie. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but like, you know, the professor who's just out to destroy the student and the student who like owns his professor, you know, after studying, you know, some online apologetics courses.

And like, you know, you might run into a professor here or there, but by and large, that that is just, I would just encourage you to like encourage people to just avoid that kind of culture wars mentality. I think it's just overall kind of destructive. You know, I have learned to be able to read and understand people who you don't agree with necessarily. I mean, I tell my writing students that you should be able to repeat the arguments of your opponents better than, you know, as good or better than they do. Yeah. And, you know, take them in good faith and then engage in that kind of dialogue. So I think those would be, you know, some of the big, some of the big points that I would recommend.

Is there anything else you would like to add before we wrap up? One of the things that, if I could just read a few verses here at the end, this is something that I kind of kept in front of me as I was going into academia, something I want to keep in front of me. There are two scriptures. The first is Proverbs 4, verses 7 to 9. The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom, and whatever you get, get insight. Praise her highly, and she will exalt you. She will honor you if you embrace her. She will place on your head a graceful garland. She will bestow on you a beautiful crown's light. There's this scripture about like, I mean, get wisdom, get insight, get knowledge.

Like, pursue it all the way. There's also a verse in the scriptures from Ecclesiastes 1, verse 18: And I applied my heart to no wisdom and to no madness and folly. I perceive that this is also, that this also is but a striving after wind, for in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow. So, you know, a little bit, you know, however you want to take those, I like to think of scripture as having a plurality of voices. And like, if you want to keep kind of a final, I guess, advice for whatever it's worth, you know, keep those two kind of visions of knowledge, of academics, of wisdom, of understanding, kind of intention.

Like, on the one hand, it's worth giving yourself to completely. On the other hand, you know, it's not everything, right? And depending on how it's pursued, it can just lead to a whole lot of pain and pain and sorrow.

And I can testify to both of those.

Balance in all things, I suppose. Yeah. Or tension in all things. Or tension, yeah, yeah. It's, you know, it's that inability to rest, right? Yeah, yeah. Wow. Wow. Well, this has been great. Thanks so much for sharing. I learned a lot. I think a lot of people will learn from this as well. So thank you. Yes.