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Teaching Introduction to the Hebrew Bible is one of the most challenging—and enjoyable—parts of my job. It shares some of its challenges with any other large humanities class: how to keep students engaged, reading closely, and asking sophisticated questions while they sit in a sea of their peers.Other challenges are particular to this course. I jokingly tell colleagues that I teach one of the only Gen Ed topics—the Bible—that students know everything about before entering the classroom. Which is another way of saying that it can be difficult to tap into students’ curiosity about a text they may know about intimately from other places. To be curious about a text is to be vulnerable to new ways of thinking about it and not everyone who walks into my classroom feels ready to be open in that way. Thus, while I assume that every student actually does have questions about the Bible, some are primed to offer only answers instead of queries about this text. This resistance may be due to the ideological heterogeneity of their peers, to the fact that my authority to teach derives from academic, not religious, credentials, or some other reason entirely. In any case, the large, nondevotional site that is the public university lecture hall can be a difficult context not only for students to stay engaged but also to unleash their curiosity about the Bible in the first place. The practice of Designated Respondents (DR), which I now use every semester I teach this 120-student course, does not resolve all of these difficulties. It does, however, generate conditions in which to address them by creating a framework for consistent engagement, inquiry, and connection. Practice Designated Respondents works in some ways like a sustained and structured “fishbowl.” Here is how I introduce students to it in the syllabus:Three times during this class you will be asked to serve as the “Designated Respondent” for a class meeting. This means that you will come to class more prepared than usual. I will look to you first to actively participate, respond to and pose your own questions during the course of the class. Try to speak at least once in each of your assigned sessions. If you are unable to attend one of your scheduled days, please contact me and I will assign you to another group. I divide students into six or seven groups (fifteen to twenty students per group) and begin the DR practice at the end of the second week of class, once enrollment has stabilized. For the first round many students are quite nervous to speak up. To help relieve anxiety, I open these sessions by asking students to pose their prepared questions about the reading, so they can get used to hearing their own voices. They can ask questions about anything. I only require that their questions: (1) invoke the assigned biblical reading directly; and (2) are put in terms intelligible to a broad, religiously-diverse audience. The goal here is to get students to slow down enough to let the Bible surprise them and then to make those surprises intelligible to students who may not share their guiding interpretive assumptions. I have found that after students speak up once or twice they gain confidence in this aspect of the assignment. Inviting students to sit towards the front of the room, if they are able, helps to mitigate the intimidation they may feel from speaking in a larger space.This practice means that I structure every class session around large questions and leave ample space for discussion. I put one or more of these questions on the opening slide for students to consider as they settle into the room. That way, more reticent students can contemplate and even prepare their responses in advance. EvaluationStudents assign themselves a grade for this aspect of class, though they can only assign themselves full points if they: (a) attend their assigned class session, (b) complete all the assigned reading for the day, and (c) complete the entire rubric.The self-evaluation rubric consists of the following questions:What percentage of the reading did you read in advance of this class?Describe two passages from the assigned reading that you were prepared to discuss.What two questions were you prepared to ask in this class session? Be as specific as you can, invoking the biblical text directly.Describe what engagement looked like for you during class.Out of 10 points, explain what grade you would assign yourself based on your answers to the above questions.It is worth noting that for some students, speaking in class is not just a strong disinclination but not possible or healthy. I work with students to create specific strategies for their voices to be heard during their assigned sessions. However, the evaluation rubric permits students who are not able to speak up to still articulate their questions, explain their engagement (which may consist entirely of attentive listening and active notetaking), and achieve full points.  Results Some students truly hate this assignment. It requires them to read and to attend, and it strongly encourages them to speak in a large class. Each one of these components can be profoundly challenging. But many more students, while anxious at first, find their voices through this practice. Some have shared with me that it has empowered them to speak more in other courses as well. Here is how one student recently described it: “I really liked the designated respondents! At first I thought it was terrible, but after I did it and participated in the course, I found them really beneficial. I have thoughts and answers to questions every day in the class but I am always too scared to raise my hand (simply social anxiety!) but being told that I have to respond has helped me participate more in class.” This practice has helped me forge connections with a larger percentage of students and to better understand their interpretive questions and concerns. I have also seen it generate connections among students within the class. Speaking up in class is a vulnerable act and it encourages students to be curious about the Bible and about one another. I have witnessed students, who were otherwise strangers, linger after class to talk in response to what they raised in our discussion. Finally, DR prevents any one student (or handful of students) from dominating discussion. Hearing from a diverse range of voices (by semester’s end, nearly every student has spoken) makes our class more socially-connected than is typical for a hundred-plus person course.Designated Respondents is not a panacea for the problems of student anonymity, alienation, and disengagement that hamper many large courses. However, by creating clear structures for close-reading and active participation from a wide range of voices, it creates conditions for some of these issues to be assuaged. 

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).

My absolute favorite way to teach is sitting around a camp stove on a bed of pine needles with students eating mac and cheese and laughing about the day’s challenges. If I’m lucky, my favorite wool socks are on my feet and the hat my friend Tess knit for me is on my head. If I’m really lucky, the students have moved from “That canoe carry was so hard!” to “I was thinking this afternoon about the point Belden Lane makes in the chapter on struggle as teaching us attention and indifference…”As much as I enjoy taking students outside for my regular semester classes, taking them through immersion courses—usually a week backpacking, sometimes canoeing—is a whole other level. All the good that happens in an outdoor session on campus is enhanced by being outdoors for a whole week or more. Students forget that they’re in class, become curious, and learn rather than ask me repeatedly if they’re doing the paper “right.” Students are less distracted on these trips, more able to focus on readings, reflections, experiences, each other. We all feel like we’re getting away with something, and we play, which makes us even more curious and open to learning. We are all more alive in the world. My teaching and my students’ learning becomes more attentive, more responsive, more active, more unpredictable in the best ways because that’s the reality of life on the trail: wild, unpredictable, active, requiring attention and response.All of these things happen, but for this post I’ll focus on just one aspect of the immersive experience: how present students become and how much that positively affects their learning and, more significantly, their lives.Two aspects of immersive outdoor trips especially facilitate students’ presence in their own lives. First, the places I backpack with students usually have no cell service, and I take their phones anyway, requiring them to go screen-free for the duration of not just the trip but the Jan-term (three weeks). Many of us make rules about devices in our classrooms and enforce presence for three hours a week, but imagine how the extended absence of their devices, the immersion into the non-virtual world, brings students into a more sustained experience of attention and therefore a deeper experience of presence. Students are not distracted by people who are not physically present. They cannot spend time staring at a video, leaving their reality behind. The things that distract them from their learning must be more interesting than those on a screen. Students tend to be much more engaged in their reading and read with more focus and depth on these trips, too! Without the numbing kinds of distraction available, students find themselves paying attention to their world and their community—each other. Their minds might wander, but they wander in ways our minds were meant to wander, making connections and noticing the world and the people around them, discovering the humanity of others and reaching out to meet needs they wouldn’t otherwise notice. They may even perceive internal movements of their own souls.The other aspect of the immersive trips that makes students so present is the pace of the trail. We are only ever doing one thing at a time. We’re hiking or sleeping or cooking or eating or playing or sitting around a campfire with one another, but never two of those at the same time (well, we can eat and do most of the other things at the same time, but these are undergraduates we’re talking about). Those are also the only things we do each day, every day, day after day. The pace and the rhythm slows us all down. We can focus. There is nothing vying for our attention. We just have to walk awhile, attend to our feet, attend to the person beside us.What happens when students are present, then, is an exponential increase in learning. Imagine conversations that last longer than thirty seconds because students have read deeply and brought questions and thoughts about the text. Imagine real conversation with real listening to one another and building ideas together because they are not wondering in the backs of their minds about who is texting them or what other conversation they are missing out on. Imagine a full day to ponder and digest the ideas of the previous night, a whole week for the course material to sink deep into students’ bones as they engage it with different people in different conversations over and over with nothing else to do but go for a walk and chat about it.Perhaps backpacking with students is not an option for you, but I imagine some kind of immersive experience is. Could you require a weekend retreat without phones and with a manageable amount of reading you do while at the retreat? Could you schedule even a single day immersion with students? Could you take them to a museum, take their phones, and give them a single task they have to do for several hours, slowly? Could you assign them a weekly meal where they have to be present to one another? May you find your immersive classroom and come to know your absolute favorite way to teach, with or without the wool socks.

I finally went to my primary care doctor the other day and proceeded to unload about three years’ worth of pent-up ailments upon her. I'm losing my hearing! Do I have early-onset dementia? My right knee hurts! Can you test my thyroid? I think I have diabetes! What is this weird bump? My pinky is numb! Is my heart rate normal? Am I a hypochondriac?! This poor woman.I’m pretty sure she diagnosed me with a very serious condition called… “aging.”I’m turning forty this year and suddenly, it seems, I find myself routinely waking up at four a.m., taking a handful of vitamins with breakfast, and grumbling about “kids these days.” The skin on the back of my hands has turned to crepe paper. The other weekend I didn’t go watch a friend’s band play because the show started WAY too late. Readers, it started at nine p.m. I fear it can no longer be denied: I’m getting older.It’s not that I don’t spend time thinking about bodies, including my own. I’ve read books such as Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning (Hrach, 2021). I teach courses on disability and race—two classes in which the body comes up a lot. I emphasize to students that religion isn’t just about beliefs; it’s enacted and embodied amidst a material world too. I know I need a snack in the middle of my Mon/Wed 9:35-10:50 a.m. class or my stomach will let out a series of plaintive whale songs. I’ve dealt with decades-long injuries. I’ve suffered from long COVID. People I love have died. But, oddly, I haven’t thought all that much about aging, or its relationship to my work, until more recently.Part of this odd oversight may be that aging is pretty embarrassing sometimes. Kids can literally fall out of a tree, get up, and walk away just fine; I can pull my back, and need to take it easy for a week, because I reached too far trying to plug in a lamp. This isn’t exactly the kind of story I want to broadcast at the monthly department meeting. Part of it may be that it’s hard to admit, perhaps even to fathom, just how much our lives are affected by this “meat suit” (as my yoga teacher calls it) that is only ours temporarily. Part of it may be that professors tend to work late into life—and so aging doesn’t seem all that relevant to my professional world. Part of it may also be that, because faculty are constantly encountering a turnstile of younger people in our classes, it may be easy to forget we ourselves aren’t forever young. I still feel only a few years older than my students (especially whenever I can sense the presence of free pizza nearby). Part of it too may be that we fancy ourselves living “the life of the mind”—even if it’s a big lie or hell, for a lot of us—and the mind can seem ageless (though the other day I stood in front of my bathroom sink and couldn’t remember which handle was for hot, so….). Part of it is denial, I’m sure.Aging brings up a bunch of considerations—and not just about the indignities and rebellions of a body I can no longer (could not ever?) control. How do I continue to do this work well when my mind is no longer as sharp as it once was? (And what does “well” even mean? Perhaps such notions change over time….) What do I have to offer to my colleagues and students, now that I am no longer fresh out of school? How do I make my own meaning, when the milestones and achievements of the earlier years (e.g., get a degree, get a job) have passed? How can I stay relevant in a rapidly changing world, around those same youths I mentioned above? How can I remember where I put my glasses?!? What are my new goals, what am I aiming toward, where is the forward momentum coming from now? How do I tap into the wisdom of mentors and others who have been through this time and these transitions before me? How do I learn to live with the losses, both personal and professional, that accumulate? How do I stay excited about doing the same thing, for semesters on end? Are there really ways to beat or stave off mid-career malaise or the midlife blues? How do I do *gestures around* all of this for another several decades? These are tough questions to contemplate and I don’t have the answers yet. I’m not sure I ever will.Some of you are probably chuckling to yourselves. What I wouldn’t give to be 40 again, you might be thinking. Yet difficult wonderings can come for us at any age or stage in our career. I’m remembering a quotation my mom, who has since passed away, sent to me once: “Sometimes when you’re in a dark place, you think you have been buried. But you’ve actually been planted.” Now, maybe, is a time to grow.

Playin’ Mas’ – Intertextual Oz As a person of Caribbean heritage and a scholar of Caribbean and African Diasporic studies, I see elements of Trinidad and Tobago’s carnival in accounts of Geoffrey Holder’s approach to envisioning The Wiz. It was Holder’s costuming, first iterated in sketches, which led to the choreography and storytelling of the The Wiz. As in the tradition of “playin’ mas’” (playing masquerade), movement, music, and costuming are intimately connected. The look and construction of the costuming plays a large part in determining the movement. The cyclone which whisked Dorothy away could be conceptualized as Oya, the Yoruban orisha of the whirlwind and guardian of the cemetery. This reading brings a sensibility to the Oz myth which opens it to other possible readings of text in context. Here, I am thinking about the tragic real-life history of1 expansionist national policies towards “western” landscapes in the late nineteenth century which saw the displacement of Indigenous people. While Baum’s narrative does not overtly touch on this aspect, Oz is peopled by different sorts of beings vying for sustainability given the tyranny of the wicked witches.This musical theatrical production was adapted as a film in 1978 with the same name, The Wiz. Plot elements were adjusted to accommodate an older Dorothy, now a teacher, played by Diana Ross. Set in an urban landscape, Dorothy’s snow cyclone travel to Oz lands her in a dystopian New York City. The Scarecrow, played by Michael Jackson, delivers a powerful lament about injustice in a new song introduced in the film called “You Can’t Win.” The song “Home,” like its parallel “Over the Rainbow,” is the movie’s emotional heart and center followed by Lena Horne’s Glinda the Good’s impassioned anthem for self-awareness, “If You Believe in Yourself.”The Wiz reboot of 2024 features a younger cast in which Dorothy’s companions on the Yellow Brick Road are her peers in age. In media interviews director Schele Williams noted that Dorothy, played by Nichelle Lewis, finding community with similarly-aged companions is relevant for a twenty-first-century social context. Williams sees the finding of one’s group of affirming and encouraging peers as a central task of contemporary life.What does it mean to teach the mythos of Oz twenty-five years after I first contemplated doing so while designing a course which I introduced in 2000? Twenty-five years ago, I focused on how Oz represented changing geographical and cultural landscapes at the turn of another century. The movement from a mostly rural population to more people living in cities was a salient feature of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century in the US. Oz, a prison drama television series of the same name was also popular during its six-season broadcast from 1997 to 2003. Where was “home” for incarcerated persons?As a class, we discussed the hero’s journey with reference to the work of Joseph Campbell and its relevance for science fiction and fantasy narratives including Star Wars (1977) and The Matrix (1999). The course contrasted this search for home with diaspora identities and religious traditions where the search for home complicates Dorothy’s assertion that “there’s no place like home.” Other retellings include Geoffrey Maguire’s 1995 Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which is based on both Baum’s 1900 novel as well as the 1939 MGM musical. A Broadway musical called Wicked based on Maguire’s book premiered in 2003. Here the Oz mythos is retold from the point of view of a character who is usually positioned as Dorothy’s arch nemesis.The Oz mythos remains a rich field for exploration in religious studies classes. It is still eminently teachable today. The text’s multiple and continued readings and reinterpretations, across a variety of genres, make it especially suitable for study. Students are exposed to the concept and practice of intertextual reading, and to the subfields of film and religion and visual cultural studies. These in turn allow for the study of shifting cultural signifiers and the enduring legacy of powerful stories. Teaching Oz in the twenty-first century allows for continued exploration of the meaning of home, community, and individual and collective journeys in an ever changing and shifting geographical and cultural landscape.There are many metaphorical yellow brick roads. I would want students to explore North American S/F (speculative fact and fiction) and fantasy literatures and their intersection with religious studies. Situating Oz as an important (although certainly not the only) origin point for fantasy literature in a North American landscape including its tensions, contradictions, and continued troubling legacies would be a richly rewarding teaching and learning experience. Oz should be put into dialogue with the texts of Octavia Butler, for instance. In my past teaching, I taught Oz alongside the imagined worlds of Star Wars and the emancipatory visions of Rastafari. Teaching Oz opens possibilities for journeying through visual and textual studies and exploring their meanings in comparative contexts.