Resources

The COVID-19 pandemic presents many challenges for professors and students who seek to practice inter-contextual biblical interpretation with a concern for social justice. Among them is the need to engage deeply and empathetically with people experiencing injustice at a time when the risk of serious illness rules out face-to-face interaction. Figuring out how to meet this challenge in a course on African American and womanist hermeneutics is one of the goals of a Wabash Center grant project that Dr. Mitzi J. Smith and I are codirecting.[i] In this post, I will begin by sharing a resource related to that goal. Dr. Smith’s design for a recent biblical hermeneutics course used video documentaries, Zoom-based interviews, and reading assignments to prepare students for interpreting the Gospel of Luke through the lens of home and homelessness. An especially valuable reading assignment was Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond.[ii] This Pulitzer Prize winning ethnographic study weaves together the stories of eight families who became homeless while Desmond was living among them in two Milwaukee neighborhoods between May 2008 and June 2009. Desmond recorded the families’ stories with their permission while acting as a friendly nonjudgmental neighbor. He describes them struggling to pay rent, avoid eviction, and find housing again after they had lost it. Readers who are interested in a scholarly study of eviction and homelessness can study Desmond’s 68 pages of endnotes as well as an important epilogue in which he proposes policy solutions, but personal stories are the heart of the book. They make Desmond’s work compelling for students, deepening their empathy as well as their understanding. In an end-of-course survey, we asked students to rate the impacts that various resources had on them, using a scale of 1 (very ineffective) to 4 (very effective). Students gave high marks to Evicted for its effectiveness in increasing their empathy for people experiencing homelessness (average 3.8) and in informing them about the causes, conditions, and possible solutions of homelessness (average 3.7). The students’ high ratings of Evicted are consistent with the impacts that we observed in their written work. Dr. Smith required them to share a key learning from each of the book’s three main parts and a question for further discussion during the week just before our intensive Zoom meetings. Their messages reflected emotional and intellectual engagement with the struggles that Desmond described. The fact that many students also referred to Evicted in their final interpretive essays is significant because they were not specifically prompted to do so. An excellent example is an essay titled “The Disciples Discriminate: A Contemporary Reading of Luke 18:15-17” by Amanda Bennett, an MDiv student at Bethany Theological Seminary who has given me permission to discuss her work here. Bennett read the story of disciples turning away children in the light of the discrimination faced by Arlene and her sons, Jori and Jafaris, as they searched for affordable housing in Milwaukee. Although housing discrimination against families with children is illegal in the US, it remains widespread, and Desmond shows that it was one of the barriers that blocked Arlene from finding permanent housing. She persisted with her applications despite repeated rejections, sometimes lying about how many children she had in order to have any hope of being considered. Finally, after eighty-nine rejections, she found a landlord who would “work with” her and her sons. Even then there was discrimination. Landlords face penalties if too many of their tenants dial 911, and Arlene’s landlord objected after she called for an ambulance during one of Jafaris’s asthma attacks. A few days later the police followed Jori home from school after he had an altercation with a teacher. At that point the landlord gave Arlene the choice of facing formal eviction or moving out immediately with a refund of her first month’s rent and security deposit. She chose the refund.[iii] Bennett asked reasonably whether the teacher had engaged in racial discrimination when she decided to call the police instead of Arlene. In Bennett’s reading of Luke, Jesus offers essential resources such as food and healing. The families who bring children to Jesus are like Arlene, who persists in seeking resources for her children. Jesus’ disciples are like white supremacist landlords, teachers, officers, judges, and health care workers, who discriminate against African American families and block them from getting the resources they need. Instead of the Sunday school image of a smiling white Jesus surrounded by children, Bennett imagined a dark-skinned Jesus sitting alone because his disciples have locked their arms to shut children out. She heard this Jesus confronting disciples today: “I will tell you over and over again, until you depart with your discriminatory ways. I welcome all.”[iv] While applauding Bennett for her outstanding interpretive work, I also give credit to Desmond for recording and publishing stories that sparked Bennett’s analogical imagination. Evicted has limitations. It is not recent enough to account for the current housing crisis due to COVID-19. Students also noted that Desmond is a relatively privileged white man and wondered how that background may have shaped his way of selecting and telling stories. Even so, Evicted clearly met our expectations as a resource for building empathy and helping students interpret Luke through the lens of home and homelessness. I would also use it in a course where students can interact face-to-face with people who lack permanent homes. Notes [i] For more information about this project, search for other blog posts by Drs. Mitzi J. Smith, Marcia Riggs, Mary Hess, and Daniel Ulrich, beginning with “Learning Womanist Hermeneutics during COVID-19” at https://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/2020/07/learning-womanist-hermeneutics-during-covid-19/. [ii] Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (New York: Broadway Books, 2016). [iii] Desmond, Evicted, 231-32, 282, 285-87. [iv] Amanda Bennett, “The Disciples Discriminate: A Contemporary Reading of Luke 18:15-17” (unpublished academic paper, August 20, 2020), 14.

I recently read Valarie Kaur’s remarkable book, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love. At one point in her story, she describes her struggle to find herself “inside the law” at Yale Law School as a Sikh woman with communal commitments to justice developed in a post-9/11 world where racist and religious violence had impacted her own community profoundly. She feels so alien to the hallowed halls of an institution created to be impenetrable for women of color that she begins to imagine it as Hogwarts, a strange place where it is her job to learn the law as if it were a set of “magic spells, incantations that when spoken in the correct order had the power to compel individuals and institutions to do things in the world” (172-173). One day, Kaur and a classmate “found the basement” they previously had not known existed: It was a different world, frenetic and urgent, coffee cups strewn on tables, students strategizing behind closed doors about their clients—inmates on death row, immigrants in deportation proceedings, detainees at Guatánamo… Here students represent real clients in real cases under the supervision of professors. It was as if two schools existed in one—one removed from the world, one enmeshed in the world; one for learning the spells, one for using them. The minute we walked in, we knew that we had found our home. Lauren joined a human rights clinic and I joined an immigration clinic. We had found our Justice School. (Kaur 2020, 178) She goes on to detail the work of Yale’s “Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic” and her own formation through working with the East Haven community to reduce civil rights violation by the local police force. She later notes that this work with her student partner Tafari and her faculty mentors “defined her legal education.” The basement was her educational home, full stop. Since I read this passage, I have been wondering where the unknown basement might exist in my own graduate theological school. Where do students and professors work together in strategic, on-the-ground work for justice? How might we bring about the kind of partnered learning about prophetic leadership that calls both student and professor together to enact visionary work in partnership with local communities? Is there such a space where the most essential formation of capacity for on-the-ground praxis related to justice occurs? How did the faculty who established these clinics come to create such a conducive climate for the formation of their justice-seeking students? Could I be a part of the same in my own school? And I admit that my imagination falters a bit. I teach primarily middle-aged adult students who are squeezing their academic work into the corners of fully deployed lives. They are parents, employees, already serving churches and working jobs in nonprofit organizations that involve full-time work for part-time pay. They live scattered across forty-four states. We rarely gather in brick-and-mortar classrooms, much less the exciting clinic and community spaces after hours and outside of credit-structures that Kaur describes. To be honest, in a small, freestanding theological school related to a denomination that is in crisis due to its own justice-related fights about sexuality, most of my time and that of my faculty colleagues is being recruited to innovate to attract new learners who will help provide revenue to support the expensive graduate degree programs that we hope to sustain into the future (without an endowment like Yale University’s). While I know that the real story of how that clinic came to be and the work that kept it going is probably full of struggle, scrappiness, and determination on the part of the mentoring faculty, it also feels very far from my Canvas classroom. The dream of that vibrant basement space, where the real education occurs, feels about as magical and distant as the enchanted castle of Harry Potter’s learning that inspired Kaur’s quest. Then I, too, have to shift my imagination again, and stop longing for the resources and available time that undergird the situation described by Kaur that are not a part of my own context. I begin to notice that my students are often already in positions with influence and power in their own communities. The very realities that make it harder for them to carve out time for the traditional academic work in a classroom keep them deeply connected to the contexts of their home settings. They have not left to immerse themselves in some constructed community away from their homeplaces. They have continued to invest in work and home spaces where their influence is established, and they maintain relational connections even while they are giving their all to take on the challenges of graduate theological work. What they, and I, need is permission and vision to work for justice within what Dr. Gregory C. Ellison, II, calls the “three feet” that surround them. When I make this shift in my own imagination, I see much more possibility for how to support their justice-seeking vocations in context. I can imagine how they can draw upon the resources in their communities to do the work that is there, just as I make the connections and attempt the work I am called to do in my own three foot radius. And that work matters. While I might long for the collaboration and shared struggle of the magical basement clinic, and yearn for the kind of influence and resources that would allow us to be together to engage in world-changing work, I am reminded that important justice work can happen in each of the institutions and relationships and churches that my students are involved with. Learning to shape my imagination for this reality, a learning community of overburdened adults dispersed across a wide geography, helps me to show up to that challenge and continue to support their vocational development in justice-seeking rather than grieve the lack of the gathered clinic in my own setting.

Growing up in Haïti, the bulk of my knowledge of literature centered on French writers like Descartes, Rousseau, Pascal, Molière, and Voltaire, among others. I did not read Shakespeare until I was in my mid-twenties, and I only recently became aware of George Bernard Shaw’s famous, or rather infamous, statement, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” While I have yet to read the full play, I believe that the statement contains a false dichotomy and misses the point about what teaching is, and what teaching should be. However, I found myself using this phrase when addressing our incoming students this past summer. I was making a case that the Wesley Seminary faculty are actually “doers.” Our faculty are practitioners who are teaching out of the abundance of the ministerial experience they have gathered over the years. As I bragged on the faculty this past summer, I could not help but think about two experiences that shaped me as student. The first occurred when I was an undergraduate student at Caribbean Wesleyan College in Jamaica. One of my professors pastored a church with a ministry in the inner city of Savanna-la-Mar. She invited me to teach outdoor Sunday school to at-risk children whom their parents could not send to church. I fell in love with these children, and we shed many tears when it was time for me to leave upon graduation. My four years doing life with them gave meaning to my time of study far beyond what reading or talking about social justice could do. The second experience took place during my time at Asbury Seminary when I enrolled in the course Wealth and Poverty in the New Testament. The course required us to read Robert Wuthnow’s Poor Richard’s Principle, and to engage in a service-learning opportunity during the semester. The weeks I volunteered at the food pantry in Wilmore, KY were very formative and helped put in context the concepts we discussed during class. Teaching on social justice and civic engagement calls for pedagogy that creates a lasting impression on the heart and mind of students. We need to influence students’ lives by doing what we teach. By this, I mean two things: first, lead by example; second, create experiential learning opportunities so students can be immersed in a context or contexts that allow them to put what they are learning into practice. Engagement implies active interaction. As a New Testament professor, I have the opportunity to lead travel courses to Greece, Turkey, and Israel. I create learning experiences that allow students to not only visit historical sites and admire the beauty of the locations, but also interact with the people in these places. The recent refugee crisis in Europe has provided opportunities for students to worship with and minister to displaced persons and survivors of sex trafficking. In Palestine, students have the opportunity to interact with Palestinian Christians and gain an understanding of the complexity of their situation. Such encounters cause students to reevaluate their theology, eschatology, and overall outlook on life. They experience brokenness and grief firsthand, and this experience moves them to action. For example, several students who travelled with me later returned to Greece for short-term service at a refugee camp, and at least one is serving long term. Meaningful engagement requires sustained interaction. I create a Facebook group for each trip. This allows us to stay connected and to reflect on the experience as the years go by, even beyond graduation. At least once a year, students are able to relive memories of the trip, share the impact it has had on their lives, and talk about where they are now. Teaching is doing. While I disagree with Shaw’s statement, I believe it conveys a warning which all teachers should heed. It is a warning against settling for merely discussing the concepts and ideas surrounding issues of social justice. It is a warning against merely giving assent to the need for engagement without living as one who belongs to the struggle. Teaching for social justice and civic engagement should embody “doing.” As an administrator, I encourage faculty to live out this truth. It is all the more important because we expect our students to be engaged in ministry while pursuing their studies at Wesley Seminary. In the Gospel of Mark, the author uses the verb poie­ō, “to do,” to describe the miracles Jesus performs. When crowd saw the things he did, they expressed in amazement, “What is this? A new teaching, with authority!” (Mark 1:27, NRSV). I do what I teach, I teach because I can! One of the best gifts I have received is a sign on my desk that reads, “I teach. What’s your superpower?”