“I have called you friends”: Toward a pedagogy of friendship in the classroom

Aelred of Rievaulx, a 12th-century Cistercian abbot, penned a powerful dialogue about the complexity of friendship titled Spiritual Friendship. Aelred’s central claim is that friendship is the primary means through which Christ’s love enters the world. In this article, I apply Aelred’s insights on spiritual friendship to argue that Christ is the Friend at the center of the classroom. In particular, I suggest pedagogical practices that facilitate friendship as a Christian virtue, compelling learners to befriend one another, to befriend the subject, and to befriend God. Aelred does not suggest that everyone whom we love is to be a spiritual friend. Rather, those whom we choose to befriend are to be tested caringly and critically for their adherence to virtue. With the help of my ancient, theologian friends (Aelred, Augustine) and my friends who are leading voices in contemporary Christian pedagogy (David Smith, James K. A. Smith, Paul Griffiths), I aim to teach students to empathize with authors (and other learners) with whom they disagree, even to befriend them, even as they test whether those ideas are to be drawn into friendship.

Developmental Systems Theory as a Process Theory

Paul Griffiths and Russell D. Gray have argued that the fundamental unit of analysis in developmental systems theory should be a process—the life cycle—and not a set of developmental resources and interactions between those resources. The key concepts of developmental systems theory, epigenesis and developmental dynamics, also suggest a process view of the units of development. This chapter explores in greater depth the features of developmental systems theory that favour treating processes as fundamental in biology and examines the continuity between developmental systems theory and ideas about process in the work of several major figures in early twentieth-century biology, most notably C. H. Waddington.

Multi-vehicle Accidents

In the 1990s Carter produced his two longest works: Symphonia: sum fluxae pretium spei; and the one-act opera What Next? to a libretto by Paul Griffiths. The action of the opera begins with a car crash from which its six characters slowly emerge. The Symphonia similarly grew from three independent commissions and its movements have been performed both independently and as a triptych. The “accidental” nature of both works announces Carter’s late life willingness to compose in a more casual, informal manner, even on a large scale.