Dr. Stephen Mitchell
about the teacher
A veteran high school humanities teacher, with eighteen years of experience in rigorous, college-preparatory Christian schools, I am honored to offer my experience to the parents and students of Kepler Education. I have a strong record of teaching excellence, including significant experience teaching students of diverse abilities.
As a scholar, I possess deep knowledge where literature, theology, and philosophy intersect. As a teacher, I am adept at putting these three disciplines into conversation with each other in my classes. I am also a skilled writing teacher, conversant in both classical and contemporary rhetoric.
As an active, published essayist, I understand the challenges of writing and can use that understanding to help my students become better writers themselves.
For the past 18 years, I have made my home in the piedmont region of North Carolina. When I am not teaching, I enjoy reading (lots of it), hiking, swimming, cycling, and gardening.
Teaching Philosophy
As a child of Christian parents, I learned early that faith is important. As a young adult, I learned, by way of both classical and modern thinkers, what Pope John Paul II has declared in the epigraph to Fides et Ratio: “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.” These words suggest that we engage the deepest human questions only when reason is completed by faith and faith joined to reason.
Thus, do I always teach with an eye toward the question of truth (of meaning), showing my students how to engage the humanities as a “search for the ultimate and overarching meaning of life” (Fides et Ratio, 102). To encourage this search, I foster conversation (especially, Socratic dialogue) as a shared pursuit of truth. In the friendships that emerge from this endeavor, students and teachers enjoy the freedom to sift and to be sifted by each other. Of course, since truth cannot be siloed into a single subject, it must be pursued across many disciplines.
Statement of Faith
As the son of a minister, I was reared in the shelter of the church. At the age of ten, I made a public declaration of my faith in Jesus Christ, a declaration that marked the beginning of a conscious and personal faith.
In late adolescence, I began to feel the need for the synthesis of faith and reason. Turning to traditional Christian intellectuals for guidance, I read and studied the work of Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Chaucer, Milton, Dostoevsky, Newman, Lewis, Eliot, Pieper, Maritain, O’Connor, Merton, Percy, et al. From these thinkers, I learned that humans reach the deepest questions of the mind and heart only when reason accompanies faith and faith joins reason. Academic research separated from metaphysical and religious truth tends to become a dry and cynical contest for power, but a religious faith that spurns the search for knowledge has relinquished the human vocation to grow into truth and wisdom through knowledge.
In my search for a community of like-hearted believers, I found my way to the Anglican Church in North America--the theologically conservative branch of Anglicanism. Here, in the fellowship of faith, I have learned to revere Scripture and to form my life in pursuit of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. As the fruit of this life, I have been privileged, through teaching and my scholarship, to invite students into this same pursuit.