Today we welcome Dr. Paul Gutacker to Bear Tracks. Paul earned his PhD from Baylor History in 2019. He is currently lecturing for the History department and directing the Brazos Fellows program. Paul exemplifies a scholar who truly made his PhD his own–using it to launch an intellectual community that helps young adults take their next step vocationally while developing spiritual disciplines that will last a lifetime.
In his brilliant little book, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds, Baylor professor Alan Jacobs takes on a commonly-held myth—the idea that our best thinking happens when we “think for ourselves.” This axiom just doesn’t match up with how thinking works. “To think independently of other human beings is impossible, and if it were possible it would be undesirable,” Jacobs concludes, “Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social.”(p. 37) Rather than trying to think for ourselves, Jacobs argues that we should consider who we should think with. We should ask: what makes a good thinking partner? What makes a community trustworthy to think with?
When I read How to Think last year, I was immediately struck by Jacobs’ argument resonated with my experience of graduate school at Baylor. I found my mentors and colleagues in the History Department to be trustworthy thinking partners, to be a community that not only sharpened my scholarship but also helped me clarify my vocation as a Christian historian and teacher. I’m grateful to have spent five year thinking with this scholarly community.
This notion of thinking with has brought me to the work I’ll be doing this year as director of Brazos Fellows, a fellowship for college graduates centered on theological study, spiritual disciplines, vocational discernment, and life together. Over the course of nine months, Brazos Fellows study with leading scholars, take on practices of prayer and spiritual direction, and explore their calling in the context of Christian community. The fellowship prepares young adults to take their next step vocationally while developing habits they can take with them for life.
The inspiration for Brazos Fellows draws from my own experience after college. I still remember as a senior feeling so unsure of what I should do after graduation, let alone with the rest of my life. As I got closer and closer to the end, both the uncertainty and the pressure grew, making it all the more difficult to make plans. It took much time and much input from mentors and friends before I arrived at the clarity needed to pursue graduate school.
My sense is that this experience is not at all unique. Even (and perhaps especially) high-achieving students often struggle to translate their undergraduate education into a vocational path. Perhaps this is due to the pace of college life easily working against healthy rhythms: a balance of work and rest, time for reflection and prayer, and a blend of study and praxis. Put another way, the busyness of college—and even more the busyness of grad school—can be inconducive to the long, slow work of attending.
Yet attention is a prerequisite to Christian discernment. Simone Weil writes in her remarkable book Gravity and Grace that “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” We might add that the costly work of attending is a kind of listening, a kind of discernment. That’s why Brazos Fellows commit to practices such as regular prayer, spiritual direction, and sabbath rest. For the rest of us, including those in the academy, we may need something similar. As Baylor professor Andrea Turpin recently wrote, grad students in particular would do well to recover the ancient Christian practice of committing to a Rule of Life. This is a good and needed word.
Along with prioritizing practices of attention, our work at Brazos Fellows presumes that Jacobs is essentially correct: we aren’t meant to ask the big questions on our own. This is true when it comes to questions of discernment—what was I made for? What am I good at, and how does that relate to my vocation?—and more fundamental questions about what it means to be human, to be embodied, to live in society. At Brazos Fellows, we ask these questions with the church—both the church throughout time and the church globally. Put in Jacobs’ terms, we aim for our team of instructors and tutorsto be a trustworthy community to think with.
After one year of directing the Brazos Fellows, it’s been immensely rewarding to see the results. Our fellows, such as Jess Schurz (B.A., Baylor ’18), are asking questions like “What is the spiritual value of loneliness?” and “How does beauty invite us deeper into reality?” Now, in our second year, a new cohort of fellows is exploring big questions like “what can the early church teach us about our cultural assumptions about death?” I can’t wait to see what questions they ask next.
And I’m all the more aware how this educational model reflects both my historical training at Baylor and the ethos of the Baylor graduate community. In Brazos Fellows, and in the many other places where our alumni teach, minister, and lead, Baylor has given birth to scholarly communities—communities defined both by serious academic inquiry and Christian commitment, communities that are trustworthy, communities that cultivate attention and discernment. Here’s to not thinking for ourselves.
If you or someone you know who might consider joining Brazos Fellows for the 2020-2021 cohort, you can find more information, view media, and request applications at brazosfellows.com.