Sound Bites from the Past

When I was a student, seek the way many professors taught Church History was through readers—a published book of excerpts from the primary sources. These books were assigned, discount and students were to read the relevant excerpts as preparation for lectures on the various time periods, viagra sale controversies, and patristic writers.

When I became the professor, I simply followed the lead of my own teachers, without really considering whether there was another way to do it. Evidence suggests that most of us did it this way—and continue to do it this way – since new readers continue to be published.

Seeing the Big Picture…

But I would like to suggest that the very concept of a reader is both “old school” and “new school”—yet in a way that gives students the worst of both worlds. Back when I was on the student end of the syllabus, and had to read the excerpts, I was always frustrated with reading these assignments. I didn’t know why until I came to be on the professor side of the syllabus, and I started thinking through exactly what it was I wanted my students to take away from my Church History class.

I realized that what I want for my students is to see the big picture of the history of Christianity. I also want them to get a real feel for the personalities that gave us our primary sources. I want them to understand their writings, both as argument and as literature, within a genre and as part of a historical context, and with a flow that cannot be discerned in a short excerpt. In other words, I want my students to understand the context of the primary documents, and I want the students to read them in context, not out of context.

…in Manageable Ways!

Another problem is that when a reader is published, the choices that are included reflect the editors’ priorities (and biases), not the priorities of the teacher. So of course my first thought was to create my own readers—and there are companies out there that will help you do that, including dealing with the copyright issues. But in the end, the students were still reading sound bites from the past—excerpts taken out of context.

Of course, one could go to the other extreme and assign the long documents like Irenaeus’ Against Heresies, but that seemed cruel. So the solution I came to is the happy medium: assign whole documents, but use the shorter representative ones, such as Irenaeus’ Proof of the Apostolic Preaching.

The Best of Both Worlds

Fortunately, we now have all of the necessary documents online, where the students can read them without having to buy all the books. Therefore my syllabus includes links to the online versions of the documents. With the publication of my own textbook, Reading the Early Church Fathers (Paulist Press), the publisher also put up a web page with links to all of the documents mentioned in the book. You can see that page at this link: Paulist Press Online Primary Sources Links Page.

To see some of the source websites I use, readers can also browse through the links on my own website: Jim Papandrea Resources & Links Page.

Prepping Students to Read

So now in my classes, I’ve taken a different approach to the primary sources. Rather than have them read as preparation for lecture (with the frustration of not knowing how the reading relates to what we’re going to be talking about), I lecture first, giving them the historical context, the bio of the patristic writer(s), and what is important about/in the text. Then—after the lecture—they read a whole document, not only with the context in mind, but also knowing what to look for as they read. (I also have a section in my book on “How to Read Early Christian Texts” so that they know how to look out for the author’s agenda, and so they avoid making generalizing assumptions from what they read.)

When the students go into their reading of primary sources with a sense of the big picture, understanding where the documents fit into the big picture, and knowing what they’re looking for, they get a lot more out of the documents. And when they read a whole document, as opposed to an excerpt, they get a much better sense of the author, the author’s world (and worldview), and what’s at stake for the history of Christianity.

Escape from Sound Bites

Therefore, my advice is, don’t perpetuate the sound bite culture that now reduces everything to an excerpt taken out of context. Instead, give your students the gift of reading whole documents. And the fact that they can read virtually all of them online means that you can choose the best documents for your syllabus without making the students buy a lot of expensive books.

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