A Call to Service

If John David Dawson’s life had followed his original plan, he might have led a quiet existence as a United Methodist minister, spending his days preparing sermons and advising his parishioners on matters emotional and spiritual.

But instead, Dawson became Haverford’s Constance and Robert MacCrate Professor of Social Responsibility in the department of religion, where he prepares notes for classes and papers for conferences, and counsels students on all things academic. But he’s found that his chosen profession is not such a far cry from what he once believed to be his calling.

“Working for a college is responding to a call to service,” he says.
“It’s a sense of commitment to something larger than oneself.”

Now, Dawson is responding to a much larger call to service. As Haverford’s new provost—replacing Elaine Hansen who, effective July 1, began her presidency at Bates College—he will be responsible for keeping the College’s intellectual pulse alive, overseeing the faculty, and orchestrating ways for professors and students to interact and benefit from each other’s knowledge.

“[Dawson] possesses the depth of scholarship and quality of teaching that exemplify what are most important at an institution like Haverford,” says President Tom Tritton. “He also has an appreciation for the depth of community that makes this College so unique.”

The more Dawson learns about the daily intricacies of the job, the more overwhelmed—but also enthusiastic—he becomes. “A typical faculty member sees some aspects of the job, but many are largely hidden from view,” he says. “I thought I knew how big the job was, but now I’m reminded every day just how big it really is.”

This isn’t a position in which Dawson ever dreamed he would find himself one day. Not while growing up in Hollywood, Md. (St. Mary’s County), when the town was not much more, he describes, than “a stoplight and a volunteer fire department and a gas station or two.” Not even as an undergraduate at Maryland’s Towson University, just outside of Baltimore, where he majored in English and history and still felt that his vocation was to enter the ministry.

But at Towson, he developed an unexpected interest in 17th-century literature, which slightly altered his vision of a minister’s life: “The imagery of the ministry one gets from reading John Donne or George Herbert bears no resemblance to the actual business of becoming a United Methodist minister.” Later, at Duke University’s divinity school, scholarly courses sparked his fascination with the study of ancient Christianity, while at the same time, his summer field work in local churches exposed him to aspects of the ministerial profession that were less than appealing. “The combination of the attraction to an academic career and finding that my academic interests were not going to get the kind of opportunity that I had imagined,” he says, “led me away from the ministry.”

After receiving his master’s of divinity from Duke, he went to Yale to pursue an M.A., an M.Phil., and finally a Ph.D. His dissertation for the latter was later reworked into his first book, Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria, published in 1992. The book is a study of Jewish, Christian, and pagan allegorical readings of ancient texts. Dawson argues that those who chose this form of reading wished to reposition their communities in relation to the larger culture. “One of the reasons people sometimes read texts allegorically is that they didn’t like what the text said, and wanted it to mean something else,” he explains. “Part of my argument was that allegorical reading wasn’t always a way of getting past what the text was about, but was rather a way of associating cultural values with Biblical texts one valued more. It wasn’t always about supplanting the text; sometimes, it was about redescribing or textualizing cultural meaning.” He focused on the city of ancient Alexandria in particular because different groups in that city used allegorical readings to exert competing interpretive claims over the wider Hellenistic culture.

While Dawson was finishing his Ph.D. exams in 1985, he learned of an open position in Haverford’s religion department. He took the train down from New Haven weekly to teach one course and supervise teaching assistants that semester, and became well-prepared to accept a full-time faculty position in 1987. “When that position opened up, I knew what Haverford was like and I had some friends here, so there was a reason for me to pay attention to it,” he says. “I wouldn’t have otherwise, because I was looking for jobs teaching ancient Christianity, and Haverford’s focus was modern.”

Nevertheless, he adapted quickly to the change in academic direction and came to value his status as a member of Haverford’s close-knit community. “It’s a tightly organized group in pursuit of certain aims, and I’m attracted to that context in which to be a scholar and a teacher,” he says. “I don’t see myself very much as a freelance scholar or writer or intellectual; I see myself as embedded in this particular community.” He was also immediately comfortable with the College’s teaching style: “The only real teaching I did as a graduate student was in small group analysis and discussion of texts, so when I came here that was the only model of teaching I knew, and it fit.” he says. “I felt like I understood how to teach here early on and without a lot of anxiety; it seemed a comfortable match between what I wanted to do and what was expected.”

As a teacher, Dawson has employed original techniques that have frustrated, challenged and enlightened students (and earned him the Pennsylvania Professor of the Year award in 1994 from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching). His modus operandi is to infuse students with the courage to become independent and original thinkers. “Most of my classes involve a kind of close collaborative reading of difficult texts; they almost never involve lecturing,” he says. “I spend relatively little time telling students what I think about something, or what scholars think about it, or what they should think about it.” Dawson and his students spend their time unraveling complicated texts, and he assigns writing projects that are broadly defined in terms of topic; his only requirement, aside from the fact that it be relevant to the material, is that the students pursue a genuine question they formulate based on what they’ve studied. “I don’t want them to tell me they have a topic or a theme for their paper, I want to know what question they have about what they’ve been working with. And I want to know if it’s a real question or just an academic ‘I must write a paper’ question.” He finds that when students have a true question to answer, and have been given the confidence to be their own readers and thinkers, and have cultivated close analytical skills, they inevitably produce interesting, rewarding work. “They can bring their minds to bear on the material in a way that is utterly different from everyone else.”

He credits his Haverford courses with influencing his second scholarly book, Literary Theory (1995), in which Dawson analyzed the works of three theorists. “I tried to build conceptual bridges between the worlds of theology and literary theory,” he says, “in order to show how literary theorists made secular interpretive moves that echoed those of the classical theological notions from which they were derived.” The book grew directly out of classes he taught at Haverford. “No matter how narrowly you were trained as a graduate student, if you come to a place where you need to teach broadly and are in conversation with a wide variety of people in different disciplines, often the nature of your own thinking changes,” he says. “So I think Literary Theory might never had been written had I not been here.”

Through the years, Dawson has effectively balanced both his teaching and research duties, presiding over courses on a variety of topics—ethical theories, ancient Christianity, literary theory and modern religious life, the role of religion in American public life—while publishing in such journals as Modern Theology, the Journal of Literature and Theology, and the Journal of Religion. His third and most recent book, Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity, was released by University of California Press in 2001. “Figural reading is a Christian tradition of reading the Bible according to which people and events in the Old Testament are taken to pre-figure people and events described in the New Testament,” he says. “It’s a way of both distinguishing and unifying the Old and New Testaments so that they tell a continuous story.” Dawson’s book examines three writers who criticize the practice by arguing that figural reading undermines the literal meaning of the text. Dawson responds that the practice of Christian figural reading doesn’t have to supplant or override a text’s literal meaning but can sometimes extend it. “This has a rather big implication for the relationship of Christianity to Judaism,” he says. “It’s an argument that Christian reading of scripture need not be supersessionist in the way it has so often been in Christianity, where both the text and the religion of Judaism have been supplanted precisely by interpretations that purport to fulfill them.”

With the publication of this book, Dawson is pleased to bring to an end a scholarly path that he has occupied the past 15 years. “Even though these three books are quite different from one another in many ways, I also think that they employ three different ways of working out a similar set of issues,” he says. “I think I’ve worked them out, not in the sense of having come to a conclusion about them but of having said all I’m able to say about them at the moment. This is a natural breaking point.”

And it’s the perfect time for him to assume the myriad responsibilities of the provost position. His desire is to have a larger impact on the College as a whole, finding ways to enhance the character of faculty members’ dealings with each other and their capacity to discuss research and teaching across the curriculum. He wants to create a common realm in which faculty and students may interact, and would like to see faculty members speak more directly to the issues of today. He hopes that interdisciplinary centers like the new Marian E. Koshland Integrated Natural Sciences Center, the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship, and the Humanities Center will help rejuvenate intellectual life on campus.

“My challenge will be to move ahead on these initiatives,” he says, “and not become overwhelmed by the day-to-day duties of the office.”

In order to handle these duties, Dawson has had to relinquish his positions as director of the Mellon Tri-College Forum, a grant to Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and Swarthmore Colleges from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to strengthen the roles of liberal arts faculty in a changing world; and as director of Haverford’s Humanities Center, an endowed resource for collective and creative thinking in various areas of scholarship. But no matter what, he intends to make time for his primary hobby: sailing, an interest that began during his childhood along Maryland’s Patuxent River but didn’t blossom into action until an afternoon drive across the Annapolis Bay Bridge with his wife, Ellen, a freelance graphic artist. “I saw the sailboats along the bay and remarked to Ellen, ‘Wouldn’t we like to be doing that?’” He and his wife took lessons, became certified, and now keep a boat on the Chesapeake, where they and children Aaron, 11, and Abigail, 8, escape for weekend excursions.

But most important is Dawson’s wish to continue teaching, and stay connected to students. “After you’ve been away for a while, you can forget what it’s like to teach a class.” A call to service, he acknowledges, requires sacrifice, but this would be too great.

-Brenna McBride

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