Oh God
A walk in the groves of evangelical academe
Greetings from Grove City, Pennsylvania, located about halfway between Erie and Pittsburgh and about 30 miles from the Ohio border. I’m at Grove City College for the annual Eastern Regional Meeting of the Conference on Christianity at Literature. There are three reasons I find myself in a place that’s way outside my usual habitat.
The first and least important is to deliver a paper. It’s derived from my work-in-progress on women in colonial and revolutionary New England and focuses on the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet, a great favorite of mine. The focus of the conference is on the writing of Wendell Berry—a regional writer with a strong environmental consciousness that’s overlaid with an implicitly Christian worldview. My contribution to this particular discourse is oblique, but fits in with the larger framework of a sense of place infused with a religious sensibility.
I’m also here because many of the people I’ve been working with on the magazine Current, a magazine for which I’ve written regularly for the last year, are coming to the conference, and so it seemed like a good way to meet them. Alas, I learned last week that Current will be folding—not enough revenue to sustain it. So the dinner will be valedictory, if no less savored for that.
Finally, I’m here because I wanted to get a glimpse of a world I really know very little about: Christian Colleges. Grove City College, founded by Presbyterians, has a strong conservative and evangelical flavor, though it’s not as denominationally focused as some of the other schools represented at the conference.
My experience here has been a little like gazing at a skewed mirror. Much seems familiar to the academic conference culture I’ve experienced for decades—milling around a reception area over coffee; listening to panels of speakers followed by discussion; book tables displaying participating authors; award presentations over dinner. But the unselfconscious references to the contours of faith are like nothing I’ve ever known. It’s all worn lightly and unaffectedly: these people are living it, not parading or selling it. I was very impressed by an undergraduate from a Baptist College in Ohio who gave a paper that embedded Wendell Berry and Annie Dillard in a context that stretched from John Winthrop to James Baldwin and who fielded questions with the poise of an assistant professor.
To judge from its impressive physical plant, Grove City College is a prospering institution. It has long had strong backing from the Pew family—as in Pew Charitable Trusts—which struck a geyser of cash in the petroleum business in the late nineteenth century (the school was founded in 1876). Grove City is to oil what Duke is to tobacco, you might say. When I went into the student union, filled with earnest white kids lacking the crisply edged couture of the students I teach, I discovered that GCC’s business school is named after Henry Winklevoss—that’s Winklevoss as in Winklevoss twins, featured in the 2010 (Facebook) movie The Social Network and eight-figure donors to my employer, the Greenwich Country Day School, a bastion of faded Anglican prep secularity. Maybe the world is a little smaller than I think.
Or maybe not. We live in a big, complicated country, and right now it seems very hard to take in all that’s going on. I pray that we have enough good sense and goodwill to sustain it a little while longer.