During our close reading of The Letter from Birmingham Jail, he defiantly asked in front of the whole class, “If you can force people into complacency, then segregation works, right? Society still functions.” I froze for a second, absorbing the gravity of the moment. My mind immediately calculated the multiple ...

When asked, “What was Muhammad’s moral character like?” Aisha replied: “His moral character was the Quran.” Students encounter this hadith at two moments in the introductory course to the study of Islam. The first is when students meet the Prophet Muhammad through hadith literature, the written record of sayings ...

I was born and grew up in the hills of east Tennessee, in the Appalachian region of the United States. As a child, I didn’t realize that where I lived had a reputation in other parts of the country. I also didn’t know that I had an exceptionally ...

“No. I’m not telling that. I don’t care if it helped. Naw!” It was the end of the second year of COVID teaching, and I was telling a friend that the semester had been the first time in a long time that I felt like my students were ...

The seminary professor, a man of color, just walked out of the academic dean’s office. He had been teaching at the mainline Protestant theological institution for eleven years. The academic dean, a white woman, called him into her office to talk about a recent article he published in a ...