Resources

During the past year, two of my favorite Brazilian writers and educators, Luiz Antonio Simas and Luiz Rufino collaborated on yet another book: Encantamento: Sobre a Política da Vida (Incantation: On the Politics of Life).  One of the central affirmations of their work (which follows their previous co-authored publications: A Pedagogy of the Crossroads, An Arrow Through Time, and The Enchanted Science of Macumbas) is that the opposite of life isn’t death—it is desencantamento, or an inability to surrender to a process of incantation. As a verb, incantare evokes our capacity to fuse song and word in an effort to raise our spirits, to spark magic in our imaginations, to invite divine presence. Our capacity to incantate spaces of learning does precisely what theologian Rubem Alves invites us to do:  name and invoke the not-yet worlds, so as to break the spells of right-here worlds that continue to abandon, oppress, exclude, and sever from ourselves and our communities of belonging. Incantation as a poetic of resistance allows us to escape, disobey, and ambush the traps set through the colonial matrix of power so that bodies can dare to see, create, invent, and integrate new possibilities freedom, belonging, and liberation through creativity and imagination. Incantation, Simas and Rufino affirm, nests our capacity to move through time, to experience a passage between forms and worlds, to change our points of reference through a politic of life that is rooted in an imprinting of the everyday as rites of reading and writing different poetic routes capable of setting traps to our collective loss of hope and vivacity.[i]  In this sense, incantation is an exercise in emergence and survivance that lives and breathes beyond the terrorizing effects of coloniality. It’s the commitment to movement, occupation, visibility, insertion, and participation. It’s the creative force that travels through crossroads of knowledge-making, confronting hierarchizations produced by ontological, epistemological, and semiotic violences. Art, as I understand it, has a tremendous power to forge incantatory pathways of resistance because of its capacity to dis-educate us from disciplinary molding. It reverberates and discloses to us that which is hidden in our interior recesses in embodied, striking, and visceral ways. It can help us re-educate our affections, as Paulo Freire puts it, or work a kind of magic in our souls, as bell hooks states.  It also inspires us to name the world as we see it, and to find a poetic tongue when the language we know fails us. It helps us resist, heal, connect, conjure, and tend to all our relations. As generative clearings, the arts are sites for world-making, for dreaming, rehearsing, and choreographing new possibilities of being and intervening in the world. When we immerse ourselves in acts of artmaking, we have the opportunity to access the visceral, the somatic life of the body, its reflexes, limits, intuition, responses, desires, needs, and its alchemies.  When we encourage and invite students to in-corporate artmaking processes as they engage readings, discussions, and bodies of knowledge, we participate in this politic of incantation. A student’s performance and ritual entitled “Disposable Beauty” still stands as one of the most profound and generative projects to which I have been witness.   As a final integrative assignment, the performance consisted of placing delicate flower arrangements throughout locations in her neighborhood that were marked by abuse, violence, and abandonment. Such poetic gestures in vulnerable spaces in the city sought to raise awareness of our transience, interdependence, and negligence in the face of injustice. The flower assemblages were made out of blossoms and foliage that flower shops would throw away at the end of the day. This poetic gesture both incantated and resisted the (i)logic of degradation, disposability, oppression, and inequity by orienting herself and participants in acts of creative wonder. Through her invocation of not-yet worlds, she extended a gesture of care, of regard, of re-worlding, refusing to be desencantada with the world around her. At the end of these performances, she invited folks to partake in tea ceremonies that were rooted in offering the gift of reciprocity, spiritual care, regard, and a warm cup of tea. As a poetic of incantation, her artistic gestures imbued spaces of desolation, disposability, and abandonment with love, presence, and beauty through a practice that integrated the semester’s resources, readings, discussions and questions with her own wisdom, creativity, and spiritual sensibilities. I return to this experience often to remind myself to continuously ask how many of the assignments outlined in my syllabi impede or foster poetic and incantatory experimentations. Notes [i] See Luiz Antonio Simas and Luiz Rufino, Encantamento: Sobre Política de Vida (Rio de Janeiro, RJ: Morula Editorial, 2020). Photo Credit: Miguel Garcia Saaved - stock.Adobe.com

I am familiar with what liminality means, but I have never put the Israelite’s journey in the wilderness and liminality together until recently. Liminality was first used in the discipline of anthropology and then applied to ritual and other areas of research. It is a term to describe being in between, being in the threshold, where a person is in transitional stage, not belonging to the past or future. I have used the term to describe the biblical Job during his suffering. Liminality is a time of confusion, vulnerability, uncertainty, and even danger. But then it also reflects a time of possibility, potential, and becoming. For example, when a person passes from singlehood to a married status, that person can no longer return to the old single self, but has been transformed into a new sense of self with someone else to live and care for. Similarly, when one is between jobs, that person is also in the liminal stage. In a way, all schools are going through this liminality during the COVID-19 crisis. Being in a pandemic is being in liminality, with all the confusion, vulnerability, and uncertainty that go along with it, not to mention danger. Being in transition is not comfortable. Belonging nowhere is painful. Having a confused status is never fun. Yet, being in COVID-19 is also a time of profound possibility, potential, and becoming. The world will not be the same after COVID-19. Many professions and fields will forever be changed in the post-COVID-19 world, and education is among them. In the future, online education and programs will be a necessity rather than an option or a suggestion. Remote learning will be the norm. The idea of expecting people to come to one’s campus physically for education will soon be in the distant past, if  that is not a reality already. During the podcast conversation I had with Dr. Lynne Westfield in early February 2021, she asked me about the future of my school: “Is it bright?”  I responded: “The future is online but everything else is uncertain.” Indeed, with COVID-19, all schools are not just in the same boat, but in the same storm, as Westfield rightly remarked. Living in liminality can be frustrating, but we can choose to see the transforming potential it has for all of us if we discern attentively what God is doing at this moment of history as administrators, faculty, and students in our particular contexts of formation. If we try to see beyond the chaotic present into the future, perhaps we can see ourselves living in a prophetic time, a critical time for reflection on things that matter. After leaving Sinai for the Promised Land, the Israelites were stranded in the wilderness for forty years. It was during that crucial time through trials, suffering, rebelliousness, and dependence, that the Israelites became the people of God. It was also during that difficult time, that the presence of God was with them (Ex 40:38). Being in liminality can be meaningful and hopeful.

Delvyn Case · Ruach (Revised Version)   The Hebrew word Ruach means both “breath” and “spirit.” Fundamental to this word (and to the Greek analogue, pneuma, which also is used in both ways) is a paradox. The notion of “spirit” denotes something ineffable and invisible - yet something that is always ready to break through and make itself known in a transformative way. Catholic mystics, African griots, and Christian Pentecostals are well-known examples of religious people who - when filled with the “spirit” – sing, dance, pray, feel, or see things that are amazing, powerful, and even out of their control. In the same way, “breath” is something simultaneously ineffable and invisible – yet also so fundamentally physical that our bodies do it without our conscious thought. We usually only become aware of our breathing when we experience something surprising or particularly important: when something beautiful makes us catch our breath, our something frightening makes us cry out in terror. In the same way, we are not usually aware of our “spirit” except in special circumstances: in a religious or spiritual state, for example, or when we have to call upon something deep within us in order to create – or to endure. This piece, Ruach, confronts this paradox by bringing to our awareness many different ways “breath” and “spirit” can become sonically and dramatic present. Throughout the piece the performers are asked to make various kinds of breath sounds with their instruments and their own voices, blurring the line between music and sound. Overall, the piece emphasizes idea of the spirit as a powerful force that is surprising, shocking, and fundamentally resistant to control.

Sex, money, politics: all the things we are told not to talk about. However, as the ethics professor at an Episcopal/Anglican seminary which draws diverse students from across the theological spectrum, teaching on these controversial issues is an important and challenging part of my job. As a professor, it’s easy for me to believe that my responsibility in teaching on controversial issues extends only to giving a compelling lecture or leading an animated discussion. However, unless controversial issues are presented in a context in which the students and I are open to learning and changing, there is always a risk that the class simply confirms the students who already agreed with me in their convictions and alienates the students who disagree, making their future openness to change even less likely. Rather, true transformational pedagogy requires not just teaching concepts, but incorporation into a community which creates the conditions for transformation. In February of 1940, Dorothy Day considered the transformation required in order for the members of the Catholic Worker to confront the difficulties of working for “a new heaven and a new earth, wherein justice dwelleth.” Day described how this work depends on God’s grace, but also demands radical change on the part of the human participants. In fact, it requires “indoctrination”—bringing people into the doctrine of the “mystical body of Christ.” Indoctrination is not simply the reception of information, but actual incorporation—becoming one body—with the community. Incorporation requires formation, which is achieved in part through shared practices such as worship (daily attendance at Mass and communal rosaries), community (carried out in kitchens and at the table), and external engagement (political activism and care of the poor). In the rest of this post, I will consider how these same practices are key for developing a community in which transformative pedagogy regarding controversial issues is possible. First, Day examines how the practice of worship highlights the “correlation” between the spiritual and the material while also emphasizing the primacy of the spiritual. Looking beyond the physical to the spiritual expands the imagination by “quicken[ing] the perceptions” to appreciate other material and spiritual experiences than one’s own. Creating fertile ground for engagement with controversial issues in the classroom requires exactly this type of transformation of the imagination. In addition, worship teaches patience and charity. Confronting our own limitations in contrast to God’s goodness should ensure that “we will not lose faith in those around us, no matter how stumbling their progress is.” In Christian seminaries in a liturgical tradition such as my own, communal practices of worship provide the perfect opportunity to encourage students to look beyond their material circumstances to seek “the presence of God” in their analysis of controversial issues. However, any pedagogical practices which move students beyond the classroom into a mode of reflective engagement—with the beauty of art or nature especially—can also prove valuable resources in a nonreligious or interfaith setting for transformation of imagination and expansion of perspective. Day’s description of the communal practices of kitchen and table point to the context which prepares people to engage with controversial questions. In the time of COVID, we have come to realize how important eating together is to create the bond and trust required for vulnerability. In addition, the cooperation of cooking together or other shared creative activities strengthen and reinforce a communal bond. Creating space for students to engage in these types of activities, whether as a whole class or in small groups, creates the conditions for true openness regarding challenging issues. Through these communal practices, students and professors begin to experience the reality of their identity as a communal body. Like a body, students incorporated in the community will start to feel the hurts and joys of one another as their own—preparing them to approach controversial questions which impact the lives of others with new empathy and urgency. Finally, Day describes the practices of service and activism which are the outgrowth of communal and spiritual practices. These actions, especially those which engage the community in service with the poor, build on the first two categories, as well as providing the end which guides them. Of course, these practices are more easily obtained in service-learning programs. However, even taking advantage of opportunities to genuinely serve others in the community can enhance solidarity within the community while also expanding the participants’ awareness of the sorrows and challenges of the world. Through shared engagement in these practices, students and professor gain a deeper understanding of the impact of controversial questions on people’s lives, confront the limited nature of solutions currently available, and come to appreciate the need not only for knowledge, but action. Will all these practices make teaching controversial issues easier? Not necessarily. In fact, they may complicate emotional engagement and can add to the administrative burden. In addition, they require the professor to surrender pedagogical illusions of grandeur or omniscience. However, as Day reminds us, “little works” matter, and through these small practices both we and our students may change and ultimately grow.