Faith and Learning - Integration Statement: Helen Sterk

 

Background: As part of the reappointment and tenure process, Calvin College asks faculty members to reflect on the relationship between the Christian faith and their calling as a professor. Professor Sterk's primary interests are in rhetoric. This statement was written in 1999.

Faith and Scholarship

Helen M. Sterk

During my scholarly and academic career, I have thought and written as a Christian. While on the faculty at Marquette University, however, I was not encouraged to do so overtly. I welcome the support Calvin College gives me to live out my Christian faith.

I continue to be fascinated by the means humans use to exercise dominion in the world. God created a good and perfect world for us and gave it to us to care for. Our sin warped that good beginning, but through the grace of Jesus Christ, we can live in the world in ways that promote shalom. My research focuses on communication and care, with an assumption that we care for others because God cared for us, and that Jesus himself gave us a key to understanding what counts as good care. His second great commandment was to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. That commandment calls us to balance justice and mercy, to recognize both rights and responsibility.

I see my role as a Reformed Christian scholar as dual. Not only do I work to bring Christian insights to the discipline of Rhetoric, but I also find ways to bring disciplinary insight into Christian life.

The study of Rhetoric, as I argued in my Spoelhof inaugural lecture, traditionally has given privilege to the discourse of powerful people. Only recently has it begun to open up to consideration of discourse of those on the margins. New theories, particularly care-based theories, and new methods, particularly ethnographic, indicate Rhetoric's willingness to engage with a wide range of persuasive symbolic acts. My work on care theory (which will be the focus of my research this school year, thanks to a grant from the CCCS given to Ruth Groenhout, Jan Curry-Roper and myself) will contribute to care-based rhetorical theory. Further, I have interviewed over 100 women on their experiences of birthing. Those interviews are held in an archive at Marquette University. They form the primary data base I will use in the next year or so for publications which will apply ethnographic research methods within the discipline of Rhetoric.

These two aspects of my scholarship­one theoretical, one analytical­grow out of my belief that God remains active in the world. Implicit in care theory is a belief that the goal of humans is to love one another. And yet, there are no graspable sets of warrants to justify that belief. It takes faith in God, a Creator and Sustainer, to provide a foundation to care theory. I believe that God is calling me to contribute to my discipline through developing communication theory based on care. Not only will this work challenge and add to current research on care, particularly feminist theories of care and communication, it also will bring further unity to my scholarship and my faith. In the writing I do on care theory and communication, I will endeavor to make the case that God's love and continuing action in the world is the reason why we should care for one another.

This is an implicit critique of the barrenness of vision in my own discipline. Our view of humans tends to be that one seeks opportunities to influence and to gain power. Feminism and Christianity offer a counterpoint. Feminist theory consistently maintains the full humanity of women as well as men. As framed by feminism, humanity is marked by interdependence and mutual need. Humans are more than the greedy opportunists sociobiology argues we are. While feminism argues human interconnection on the basis of a global need for all humans to care for one another, Christians say they are created to be in relation with each other and with God, given the charge to hold dominion in the world. Dominion could be seen better as responsible, hands on, connected caring. We can take as a model the way the Bible presents God and Jesus as caring through means of both justice and mercy. Whether or not one is Christian, one still can see the anchor a Christian starting point gives a discussion of care. We love because God first loved us.

In my analytic writing that focuses on drawing out the implications for life and medical communication and practice found in the women's stories of giving birth, I work with two basic Christian assumptions about people. First, we are all created in God's image, and therefore, deserve honor and respect. Second, Christ's command about how to live in the world­to love our neighbors as we love ourselves­speaks directly to the sort of care that should be given to birthing women. In giving that kind of care, caregivers will balance their own sense of what's right with the woman's sense of what she needs. The interviews show the effect on women of impersonal, inconsiderate care, the kind of care that goes by the clock, by the protocol book. And they show the impact of care that considers women as full partners in the process, that includes listening to them and taking their unique needs and situations into account. Christian thought that reflects the acts of creation and redemption, applied to a specific situation such as birthing, can show how we humans can be part of the act of renewal in the world.

As a feminist and a Christian, I believe it gives honor to let people tell their own stories. The stories of birthing have been told by authoritative expert voices, speaking about birthing from the point of view of an observer who sees birthing as potentially dangerous at every point until the baby is born. Whether those experts are male or female matters little, the observers' perspective blinds them to experiential realities of birthing and leads to more interventions than necessary. I want to give respect and privilege back to the persons engaged in the practice, contributing a better sense of the "affections" to our cultural store of knowledge about how birthing happens and how it affects women and their lives.

This scholarship of discovery brings to light and life a point of view that largely has been absent in both scholarship and popular discourse about birthing. While some scholarship advocates a woman-centered vision of birthing, the doctor-centered vision holds hegemony. I have two books in the works that will help scholars in general, and women in particular to see other options. The first is a scholarly co-authored book that encourages academics and caregivers to consider alternatives to the medical model of birthing. The second is a book constituted by the stories told by my interviewees. Hearing about a wide variety of experiences, caregivers, and outcomes will allow women to make informed decisions about birthing options. Together, these two books will bring Christian feminist insight into medical discourse about birth and birthing practices.

I do not see my scholarly role as limited to bringing Christianity to bear on disciplinary thought. My role is to look the other way, too, to the contributions my discipline can make to Christian life and thought. My discipline has much to contribute to Reformed Christian thought and my goal is to help to move disciplinary insights into Reformed Christian conversations. I have been given a window into that way of thinking and writing through my work with Quentin Schultze on Communication Through the Eyes of Faith. Although the book is now thoroughly his, I contributed to an earlier draft and participated in discussions with the team he gathered together for this project. That project operated under the assumption that Christianity has much to offer Communication Studies and that Communication Studies has much to offer Christianity.

The discipline of Rhetoric is concerned with discernment, with critical judgment. Traditionally, that judgment was of the value of important, spoken discourses, particularly those of public policy makers. There still is a strong strain of that sort of work. However, in recent years, Rhetoric has broadened its scope to the full range of human discourses. In my work published in After Eden: Meeting the Challenge of Gender Reconciliation (a CCCS funded project that brought me here in 1989-1990), I use rhetorical concepts and theories to scrutinize and critique arguments made in Christian Reformed circles on women's ordination and to explore Christian uses and abuses of language in constructing gender relations. In addition to this work, I have plans for projects that would be appropriate for the Journal of Communication and Religion and also The Christian Scholar's Review. Two of these include explaining the religious warrants that undergird the discourses of women's suffrage speakers and analyzing the rhetorical strategies employed by Anne Hutchinson in her heresy trial. Just as Augustine used classical rhetoric to inform Christian preaching, so I use the tools of my field to analyze Christian discourse.

Further, I appreciate the license Calvin College gives faculty members to take their scholarship beyond the traditional outlets of books and refereed journals. As Spoelhof Chair, I have been offered many opportunities to speak to different types of audiences. I see this as part of my job as a scholar and teacher­not only to serve my discipline and the college, but also to serve the broader community. I intend to continue speaking to a variety of audiences, on and off campus. This fall, I have been asked to serve a three year term on The Banner as a contributing editor. I anticipate writing about Christian life and talk from the point of view of Rhetoric. I see The Banner as a place to make a difference in the community I now call home. In a variety of contexts, I intend to use the tools of my discipline to discern the value of various Christian discourses. As a scholar, I am trying to answer God's call. I appreciate the opportunities and support Calvin College offers me as I seek to fulfill that calling.