Resources by Joseph K. Gordon

On a Sunday morning in mid-April, my students and I gathered around the firepit in the open-air Council House at the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont. Light drizzle pattered on the roof and danced through the open smoke vent, speckling the dust and ash at our feet. Just out of sight the Middle Prong river thundered, singing to us through a grove of Hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis), Sycamores (Platanus occidentalis), and Tulip Poplars (Liriodendron tulipifera). The deciduous trees were leafing out, sprouting and unfurling fresh, vibrant spring greens. They would’ve been blinding in the sun, but the clouds softened and dispersed the light so it felt as though the whole world had been dyed green. Soon pale yellow and orange tuliptree flowers would explode from buds to beckon hummingbirds and bumblebees into the bustle of spring.“The body of Christ, broken for you,” I addressed each student. “And the blood of Christ, the cup of salvation, given for you.” We ate and drank, tasting and seeing, overwhelmed by the goodness of creation and her Creator. Our shared experiences throughout the semester and during that retreat weekend transfigured the embodied, communal practice of eucharistic thanksgiving. We’d seen many broken bodies together – I remembered the sun-bleached skull of a buck, its flesh long returned to the soil. And there’d been at least some blood shed, mostly my own, given to thorns and briars in our adventures and exploration.While that Sunday service was especially powerful, the “normal” religious rituals of prayer and Scripture reading that began each class session took on new resonances as we learned outside. I probably should not be as surprised at these developments as I sometimes still am. The Bible is “an outdoor book . . . a hypaethral book . . . a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better,” according to Wendell Berry.[i] While Berry denies that he is “an accredited interpreter of Scripture,” I have been learning and practicing the tools of disciplined, responsible, faithful biblical exegesis now for two decades.[ii] The work of considering the words of Scripture outside has had a greater transformative effect on me, I have to admit, than the whole sum of my academic research and theological reflection.[iii] My eyes have been opened anew to the power and beauty of the creaturely imagery of Sacred Scripture. Study and even religious reading inside now often feel sterile, and sterilizing, to me. One student commented that while she’d never before considered reading the Bible from the imagined perspective of a plant or animal, now she could never imagine going back to the way things were before.Last year, on Earth Day, my Creaturely Theology class invited fellow students and colleagues to join us in a new tradition. We chose not the conventional activity of planting trees – though our future work will certainly involve much planting – but instead to uproot. There are times for both (Eccl 3.2), whether in farming, or faith, or academic formation. In the outdoor classroom of Johnson University’s campus, non-indigenous privets (Ligustrum sinense), honeysuckles (Lonicera japonica and L. maackii), pears (Pryus calleryana), and tree-of-heaven (Alianthus altissimua) are abundant, especially on borders between fields and forest. They obscure the vision of the goodness of this place and crowd out the native lives that once thrived more freely here. Ivy (Hedera hylix), kudzu (Pueraria montana), and wintercreeper (Euonymus fortunei) smother large patches of soil, devouring all available nutrients and making it impossible for indigenous plants, fungi, and animals to dwell where they once did.One must first have eyes to see to identify such obstacles, and then one can work to uproot them, making possible renewed thriving and good growth. Practicing seeing and reading, giving and receiving, outside, even especially in the traditional practices and words of our faith, has caused scales to fall from our eyes. It has transformed and is transforming us to see, believe, and be empowered to get to work in trust that the God who has begun such work in us, and in God’s world, will be faithful to bring it to completion. Notes & Bibliography[i] Wendell Berry, “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,” Cross Currents 43, no. 2 (1993), 155.[ii] See Wendell Berry, Our Only World: Ten Essays (Counterpoint, 2015), 168.[iii] This is not to repudiate or downplay any of that work, which I still stand behind. See Joseph K. Gordon, Divine Scripture in Human Understanding: A Systematic Theology of the Christian Bible (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019) and also Joseph K. Gordon, ed., Critical Realism and the Christian Scriptures: Foundations and Readings (Marquette University Press, 2023).

Humans, like all living things, are creatures of habit. The familiarity of my classroom spaces, whether indoor or outdoor, is profoundly comforting to me. The established structures and routines – the layout and furniture of the room (or patio), where everyone sits, the specific times we keep for prayer, discussion, board work, and listening all come together – a spatiotemporal synergy – to create an atmosphere of healthy safety that makes the gentle provocations and challenges needed for learning, growth, and even transformation possible. We can address ideas and issues in the unique space and time we have together because of its set-apart particularity. And stability, predictability, and repetition are integral ingredients for the very possibility of such work.When I take students outside for Creaturely Theology, though, such routines and structures are out the window, literally. The changes and challenges of the seasons demand adaptability. We must be ever ready with open minds, hearts, and even hands to receive whatever is offered, moment by moment.There are certainly rhythms and regularities. Throughout the semester we return to the same places again and again, often via the same trails and routes. Every time we arrive again to where we have been before, things are new. The cold browns and grays of January and February give way to rich, vibrant greens, and then whites, yellows, pinks, oranges, and blues, as herbaceous plants awaken and show off beautiful ephemeral blooms in March and April. In the cool, wet winter, we regularly encounter salamanders, small mammals, and ground-dwelling invertebrates, but as the world warms, the diversity of lives multiplies before our eyes. Flying insects appear seemingly from nowhere, and snakes, lizards, and turtles emerge from the subterranean slumber of brumation into the lengthening brightness and warmth.Chorus frogs and spring peepers announce the inevitable coming warmth before we can feel or believe it. Overwintering birds depart and spring migrants arrive, transforming the diurnal soundscape, filling each holler and hilltop with new harmonies. Even aromas shift dramatically. The moldering, earthy wetness of winter gives way to the spice and sweet sap of buds unfurling and swelling into leaves and verdant new shoots greedily pressing through previous years’ detritus, pushing aside soil and rock, to meet the sun. Later in the semester, petrichor – the scent of warm rains on drying soil – lifts our spirits, even when our hair and clothes are dampened.Every change and happening has its particular power for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, but sometimes the experiences are more personal. Some scents and sights have almost bowled me over, returning me to the sensations of my undergraduate self – now twenty years past – in this same but different place.In my last blog I mused on the importance of recognizing and learning the names of our living non-human neighbors whose ancestors have dwelt here for countless generations. It is, of course, impossible for my students and I to know, and to draw near to, all of them in just one semester. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer stresses the desperate need for indigeneity in our age of globalized placelessness.[i] We must shed our restless destructiveness to become grounded again. The health of our environs, their non-human inhabitants, and our own well-being, both physical and psychological, depends upon such attention and connection. It cannot happen completely while obtaining a Bachelor’s degree, let alone during a semester, but I can help plant its seeds, and tend its early growth, with each new cohort of creaturely theologians.The seasons and lives of this place are constantly reshaping the typical rhythms of academia and my own teaching life. I no longer feel as if I am passing through these woods and fields in unassailable ignorance, taking from them what I can. However slowly, I am becoming naturalized. The more I learn, the more palpably I know my ignorance and limitations; and yet, paradoxically, the more I feel at home. As this place and its inhabitants remake, and renew, me, I am better able to share such intimate care with my students.As one student put it at the end of the semester, “We kept coming back and getting to know the area. . . [I]n a way it became ‘our campus,’ not in the sense of ownership, but in the sense of friendship.” Notes & Bibliography[i] See Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 205–15.

In an address at the 1968 International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), Senegalese forester Baba Dioum famously declared, “In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.”[i] We cannot understand what we do not notice, and we will not notice what we cannot name. To love and learn we must first know, and to know, we must name. In my more conventional courses, I continue to assess students on theological and philosophical terms and names. I do so not to determine students’ comprehension and competency in a master discourse, but instead for the sake of calling them to account, to attention, to care, for the uses of variegated, precise language. Because the world is dynamic and changing, and since I hold that God calls human creatures to growth in self-transcendence, we must take seriously the task of stewarding our thoughts and speech.Concepts, ideas, and words, labels, classifications, and names all have dates. Each has a history. But language use is not merely a matter of historical interest, it is a profoundly serious moral task. Through naming, or taxonomy, we learn to navigate the worlds of meaning we have received.[ii] The work of learning, and even creating, new names can be a profoundly liberative, even salvific, activity. But naming can also be used to instrumentalize, enslave, and degrade places, creatures, and persons.Consider the moral difference between labeling fungi, plants, and animals “natural resources,” on the one hand, and “living organisms” on the other. The former risks instrumentalizing such lives economically; the latter might instead help us to recognize their intrinsic value. A third approach might recognize such lives not as resources, or as living things, but instead as “creatures” called into existence, loved, and sustained by God.Whether one uses the language of “natural resources,” “living organisms,” or “creatures,” all three are morally preferable to operating with a mental bestiary or botanical consciousness that ascribes worth, or wrath, to creatures from a narrowly anthropocentric perspective. “Pests” and “weeds” play major roles in our collective cultural psyche, but our distain for such living things does not make them any less loved by God.[iii]In Creaturely Theology we share in the divine work of knowing and caring for other creatures through noticing and naming the lives, even those we might initially despise, that surround us. Each student is tasked with identifying at least one hundred different species of plants, animals, and fungi during the semester. That work requires leaning on scientific and naturalist wisdom gathered in field guides and the living community of iNaturalist experts to get to know the creatures we happen to meet.[iv]Such work has lasting, powerful effects. As one student put it, “The class as a whole showed me how to wonder again. We would go into the woods not knowing what we would find, and then see a plant and not know what it was, and then not know much about it even after identifying it!”We are learning so much about the biodiversity of this place, but such knowledge only increases our appreciation of the mysterious otherness of each creature! We never encounter a generic flower or beetle or bird or snake; each chance meeting is with a unique, unrepeatable individual, known intimately by its Creator. To share such knowledge is a holy privilege, and each time we do we become just a little more like the One who has made us all. Notes & Bibliography[i] See Barbara K. Rodes and Rice Odell, eds., A Dictionary of Environmental Quotations (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 33.[ii] My approach to the related issues of self-transcendence, growth, meaning, and historicity depends upon the work of Bernard Lonergan. See especially Bernard Lonergan, “Natural Right and Historical Mindedness,” in A Third Collection, edited by Robert M. Doran and John Dadosky (University of Toronto Press, 2017), 161–76.[iii] For an important exploration of the risks and deleterious effects of such consciousness on both non-human creatures and on humans, see Bethany Brookshire, Pests: How Human Create Animal Villains (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2022).[iv] See https://www.inaturalist.org/. We also use the apps Seek (https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app) and Merlin (https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/). Both are useful but Seek often exhibits the significant limitations of AI technology, while Merlin more regularly shows its promise.

With almost no leaves in the canopy above us, sunlight flooded the gently sloping hillside, penetrating and illuminating every open space in the leaf litter. My students and I had just spent some time—I don’t know exactly how long—inspecting a Dark Fishing Spider (Dolomedes tenebrosus) who was absorbing the warmth on the smooth gray bark of an American Beech (Fagus grandifolia). The spider—stretched out like a stereotypical beach bum—seemed to be enjoying the early spring warmth as much, if not more, than we were.“This doesn’t even feel like class,” one of my students exclaimed, taking a seat in the crunchy oak and hickory leaves. Indeed it didn’t. I had hoped for this.That experience was just one of countless precious memories during my first semester teaching Creaturely Theology in the spring of 2023. That course, an upper-level undergraduate theology elective, weds theological reflection on the more-than-human world, spiritual formation in nature, and biological and ecological surveys of the flora and fauna of Johnson University Tennessee’s campus.[i]In the fall of 2020, due to COVID risks, I began teaching outside almost exclusively. That experience brought immediate, unexpected pedagogical opportunities.[ii] While I continue to teach my regular courses outside as often as possible, “Creaturely Theology” has drastically enlarged my outdoor classroom. Now my students and I spend every Monday morning in the spring exploring the wild and hidden corners of Johnson University Tennessee’s 400-acre wooded campus. Increasing the physical dimensions of my “outdoor classroom” has required comparable growth in my pedagogical imagination and teaching repertoire.In this series, Creaturely Pedagogy, I will explore some of the exciting, life-giving lessons I am learning from my students, our non-human neighbors, and from the land itself through Creaturely Theology.All has not gone smoothly, I confess. The course has attracted significant attention, some of it negative.[iii] One social-media commenter, while generally supportive, called the course “lighter weight.” Every university educator and student has heard of the trope of the “blow off class.” Such courses ostensibly require little work on the part of students. They lack rigor. They are filler. Some even judge them to be a waste of time and resources.While I succeeded in creating a course that—at least sometimes—did not feel “like class,” it was not because Creaturely Theology wasn’t rigorous or intellectually challenging. I had to modify the schedule because of the density and difficulty of the required readings! The very distinction between serious and unserious courses, though, provides occasion to evaluate the ideals and goals of university education generally, and religious and theological education specifically, in our moment.In the recent past—with effects still relevant to the present—Western university education has idealized theory, technical content, control, and the abstract. In a word, education and competency have been equated with “mastery.”[iv] But none of the current educational disciplines that exist in university contexts today, not even the so-called “hard sciences,” can deliver mastery over their subject matter. In each there is an almost incomprehensible amount of material to examine, and new developments and discoveries happen all the time, even in the humanities, and, perhaps most shockingly of all, in theology! Education must involve developing competencies to think, speak, and work humbly and responsibly in a complicated world. And the work of coming to think and speak well about God and all things in relationship to God is rather involved work, after all.As readers of this blog know well, all human knowing is embodied. There is no human learning without sensation, and consciousness never happens untethered to underlying neurology and neurobiology. All learning involves feeling. All loving does, too. Creaturely Theology has allowed me to combine high-level theological reflection with unforgettable, hands-on experiences in the more-than-human world.In my forthcoming blogs in this series, I will often emphasize the importance of sensation and feeling in the work of theological reflection and learning. Future entries will explore the themes of naming, risk and fear, departures and arrivals, and ritual. I hope you’ll follow along.Notes: [i] Initial funding for the course came from the Science-Engaged Theology course grant competition in the St. Andrews New Visions in Theological Anthropology project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation.[ii] In a previous blog series, I shared some of the things that I had been learning from teaching outside.[iii] See “Johnson University’s New ‘Creaturely Theology’ Course Stirs Controversy.”[iv] Note Willie James Jennings’ salient critique of “mastery” in After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2020).

“You are a creature in the midst of creation.” Those words, which I have heard or recited in versions of the Ignatian Examen countless times in the past decade, kept returning to my mind as we gathered in our outdoor classroom. That space and time made it possible to better notice and appreciate our communities of fellow creatures, human and nonhuman. As I noted in my first blog in this series, my students in “Contemporary Theology” and I found it almost impossible to sustain discussion indoors while masked and socially distanced. Outside, though, our conversations often flowed freely. Experienced educators work hard to cultivate a sense of belonging, and each class develops its own collective personality. I have noticed that the classroom communities that I have had since beginning to teach outside have often been markedly stronger—students are more resilient, more engaged, and more willing to be challenged constructively—than those I was able to foster indoors. I took primary responsibility for setting up and tearing down the classroom—including moving our portable whiteboard, stored chairs, and a table for my laptop for Zooming students. But I invited students to share in such responsibilities and many commented that doing so enhanced their learning and sense of belonging. By meeting outside, despite the challenges, students noted that they knew they were doing their part to keep our community safe. The distinctive contingencies and flexibility required to be outside enhanced our sense of togetherness. The specialness of the opportunity to be outside seems to have primed us to attend well to one another and to the unique tasks of the moment, working to ensure that we could safely and fruitfully continue meeting. Neighbors and members of our uncommon community often passed by and through our classroom. Students, faculty, staff, administrators, prospective students, and other visitors passed by, reminding us of the institutional context of our shared work and of our accountability to one another. We were reminded of our relationships with and impacts on the nonhuman neighbors in our community constantly. I was not the only one to root around in the mulch—one day when I reached into the soil to show my students the mycelium, I discovered instead a beautiful millipede going about their own work of decomposition. We were joined by towhees, robins, and countless other birds who made a ruckus in the leaves and mulch of the flower beds as they searched for food. Sometimes five-lined-skinks, catching the sun with electric blue tails, skittered by or paused to soak up the heat from the bricks. Bald eagles, ospreys, red-tailed hawks, black vultures, and turkey vultures soared above us majestically. The bird song sometimes overwhelmed us in its constancy and diversity. In late summer and early fall cicadas serenaded us with the birds, and in the spring upland chorus frogs and spring peepers made their contributions to the soundscape. On a warm early spring day in March one class asked if we could meet for class on the bank of the French Broad River down the steps from our normal classroom. An otter, a great blue heron, and countless bluebirds joined us that day—or rather, we joined them. Sometimes harmless but intimidating carpenter bees insisted on participating in our discussion, buzzing and bumping along the picnic tables. On multiple occasions I had to rescue wasps and spiders from terrified students, gently scooping them up and relocating them away from danger. God had created them and declared them good after all (Genesis 1.21, 24, 25), our ignorance and incredulity notwithstanding. Just as God does not need us (Acts 17.25), I reminded everyone (including myself) that God does not need them; but God nevertheless calls us and them into being out of love. One September day immediately following class a student shouted my name from just up the stairs: “Dr. Gordon, there’s a snake!” A midland rat snake was crossing the road towards our classroom. The distressed serpent had crawled through erosion control mesh that was cutting and constricting its body. It was a poignant reminder of how human decisions and assumptions cause suffering for our nonhuman neighbors. I borrowed a pocketknife from a student, freed the snake, and released it down the hill. Once, a flock of thousands upon thousands of starlings brought class to a complete standstill. The deafening cacophony of their calls left us no choice but to watch as they moved from tree to tree over an area where the undergrowth consisted solely of English ivy. Both groups of organisms were clearly thriving, but they do so at the expense of our native nonhuman neighbors. They are both here in east Tennessee, I reminded us all, because of human choices. In my classroom without walls, we often talked about God’s transcendence and otherness, but we learned also of God’s nearness, God’s care for our particularity, and that our particularity is bound up in countless relationships with other persons, and with our nonhuman neighbors—both animate and stationary. Such lessons came to us outside without much effort on my part. Resting in the cool of autumn and the early warmth of spring, listening to the birds and cicadas and frogs and lawnmowers and children, smelling the damp mold and blooming roses, setting up and putting away chairs or shade canopies, we could sense and know well our connections to one another, to the place itself, and to God, as “creatures in the midst of creation.”

My fall 2021 “God and the Human Person” students had just read M. Shawn Copeland’s excellent piece “Scripture and Ourselves: Reflections on the Bible and the Body” and were having a rich discussion on the goodness, beauty, opportunities, and limitations of the experience of being “body-persons.”[1] Every time we engage that piece, I am shocked anew when students, especially young women, report that they have never heard that God values bodies and calls us good. Despite what some Christian traditions have held, Copeland reminds us that according to Scripture, according to God, it is good to be body-persons in our particularity. In the second creation account in Genesis, we read that humans are made from, and made to work, the soil. Our embodiment is good and it is also connected to the dirt![2] During a lull in the conversation I spontaneously walked to the edge of the patio, reached over the red brick wall, and plunged my hand into the flower bed. I pulled out bright yellow and white threads binding the soil and woodchips together: “What is this beautiful structure and what is it doing here?” I asked. It was mycelium, root-like fungal threads—hyphae. Unbeknownst to most, the life and thriving of such organisms are integral in subterranean ecologies and are vital ingredients for what happens above the soil, too. Fungi play a vital role in decomposing organic matter. I replayed that object lesson during Lent this past semester. Such organisms return us to dust, too, giving us back to other creatures (Ecclesiastes 3.20). My outside classroom invited such serendipitous teaching moments again and again during the past two years. Without a ceiling sheltering us, away from the artificial light of flickering screens and in the blinding brightness of the sunshine, none of us could forget or ignore our embodiment. With no walls the breeze caressed our skin, sometimes a few raindrops threatened to send us scrambling inside. We dressed in layers or brought blankets on cool but warming days. On early fall semester days and during late spring semester days we wore hats and sunscreen or put up shade canopies. Being outside forced us to heighten our attention to the weather and changing seasons to better know our place and its natural rhythms. Even while standing and sitting on a built environment, the brick patio where my class met, being outside literally grounded us. The openness of the classroom to the sky above also signified our capacity for self-transcendence and growth in knowledge of ourselves, God, and God’s world. Our growth in knowledge of ourselves, God, and God’s world is always embodied, always grounded, of course. But the goodness of that fact, and even the goodness of our limitations, can be communicated outdoors in ways that it cannot be while inside. The week after we talked about embodiment in “God and the Human Person” we discussed interiority, consciousness, and ways of knowing. To exhibit the linkage between inner and outer, consciousness and sensation, most days I played instrumental music at the beginning of classes for prayer time. I invited students to close their eyes, to recall that we are always in God’s presence and that God is for us, and to attune themselves to their breathing, the music, and the sounds of the breeze and birds. The pivot between sensation and inner quiet served the work of attending both to our bodies and our minds.[3] Some days playing children, noisy lawnmowers, or gusty winds made the planned intellectual work of my classes difficult or even impossible. Despite my frustrations with such “distractions,” each served as a poignant reminder of the privilege of intellectual work, of its value, of its limitations, and of its relationships to “real life.” The “distractions” pressed in on us, and through them God taught me (and my students tell me they are learning this, too,) how we are not objective points, atoms bouncing around off one another, but are enmeshed in communities with other body-persons, communities including other nonhuman creatures, in worlds of meaning shaped by social and cultural assumptions and infrastructures. We always learn our capacities and limitations as body-persons in such communities, after all. My next and final reflection on learning and teaching without walls will explore how being outside helped us to recognize and attend to such communities.   [1] M. Shawn Copeland, “Scripture and Ourselves: Reflections on the Bible and the Body.” America: The Jesuit Review (September 21, 2015). [2] On how we are “soil-birthed and soil-bound,” see Norman Wirzba, This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 65-67. [3] The first few times that I utilized music for prayer time, though, we dove straight into difficult discussion. I quickly discerned that the transition was too abrupt, akin to emotional or intellectual whiplash! I devised a buffer time of standing and stretching following the music/prayer time and preceding discussion.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had untold impacts on our shared work of teaching and formation. For those whose institutions have continued in-person instruction, no matter the degree of precaution taken, the risks of transmission have added fear, stress, and uncertainty to teaching contexts that already include significant challenges (which I need not enumerate here). Our challenging circumstances have also provided unique opportunities, though. And many have responded with admirable flexibility and resiliency. I have heard inspiring stories from friends and colleagues who have been able to facilitate safe learning and are sometimes even thriving, within the constraints and possibilities of our specific situations. I always have butterflies when a new school year begins, but in August of 2020 I felt paralyzed. How could I ensure that I was doing everything I could to keep my students safe while also facilitating the possibility of learning and growth within the unique stressors of the moment? I decided that, as long as I could ensure accessibility, all of my classes would meet outside, weather-permitting, as often as possible. In this first blog (of three), I will introduce the practice of outdoor teaching and reflect on its significance for theological education in our current circumstances. Two subsequent blogs will explore significant experiences and takeaways from my own outdoor instruction since August of 2020.[1] As I noted above, my fundamental motivation for outdoor teaching was to ensure a safe learning space. To be sure, walls and a ceiling offer safety and protection from the elements. When indoor spaces become places of more significant risk, though, we can experience what is normally protective as oppressive. The masks and distancing required for safety in enclosed spaces also raised literal barriers to communication and to nurturing the sense of community which I strive to facilitate for my students. Meeting outdoors allowed us all to breathe more freely, and in turn, to communicate and cultivate community more intentionally and with greater effect than would have been possible behind masks, socially distanced, and wary of the threat of a pathogen spread much more easily in enclosed spaces. Outdoor education has a long and storied history. While it has not always been adequately inclusive in western contexts, indigenous peoples have long emphasized the importance of learning within, and from, places of inhabitance. Our current climate crises demand that educators in theology and religious studies intentionally practice and foster connections with our more-than-human natural world for the sake of its well-being and for the sake of our own survival. Such intentionality is a matter of spiritual, religious, and moral concern for me as a Christian theologian. Though I have yet to teach a course directly on issues of creation care, teaching outside has already provided me with countless opportunities to connect my students to the natural world. Aside from providing an occasion to help meet the exigencies of responsible stewardship and living justly in creation, I have found that outdoor teaching is profoundly humane. Our built environments have the potential to make us forgetful of our dependence, contingency, and even capacities for embodied learning. However, as Jennifer Ayres writes, “When learners are invited outside the four-walled classroom, . . . their sensory experience of nature, particularly when paired with caring mentors who can accompany the learners as they make sense of their experience, can be transformative.”[2] When we resumed face-to-face instruction in the fall of 2020, I told my students that I suspected that our shared work together during the 2020-2021 school year would likely make for the most challenging and most poignant year of their educational journey. It was certainly the most difficult and most transformative school year yet for me. Teaching outdoors has provided me countless opportunities to reassess and improve my abilities to empower and instruct my students, to discover and promote cross-curricular and intellectual, moral, and practical connections, to appreciate the privilege of the work that I am able to do, and to marvel at and encourage the courage, attentiveness, resiliency, and creativity of my students. Though the uncertainty of the pandemic continues—I write these words just days after the discovery of the Omicron variant—because of the countless benefits both I and my students have experienced in classrooms without walls, I cannot imagine going back inside again full-time. I will be relieved if and when we are all able to breathe, speak, and listen more freely indoors, but all of my future teaching will include the fresh air of my classroom without walls. [1] I am grateful for the opportunity to share what I have learned in the hopes that others might benefit. That said, I must acknowledge that the privileges of my embodiment (as a cisgender white male) and my institutional circumstances (a campus with infrastructure amenable to outdoor instruction) mean that what I have been able to do may not be possible for others. Even so, the experience of meeting outside has reminded me of things I had forgotten and taught me new things about pedagogy that are worthy of consideration, even for those unable to teach outside. [2] Jennifer R. Ayres, Inhabitance: Ecological Religious Education (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2019), 76.