Posted on

Personal Reflections on Pietism

Through my role on the Commission on Covenant History, I was able to bring Dr. Chris Gehrz to campus for a lecture and a faculty discussion. It was a wonderful set of events and has re-invigorated by exploration of pietism and libraries. Perhaps it would be more fair to say this lecture reinvigorated an exploration a pietism and my personal life…and I hope that I’m able to connect these thoughts to my professional calling as a librarian!

He started his lecture by telling “his story” so I’ve decided to start in the same place – but telling my “stories” of pietism. In reading his book – The Pietist Vision of Higher Education – and over the course of the lecture and faculty discussion, I’ve been able to reframe several key events in my educational past through the pietist lens of  “transformation” or “re-birth.” So I’ll try and capture these memories using the language and spirit of pietism. Continue reading “Personal Reflections on Pietism”

Posted on

Graduation and Commencement

After four semesters and countless hours of work, I’m slated to graduate from Library School this weekend. I’m actually not able to attend the graduating ceremony but I thought I would take some time to consider what this means for me on a personal level.

I recently toured a special exhibition in the Art Institute of Chicago that features Van Gogh’s bedroom paintings. It was a fabulous exhibition that provided a lot of information the paintings and the painter. But one line from the exhibit stands out to me as particularly relevant to this time of my life. A panel describing Van Gogh’s decision to become an artists borrows Van Gogh’s own language – through a letter to his brother Theo – which provided language for my current season.

In 1880 Van Gogh decided that art was his true calling. Describing his decision to his brother Theo, he used the language not of professional choice but of belonging: “I often feel homesick for the country of paintings.”

-page 17, Groom, Gloria Lynn, and Allison Perelman. Van Gogh’s Bedrooms. 2016.

Borrowing this language – without comparing myself to this master painter! -I want to explore libraries and librarianship not as a professional choice but as a sense of belonging. In focusing on this sense of belonging, I do not want to downplay the professionalism of librarians nor the important decisions that I’ve made that have brought me to this place. I feel strongly, however, that the appropriate way to understand these identifiers is from a place of “belonging”

This is plainly true in one sense of the word: I belong to group of professionals bound by professional practice and ethics. I belong to a group of co-workers here at North Park focused on student success. The Dean of GSLIS was also quick to point out that I belong to the group of GSLIS alumni – over 10,000 strong! – with the implication that I should also belong to the subset of alumni that support the school through financial gifts. I also belong to the American Library Association, and, recently, the Chicago Area Archivists association.

These ways of “belonging” are important but – as I hear in Van Gogh’s letter – I mean something a bit more direct. I belong to libraries.

I belong to the Grand Rapids Public Library – especially the West Leonard branch – where I remember visiting frequently growing up and revisiting over holiday breaks when I needed peace and quiet to study.

I belong to the libraries in my middle school and high school where I found marvelous books and a shelter from the storms of adolescence.

I belong to the D’Angelo Law Library at the University of Chicago where I found I could flourish in libraries.

I belong to the Chicago Public library where I found practical resources – a quiet place to study and apply for jobs – and deeper joy and inspiration.

But mostly, I belong to my beloved Brandel Library at North Park University. Perhaps more than any other place in my life, this place testifies to my personal and professional transformations. I dare not try to offer a complete chronicle; only to say that these transformations have been profound. The library has been been, at times, a neutral place that has been witness to these developments and, at other times, a charged catalyst that has fostered and created this sense of belonging.

Belonging and Membership

In thinking about this post and reflecting on graduating using Van Gogh’s words, I’ve started thinking a lot about the term “membership” and thinking about whether “belonging” or “membership” is a more appropriate framing device for these graduating and commencement reflections.

When I think about the term “membership, my definition draws heavily from St. Paul and Wendell Berry. St. Paul writes:

For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ.

1 Corinthians 12:12

And Wendell Berry, drawing on language from St. Paul, writes about the fictional community of Port Williams:

The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.

That Distant Land, 356

Even though I like the direct, emotive language of belonging, I think that membership language reflects the reciprocal relationships that are created through belonging – relationships between person and place and relationships between individuals – and the mutual obligations that we are called to respect.

I have a tendency to keep things like this in draft forever – so I’m going to publish this post with the understanding that these ideas are still in flux and that I’m likely to revisit this post in the future.

Posted on

Review: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr

I was reminded of an this article I’ve been meaning to read for a long time and finally took the time to read. Here is the title and information in wonderful, library-approved style:

Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic, August 2008. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/.

google-appI wanted to read this article and then offer a series of reflections – both on the substance of Carr’s writing and from my own personal experience – that would respond to the questions he raises.

The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

Carr wrote this in 2008 – I think it is safe to conclude that the rate at which the internet has subsumed other intellectual technologies has only increased since then. This seems plainly true – technology in general and the internet in particular have replaced old forms of intellectual technologies. However, the conclusions that Carr draws from this fact deserve some scrutiny.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

I’ve added emphasis to point out what I see as a troubled conclusion. It is troubled in a number of ways. First, in his hypothetical example, a new e-mail message may announce its arrival in that way; in my use of technology that is a preference that the user has sole control over – it is up to the user to make that decision themselves. Second, what is the logical relation between this pop-up message and the users’s attention and concentration? Carr writes merely “the result is” which seems noticeably weak given his tone elsewhere. I would argue that these two flaws – viewing the use of technology as inevitable and not as a set of user choices and the muddled relationship between technological change and user response – are the flaws to his argument.

Two critiques of my own critiques. First, I’m not saying that Carr is wrong is in his assertions regarding technology and the human mind. I’m merely saying I’m not convinced. Second,

This puts me in an uneasy place. Though I at least partially reject Carr’s premise, I find myself agreeing with many of his conclusions. For example,

In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking. If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.

I can agree with this wholeheartedly. My response, however, is different. Rather than see this loss of “quiet space” as an inevitable consequence of the technological age, I see it as a consequence of remarkably poor user behavior. The task in the digital area is to understand the far reaching of effects of technology (which I believe represent a fundamental paradigm shift in libraries and the broader world) and then to adopt behavioral patterns to those norms.

This post has taken a very abstract approach to this question – but the whole time I was thinking of the smartphone I now carry with me everywhere I go. In Carr’s words, it has very much become my “map and clock, printing press and typewriter, calculator and telephone, and radio and TV” and, to be honest, I couldn’t be happier with that. However, there are many times when I simply turn off my phone, leave messages unchecked, and enter the “quiet spaces” Carr mentions later. At least in my mind, my smartphone use does not destroy the “quiet spaces” of life and both offer essential and exciting parts of the human experience in the 21st century.