Back around 1980, when I was a philosophy professor at Wheaton College in Illinois, I introduced a course on work and leisure, and, in 2015, I had the occasion to renew teaching on that subject as a professor of Christian philosophy and ethics at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. At Wheaton, the topic stirred interest off campus as well as on, and I was invited to address it in a variety of venues, e.g., a ski lodge in Breckenridge, Colorado and a church near Water Tower Place in Chicago. It’s been clear that the subject matter is immediately engaging to a wide spectrum of people.
The first time I taught it at Southern was on the traditional model, with once-a-week, three-hour, face-to-face instruction throughout the term. The second time around, the course was of hybrid construction, with two days on campus preceded by a range of activities, some of which were new to the course. When I was drawing up the hybrid version, it seemed like a good idea to have students take brief “selfie” phone videos to share with classmates and elicit responses. I was freshly tuned up on work/leisure video clips, having shot dozens of them around the country (from DC to Detroit to Dallas and to a couple of towns in Indonesia) and the techies on campus told the students how to link their productions to our instructional software. Again, it seemed like a good idea, but it proved unwieldy, with hit-or-miss postings and a number of students falling behind.
I regret dropping the obituary notes, for those mini-biographies provided great career overviews. But I did stick with two first-version requirements that proved to be intriguing and even edifying—“Outside Testimony” and “Page of Personal Resolve.” The former required interviews with acquaintances “out in the world,” asking them to take stock of their work life—satisfactions and disappointments, purposes and challenges, and the stewardship of their callings. The second had the students apply the lessons of the course to what lay ahead of them, both in the workplace and in their recreational choices. A number of them told me how gratifying those exercises were, especially in light of the course content.
Each time I’ve taught this course, I’ve worked within a Christian setting, so we made good use of theology, church history, and Christian ethics, e.g., in our study of monasticism, Luther’s teaching on the sacredness of all vocations, Sabbath rest, and guidelines for the choice of entertainment. But as this syllabus’s course “Rationale” notes, the topic draws all sorts of secular material into the conversation, e.g., Kant on drudgery; Jefferson on agriculturalism; Steinbeck on Dustbowl migrants; The Office on TV; and Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter.
An overarching question throughout the course was whether we worked so that we might rest or, rather, rested so that we might get back to work. Is it our purpose to “Get all we can, can all we get, and sit on our cans”? Or is it to never completely retire as long as we live on earth?
The regular course, represented by the syllabus you see here, had no videos, but that all changed when we went online for a hybrid class, an option much encouraged by the school. By the time we launched the latter, I was able to post sixty-nine videos, a dozen shot on campus with a crew, essentially lectures interspersed with images, whether the lyrics to a work song or a photo of one of our writers. The other fifty-odd videos traced my travels, with tripod or selfie stick in hand.
Along the way I’d interviewed a stay-at-home mom, a hotel housekeeper, a writer/speaker whose main theme was TGIM (“Thank God It’s Monday”), disaster relief volunteers, and residents of an assisted-living facility; I delivered impromptu lectures in front of the first Ford assembly plant in Highland Park, Michigan and on the brink of a huge limestone quarry near Bloomington, Indiana (think the movie, Breaking Away); and I walked through a furniture factory in Dumas, Arkansas as well as a riverfront municipal playground in Owensboro, Kentucky.
I got into this “movie” business accidentally. On a seminary mission trip to Detroit, we helped some ministers up that way by shooting short videos of places needing assistance from the Bible Belt. Some of what we shot was “Ruin Porn,” images of abandoned and run-down once-great buildings, such as the old Packard Plant. But we also filmed signs of new life, such as Comerica Park, where the Tigers play. And as we made our way down Woodward Avenue past Wayne State University, we came to the Detroit Institute of Arts, which I used to frequent as a kid on visits to my maternal grandparents. It hit me that I might shoot a little footage to fold into an online aesthetics course I was building with the tech team back on campus. So I had one of the students follow me gallery to gallery with the little, almost-lipstick-sized camera they’d provided me.
When I got back to the school, I asked if I could maybe use that footage, and their response was, “Are you kidding? Yes!” It was like catnip to them. And right off, they ordered me a flip-screen digital camera, tripod, and lavalier, urging me to take them with me wherever I went. So I was off to the races, supplying them material from The Treasury in Petra, Jordan (as seen in Raiders of the Lost Ark); the performance of buskers in San Diego’s Balboa Park and the plaza in front of Boston’s Faneuil Hall; the interior of “Graceland II” in Holly Springs, Mississippi, full of kitschy Elvis memorabilia; the Ole Miss campus, with its many Greek columns, reflected in the school’s logo; big murals on downtown buildings in Grand Rapids, Michigan, as well as on the Ohio River flood wall in Paducah, Kentucky. These were well-received in the aesthetics course, so extending the practice to the Work and Leisure course was natural.
Two other quick words on pedagogy: 1. Since my days as a philosophy prof at Wheaton, I’ve given the students open-book, open-note (but not open-neighbor) clippings finals, described in the syllabus featured here; they’ve been very helpful in spreading out the curve, with some students really “getting it,” and others not so much; 2. This syllabus provides links to online material, and these readings have proven to be very helpful in a variety of courses, providing an ancillary anthology, with no cost to the students.
In closing, I thought you might like a look at a few images drawn from the work & leisure course videos:
And I also show the front pages from two of my clippings finals in other courses.
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Mark Coppenger
Mark Coppenger (BA, Ouachita; PhD Vanderbilt; MDiv, Southwestern) has taught philosophy at a number of colleges and seminaries, and also served as an Army officer and pastor. A good introduction to his work is available at his website, markcoppenger.com. Two new books are forthcoming this spring—Apologetical Aesthetics (Wipf and Stock), featuring a dozen of his doctoral students in theology and the arts, and a commissioned work from the Scottish publisher, Christian Focus (If Christianity Is So Good, Why Are Christians So Bad?).
A fascinating summary of what seems to be a worthwhile course.