Resources by Daniel Orlando Álvarez

Diversity is the standard for theological education. One of the dimensions of courage that we must have in our classrooms is the ability to see multiple perspectives. To word it differently, we must have the ability to put ourselves in another person’s shoes. I am reminded of the poignant song and video by Everlast, “What It’s Like.” Part of the problem in religious circles and in society in general is the complete lack of empathy. Empathy is defined simply as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” It contrasts with sympathy, defined as “feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune.” Empathy means you are in (em) their suffering (pathos), and not only with them (sym) in their suffering (pathos).In online environments it is difficult to create empathy. After all, we are not in brick-and-mortar classes. We sit comfortably behind a screen and are not interacting in person. However, there are still opportunities to create a sense of empathy, and consequently being present, with one another – even if we are from different walks of life and from different parts of the world. In one of my classes I had students from Africa, Latin America, and the US. The students from the US in this class also reflected an incredible amount of diversity. My students are Black, Caucasian, Hispanic/Latin@, and of mixed race heritage. We are challenged to walk with one another and, at the very least, to understand each other’s perspectives.On the first day of class I strive to help my students get to know each other. Knowing is not merely knowing information about one another, but to enter into a relationship with one another (an affective move). The best way to do so is to listen to each other’s stories. For the last few years I have asked students to post a video of themselves in which they show an object that represents their personality and the significance of faith in their lives. I learned this tactic in a Wabash Workshop for early career faculty. Since then, I have found it to be a very helpful exercise. Most students have discussed a Bible that was gifted to them. Others post pictures of significant family members.This tactic presents opportunities to enter into another’s reality. One of my Black students posted a video where he quietly and soberly described the only gift he ever received from his father when he was three years old. It was a small jacket his father bought while stationed as a soldier in Vietnam in 1966. It had a map of Vietnam with place names and surrounding countries embroidered on the back along with the year, 1966. The student’s name was on a front pocket of the jacket. Except for occasional visits and this lone gift, his father was completely absent from this student’s life. For my student this reflected a lack – of stability, of responsibility, of keeping one’s own word, and of a loving family.My student later shared that when his dad passed away his thoughts toward him changed. He started missing him. He also started thinking about the opportunities he had missed with his father. The father’s own racial background and his experience in Vietnam meant his life had been marked by trauma, instability, and many struggles. Somehow, this jacket created an opportunity to empathize with his dad and to forgive him. My student stated that because of this experience, he desired to be a present male figure in his own son’s life.Two things stood out to me. First, I thought of all the pressing contextual issues in the life of my student’s father. The country was going through the Civil Rights movement (1954-1968). His father had been shaped by segregation, Jim Crow laws, and all the psychological harm of racism.[i] Black colleagues have shared that due to moving and different circumstances they cannot trace their ancestry back for more than one or two generations. His father was also a soldier in one of the most unpopular wars. The year 1966 was marked by mounting casualties and a sense of futility as superior US firepower could not break the resolve of the Vietcong. To create a sense of community and empathy in class, I encouraged my students to think of the trauma that this father had endured and of the courage that it took for the student to be transparent and vulnerable enough to share about this object.Second, I thought of the courage it took my student to forgive his father and to deal with this trauma as he built his own family. I thought of the resilience he demonstrated to be able to make sense of his own situation even though he may not have fully understood his father’s situation. Faith has played an important role in my student’s life, giving him language and ideas to deal with his own difficulties, and with his absent father. It also empowered him to take ownership of the situation and to pour out what he never received into the life of his own son.My student is a living testament to the courage reconciliation requires. The classroom made us walk together with this student who had a very different history from all of us. The online classroom required us to be present with him. My comments and responses were paths to give him necessary attention and models for how to respond to those who reveal trauma and become vulnerable to us. Most importantly, I, a Hispanic/Latin@ faculty member from a different generation, was able to empathize with this student. Hopefully, this distinct affective move was able to model a way forward in our conflicted cultural milieu. Notes & Bibliogrpahy[i] Robert T. Carter and Thomas D. Scheuermann, Confronting Racism Integrating Mental Health Research into Legal Strategies and Reforms(Routledge, 2020).

Watching news of ICE arrests and protests in Los Angeles, I cannot help but think how we have got here. The perception of many people who voted for President Trump is that there are too many “illegals” in this country. The reason for this impression, perhaps, is that the Latino presence in some states has increased exponentially in the last few decades. Towns with minimal or no Latino presence now have significant immigrants. The image below demonstrates this change in non-traditional Latino states, where the unprecedented growth has taken place.[i] According to the U.S. census bureau, between 2022 and 2023, the Hispanic population accounted for just under 71% of the overall growth of the United States population.[ii] Hispanics of any race grew to just over 65 million, an increase of 1.16 million (1.8%) from the prior year.[iii] This growth significantly contributed to the nation's total population gain of 1.64 million in 2023.[iv]I live in the small town of Cleveland, TN. I remember first arriving in Cleveland when I was in the first grade. I have been in and out of Cleveland since I was six years old. Back in those days—and aside from my sister—I was the only “Hispanic” kid in the school. No one knew much about me except that I spoke Spanish and that I was learning English. I may not have been fluent in English, but I was good at learning things and came to the classroom with strong abilities. Though I did not have the language skills to keep up with my peers at the beginning, a particular instance let me know that I could do what my peers could do. I remember the teacher gave out a math worksheet on my first day of class that I finished before all my peers. I also got all my answers correct. Later, I steadily learned English and spoke it fluently within a year. In fact, I spoke English with a southern accent. One time, my parents recorded a greeting to send to my grandmother on a cassette tape. When I visited my native Honduras in the late 1990s, my sister and I found the exact cassette tape with the recording on it. When we listened to it after all those years, we laughed because we had a thick southern accent.            I am now in my 40s, and the school system has changed. There are many more children of Latin American descent, as well as other heritages. My son’s middle school has a lot of Hispanic students. He played soccer on his team with children whose parents were 1st generation immigrants of Argentine, Chilean, Dominican, Honduran, Guatemalan, and Mexican heritage (among many non-Latin American backgrounds, of course). He would sometimes come up to me and ask me questions about what certain Spanish words meant. Here I am, nearly forty years after I first arrived in Cleveland and things have changed in this small town. But even though all the children I have met here have arrived through the proper channels or are born U.S.-citizens, there is a strong anti-immigrant sentiment in my community.            This is xenophobia: the dislike of or prejudice against people from other countries. Just because a person is brown, it does not mean that they were or have been “illegal.” Seeing ICE arrest U.S. citizens even after providing proper ID is a clear sign of racial profiling by those who are supposed to keep us safe. Seeing the military deployed at protests is a politicization of the military. The way that these politics are working out makes me wonder if brown people will ever be perceived as true U.S. citizens and equal. The Latino community has increased exponentially. It is nothing to fear. And even if one day they were to become a majority in the U.S., like the case of Blacks in South Africa, it appears they would still be a minority in terms of economics and/or power. I am a Christian and there are two important elements of faith that are important for us. The first is hospitality as a qualifier for leadership in the local church (1 Peter 4:9; 1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:8). I would also argue that it is a mark of a true Christian and a Spirit-filled life (Hebrews 13:2). The other element is compassion. If we remember the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10), good will and compassion extend beyond cultural, ethnic, racial, socio-economic, and nationalistic barriers. The radical nature of the Samaritan’s aid to the Hebrew man cannot be understated. The immigrant—whether legal or “illegal,” documented or undocumented—is our neighbor. We must now consider what it means for them to be our neighbor and what hospitality requires of us. Notes & Bibliography[i] US Census Bureau, “Percentage Change in the Hispanic or Latino Population by Country: July 1, 2022 to July 1, 2023,” https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2024/comm/hispanic-population-change.html, last accessed June 19, 2023.[ii] US Census Bureau, “New Estimates Highlight Differences in Growth Between the U.S. Hispanic and Non-Hispanic Populations,“ June 27, 2024, https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/population-estimates-characteristics.html (last accessed June 5, 2025).[iii] Ibid.[iv] Ibid.

In a previous blog, I highlighted courage as a a key factor in teaching. It ultimately pointed to a struggle for the affections of our students. I discussed the importance of winning their affection as a key component of my work as a teacher. It is a valuable step to gain credibility in the classroom. Below, I continue addressing this battle for the affections.I teach at Pentecostal Theological Seminary. Many of my Academy peers at non-Pentecostal institutions, in Wabash workshops, and in other settings have expressed their interest in Pentecostalism. It is like a hobby or curiosity due to the perceived eccentricity of Pentecostal belief and practice. I have also met many in the Academy who grew up as Pentecostals but are now a part of other religious traditions. Somehow, their experience still informs their identity and they now work in theological education even if it is through different lenses. Others hear the word “Pentecostal” and just raise their eyebrows because of the many misinformed stereotypes.Perhaps the most groundbreaking work for Pentecostals was Steven Jack Land’s Pentecostal Spirituality: A Passion for the Kingdom (1993). To this day, I understand that it is the all-time best-seller for the Centre for Pentecostal Theology. Land’s title is descriptive for Pentecostalism.[i] Land connects systematic theology and spirituality. For him, Pentecostals are a Wesleyan form of religion similar and different from other streams of Christian thought in that their theology stresses the affections. Post-Land, Pentecostals understand that theological education is about “knowing in one’s mind” (orthodoxy). It is also about “knowing how to do” (orthopraxis). Yet, education also involves feeling or aligning one’s affections or disposition the right way (orthopathos).My tradition points to the importance of winning and molding the affections of the human being.[ii] This is something that can help us as we teach. Theological education most certainly includes the mind; however, it is much more than rational assent. Theological education is concerned with the student engaging in the right practices, but that is not its end. Theological education is concerned with things that are at stake in our culture and are of utmost importance; as such we are in a struggle for the heart of our generation, for the affections. Nonetheless, the affections must also involve the mind and our practices. Too many Pentecostals love God, but they do not love God with their minds or with their practice. The three (orthodoxy, orthopraxis, and orthopathos) go hand in hand as a perichoretic philosophy of learning, if you will.My concern is with this latter orthopathic dimension in theological education. Let me clarify, Pentecostals are known for “tongues and drums.” In what I describe I am always conscious of the mind and action. However, religious or theological education must be concerned with orthopathy. This term comes from the Greek roots, ortho and pathos. Ortho refers to the “correct manner” or to a “proper way”; pathos refers to suffering, or in the literal sense, a quality that evokes pity. Theological education must not only be concerned with the right information about God or the right practice. It must also be concerned with producing the right passion, or the right affections, concerning the things of God.Let me provide an illustration. A person may not know about justice in Scripture or in a particular religious tradition. We do the difficult work of presenting students with this hard intellectual fact. Second, a student may be acquainted with the notion of social justice and may even participate and engage in activities promoting justice or the right social action. However, even in my intellectual knowledge of justice and the right practice of social justice, I must remember the underlying need to love my neighbor as myself – even when this neighbor may not think or act like me. This is a profound affective move that conditions my relationship to all human beings, even if I rationalize that they do not deserve to be treated as such. Thus, orthopathos refers to a gut check about being invested in the right way of being in the world or feeling in the world towards God, neighbor, and self – vertically, horizontally, and dispositionally.I know this is a brief essay and I may not have time to write more about this. But in my particular tradition (wesleyan-pentecostal), any writing about teaching must include these three dimensions: orthodoxy, orthopraxis, and orthopathy. As a result, theological education must include those elements that evoke the most poignant affections, such as (but not limited to) music, poetry, dance, art, and other media. People wonder what makes Pentecostals grow. It is this radical inclusion into liturgy and beyond (such as the world of the Academy) of this oft-forgotten part of our humanity – the affections. Orthopathos is a powerful composition that produces lifelong learners that are passionate about theology, education, and God. Teaching seeks to live out these vibrant vertical and horizontal relationships.  Notes & Bibliography[i] There are many different types of pentecostalisms. There are charismatic Pentecostals, third wave Pentecostals, reformed Pentecostals, and anabaptist-like strains of pentecostalism. But I teach at Pentecostal Theological Seminary, a school that traces and articulates the development of its Pentecostalism to the nineteenth-century Holiness Movement (i.e. Phoebe Palmer, Charles Finney, etc.) and eventually to John Wesley (pentecostalism’s grandfather). It is known as “the Cleveland School” for its Wesleyan-Holiness-Pentecostal perspective.[ii] Jonathan Dean, A Heart Strangely Warmed: John and Charles Wesley and Their Writings (Canterbury Press, 2014).

Teaching. Is there a greater thing to fear? For those of us in religious education, the “straw epistle” tells us that the teacher will be judged more strictly (James 3:1). These words on strict judgment are a source of meta praxis reflection for me. Irene Orr defines meta praxis as: “the potential for human flourishing through an awareness of practice and the value of making craft as an explicit knowledge pathway. Within and beyond the practice, this pathway has the potential to put us in touch with the essential vitality of life and its human value.”[i]Below, I focus on my meta praxis with the idea that the craft of teaching requires courage. This courage reflects on the essential vitality of life and its human value. Furthermore, it requires us to make a serious connection between what we study and how we live it out. In Spanish we say, “Del dicho al hecho hay mucho trecho” which means something like “From saying it to doing it there’s a big stretch.” It is similar to saying, “It is easier said than done.”Teaching is a task that is undervalued in our cultural milieu – and especially in fundamentalist circles it is seen with suspicion. I live and work in fundamentalist circles in the Southeastern US. Fundamentalism loves the end-time prophets, the soothsayers, and the showmen. In the classroom, it prefers indoctrination and rote recall. For example, it took a solar eclipse in 2024 to generate speculation about eschatological events and a lot of misinformation pouring into the livelihoods of people of faith. True education involves so much more than fear mongering. It engages people where they live. Otherwise, there can be no authentic reflection or flourishing.In my experience, writing about teaching requires us to have the courage to be human. For example, in my classes I have experienced that it is important to build and establish a rapport with students. In building a rapport, the teacher must engage the students right where they are at, wherever they come from, and with the baggage (for better or for worse) of their religious background. It is here that being human involves a level of relatability. Griffiths states that being relatable can help to create an appetite for learning.[ii] As a person with a PhD, I am an expert on the content. I have studied it and know that the material I teach is potentially life-changing. The difficulty arises because as a teacher I engage the learner at the mundane level of everyday reality. The journey towards the deeper layers of cognition and the underlying base epistemology is quite daunting, particularly when my students are not asking the questions I want to answer. Furthermore, the age of disinformation complicates my work.[iii] I have had several students who have no formal theological training in my classroom. They are usually content to compartmentalize the grammars of theology from their lived reality. Quite simply, some students just want to know how to make their church grow numerically, how to increase donations, and about the latest eschatological theological fads. It is taxing to engage them in the everyday visceral reality with the deeper theological grammars that powerfully shape and mold human beings.I have found that an effective way of demonstrating humanity is by incarnating my deepest values in the classroom. Much of what I teach about is modeled in the classroom. The values that I hold dear are more often “caught” than they are taught.[iv] For me, it has become imperative to establish some sort of relational connection with my students. As a teacher, I find myself carefully observing the world around my students. I become a student of my students. It is similar work to that of ethnographers when they enter a group and establish a rapport for their task of observation. I have heard many of my peers criticize this by saying that our students don’t need their hands held, but when looking at different academic studies about the classroom, the most common denominator in retention success is a human connection.[v]And when one considers that the number of students specializing in religion is actually decreasing, this becomes even more important. Ultimately, it is a battle for the affections of our students, whether they are undergraduate or graduate students. I recognize that this affective work cannot be readily quantified as the affections are an elusive but very real element of our humanity.Having courage means that I must create a hospitable environment – even with the fundamentalists. I have found that teaching works best when I create a hospitable environment, even when we vehemently disagree. However, students desire a “relationship-rich” experience in their journey through higher education.[vi] It requires courage because quite honestly, my time is filled with faculty meetings, committee meetings, personal research, writing, and the search for creativity – the temptation is to let contact with my students slide and limit my communication with them to terse sentences via email (if I respond at all). This press for time means that my contact with students must be intentional and meaningful. The teacher must have the courage, even in asynchronous online interactions, to establish quality contact with students.I am convinced that being courageous yields positive results. It ultimately means that my voice, a Honduran-American mestizo voice, is at the very least respected because I have shown hospitality when many students merely think of me as just “the Hispanic professor.” This hospitality transforms me from a stranger (read: a “Bad Hombre”) into being able to engage my students, even with the insertion of a dissonance of perspective. It is this relationship with them that allows me to introduce them to a new thought or a different pattern of living (meta praxis) that can alter someone’s life journey. My mere presence has a new sense of authority that can possibly create enough ripples at the edges of life experiences so that I might alter the web or system of beliefs.[vii] I engage the teaching discipline to discover ways to alter webs and engage my students as I further embody concepts and the dense stuff in the clouds and give it traction in their daily lived experiences. We agree, disagree, and yet ultimately strive for synthesized solutions on our journey together. Notes & Bibliography[i] Irene Orr, “Meta Praxis: Craft Praxis: A Way of Being,” (Doctoral Thesis, University of Dundee, 2020).[ii] Paul J. Griffiths, Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar (Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 2, https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=b3a0cf3c-9a8b-3131-b54f-14e766e41a5e.[iii] W. Lance Bennett, The Disinformation Age (Cambridge University Press, 2020),https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914628.[iv] For an example see Ronald Allen, “Is Preaching Taught or Caught: How Practitioners Learn,” Theological Education 41, no. 1 (2005): 137-152, https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=5e35cd3a-845e-389c-bddd-d72efdd95eb0.[v] Rebecca A. Glazier, Connecting in the Online Classroom : Building Rapport Between Teachers and Students, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021), https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=b7ecbdd5-70bf-3ed1-9f85-342d7e4829bd.[vi] Glazier, Connecting.[vii] Brett Topey, “Quinean Holism, Analyticity, and Diachronic Rational Norms,” Synthese 195, no. 7 (July 2018): 3143-3171; 3144, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26750351.

I was the only Hispanic student in my elementary school. In high school I was always in some kind of conflict because I was still the only Hispanic. My whole life I have had to learn to navigate a culture in which I stood out for various reasons. This in-betweenness has characterized my life since then. It is like living in the hyphen between Hispanic-American.[i] I have studied and gained my education where I was a minority. I have dealt with microaggressions and full-out aggressions of various sorts since I was a child. So now that I have a PhD and am a Director at the institution where I am employed, have things changed?No. I am now the “Hispanic Professor.” Some students come to my class guarded and assume that I am “liberal” just because I am Hispanic. Some people have the audacity to think that I am a “token” professor and am here although I really did not earn my place. As Hispanic/Latin@ my point of view is not the same as theirs and naturally, since Hispanics do not have education and are not educated, my viewpoint carries less weight than that of other professors. As a corollary, my judgment as a program director is faulty since Hispanics don’t think. People come to my office and are surprised that I am “tall for a Latino.” I have been asked “Are you really Hispanic?” simply because I speak English relatively well. However, the question I am most often asked is, “Where are you from?” Like, “Where are you ‘really’ from?” It is as if people just want to pigeonhole me, label me, and keep me in their neat little place in their social constructs, especially that social construct that sees Hispanics as wetbacks, illegals, foreigners, and not truly American.I read The Merchant of Venice in High School. The lines I remember most in this play are when Shylock the Jew states,Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?[ii]Shylock was making an important self-discovery. Was he a villain just because of his Jewish heritage? Did he not also have feelings, passions, and senses and live like everyone else? These lines help us understand Shylock’s posture throughout the play. But for me, they point to something that I have longed for since childhood. At some point, I want to be known by everyone as a fellow human being. I do not wish to be limited by my bronze skin, ethnicity, or the nationality of my parents and grandparents.I am always mindful of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech, “I Have a Dream.”[iii] Please do not misread me, I have not faced any of the cruelties that he or those in the Civil Rights struggle did. Nevertheless, his speech is a constant reminder that our mental schemes need transformation. What hits home with me are these lines: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.”This is the cruelty of our own society. We assume all kinds of mental and social constructs based upon the mere outward appearance of a person. The outward appearance is but one of the many dimensions of a human being. It does not account for the mind, the psyche, the spirit, or the soul of a person. It does not take into account the personal story of that individual and the experiences that have shaped him or her. It does not take into account the spirituality and faith of these people and the beauty and creativity of the Black Church, or the Latina Church.[iv] While a person’s phenotype may reveal some things, a common history, a common ancestry, it does not in and of itself define the totality of that human being. And as those who study humans know, humanity has a powerful soul that dares to dream, that challenges the status quo, that questions the way things are, that invites the divine to enter their lives to rearrange our brokenness into the image, likeness, and goodness of God.So, I am one of the most educated Hispanics/Latinos in my community. I still am reminded on a daily basis of the need for humility and patience with my fellow human beings, who, having much less formal education than me, have pigeon-holed me into the mold of “the Hispanic professor.” Notes & Bibliography[i] Sarah Menkedick, “Living on the Hyphen,” October 14, 2014,https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-86-fall-2014/living-on-the-hyphen. See also Justo González, Santa Biblia: The Bible Through Hispanic Eyes (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 79.[ii] William Shakespeare, “The Merchant of Venice,” 3.1.57-66. References are to act, scene, and line. https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/the-merchant-of-venice/read/3/1/#line-3.1.57.[iii] National Public Radio, “Read Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech in its Entirety,” https://www.npr.org/2010/01/18/122701268/i-have-a-dream-speech-in-its-entirety.[iv] Church in Spanish is iglesia, a female term, hence “Latina.”

Being Triggered as a ProfessorI have noticed that some students are quick to throw loaded terms without knowing exactly what they mean, or they erroneously assume they know what they mean. Maybe you can relate. For example, I was teaching a Contemporary Theologies course and I was discussing German theologians during and post-World War II. One of my students did not know the difference between fascism and communism. This student basically stated that the Nazis were socialists and by extension communists because their name was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (National-Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). The student could not get past the “Socialist” in the name and described anything left-leaning as fascist. As you and I know, the fascists and the communists could not stand one another. The only thing they had in common was the totalitarian form of government with strong dictatorships in power. However, their foundation and aim were different. I pointed the student to basic Encyclopedia Britannica articles on the political spectrum, fascism and on Nazism so that this student could better understand the difference between the two.I was taken back by the student’s confidence in his position and his willingness to correct me when he was so sure I had made a mistake. In the end I was surprised by having to endure a student like this who did not want to listen. In this case, this particular student came to the classroom with a mind already made up and not willing to dialogue with different or diverging ideas, or even those based on facts. Rather, this student was there wanting to reinforce preconceived notions of what is right and wrong, and in this case, what was left and what was right.I had another student in a different semester’s offering of the same course that really set me off—I lost it. This student refused to acknowledge racism and the effects of racism in US society. I had students of color who were emailing me of how deeply offended they were from the first day of class until the last day of class. This particular student firmly believed that the US was completely free of any type of racism. Consequently, Black people were lazy, Hispanics/latin@s liked to blame Caucasian people like him for all their problems. The student refused to acknowledge history, of things that happened in the Civil Rights Era, and problems that continue to affect minorities and people of color.I don’t know if you’ve ever been there, but I lost my patience with this student on the second day of class. Oh, my! It was going to be a long semester. I could feel my blood pressure rising. My muscles began to tighten. My heartbeat went up a few notches. It seldom happens, but at that moment I began to ask this student a barrage of questions and making statements about being intolerant and closed-minded to considering the perspectives of others and those from different communities who have suffered under unjust housing practices, and deeply ingrained attitudes and postures from those in power in society.[i] I wanted to say (but thankfully I did not), what in the world are you doing in graduate school if you don’t want to learn anything? What are you doing in graduate school if you already have the answers to life’s great questions?It is not a good place to be, being triggered and going off on a student. It sets a poor example. We are to model hard intellectual reasoning. Also, as a teacher, my vocation is to model a hospitable classroom environment—even with those that do not agree with me. Nothing gets accomplished in the heat of the moment with tense exchanges or when we get angry.As I was wrestling with this student and his lack of engagement, and taking into consideration our students of color in the class, I finally realized that I was not going to change this person. All I could do at this point was not react in the way that this student expected. The student was actually getting pleasure from being the unmovable object in the class. It was reinforcing his victim mentality and it was reinforcing his own belief that he was blessed as he was persecuted.Education is not going into a classroom to reinforce one’s own ideas or point of view. Part of the value of education is observation and the ability to take on multiple perspectives, having the common decency to put oneself in another person’s shoes and having empathy. Education involves some level of contemplation upon the world and my neighbor. It is a continual question included in the Gospels, “who is my neighbor?” in the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). One cannot help but realize that no matter the ethnic, cultural, or racial origins of my neighbor, that we are interconnected. Humans are spiritual beings and that compassion is one of the core values that we must demonstrate towards one another. There must be empathy, kindness, and humility towards the other. It is on this road that we can establish some kind of spiritual enlightenment about living in an increasingly diverse society. Either we enter with fear defending our way of life to the very end, or we enter with a holy reverence towards the other as a fellow human being in the imago Dei.In the end I also had to examine myself. I had a long day. The class was at night, I was tired. The other issue I had was that I had to try to defuse the situation. I had to model my sense of tolerance even for those who have different perspectives from my own. It is not the first time that this has happened nor will it be the last. Finally, I decided to trust the institution and my colleagues, knowing that through the whole process at any serious graduate-level institution, the student will continually be challenged to have a rational, modern, and well-informed outlook. We are seeking to form individuals who are deeply, spiritually aware of their vertical-horizontal relationships—to God, to others, and the self. In the meantime, I prayerfully continue to teach, knowing that transformation is ultimately not left up to me. So, I tried hard to let the conversations continue to be frank and honest and to let history and hard rational discussion tell the story, ultimately trying to model a positive affective disposition towards the other.Notes & Bibliography[i] See for example, Robbie W.C. Tourse, Johnnie Hamilton-Mason, Nancy J. Wewiorski, Systemic Racism in the United States: Scaffolding as Social Construction (Cham, Switzerland: 2018).

During my teaching experience in Zambia, music became an important part of the day-to-day life of my students’ coursework. When I first asked the students to share about things they valued from their own culture, one of the elements they mentioned was their love for music. As I was to later find out, this love of music did not refer to music theory or a song being played. Rather, it is a way of living out their culture and experiencing life through music. Music was everywhere in Zambia: in my students’ homes, in their schools, in their churches, and in their houses of worship, for example. Music was to be experienced and led to a form of embodiment, or at the very least recognizing that as human beings we are embodied in our everyday visceral reality. I also found myself making connections to my own Latinx ethnicity. For example, many individuals of Latinx heritage also share an African heritage. Several countries in Latin America have been marked by racial intermixing between Africans, Amerindians, and Europeans. There is even a growing field of study of the Afro-Latino experience. I recently did a DNA test and discovered that at least 10 percent of my DNA is African. It was surprising, but in my Latinx experience it was a heritage that was suppressed and ignored, although the cultural influence was undoubtedly there. I thought that perhaps engaging music would be a way to connect my own heritage to the experiences of these students in Zambia. And concomitantly, perhaps the use of music could lead to an embodied experience in the classroom where we could build bridges between our cultures, ethnicities, and races. I knew that I had to improvise in my lesson plans to accommodate this important cultural element in the classroom. I asked each student to prepare a song for one of our teaching sessions during our time together. Because I had 12 students, I asked some of them to pair up. I was specific and asked for songs that they sing for worship in their own country and that were relevant to the course content, but they had the freedom to choose the song. I encouraged them not to use digital sources, but to sing or play the songs in their own way. When the first student presented her song, her voice carried over the class. It was an old hymn that the students immediately recognized (I did not). The students all joined together in their singing. Their bodies swayed and some raised their hands. In this expression, their bodies were present, involved, and recognized. It brought to memory the book by Estrelda Alexander, Black Fire, where she traces the importance of African spirituality in Pentecostalism and describes the body-mind-spirit correspondence of their worship.[1] For my students, music was a corporeal and corporate experience. As an instructor who was present in this environment, I was stating by my mere presence, “Yes, you and I are different; but we can enjoy these musical arrangements together. We can share in this special moment. We are together in this class. We are on equal footing.” Music gave them a legitimacy to express themselves. In listening, I demonstrated that they were valued. Their contributions as authentic as they were to their context were not dismissed or looked down upon, or even looked over. Their voices mattered. Their culture mattered. Their skin tone mattered. I was deeply appreciative of the resourcefulness of my students despite having little or no resources. Music was one way that this resourcefulness played out. For example, the students sang together. Sometimes, it seemed they were singing two different melodies, yet their differences complemented each other. They would also use their hands to clap or use sticks to keep the beat and rhythm. I was amazed at how they all wanted to participate in this experience. If they didn’t know the lyrics, they hummed along. After the singing, the class seemed to come together. Not only were student’s minds engaged in the course content, but their bodies, attitudes, and culture were involved also. I concluded that music is a wonderful resource. It is able to change a person’s mood. It is able to create a certain ambiance or environment. It is also something that is shared if everyone is listening to the same thing. All the participants move to the music together. The classroom was not just a foreign Honduran-American telling students how to think or what to think. Rather, it created space for meaningful engagement. As I return to the US, I want to make music a part of my courses. Whether we sing old hymns or modern music, it is important to honor the cultures, ethnicities, and races of my students. This is one way to engage them. I know students may have reservations about singing, but at the very least they can bring a video clip to play in class through web services like YouTube. Whether it is online or in person, sharing in music is an activity that all can participate in   [1] Estrelda Y. Alexander, Black Fire: One Hundred Years of African-American Pentecostalism (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2011).

As a student in North American classrooms I learned about punctuality, sometimes the hard way. It became so ingrained in me that I am now always early for everything; I am present fifteen minutes ahead of time before the start of church, class, or any mundane event. I reflect on this and find that I am a Latinx individual who has become acclimated to life in the US. However, I now find myself teaching in classrooms that are increasingly diverse. As I interact with these diverse students, I find myself reconnecting with my roots and learning that my heritage as a Latinx person allows me to make connections to the culture of many of my students. Punctuality is a strong Western value. Time is money. One of the greatest resources people have in their possession is time. Yet this is one of the things that sets Western thought apart from other cultures around the world. An example of an attitude that contrasts sharply with this idea is the Latin American saying: “hay más tiempo que vida” (there is more time than life). This saying can be interpreted in two ways. First, one can say carpe diem, seize the day. Life is short, therefore one must make the most of his or her time on earth. The second way this can be taken is that there is plenty of time. Time will go on, and one must therefore invest in relationships rather than fret over punctuality and time. This second interpretation is the way many Latin Americans behave and think consciously and subconsciously. It obviously conflicts with the expectations of Eurocentric culture.[1] I spent three weeks teaching two courses in Zambia last year. One area that I was able to build bridges from my Latin American background with my students from Zambia was through the principle of Ubuntu and its implications for time. Ubuntu is a term that cannot be translated because of the density and depth of its meaning.[2] It is a term that may be described as meaning “humanity for others,” “I am because you are,” “I can only become a person through other persons,” and “to become a person.”[3] A term from Latin America that is similar is the Oaxacan concept of nakara. It is translated as “a willingness to take responsibility for another by providing what is needed for a healthy life.”[4] It indicates a strong collective bond. Rather than being disjointed individuals pulling away from each other, this invites us to see our connectedness and relatedness to one another. My actions affect another person and their actions also affect me. We do not live in a vacuum. Even in our most individualized Western mindset our actions have consequences, whether to an organization, our society, to the environment, to those of a different nationality or race, etc. As I reconnect with my own Latin American roots and simultaneously interact with my Zambia students, I realize that we may be so concerned over the things we must get done and material that needs to be covered that we forget that as teachers we must model an empathic humanity to others. I knew I had a lot of things to get done for my intensive courses in Zambia. However, the first day there, I realized that the students had only participated in asynchronous class sessions and that their only connection to me was a computer screen. The students vocalized the difficult time they were having with this type of education, learning our LMS, and the culture of online courses. These were very foreign. They were in a state of learning shock, longing to establish a close connection with their professors and the seminary. This was the reason that I decided to improvise and to be flexible with my goals. The first day of class, instead of beginning to lecture, I asked them about themselves and the deepest held innermost values related to their own culture and way of being in the world. The students timidly warmed up and began to share from their own point of view. During my personal time at the hotel, I designed some activities that involved teamwork and group discussion. I have often seen my students in the North American context groan and complain about these types of activities. They seem to be very practical and just want the instructor to disseminate information. They also dislike working in groups because they are oriented to doing well for themselves first. Group work may reduce the importance of their individual work and consequently impair them from getting a good grade. But my students from Zambia thrived in this type of environment. They laughed, shared, and opened up to one another. The second thing that I had to adjust was to slow down and spend time on those concepts that I thought could make a positive influence on the students. I learned that I do not have to cover everything. My students are intelligent and responsible for their readings. It was as if my students had to come to a sense of corporate satisfaction with the material covered. I was surprised that when something deeply impacted them that they demonstrated their concern and appreciation for the course content by keeping silent. It is as if they had to digest the material and take their time doing so. Their silence was a mark of comprehension, a sign that they were processing their thoughts and were satisfied with what they were learning. If I can describe it, it was a silence that in Western contexts might be perceived as uncomfortable, but for them it was meaningful. It was the silence of awe and wonder. As I strive for cultural competence and modeling the right relationship with others, Ubuntu has become an important relational term that helps me build a rapport with my students from Zambia. While I may not be the best model of it, for me it means that the classroom must have a strong relational component. My students not only want to receive the right information, but they also want to exist in the right relationship with the instructor and their classmates and course content. I found myself learning from them. Ubuntu has the potential to cross socioeconomic and cultural borders. I find myself thinking differently of my role as a teacher, the class dynamic, and my relationship with my students.   [1] Disclaimer: this does not mean that the class is unstructured or that there is no time limit for student assignments. [2] John D. Volmink, “Ubuntu: Filosofía de vida y ética social,” in Construir puentes Ubuntu para el liderazgo de servicio, edited by the Consortium of Building Bridges for Peace (Canterbury: ImPress, 2019): 45-66. [3] Ibid. [4] Paula E. Morton, Tortillas: A Cultural History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014), 34-36, 138.

Last semester I spent two weeks in Zambia teaching a Doctor of Ministry course to students from eight different African countries. This was an important experience for me because it magnified many of the similar cross or intercultural exchanges that I have experienced in the classroom here in the US. Of concern to me was the notion of cultural competency in order to have a creative classroom experience that enhanced students’ learning. Cultural competency may be defined simply as “the ability to successfully teach students who come from cultures other than our own.” It has also been defined as “the ability of a person to effectively interact, work, and develop meaningful relationships with people of various cultural backgrounds.” The first definition is a bit too utilitarian for me. It is measured simply by teaching students, and students learn all kinds of things from us—including sometimes what they do not want to be like. The second is a better definition, since the focus is on the interaction between the teacher and students. I think it is important to study our students and learn as much as possible about them, in order to build rapport with them and creatively relate our course content to their lives and contexts. As I prepared for this experience in Zambia, there were many contextual aspects to consider. First, I was clearly an outsider. Even upon arrival at the international airport, individuals looked at me and could tell I was not only different, but also an outsider. Many of the students came from countries that suffered under the yoke of colonialism, and much of my training in the Academy has sensitized me to its effects and the necessary work of conscientization among the oppressed.  Secondly, I had to consider how distance would affect us. In African countries, students are generally used to getting to know the instructor and spending time with them. I had met the students virtually via online discussion boards, but their cultures require a person-to-person engagement. Several students had limited internet services and/or sporadic cellular services. Sometimes their cities experienced brownouts or blackouts that limited their online engagement and even their submission of assignments in a timely manner. Being present with the students made a difference and they made it known to me how much they appreciated me being there in person.  This type of situation can be frustrating. Conflict may arise unnecessarily. My ethnic background is that I am Latinx and specifically of Honduran heritage. I have also been immersed in North American education culture for most of my adult life. The Academy has its own culture and expectations. I constantly asked myself how I was to navigate these cultural differences and build bridges to students with completely different experiences and expectations in the classroom. The heart of the matter was that I first had to get over myself. I am Latinx, but even among my community I have always heard things like “hay que mejorar la raza” (“we must improve the race,” meaning we must act European and live among “whiter” races); or “trabajar como negro para vivir como blanco” (“working like a black person in order to live like a white person,” implying that white people always live better than black people). Work among people from different ethnic identities and cultures requires humility. We must have a posture of asking questions and learning from the other—not passing judgment. We must become students of our students. I went into the Academy to be ever inquisitive, to seek out new experiences, to have new ideas, and to somehow make this a better world. This meant that I also had to move beyond my own stereotypes of Africa. Colonizers referred to it as “the dark continent.” One of the first references I had to Africa was seeing hunger portrayed on television through human disasters in Ethiopia and Somalia. More recently, a president referred to countries outside the US as “s—hole countries.” Our mental sketches and mental images need deconstruction. But deconstruction is the easiest part of the process. Anyone can tear down, criticize, or point out flaws and errors. The hard part is to reconstruct a new just and fair structure or mental scheme once the previous ones have been torn down. As for creativity, on the first day of class I asked my students to create a list of positive African values and ideals that they strove to live for. Among the many things they shared were Ubuntu and music. Ubuntu is a South African term that means “I am because you are,” or “humanity towards others.” It is a philosophy adopted by many people of Africa that emphasizes relationships, listening, and being heard. Ubuntu gives them a sense of satisfaction or fulfillment in their relationships with others. Music stood out to me because music is everywhere in Africa. Through drums, in their ministries, and in their homes, my students in Zambia love music. I asked myself how I could use these values to create a classroom environment that would appeal to my students. Our classrooms in North America tend to be cold, dry, and stale. We tend to see education as disseminating the right information so the students can think the right way and act the right way in this world. It is a manner of doing education that prioritizes intellectual ability to the detriment of students from different cultures. The students in Zambia appeared to be pointing me in a direction through Ubuntu that was warm, relational, and alive. The concern was not only in receiving the right information or learning the right way of doing things, but in being in the world and being in right relationship with one another. Music accentuated the quality of pathos, in the sense of evoking emotions or affections that seemed to satisfy a desire to be in right relationship with one another. After finding out what the students valued, I decided to tweak my lesson plans and include activities that were more dialogical and that included music. In my following blogs, I will continue discussing specific ways in which Ubuntu and music helped establish a positive rapport with my students from African countries.

Building the Field of Higher Education Engagement: Foundational Ideas and Future Directions presents twelve landmark articles from 1996-2012 that contributed significantly to the emergence of the field of engagement. Along with the articles, the book presents updated commentaries and responses by the original authors or noted scholars to the questions they proposed. The format of this publication is thoughtful as each chapter presents conversation-provoking questions about engagement across academic disciplines. In addition, Chapter 13 is a prospective look into the future. Nine authors provide their insights to what engagement may look like in the next two decades. This book is valuable to those in the specific field of religious education as it strives to rethink the work of the academy. Lorilee Sandmann states that colleges and universities remain one of the greatest hopes for intellectual and civic progress because they search for answers in light of pressing problems (xiii). Furthermore, higher education in its highest ideals is committed to the scholarship of engagement. She defines engaged scholarship as a mutual relationship between academia and the community that leaves a positive legacy for all partners (xiv, 196). These concepts challenge established notions about higher education. First, this book examines the most foundational values of education. Engagement should be built from these values and not the expectation to do research and achieve tenure. As a result this creates ripples in the culture and expectations of the academy so that a new or revised model for higher education may emerge. Second, this book challenges the way educators see themselves and how they are to engage the community. The community has come to view them as ivory tower elites. Conversely, this volume challenges institutions and educators to participate in outreach to the community at large. The text provides several interdisciplinary examples of outreach. It is important because it generates conversations about the role of faculty and their role in outreach. This is a valuable contribution as the book also gives suggestions on how engagement and outreach can be measured so as to be included in the tenure process. Another valuable idea is the notion that knowledge is now non-linear. It was expected that the academy would study, research, and provide solutions for the world. The consequence is that the academy does not answer the questions the community is asking. In a non-linear world, the community has knowledge. The academy must necessarily be more engaged in the world that surrounds it. Through interdisciplinary dialogue, the text provides valuable insight into these conversations. For theological educators this is an important book because it provides language to understand the complex relationships between the community and the academy; as well as that between faculty and administration. It causes the reader to reimagine the requirements of tenure and the meaning of higher education in a fast-changing cultural milieu. This book conceptualizes the changes in the work of the academy so that one is better prepared to engage an institution’s culture and values so that it may be more true to education’s highest ideals and values.