7 Things I Learned after 10 Years of Editing an Academic Journal
Reflections after a decade with "Christianity & Literature"
I sat on a couch hip to hip with my colleague, Mark, in a hotel room in Vancouver, answering questions from the four academics seated across from us. I was a freshly appointed Assistant Professor when Mark asked if another junior colleague and I would join him in nominating ourselves as the editorial team of Christianity & Literature. The journal had been the flagship publication of the national and regional Conference on Christianity and Literature and had featured writing by the most influential scholars of the last five decades studying Christianity and literature, poetry, and drama. As stated in the journal’s editorial statement, it publishes quarterly peer-reviewed essays that explore
“how literature engages Christian thought, experience, and practice. The journal presupposes no particular theological orientation but respects an orthodox understanding of Christianity as a historically defined religious faith.”
The usual way academics interview for jobs and positions like this one is ludicrous. You apply, wait months for a response, fly to a conference for a first interview, fly to the institution for a second interview, and often after 4 or 5 months receive a final answer. If you ever want to witness the inglorious combination of stress and ambition, go to the national convention of the Modern Language Association and immerse yourself in crowds of gray-suited grad students nervously marching around, glad-handing, and twitching their eyes.
This interview was more relaxed, and in the end we took the reins of C&L. This month marks the end of our decade of editing. I’m grateful to the folks at CCL and to my fellow editors, Mark and Caleb. But I’m happy to move on.
Academic publishing is notoriously mysterious, and so I thought I’d pull back the curtain a bit.
And so without further ado, here are 6 lessons I learned from my time at Christianity & Literature.
LESSON 1: Most of us like the same authors.
And by “us” I mean Christian scholars or scholars who like to study Christian themes. This is a lesson that is specifically applicable to the kinds of scholars who submit essays to a journal on Christianity and literary studies. Although we would receive submissions on all sorts of texts — from classical to medieval to romantic to modern; poetry, drama, fiction, creative nonfiction, film; secular and pious; popular and obscure — there were some authors who appeared far more than other in essay titles. If you’re a student of literary history, you can probably guess some of them:
Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton, of course.
The Romantics and especially those poets who sought to describe their approach to poetry and culture, like Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Dostoevsky.
Modernist authors who tend to create God-shaped holes in their writing, especially T. S. Eliot.
The Inklings, especially C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Hopkins, and Dorothy Sayers.
And perhaps most of all, a cadre of modern fiction authors for whom “life = a struggle of faith” — Toni Morrison, Tom Wolfe, Flannery O’Connor, Wendell Berry, and most consistently of all Marilynne Robinson.
Saturation of scholarship aside, it’s simply worth noting that Christians tend to find these authors interesting. So we might also make the observation that some authors actually lend themselves to studying through religious themes and theological ideas—not a statement about which there would be consensus.
LESSON 2: Academic publishing in the humanities is a game.
If you’re a grad student in History or English, sorry to burst your bubble. But getting an essay published is about 50% subject knowledge and 50% conformity to conventions. If you play the game well, cite the right people, utilize enough nuance, try not to sound like you love literature, then you’re far more likely to get published.
LESSON 3: It’s not fun to read academic writing.
As per Lesson 2, there’s a formula to writing a publishable academic essay in the humanities. You have to copy how it’s done in the sciences. State your thesis. Describe your methodology (eco-critical, cultural marxist, historicist, queer, etc). And then work systematically through applying your methodology to your chosen text(s). The result is an essay that nobody wants to read. They have effusively long footnotes and citations. Their jargon flexes to the level of being nigh unintelligible. And most essays exhibit a fear of showing any emotional whatsoever, even though poetry traditionally is defined by its excitement of emotion.
In defense of this formula, it has a built-in bullsh*t radar, and it guards against essays where a critic simply says what they happen to think about a certain literary text. But still, literature and other humanities topics are not sciences. And we don’t read literature primarily to cure cancer or build better bridges or provide better psychiatric care. We read literature, ostensibly, to learn about the human condition and, in my opinion at least, to become better disposed toward beauty. …and sometimes, yes, to participate in critiques of social, political, and scientific systems.
LESSON 4: You learn a lot about someone from how they judge essays.
When an essay is submitted to an academic journal, it’s first reviewed by the editors, and if it passes muster, then it is sent to usually two blind reviewers (“blind” in that the essay is anonymized). The reviewers offer an opinion — at C&L, the options are to publish as is, request minor revisions, request major revisions, or reject outright. Editors make an effort to find reviewers who have also published peer-reviewed work on the texts or topics covered in the submission.
But man, there’s quite a range with which people assume the role of reviewer. To be certain, most reviewers are honest and constructive in their reports. But others make it personal. For example, on more than a few occasions, reviewers would take offense if an author failed to cite an essay or book that the reviewer published himself or herself. Can you imagine the nerve! And nothing can save the essay after that transgression. In other instances, the reviewer might detect that the author associates with an academic tribe with which they disagree. Tribalism is a real thing. They sense sentimentalism. Or they catch a whiff of cultural relativism.
And authors are at the mercy of reviewers. The best reviewers are charitable, even if they decide against publication. The worst are those who are intellectually territorial.
LESSON 5: Publishing is a poor measure for proficiency.
Especially as a measure for proficiency in teaching. In no way is it the case that the most published scholars are the best teachers. In fact, often the opposite is the case, since they probably spend the majority of their time doing research instead of honing their teaching.
But even beyond this, academia tends to draw too think of a line between teaching and scholarship. Both are forms of communication, and both require possessing a deep understanding of the material being considered. And I would argue that the best academic writing in the humanities demonstrates the intellectual virtue of humility, a virtue that is essential for effective teaching. If the question I’m asking my students to answer is a question that I too am authentically curious about, then the conversation is likely to go well.
One last comment on this lesson. Typically, the kinder and more generous the person, the better their academic writing is. I wonder if other students and scholars have found the same to be true.
LESSON 6: It’s easy to tell if an author is religious or not.
That’s probably a delicate thing to say, maybe even cancelable to some people. And to be clear, we never made assumptions about an author’s religious or nonreligious life in reviewing their work. But given the nature of the journal, patterns emerged that were impossible to ignore.
Some authors demonstrated an intellectual investment and that typically only comes from encountering the ideas being considered in modes that exceed the merely academic. I’ll offer an example. Scholars of all stripes are liable to make generalizations. As it turned out, it was more common for scholars of faith to make generalizations about Christian belief and practice than secular scholars. That’s often because of their personal investment in it (“The Christian theology of atonement teaches that . . . [fill in the blank].”). On the other hand, secular scholars would either avoid engagement in theological nuance altogether or would simply get things wrong relative to generally orthodox understandings.
I mention this lesson simply out of interest in how personal conviction affects academic objectivity. Or perhaps more accurately, our standards of academic objectivity are always inevitably subject to personal conviction — whether religious or not.
LESSON 7: Literature is religious.
This is more of a hot take than it is a measured reflection. But after reading hundreds of essays on literature and religion, across historical periods and genres, it appears to me that the elements of literature that scholars argue to carry religious meaning are constitutive of literature in general.
I’ll explain what I mean. Literary critics don’t typically point to overt theological themes when expositing the religious implications of a novel. Instead, they’ll examine moments of ambiguity, or moral crises, or wondrous events, or the power of the imagination, or a character’s concrete dependence on circumstance and the material world. In fact, it is more common for a literary critic to present a character’s religious doubts than their faith when extrapolating the religious meanings of a text. But these things — imagination, ambiguity, circumstance, wonder, moral crisis, and the unexpected — are the very stuff that literature in general is made of. According to critics, they also happen to characterize the spiritual journey.
And so either those things are not characteristic of religion and faith, or, as it happens, all literature is intrinsically religious. …There’s so much more to say about this point, but I’ll leave it at that.
This week begins semester 2, of year 2, of Hildegard College’s undergraduate program. Two new freshmen join the cohort this Spring.
In Foundations of Thought, we embark on a semester studying the question, “What is Nature?” This is a course in natural philosophy taught through primary sources. We’re reading Aristotle’s Physics, Ptolemy’s Almagest, Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, and other historical works. The goal is for students to become fluent in the greatest ideas that engage with the question, What is Nature?
At the same time, students take a tutorial course in Euclidean Geometry. Each class, students memorize two propositions from Euclid’s seminal work, the Elements of Geometry. Two students are chosen at random to reproduce one proposition each, entirely from memory, on the board, using diagrams and writing out the logical argument. You can read about my own experience of this here.
In the entrepreneurship Incubation Lab, students are working on designing and testing their ventures, focusing especially on business models, financial planning, and organizational development.
I’ll post some insights on the semester’s progress as it unfolds.
In the meantime, do you know a young adult who should learn more about Hildegard College?
If so, send them this post, or put them in touch with us at admissions@hildegard.college.