Finding Our God-Terms

The work of literary critic Mark Edmundson offers a powerful vision for recentering the American university.

By Joshua HallMarch 2, 2026

• Literary Criticism

• Education

IN WHY READ? (2004), Mark Edmundson writes that all of his English classes, regardless of author, period, or genre, pose the same central question: “How do you imagine God?” Whether students are atheists or agnostics, rabid apostates or fervent church-, synagogue-, or mosque-going believers, he asks them to use their time in college to seek a life richer in spiritual meaning than the “cool consumer worldview” he claims elsewhere is “the order of the day” at modern American universities, which have become too noisy for anyone to hear, let alone imagine, God.

For over three decades, Edmundson—a writer and professor at the University of Virginia—has rightly observed that a consumer-oriented university, by definition, cannot offer the free, uncommercialized space required for students to question the values they have been socialized to accept, including the corporate “frat-boy ideology” that currently rules campus life. He wants students to know that the pursuit of what he calls, in his 2018 book The Heart of the Humanities: Reading, Writing, Teaching, “consumer bliss” is not a form of freedom but overstimulated slavery—a soulless, self-surveilling state they would be wise to buck or, at the very least, consider skeptically. That process, Edmundson insists, starts with questions about God, “even if what we’re going on to do is read the novels of Henry James.”

I have never been a student in Professor Edmundson’s classes, but I have read and taught him for nearly 20 years. In his books, he rarely answers his bold, anachronistic class opener squarely. Whether he’s writing literary criticism (1995’s Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida: A Defence of Poetry), memoir (2002’s Teacher: The One Who Made the Difference), or personal essays (The Heart of the Humanities), Edmundson considers any number of contradictory intellectual, emotional, and spiritual perspectives from which readers must infer his conclusions about divinity. His general unwillingness to resolve the question of God (he calls himself a “longtime agnostic”), as well as his seemingly endless fascination with dialectical reasoning, often drives my students crazy. Their internet-addled nervous systems cannot tolerate uncertainty, tension, or doubt—a condition that prevents them from reading deeply and thus grasping Edmundson’s central message: however tech-saturated and ruthlessly transactional the modern American college experience has become, a university education is still the best escape route, maybe the only enterprise in American life that allows you to “gaze out onto the larger world and construe it freely.”

Yet such gazing and construing, as Edmundson notes in The Age of Guilt: The Super-Ego in the Online World (2023), requires time, most of which is now gobbled up by electronic devices. Students spend their college years with their minds “locked into a tiny rectangular space,” consuming content instead of reading alone, “deeply and privately.” (An internet-linked computer, no matter how many privacy protections one has in place, is never a private space.) Solitude is an elemental necessity of intellectual life, but it has been replaced by a technocratic vision of learning, one that values information, instant answers, and surface-level exchange over deep thought, self-reflection, and inner transformation. More and more, campus buzzes like a shopping mall, the bookstore is an emporium for electronics and university swag, the classrooms look like something out of The Matrix (1999), and even the library is becoming gadget-saturated. In a few years, I’m sure the stacks will be a massive electronic database, the books replaced by wires sizzling with literary information, but for now, one can still read there in something resembling silence.

And in that secular semiquiet, Edmundson insists, even the godless can find God—or, more accurately, “god-terms,” for words themselves are Edmundson’s secular deities. There might not be an ultimate center, a final Truth or God, he suggests, but there are brave, brilliant, compassionate individuals (like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman) who have used words to put forth a vision of a life worth living. Students must encounter “the best which has been said and thought” (in Matthew Arnold’s famous words) so they can understand themselves and have some say in the direction of their lives. By seeking out writers who can help them articulate what Edmundson calls, in The Heart of the Humanities, their “defining beliefs,” their god-terms, students begin the process of a “real education.”

Such Emersonian American optimism is difficult for many of my students to take seriously. Even though they come from middle-class backgrounds and comfortable material lives, they are cynical, even nihilistic, about ideas like freedom, self-determination, and progress. All their lives, they have seen images of the United States at its worst—porn and pillage and plunder, pompous magnates and warring tribes on the march. Their sense of meaning and purpose is internet-based and totally transactional, so they understand college as a materialistic, self-enriching hustler’s paradise. They have never known a quiet, tech-free learning environment. They have never experienced what so many of us took for granted throughout our own college educations, before screens colonized university life: the sustained silence necessary to read and think; the boredom one must endure (and cultivate) to penetrate the surface layers of self and get down to the soul, one’s god-terms, one’s “outermost circle of commitments.”

A real education, as Edmundson writes in The Heart of the Humanities, should encourage students to question their early socialization, their inherited values and beliefs, including their likely addiction to consumer culture. College is a place to question whether “the authorities” in students’ lives “have it right.” If students take the consumerist path of the current authorities, Edmundson warns in Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education (2013), they will “have a driveway of [their] own” but also be “truly and righteously screwed.” Thus his central message: An education spent in pursuit of material comfort and convenience is a recipe for unhappiness, an existence in thrall to the raw, hungry American mantra of success, “More! More!”

When I see my students scrolling away their formative intellectual and emotional years on a computer screen, most of them don’t look happy. They look scared, overstimulated, and craving distraction. This condition, Edmundson suggests, is rooted in our oversocialized consumer culture, which has probably impacted their development more than their family, school, or religion has. Instead of spiritual questers, searchers after the good, beautiful, and true, students come to college as good consumers, kids who have unironically adopted Kurt Cobain’s pathetic, deeply ironic plea: “Here we are now, entertain us!”

Against this insidious American entertainment culture (one thinks of Neil Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business), Edmundson suggests that deep reading can be a model for meaningful, purposeful, selfless living. In a wonderful essay on his graduate school days at Yale, Edmundson offers a vision of how we might respond to Generation Z’s despair: “I can still see Thomas Greene, hands trembling slightly, face frowning with concentration, trying to get at that poem by Wyatt, trying to get it right, trying to meet the poet there in the seminar room, 400 years down the line, and give him what he’d earned,” Edmundson writes. “It was an example not only of how a critic treats a poet but also of how one human being can treat another.”

This is perhaps the clearest passage in which Edmundson insists that words are the physical manifestation of a writer’s soul, that we should treat people with the same care and nuance with which we read poetry, for the “holy” medium of words is the best way out of the culture of self that is so pervasive in modern American life. We need not be victims of that culture or reduce ourselves, as he puts it in another essay, to individuals at “the intersection of many evaluative and potentially determining discourses.” We can read our way out of our lives, as he argues in The Age of Guilt, and into “something better.”

Edmundson’s generosity, his Christian charity and spiritual metaphors, can cloud the fact that he is, at heart, a secular writer, an earnest seeker of what the philosopher Brian R. Clack calls “something precious lying at [religion’s] heart.” That something precious, in Edmundson’s view, is a language to define and describe an ultimate belief, the limits of an argument, god-terms. When we invoke words like “God” or “Nature” or “Fate” (or more secular god-terms like “race,” “gender,” or “class”), we set the limits of the discussion and define what Edmundson calls the “corners” of the metaphor. God-terms are unquestionable because they cut off further inquiry; they are—as he puts it in Why Read?—“the point beyond which argument and analysis are unlikely to go.”

Whether sacred or secular, god-terms (in Why Read? Edmundson also calls them “Final Narratives”) emphasize that human meaning is literary and narrative in nature. The concept, which Edmundson borrows from Kenneth Burke, appears in Literature Against Philosophy, a book about literature and literary criticism that is still ahead of its time in its commitment to dialectical engagement with what, in the current academy, often seem like irresolvable factions—namely, the poets and the critics. Notably, Edmundson, then a literary critic, sided with the poets, but even in 1995, he declared that literary criticism, the attempt to get the poetic passions under intellectual control, had won. Modern television culture, much like his Yale education (or at least some of it), was about “debunking […] ideals.” The former’s culture of irony and satire and the latter’s endless web of interpretation, he argues in The Heart of the Humanities, rendered the notion of individual genius “silly [and] outmoded.” God-terms in the 1980s and ’90s weren’t rich, demanding concepts like capital-T “Truth” and capital-A “Art” but easy-to-grasp, vulgar business phrases like “work hard, play hard” or “become a leader.”

If anything, those phrases have gained currency with today’s students, many of whom see money and power as the highest goods, as ends in themselves, the only real purpose of going to college. Yet instead of pursuing lives defined by “business-speak” or “politico-speak” (or some other popular, money-based idiom), Edmundson encourages students, in The Heart of the Humanities, to read the great poets, the Romantics especially, writers who “fuse feeling and thought” on the page. He urges students to see words not as metaphors or representations but as the writers themselves, real human beings, right there on the page, waiting to be understood and appreciated, as Thomas Greene did for Wyatt. Language is an integral, if not the central, meaning of human life. We are word-making creatures, and our words, “at their best” (a phrase that recurs in Edmundson’s work), offer hope and purpose, a way of figuring out who we are, who we have been, and where we might be going.

It’s an affirmative vision of higher education, one worth taking seriously in this sped-up age of simulated learning. Edmundson wants students to slow down, find their own god-terms, and “initiate the process of growth.” For growth, as he sees it, doesn’t stop at 18 or 25 or 35 or even in middle or old age. It’s a lifelong process, one in which we are forever, as he puts it in Teacher, “works in progress.” It’s difficult to sustain and live out such a view, for the temptation to come to a permanent, binding god-term, especially one rooted in consumer culture, is all around us—on screens, in loud advertisements. It’s too easy to “slip into” these “forms of worship,” as David Foster Wallace said, unaware of their infinitely pleasurable emptiness. But Edmundson, unlike Wallace, is a great gatherer of hope, his message one of achievable, real-world salvation—the idea that a life lived well ends not in despair but in gratitude for the opportunity to live and breathe and walk the earth, however painful or frustrating the journey. Edmundson says, in Why Write? A Master Class on the Art of Writing and Why It Matters (2016), that he often stares at his pencil and “smile[s] with strange gratitude,” for the pencil is the instrument of his vocation, his way of making contact with divinity.

Like “reading,” “writing” is a resolutely secular Edmundsonian god-term, one students should consider as “a live alternative to the demoralizing culture of hip in which most of [them] are mired” (as he puts it in Why Teach?). There is no tech overlord, no surveillance, just student, pencil (or pen), and paper, in the quiet, sustained pursuit of self-knowledge. Kurt Vonnegut called it a writer’s ability to “cure himself” daily, but Edmundson is more elevated than the black-lunged sage. “We have at our hands’ reach,” he writes in The Heart of the Humanities, “a skill that is also a spiritual discipline. Writing is a meditation; writing is as close as some of us can come to prayer; writing is a way of being, righteously, in the world.”

The difficult pleasure of finding god-terms is, for Edmundson, an expansive, edifying experience. Although many of the writers he values are canonical and white, he is careful to note that god-terms don’t need to be limited to authors with whom one can identify. After all, the first book that Edmundson bought with his own money, he says in Teacher, was The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). In X’s transformation, Edmundson saw a glimpse of his own potential, a way to change his life for the better, and that’s what he ultimately wants for his readers: a chance to find the words that will help us (as he puts it in Why Teach?) to “stop and think and then try to remake the work in progress we currently are. There’s no better place for that than a college classroom where, together, we can slow it down and live deliberately.”

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Featured image: Photo of Mark Edmundson by Sanjay Suchak, University of Virginia Communications.