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I’ve been neglecting my scholarship since March 2020. That, in case you don’t remember, is when the pandemic hit, sending faculty off into a mad scramble of Zoom, hybrid teaching, mental health emergencies, and social distancing. Once vaccines allowed us to stick our heads back out, we began working on tasks we had neglected during that mad scramble. And all the while, wave after wave of terrifying news coverage hit. George Floyd. The invasion of Ukraine. “Don’t say gay” laws. More talk about bathrooms than I would have thought possible. The seeming inevitability of another Trump/Biden election. Ever increasing temperatures, metaphorically and literally. Wildfires in the West, in Canada, and on Maui. Gaza. In the middle of all this, I started my sabbatical. That is an amazing privilege, but it put me face to face with my demons because I hadn’t even looked at my scholarship since March 2020 (except for the frantic days last summer when I wrote my sabbatical application). I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to be working on. And when I reread my application, I realized that I didn’t care. How could my research matter, to me or to others, in a world that increasingly literally is on fire? The state of our profession made it even harder for me to delve into my scholarship. Majors and programs are shrinking, budgets are being cut, departments are closing. Every week seems to bring more bad news. At the same time, most of us need to rethink our teaching and learn new pedagogical techniques because more and more students need more basic instruction than we are trained to provide. And we need to figure out how teach in the era of ChatGPT. So yeah. It’s a lot. Under these circumstances, how should we approach our scholarship? What can we learn, write, and do that will benefit us, our profession, and our students? It depends. Some of us do find meaning by delving deep into traditional scholarship of discovery, examining the arcana of Greek and Hebrew terms, exploring manuscript variations and intricate scholarly debates, even while recognizing that few will read our work. Some are nourished by the intellectual challenges in that work and emerge refreshed and intellectually stimulated. Others don’t, but find themselves constrained by circumstances. They need to do scholarship to earn promotion or tenure or to have a chance of landing a teaching position. These are all good reasons to dig into the obscure references and produce additional journal articles. But what about the rest of us? There seem to be plenty of faculty who, like me, don’t find meaning and purpose in the scholarship of discovery. And some of us, like me, are tenured. If we don’t have to publish another peer-reviewed article, what else might we reflect on and write about? There is an opportunity in this moment of crisis and uncertainty, an opportunity to change course and to engage in scholarship that feels more meaningful. What that means will be different for different people. An increasing number of faculty are doing work in social justice. Some are turning their attention to climate change and the despair it induces in many of us. I am staying closer to home, focusing on some of the challenges in my own profession: I’m thinking about how academics in the humanities can move forward and how we can avoid burnout. How can we learn to live well despite having less stability and more uncertainty than before? Can we find good ways to grieve for the careers we thought we would have and for the fields that we love and then find meaning and joy in teaching new populations of students instead? Philosophers and religious studies scholars have deep resources to draw on here, thousands of years of reflecting on happiness, meaning, and the human desire for stability and permanence in a world of rapid change. I’m diving in, reading about acceptance, grief, and hope in Buddhist and Christian texts, in psychological research, and even in self-help books. And I find inspiration in an unexpected line from a psychology journal article: “Hope can be practiced by locating a deep desire, value, or commitment and taking a step toward it.”[i] For so long, I’ve thought that hope for our profession required believing that the numbers of majors, funding, and programs will increase again. That would be lovely, of course. But this line points towards a different understanding: Hope is the practice of teaching and working in a way that expresses our core values and commitments and continuing to do so even though the situation is changing. It is not all that I wanted, but it makes my work feel meaningful and important again. That may be enough.     Notes [i] The quote is from James L. Griffith’s “Hope Modules.” He is paraphrasing Kaethe Weingarten’s “Hope in a Time of Global Despair.” (I have not yet read Weingarten’s article yet, but it’s next on my list).

“Can we please go outside?!” my students begged. “Allow me to be your fully-formed pre-frontal cortex,” I told them. “In five minutes, you will be cold just sitting still, and none of you actually wants to sit in the snow.” An unusually long and unseasonably warm fall last year meant that my classes took place outdoors until the end of October. Then, in an unseasonably early snow dump, we were back inside. The students in my history of Christianity class were not pleased. They persisted: “We could do a walking class!” As our day on the crusades approached, I thought, I could make this happen. I told them to come prepared for an outdoor walking class. That morning, while I ran, I planned my adapted lesson. It was one of the best classes I have ever taught. If you had told me when I began teaching ten years ago that I would plan an entire lesson on a 35-minute run the morning of the class, I would have questioned your sanity. I needed detailed plans that I had read over several times so that things would move smoothly. I needed back-up plans for when something didn’t quite work right or an activity didn’t take long enough. I needed to know everything there was to know in case a student asked the question I hadn’t prepared for. Something had changed. Yes, some of the change is from teaching in general. Doing a thing long enough gives confidence, and teaching long enough teaches flexibility, or at least being okay with flexibility, because no plan survives contact with living, breathing students. But I have noticed that teaching outdoors has emboldened me as a teacher. So much so that I would try something as absurd as an Oregon-Trail-style role-play of the crusades in the snow—students kept dying of dysentery and cholera on our trek around campus. One reason teaching outside emboldens me is simply that I feel more myself outside. The more I feel like myself—or the more comfortable I feel—when I’m in front of a class, the more likely I am to feel the freedom to risk failure by trying something new or trying something I haven’t fully thought through. What space do you feel most comfortable, most yourself, in? Could you hold a class there? Could you make your classroom feel more like that comfortable place? Is it possible that our students might find it more comfortable too, that they might risk more? Another thing I’ve discovered is that when I’m teaching outside I feel like I’m getting away with something. So do the students. Class is supposed to be in a cinder-block room at desks with harsh lighting and cause extreme boredom. We almost whisper to each other as we head outside, “Don’t enjoy this too much or the administrators will find out and make us stop!” If I feel like I’m getting away with something, I’m a little exhilarated by the risk and willing to try more. There’s also a conspiratorial spirit I develop with the students: we’re all in this rule-breaking together, so let’s go for broke. They’re more willing to try things. Even better, if they feel they’re getting away with something, they drop their guard and are more willing to play, to try new things, to risk failure. They’re more willing to learn because it doesn’t feel like what they’ve been taught learning feels like. Finally, things are less likely to go to plan outside, so I have gained a lot of experience about decision-making and confidence. Did it start raining? Is it heavy enough to go inside, or do we wait it out? From those experiences and choices, I have learned that once I make the decision, I need stick with it, no going back and forth. Lawn mowers come too near? I have learned what points are most important in each lesson. Knowing that, I can have fun with the details. Did a student have a medical emergency on a backpacking trip? I learned I can handle real emergencies and think through the steps that need to be taken. These lessons transfer to the classroom as well, where I’ve become a better teacher for knowing my main points and sticking with a decision to keep momentum in a new activity (unless it’s really going poorly and needs intervention) and being able to react calmly to minor incidents. Having experienced a range of interruptions and impetuses for improvisation, I am emboldened to think that I can handle anything. Sure, I will still be surprised. I will still need help. I can’t handle everything. But the confidence—and also humility—that has risen from teaching outdoors has resulted in more creative lessons, more engaged students, and more effective learning. Emboldened to risk, my students are emboldened to risk, and that’s when all of us can learn. Even while we’re pretending to die of dysentery.   Appendix Crusades role-play walking class lesson plan Students have read Justo Gonzalez, Story of Christianity vol. 1, pp. 345-351, and Bernard of Clairvaux, “In Praise of the New Knighthood” Numbers are for a class of 15, but could be adjusted for a bigger class (i.e., could have 2 people play the pope collectively, have a couple of assistants to Bernard, etc.) Explain to the students that we will be role-playing today and walking around campus Assign major parts: 2-3 pilgrims returning from the Holy Land with reports of persecution Pope Urban: Will convene the Council of Clermont and lead 3-4 Advisors to the Pope: Advise at the Council of Clermont Bernard of Clairvaux: Will lead “knight training camp” Everyone else is variously council members, crusaders, knights *Since I was doing this for the first time, I asked two students who I knew were good at understanding the material they had read and who would be game for this kind of role play to be Pope Urban and Bernard, and asked for volunteers to be pilgrims and advisors. It could be done as all volunteer, but it’s good to have in mind who might be especially good and make a direct request as a way of avoiding silence when asking for volunteers. If I hadn’t had those two particular students, I would have needed to get my volunteers the day before so they had time to prepare. I led them walking around campus and stopped periodically to have an activity and lesson. First stop: Near the Holy Land 2-3 pilgrims run up to our group and tell us what it was like for them on their pilgrimage in the Holy Land—how they were treated, what difficulties Muslim rulers are causing, etc. When the pilgrims run out of their own ideas, ask the rest of the class to fill in While walking, ask students to think about how they would feel hearing these reports. Who wanted to do something about it and who didn’t? Assign them different kinds of life (farmer, knight, artisan, monk, etc.) and see what they might think. Second stop: Council of Clermont The Pope needs to convene the council and then receive reports from advisors about what needs to happen This stop is about getting at the reasons people wanted a crusade and the reason the pope ordered the first one (and then later ones) When advisors and pope run out of reasons, the rest of the class fills in further details again Pope makes a decision and begins the first crusade While walking, discussion of how many crusades there were and how they were different, what reasons were similar and different for each one *If group is too big to hear each other while walking, then make another stop quickly after this one to have this discussion. Also while walking, periodically point at a student and say “you have died of _____” fill in various ways and reasons they died so students get a sense of the futility of this. Dysentery, an infected cut, robbers, a battle, etc. Third stop: Knight training camp with Bernard of Clairvaux Bernard convenes knight training camp and leads the rest of us in how to be good knights, based on the “In Praise of the New Knighthood” reading. I also lead some discussion here about the monastic flavor of Bernard’s new knighthood and other things we need to pick up from the text. Help us understand the people who were doing this Wander some more, more discussion about the length and number of crusades, children’s crusades, etc. Continue with “You have died of…” End back at the classroom and ask how many are still alive, so they have a sense of the magnitude of deaths. Concluding conversation, reflections on the experience, final important points about content.

“I just do not know if I have it in me to write another paper” were one student’s words midway through my Hosea exegesis course. By this time, I was on my third semester of pandemic teaching. Zoom fatigue had set in alongside our unceasing grief for the daily Coronavirus death tolls. Hearing each other in a virtual space that seemed coerced and yet routine was not limited to a spotty Wi-Fi signal or faulty audio equipment. Our hearing—that kind we learn from—had fallen numb. Pre-pandemic, the design and pedagogical approach to my Hosea exegesis course had reached a sweet spot. I had a good learning balance between group work (contextualizing the biblical critic and reading in community) and individual final projects. As for the psychosocial dynamics of this space, it was easy to read the feeling states in the room—enervation, anxiety, but also, surprise, discovery, or intrigue. And by midway through the course, everything in my syllabus usually went as planned, barring a few late papers. As such, hearing to learn and learning to hear seemed to work harmoniously with our embodied practices in the classroom. The abrupt shift to pandemic teaching posed unique challenges to my hearing-learning reflexes. Upon reflection, the issue was not auditory but rather a stale hollowness of presence or what I call “the hollow hearing effect.” Arriving at this diagnosis of the learning experience was, indeed, a process, beginning with the shocking midsemester flip to online teaching to running a new learning platform to revamping my syllabi for a new virtual world of teaching Bible. Soon, the rhythms of my synchronized classroom felt random and sluggish, in part because of our connectedness to the globe’s misery but disconnectedness on Zoom. Then comes spring 2021, the semester of my Hosea exegesis course. Going in, I recall feeling optimistic about my redesigned syllabus. Instead of my usual “reading in community” group assignment, I had students contribute asynchronously to a video community commentary. Here, students created a ten-minute video in which they read their English translation of the assigned Hebrew verse, highlighted one major poetic feature, discussed two contrasting interpretations, and lastly applied their reading to a contemporary issue (e.g., trauma, migration, empire, gender, violence, justice). Below each uploaded video commentary, students had the opportunity to pose questions and offer constructive feedback. Each week, their online community commentary unfolded according to plan. Although their feedback fell between modest and missing, their videos showed a genuine and critical engagement with Hosea. I was especially moved by their applications of Hosea to various contemporary issues (white privilege, anti-black violence, family separation at the Texas-Mexico border, reproductive justice, the pandemic, etc.). Despite the decent success of this assignment, students were still coping with the constraints and hardships caused by COVID-19. While I could help them decipher the trauma in Hosea, I had difficulty reading their own learning woes online. By week ten, it finally became apparent that my syllabus’ mechanical precision did not exempt students from the grief-inducing complexities of a global pandemic. Their day-to-day angst of forced immobility and family separation were coupled with a weekly dose of prophetic texts rife with trauma, violence, and abuse. Add to this their application of Hosea to contemporary traumas, and the results were a learning breakdown. Once I was made aware of this, I felt like I do when I travel with my family through an international airport. Usually, I am leading the way to our connecting gate. Without looking back, I soon go from a steady walk to a marathon-style stride. Though I arrive on time, my family is nowhere to be seen. Out of breath, they finally arrive asking angrily, “Why didn’t you stop for us?” Hence, though I made it to week ten of my syllabus, my students were “crawling towards the finish line.” Unlike my airport marathon, I decided to put the brakes on my syllabus two weeks before my Hosea exegesis course ended. As a remedy to my students’ learning woes, I decided to offer them a second option for their final project. In lieu of an academic exegesis paper, students could submit an art exegesis project. Indeed, my recourse to art was not some random contrivance. From the standpoint of prophetic literature, the art of poetry served as a viable care-strategy for coping with the traumas of imperial conquest. Moreover, artmaking and the traumas of forced migration have been central to my advocacy work in the US-Mexico borderlands (see Arte de Lágrimas: Refugee Artwork Project). Thus, to turn to art for a final project made sense at a deeper level. In the end, every student in the course submitted an art exegesis project, which included original art, an art talk, and reflection. Here is an example of one student’s triptych art exegesis (oil paintings):   “I Will Tear” (Hosea 5:14)               “I will love them freely…And lengthen his roots” (Hosea 14:4-5)               “And Shall Arise among your people” (Hosea 10:14)           Among the responses, one student stated, “It revealed to me things about the text and about myself that I don’t think I would have seen doing my standard mode of exegesis.” As their teacher, it gave me a way of hearing my students that was far from hollow but rather healing.

I stopped dead in my tracks. I had been enjoying an early-Autumn walk, crunching my way through fallen leaves, while listening to a Wabash Center podcast in which Dr. Nancy Lynne Westfield and Rev. Dr. Steed Davidson were discussing how to “Future Proof Your Career.” I stopped walking when I heard Dr. Westfield declare: “I guarantee you, you will not have the career your mentor had. That career is over.” Later she remarked, “We need to adapt.” I didn’t stop walking because I was angry about having to change my pedagogy. To be honest, I enjoy that sort of thing. Neither did I stop walking because I was shocked. I know that small private liberal arts institutions and seminaries are facing enrollment challenges now, perhaps more than ever. And, for this reason, new adaptions and academic-adjacent careers are a reality for those of us teaching theology and religion, especially those of us who are in the beginning or middle stages of our career trajectories. I stopped walking because I was stunned by the clear and honest way Dr. Westfield had articulated something I had been thinking about a lot—and to be honest, wrestling with—in a couple of different ways in my current institution. I teach in the Theology department at a fairly small, private Catholic institution. Most of the students we teach register for our courses to fulfill a General Education requirement in the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. This context is quite different from one in which I formerly taught, comprised of students pursuing a theology degree for professional ministry. My current colleagues and I have been reflecting on the purpose of our department and its course offerings within our institution; in doing so, we have discussed how we primarily serve the General Education curriculum, rather than a curriculum designed for theology majors. While we have several majors graduate from our program every year, we need to make sure we are serving not only them, but also the bulk of the students in our classes who are not theology majors. Of course, a curriculum designed for majors needs to cover a range of diverse areas of study within its discipline, equipping students with the knowledge and skills necessary to pursue a career or further studies in its area. Content is critical. Certain topics in the discipline must be covered. However, in a curriculum designed for students taking a couple of courses in theology as a general education requirement, specific areas of content are less critical. Instead, courses are meant to introduce students to a discipline—not by covering all of its topics in a preliminary way—but by teaching students how to use the approach of the discipline, or to think with its lens. For example, in a content approach, I construct a course around the question: “What do students need to know about Christianity?” I then choose a textbook that covers these areas of knowledge that I have deemed necessary. The methodological approach, instead, asks: “How will I teach students to think theologically?” Often, when the course is a requirement for their graduation, I have to ask the additional question: “How will I get students to understand that learning to think this way is relevant to their lives?” One way our department has done this is to revise the introductory theology courses we teach. Rather than asking our students to fulfill their first theology course in an introduction to Scripture or Systematics, we designed a course that introduces students to Christian scriptures and theological disciplines through the lens of justice. This change in focus made us adapt the way we teach. Rather than simply teaching only about our content areas of expertise, we are teaching in ways that engage the contemporary questions our students (most of whom may be categorized as Gen Z) find relevant. This change, in my experience, has increased student engagement. For example, not many of my students—especially those who are not majors or care much about Christianity—find a unit on creation in systematics very interesting, at least on a personal level. Their lives aren’t invested in the doctrine of creation ex-nihilo and learning about pantheism and panentheism. However, if I introduce them to Christian scriptures and theology on creation with a primary focus on global warming, they are engaged almost instantaneously. This focus addresses something the world needs right now. More than increased levels of engagement, though, this new approach introduces students to a practice of applying theology to contemporary concerns. My hope is that by the time they leave my class, when religious ideas and concerns show up in contemporary events, they know how to evaluate and analyze them. How is scripture being used at an anti-immigration protest, for example? What we have done in our department resonates with a point Dr. Davidson made in the podcast. He mentioned someone who wanted to research gazelles in antiquity. This person eventually became interested in contemporary animal rights movements and wanted to bring that into their work, but the individual’s dissertation committee advised against it. (Most likely because the committee didn’t know how to direct it in that way). The point is that the questions in which the dissertation committee members are interested are not the same questions that those with future careers will need be to ready to answer, in order to thrive. The other way I (and some of my departmental colleagues) have been thinking about this question is in our upper-level courses. I’ll be honest, I’m attached to mine. I have a 300-level course on “Medieval Women Mystics” that I love because I get to introduce students to my favorite area of research and expertise. I’m beginning to understand, however, that it’s probably time to contemporize this course as well. It’s time to reframe this course around important questions of our time. Stay tuned.

To listen to this blog, click here.  Those of us serving on faculties cannot escape the deep influence of the culture of the school upon our scholarship. Where you teach has as much to do with your scholarly formation as what you teach. The location of the doing of your scholarship will allow or deny your sense of belonging, rootedness, and contribution.  For this reason, we must develop a curiosity for our context and an imagination for elsewhere. Ask yourself: What is this place to me? What has this place been for those like me? Is there a healthier place for me and my work? In the early years of my career, participation in Wabash Center afforded me conversations on scholarly identity and formation for which my place of employment did not know how to provide. The lack of mentoring I received from my school was in no way unique. They were not neglectful. I have come to understand that few schools in higher education provide in-depth, intentional faculty formation. Wabash Center programming, then and now, fills a gap for networking and provides opportunities for critical reflection and planning. We provide exposure for faculty to the varieties of pedagogical approaches and dialogue for ways of achieving those approaches. These conversations are often life-giving and career-saving. Routinely, Wabash Center provides a space to prepare you for knowing your place. Faculty are taught the importance of learning to read the context in which they are employed. We dissuade colleagues from thinking that the performance of, and achievements in, scholarship can be thought of as being generic or universal. No two schools are the same. All schools have known procedures as well as unspoken expectations, whispered secrets, and under-tapped resources. I remember it clearly. It was an assignment that substantially impacted my career. The assignment given our cohort group in my first Wabash Center workshop was to: compile all the institutional documents to which you are privy (e.g. faculty handout, tenure process and procedure instructions, promotion process, school mission statement, organizational chart, statement of charter, history, accreditation report(s), etc.), read all the compiled documents and take notes as you read, consider your given context, and now create a map/plan of your (1) teaching, (2) service, and (3) scholarship for 1 year, 3 years, 5 years, 7 years. We were instructed to return to next summer’s gathering with a thoughtful plan for our own scholarship in our own contexts. I tell you confessionally, but not ashamedly, that if I had not been given this assignment at Wabash, I would not have made an intentional study of my location, nor would I have created a clear path for my scholarship. Fulfilling this assignment gave me insights that I did not know I needed.  When I compiled and read the university materials, I gained knowledge of the place that I had not previously known and that had not been made clear to me.  Creating my map lowered my anxiety about the tenure process. The exercise made me more articulate about who I was as a scholar, and what I wanted for myself in my scholarly pursuits. My aspirations became vivid. It was a kind of liberation. And so, more than twenty years later, I am instructing our Associate Directors to develop a map, a plan, a schedule that reflects and actualizes their aspirations and hopes for their own scholarship. They cannot, must not, wait for me to shape them into my image. Their scholarly identity must be in their own hands and hearts.  They will have to decide if rooting their work in the place of Wabash Center satisfies the need of their soul. Here are nine reflection questions I offered to them:   What does it mean to understand your work as scholarship? What, for you, is the production of new knowledge? What does it mean to see yourself as a scholar of religion? How does your family make sense of your profession? How does your community make sense of this profession? What do you imagine to be the advantages and disadvantages of your career for your loved ones? How will you keep connected to your family as you do this work? Thinking in metaphors or similes, what scholarly identity are you imagining and pursuing? Since scholarship is typically organized and judged in activities of teaching, service, and research/publication – how will you pursue each of these elements? Be specific. Are there other scholarly pursuits beyond these three elements that are of interest? What expressions of scholarship, or discrete projects, do you want to pursue in the next 2 years, 5 years, 10 years? How do these projects fit into the institutional narrative and mission? What are the obstacles to these pursuits? Who are your scholarly conversation partners? Who are your mentors? What is your scholarly niche, specialty, focus, expertise, and how does this specialty align with your institutional context? What will it take for your flourishing? What are the prerequisites for your healing? What are the needed habits and practices to support your scholarly aspirations and plans? How do you nurture your imagination, creativity, and artistry? Be mindful that a plan is meant to guide and not to constrain. Plans will change as new opportunities are recognized and as your context ebbs and flows. Be mindful that the place that prefers scholars who are indifferent or passive about their own formation will likely react to your exercise of agency and self-determination. Be mindful that few can call the academy home – so most are strangers in this strange land. Healthy formation in academic places requires forethought, provisions, anticipation, and time. We must have our own best interests at heart lest we be tossed and entangled by others’ agendas for our ideas, our labors, our souls.