John Marson Dunaway
French & Interdisciplinary Studies
Mercer University, Macon, GA
Sometimes I am not a very sensitive guy.
As Director of the Center for Faith, Learning, and Vocation at a faith-based institution, I’ve been leading a one-week summer workshop on faith and learning for faculty for the past six years. Each summer 12 to 15 colleagues from the various faculties of our university spend an entire week reading and discussing books and essays on living out our special calling as teachers at a Baptist university.
Almost without exception, colleagues say they’ve profited in a unique way from getting to know their colleagues in such a setting and thinking together about things that have such profound significance for us as mentors of tomorrow’s leaders.
Not Restricted To Christians?
When I sent out the invitation for faculty members to apply about two or three years ago, I was asked by a Jewish colleague whether the workshop was restricted to Christians. “Of course not,” I responded. “We’ve had Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, and even agnostic faculty to participate in the past.” My Jewish colleague was visibly relieved and promptly submitted her application.
Well, not only did she find the workshop rewarding, she also ended up serving a two-year term as a Fellow in the Center, organizing an Abraham Salon (an interfaith dialogue among adherents of the three Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). Until she asked me whether non-Christians were eligible, it had never occurred to me to state specifically on the invitation to apply for my workshop that they were welcome.
Though Mercer is a Baptist institution, there are about as many non-Christians on the faculty as there are believers. My insensitivity to the position of a Jewish or Muslim or agnostic professor in a Baptist university had led me unwittingly to exclude at least one colleague from the blessings of that collaborative experience.
Champion Of the Marginalized
Miroslav Volf is a brilliant Christian academic who has written a widely-read book entitled Exclusion and Embrace. He talks about our responsibility as Christians to reach out to people who seem alien to us, whether because of racial or ethnic differences or even differences in belief.
Jesus was always the champion of the marginalized. Christian faculty members themselves may well feel like the marginalized ones at secular universities. Yet the call of Christ is still to reach out and embrace those who seem so different from us, rather than to exclude them from our holy huddles.
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(c) 2008 John M Dunaway Used by permission of Faculty Commons