ABSTRACT
As I have found writing this chapter, engaging with the personal and professional dilemmas of others invites attention to one’s own. In reading these three chapters by John Liang, Kitty Purgason, and Don Snow on Christianity and related pedagogical concerns, I have been made more aware of my own insights and blind spots on this topic. As for the latter, a noticeable gap in my existing publications on language and identity (e.g., Morgan, 1997, 2004, 2007), is any discussion of spirituality or religion as salient components and/or outcomes of language practices and discourses. So, where does this apparent blind spot come from? Upon reflection, I recognize several contributing elements. Certainly, the need to kick-start an academic career requires engaging in the dominant conversations of one’s intended community of practice, and in TESOL, the sociolinguistic and cognitive variability that might arise from religiosity has yet to insert itself alongside gendered, racialized, and ethno-linguistic factors as a publishable debating point. My ambivalence and inattention to spirituality in the context of language and identity research has personal origins as well, in particular, deeply edged memories of growing up Jewish in the small, mid-western Canadian city of Regina, in which being part of a struggling religious minority (now approximately 150 families in a city of 200,000) was often difficult and confusing. I still remember the occasional religious taunts, a few subsequent fights in the school yard, and a general resentment of having to attend Hebrew school and later having a Bar Mitzvah while other kids had the freedom to play. I don’t mean to trivialize the notion of freedom here, but what comes to mind is how hard the Jewish community had to work to generate the religious solidarity and group cohesiveness that might sustain itself against the ever-present and often overwhelming pressures to assimilate. It was much later, in 1984, while working as a volunteer laborer at Deganya Bet kibbutz in northern Israel, when I came to appreciate and understand this intensity of activity, the collective obligations it required of community members, and how it seemed to permeate even the smallest performative act of faith in Regina. In terms of identity, being a Jew in Israel was much easier. There was no need to explain or to justify. The architecture of reinforcement was everywhere, allowing for the luxury of choosing to be humble or assertive,
innovative, or trangressive in ways unimaginable in my childhood home, where everything around us promoted and underwrote the “normalcy” and “truth” of a Christian world. Coming from Canada to Israel and back, I became more aware of the unacknowledged power that comes with membership in the dominant faith-how members of powerful congregations need not speculate about the adverse consequences of public observance and how even the most narrow, fundamentalist notions may be accorded serious and sustained policy consideration simply because of the religious authority behind it.1
