Click here to listen to the episode on Spotify
In the twelfth episode of the second season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Karen An-hwei Lee, Professor of English and Provost at Wheaton College. Lee opens by discussing the importance of the Christian imagination, how such an imagination is fostered by a liberal arts education, and how such an imagination is critical to the faithful exercise of professions such as medicine, law, business, and ministry. Lee explores how poetry became foundational to her calling as an educator, the ways poetry fires the Christian imagination, and how poetic structures express ways the image of God is present in the lives of the people she encounters. Ream then asks Lee to explore the ways various poets and teachers nurtured her calling and helped her to see more in the world than that which materially resides before us. They close their conversation by exploring Lee’s understanding of the academic vocation and her hopes in the months and years to come in terms of the understanding of the academic vocation that unites educators serving the Wheaton community.
- Karen An-hwei Lee’s Duress (Cascade Books, 2022)
- Karen An-hwei Lee’s Sonata in K (Ellipsis Press, 2017)
- Karen An-hwei Lee’s Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations (Cambria Press, 2013)
- Karen An-hwei Lee’s In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004)
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
—
Our guest is Karen An-hwei Lee, Professor of English and Provost at Wheaton College. Thank you for joining us.
Karen An-hwei Lee: Good morning, Todd. Thank you for having me this morning.
Todd Ream: Critics often argue part of what presently plagues higher education is the result of the minimization or even the elimination of the imagination as a capacity worth cultivating. In essence, we’ve reduced education to focus on what simply resides materially before us in the immediate moment.
While the imagination has historically played a significant role in Christian formation, critics also argue Christian higher education is not immune from what plagues higher education as a whole. In what ways, if any, can the Christian liberal arts be a response to such a challenge?
Karen An-hwei Lee: Sure. So, God uses the Christian liberal arts to edify and shape the human imagination. And so, through Christian faith integration and spiritual formation in our students and our faculty scholars and our creative performing artists, that imagination can edify public Christian theology, also raise up Christian believers and leaders to serve the Church and society and be our future shapers of public Christian discourse.
Todd Ream: Thank you. In what ways, if any, should the disciplines that comprise the liberal arts be asked to work together to cultivate such imagination?
Karen An-hwei Lee: Yeah, so I see here at Wheaton College, for instance, multiple disciplines collaborating through our faculty/student collaborative research projects and creative projects across different disciplines. We also have an award winning and nationally ranked interdisciplinary studies program interdisciplinary studies that exists in the interstices among multiple disciplines and asks bigger questions about life and God and what our callings are, vocations are with our earthbound time on earth as we look heavenward towards eternity.
Todd Ream: In what ways, then, should theology be woven into the fabric of those disciplines?
Karen An-hwei Lee: Yeah, absolutely. So, of course, theology is also a disciplinary field with its academic boundaries as well as a subject matter specialty. And we have outstanding theology faculty here at Wheaton College.
So theological studies also provides a framework and foundational knowledge for our core studies, our Christ at the Core general curriculum, which provides a basis for our graduate school, our graduate studies, advanced studies, post baccalaureate as well. So theological studies are interwoven through Christian faith integration throughout our curriculum.
Todd Ream: Professional disciplines have grown in terms of student numbers and in turn faculty numbers populating faculties on college and university campuses in the last couple of decades. The faculty, though, often in those areas have to grapple with the fact that there are certain numbers of credit hours for licensure and such.
But they also argue that the liberal arts are necessary to create flexible graduates for the learned professions. In what ways then is the imagination important for formation for say service in medicine or law or business?
Karen An-hwei Lee: The Christian liberal arts, the shaping of holistic integration whole person education that integrates the brain and the mind, as well as the heart and the seed of the emotions, nurtures virtuous thought and those habits of mind that equip, empower, and also prepare graduates for a future world in whatever careers that they might choose to be leaders, and also to bear witness to Christ in those different areas.
Todd Ream: Thank you. If I may, I want to ask you some questions now about your own sort of journey and your own preparation for the academic vocation and your service there at Wheaton.
You grew up in Massachusetts, earned a BA and an MFA from Brown University, then headed West and earned an MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
While you’ve published novels such as Sonata and K, and nonfiction titles such as Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora, poetry is the primary focus of your scholarly and creative efforts. Your first of five books of poetry to date In Media Res won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the Norma Farber First Award from the Poetry Society in America. At what point in time did poetry begin to capture your imagination?
Karen An-hwei Lee: First of all, we know from Ephesians 2:10 that we are all God’s living poems. So, when I see people, I see poems, and I see poems everywhere. In terms of my own journey with poetry as a literary genre, I had fantastic teachers over the years.
So, in first grade, a wonderful teacher who had us writing and illustrating chapbooks about plants and seeds and our own lives. And she would read aloud these chapbooks to us while we sat criss cross applesauce on the rug in the classroom. Then I had Chinese school teachers who had us memorizing classical Chinese poetry.
And we also had a fourth grade teacher who had us journaling in nature outside in the black and white composition journals. Fifth grade teacher who had us taking dictation, so Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, Carl Sandburg, and that erasable ballpoint blue pen that we used in fifth grade.
And so, some of the years I can remember a moment where teachers or mentors brought poetry alive. My mother is also an archivist. She’s retired now, but I was surrounded by books when I was little.
Todd Ream: Now when you say, when you see people, you see poetry. Can you unpack a little bit more what you mean by that? Because when I see people, I see people. When I see poetry, I know enough to ask you to help me with it too. But yeah, help me understand, yeah, what you mean by that.
Karen An-hwei Lee: Every soul is a living poem so the Greek is poiema in Ephesians 2:10 and it’s in different translations. It can be a living poem or a masterpiece, handiwork, workmanship and it’s God. So God created souls, created people. We are made in the image of God, imago dei.
And so when I see people, it’s some people describe the souls as oh, we see diamonds, or we see this, or I see poems instead of the diamonds. And sometimes the souls can’t look like diamonds, if you want to use a metaphor. Yeah, so, I see special living, sentient peers in this earthbound existence that we have for this season who are made in the image of God, the Creator.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Yeah, that’s beautiful. Thank you. You mentioned the teachers were critical to your interest in poetry and your formation as a poet. Do you credit any writers with cultivating such an understanding and is there one whose work you turn to for a greater measure of inspiration than perhaps others?
Karen An-hwei Lee: Yeah so, you know so many poets I admire. So the Polish poet Anna Kamieńska, American poets, Anne Carson, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, who’s an Asian-American poet, Emily Dickinson, of course, since dictation in fifth grade, also Mary Oliver so a range of poets writing variously in mingling the abstract and the concreteness of our lived experience and asking large questions.
And also, a special use of language that is distinctive that sort of sets them apart from others. I mean, someone like Mary Oliver has a sort of plain spoken language. But when you slow down and read her carefully, there’s a real profound depth to the truth that she’s imparting. And she’ll just take a sort of a special angle on something, whether it’s the waterfall that’s knifing down or she’s looking up at the sky and she sees swans in the clouds like a mattress or something.
Aame thing for Emily Dickinson. So her poems are pretty short. They’re these dashes. And if you look at her original manuscript, some of the dashes are shorter than others. And some are curly cues. She also had variants for words. So you could switch out words for the ones that appear in a print version. There are alternates that she was thinking about that she also noted.
And she wanted her poems to breathe, and they were very abstract, so she’d talk about the brain, but then talk about the brain in terms of being wider than the sky, and then connected to nature, as well as metaphysical questions, faith, and doubt that she was wrestling with on multiple levels. This makes poetry endlessly interesting, and this could be a whole other interview, Todd.
Todd Ream: We need someone with, with greater qualifications than me in this particular area, to least carry my end of the weight here, but I do want to ask in what ways do you then, when you read these writers who inspire you, do you sort of do so with an eye to adopting either implicitly or explicitly certain qualities of their style versus retaining and then currently cultivating and advancing your own style?
Karen An-hwei Lee: Yeah so there are different seasons to a poet’s life in terms of how she, how generative she is and how much time she actually has to write and, and what sparks inspiration. And so I’d say there, there was a time, say maybe two or three decades ago when I would really study poets I admired and look at what the technique was and what is it that they’re doing in the poems that are, are just sort of blowing the roof off the top of my head is only taking the top off your head. It’s a poem.
No, it’s just sort of this continuous musical cadence or background music. So when I’m looking at a poem by a poet whom I admire, let’s say a new poem by Anne Carson or someone, or maybe Berssenbrugge has come out with a new book and she’s working with an artist, so there’s a sort of visual word-image relationship going there.
Then I just ask what is a poem doing? Sort of like it’s an organic type of cell and just looking at it through a microscope. And what is it that I can learn through osmosis of the pleasure of looking at this poem and its difficult turns and the sort of mysterious moments that are a little obscured. I don’t quite understand what’s going on but I’m enjoying the experience of relating to the language and seeing these images and how the whole poem sort of resonates on multiple levels.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. When working with words in the form of poetry, in what ways do you find it challenging, but in what ways do you also find it joyful and life-giving? And what ways might those experiences be related to each other?
Karen An-hwei Lee: I think it is related so, readers of poetry, for instance you know, general audiences, or if you’re teaching non-English majors, for instance, poetry can be a formidable, formidable, yeah, object. So it’s not even a page, in some cases, it’s staring up at you and it seems a little enigmatic. And so the whole process is, it’s almost like practicing a discipline of spiritual attention, or mindfulness, or meditation or Lectio Divina.
There’s also Visio Divina, praying with the eyes, is slowing down and, and noticing and observing, what is the poem doing? How are you responding to the poem? What is it that the poem is divulging, revealing, or maybe concealing and being a little elliptical? Why is the poem doing these things?
And so poem, poetry can be dense. There’s poetic compression, special uses of language that can be abstruse to some readerly audiences. That’s also part of the joy of poetry too, is when you really sit down to spend time with a poem and you get those little sparks and aha moments, or the poem just speaks to you.
It’s a little bit like that experience that people have when they are looking at abstract art or, or some sort of medium that doesn’t immediately make itself figuratively or transparently representational or denotative. So there’s a reward that comes out at the end, but you do have to earn it sitting down with the poem.
Todd Ream: Perhaps embedded in what you were just talking about there in terms of how to approach a poem and how to give it the attention and muster the attention that it deserves, in what ways is poetry then central to or critical to the formation of our imaginations and to a Christian imagination?
Karen An-hwei Lee: I’ll share this little story. When I landed on Wheaton College campus in 2020, there was a time that was overshadowed by a global pandemic, a very difficult time. And so what role does poetry have in such a season of challenge and change and uncertainty?
And so I shared with you that when I see people, I see poems. And when I landed on this campus I actually saw poems everywhere, including throughout God’s creation, and also throughout the time of suffering. So I don’t know if this answers your question directly, or maybe I’ve sort of digressed away from answering your question, so feel free to circle back to it.
But I believe that if we dedicate the human imagination to God’s purposes, and also to seek His will in things, then He also will continue to speak through us through the Holy Spirit. He is also the Logos, He is the Word, through scriptural truth. And then, whatever gifts that He has placed in you, it’ll inspire those and sort of spark those to bear fruit.
And so these joyful poems that acknowledge suffering in the midst of a global pandemic, in a time of change, challenge, and uncertainty emerged in a collection called Duress, which was by Cascade in 2022. And those are all poems I wrote during my first two years here.
So another image I think that I’ve shared with others before is in a time of suffering, I have this image of a giant granite millstone, which I saw at the Mission San Juan Capistrano. Here’s another example of where poems come from, and where a poet might see poems, is that it looks like a pretty, it’s greasy because it was crushing olives or olive oil, mundane, old object that, upon a first glance has no innate aesthetic beauty to it is not artful per se, in terms of artistic intentional shaping for an aesthetic effect or something, even a conceptual way.
But in times of suffering, God has brought up this image of a giant millstone at the Mission San Juan Capistrano, rolling slowly, crushing olives. And it’s that first cold press that we all really like when the olive oil runs out and it’s got that sort of goldy-greenish color. And so during times of suffering and duress, when the millstone crushes us, that’s when what’s inside runs out.
And I think, in a way, that’s how poems also can work, too, for people who are Christian believers. And so the purpose then would be to use the poems or to have the poems bear witness to God’s purpose in a time of suffering.
Todd Ream: Yeah, well said. Thank you. Thank you. The volume that you mentioned, Duress that was published, a lot of those poems were also offered before faculty members and in faculty meetings that were held during that season. Is there one in particular that you might highlight, a particular poem from that volume that you might highlight?
Karen An-hwei Lee: Yeah, so our wonderful faculty opened up spaces, even though we were socially distanced and remote for me to join them and share devotions. So I would usually include a poem. And an example would be a human disaster and leadership humanitarian disaster relief program, leadership relief program, HDL we call it. And so they invited me to share devotional. I included a poem, blessing for refugees and for our relief workers all around the world in a time of crisis.
And our faculty members in the Humanitarian Disaster Leadership Program have been very active in serving around the world including in, in war zones, including in areas where there is a lot of refugee migration to be the hands and feet of Christ.
And so, this poem then grew some little legs so another thing that happens by imagination is things get personified. So poems also become people, come from people. They also become people, instead of hopping around like a grasshopper, going to different places. And so it’s a poem that has had a bit more circulation than some of the other poems because of community invitations and interests in, in seeing poems as harbingers and messengers of hope in a time of change, challenge, and crisis.
Todd Ream: Thank you very much. Prior to your appointment, then, as Professor of English and Provost at Wheaton during that season in 2020, you served as Vice Provost at Point Loma Nazarene University. At what point in time did you determine administrative service was part of how you were called to exercise your understanding of the academic vocation?
Karen An-hwei Lee: So before I joined the Nazarene University, a campus that I really, really love, I was faculty for 15 years, so tenured faculty at a small Assemblies of God College in Orange County, California, in Greater Los Angeles. And over time, as I became more senior faculty I collaborated with administrators, as well as with other faculty colleagues and students on a wide range of initiatives, including accreditation and I happen to find accreditation really fun and interesting.
Todd Ream: I’m glad you do.
Karen An-hwei Lee: It might as well be somebody who finds it fun and interesting.
So I enjoy translating things. And so so understanding what the regulations are and why they are that way, and then helping to make them relevant for say faculty and then explaining to, say different committees who are working on assessment or program review or on other types of initiatives for continuous improvement what some of the outcomes we hope to see are, how, how we might arrive at them or what some, what some faculty perspectives or concerns or questions might be, and then relaying that to administration. So, working closely with people in different areas of the college was something I particularly enjoyed. And that eventually led me to a full-time administrative role at the Nazarene University in San Diego.
Todd Ream: That’s interesting. Again, I will say I’m glad that I have colleagues who enjoy accreditation. I’m more than willing to do my part and follow their lead when those seasons roll around but I’m more than willing to let them let them lead and I will follow in that.
Karen An-hwei Lee: I’m happy to be that company, Todd.
Todd Ream: Thank you very much for your service in that sense to us all.
What discernment process then led you to accept the appointment as Professor of English and Provost at Wheaton College?
Karen An-hwei Lee: Yeah, so I love the Christian liberal arts and Wheaton is stellar in every way in terms of living out and expressing that mission. And just the opportunity to serve such a distinguished faculty who have among the world’s strongest thought leaders and public theologians and also the amazing music conservatory that we have with simply amazing faculty composers and performers who are world class. I’ve jumped onto this adventure and am still here.
Todd Ream: Is there such a thing as a typical day? And if there is, what populates it?
Karen An-hwei Lee: I’d say a typical good day is when I have time. It is important to sit down with faculty, with some of our staff leaders as well, our key campus stakeholders, including student facing academic services, and also throughout student development, to think through these different situations and put some options on the table with resources, resources always very good to have, towards solutions.
So then at the end of the day, okay, that was a really good day. You know, I think we made progress on that. People feel heard. We have some options on the table, there’s some resources and we’re pushing forward with some solutions here. So yeah, that’s a typical good day.
Todd Ream: What dimensions of the work then, and perhaps it’s embedded in what you just said here in certain ways or particular ways, do you find sort of most compelling or rewarding then?
Karen An-hwei Lee: The reward is yes, I was able to advocate for something effectively. And sometimes that advocacy is people felt understood, they felt heard, and they knew what goals we’re heading towards. And there is, for the most part, consensus on that. There is, okay that’s, that feels really rewarding.
Todd Ream: Now, you mentioned the word consensus and we’re talking about faculty members. So those would be very good days there because as we often say, if you have one of us, you have two opinions perhaps, or if you have two of us, we have three opinions. So yeah, no building that is, is critical and it does come but it, it takes time. It takes investment. And it takes a willingness to listen and learn from people.
Karen An-hwei Lee: Yeah, something that I really enjoyed in our in our conversations that you put together around the Emerson Project with the other provosts is chatting with the other provosts about how they approach things and what they’re thinking about and something that Mike Hardin mentioned, which I really appreciated was that he highlighted the importance of of the ethos of agape on a Christian university campus or a Christian liberal arts campus like Wheaton College.
And so without that ethos of agape and our koinonia fellowship it, it makes it even harder to have consensus if you don’t have agape or koinonia as some of your foundational principles and values and theologically scripturally something that is covenantal for us as a community.
Todd Ream: Now I often think the most rewarding part about that dimension of building consensus is that you have people with well-developed ideas about things, who can come together, under the guise of, and the understanding of that together, we can potentially even have better ideas, and that that will emerge as a result of that.
If you don’t have what you were just mentioning that Mike talked about in his article and the spirit of agape, our opinions can become those which, with which we wield for power over another individual or turf or whatever it may be, especially if we’re talking about resources that have a finite, which we always are in some capacity, a finite measurement to them.
But if we believe that our opinions can be greater as a result of consensus and then my thoughts in conjunction with your thoughts, then become something better than what I could have otherwise imagined. Yeah, it’s a beautiful process worth the investment.
Karen An-hwei Lee: Amen to that. Better informed unity through consensus.
Todd Ream: You mentioned the project with which you worked with Mike Hardin and several other provosts who we’ll talk about here in just a minute. And as an expression of what you sort of learned to date as Wheaton’s provost, you contributed the article to Christian Scholar’s Review, the Fall 2024 issue, entitled The Christian Scholar as Poet. Would you please share how you came to frame your article? Because in many ways it’s rooted in what we’ve talked about, but in other ways it’s bigger than that too.
Karen An-hwei Lee: Yeah, so taking Ralph Waldo Emerson’s The American Scholar essay as a springing point, which the four or five provosts of us read together. So if, if a contemporary American scholar is a well qualified academician and a subject matter specialist, then the Christian scholar, a Christian scholar, I should say, is called to offer more than that.
And so with the Christian faith integration and also the mentoring of students through whole person spiritual formation for their lifelong journeys in Christ to become public shapers of Christian theology and Christian discourse, and also to help serve the Church, to build the Church and to serve society, to be future shapers of ecclesial and social discourse as the world’s best Christian thinkers, then the Christian scholar is called to do more than a regular American scholar or secular scholar.
And the poet part is just sort of contemplating, you know my own sort of parallel journey as a scholar poet. It is that no poet now truly, I believe, writes in isolation. So going back to Emerson and sort of the solitude and being a transparent eyeball in nature and this sort of romanticized notion of the type of intellectual scholar that Emerson was talking about at an earlier time in our nation’s history when it, he was very much challenging traditional paradigms, educational paradigms, social paradigms, and wanting to you know, individualistically pave his own way.
No, no poets or scholars nowadays, whether Christian or American or global really work in their own caves. So that’s where it comes in as sort of the collaborative community of the choir of voices of your peers, as well as the socially marginal or liminal space that intellectuals and poets can have in parallel with each other.
Now, I was fortunate to be educated at institutions where poets and scholars, literary scholars had quite a bit of commerce with each other and would be friends with each other and also work with each other. And so the literary scholars would comment upon the poet’s work and so there was maybe a broader academic readership for some of the poets. And the poets also were versed in what was happening in contemporary literary scholarships and what the major issues were in literary scholarship.
And so it’s this sort of permeable boundaries among genres and disciplines and modes of knowing, that is what I was sort of bringing to the Christian scholar-poet reflective thinking that I was talking about in my essay.
Poet also maybe this is a romantic part of me, has sort of a role as being a seer and a sage in some instances for his or her age, and generation, and so that’s something that Emerson also alluded to in the poet. He also wrote some poems of his own as well.
And so it’s trying to blend all these things together in terms of thinking holistically about the role of a Christian scholar today and how, how the scholar itself and the academy has traveled quite a ways in some terms from the Emersonian notion of you know, the thinker in nature in solitude, immersed in his thoughts and trying to think the very best of thoughts.
So I think that Jay Brewster of Pepperdine mentioned, which I thought was interesting. So Jay comes from a scientific discipline and he said nowadays scientists really have to collaborate. And the collaboration is grand-scale because we have access to cloud-based data and you can communicate with scientists all over the world on a major research project. And you really cannot avoid doing this thing, you cannot be doing this thing by yourself in isolation. You cannot avoid this sort of grand, grander scale, larger scheme collaboration. And so that’s, that’s something that was interesting to me too.
I come from the humanities also do come from a family of scientists, so I have a glimpse into, into their world of research as well, is that things are in this age of big critical data in the 21st century, and also with artificial intelligence, very much knowledge has greatly expanded and is so enmeshed. So I think I strayed away a little bit from your original question about what my paper was about. I started to unpack the entire paper.
Todd Ream: Well, no, it’s, it’s especially helpful to hear that. I think like we were talking about, say with meetings and about how ideas are enhanced and grow scholarship when practiced in such a manner as you’re talking about can do the same.
In the humanities, though, unfortunately, I think we’ve lagged behind our colleagues in the sciences and the social sciences in terms of working in collaborative structures and especially doing so when inviting students in the practice of undergraduate research, so to say. They tend to have figured out how to construct teams and work with teams and organize teams.
So it’s very helpful to hear you say not only what you experienced as a graduate student, but then also what your optimism is for those of us who work in contexts that are primarily within the humanities too. So yeah, no, thank you.
You mentioned the sage or seer role of the poet. One of the qualities of the academic vocation that has been argued to be declining is the role of the public intellectual. How do you see the poet and the poet in this understanding of the academic vocation from Christian vantage point or perspective, contributing in ways that public intellectuals once did, or in some ways inspiring a new, an understanding of the value of the public intellectual?
Karen An-hwei Lee: I take Daniel from the Old Testament as a model for how contemporary poets, and also poets throughout the centuries, could possibly be well versed in the secular knowledge, in Daniel’s case, Babylonian literature and history, and help to interpret dreams and signs of the times, to advise leaders. In Daniel’s case, the king, about directions and God’s purpose and also all of his purpose is to bear witness and to be a part of God’s plan and to be a part of whatever it is that is a story that God is writing through human civilization, through the generations.
And so poetry and dream interpretation and oneiromancy and being able to interpret symbols, it goes beyond, it’s not mere, but sort of cultural semiotics or sort of decoding and interpreting cultural artifacts or signs and symbols of a society.
But also something that Daniel was doing was inspiring people to, to look at God when he’s thrown in the den of the lions and the lions have their mouths shut. You know, that’s a very powerful witness that he is serving somebody who is aware of all the laws and literature and history of that secular age, but is actually more than that. God is the creator and he is the source of everything that is good. And Daniel is a part of that.
And so in terms of poets being seers and sages, it’s I don’t throw this term around lightly or want to just, just bring it out, but sort of a prophetic type of station or role there is a potential there for that.
Todd Ream: Thank you. What are your hopes then for this understanding as it relates to the past, the present, and then the developing future of the academic vocation as it’s exercised at Wheaton College?
Karen An-hwei Lee: You know, we are always interested in ways to become more innovative and also to be versed in cultural understanding about the past as well as implications for the immediate present, as well as the future.
And so we know that Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever, but social institutions and educational paradigms and also human assumptions allying all of these paradigms need to change because we can get off course and we are flawed.
And, and, and so it’s important to have a strong interpretation, understanding of Scripture, and the context in which Scripture was written. And also you know, so strong exegesis and also strong hermeneutics. We know how to interpret it and also how to apply it. And so that’s something lasting at Wheaton that I believe will continue into the future.
We also need to be innovative and be able to adapt, say, our curriculum or our educational paradigms and our mentoring in terms of meeting the needs of students and preparing and equipping them to be the future thought leaders and Christian believers.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Wheaton plays an important role in exercising leadership in Church-related higher education and higher education as a whole. As a result, what are your hopes for this understanding as it might contribute to the academic vocation in other institutions?
Karen An-hwei Lee: Something I’ve really enjoyed in my years here at Wheaton College my fourth year. Actually, I’m entering my fifth year now, so when I say years it’s not decades, I just wanted to say that.
People from other institutions so faculty administrators will ask us for resources. So, you know resources in terms of our faith and learning and faith and teaching program, our two year program in terms of our community covenant, looking at that as one of the models as they look at documents and institutional commitments on their own campuses.
And so, Wheaton has a wealth of these very rigorously thought out through consensus-based discourse that’s Christ-centered in terms of our institutional commitments, our statement of faith, our Christ-centered diversity commitment, and our community covenant, among other important commitment documents that we have that provide a theological foundation to communicate our understanding of how we approach the Gospel, how we approach Christ center pedagogy in our classroom as well as mentoring.
And so we share those freely with our stakeholders and with any other institutions who might want to learn from us, or we can learn from them and engage in a dialogue or a conversation.
Todd Ream: Thank you. As we close our conversation, I want to ask you to reflect a little bit more about what you learned and then what you hope to contribute to those conversations that you’ve mentioned already with other provosts as you all work together on preparing your essays for this theme issue.
You’ve highlighted a couple of contributions already, but are there others that you would want to mention about that experience? And any ways you’d want to acknowledge their contributions to your thinking and what you hope to offer them?
Karen An-hwei Lee: Yeah well, I just wanted to thank Noah Toly who’s also been a colleague of mine here at Wheaton College and also that I greatly admire Nancy Brickhouse. She has tremendous energy and vision for Baylor University and in particular, really enjoyed our thoughtful exchanges on the pragmatic aspects of vocation in the context of Christian formation and preparing our students on both our campuses for the world as they lead and have influence wherever they’re called.
So I guess in a word I would express my gratitude for what my peer colleagues have shared through their projects.
Todd Ream: Thank you very much. Our guest has been Karen An-hwei Lee, Professor of English and Provost at Wheaton College. Thank you for sharing your time, your insights, and your wisdom with us.
Karen An-hwei Lee: Thank you so much for hosting me, Todd. I’ve very much enjoyed our conversation today.
—
Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
