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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
John Dunne's books A Search for God in Time and Memory and The Way of All the Earth describe and employ a method which their author calls “passing over and coming back,” in order to attain and lead his readers into a sympathetic understanding, first of other lives and second of other religions. These and Dunne's other books are generally taken to be among the major theological works of recent years, but teachers of theology have tended to find them forbidding as texts for undergraduates. In this paper I wish to discuss some techniques which I have employed to assist undergraduates not only to read Dunne's books but to engage personally in the process of passing over and coming back. I wish to go further than that, though. It seems to me that the techniques I am presenting are applicable to other texts besides Dunne's, and I want to stress that broader application. It also seems to me that there are some real problems, especially moral problems, in engaging in “passing over and coming back” in a classroom setting, and I want to set out something of what those problems are, to discuss the extent to which I cope or fail to cope with them, and to invite readers' reflections on how better to cope with them. Because I am offering reflections on my own experience (including unsolved problems) as a teacher and not trying to put forward a general theory of any kind, I am keeping this paper in the first person singular throughout.
1 A Search for God in Time and Memory (New York: Macmillan, 1969).Google Scholar
2 The Way of All the Earth (New York: Macmillan, 1972).Google Scholar
3 The City of the Gods (New York: Macmillan, 1965)Google ScholarTime and Myth (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975);Google ScholarThe Reasons of the Heart (New York: Macmillan, 1978);Google ScholarThe Church of the Poor Devil (New York: Macmillan, 1982).Google Scholar
4 The Way of All the Earth, p. 53. Obviously, these steps would have to be modified a little for the case of passing over to other cultures or religions.
5 Ibid.
6 A Search for God in Time and Memory, p. ix.
7 Copies of these notes are available on request from the author.
8 This is one of five moral objections raised in Hinman, Lawrence M., “The Limits of the Quest for Relevance,” Contemporary Philosophy 7/3 (Summer 1978), 10–11Google Scholar, to the kind of teaching I am describing here. The remainder of Hinman's objections center on the point that it does violence to students' integrity and autonomy to require personal appropriation of course material, especially at the forced pace that an academic calendar makes necessary. These objections merit serious consideration from anyone who is attracted to the kind of teaching techniques I have described. However, I believe that the grading criteria set forth in this section, the flexibility of the journal assignment discussed above, the text-centeredness of the courses, as discussed in the next section (it is ordinarily not immoral to require and grade attentiveness to a text), and the fact that the courses are electives rather than required courses can form an adequate safeguard against the moral hazards Hinman sets out.
9 Weil, Simone, Waiting on God (London: Collins Fontana, 1959), p. 66.Google Scholar
10 The Way of All the Earth, pp. 48-49.
11 I wish to thank my former students Ellen Garrott, Linda Gorman, and Edward Rieu for comments on this paper. Edward Rieu's six typewritten pages of commentary were especially helpful.