I’ve spent most of my twenties at home in Academia.
Granted, I say “at home” reservedly: I did my share of kicking and screaming, clawing at the inner city walls to get out. But like it or not, Academia was my home for several years. I couldn’t shake loose of it. I often loathed it. I secretly loved it. I always feared it.
For a good while I resigned myself to a life there in the Ivory Tower. Or rather, in its shadow. I came to expect — with grave (perhaps craven) solemnity — merely the occasional dull duty of winding up the Tower’s long staircase to pull one dusty bell or another. No doubt my fascination with linguistics and speech-act theory had something to do with that pall of dust on all my imagery then. I loved the stuff, gobbled it up (the theory — not the dust). But after months of isolated study, I felt undernourished. Dusty.
But then, several months after leaving graduate studies in Vancouver, I discovered with glee that I’d dislodged myself at last from Academia. Direct work with the poor and homeless, while it lacked that abstract fascination I’d felt with Paul Ricoeur and the study of metaphor, gave me what I’d lacked and longed for: nourishment. This was lived faith. And with the added bonus of something else I’d been missing: a shared faith: there was real community here. Real relationship. The messiness of human interaction. The contrast was stark: Who the hell wanted to hear about memes and phonemes, much less consume them three meals a day? I didn’t myself. Not anymore.
The next full year I spent in happy exile: flitting from one new possible vocation to another. Free at last, I apparently longed for new shackles. I found them: journalism, environmental law, social work came to the fore — all future “careers” involving “hands-on” work for social or ecological justice, joining some David or another against a host of beefy Goliaths.
In the end, none of these stuck. Law and Journalism died the same slow death: the both fell victim to the same suspicion that there is no place for Davids in Big Media, nor in the American court of law. I’m probably wrong on this, but I just kept seeing a gaggle Davids lining up to enter either profession, only to get crushed before they really got going. Granted, I’ve googled “attorney-activist” as many times as the next guy. I’ve seen the 3,790 hits, same as you. They’re out there. But when I looked at the list of available jobs in Missouri, 99% weren’t something I wanted to do.
Social work, meanwhile, died because I think I called my own bluff. I spent a year as a case manager right after college, and didn’t much like it. There’s not enough reading and writing involved, and too much of that messy, hands on interaction that I claim to love. Plus, Jen (my wife) is training to become one as we speak, and that felt like too much of the same thing. For crying out loud, I’m squeamish about our ordering the same eggs benedict at Cafe Berlin.
Over all this time, I put down theology books altogether. Frankly, I quit going to church, though I don’t feel that my faith ever really flagged. That same faith just made its way into world issues and events: poverty and preventable wars, ecological disaster (or … ecological hope?).
Finally, a some point I looked up, and here I am again. Right back home, parallel parking my long caravan of vocational baggage and unfulfillable dreams, smack in the burbs of Academia. Back to the world I had run from not so long before: Christian Theology. Religious Studies. Stretching like an Olympian for the hoop-jumping events to come: applications, PhD, tenure.
God, am I crazy? Aren’t I just squandering a perfectly good exile? And for what?
Let me get all stuffy here. My goal over the coming months is to test a hypothesis. Namely, that if one keeps the newspaper in hand and stays passionate about social activism, Religious Studies can indeed be a powerful mode of response to the life-sucking trends of globalization, earth-abuse, and social injustice. One can join the academic establishment without becoming …. established …. oneself.
It took all I had not to end that with a question mark. So here is the perennial question: How thick are the walls of Academia? When is an flegling activist wise to step within them, and when to stand clear?
