Authority, Passion, and Subject-Centered Teaching

This book asserts that authority is a contested category and explores why traditional notions of authority are increasingly in tension with progressive and postmodern claims, devolving into stalemate, schizophrenia, or power plays. Offering a Christian framework as a philosophically coherent and practical alternative for teachers, the author argues that Jesus provides a pattern from which to reconstruct our conception of teaching authority in ways that align with evidence-informed teaching practices and cultivate intellectual virtues. Rather than examine "e;Jesus as teacher,"e; the book instead applies the central insight on authority that Jesus embodies. This authority with which Jesus taught, it argues, stemmed from his passion-that is, passive, even suffering, experience. The author aligns this to a subject-centered conception of teaching (as opposed to student-centered or teacher-centered) in which the subject is the authority and knowing is identified with being acted upon by the subject. Teaching with authority thereby becomes a matter of unveiling suffering with students and inviting them into their own suffering encounter with the subject. Building on the work on Parker Palmer and exploring pedagogical practice from a Christian perspective, this book will appeal to scholars and researchers with interests in higher education, evidence-based teaching, educational theory, religion and education, and Christian history and thought.