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CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND FAITH

Jacob W. Neumann
Department of Curriculum and Instruction The University of TexasPan American

Abstract. Critical pedagogy has often been linked in the literature to faith traditions such as liberation theology, usually with the intent of improving or redirecting it. While recognizing and drawing from those previous linkages, Jacob Neumann goes further in this essay and develops the thesis that critical pedagogy can not just benet from a connection with faith traditions, but is actually, in and of itself, a practice of faith. In this analysis, he juxtaposes critical pedagogy against three conceptualizations of faith: John Caputos blurring of the modernist division between faith and reason, Paul Tillichs argument that faith is ultimate concern, and Paulo Freires theology and early Christian inuences. Using this three-pronged approach, Neumann argues that regardless of how it is seen, critical pedagogy manifests as a practice of faith all the way down.

Introduction
In 1996, Barry Kanpol called the educational left to come to terms with the profound theological possibilities and implications of its work.1 In analyzing the relation between critical pedagogy and faith, I seek not only to address this call but to tackle what I see as a more fundamental issue: the essential nature of critical pedagogy as a practice of faith. While I draw from Kanpols work in linking critical pedagogy and liberation theology, I push further and nd that critical pedagogy, whether it is seen as a reection of Christian beliefs or as a purely secular enterprise, is in fact, in all of its guises, a manifestation of faith. This understanding of the fundamental nature of critical pedagogy is important because it opens new contexts and new opportunities for critical work. Kanpol and Fred Yeo argue that a spiritually driven vision is missing from the literature of educational critique.2 I disagree. I nd that much, if not most, educational critique is spiritually driven or at least driven by faith. But, and this is the essential point, it all depends on how we think about faith. It is my purpose in this essay to collide marginalized conceptualizations of faith with a new analysis of critical pedagogy, not in an effort to reinvest critical work with a spiritual vision, but in order to help reinvest critical work with meaning and efcacy in our schools.

A Brief Outline
Critical pedagogy has a complex relation with faith and has been repeatedly linked to it in the literature.3 Such linkages t our commonsense understanding. It
1. Barry Kanpol, Critical Pedagogy and Liberation Theology: Borders for a Transformative Agenda, Educational Theory 46, no. 1 (1996): 105. 2. Barry Kanpol and Fred Yeo, Foreword, in The Academy and the Possibility of Belief, ed. Mary Buley-Meissner, Mary Thompson, and Elizabeth Tan (Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2000), xii. 3. See Phillip Berryman, Liberation Theology (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press, 1987); Myles Horton and Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking, ed. Brenda Bell, John Gavenda, EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 61 Number 5 2011 Board of Trustees University of Illinois 2011

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takes faith to challenge the status quo. It takes faith to challenge school practices, especially as a teacher within the school. Critical pedagogy certainly places faith in dialogue.4 For Paulo Freire, faith in dialogue requires an intense faith in humankind, faith in their power to make and remake, to create and re-create, faith in their vocation to be more fully human.5 And critical pedagogy holds faith in students, faith that they will take the critical path or will at least adopt some measure of criticality into their daily lives even after they have left the educator. Often, however, linkages between critical pedagogy and faith traditions seem to serve as measures to improve critical pedagogy: to reframe, rethink, or redirect it. For example, Joe Kincheloe draws upon Buddhist insights that involve isolating and letting go of an egocentrism that blinds us to the virtual and relational nature of our selfhood in order for critical pedagogy to avoid those denitions of critical work that position it as an egocentric manifestation of the combative proponent of rationality.6 In another example, Amy Goodburn compares her faith in critical pedagogy with some of her students personal religious faith; for Goodburn, each is a belief system that provides structure for interpreting the world, offering both context and meaning. Where Goodburn initially saw disconnection between her critical aspirations and her students fundamentalist religious beliefs, reection led her to see more connections than differences between the discourses of fundamentalism and critical pedagogy.7 These connections led Goodburn to claim that perhaps faith is what is needed most for a successful critical pedagogy faith in the value of initiating dialogue in the face of conicts over discourses and faith in students and teachers ability to value and negotiate each others differences.8 And in yet another reference to the value of linking critical pedagogy with faith traditions, Shari Stenberg claims that the prophetic tradition of Liberation Theology offers us visions that may not only enrich our understanding of critical pedagogy, but may also help us to enact it more fully.9
and John Peters (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press, 1990); Kanpol, Critical Pedagogy and Liberation Theology; Amy Goodburn, Its a Question of Faith: Discourses of Fundamentalism and Critical Pedagogy in the Writing Classroom, JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory 18, no. 2 (1998): 333352; and Shari Stenberg, Liberation Theology and Liberatory Pedagogies: Renewing the Dialogue, College English 68, no. 1 (2006): 271290. 4. Nicholas Burbules, Dialogue and Critical Pedagogy, in Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy Today, ed. Ilan Gur-Zeev (Haifa, Israel: Studies in Education, University of Haifa, 2005), 193207. 5. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Ramos (New York: Continuum, 1993), 71. 6. Joe Kincheloe, Critical Pedagogy: A Primer (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 134. 7. Goodburn, Its a Question of Faith, 348. 8. Ibid., 352. 9. Stenberg, Liberation Theology and Liberatory Pedagogies, 288. JACOB W. NEUMANN is Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of TexasPan American, 1201 W. University Dr., Edinburg, TX 78539; e-mail <neumannjw@utpa.edu>. His primary areas of scholarship are critical pedagogy, social education, and educational foundations.

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Like these other scholars, I also develop connections in this essay between critical pedagogy and faith traditions. But I go further and work to develop a thesis usually missed in the literature: that critical pedagogy does not just have religious roots10 and strong connections to liberation theology,11 but is in and of itself a practice of faith. I work here to advance the point that to do critical pedagogy is to practice critical faith in other words, critical pedagogy is not simply inuenced by faith traditions; it is faith all the way down. In arguing this point, I approach the faith of critical pedagogy from three directions, arguing, in turn, its three elements. First, I look at critical faith from the standpoint of the alleged split between reason and belief, drawing primarily from John Caputos argument that reason and belief, contrary to commonplace thinking, are actually not that far apart: reason is not being able to see all the way down and belief is to see only through a glass darkly, but both rest on underlying, taken-for-granted assumptions, so that reason and belief are actually two different kinds of faith.12 Second, I approach critical faith from the standpoint of ultimate concern. Here I lean on Paul Tillichs argument that overturns commonplace understandings of faith as the belief in the unseen or the unseeable, or even as the religious belief in a Creator, and replaces them with an understanding of faith as the quality of having an ultimate concern, something about which one is concerned ultimately.13 Third, I look at it from the standpoint of religious faith, specically drawing from Paulo Freires early religious inuences and from connections to liberation theology. I should note at the outset that I recognize that the three analytical positions I take will at times contradict each other. For example, Caputo seems to imply that faith is, at least in part, the belief in what is not seen. Yet Tillich exploded this distinction by arguing that faith applies not to trust in things not seen, but to an individuals ultimate concern. And neither scholar focuses explicitly on faith as a purely religious affair. My hope, then, in taking this three-pronged approach, is to show that regardless of how it is viewed, critical pedagogy is always an embodiment of faith, a practice of faith. In other words, it is these three elements that comprise critical faith. Critical faith is not sometimes religious or sometimes ultimate concern; it is not merely one element and not the others. Rather, critical pedagogy is faith because it looks through a glass darkly, because
10. See Paulo Freire, The Politics of Education, trans. Donaldo Macedo (South Hadley, Massachusetts: Bergin and Garvey, 1985); and Horton and Freire, We Make the Road by Walking. Freires The Politics of Education will be cited in the text as PE for all subsequent references. 11. See Kanpol, Critical Pedagogy and Liberation Theology; Berryman, Liberation Theology; and Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theory of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1988). 12. John Caputo, Philosophy and Theology (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 2006). This work will be cited in the text as PT for all subsequent references. 13. Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Perennial Classics, 1957). This work will be cited in the text as DF for all subsequent references.

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it holds an ultimate concern, and because it draws from the religious warrants of emancipation and transformation.

Through a Glass Darkly

Critical pedagogy is often a cognitive, rational activity: inquiry, analysis, discourse, action, and the like. But this activity rests on a foundation of belief beliefs about causes and effects, about desires and motivations, even about notions of right and wrong. In other words, critical pedagogy is a rational activity that trusts in a variety of anticipatory assumptions that ground its material potential. Or, as William James observed, there are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming.14 Thus, from one perspective, critical pedagogy is an act of faith simply because of these underlying assumptions. For this analysis I draw heavily from Caputos concise discussion of the weakening modernist distinction between faith and reason. To introduce this discussion, I quote a section from Caputo at length:
To understand is not a kind of pure staring at an object. True, we are constantly receiving input from the world, but whatever we receive is received in a manner that is suitable for the receiver who must make ready for the reception. Even the most elemental perception is structured around a moment of expectation that is conrmed or not. When we open the door, we expect to nd a house inside, not a wind-swept prairie; when we lift the telephone book, we expect to feel its weight; when we sink into a chair, we expect it to hold us up. The perceptual world is to an important extent a coherent set of expectations, what Heidegger called an ensemble of interpretive for-structures, by means of which we make our way around the world via felicitous assumptions, ways of taking things as such-and-such, where if we move it, lift it, use it, eat or drink it, greet it with a friendly hello, our expectations are conrmed or not. (PT, 55)

Besides these nuanced for-structures that apply to everyday life, critical pedagogy holds its own range of assumptions: that society can be changed through critical action, dialogue, and education; that people want to learn and to use its language and analytical structures; that people want to challenge existing structural power dynamics. Thus, critical pedagogy relies on both the micro structures of anticipation, without which we would have to reinvent the wheel several times a day, and larger macro assumptions related specically to critical pedagogys purpose (PT, 55). These assumptions are the foundation and underpinning of reason, that which provides it roots and substance.15 This analysis of the faith16 underpinning reason blurs the modernist division between faith and reason. For Caputo, both faith and reason turn on a seeing as. Knowing rests on an ongoing faith and trust in an ensemble of assumptions and presuppositions . . . that enable us to make our way around a lab or an archive,
14. William James, The Will to Believe, in Pragmatism: A Reader, ed. Louis Menand (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 87. 15. David Purpel, The Moral and Spiritual Crisis in Education (New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1989), 59. 16. Here I mean faith as trust in something neither seen nor empirically proven. Later in the essay, when I discuss Tillich, I will contradict this position by problematizing the correlation of faith and trust.

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a poem or an ancient language, an economic system or a foreign culture (PT, 56). But
by the same token, to have faith in something is not darkness and not-seeing all the way down. On the contrary, one will not be able to see at all without a certain faith, if we do not have a take, an as, an angle, a perspective, a vocabulary that we believe and trust. To believe is to take something as, and to proceed with some condence in our perspective, in order that we may see and understand. So believing is starting to look a lot like seeing. (PT, 57, emphasis in original)

Michael Polanyi calls this tacit knowledge and claims that to hold such knowledge is an act deeply committed to the conviction that there is something there to be discovered [even if] . . . the anticipation of discovery, like discovery itself, may turn out to be a delusion.17 This trusted knowledge might be considered to be a form of faith because even though we may believe unreservedly in a certain set of truths, there is always the possibility that some other set of truths might be the case.18 In terms of critical pedagogy, people might not be interested in critical social change; dialogue might not be most effective in fostering such change; and schools might not actually be productive, or even appropriate, sites for social critique. But to a critical pedagogue, assumptions such as these often form the bedrock of ones entire praxis. Caputo and Polanyi, however, push further, past larger belief/knowledge systems and toward the micro-structures that support macro knowledge/belief. Regarding the alleged divide between reason and faith, Caputo, for his part, does not distinguish between reason and faith as seeing, on the one hand, and not-quite-seeing, on the other. Instead, the distinction between philosophy and theology is between two kinds of interpretive slants, two kinds of interpretations that are inwardly structured by the sort of faith at work in each (PT, 57). James Fowler calls this faithing and argues that people differ not so much on the basis of having faith or not having faith, but in the nature and quality of the faithing process.19 For David Purpel, faith resembles trust, and to reason is to reason from a faith.20 This trust, as Polanyi might put it, lies in the intimation of something hidden, [something] which we may yet discover.21 This tacit thought forms an indispensable part of all knowledge.22 Tacit knowledge that knowing that cannot quite be articulated, that even escapes clear recognition informs Polanyis well-known phrase, we know more than we can tell.23
17. Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 25. 18. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 440. 19. James Fowler, Stages of Faith (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981), 33, quoted in Purpel, The Moral and Spiritual Crisis in Education, 59. 20. Purpel, The Moral and Spiritual Crisis in Education, 59. 21. Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 23. 22. Ibid., 20. 23. Ibid., 4.

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Because we cannot necessarily recognize these assumptions, because we cannot clearly reason all the way down without these structures of anticipation, reason and faith begin to resemble each other. As Caputo puts it,
seeing as weakens the idea of pure seeing defended in the camp of reason and strengthens the idea of seeing in part defended in the camp of faith. Seeing as gives faith a larger role to play in what was hitherto called reason and sends negotiators on both sides of this classical debate back to the drawing board. (PT, 56)

Because both reason and faith see as, seeing begins to look like believing and believing begins to look like seeing (PT, 57). To act, then, from a critical perspective based on critical reasoning is a form of practicing or manifesting faith because it is to act while looking through a glass darkly.

Ultimate Concern
The second standpoint from which to view critical pedagogy as faith is from the standpoint of ultimate concern. For this part of the discussion, I draw extensively from Paul Tillichs book Dynamics of Faith. Tillich held that the most ordinary misinterpretation of faith is to consider it an act of knowledge that has a low degree of evidence (DF, 36). For Tillich, faith is not trust in the truth or existence of something not seen, such as trust that God exists or belief in the truth of God. If this is meant, Tillich told us, one is speaking of belief rather than faith (DF, 36, emphasis in original). In distinguishing faith from belief, Tillich did not discriminate against belief. Indeed, he claimed that without such trust we could not believe anything except the objects of our immediate experience (DF, 37). Instead, Tillich made the case that faith is more than just belief, more than just trust: For faith is more than trust in even the most sacred authority. It is participation in the subject of ones ultimate concern with ones whole being (DF, 37):
Man, like every living being, is concerned about many things, above all about those which condition its existence, such as food and shelter. But man, in contrast to other living beings, has spiritual concerns cognitive, aesthetic, social, political. Some of them are urgent, often extremely urgent, and each of them as well as the vital concerns can claim ultimacy for a human life or the life of a social group. If it claims ultimacy it demands the total surrender of him who accepts this claim, and it promises total fulllment even if all other claims have to be subjected to it or rejected in its name. (DF, 1)

From this perspective, faith and reason are not two different ways of knowing: while Caputo blurs the modernist division between faith and reason, calling both faith and reason looking through a glass darkly, Tillich insisted that the two belong to separate realms. Reason involves knowing; faith involves concern. For Tillich, then, faith, properly understood, holds no quarrel with reason:
Faith does not afrm or deny what belongs to the prescientic or scientic knowledge of our world, whether we know it by direct experience or through the experience of others. The knowledge of our world (including ourselves as a part of the world) is a matter of inquiry by ourselves or by those in whom we trust. It is not a matter of faith. (DF, 38)

Critical pedagogy, of course, carries an ultimate concern. According to Kanpol, critical pedagogy refers to the means and methods that test and hope to change

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the structures of schools that allow inequalities and social injustices.24 It is a praxis that sees education as a tool for eliminating oppressive relationships and conditions.25 Its literature carries the rhetoric of emancipatory education, liberatory education, and revolutionary education.26 But by no means does critical pedagogy have a single ultimate concern, because, as Joan Wink reminds us, critical pedagogy is not easily dened and understood in a neat little package.27 For Peter McLaren, critical pedagogy is as diverse as its many adherents.28 And for Kanpol, its areas of concern can involve anything to do with schooling and the wider culture.29 Patti Lather and Ilan Gur-Zeev even refer to critical pedagogies instead of a singular critical pedagogy.30 But even if critical pedagogy is not narrowly dened, it nonetheless holds ultimate concern. From this perspective, critical pedagogy is faith not because of the blurring between faith and reason or because of critical pedagogys heritage in the Catholic Church, but because of its overriding principles and purposes, even if those principles and purposes might sometimes be expressed differently by different criticalists. Critical pedagogy is faith simply because of the presence of an ultimate concern. For Tillich, the content of an ultimate concern, though important to an individual or group, does not affect its denition as faith. While there is not faith without a content toward which it is directed, the nature of that content does not determine whether or not faith exists (DF, 12). Tillich offered numerous examples of ultimate concern that are directed toward a variety of different content. For instance, if a national group makes the life and growth of the nation its ultimate concern, it demands that all other concerns, economic well-being, health and life, family, aesthetic and cognitive truth, justice and humanity, be sacriced (DF, 2). In another example, what he called more than an example, Tillich wrote that faith, for the men of the Old Testament, is the state of being ultimately and unconditionally concerned about Jahweh and about what he represents in demand, threat and promise (DF, 3). And in what he called almost a counter-example, Tillich discussed
the ultimate concern with success and with social standing and economic power. It is the god of many people in the highly competitive Western culture and it does what every ultimate 24. Barry Kanpol, Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction (Westport, Connecticut: Bergin and Garvey, 1999), 27. 25. Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade and Ernest Morrell, The Art of Critical Pedagogy: Possibilities for Moving from Theory to Practice in Urban Schools (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 14. 26. Antonia Darder, Marta Baltodano, and Rodolfo Torres, eds., The Critical Pedagogy Reader (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2003); Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed; and Peter McLaren, Critical Pedagogy: A Look at the Major Concepts, in The Critical Pedagogy Reader, ed. Darder, Baltodano, and Torres. 27. Joan Wink, Critical Pedagogy: Notes from the Real World (Boston: Pearson, 2005), 1. 28. McLaren, Critical Pedagogy: A Look at the Major Concepts, 69. 29. Kanpol, Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction, 185. 30. Patti Lather, Critical Pedagogy and Its Complicities: A Praxis of Stuck Places, Educational Theory 48, no. 4 (1998): 487497; and Ilan Gur-Zeev, Toward a Nonrepressive Critical Pedagogy, Educational Theory 48, no. 4 (1998): 463486.

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concern must do: it demands unconditional surrender to its laws even if the price is the sacrice of genuine human relations, personal conviction, and creative eros. (DF, 4)

Ones ultimate concern transcends eeting, temporal, or transitory concerns; it reaches to the core of our being. Even a skeptic or an atheist can have faith, because the despair about truth by the skeptic shows that truth is still his innite passion. The skeptic, so long as he is a serious skeptic, is not without faith, even though it has no concrete content (DF, 22). Thus, an ultimate concern need not be considered religious to be ultimate; it must simply be something that concerns one ultimately. We are driven toward our ultimate concern by, as Tillich put it, the passion for the innite (DF, 11). This passion is not religious in an institutional sense, but is driven by [an] awareness of the innite to which [we] belong, but which [we do] not own like a possession (DF, 10). It is religious in the sense of longing for union with the innite, for that which is really ultimate over against what claims to be ultimate but is only preliminary, transitory, nite (DF, 11). The opposite of faith, then, is relativism, which Tillich called an attitude in which nothing ultimate is asked for (DF, 65). Tillichs relativism intensies commonplace notions of relativism, in which things are equal and substitutable, as he seemed to speak to a larger spiritual inertia. If relativism is the opposite of faith, it would seem that Tillich established a continuum of personality: from faith-ful to faith-less. Yet he made no such argument; indeed, he claimed that people cannot be wholly without faith. Tillich considered faith to be an act of the total personality. It happens in the center of the personal life and includes all its elements. . . . They are all united in the act of faith (DF, 4). As such, he went on to argue,
ultimate concern is the integrating center of the personal life. Being without it is being without a center. Such a state, however, can only be approached but never fully reached, because a human being deprived completely of a center would cease to be a human being. For this reason one cannot admit that there is any man without an ultimate concern or without faith. (DF, 123)

Because we are human, Tillich seemed to say, we must have an ultimate concern. And because we must have an ultimate concern, because we cannot fully embrace relativism, we must have faith. Tillich argued that even though the content of faith does not matter for its denition, its content is indicative of the type of faith: ontological or moral, the holiness of being or the holiness of what ought to be. Holiness, in this paradigm, is not reserved for religious symbols or teaching, or for a sort of moral perfection. Rather, what concerns one ultimately becomes holy. The awareness of the holy is awareness of the presence of the divine, namely of the content of our ultimate concern (DF, 14). The holy is the longing for a higher power, not necessarily in terms of purpose, but certainly in terms of meaning. The feeling of being consumed in the presence of the divine is a profound expression of mans relation to the holy (DF, 15). In ontological faith, the holy is rst of all experienced as present (DF, 66). In moral faith, holiness is experienced as a feeling of what ought to be. But let us not draw too wide a distinction between these types of faith, for there are always elements of the one type within the other (DF, 80).

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Critical pedagogy embodies both types of faith. Tillich described a humanist variant of ontological faith: For humanism the divine is manifest in the human; the ultimate concern of man is man (DF, 72). This faith is secular in that it does not try to transcend the limits of humanity, belonging to the ordinary process of events, not going beside it or beyond it into a sanctuary (DF, 72). Tillich explained secular humanist faith:
Often people say that they are secular, that they live outside the doors of the temple, and consequently that they are without faith! But if one asks them whether they are without an ultimate concern, without something which they take as unconditionally serious, they would strongly deny this. And in denying that they are without an ultimate concern, they afrm that they are in a state of faith. (DF, 73)

Critical pedagogy embodies an ontological secular humanist faith in its concern for peoples actual lived experiences. Critical pedagogy struggles with life as it is, with manifest realities. As Kincheloe writes, critical pedagogy should never, never lose sight of its central concern with human suffering.31 Even the sometimes heavily theoretical emphasis of critical pedagogy bridges theory to that which is manifest, in that critical pedagogy must always be connecting to the reality of human suffering and the effort to eradicate it.32 Yet, critical pedagogy also emphasizes what ought to be; thus, here we can connect it to what Tillich called an ethical moral faith. This faith, even its modern humanist iterations, has roots in Old Testament Judaism, and it demands justice. For this faith, the experience of the holiness of being has never overwhelmed the experience of the holiness of ought to be (DF, 77). This faith emphasizes the law of justice and righteousness. As Tillich put it, modern humanism, especially since the eighteenth century, rests on a Christian foundation and includes the dominant emphasis on the ought to be, as elaborated by the Jewish prophets (DF, 78). Tillich went so far as to link revolutionary proletarian movements to this moral faith:
Their faith was humanist faith, expressing itself in secular more than in religious terms. It was faith and not rational calculation, although they believed in the superior power of reason united with justice and truth. The dynamics of their humanist faith changed the face of the world, rst in the West, then also in the East. It is this humanist faith of the moral type which was taken over by the revolutionary movement of the proletarian masses in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (DF, 79)

Tillichs history situates this angle of faith within a broad landscape, one that helps create a fuller context from which to analyze, and possibly enact, critical pedagogy.

Religious Faith
From a third, and quite different, perspective, critical pedagogy can also be seen as reecting or manifesting as religious faith in action. Perhaps the strongest and most well-known connection of critical pedagogy with religious faith comes from Paulo Freire. Stenberg claims that those of us who espouse critical pedagogy
31. Kincheloe, Critical Pedagogy, 12. 32. Ibid.

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and embrace Paulo Freires visions of praxis and conscientization work out of a tradition, often unknowingly, with deep ties to religious faith.33 And as Nicholas Burbules writes, Many have noted the strong link between Freires theology, his personality, and his political practice; and from his earliest writings overt religious allusions and analogies can be found.34 Peter Jarvis, for example, locates Freire within the prophetic tradition of the Christian church,35 and according to Gillian Cooper, Freire not only uses theological language, but also acknowledges the inuence on his thinking of the Roman Catholic Church of his Latin American background.36 Yet, according to Priscilla Perkins, Freires religious inuences are often overlooked or ignored by criticalists.37 Indeed, many on the educational left are uncomfortable talking about any form of spirituality, especially regarding schools.38 For Cooper, this results in a misuse of Freires philosophy: those Marxist or socialist educators who adopt Freires philosophy miss one important element of it, namely the inuence of Christianity; conversely, Christian educators downplay his Marxism and simplify his Christianity.39 Freires Christianity has roots in liberation theology, arising from what he called the prophetic church. Unlike the traditional church and the modernizing church, which, according to Freire, alienate the oppressed social classes by either encouraging them to view the world as evil or by defending the reforms that maintain the status quo, the prophetic church rejects do-goodism and palliative reforms in order to commit itself to the dominated social classes and to radical social change (PE, 136 and 137). Like critical pedagogy, the prophetic church demands a critical analysis of the social structures in which the conict takes place (PE, 138). Within this prophetic church, the theology of so-called development gives way to the theology of liberation a prophetic, utopian theology, full of hope (PE, 139). Thus, Freire roots the religious struggle for faith and the political struggle for liberation in the same moment and the same set of events the historical reality of conscientization for political involvement.40 Liberation theology is an expression of a resolute process that is changing the condition of the poor and oppressed of this world.41 It is an attempt to help the
33. Stenberg, Liberation Theology and Liberatory Pedagogies, 271. 34. Burbules, Dialogue and Critical Pedagogy, 206. 35. Peter Jarvis, Paulo Freire: Educationalist of a Revolutionary Christian Movement, Convergence 20, no. 2 (1987): 31. 36. Gillian Cooper, Freire and Theology, Studies in the Education of Adults 27, no. 1 (1995): 6878. 37. Priscilla Perkins, A Radical Conversion of Mind: Fundamentalism, Hermeneutics, and the Metanoic Classroom, College English 63, no. 5 (2001): 585611. 38. Kanpol, Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction, 2 (emphasis in original). 39. Cooper, Freire and Theology. 40. James Fraser, Love and History in the Work of Paulo Freire, in Mentoring the Mentor: A Critical Dialogue with Paulo Freire, ed. Paulo Freire (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 194. 41. Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, xxi.

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poor interpret their own faith in a new way; at the same time, it is a critique of economic and social structures and ideologies that justify inequality.42 Growing from the efforts of Latin American clergy to effect social change on behalf of the poor and dispossessed, liberation theology has been called an interpretation of Christian faith out of the experience of the poor.43 In the 1970s and 1980s, Latin American Catholic priests, nuns, and lay activists interested in advocating for the poor and in directly challenging structural inequalities drew a model for engaging with the poor from Freires concept of conscientazacao: As church people became aware of the method and spirit of concientizacion (in the Spanish), they came to see it as tting very neatly into the emerging sense of how the church should opt for the poor.44 As these elements in the Church renewed and revitalized their advocacy for the poor, bishops began calling for a liberating education, and stating that education should be democratized. Education should not mean incorporating people into existing cultural structures but giving them the means so that they can be the agents of their own progress.45 Thus, liberation theology sought to carry out the Churchs mission by showing the lot of the poor and engaging them in a process of evangelization that would develop a critical consciousness.46 Some of Freires writings make explicit connections to Christianity and Christian faith, citing his Christian background as an early powerful inuence on his thinking. Freire described an early experience that illustrates the roots connecting his faith and his activism:
I remember that when I was 6 years old, one day I was talking with my father and my mother, and I protested strongly against the way my grandmother had treated a black woman at home not with physical violence, but with undoubtedly racial prejudice. I said to my mother and to my father that I couldnt understand that, not maybe with formal speech I am using now, but I was underlining for me the impossibility of being a Christian and at the same time discriminating against another person for any reason.47

He explained further, regarding his later activism, that when I went rst to meet with workers and peasants in Recifes slums, to teach them and to learn from them, I have to confess that I did that pushed by my Christian faith. This beginning, being pushed by faith to advocate for the poor, might be considered a form of mission, reected in Freires statement that I have to say that I went rst as if I had been sent.48 In fact, Freire claimed little distinction between his Christian faith and his revolutionary ambitions:
Being a Christian, a revolutionary; these are very close. It assumes a totality of humility of telling me that I am a man trying to become a Christian; I am a Christian trying to become 42. Berryman, Liberation Theology, 5. 43. Ibid., 4. 44. Ibid., 37. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 38. 47. Horton and Freire, We Make the Road by Walking, 243. 48. Ibid., 245.

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a revolutionary. I am a Christian revolutionary or a revolutionary Christian because I know what I want to become.49

Yet, in other writings, he maintained a role for spirituality, but did not necessarily emphasize those early Christian inuences,50 even, as Peter Roberts claims, feeling a certain discomfort in doing so.51 Thus, Freire did not advocate a proselytizing faith, but rather interpreted the Gospels as a call to social action.52 He claimed that if you ask me, then, if I am a religious man, I say no, Im not a religious man. They understand religious as religion-like. I would say that I am a man of faith.53 Indeed, Freire wrote as a man of faith inuenced by early Christian experiences, but not interested in a static, institutional religion. Instead, his seems to be a religion of the street and of the slum, with a prophetic investment in the historical material reality of the poor and oppressed. As Henry Giroux writes, Freires faith is informed by the memory of the oppressed and by suffering that must not be allowed to continue.54 Freire could hold simultaneous conversations with both Christ and Marx, always [speaking] to them both in a very loving way.55 Freires optimism about human nature, and his faith in its worth, are not only Marxist but also Christian.56 While the Marxist inuence in Freires philosophy receives considerable attention, it is important to remember these early Christian, preMarxist inuences. Freires use of the language of Easter and of Exodus is telling: when we look behind the Marxist inuence, we nd these religious ideas of rebirth and of leading out informing critical notions of transformation and emancipation. For Freire, liberation is thus a childbirth, and a painful one[, which] . . . brings into the world this new being: no longer oppressor nor longer oppressed, but human in the process of achieving freedom.57 He noted further that Conversion to the people requires a profound rebirth. Those who undergo it must take on a new form of existence; they can no longer remain as they were.58 This process of transformation is based not on miraculous revelation or shallow quick x solutions but on a complex, difcult and often lengthy process of critical reection,
49. Margaret Costigan, You Have the Third World Inside You: Conversation by Paulo Freire, Convergence 16, no. 4 (1983): 37 (emphasis in original). 50. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Indignation (Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers, 2004). 51. Peter Roberts, Education, Death, and Awakening: Hesse, Freire and the Process of Transformation, International Journal of Lifelong Education 28, no. 1 (2009): 7. 52. Ibid. 53. Horton and Freire, We Make the Road by Walking, 246. 54. Henry Giroux, Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning (New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1988), 113. 55. Ibid., 246. 56. Cooper, Freire and Theology. 57. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 31. 58. Ibid., 43.

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dialogue and social action.59 This is not simply the Easter of sacraments and liturgy. It is the Easter that
results in the changing of consciousness, [which] must be existentially experienced. The real Easter is not commemorative rhetoric. It is praxis; it is historical involvement. The old Easter of rhetoric is dead with no hope of resurrection. It is only in the authenticity of historical praxis that Easter becomes the death that makes life possible. (PE, 123)

This Easter signies a transformation that means a deep change in the consciousness of teachers; a shift that goes beyond mere commemorative rhetoric to a genuinely transformative, biophiliac (life-loving) process of educational resurrection.60 In this Easter, Freire held, you have more and more to die as an elitist mind in order to be born as a popular mind.61 Yet when Freire claimed that the prophetic church invites the oppressed to a new Exodus (PE, 139), he was, of course, not suggesting that criticalists or even the church can or should act like a modern-day Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt. Because as he stressed again and again, revolutionary leaders cannot think without the people, nor for the people, but only with the people.62 Thus, the faith in Freires writings is a dialectical faith, a dialectical worlding in which the world is named in the word, which, once named, reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming.63 Language, here, becomes a world-builder. In reading the word, we also read the world, because in reading the word, we read the world in which these words exist.64 But in reading the word-world, we are presented with the problem of renaming the world with new words, thus building new worlds. We change the world through the conscious, practical work of writing and rewriting the word-world.65 As Jarvis writes,
Hence, for Freire, the idea of development is grounded in a theological understanding of the world and of humankind. Any theory, or action, that does not allow the individual humanity should be avoided. The destiny of the person is to be involved with the Divine in the creation of a new world.66

Giroux has called this a language of possibility, one linked to forms of self and social empowerment that embrace the struggle to develop active forms of community life around the principles of equality and democracy.67 Freire positioned critical ethics, what he called a universal human ethic, as a critical genesis: I speak of a universal human ethic in the same way I speak of
59. Roberts, Education, Death, and Awakening, 66. 60. Ibid. 61. Costigan, You Have the Third World Inside You, 37 (emphasis in original). 62. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 112. 63. Ibid., 69 (emphasis in original). 64. Paulo Freire, A Response, in Mentoring the Mentor, ed. Freire, 304. 65. Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World (South Hadley, Massachusetts: Bergin and Garvey, 1987). 66. Jarvis, Paulo Freire: Educationalist of a Revolutionary Christian Movement, 36. 67. Giroux, Teachers as Intellectuals, 135.

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humanitys ontological vocation, which calls us out of and beyond ourselves.68 To be world-builders is rst to recognize and then to act from that recognition as historically conditioned subjects: Insofar as I am a conscious presence in the world, I cannot hope to escape my responsibility for my action in the world.69 In this theological position, each of us is not only responsible for our actions, but is called by our presence in the world to partner with the Divine to continually recreate the world. But notice how Freire evinced little or no interest in exactly quantifying what that Divine is, for, again, that would lead us into a reductionism he abhorred. Instead, the theology of critical ethics emphasizes ontology and development, the ux between being and becoming:
It is in our becoming that we constitute our being so. Because the condition of becoming is the condition of being. In addition, it is not possible to imagine the human condition disconnected from the ethical condition. Because to be disconnected from it or to regard it as irrelevant constitutes for us women and men a transgression.70

A transgression from what? From humanization, peoples historical vocation.71 Faith in Freirean praxis, though religiously inuenced, seeks no liturgical validation or mandate. It is faith from and in the ontological vocation of human development. It is Easter and Exodus manifested as transformation and emancipation.

Interconnectedness of Faith
The interconnectedness of critical faith lies not in nding elements of, say, Tillich in Caputo or Freire in Tillich, although I believe these connections exist. Rather, these elements of faith interconnect in how they inform our positions on critical pedagogy in our deciding what critical pedagogy means. The preceding discussion is not intended to suggest clear, independent divisions between these three elements of faith; instead, these elements overlap and intersect. I see Caputo, Tillich, and Freire as positioned at three points of a triangle of critical faith, each informing and inuencing the others, but each having its own gravity well. I believe these three faith elements inform all of critical pedagogy, perhaps even contributing to the tension found in the literature among its various positions and instantiations. As readers of this journal certainly know, critical pedagogy has long been in tension with itself. In the language of the faith orientation I present here, this tension seems to exist among its ultimate concern, its religious drive, and its inherently unstable nature. To take one example, in a previous issue of Educational Theory devoted to the topic of critical pedagogy, Patti Lather writes, To counter Peter McLaren and Ilan Gur-Zeevs insistence on the right story of critical pedagogy, I propose a thinking within Jacques Derridas ordeal of the
68. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage, trans. Patrick Clarke (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littleeld, 1998), 25. 69. Ibid., 26. 70. Ibid., 39. 71. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 66.

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undecideable and its obligation to openness, passage, and non-mastery. While Lather seeks to discipline the masculinist voice of abstraction and universalism [in critical pedagogy] . . . with some feminist pedagogy, viewing the tension within critical pedagogy as a boy versus girl thing, I see this more in terms of a tension of faith.72 It is hard to say just what critical pedagogy is: more materialist? more political? more feminist? more spiritual? more student-centered? In this essay I have also situated it all over the map: as solidarity, as transformation, as listening, as ethics. The tension, then, arises in articulating an essence of critical pedagogy, because, it seems to me, we are pulled in various directions by our own particular faith, such that perhaps any one rendering of critical pedagogy reects the tug of ones own critical faith. In other words, I nd that instances and variations within the critical pedagogy literature seem to voice positions grounded more in one or the other (or multiple!) faith elements, while still containing inuences from the others. Let me momentarily engage in a bit of mind reading (albeit with admittedly suspect clarity) and examine a few selections from that 1998 issue of Educational Theory in which the authors present substantively different takes on critical pedagogy. In this issue, Lather, for example, seems to draw more from Caputo, while McLaren and Gur-Zeev seem to draw more from Freire. Although I believe an engaging debate might be had to deconstruct the faith of various critical positions, my intent here is instead to show how these positions might fall, to greater and lesser degrees, within the three gravity wells of faith. In borrowing language from Derrida, Lather speaks to exactly the kind of undecideability that Caputo references,73 while McLaren and Gur-Zeev, on the other hand, speak more to a material reworlding. Yet, this (arguable) distinction is not absolute, because Lather too seeks a manner of reworlding and McLaren and Gur-Zeev also acknowledge contingency.74 And each is certainly guided by a sense of ultimate concern, even if the specic content of those concerns varies. In other words, none of these positions solely inhabits only one of the three faith elements, but, arguably, each draws more strongly from one than the others. This interconnectedness makes critical pedagogy a risky business. For while we might feel the surety and righteousness of our ultimate concerns, Caputo destabilizes our footing, reminding us of our always tenuous stance and the faith
72. See Lather, Critical Pedagogy and Its Complicities, 488489; Peter McLaren, Revolutionary Pedagogy in Post-Revolutionary Times, Educational Theory 48, no. 4 (1998): 431462; and Gur-Zeev, Toward a Nonrepressive Critical Pedagogy. 73. For more on Caputos extensive scholarship on Derridean deconstruction, see John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); and John Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 74. I recognize here that Gur-Zeev critiques Freire as nave. However, from a faith orientation, Gur-Zeevs argument for counter education, in my reading, nonetheless emphasizes the religious desire for autonomy and worlding, even as he also pulls from Caputo in intending to demystify and negate any self-evident knowledge. See Gur-Zeev, Toward a Nonrepressive Critical Pedagogy, 486.

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implicit in our assertions. And while, following Freire, we might feel a passion for critical proselytizing, Tillich reminds us of the shared nature, and individual value, of our ultimate concerns.

Implications and Possibilities

What does this argument mean for critical pedagogy? These elements of critical faith the inbreath of hope, ones ultimate concern, and a critical Easter and Exodus combine both to differentiate critical pedagogy from other educational theories and to instill in it a renewed sense of ethics and humility. This critical faith cautions us toward hesitancy, not in our strength of insight, but in our force of prescription: We must have the courage not only to examine how we as individuals reect the values and norms of the culture. As educators we often are the system, even as we are both its cause and effect.75 Thus, one implication for critical pedagogy is a renewed push for communion: critical pedagogy as border crossing.76 For to make communion with students and teachers is to engage in not merely persuasion, but collaboration. In this reading, critical faith is both an ethics of ought to be and an ethics of listening. Perhaps by orienting from critical faith, critical pedagogues can nd ways to situate theory closer to lived praxis in schools and to the immediate values and concerns of teachers and students. Here I think not in terms of criticalist with criticalist, but of criticalist with parent or criticalist with uncertain colleague. For parents who might balk at criticalese still hold ultimate concerns, as do colleagues who care about educating for democracy but reject Marxist or postmodern or feminist critical analysis. I believe it is at this juncture of faith and communion that new possibilities open up for critical pedagogy. This is critical pedagogy as transformation, one that starts with the postmodern rupture of difference, but within that rupture a vision of faith can transcend theoretical discourses without denying their value. This may lead us toward a higher belief in a spirit that helps to form a community of faith.77 My experience in schools tells me that teachers care about their students. And they often value critical analysis. But that analysis must be tangible, even in a sense organic. Thus, to begin at a place of faith is to esteem ones positionality and ones a priori values. This is also critical pedagogy as solidarity and a counter to the limitations and excesses of a detached critical perspective.78 To form communion, then, is to meet on a common ground of faith, exploring how our faiths converge. As Tillich put it, faith is real only in the community of faith, or more precisely, in the communion of a language of faith (DF, 135). If critical
75. Purpel, The Moral and Spiritual Crisis in Education, 63. 76. Henry Giroux, Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education (New York: Routledge, 2005). 77. Kanpol, Critical Pedagogy and Liberation Theology, 116. 78. William Ayers, Gregory Michie, and Amy Rome, Embers of Hope: In Search of Meaningful Critical Pedagogy, Teacher Education Quarterly 31, no. 1 (2004): 128.

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pedagogy is to be an effective exploder of myths,79 it must begin from this place of shared faith. However, orienting critical pedagogy as faith also presents conceptual obstacles. If, as Tillich held, the content of ones ultimate concern does not determine whether or not one has faith, but that simply holding an ultimate concern is itself indicative of having faith, then, one might reasonably ask, how does critical faith differ from, say, the faith implicit within the No Child Left Behind Act or within the standards movement? The answer lies in the totality of critical faith. Critical faith is not faith only because it holds an ultimate concern; it is also faith because of the content of that ultimate concern and, just as importantly, because conceptualizing a critical pedagogy is inherently unstable. Thus, while perspectives on education as diametrically opposed as critical pedagogy and the standards movement both hold an implicit faith, the content of those faiths radically diverge. Unlike the standards movement, critical faith urges toward transcendence, driven by that spiritual calling to recreate the world through a critical Easter and Exodus. In this faith, however, is also a humility, acknowledging that we look through a glass darkly and thus reason from a faith, reasoning as much from hope as from critical analysis. This quality differentiates critical pedagogy from other educational discourses, and especially from essentialist discourses such as the standards movement, for criticalism acknowledges radical contingency: of presence, of interpretation, of context. Therefore, while the religiousness of critical pedagogy reaches toward rebirth and renewal an evocative reworlding Caputo pulls it back from, and indeed past, mere instrumentalism. Kincheloe seems to espouse both this communion and this troubling of outcomes in arguing that unless such a position induces a letting go that moves us to new forms of interconnection and compassion, then critical pedagogy is a sham.80 In other words, even as critical faith moves forward, in terms of concern and worlding, it must also turn back on itself, to always interrogate its own assumptions. Another obstacle of a faith orientation lies within the idea of faith as transcendence, presenting transcendence as a problem. For many, perhaps most people, faith specically means religious faith, with all of its accompanying baggage. For the religious person, identifying critical pedagogy as faith might clash with his or her own beliefs about what faith means, perhaps signaling something insufcient or even offensive to religious faith. For those who are suspicious of organized religion and associate faith with those suspicions, a faith orientation might present obstacles of perceived dogmatism and evangelism. My hope, and a challenge I lay down here, is that fundamentalism on all sides can be overcome, perhaps through listening and patient, respectful engagement. We saw this possibility in Amy Goodburns account: while initially at odds and opposed,
79. Sonia Nieto, Afrming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education (White Plains, New York: Longman, 1996). 80. Kincheloe, Critical Pedagogy, 136.

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even affronted, by the beliefs expressed by her Christian fundamentalist students, she saw through critical reection more connections than differences between the discourses of fundamentalism and critical pedagogy.81 I do not suggest that criticalists set aside transformative and emancipatory questions; however, we can initiate dialogue and action, not in the language of abstract and oftentimes impositional analysis, but from what we hold most dear. The problem of communion leads us to yet another implication, and one that speaks to the question of what constitutes critical pedagogy: the problem of effect. Back in 1996, Kanpol argued that a sovereign of possibility must be held if we are to make serious inroads into the dominant culture.82 This is a point worth exploring, because as I believe any examination of schools and schooling will show, and as Tony Knight and Art Pearl have argued, apart from isolated instances, critical pedagogy is essentially invisible in schools.83 As far back as 1987, scholars struggled to theorize a meaningful critical pedagogy that might breathe life in schools.84 Perhaps the persistence of this struggle stems in part from emphasizing critical pedagogy as something almost entirely other than the dominant culture, and thus from the culture (even of the teachers) already present in schools. Put differently, while people may hold different levels of awareness, there is no critical self completely separate from the structures and values criticalism critiques, no repressed or truer self for educators from which to panoptically diagnose the educational landscape below.85 So while productive critiques can be made of the forces affecting schools and society, critical pedagogy too often seems to be articulated as merely another force to affect schools and society. My reading of the critical pedagogy literature suggests that there is more distance than community with the teachers and administrators who run our schools. Yet, the school reform literature clearly tells us that for any reform of school culture to be successful and lasting, teachers must hold it close.86 As
81. Goodburn, Its a Question of Faith, 348. 82. Kanpol, Critical Pedagogy and Liberation Theology, 116. 83. Tony Knight and Art Pearl, Democratic Education and Critical Pedagogy, Urban Review 32, no. 3 (2000): 197226. 84. Elizabeth Ellsworth, Why Doesnt This Feel Empowering? Working Through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy, Harvard Educational Review 59, no. 3 (1989): 297324. 85. Noah de Lissovoy, Staging the Crisis: Teaching, Capital, and the Politics of the Subject, Curriculum Inquiry 40, no. 3 (2010): 427. 86. Cheryl Craig, The Relationships Between and Among Teachers Narrative Knowledge, Communities of Knowing, and School Reform: A Case of The Monkeys Paw, Curriculum Inquiry 31, no. 3 (2001): 303331; Cheryl Craig, Why Is Dissemination So Difcult? The Nature of Teacher Knowledge and the Spread of Curriculum Reform, American Educational Research Journal 43, no. 2 (2006): 257293; Mary Metz, Real School: A Universal Drama Amid Disparate Experience, in Education Politics for a New Century, ed. Douglas Mitchell and Margaret Goertz (Bristol, Pennsylvania: The Falmer Press, 1989), 7591; Jonathon Silin and Fran Schwartz, Staying Close to the Teacher, Teachers College Record 105, no. 8 (2003): 15861605; and David Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995).

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Michael Fullan has observed, Educational change depends on what teachers do and think its as simple and as complex as that.87 The question for critical pedagogy, then, is how can it speak to the teacher in the school down the street? If we take a broad look at education, a heavily Marxist critical pedagogy clearly has little, at best a marginal, inuence on schools. Perhaps this results from the fact that it is often couched in language that only educational scholars can read. But more likely, I submit, it is because most people, at least in the United States, just are not Marxists. Most Americans, it seems to me, believe the story of progress and perseverance, whether this is mythology or not, and are, even if they are without capital themselves, capitalists nonetheless. This question of effect problematizes reconstructionist, and especially Marxist, end zones and goal lines. In other words, is the possibility of critical pedagogy some better future toward which critical analysis is bent? Or does its possibility lie in the exhausting of outcomes? Before we ask the instrumental and material question, where do we go from here? we must examine a more foundational question: Is the content of critical pedagogy a promised land, or is it merciless criticality, methods of inquiry, and a process of critique that return us, again and again, toward grasping at how we know we know that we know? Put differently, and perhaps too simply, the question of effect asks us whether critical pedagogy is a period or a question mark. Or can critical pedagogy escape this seemingly fundamental, yet essentially arbitrary dichotomy in recreating itself? The possibility for the continued growth and inuence of critical pedagogy lies in how this question is answered. It is my belief that a faith orientation presents new avenues from which to conceptualize a critical pedagogy that escapes this either/or thinking and serves as a foundation for both communion and transformation while balancing the tension inherent within critical faith.

87. Michael Fullan, The Meaning of Educational Change (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001), 115.

I WOULD LIKE TO THANK Nicholas Burbules, Neil Liss, and the three anonymous reviewers for their keen insight in helping me develop this essay.

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