Keywords

reconversion narratives, teaching, faith, stories

Document Type

Article

Abstract

As two English professors, we regard stories as our daily bread. Our love of the complexity of stories and storytellers led us to explore the pattern in the book Faith Is Not Blind[1] and apply it to the everyday lives of people who used it. This pattern of finding “simplicity beyond complexity”[2] takes a metacognitive approach to understanding the development and the nurturing of lifelong faith. In our work at faithisnotblind.org, we’ve interviewed over one hundred people about how their faith has been challenged and how they have responded in ways that preserved their faith. The stories are diverse, thoughtful, and inspiring. But more than that, studying them has taught us that the way we frame our spiritual stories is just as significant as the stories themselves. Often what interviewees learned about how they learn was more important than any specific answers to their questions. In other words, the metacognitive process (by which we learn about how we think and how we learn) was equally significant in itself. Our analysis of these stories began to change the way we taught our students and the way we framed our questions in the classroom. We started to focus more on helping our students discover how they learn and how they talk about what they learn, especially as it pertains to their faith.