Less John, more Joan. How Paris’ secular hymn fell flat

Despite launching a flaming piano of peace, France missed an obvious emissary.

Cameron Wiltshire-Plant

Cameron is training to be a vicar in the city of Leicester.

A floating stage bears a flaming piano and singer standing at a mic.

That opening ceremony.

BBC.

Amid the furor around Dionysus and his flesh suit it was another point in the Olympic opening ceremony that got me thinking spiritually. Which is ironic, given the moment’s message. Silence fell after a chaotic, multi-barge disco. An atmospherically lit boat carrying a piano on fire sailed down the Seine, with a beautifully sung Imagine, by John Lennon, drifting from the singer.

Nowhere does secularism like France, with a religion-less public society so entrenched that a French Muslim sprinter, Sounkamba Sylla, had to swap her hijab for a cap at the opening ceremony to abide by its public religiosity laws. Telling a woman what she can and can’t wear is not a great look for a modern democracy. However, choosing Imagine, - a well-known atheistic plea for a world without religious devotion and the dogma, extremism, and warring that comes with it, perhaps tells us what France is going for. Beautiful, modern, peace. The world as one in Godless enlightenment. No hell to scare you. No heaven to inspire you.

Except. Humans have managed to do an excellent job of conceiving, enacting, and justifying extreme violence without religious devotion for much of the last two centuries. Side-by-side with religious acts of aggression were communist oppression, The Great Leap Forward, Gulags, Darwinian race wars, the Holocaust, and the Cold War. Perhaps rather than blaming religion for the constant state of war the global populace finds themselves in, John Lennon would be best investigating our common human instinct.

Each time we go a bit Joan, and are inspired to overthrow injustice, the Kingdom of peace comes a little nearer.

When God is taken out of the equation, peace is no better found in science, rationality, or self-actualisation, the twentieth century demonstrates that. These things are just as likely to be twisted towards conflict. Without God there is no inspiration to be selfless, moral, or compassionate, the impulses of each which might lead to reconciliation rather than war.

Just a little after the flaming piano, a figure that better points the way to peace came riding down the Seine. Billed as a Gallo-Roman goddess, it was more a recreation of Joan of Arc, the French saint who brought spiritual leadership to her country and defeat to English invaders. She bore the Olympic flag onto dry land. In a very medieval way Joan’s life after hearing from God was of breaking sieges and leading armies. It might seem strange to anoint her the bearer of peace, but she shows the way to the united humanity that John Lennon was striving for.

Christians await with anticipation the Kingdom of God fully coming on Earth which will bring with it peace and perfect justice. Joan, being led by God to challenge the oppression of English invaders, points the way towards it by rising up against injustice. And she points the way back to Jesus, her Lord, who turned the world upside down with his message of peace and his beginning of this Kingdom of God. Each time we go a bit Joan, and are inspired to overthrow injustice, the Kingdom of peace comes a little nearer.

Rather than seeking a Godless paradise which can never have enough moral force to be anything other than a selfish search for meaning, we must look to Joan’s God. We will find a God who calls any who will follow him to a life of justice and peace. Only in giving up our own desires, to follow the example of Jesus, will we ever have a world as one.

As my wife, Harriet, remarked whilst we watched Lennon’s hymn, it’s only a few words away from being spot on. Rather than taking the modern French approach and keeping God away from the public sphere, we might delve into Joan’s spirituality and find a burning for justice, a desire for peace, and a self-sacrifice which will one day lead to peace under God. Imagine there’s a heaven. It’s easy if you try. And it’s the only place humans will ever find the true and lasting peace of Lennon’s imagination.

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Education

Leading

26 July 2024

5 min read

Why I teach over my students’ heads

Successful teaching is a work of empathy that stretches the mind.

James K.A. Smith

James is a philosopher, cultural critic and author.

A blackboard covered in chalk writing and highlights.

James's chalkboard.

I’ve been teaching college students for almost 30 years now. As much as I grumble during grading season, it is a pretty incredible way to make a living. I remain grateful.

I am not the most creative pedagogue. My preference is still chalk, but I can live with a whiteboard (multiple colors of chalk or markers are a must). Over the course of 100 minutes, various worlds emerge that I couldn’t have anticipated before I walked into class that morning. (I take photos of what emerges so I can remember how to examine the students later.) I think there is something important about students seeing ideas—and their connections—unfold in “real time,” so to speak.

I’ve never created a PowerPoint slide for a class. I put few things on Moodle, and only because my university requires it. I’ve heard people who use “clickers” in class and I have no idea what they mean. I find myself skeptical whenever administrators talk about “high impact” teaching practices (listening to lectures produced the likes of Hegel and Hannah Arendt; what have our bright shiny pedagogical tricks produced?). I am old and curmudgeonly about such “progress.”

But I care deeply about teaching and learning. I still get butterflies before every single class. I think (hope!) that’s because I have a sense of what’s at stake in this vocation.

I am probably most myself in a classroom. As much as I love research, and imagine myself a writer, the exploratory work of teaching is a crucial laboratory for both. I love making ideas come alive for students—especially when students are awakened by such reflection and grappling with challenging texts. You see the gears grinding. You see the brow furrowing. Every once in a while, you sense the reticence and resistance to an insight that unsettles prior biases or assumptions; but the resistance is a sign of getting it. And then you see the light dawn. I’m a sucker for that spectacle.

This is how the hunger sets in. If you can invite a student to care about the questions, to grasp their import, and experience the unique joy of joining the conversation that is philosophy.

Successful teaching is, fundamentally, a work of empathy. As a teacher, you have to try to remember your way back into not knowing what you now take for granted. You have to re-enter a student’s puzzlement, or even apathy, to try to catalyze questions and curiosity. Because I teach philosophy, my aim is nothing less than existential engagement. I’m not trying to teach them how to write code or design a bridge; I’m trying to get them to envision a different way to live. But, for me, it’s impossible to separate the philosophical project from the history of philosophy: to do philosophy is to join the long conversation that is the history of philosophy. So we are always wresting with challenging, unfamiliar texts that arrive from other times that might as well be other planets for students in the twenty-first century.

So successful teaching requires a beginner’s mindset on the part of the teacher, a charitable capacity to remember what ignorance (in the technical sense) feels like. To do so without condescension is absolutely crucial if teaching is going to be an art of invitation rather than an act of alienation. (The latter, I fear, is more common than we might guess.)

Such empathy means meeting students where they are. But successful teaching is also about stretching students’ minds and imaginations into new territory and unfamiliar habits of mind. This is where I find myself especially skeptical of pedagogical developments that, to my eyes, run the risk of infantilizing college students. (I remember a workshop in which a “pedagogical expert” explained that the short attention span of students required changing the PowerPoint slide every 8 seconds. This does not sound like a recipe for making students more human, I confess.)

That’s why I am unapologetic about trying to teach over my students’ heads. I don’t mean, of course, that I’m satisfied with spouting lectures that elude their comprehension. That would violate the fundamental rule of empathy. But such empathy—meeting students where they are—is not mutually exclusive with also inviting them into intellectual worlds and conversations where they won’t comprehend everything.

This is how the hunger sets in. If you can invite a student to care about the questions, to grasp their import, and experience the unique joy of joining the conversation that is philosophy, then part of the thrill, I think, is being admitted into a world where you don’t “get” everything.

This gambit—every once in a while, talking about ideas and thinkers as if students should know them—is, I maintain, still an act of empathy.

When I’m teaching, I think of this in a couple of ways. At the same time that I am trying to make core ideas and concepts accessible and understandable, I don’t regret talking about attendant ideas and concepts that will, to this point, still elude students. For the sharpest students, this registers as something to learn, something to be curious about. Or sometimes when we’re focused on, say, Pascal or Hegel, I’ll plant little verbal footnotes—tiny digressions about how Hannah Arendt engaged their work in the 20th century, or how O.K. Bouwsma’s reading of Anselm is akin to something we’re talking about. The vast majority of students won’t be familiar with either, but it’s another indicator of how big and rich and complicated the intellectual cosmos of philosophy is. For some of these students (not all, certainly), this becomes tantalizing: they want to become the kind of people for whom a vast constellation of ideas and thinkers are as familiar and present as their friends and cousins. This becomes a hunger to belong to such a world, to join such a conversation.

This gambit—every once in a while, talking about ideas and thinkers as if students should know them—is, I maintain, still an act of empathy. To both meet students where they are and, at the same time, teach “over their heads,” is an invitation to stretch into new terrain and thereby swell the soul into the fullness for which it was made. The things that skitter just over their heads won’t be on the exam, of course; but I’m hoping they’ll chase some of them for a lifetime to come.

This article was originally published on James K A Smith’s Substack Quid Amo.