Teaching with Complicating Views: Beyond the Survey, Behind the Pro and Con

Locklin, “Teaching with Complicating Views,” page 1

NOTE: this is a late, but pre-review version of an article subsequently published as:

Locklin, R. B. (2013), Teaching with Complicating Views: Beyond the Survey, Behind the Pro

and Con. Teaching Theology & Religion, 16: 201–220. doi: 10.1111/teth.12043

TEACHING WITH COMPLICATING VIEWS:

BEHIND THE SURVEY, BEYOND PRO AND CON

Abstract: In this article I propose a method of selecting and assigning readings in the religious

studies or theology classroom, such that they complicate one another, rather than standing in

opposition or as simple alternatives to one another. Such a strategy emulates key pedagogical

insights of twelfth-century sentence collection, an activity at the very heart of the earliest

universities in Europe. It also draw support from at the theories of intellectual development and

perspective transformation advanced by William G. Perry, Jr., Jack Mezirow and the Women's

Ways of Knowing Collaborative. All of these suggest a principle of “complicating views” that can

be flexibly employed in a variety of ways and diverse pedagogical contexts, as illustrated by

examples from several classes. Such strategies aim to avoid reinforcing intellectual patterns of

dualism or undifferentiated relativism; instead, they attempt to promote students' ability to

integrate discordant voices and to appreciate diverse points of view, while also staking their own

claims relative to them.

(A) Introduction: Course Design, at the Ground Level

Few choices are more basic to course design than the selection and organization of

reading assignments. It is so basic, in fact, that our options may sometimes seem rather limited.


If our courses satisfy general education requirements, we may have a prescribed curriculum, with

greater or lesser flexibility. More commonly, our choices are constrained by a combination of

term length, catalog course description, place of the course in one or more major programs, the

distinctive needs of our student populations, and the limits of our personal expertise. Though the

field of selection may be wide open in theory, therefore, such practicalities frequently reduce our

options considerably.

One of the most obvious choices, particularly in introductory level courses, is to adopt

one or more standard textbooks. Indeed, in his influential Teaching Tips, Wilbert McKeatchie

recommends textbooks for university instruction across all disciplines (2002: 12-15). While

conceding some of the advantages of coursepacks and other alternative arrangements,

McKeatchie comes down solidly in favor of using a standard textbook that accords as closely as

possible with the instructor's course objectives, supplementing this text with other readings as

necessary, and striving to “keep skipping around to a minimum” (13). Perhaps most importantly

for my purposes here, McKeatchie's whole discussion of this issue occupies only four pages—a

little over 1% of his book. The really important and difficult question for university instructors,

this seems to imply, is not the selection of readings per se, but what to do with these readings

once they are selected.

Though the question of reading selection may be more contested in theology and

religious studies than in many other university disciplines, the textbook still looms large in the

conversation, as demonstrated by several recent contributions in Teaching Theology and

Religion. Those authors who argue for the use of textbooks in the religious studies classroom

echo many elements of McKeatchie's short discussion: textbooks can provide a framework and


sense of order to the course and lend legitimacy to the subject in the eyes of many students

(Blanchard 2009; Cloutier 2009); they can facilitate students' acquisition of background

knowledge outside of class (Clingerman 2008; Bulkeley 2009); and they can level out disparities

in literacy level among the students (Cloutier 2009). Most proponents also suggest, of course,

that such standard textbooks be subjected to critical inquiry, supplemented with other materials

and recognized as distinctive, limited representations of their subjects (see especially Clingerman

2008 and Derris 2009). “Thus,” Forrest Clingerman concludes, “using a textbook effectively

means critically assessing and working with its version of the story” (138).

For those teachers who opt not to use textbooks, the question of critical engagement takes

a still more central role. For Margaret Parks Cowan (2009), reading assignments in the Hebrew

Bible intro course should abandon the canonical order favored by many textbooks in favor of a

more thoroughly organic and historical approach that introduces critical tools in close relation to

relevant examples of conflict and textual interpretation. For his part, Bruce David Forbes (2009)

notes that the supposed virtues of textbooks—such as their authority in the eyes of students or

their comprehensive scope—usually stifle rather than encourage critical thought. He prefers

“collections of readings that offer contrasting or opposing viewpoints and competing voices,

instead of an overall text by a single author” (257).

In this essay, I do not intend to resolve for or against the use of a standard textbook, at

least not directly. In fact, I want to recommend an attitude towards selecting reading assignments

that aims precisely for indirection, for constructive dissonance and for what I term “complicating

views.” “Opposing” and “competing” points of view certainly have their place, as Forbes

contends. But it is also possible to imagine readings in a more complex relationship to one


another, a relationship that at least aims to push beyond the basic dualism of “pro and con” and

the implicit relativism of the textbook survey. Many of us who teach undergraduates aim to

foster their capacity not only to think through complex intellectual problems, but also to form

their own judgments in disciplined awareness of that complexity. One way to foster such

competence, I suggest, is to select readings that make claims and invite commitments, to

juxtapose these readings in complicating ways and thus to offer an interpretive space for students

to jump in. The decision whether or not to use a textbook, then, depends upon a prior judgment

about how this particular text might or might not function to complicate students' views.

My argument proceeds in two major movements. In the first, I adduce two interpretative

trajectories that can support a pedagogy rooted in “complicating views,” starting with the

twelfth-century practice of sentence collection and continuing through the twentieth-century

cognitive theories of William Perry, Jack Mezirow and the Women's Ways of Knowing (WWK)

Collaborative.1 In the second, I offer three examples of what teaching with such complicating

views might look like, drawn from my own undergraduate teaching at the University of Toronto.

My hope is that readers may recognize some elements of this proposal in their current

pedagogical practice, as well as rethinking those places—large or small—where their selection of

reading assignments may become more self-conscious, constructive and conducive not only to

the communication of content, but also to students' ongoing development and intellectual

transformation.

1 In their new preface to the 1997 re-issue of the important 1986 work Women's Ways of Knowing, Mary Field

Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger and Jill Mattuck Tarule highlight their assiduous

efforts to achieve a “single voice” in the book (1997, xii-xix); hence, in describing the work, I find it preferable

to describe its authorship in the singular—using “WWK Collaborative” as my shorthand—rather than in the

plural.


(B) Complications: From Paris to Perry

To the best of my knowledge, no one has explicitly proposed that teachers should assign

readings that “complicate” each other or that they teach by means of “complicating views.”2

This does not, of course, mean that either the idea itself or the pedagogical assumptions on which

it rests is new. Far from it. The fundamental idea for this proposal can be located at least as early

as the twelfth-century CE, in what has come to be thought of as “the central text for university

theological training at Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, and in theological faculties and studia

elsewhere from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries” (Courtenay 2000: 245)—namely, The

Sentences of Peter Lombard (d. 1160). At the same time, I suggest, the idea gains further clarity

when passed through the lens of the models of cognitive development advanced by William

Perry, Jack Mezirow and other contemporary educational theorists. From these sources, old and

new, we gain important insights into the goals of university education very generally, as well as

important pointers for the place of reading selection within this broader project.

(1) The Pedagogical Vision of the Medieval Sentence Collectors

Though it is arguably one of the most influential genres in the entire history of higher

education in the West, the medieval sentence collection has, in the words of the prominent

medievalist Marcia Colish, “suffered a sad fate at the hands of modern scholars” (1997, 1).

Located between the sublime monastic theology of Anselm of Canterbury and Bernard of

Clairveaux on one side and the grand syntheses of Aquinas and Bonaventure on the other, even

2 It should be noted, however, that I owe both my familiarity with the work of the medieval sentence collectors

and this term itself to my colleague Giulio Silano, who sometimes speaks, when confronted with thoroughly

secularized students in his courses on Catholic theology, medieval history and canon law, about “complicating

their views.”


the highly influential sentence collector Peter Lombard has tended to be treated as an

“unadventurous bore” and the sentence collection itself as a kind of “defective” summa on the

way to the real thing (Colish 1988, 136; Colish 1994, 11-12). One of the reasons for this negative

judgment, it can be argued, has been a failure to assess these works not as systematic treatises,

but as what they were actually designed to be: namely, “the century's most innovative tool for the

education of professional theologians” and other students gaining credentials for “higher office

in church and state” (Colish 1997, 2; Courtenay 2000, 254). Importantly for my purposes, the

principal ingredient of this innovative tool was the deft selection and organization of key texts.

What precisely is a sentence collection, and why was it so innovative? Here a bit of

historical background may help. For sentence collections grew organically out of biblical glosses

and, above all, the glossa ordinaria that was edited, standardized and brought into its final form

in the early part of the twelfth century.3 This work represented the culmination of centuries of

biblical study, in which important, relevant statements from other parts of scripture and from

Patristic authorities were copied directly into the margins of manuscripts of the Bible in order to

clarify individual passages. Eventually, these statements—or “sentences”—came to dominate the

page and, with the development of sentence collections, took on a life of their own. The earliest

collections, such as Hugh of St. Victor's De Sacramentis, adopted a chronological order based on

the biblical account, clustering relevant sentences with reference first to creation and eventually

to the last things. Later collections like Peter Abelard's Sic et Non and also the more synthetic

Sentences itself would follow a more topical, systematic order (Rosemann 2004b, 27-33, 57-61;

cf. Colish 1988, 142-152; 1994; 1997, 6-11). The selection of relevant authorities from the

3 For the discussion that follows, I have depended upon the very lucid account in Rosemann (2004b, esp. 25-33,

42-53).


glossae and their organization into a textbook curriculum were, moreover, neither mindless nor

theologically neutral. The collectors, Colish argues, “. . . emerge as authors who made selective

use of their authorities, subjecting some of them to criticism while using others to support the

personal theology of a master, or a consensus position, old or newly emerging, if it was deemed

in need of defense” (1994, 12).

The most innovative aspect of the sentence collection, however, was not the simple fact

that collectors assembled authorities to support particular theological positions, which monastic

theologians and others had done before; it was the way that they did this—namely, by placing

key sentences into deliberately problematic relations with one another. The most obvious

example is, of course, Abelard's famous Sic et Non, which consisted entirely in a list of

authorities on both sides of contested theological problems, accompanied by a kind of

methodological toolbox of hermeneutical and critical methods for their resolution (Colish 1988,

146-48; Rosemann 2004b, 28-29). In Peter Lombard's Sentences, the constructive ambiguity and

contradiction of selected authorities is less overt, but no less essential to the educational project.

In one important Distinction4 of Book I on the Trinity, for example, the Lombard begins by

adducing scriptural and Patristic evidence that seem to affirm that God the Holy Spirit can be

identified with the divine gift of caritas or self-giving love. Then, in the chapters that follow, he

deliberately frustrates this thesis with objections, again supported by scriptural and Patristic

authorities, and resolves or “determines” them by showing how they can be contextualized,

reinterpreted or reconciled to the claim that true charity is not a created virtue, properly speaking,

but God the divine self (Rosemann 2004a; Lombardus and Silano 2007: 88-97). Perhaps most

4 The Sentences is divided into four books of between 164-290 chapters each. On the basis of Peter Lombard's

detailed table of contents, brief overviews and summaries, Alexander of Hales grouped these chapters into

Distinctions, each of which takes up a particular theological topic (Rosemann 2004b, 64-65).


interestingly, in this discussion the Lombard explicitly concedes that his is a minority position—

and, indeed, it would eventually be contested by Bonaventure, Aquinas and others well into the

twentieth century (Rosemann 2004a, 409-11, 429; 2004b, 85-90).

Peter Lombard's concession on this score suggests that the emphasis of his sentence

collection, like that of Abelard and other collectors from the period, fell less on the particular

positions he took on any particular theological topic than on the intellectual practice he employed

to get there. Thus Colish claims that “instead of seeking to settle questions with an authoritative

ipse dixit, [the sentence collectors'] goal is to raise questions and to promote theological

speculation” (1994, 12-13); or, in the words of William J. Courtenay, the sentence collections

“prepared students in the art of resolving ambiguities in the text of Scripture and in theological

questions . . .” (2000, 254). The well-constructed sentence collection juxtaposed conflicting texts

to raise problems for students, while also providing hermeneutical tools and models of adept

reconciliation. The final goal of such a pedagogy may perhaps best be construed as a distinctive

form of prudentia or practical wisdom, capable of respecting the integrity of conflicting texts,

skilfully negotiating their various claims, and taking definite positions even in the midst of such

conflicts and complexity (see Locklin 2006, 285-91).

(2) Cognitive Development, Connected Knowing and the “Believing Game”

One of the most intriguing aspects of the sentence collection as a pedagogical tool is its

self-consciously problematic foundation in belief and affirmation. That is, the tool poses difficult

intellectual problems and creates room for speculation precisely because most if not all of the

conflicting positions selected and juxtaposed by the sentence collectors would, at least ideally,


have been affirmed as authoritative by the prospective student. In the case of Peter Lombard's

Distinction on the identity of the Holy Spirit with caritas, for example, most of the sentences on

both sides of the argument are drawn from Augustine of Hippo—mainly, from his work On the

Trinity. Where the skeptic might find simple incoherence, the sentence collectors discovered a

vibrant teaching resource, one which would foster many of the most critical, original thinkers of

Western Europe for no fewer than four centuries.

To explore this aspect of the sentence collectors' project more deeply, and perhaps to

complicate it a bit, it may be fruitful to “fast-forward” nearly eight-hundred years to some

modern and contemporary models of adult cognitive development, beginning with William Perry

and Jack Mezirow. Drawing on longitudinal data generated from college interviews at Harvard

University, Perry advanced a complex scheme of development that can, at least for our purposes,

be reduced to two major transitions: 1) a significant shift from dualist, authority-based patterns

of thought to what Perry termed “Multiplicity,” in which “everyone has a right to his own

opinion; none can be called wrong”; and 2) a no less major shift from such Multiplicity to a more

context-sensitive, disciplined “Relativism” which includes, at its furthest extent, a willingness to

form self-reflective, provisional and “Evolving Commitments” (1981, 78-80, 94-96). More

recently, Mezirow has advocated a broader, recursive “transformation theory” that tracks

intellectual development in a particular field of inquiry from its origin in a “disorienting

dilemma,” through a process of critical examination, experimentation and imaginative

“reframing,” and finally to its culmination in a new, “more dependable frame of reference . . .

that is more inclusive, differentiating, permeable (open to other viewpoints), critically reflective

of assumptions, emotionally capable of change, and integrative of experience” (Mezirow 2000,


19-20; cf. Mezirow 1991). Here again emphasis falls squarely upon students' movement beyond

dualism or pure relativism to a more dynamic, synthetic and self-reflective point of view.

Though their theories of development differ in important ways, both Perry and Mezirow

place strong emphasis upon what Mezirow refers to as “reflective discourse,” namely, “. . . that

specialized use of dialogue devoted to searching for a common understanding and assessment of

the justification of an interpretation or belief. This involves assessing reasons advanced by

weighing the supporting evidence and arguments and by examining alternative perspectives”

(2000, 10-11). But how can such reflective discourse be achieved? Perry may be read to answer

this question, at least in part, when he insists that university faculty interested in fostering

students' growth “beyond dualistic thought” must

. . . learn how to validate for our students a dialectical mode of thought, which at first

seems 'irrational,' and then to assist them in honoring its limits. To do this, we need to

teach dialectically—that is, to introduce our students, as our greatest teachers have

introduced us, not only to the ordered certainties of our subject matter but to its

unresolved dilemmas. This is an art that requires timing, learned only by paying close

attention to students' ways of making meaning (1981, 109).

Though the idiom here is far more generalized—stated in terms of “making meaning” rather than

“resolving ambiguities in the text of Scripture and in theological questions”—this pedagogical

vision closely mirrors the implied pedagogy of the sentence collectors, as treated above. Here as

there, the educational curriculum ideally generates fruitful dilemmas, rather than merely


communicating certitudes or challenging previously held views. Here as there, emphasis falls

squarely on the methods, modes and intellectual processes by which differences can be

adjudicated, reasonable judgments affirmed and alternative perspectives acknowledged.

In concrete practice, of course, students will arrive in the classroom at various levels of

readiness for this kind of reflective, dialectical discourse and may even, in Perry's terms, reject it

as “irrational” at first. Even more pressingly, as argued by the WWK Collaborative, upholding

such discourse as a uniform ideal may also risk masking power inequalities among students and

ignoring the distinctive experience and learning styles of female students in particular (Belenky

et al 1997; Belenky and Stanton 2000). Thus, in their study Women's Ways of Knowing, the

Collaborative drew on interviews with 130 adult women to offer an alternative sequence of five

cognitive positions, beginning with the experience of being “Silenced” and culminating in

critical, self-consciously “Constructed Knowledge.” These positions loosely cohere with Perry's

scheme, while also challenging many of his fundamental, arguably masculinist assumptions.

Notably, the Collaborative advanced the more passive but no less dichotomous mode of

“Received Knowledge” in place of Perry's “Dualist” position, as well as a position of “Subjective

Knowledge,” rooted in personal experience and attention to one's “inner voice,” in place of a

more generalized “Multiplicity” (Belenky, et al 1997, 43-45, 62-68). In these cases and many

others, recognition of both the strong correspondence to Perry's scheme and distinctive

differences from it can help teachers meet the needs of a wider range of students without

abandoning the desire “to challenge and stimulate them to develop more elaborate approaches to

the construction of knowledge” (Belenky and Stanton 2000, 93).

Absolutely central to this task, moreover, is the development of what the Collaborative


very nicely clarifies as “Procedural Knowledge,” defined as the understanding that “ideas can be

communicated, analyzed, developed, and tested by making good use of procedures” (Belenky

and Stanton 2000, 86). Here, it is worth noting, the WWK Collaborative differentiates not

between Perry's “Relativism” and their “Procedural Knowing” as such, but between the kinds of

procedures emphasized in each scheme: “Separate Knowing” in one case, and “Connected

Knowing,” in the other. To illustrate the difference, they draw in Peter Elbow's distinction

between the “doubting game” and the “believing game” (1973; see also Booth 2005; Elbow

2005; Elbow 2006). According to the former method, sound judgments are achieved by standing

apart from various proposals and points of view in order to scrutinize them and expose their

weaknesses; according to the latter method, the interpreter attempts to achieve a similar result by,

insofar as possible, affirming every alternative proposal in order “to scrutinize not for flaws but

for hidden virtues in ideas that are unfashionable or repellent” (Elbow 2006, 19). The members

of the WWK Collaborative, like Peter Elbow, readily concede that both procedures may be

necessary for full cognitive development, and they assert that, though there may be gender-

related tendencies, “Separate and connected knowing are not gender-specific” (Belenky et al

1997, 102). Yet they also observe that it is invariably the pattern of Separate Knowing that is

upheld as the primary ideal of sound reason in the theories of Perry and Mezirow, as well as in

the broader academy (Belenky et al 1997, 103-12; Belenky and Stanton 2000, 90-91).

Importantly for my purposes in this essay, both the WWK Collaborative and Peter Elbow

note that there are elements of Connected Knowing and the “believing game” that make them

particularly suitable for any educational philosophy that purports to culminate in self-reflection,

integration and commitment. As Elbow puts the matter, “critical doubting doesn't actually do so


well in the arena where its most needed: helping us doubt our own ideas . . . In practice, critical

doubting tends to function as a way to help people fend off criticisms of their own ideas or ways

of seeing” (2005: 390). For their part, the members of the WWK Collaborative reflect that:

Although [the] selfless aspect of procedural knowledge is its glory, some women began to

experience it as alienation. This was especially and perhaps exclusively true of our

separated knowers. They no longer felt any personal involvement in the pursuit of

knowledge . . . Connected knowers, on the other hand, were attached to the objects they

sought to understand; they cared about them. This being so, it seems likely that connected

knowers can make the transition beyond purely procedural knowledge more smoothly

than those who are tipped toward separate knowing (Belenky et al 1997, 124).

Negatively, following Elbow, Separate Knowing carries the risk of ever new dualisms or even a

mere “change of faiths or doctrines” in place of actual intellectual transformation (2005, 389-90).

Positively, as the WWK Collaborative suggests, more Connected procedures of listening and

affirmation may also more easily pave the way toward authentic, self-reflective commitment.

(C) Teaching with Complicating Views: Some Classroom Examples

When re-considered in light of these modern and contemporary theories of cognitive

development, the twelfth-century sentence collection can be interpreted as a distinctive practice

of dialectic, reflective and procedural discourse, aiming to foster intellectual maturity and

commitment on the part of its students. Though the structure of this pedagogical practice no


doubt reflects some features of Separate Knowing—above all, the practice of setting authorities

in opposition to one another—it also reveals considerable affinity with patterns of Connected

Knowing. Above all, as already noted, sentence collectors strove mightily to preserve the insights

and authoritative status of most if not all of the texts they selected, on every side of each

theological topic, through complex strategies of contextualization and re-interpretation. To

borrow the words of the WWK Collaborative, the sentence collectors “were attached to the

objects they sought to understand; they cared about them” (Belenky, et al 1997, 124). Careful

listening, affirmation and provisional assent even to highly divergent views thus assumed a

central role in their assiduous effort of hermeneutical reconciliation.

Even if one grants this affinity between procedural knowing and the practice of sentence

collection, however, it may seem dubious to apply insights from it to undergraduate classrooms

in theology and religious studies. For these disciplines have struggled throughout their shared

history with their own distinctive forms of dualism, which render some forms of affirmation and

assent at least problematic, if not altogether verboten. Both have also, more importantly for my

purposes here, tended to depend upon curricular models of historical survey, topical overview

and/or debate, pro and con, on controverted issues of belief, practice or interpretation. Such

approaches may well function effectively to invite students beyond monolithic worldviews and

uncritical assent to received authorities. Yet, we can also ask whether the very structure of such

models also risks reinforcing dualistic patterns of reasoning, on the one hand, or raising the

specter of undifferentiated relativity and “Multiplicity” as its explicit or implicit intellectual

ideal, on the other.

As a way to address such concerns—or, better, to make a slight but significant course


correction to these dominant curricular models—I have increasingly found myself attempting to

teach through the creative juxtaposition of what I call “complicating views.” A “complicating

view” is, by definition, a view that functions to complicate, to complexify or to unsettle some

other view. In the ideal case, complicating views do not stand in a relation of simple opposition

or simple incommensurability. Rather, a truly complicating view may challenge a particular

aspect of another view, such as its evidentiary base or its relevance; it may suggest an alternative

framework for evaluation; it may extend the inquiry in a creative or problematic way; it may

affirm the conclusion of the other view from a different, possibly conflicting foundation; or, if it

does stand in opposition, it may do so in a way that somehow reconfigures the terms of the

debate. Again in the ideal case, complicating views should be those that can be held together, but

which also, if held together in a sustained way, somehow change the terms and tenor of the

conversation as a whole. The role of the classroom instructor, like the medieval sentence

collector, is to create a structure in which students are encouraged to engage these views from a

position of at least provisional assent and to cultivate their own skills of adjudication, decision

and hermeneutical reconciliation.

In this section, I offer several examples to illustrate how I have attempted to employ

complicating views in my own undergraduate teaching in the interdisciplinary Christianity and

Culture program at [my university]. Then, in my conclusion, I attempt to generalize the approach

a bit, to compare it to some other recent proposals in the scholarship of teaching and learning in

theology and religion, and to suggest a few ways that it might complicate the ways that we select

and employ reading assignments in our classes.


(1) First Experiments: The Survey and the Seminar as Sentence Collections

I first encountered the Sentences of Peter Lombard at the end of my first year at [my

university], and I immediately decided to experiment with re-thinking my courses in terms of

sentence collection for the following year. Two courses, one at each end of undergraduates'

academic careers, recommended themselves for special attention: the year-long introductory

“Catholicism” course (SMC103Y), a version of which I had already taught in my first year, and

the one-term graduate/undergraduate seminar, “Religious Pluralism and the Church”

(SMC419H), which I was creating for the first time.

The first issue I faced in attempting such a translation was fairly obvious: what counts as

a “sentence” in an undergraduate Arts and Science course? For Peter Lombard and the other

sentence collectors, a “sentence” consisted of an apparently definitive judgment on a question of

interpretation from the scriptures or from a Patristic authority, as revealed in a short quotation;

for me, I quickly judged, a “sentence” would be a reasonable compact, complete and coherent

argument on a particular question of interpretation, as advanced in a short essay, scholarly article

or book chapter.

Once I had established this translation from the sentence collectors to my undergraduate

classroom, I worked together with my teaching team to work the creative juxtaposition of such

“sentences” into the “Catholicism” course.5 To a certain extent, of course, the whole curriculum

aims to complicate students' views in one way or another: in our study of history in the first unit,

for example, we ask students to make detailed comparisons between early church orders and

contemporary liturgical celebrations, and, in a second unit on the Second Vatican Council, we

5 I offer my gratitude to those colleagues who have collaborated with me at different points in the life of the course

and who have deeply informed my thinking about the course: [EJ, MO, PB, and BD].


address the issue of the Council's purported “break” with prior tradition by assigning not just

different arguments, pro or con, but different kinds of arguments that framed the dispute in

different ways (e.g. Dulles 2003; O'Malley 2003). In the final unit on “Contemporary

Catholicism—Visions and Views,” however, this aspect of the course becomes fully explicit, as

we study selected arguments of three major thinkers in dialogue with what we specifically

designate as “complicating views.” Along with Pope John Paul II's 1995 encyclical The Gospel

of Life, for example, students are asked to consider possible distinctions between different levels

of authoritative teaching, on the one hand, and between “disagreement” and “dissent,” on the

other (Doyle 2002). And, when we read a work by a well-known Toronto philosopher and social

activist (Leddy 2002), they have the opportunity to ask the author both in person and through

their own reading how her Augustinianism—or, indeed, her attitudes toward contemporary

consumerism—compares with that of Pope Benedict XVI (2009).

The intent of this final unit of the “Catholicism” course is nicely illustrated by three

readings selected for a unit on Catholic teachings on sexuality: a moderately progressive

Dominican priest arguing for married chastity on the model of Jesus' vulnerability on the Cross;

a moderately conservative, married biblical scholar arguing against Catholic tradition for an

affirmation of homosexual relationships and same-sex unions; and an openly lesbian journalist

arguing for the tradition against them—all of them, of course, self-identified Catholics (Radcliffe

2005, 89-110; Johnson and Tushnet 2007). The positions are, as such, familiar to most students;

yet, the specific arguments, and especially the social identities of those who advance them,

invariably unsettle expectations that Catholics and non-Catholics alike bring to the tradition.

The organization and creative juxtaposition of such “sentences” followed a similar


pattern in the advanced “Religious Pluralism” seminar. Having never taught such a course, I

decided that I wanted to accomplish at least two goals: 1) to study at least one important

Christian proposal in interreligious study and dialogue at some leisure over a period of several

weeks; and 2) to create room for comparable reflections from other traditions. With this in mind,

I adopted two texts that lay close to hand: Jacques Dupuis' Christianity and the Religions (2001)

and a special issue of Theological Studies dedicated to “The Catholic Church and Other Faiths in

Living Perspectives” (Clooney 2003). In order to preserve the desired sense of leisure, I

organized these two sources not sequentially, but by topic; so students read Dupuis on the

threefold typology of exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism along with a self-consciously

parallel typology by the Buddhist scholar John Makransky, his chapter on “covenant” along with

a discussion of the Noahide laws by Jewish scholar Ruth Langer, and his chapter on revelation

along with an account of the Qur'an and the “People of the Book” by the Muslim scholar Qamar-

ul Huda, and so on (in Clooney 2003, 255-305, 334-61). In each case, the juxtaposed sources

possess sufficient common ground to bring them into conversation, yet they also differ not only

with respect to their respective positions but also, more importantly, with respect to the tradition-

specific warrants and histories from which those positions emerge. Hence, in my judgment, they

function as effective complicating views.

The learning requirements for first- and fourth-year students are, of course, specifically

different. Hence, even though these two courses incorporated complicating views in similar

ways, these texts were employed differently in each case. In the seminar, for example, the onus

for negotiating these different kinds of claims was placed directly on the students: each week,

students prepared written assignments that summarized the argument of one of the “complicating


views” and evaluated this argument in light of other assigned sources, and student presenters

were charged to bring out shared themes, to address significant differences and to supply a

broader context for our shared discussion. Though students' actual maturity and preparation vary

even at this advanced level, enrollment restrictions and the 400-series designation permitted me

to presume a relatively high level of comfort with dissonance, analysis and comparative inquiry

for the purposes of course design.

Not so for the first-year lecture course. In this case, the teaching team attempted to model

the kind of procedural knowledge we intended to foster, prior to and alongside students' active

discussion in their tutorial sections. As already noted, we explicitly introduced the idea of

“complicating views” early in the third unit, and told students to look for points of dissonance

even as they attempted to arrive at a sympathetic understanding of each and every argument they

encountered. In course lectures, we attempted to make the most positive, persuasive case for

each source we read and to suggest one or more ways in which these sources might complicate

one another. By the time we arrived at the tutorials, in other words, the complicating views were

already to some extent pre-digested for the students. Regardless of where they stood with regard

to their own preparation and engagement with these sources, they entered the discussion with a

preliminary sense of the kind of reflective discourse we intended.

Whereas the advanced seminar more closely resembled Peter Abelard's Sic et Non, we

might say, with its bare juxtapositioning of discordant texts, the first-year course instead

followed Peter Lombard in its willingness model potential strategies of reconciliation for

students to emulate, or even to contest. But in both cases, the goal was essentially the same: to

invite a shift from dualistic or purely subjectivist modes of reasoning to more complex,


integrative frames of reference.

(2) The Rule of Three: Debating the Historical Jesus Debate

Somewhere between the modeling strategies of the first-year lecture and the presumed

familiarity of the fourth-year seminar stand other, intermediate strategies of teaching with

complicating views. In some upper-level courses, for example, I have insisted that students

directly engage their sources through the use of “capsules”: short written assignments which

summarize the main argument of an article, chapter or book, the most important evidence

adduced in its support, and a discussion question. In addition to preparing such capsules

individually, students usually also work alone or in groups to present these arguments to the

whole group. Most basically, such capsules function as a form of jigsaw reading exercise,

allowing the class to cover more ground in a short time (see McKeatchie 2002, 217-18). Yet, I

have discovered that, because students find themselves forced to speak for particular authors

prior to their critical evaluation of them, the exercise can also be seen as a particular instance of

Peter Elbow's “believing game.”

In my third-year course “Christ in Christian Tradition,” I have typically dealt with the so-

called Quest of the Historical Jesus alongside the main curriculum, through periodic presentation

and discussion of “Jesus Capsules” based, at least initially, on Marcus Borg and N.T. Wright's

The Meaning of Jesus:Two Visions (2007). I like this book for a number of reasons, not least

because of what I consider its very sane balance of Separate and Connected Knowing. Though

Borg and Wright position themselves as liberal and conservative opponents, they also note that

they wrote the book together, on retreat, and they give careful, generous accounts of each other's


arguments and note points of common ground before they develop their own positions.

Nevertheless, for the first few years, I was unhappy with the discussion engendered by the

capsule presentations. Because of the oppositional structure of the work, I concluded, students

tended either to take sides or to check out.

Rather than dispense with the exercise, I went through the syllabus and added third voices

to complicate each discussion. Along with Borg and Wright's discussions of historical method,

for example, I added a document on Jesus scholarship by the Pontifical Biblical Commission of

the Catholic Church (1964); to their different accounts of Jesus' life and ministry, I added a more

thoroughgoing eschatological interpretation in the tradition of Albert Schweitzer (Fredriksen

1988). Finally, at the conclusion of the unit, we discussed one argument against historical Jesus

study (Johnson 2000), one spirited defense of it (Meier 1991) and a third critique and alternative

feminist historical reconstruction (Schüssler Fiorenza 2000).

The difference, in terms of class participation, was dramatic. For one thing, there was

always more comparative work to do, since the third voice in every case more closely resembled

one side of the debate in some respects and more closely resembled the other side in other

respects—or, in the case of Schüssler Fiorenza, struck at assumptions shared on both sides.

More fundamentally, I believe that students came to see that these two positions were not the

only ones available. Other points of view could and should be drawn into conversation with

them. Taking sides or checking out were not the only options; indeed, students felt increasingly

free to argue that they were not good options at all.

(3) The Inherently Complicating View: Il Papa Feminista?


Because the status of one or another text as a complicating view depends not only on the

other texts with which it is paired but also in some cases on the expectations students bring to it,

some texts and interpretive positions can function as complicating views by themselves. This I

learned through a somewhat arbitrary, yet fortuitous decision to present Pope John Paul II as

what he himself claimed to be: Il Papa Feminista, the “feminist Pope.”

I usually try to include feminist voices in my courses, and, as I revised my Catholicism

course after the first year, I was looking for a suitable opportunity. Given the way that authors

and topics were lining up, it turned out that I had the most freedom of choice in a unit on Pope

John Paul II. So, I selected readings that dealt with the “new feminism” of the late Pontiff,

including his 1995 Letter to Women, a more recent document on contemporary feminism by the

Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (2004) and a short article offering generous, yet

pointed criticism of the CDF document (Beattie 2004).

The results were underwhelming. First of all, most students found the arguments of the

CDF impenetrable, which did not help raise the level of discussion. Second, because the

“complicating” article took an explicitly critical perspective on the CDF and the question of

women's ordination—albeit a defensible one, in my view—students quickly split on this issue,

and the question of warrants, evidence or argument barely showed its face . . . much less the

ideal of sympathetic familiarity with the opposing view.

In this case, I gained needed clarity from my teaching assistant (and later co-instructor)

EJ. When she lectured on Pope John Paul II, EJ forcefully argued his claim to be the first

“feminist Pope,” strengthened the claims in the Letter to Women with a range of other papal

documents and informal addresses, and, only after giving an extremely sympathetic and


persuasive case for the pope, turned to alternative, more critical views. She had, in essence,

revealed that I had not fully followed through on my instinct that this might be a good place to

press questions of feminism and women's empowerment. She complicated my view.

After this, we reduced the discussion to two voices. One of these was the voice of the

“feminist pope,” as revealed in his Letter to Women and several occasional addresses, in which

he speaks with unmistakable clarity about the importance of women in the Catholic Church, their

systemic oppression throughout history, and the need for their leadership in politics and in

Church ministry. The second was a short essay entitled “What Women Want,” which offers a

alternate vision and critique of John Paul's “new feminism” through, of all things, a creative

reading of the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Kaveny 2003). Both voices position

themselves as unambiguously pro-woman. The Pope certainly articulates the Church's restriction

of ordination to men very clearly, but strongly contends that this should not obscure his more

fundamental stance in favor women's empowerment, in the world and in the Church. For her

part, Kaveny avoids the issue of ordination entirely. Yet her account, if fully accepted,

necessarily challenges the vision of women's human vocation offered by the Pope or, at the very

least, some of his leading interpreters. It is a very effective complicating view.

Nevertheless, as student discussions in subsequent years would amply reveal, the primary

complicating view in this case is that of the late pope himself. Since we streamlined the reading

selections, these discussions have been among the most avid and unpredictable of the whole

course. More conservative students are typically uncomfortable with considering the pope a

feminist; more progressive students from inside or outside the Catholic tradition often do not

associate feminism with the papacy; and all sides discover that, in order to venture any opinion


on the issue, they must define what they mean by “feminism” in the first place. Though I don't

have exact figures, I believe this project has become the focus of more of the final summative

“interview and synthesis” papers than any other treated in the course—certainly, it has produced

many of the strongest such papers. These students come to a wide range of different conclusions,

of course, but they do so by interviewing particular Catholic women or women in leadership at

Catholic institutions, attempting to reconcile these interviews with the positions advanced by

John Paul II and his critics, and, from this complex foundation, articulating their own views. I

chalk that up as a win.

(D) Further Complications

Naturally, the practice of complicating students' views cannot be reduced entirely to the

selection and juxtaposition of key texts. Connected Knowing, in the theory of the WWK

Collaborative, requires as its correlate “Connected Teaching” and a vision of the teacher as

“midwife” for students' own work of education. Perhaps above all, this includes our willingness

to play the “believing game” with the distinctive views and visions articulated by our students

(Belenky, et al 1997, 214-29; Belenky and Stanton 2000, 91-96; Clinchy 2000) – views that may,

as my own experience well attests, further complicate our own. Peter Elbow commends group

facilitation practices that encourage “active listening,” student testimonies, the creative use of

silence and private writing, and the disciplined exercise of “nonadversarial disagreement” (2005,

394-97; 2006, 21-25). The most vivid classroom interactions are invariably those that take place

between the actual persons who occupy the learning environment, and these may also be the ones

most likely to facilitate intellectual transformation.


Despite this, the schedule of reading assignments remains the most consistent reference

point for most teachers and students in most university courses, both inside and outside the

classroom. Hence, it makes sense to design this schedule so that it can serve to model, mirror and

ground the kind of engagement intended by the course as a whole. In the context of this article, I

suggest, this means re-imagining our reading assignments in terms of sentence collection. In

some cases, such as the examples described above or the model of “interactive interpretation”

proposed by Patton, Robbins and Newby (2009), this can involve the collection of primary and

secondary sources specific to individual courses. In others, it can involve creative adaptation of

an existing curriculum or new insight into existing materials. If one looks at introductory texts in

the theory of religion, for example, several recent textbooks actually resemble sentence

collections rather closely, drawing together short primary source readings on particular broad

themes along with “counterpoints,” alternative contemporary proposals or other complicating

perspectives (e.g. Olson 2003; Stenski 2006). Even a standard survey text like Daniel L. Pals's

Eight Theories of Religion (2006) could, through the strengthening of the final “critique” section

with additional readings or simply through creative use of lectures or writing assignments, be

nuanced to bring out dissonance and mutual complications along the lines proposed here.

Beyond simply raising new considerations for the selection and deployment of assigned

texts, however, both the practice of the medieval sentence collectors and the learning theories of

Elbow and the WWK Collaborative in particular also draw renewed attention to the central,

creative role played by self-conscious attitudes of affirmation, belief and existential commitment

towards this material on the part of both teachers and students. This notion too is not without

precedent in the field. In religious studies, for example, Laurie L. Patton and Chakravarthi Ram-


Prasad have contended that the study of Hinduism in particular should increasingly be

characterized as “samvada,” reasoned debate or “'inter-logue' between people in various,

multiple, complex, and changing historical circumstances” (2006, 289). Questioning the value of

all binaries and oppositional frameworks, including the claim of liberalism to represent “the sole

and incontestable ideology of interpretation,” Patton and Ram-Prasad commend a more

thoroughly pluralistic approach to the field, in which scholars acknowledge the potential biases

of their social and intellectual locations, make the most forceful arguments possible on behalf of

their opponents, and seek to “guarantee even conflicting values” (2006, 289-95).

As well, on the theological side of the conversation, we can note a parallel movement in

the contemporary comparative theology of Francis X. Clooney, which adopts a position of “faith

seeking understanding” within a particular religious tradition, while unsettling previously settled

meanings in that tradition through rigorous interreligious dialogue and inquiry (see Clooney

2010; Locklin and Nicholson 2010). For her part, Judith Berling has proposed a five-step process

of interreligious learning, in which students of Christian theology

. . . (1) enter other religious worlds through engaging and crossing boundaries of

significant difference; (2) begin the task of interpretation and understanding from their

distinctive religious locations; (3) enter a series of conversations and dialogues both with

the voices of the other traditions and also with other Christians seeking to develop more

flexible language for understanding Christian tradition in relation to other religious

possibilities; (4) begin to live out new relationships and Christian practices based on the

new understandings; and (5) internalize the learning process so that they can continue


developing such conversations and relationships (Berling 2004, 64).

Particularly through its self-conscious deployment of “unease or discomfort” and the central

place given to “texts”—understood broadly to comprehend not only written documents from

other traditions, but also rituals, ethical norms and other practices, as well as alternative “texts”

or interpretations within the home tradition itself—Berling's proposal resonates strongly with the

notion of teaching with complicating views, at least as I have developed it above (see 2004, esp.

71-77, 97-103). Here, the prior existential commitments of the students represent not only a

starting point for their inquiry, but also a critical, dynamic component of learning itself.

Patton, Ram-Prasad, Clooney and Berling do not necessarily represent consensus views

in religious studies and theology, but neither are they marginal outliers. Along with medieval

sentence collectors like Peter Lombard and more contemporary voices in the theory of

intellectual development, these scholars offer distinctive perspectives and new vocabularies to

describe the dynamics of teaching, learning and scholarly inquiry in a university context. These

dynamics themselves are not new: as I have attempted to demonstrate, they go back at least to

the origins of the university. In reconsidering their proposals and bringing them into constructive

conversation, moreover, we may or may not radically change the way that we assign readings in

our courses. The exigences of curriculum requirements and the limits of personal experience are

not simply resolved through appeal to the importance of “complicating views.” Yet, we may

nevertheless come to appreciate the practice of selecting readings more deeply and to perceive

new possibilities in these readings, once assigned. Our pedagogical practices may, in short, find

themselves fruitfully complicated and, thereby, transformed.


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Teaching with Complicating Views: Beyond the Survey, Behind the Pro and Con

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