Sublime

who is the self that teaches? How does the quality of my selfhood form—or deform—the way I relate to my students, my subject, my colleagues, my world? How can educational institutions sustain and deepen the selfhood from which good teaching comes?

We must ask the question of selfhood and answer it as honestly as we can, no matter where it takes us. Only as we do so can we discover the community of our lives.

Parker Palmer’s Center for Courage & Renewal (CC&R) has explored how to integrate storytelling into organizational life. The nonprofit center creates soulful retreats to help teachers, doctors, clergy, and business leaders reconnect with their vocation and reunite role and soul.

First, I had been trained as an intellectual not only to think—an activity I greatly value—but also to live largely in my head, the place in the human body farthest from the ground.

By all appearances, things were going well, but the soul does not put much stock in appearances.

“For a good man to realize that it is better to be whole than to be good is to enter on a strait and narrow path compared to which his previous rectitude was flowery license.”