My Dad Was a Baptist Preacher – I’m a Philosophy Professor
Wes Siscoe is an Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University. With a passion for making philosophy accessible, Wes founded the Philosophy Teaching Library as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame.
I grew up the son of a Baptist preacher. We lived right next door to the church. As a little boy, I’d spend my Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, Wednesday evenings, and sometimes even Saturdays there, learning to pray, reading scripture, and occasionally trying to scale the marquee letterboard out front.
Unsurprisingly, the first time I read the word ‘philosophy’ was in the Bible. But the message was not a positive one. In one of the apostle Paul’s letters, he warns:
See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ. (Colossians 2:8)
Because of Paul’s words, my Bible-believing church was suspicious of philosophy. They thought it was misleading and deceptive, creating atheists out of committed Christians.
With this upbringing, you might be surprised to learn that I am a philosophy professor. You might also be surprised that I helped create The Philosophy Teaching Library, a collection of introductory philosophy readings for high school and college students. But as I learned more about what philosophy actually is, and how it has been a way of understanding the world more deeply for the religious and non-religious alike, I became convinced that philosophy should be more accessible for teachers, students, and society as a whole.
I grew up reading more than just the Bible. My dad had a library – stacks and stacks of books on theology, psychology, leadership, and biblical interpretation. And I was curious. Though I didn’t understand much at the time, I started lots of those books, even if I rarely finished them.
I also had a lot of questions. I wondered whether God existed, if we had free will, what it meant to love others, and what religion (if any) was correct.
And my questions often got me in trouble. One evening when I was in high school, I challenged my younger sister to the following “game.” I would describe two political policies on an issue and ask her which one she thought was best. There was one catch: I wouldn’t tell her which policy was supported by Democrats and which was supported by Republicans. My mom quickly put the kibosh on that game.
Anyone with some familiarity with philosophy would have instantly recognized my questions as exactly that – questions about ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. But I never really thought of my questions as philosophical. For all I knew, the answers philosophy offered were as hollow and deceptive as the apostle Paul said, but the answers I was discovering to my questions were anything but that.
When I started college, I began as a double major in biblical studies and psychology, two subjects I was already familiar with from my dad’s library. But when I took a philosophy class my freshman year, I quickly changed course. I saw that philosophy, far from being antithetical to the faith in which I was raised, could actually help bring clarity and insight to my questions.
The great saints of the church have always thought this was so. We still read the writings of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas for their philosophical insights, and they viewed philosophy as the handmaid to theology – a necessary preparation for understanding the things of God. The problem isn’t philosophy but being fooled by wise sounding but ultimately misleading ideas.
Looking back, I now realize that I should have had access to philosophy all along. I had so many philosophical questions – I should never have made it to college without knowing more about famous philosophers and the questions that they tried to answer. But there are many challenges to this sort of access.
First you have to know what to read. Maybe I could have started with Plato’s Republic. But it’s over 100,000 words long. Should I have just started at the beginning? How could I have found the most important parts?
Next, you have to know how to read. Even if I knew what to read, philosophy texts can be dense and unfamiliar, requiring a wealth of background knowledge to interpret and understand.
This is where The Philosophy Teaching Library comes in. The Library helps students identify what to read – the most crucial foundational texts. Then, the Library helps them understand those books and articles. Our pieces are authored by philosophy professors who take readers word by word through the texts.
A friend of mine teaches theology at a Catholic high school, and he discovered that giving students translations of the Euthyphro or the Apology just wasn’t working. There is too much new vocabulary and too little guidance for students to glean much from the readings on their own. Now, he is using the Library with his students.
My hope is that, as my friend discovered in his class, the Library can supply the resources I didn’t have growing up, and bring the (actual!) wisdom of the great philosophers to high school and college students everywhere.
