Nurturing the Next Generation of Scholars

Meredith Coleman-Tobias

Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago
Doctoral Fellow ('10)

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June 29, 2010

A Right Question

“Why are you doing a PhD?” – Drs. Manigault-Bryant and Walton encouraged the first-year students to find the choruses in our praisesongs for the Ph.D. We were in search of, as Dr. Walton succinctly identified, our animating impulse for the next four to ten years. I first said out loud: “I don’t know.” I then gave pieces of the puzzle in an effort to make narrative meaning of my presence. The “I don’t know,” at the moment, felt like enough. Indeed, Dr. Iva Caruthers challenged this year’s group of motley doctoral fellows with a charge: we do not have to know the right answers to the wrong questions, Caruthers contended. Rather, we are able to say “I don’t know” in the face of the right questions.

“Why are you doing a PhD?” – a right question.

I had an uncanny pull toward full disclosure in the safe space of the doctoral conference. I could have paraphrased my admissions essay, but I felt the probe for deeper interrogation. I followed my “I don’t know” with a series of discrete happenstances that landed me in the room. In the midst of my descriptions, I faced what I knew for awhile – the expectations of my community have significantly informed my pursuit of the Ph.D. The “I don’t know” served as a counterpoint to the vast constellation of collective knowing in my life: creative pedagogy can offer intellectual transformation; womanist frameworks have space for the transnational contribution I seek to make; performance art has a central place in the classroom. Yes, yes, yes – all of this. And more.

It has taken me a little while to understand the relevance of “I don’t know” in a conference weekend packed with interrelated spaces of knowing. Indeed, brown faces gathered at the conference to tarry on a collective way of knowing as current and future black scholars of religion. I knew some of the faces attending the conference. The leadership ethos of the conference presumed not-too-distant positions of authority and knowing. Our conference faculty: knowledge upon knowledge upon knowledge. These knowings – grafted, fine-tuned, three-dimensionalized, and vivified in the company of very smart folk this weekend – catapults me to the paradox in Dr. Caruthers’ statement.

What questions belied our “knowings”? As we re-considered our stakes in theological cornerstones this weekend, there remained the potential to build shrines to knowing. Dr. Caruthers’ question undid our brick and mortaring and made us aware of the under-considered task: taking the “I don’t know” seriously as a hermeneutic to engage the temporal vocation of doctoral student. “I don’t know” makes the way possible for the proverbial house of difference. In some cases, “I don’t know” makes what we know – I mean, know that we know – much more stark. I am glad to hear the discourse of ambivalence privileged in academic discernment. It invites others into the story to make meaning. After the breakout session, for example, Dr. Manigault-Bryant pulled me over and offered to simplify my narrative. “In this doctoral program, you are creating your own space.” True.

Was this weekend a gathering of questions, in and of themselves, seeking the sacred company of kindred? If we are, as Dr. Ysaye Barnwell penned and Dr. Manigault-Bryant and Rev. Sampson reminded us at the opening luncheon, “our grandmothers’ prayers, our grandfathers’ dreamings, the breath of the ancestors, [and] the Spirit of God” then all of our becoming allows the texture embedded in known identities to be fleshed out. We greet each other in the light tread and tentativeness of our right questions, as opposed to the dead-end and demand of our right answers. Thank God for this ontological out. Or introspective in. The figuring demands that, if we are able, we get up tomorrow morning. Our portable altar-making in the academy offers the ever-present hope of the query.

And the possibility to do differently, if not better.

The right questions are ritual catalysts toward intentional action, even in this face of the unarticulated. The breadth of the answering is journeyed in our work.