Gracious Play: Discipline,Insight, and the Common Good

The article is a theological reflection on the vocation of university teaching that describes the heart of the matter of what faculty do in the classroom. The author draws on personal narrative, social‐psychological analyses of how insight occurs and contexts for insights are constructed, and sociological accounts of shifts that have altered significantly the context of university teaching and learning at the cusp of the millennium to make her case. She argues that the vocation of university teaching involves creating spaces of gracious play that are potentially transformative for students and faculty. Creating such spaces, however, draws faculty into an asceticism that can be understood as a spiritual path. The article is a revision of the author's 1999 St. Elizabeth Seton Lecture at the College of Mount St. Joseph, Cincinnati, Ohio.