Introducing "Stories of Belief"

Let's read some spiritual autobiography together over the next few months

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In the spring of 2018, an improbable thing happened to me – on my first round on the academic job market, I was offered a position as an assistant professor at Regis College, a small Catholic liberal arts college outside Boston. I was in my fourth year of my PhD program at Northeastern University, I still had one more year of funding, but I was also married with two small children living in an apartment and very eager to start earning a salary. When I got the offer, I knew it wasn’t the perfect job, but it still struck me as a minor miracle.

Though my PhD is in English and my dissertation was about literary journalism, neither was part of my main teaching assignment. Regis had, years ago, combined all of its Humanities departments into one Humanities Department and my appointment specified that my time would be spent between Humanities and General Education. I would be teaching a lot of core classes.

As it turns out, this ended up being one of my favorite things about the job. In a Humanities Department, more comes into play in class assignments than one’s academic specialty and because I had a background steeped in religious education – 12 years Protestant, 4 years Catholic – and because I had written and published extensively about religion, Religious Studies was part of my teaching portfolio.

The first RS class I taught was called “Jesus: Myth and Reality.” I loved it! I told students on day one that the class was not about theology – I’m not even Catholic so I wouldn’t presume to teach Catholic theology! Rather it would be a literary/historical study of the person of Jesus. We called it “Jesus Class.” It was great fun.

But my absolute favorite class to teach came the following semester when I was offered a course called “Stories of Belief.” This course actually allowed me to combine my interest in religion with my background in writing and studying nonfiction. I was so excited. On January 9, 2019, I wrote the following to my friends on Facebook: “Okay, it's happening! I get to teach a course called ‘Stories of Belief!’ Who do I absolutely have to include? Think spiritual autobiography/memoir. Help me make this awesome!”

My network did not disappoint, and I used many of their suggestions to build the course, which I had the opportunity to teach each spring semester from 2019 to 2024, when I left Regis for my current job. Now, I teach courses that are more squarely in my wheelhouse, and I’m very happy to do so. But I miss teaching “Stories of Belief,” especially now as the Spring semester is beginning and I find myself without it for the first time in a long time.

Maybe I’m overselling it, but for me, this course was lifegiving. Each week, from January to May, I got to meet with around 20 smart, engaged, and earnest students to talk deeply about beliefs – those of the authors we read and, necessarily, our own. It was magical. It was what I always imagined teaching would be like, and I’m loathe to let that go.

So, here we are, it’s the start of the Spring semester and I want to teach Stories of Belief! I have plans down the line to repurpose the course to fit my new position, but until then, I have all these lecture notes and I want to share them. My plan is to do just that.

Over the course of the semester – or, for those who don’t still live their lives by the academic calendar, over the next several months – I’ll publish essay versions of those lectures (and links to the readings, when I can) and invite conversation. Here’s the syllabus:

1. “God Shopping” from Lit by Mary Karr

2. Excerpt from My Mother’s Bible by Walter Kirn

3. “Salvation” from The Big Sea by Langston Hughes

4. “I Quit the Church” from An American Childhood by Annie Dillard

5. “In the Dark Night of Disaster” by Anthony Pinn

6. “Introduction” from Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis

7. “Abandoning Doubt in Sedona, Arizona” by Raquel Cepeda

8. “Standing in the Shadow of Hope” by Austin Channing Brown

9. “With a Great Price” from Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton

10. “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” from Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott

11. Excerpts from “Book 3” from Confessions by Augustine

12. “Periodic #2” by Franny Choi

13. Excerpt from Acts of Faith by Eboo Patel

14. “Confession” from The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day

15. “Foot Notes” from Blankets by Craig Thompson

Yikes, writing that out, it’s a lot. But what a reading list, right? There is the potential for some extra credit reads, too, in the form of essays that I taught in various iterations over the years. For example, the first time I taught the course, I included John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay “Upon This Rock” about attending a Christian rock festival, an excerpt from John Carroll’s memoir American Requiem, and an essay by my friend and one-time editor Patton Dodd. I’ll try to bring these back into the mix.

Obviously, I have my work cut out for me converting my lecture notes into readable essays, but I suspect that revisiting these stories will be as life-giving for me as it was when I taught the course at Regis. I hope it will be for you as well.

We’ll begin next week with “God Shopping,” a chapter from Mary Karr’s memoir Lit. Here is a bit of background on the book to get you started. Ideally, I’d love to share the full text with you here, but I’m unclear on the legality of that. For some other readings down the line, I will be able to provide a link to the full text because it is already online, but in this case I can’t find the text online, and I don’t feel comfortable sharing a whole chapter from Karr’s book. You can learn more about the book and read an excerpt here. You might also try your library (or Libby!) or just buy it; you won’t be sorry!

See you in class!

A note about the artwork: from another writer on Substack, I got the idea to utilize Open Access artwork from art museums. Not only is it fun to dig into these collections (the above is from the Met) and learn more about art, but it feels like the most intentional way of fighting the creep of AI-generated art. You can explore the Met’s collection here.