Possibilities for Interfaith Dialogue in Writing Centers and Programs

This article speaks into the pervasive silence on the subject of faith in writing center and writing program work. Through revisiting Sharon Crowley’s Toward a Civil Discourse and investigating silence, we encourage “counterfudamentalist work”: work that counters fundamentalist methodology by inviting fundamentalists and believers and nonbelievers of different kinds into nonliteralist and open-minded ways of reading writing-centered experiences involving religious faith and secularism. The three authors of this article offer personal narratives about their own experience with faith in their centers/programs and use different theoretical perspectives to start a necessary dialogue on faith and religious experiences. By interweaving theoretical perspectives, research, and personal narratives involving our WPA work, this article argues that writing center/program administrators must do the same, and we hope to model the types of conversations we must bring into our centers.