In The Antediluvian Librarians’ Secrets to Success, authors Jane Lenz Elder (Reference Librarian, SMU), Duane Harbin (former Assistant Dean for Technology, Planning & Compliance at Perkins School of Theology), and David Schmersal (Access and Instruction Librarian, Austin Seminary) draw on their combined experience and unique perspective as librarians to address the most common concerns they hear students express. Their light-hearted approach, combined with eye-catching illustrations, makes for a friendly work students can read from beginning to end or refer to as they move through their first anxious weeks of seminary. Atla’s Alex Leiseca spoke with the authors about their book in a recent interview.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
How did you get the idea for this book? Was there one situation or epiphany that prompted you to write it?
Duane: This book started out as a series of articles that went into our weekly seminary newsletter that we called Surviving Seminary because we all had students arriving at our desks in a froth because and they had no time to deal with their problems. What I had kind of hoped was that they wouldn’t necessarily absorb it at the time they saw it, but they might remember it when they needed it.
Jane: The opportunity arose because we had our new director arrive. Anthony Elia was very interested in starting what he’s calling the Bridwell Press. Having been a series of articles that we had done over the years, [the book] just needed some organization. And then he had the idea of including illustrations by one of our former colleagues who’s now retired, Rebecca Howdeshell, who’s an artist and did art on the side in addition to her day job. So I’m just thrilled with the artwork. That was the first book to come out of the Bridwell Press.
David: I came on board in 2013. I think [Jane and Duane] had been doing [Surviving Seminary] for maybe a year or so up to that point. And we got together at beginning of the school year and planned out what topics we were going to be covering for that year; we kind of divvied things up based on expertise, interest, willingness, or who could be cajoled into writing on something.
Duane: And Jane took all of that disparate material and pulled it together. She selected the pieces that were most enduring and gave them all a common voice.
Would you say that the advice in this book is more suited for seminary students or for all graduate students?
Jane: I would think for all graduate students in humanities, and the reason I say that is that my first master’s was in history, and I was the assistant of an endowed chair in history for about fifteen years. So a lot of the aspects of certainly time management and how to do research from my perspective came from there.
Duane: I do think that it has some general applicability. One of the things that this grew out of was my experience working with planning student orientation. Student orientation is one of the continual issues, I think, for graduate educators. And in theology, we were getting people with all kinds of backgrounds, which I’m not sure that’s true in all graduate fields. But we would get students who had never really done humanities research before. Hopefully, when you get go into a doctoral program in something like English, that isn’t the case. But there’s never enough time to tell students everything they need to know, and every student is different. And hopefully, faculty advising works, but it doesn’t always.
David: We did as part of orientation, a sort of introduction to both library and also theological research and graduate-level research as a sort of “welcome to seminary, here’s what you can expect.” A lot of the students are coming to seminary as a second career, and it had been a while since they’d been in any sort of higher education level learn in theological disciplines. So we’ve tried to sort of give them a sense of a sense of, if you’re feeling overwhelmed by what you are facing, it’s not because there’s anything wrong with you, it’s because you’re taken on a daunting task. One aspect of seminary and what makes it somewhat different from other disciplines is there is for many people going into theological education, and seminary in particular, a sense of vocation. So your identity in a way is tied up with what you’re studying. But there’s a sense of, “if I fail Hebrew, I may not be called of God to do what I thought I was supposed to do. And therefore, who am I and why am I supposed to be doing with my life?” I imagine that that probably comes across in other disciplines, too. But there is a sort of existential dread that can come with some of the things that people are facing and studying. But that’s just sort of one way another layer on top of just basic graduate level stress and research and challenges. So we also tried to address that.
You’ve mentioned one of the common problems was getting into research, or getting back into the swing of things as a student. Were there any other common issues that you noticed?
Jane: I did, because we were also at the same time, running a theological writing center, in addition to reference so students could come to us for both. And one of the things I noticed quite early that professors don’t see because of the siloed disciplines in theology, is that theologians are required to write in a number of different ways. Obviously, scholarly papers with appropriate citations were a big challenge. But nobody ever stopped and said, “Look, you’ve got an assignment here. That’s a journal entry. You’ve got an assignment here, that’s a sermon. You’ve got an exegetical assignment, a theological argument, paper, and all of these are different and you have different tones and different flavors.” But if you’re in law, you’re learning how to write briefs. And if you are in history, you’re learning how to write narrative. So that was something that was under-emphasized. And when you actually say it, they think, “Oh, that’s why I’m having so much trouble.” So that was that was a really big aspect for me.
Duane: And it was apparent to me that the same kind of issue was coming up on the reading side. Theological students have to read across a ridiculous number of genres, many of which they had never encountered before. So a lot of our students had never read an ancient writer before they showed up. And they didn’t know how to handle the kind of rhetoric that Augustine, for example, uses. So in addition [to writing and research,] they had a reading list that they found daunting. They didn’t necessarily know how to approach the works effectively. We had pieces on how to read ancient writers. There were so many issues, you know, any given student didn’t have them all. But across the spectrum, there were so many different areas in which students needed help.
Have you noticed that these problems have changed after COVID? Or have you noticed new issues that have arisen since COVID? Are they about the same?
Jane: I would say that the shift towards online pedagogy has definitely had an impact, and assignments are changing because of that. So I’m still not entirely certain how that’s going to continue to fall out. But right now, Perkins is getting ready to launch new modalities. And so the live in person classes are going to be held on a much more condensed weekly schedule. But then there’s going to be almost everything now available online at some point. So again, how that falls out long term we’re waiting to see.
Do you have top tips for how to succeed that you would give to a graduate student, either in humanities or specifically in seminary?
Jane: I’d say time management skills. If they’re having trouble managing their time in seminary, how are they going to manage their time when they’re either running a church or they’re in a doctoral program? So I try to encourage everybody to really work on that while they have a chance here.
Duane: Mine would be don’t panic and make a plan. Which is, in a way, a way of saying exactly the same thing. But I guess what I’m really saying is, you have to prioritize and make choices because you simply cannot do it all. So you’re going to have to make up your mind what your priorities are and live by them.
David: I’m going to cheat and say two. The first one is you don’t have to read the whole thing. The second one, I think this concept of critical humility is, to me really important, this sort of idea of, on the one hand being critical and examining what authors that we tend to revere, like Augustine, or Thomas Aquinas, or James Cameron, and being critical, asking, “Well, why are they saying this? Do I agree with this? How does it relate to other things that I’ve been reading?” but also being humble and recognizing St. Augustine knew a lot that I don’t know. And I can learn a lot from him, and I should be open to learning from a diversity of voices and recognizing that I probably will never agree with John Calvin on 90% of he says, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have anything to say that is worth learning and listening to and to consider, okay, why do I disagree with them?
Jane: I’m going to springboard off of what David said, because that critical humility component is so important, and it flies in the face of everything social media has trained us to do. So I would hope that people coming through seminary, learn about nuance, and accept it as a valid way to live your life. And I guess the other part of that is that I would hope that more people who have an interest in the church, but they also have a career and another field would be interested in pursuing theological education for their own enrichment. I think that’s, that may be the answer to a lot of the under enrollment we’re seeing in theological schools. And there’s just so much to gain by being exposed to the ideas and the great thinkers of the church. I would love to see that and with new modalities and online delivery, I would like to think that that’s something that’s going to be more possible for people.
David: A more immediate concern is that AI is going to take over and take all of our jobs, and we’re going to end up being redundant. But, you know, that’s just sort of a basic underlying sense of dread that I think many of us carry with us that education is just one application with that. One thing that is both a concern and possibly a source of hope, is that I feel like we see so many people coming in to seminary, and professors sort of assumed a basic familiarity with Christian doctrine that just isn’t there, like people will just end up in the pews just really have no idea what Christianity actually teaches. And that leads to all sorts of misconceptions leads to wrong ideas being sort of perpetuated in media and not really hearing voices clearly. I think that theological education has an important role to play not only for training clergy, but also for helping the laity sort of realize that there’s a lot of rich wisdom in the Christian tradition, that doesn’t depend on latest social media fads or technology that people have been thinking about this for 2000 years. So robots are not going to be able to replace that when they they can’t engage in that level of reflection. Even in a world where there’s so much change, that there’s this sort of sense of groundedness and rootedness and something that is so old and so rich, and so meaningful, so that that’s a source of hope.
Duane: It’s been a long term concern of mine that the church and the academy don’t listen to each other very well. My greatest concern about the future of theological education is that the school and the academy and the church are not going to succeed at listening to each other, and they’re going to go down separate paths, in terms of what they consider good preparation for the ministry. And I think that would be backward. My great hope is that the the academy and the church can come together and have a very serious conversation about what the role of the professional minister, or the nonprofessional minister for that matter, is and what the best training for that is, since it’s not a single role, and what the best training for those roles are, what that looks like. And for the academy, I’m hoping that we can establish some sort of way to maintain a longer term relationship with our students, because we cannot do it in the amount of time that we’re allotted. It’s just logically and physically and emotionally impossible. So we need to come up with new models that involve longer term relationships that address the needs of people who are at different points in their ministry and their lives.
Do you have a theological book that you would recommend?
Jane: Mine’s going to be Duane’s probably, because he’s the one that recommended it to me, but it’s Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.
Duane: I tend to have anybody who expresses any interest in Christianity read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. The other one is Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. It’s not a “theological” book, per se, but it’s very theological.
David: Mine is based on what I’ve read recently, because otherwise, I’d be sitting here thinking for too long. Custom Discipleship I think is foundational. I recently read volume one of it but Pope Benedict the 16th has a two volume work on Jesus of Nazareth. And I’ve read a few books on Jesus, and I have to say, this is one of the best that I have read. It’s a synthesis of scholarship and devotion and was very good.
Join us in congratulating Jane, Duane, and David on this accomplishment! Learn more about their book and how to access it.
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