Last week, with prompting from one of the students in the class, I asked each of the students to write a positionality statement about the topic around which the remainder of the class was centered. We’re going to study atheist college students. And it occurs to me that, as an instructor guiding this process, my own positionality and biases may be just as important as those of my students. So, like them, I’m writing this statement to outline my thoughts about the population we’re going to study in this class (atheist students) and the project overall.
I’ve always struggled with notions of religion, god, a higher power, spirituality, and just about any other term that falls in the same realm. Although I went to a Lutheran pre-school for two years, was apparently baptized as such (so says my mother – I don’t remember), and vividly recall my hand-made prayer book and saying “now I lay me down to sleep…” before bed as a young child, religion has never been a part of my family’s identity. As a child, I never went to church. My parents didn’t really talk about god or any other religious or spiritual traditions. My parents have always been pretty pragmatic, so big-picture issues never really came up.
In high school and beyond, I did a lot of thinking about metaphysical philosophy and logic. As a result, I concluded that I was (and still proclaim to be) an atheist, with occasional dabbling in the realm of agnostic. After some sideways glances and judgmental comments from others when I shared that information with a couple of close friends while at UNC-Chapel Hill, I basically stopped talking about it to other people. It wasn’t until I was engaged that my religious status came to the forefront. When my wife’s family wanted a traditional Catholic wedding, I refused, much to the disappointment of her grandparents. I even refused to get married in a church. But I was OK to be wed by a family friend who, in addition to being an ordained minister, was also a biblical scholar at a local at a local university.
Nonetheless, on a handful of occasions over the last six years I found myself “praying” or “talking to god” (in quotes because they were not at all formalized, just some vague requests of or questions to something outside myself) about the birth of my children or when my mother went to the ER with a life-threatening heart condition. In the years since, as I’ve struggled with bouts of depression and have sought a personal purpose/mission/calling, I’ve become increasingly open to spiritual possibilities beyond what I am capable of rationalizing. But I’m a guy who enjoys the complexity of paradoxes and appreciates the calm that accompanies hard-earned simplicity in the form of grand truths and universal principles.
In just the last 4 months, I’ve joined a liberal Christian church (the United Church of Christ), attended sessions of the local Freethinker’s forum at the Universal Unitarian Church, enjoyed a traditional Jewish Shabbat meal with a colleague, spent 4 days on a Buddhist silence retreat, and introduced moments of silence and mindfulness meditations into my classes.
It’s complicated. J Perhaps that’s why I’m so intrigued by our class. So much diversity of thought, so much consideration of people and ideas that extend well past our own personal beliefs. I leave class every time with a serious headache, the kind I used to get when I really thought about things deeply…the kind I get far less frequently than I would like as a professor.
