One of the things that I like most about Stanley Hauerwas’s letter to Christians starting college is that he takes a few paragraphs to think ahead to the time when a student moves from core curriculum to major and minor concentrations.

Eventually, you will no longer be a freshman, and American undergraduate education will force you to begin to specialize. This will present dangers as well as opportunities. You will be tempted to choose a major that will give you a sense of coherence. But be careful your major does not narrow you in the wrong way.

I think one of the best things that happened to me in college was moving beyond just a major in Bible to a second major in English.  They kept one another in check even while they pushed each other along.  Hauerwas continues.

The argument Hauerwas presents encourages the student to treat the history of one’s chosen discipline with care because it can inform one’s understanding of the big picture.  It also helps to understand the evolution of unspoken “agendas” for a given field:

Too often, though, students have no idea how and why the scientific fields’ research agendas developed into their current form of practice. To go back and read Isaac Newton can be a bit of a shock, because he interwove his scientific analysis with theological arguments. You shouldn’t take this as a mandate for doing the same thing in the twenty-first century. It should, however, make you realize that modern science has profound metaphysical and theological dimensions that have to be cordoned off, perhaps for good reasons. Or perhaps not. The point is that knowing the history of your discipline will, inevitably, broaden the kinds of questions you ask and force you to read to be an intellectual rather than just a specialist.

Hauerwas goes on to say that writers like Dante shouldn’t be “kept” by English departments alone, that he has much to offer in areas beyond the land of literary criticism.

In the end, Hauerwas promotes a kind of “theological interrogation” that I think is appropriate (if not grossly under-practiced on multiple levels, high school included).

I emphasize broadening your major with historical questions and challenges to set categories because your calling is to be a Christian student, not a physics student or an English student. Again, I do not want to make every Christian in the university into a theologian, but it is important for you to interrogate theologically what you are learning. For example, you may major in economics, a discipline currently dominated by mathematical models and rational-choice theories. Those theories may have some utility (to use an economic expression), but they also may entail anthropological assumptions that a Christian cannot accept. You will not be in a position even to see the problem, much less address it, if you let your intellectual life be defined by your discipline.

In the end, it’s really a way of thinking about thinking that involves the Spirit.  And it’s just as particular as any other perspective or form of “criticism.”  There is some real wisdom, I think, in what Hauerwas asserts.

(image from sju.edu)