The Teacher

a slight detour on the teacher that made the difference.

Liberal Arts defender, Mark Edmundson, wrote a wonderful memoir called Teacher: The One Who Made The Difference about his highschool teacher, Frank Mears, who challenged him to think deeply and for himself. “Lears’s impassioned attempts to get these kids to think for themselves provided Mark Edmundson with exactly the push he needed to break away from the lockstep life of Medford High.”

If you are fortunate, and someone who thinks for themselves, you too, probably have your own Frank Mears who shook you out of your mental slumber and unlocked something ineffable and long-lasting. If you’ll indulge me, I want to pay tribute to mine.

This is Doug Bain. He died at the end of May and I’ve been putting off writing about him until I could think carefully about what he meant to me. I owe that to him and so much more.

The context is a very small women’s college in North East Mississippi. The only men alowed to attend Blue Mountain College when I was an undergrad, were men studying to be ministers—almost exclusivley in the Southern Baptist denomination.

Traditional in its architecture, values, and strict adherence to the parallel but not co-education tracks. So strict that when I was elected to be the leader of the student English society, we had to get special dispensation. (in 2005 the BMC voted to go completely co-ed).

I got a double major in English and Biblical Studies. Dr. Bain was one of two Biblical studies professors and had the reputation of being, like Edmundson’s highschool philosophy teacher, a bit of a maverick. Quiet, soft-spoken, and slow to speak in a department known for boisterous, rousing, revivalist preaching, Some of saw him as a outsider.

I liked him immediately. His office was a closet on the top floor of the oldest building I’d ever seen. (the college was founded in 1873). Being one of only two profs in the department meant that I had Dr. Bain for many classes so I had lots of occasions to pester him about this or that.

But there is one lecture, one class, that changed me completely. I don’t think I ever had a chance to tell Doug Bain about what that that class meant to the trajectory of my life and now he’s gone.

It was a Church History class. It was after lunch. The Mississippi sun was invading that classroom like it was Bull Run, even the wooden floor boards were hot. You get the picture. No one was really paying that much attention. The subject matter was the dry-as-dust Medieval papal politics.

Then Dr. Bain started talking about something other than encyclicals and schisms. He started talking about philosophy, specifically metaphysics. Metaphysics is the study of nothing less than the nature of reality. I don’t mean how we experience reality or how we know what is real (that’s epistemology) but what is. Reality itself.

Now, at that time at least, Blue Mountain College had no philosophy classes. It wasn’t required for a ministerial degree which I consider just wrongheaded but I will forgive my alma mater. Dr. Bain however was not going to let us graduate and go on to be clergy without some philosophy. So he lectured that hot afternoon about metaphysics and why it mattered.

He filled that that sunlit lecture hall with questions. He paced the creaking reconstruction-era floor boards struggling to illustrate why the relationship between mind and matter was so crucial to the Medievals.

I’d love to say the class was riveted, but honestly I don’t remember because my mind was abuzz with questions as I started taking notes for the first time that day. (The others probably weren’t riveted. I mean metaphysics, like escargot, is an acquired taste. For some odd reason, I just loved the taste of abstract reasoning about reality. Go figure.)

My mind raced through the implications of each philosophical choice about Platonic Rationalism, Locke’s Empiricism, Skepticism, and the Kantian synthesis. It was like I had a puzzle partially completed that I loosely called my theology and world-view and Doug Bain dumped a bunch of new pieces on the table and said,”These are here. How do they fit?”

I’ve been figuring out where the pieces fit for my entire career. Where does moral philosophy fit with medical culture? How does moral reasoning fit with our understanding of punishment? Life, the Universe, and Everything that’s my playground and Doug Bain was the one to open the gate and encourage me to jump on the merry-go-round, and climb the monkey bars.

He taught me to courageously subject my intuitions to cross-examination and he never, ever let me take the easy way out. When I asked him about the political controversies swirling in the Southern Baptist Convention in those years, Doug gave me some reading, made time in that closet of an office for my questions, and left me to render my own conclusions.

That lecture on that afternoon, unlocked something in me. A deep desire to think clearly and broadly about all of reality. A drive to make the pieces of my worldview fit no matter how many years of my life it took.

I figured out in grad school that I had no interest what gets called contemporary metaphysics. It would be another professor who introduced me to Mill’s On Liberty, who kickstarted my love of moral and political philosophy.

(There was no professor who jumpstarted my interest in Bioethics, that was occasioned by the doctors who were trying to figure out what was destroying my health, but that’s a substack for another day.)

Medieval philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas was so indebted to Aristotle that he often just referred to him as The Teacher. I don’t have just one “The Teacher” but Doug Bain was one of a very few that I would call my Teacher. Put simply, I don’t think I’d be a philosopher if it wasn’t for my Biblical Studies professor, Doug Bain. I hope he knows that and is happy.

And in that spirit, I hope you too find and celebrate The Teachers in your life.