Becoming Beholders: Cultivating Sacramental Imagination and Actions in College Classrooms

Catholic colleges and universities have long engaged in conversation about how to fulfill their mission in creative ways across the curriculum. The "sacramental vision" of Catholic higher education posits that God is made manifest in the study of all disciplines. Becoming Beholders is the first book to share pedagogical strategies about how to do that. Twenty faculty--from many religious backgrounds, and in fields such as chemistry, economics, English, history, mathematics, sociology and theology--discuss ways that their teaching nourishes students' ability to find the transcendent in their studies.

About the Author :
Karen E. Eifler is Professor of Education and Co-Director of the Garaventa Center for Catholic Intellectual Life and American Culture at the University of Portland in Oregon. She is the author of A Month of Mondays: Spiritual Lessons from Catholic Classrooms (ACTA Publications, 2011) and been published in many journals including Catholic Education: a Journal of Inquiry and Practice, Transformational Education, Journal of Teacher Education and The Teaching Professor.

Review :
The editors write of the need for spaces where learning has meaning and purpose. Teachers don't create those kinds of spaces with their knowledge of the content or a sophisticated repertoire of pedagogical techniques. They do so with an imagination that sees what and how they teach in a life-enveloping context. That's what these essays showcase. You see how teaching looks when it's infused with a bit of divine perspective.Maryellen Weimer, Professor Emeritus of Teaching and Learning, Penn State University "Becoming Beholders "gives the reader amazingly practical advice on how to entice busy and normally reactive college students to change modes and instead learn to be deliberatively reflective. With examples from disciplines as diverse as abstract mathematics and chemistry to communication studies and literature and writing, I walked away with several ideas to transform my teaching and how to answer a question I've always struggled with: how can my ordinarily secular physics courses become so much more in light of the Catholic intellectual tradition?" Becoming Beholders "helped me conceive of new ways to help my physics students look at nature and the world and see, as Michael Himes, SJ, puts it so eloquently, the omnipresence of grace-"the love that undergirds all that exists."Gintaras Duda, Associate Professor of Physics, Creighton University, 2013 Carnegie/CASE US Professor of the Year