As I head back into the regular rhythm of the school year and reflect on my summer, I find myself thinking about how much of it was spent writing and thinking alongside other people. Some of that work has been on two edited volumes: reading and responding to colleagues’ chapters, debating introductions, moving texts around, considering what these books are becoming as a whole. I’ve also been writing a book with a colleague about Stoic joy and its American heroines.
Again and again this summer, I opened a document knowing that someone had been writing in it since I last saw it. A sentence had changed, a question appeared in the margin, an argument opened up in a direction I hadn’t anticipated. How might a text take on new scope and imaginative frame with another mind in conversation with it? Also, occasionally: who deleted that sentence I really liked? (Probably it didn’t need to be there, I realized.)
My thesis is this: if Christian life was never meant to be lived alone, perhaps intellectual life wasn’t either.
We often carry an image of the medieval monk writing alone, but the university itself offers another model. The word university comes from the Latin universitas, a whole or corporate body. In the medieval university, the universitas magistrorum et scholarium was a community of scholars organized around the work of learning. Even as universities have not always lived up to that communal ideal—and we still tend to picture the lone tweedy professor when we imagine the life of the mind—the word itself is useful. Learning and creating have always taken place in company.
And yet we are still often surprised—even dismissive, I dare say—when scholarship in the humanities does the same, regarding collaborative work as somehow lesser than solitary work.
We claim we value collaboration broadly in the academy, of course. Strategic plans include it. We create interdisciplinary institutes and collaborative grants, and we urge our students to learn to work in teams. Thus, on the surface, we are very fond of collaboration—right up until somebody has to put it on a CV. At the point where scholarly work becomes the basis for evaluation and promotion, collaboration is good—but not quite as good as the ideal of independent inquiry.
The lone author, then, still stands as the default. Monographs reign supreme while collaborative work requires some explanation: Who actually wrote the thing? How much did each person contribute? Is an edited collection really the same as a monograph, or is a co-authored book a mere half-book? We don’t tend to think first of the search for truth together; instead, we try to parse out who did what so we can check a box on a form.
I recall, with a bit of a sting still, Karen Kelsky‘s acerbic advice on her The Professor Is In blog to young scholars wondering whether they should edit a collection: “No,” she says. “Let me say it again: no.” What if it’s just papers from a conference panel? No. What if I’m co-editing, so I don’t have to do all the work? No. One cannot accuse her of mincing words.
And, absolutely, there are reasons for this type of advice. Institutions have to evaluate scholarship, and young scholars need honest guidance about what kinds of work will help them earn tenure. But now, as a full professor—and thus perhaps finally entitled to some opinions of my own, like Kelsky—I find myself reflecting anew, especially after many joyful, generative years spent editing and writing collaboratively: should the advice of the secular academy always be the advice of the Christian academy? Ought we sometimes say yes where it says no?
Because I think that beneath our suspicion of collaborative scholarship lies an assumption that Christian universities ought to be particularly willing to interrogate: that intellectual achievement belongs most fully to the individual. Christianity, though, offers a valuable corrective to what can become a rather lonely vision of intellectual life.
Consider Augustine’s Confessions, a work that might at first appear to be the ultimate story of an individual soul; after all, that is how this book is often taught and read. Yet Augustine does not arrive at faith or understanding on his own. Friends accompany him, argue with him, read with him, mourn with him, and redirect him. His mother Monica does, too.
In Book IV, mourning the death of a beloved friend, Augustine remembers feeling that they had been “one soul in two bodies.” Yet he also recognizes the danger of making another finite person bear what belongs to God alone. A few pages later, he remembers what he loved about friendship: talking and laughing together, reading together, disagreeing without bitterness, “sometimes teaching, sometimes being taught,” missing one another and welcoming one another home.
That sounds suspiciously akin to intellectual community in its highest form. Augustine becomes Augustine, the scholar we revere in Christian circles today, only in and because of company.
Christians believe in a God who creates abundantly and invites human beings to participate in the work of making, cultivating, and renewing the world. We do not create ex nihilo. We receive languages we did not invent, traditions we did not begin, books we did not write, teachers who formed us, ideas that came to us through other minds. Scholarship has always worked this way, even when only one name appears on the cover. Perhaps collaborative scholarship simply makes our dependence on one another harder to hide.
And that dependence can feel risky. To collaborate is to give up some control—over the sentence, the argument, even the finished work that will eventually appear beside our name. We academics spend a lot of time establishing what is ours: our argument, our research, our contribution. But Christianity asks us to pay attention beyond ourselves: to listen, to receive, to allow another person’s thought to alter our own. Sometimes it even asks us to relinquish a little of our will for the good of another—and for the intellectual community of which we are a part.
Paul’s image of the body in 1 Corinthians is helpful here: the eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you.” We are gifted differently, and those differences don’t diminish the body; they make the body possible. What might happen if we brought that same imagination more deliberately into our scholarly lives—if another scholar’s gifts were not automatically read as competition for our own, but as an enlargement of what becomes possible when we work together? For Christian scholars, collaboration may be more than an efficient way to work. It may be a Christian practice in and of itself: an intellectual expression of humility, generosity, and receptivity to the gifts of others. And perhaps it is one small way that Christ animates the intellectual life, reminding us that knowledge, like so many of God’s gifts, becomes more abundant when it is shared.
