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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).

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.

I am not a scholar of Religion or Theology. However, my work as a creative writer and professor of Creative Nonfiction often involves identifying everyday divinities; finding the sacred in small things, the flawed, and the profane. Many of the readers/contributors to this blog might recognize my name as a kind of curator for this space. I serve the Wabash Center as an Educational Design Manager, a job that has brought me great opportunity to learn, share and reflect approaches to teaching and the teaching life. When I became aware that one of our blog publishing dates would fall on Juneteenth, I wanted to take the opportunity to write about it and perhaps encourage others to learn and teach more about the subject…Juneteenth: What is it?June 19, 1865: Gordon Granger of the Union army arrived in Galveston, Texas, to inform enslaved African Americans of their freedom and that the Civil War had ended. General Granger’s announcement put into effect the Emancipation Proclamation, which had been issued nearly two and a half years earlier, on January 1, 1863, by President Abraham Lincoln.Juneteenth is an annual commemoration of this event and the end of slavery in the United States after the Civil War. It has been celebrated by African Americans since the late 1800s. It is the longest running Black holiday. Also known as Freedom Day, Jubilee Day and Cel-Liberation Day.The day was first recognized as a federal holiday in 2021, when President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law after the efforts of Lula Briggs Galloway, Opal Lee, and others.I grew up knowing nothing about Juneteenth. This history was not taught to me in my public schools. I first became aware of the day and its significance in college, thanks to my first African American literature professor, and the book by Ralph Ellison. When I  heard the story, I was angry. Understandably, I think. The idea that slavery in the United States continued quite a while after the Emancipation Proclamation was deeply frustrating. But I was also upset with the fact that this event seemed whitewashed from my education. Why wasn’t this major moment in African American history discussed every Black History Month? Why wasn’t this made a part of the curriculum I was given?Another part of me was unsurprised. As a Black person in America, I am familiar with the ways my homeland can defer its promises of equality, and how inconvenient histories can be overlooked in order to affirm narratives of American exceptionalism. The story of Juneteenth complicates our understanding of the Civil War, Lincoln’s legacy, and the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.I wouldn’t encounter Annette Gordon-Reed’s Juneteenth until I was a teacher myself, assigning it to myself and my graduate students to read together. Together, along with other supplementary texts, we’d learn more details about the factors which led chattel slavery to continue in America years after it was said to have ended…States with little or no Union Soldier presence refused/ignored the order to free enslaved people.Border states, including Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri, and of course Texas, ignored emancipation.Slave owners threatened to kill slaves if they tried to leave. Some slavers moved to Texas to keep people enslaved. Galveston, Texas was the last stronghold.The Emancipation Proclamation didn’t apply to Indian tribes. The five “Civilized Tribes” (Cherokee, Choctaw, Muscogee, Chickasaw, Seminole) owned Black, Mixed and Indigenous slaves. Chattel slavery among these tribes was not officially ended until 1866.These factors demanded considerable time and effort to navigate and prompted questions that were uncomfortable for the learners and for me as well. But I believe more was gained by engaging with Juneteenth in the classroom—a greater understanding of ourselves in relation to our citizenship, our communities of belonging, and one another.I wish I had the opportunity to have learned about the event sooner in my life and more often throughout my matriculation through academia. Even if it would have been awkward at times. I wish to have been able to observe this commemoration of freedom earlier, and the chances I might have had to unpack its significance with teachers and fellow students.There is no real discussion about freedom in America that does not invoke the lived experience of Black people. As the poet Terrence Hayes suggests, Black people share a historical and constant relationship to freedom. To take this further with a question: in lessons about the liberation found through God’s grace—the freedom from fear discovered in faith and divine will—why wouldn’t we center the lived experiences of a systemically subjugated population? Why not ask students to engage with a moment that signifies a turn toward a more moral universe? I would like to make a case for making Juneteenth a point of discussion in classrooms across all fields of study, but especially in theological and religious education with its potential to position scholars who lead communities and shape public thought. There is so much to be gained in the teaching of Juneteenth.Here is a resource, a Juneteenth Reading List cultivated by the Smithsonian’s National African American History Museum: CLICK HERE. As we consider how we might craft lessons around this holiday, making sure to read as much as we can on the subject feels imperative.If there are readers who have had success teaching Juneteenth and would like to share a reflection on their experience, reach out at quistd@wabash.edu.

The WizIt is the malleability of the Oz story to reflect different social, historical, and cultural contexts while utilizing recognizable symbols – special magical shoes, the Yellow Brick Road – which makes it such a powerful myth of America. Early in the twentieth century, within a few years of the publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, stage productions had already begun. The 1939 MGM film in which the title was shortened to The Wizard of Oz proved to be iconic in its portrayal of the story of Dorothy and her friends’ journey through the magical land of Oz and their journey of self-discovery. Oz started out as a literary narrative but is retold as a musical film. The Hollywood film musical was well established as a featured genre in which songs, their lyrics, and dance sequences were part and parcel of the narrative. The film musical, in turn, drew on the tradition of musical theatre. Musical theatre’s earlier predecessors included vaudeville, and prior to that, the minstrel show, the earliest popular stage entertainment in the United States.Minstrel shows emerged in the nineteenth century as performances of imagined blackness based on racial stereotypes. Minstrel shows featured white performers in blackface (makeup, wigs, and costuming). Minstrel shows proved to be so popular that there were minstrel shows featuring black performers who donned costume and makeup on stage to perform caricatures. While minstrelsy was supplanted by the movies as the most popular form of mass entertainment, it still lingered well into the twentieth century in stage shows and in film. Reflecting segregationist policies of the era, not many people of African descent who identified as black were cast in mainstream musical theatrical productions. Coupled with this practice, there were all-black musicals on Broadway. In Dahomey was the first such musical, staged in 1903. Others followed in subsequent decades leading up to the staging of the 1964 all-black cast of Hello Dolly! featuring Pearl Bailey in the title role.The introduction of The Wiz in the mid-1970s featuring an all-black cast should not be separated from its contemporary sociocultural or historical context. This staging drew on Baum’s original storyline, as well as on the 1939 MGM musical, but the story was transplanted from turn-of-the-century Kansas to contemporary urban, black America. The full title was The Wiz: The Super Soul Musical of “The Wizard of Oz.” This title was a statement about the musical’s positioning in relation to the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz which itself was positioned in relation to Baum’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. And so, as an audience, we are presented with a version of a version of a version in the fashioning of an authentic representation. The direction and creative costume design by Geoffrey Holder is in itself worthy of exploration, as I will discuss below.Occurring only a decade after the tumult of the 1960s, The Wiz reflected 1970s black American musical genres incorporating soul and gospel-tinged R n’ B in its lyrical content. Its storyline featuring a young Stephanie Mills as Dorothy provided a powerful message of belonging, self -awareness, and affirmation of black identities through embodied performances. With costumes by Trinidadian-born dancer, choreographer, actor, and artist, Geoffrey Holder, the musical was a triumph, winning seven Tony’s (considered the pinnacle of awards for Broadway musical theatre) in 1975. These included Best Musical and two for Holder as director and choreographer.

The Mythos of Oz This year, 2024, marks two milestones of Oz, an American mythos based on L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In the first instance, it is the eighty-fifth anniversary of the MGM movie musical The Wizard of Oz (1939), and in the second, the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of the musical theatre production, The Wiz. Beginning in 1974, The Wiz toured in selected cities in the US before its groundbreaking promotional television advertisement and premiere on Broadway in 1975. It went on to commercial and critical success winning multiple awards. Significantly, a reboot of The Wiz began touring in the fall of 2023, originating at the Hippodrome Theatre in Baltimore, where its life as a stage show began in 1974. It will return this spring, 2024, on Broadway. Such is the power and endurance of the mythos of Oz that 124 years after Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion set off to “follow the yellow brick road” in search of the Wizard of Oz, audiences are willing to “ease on the down the road,” in a reboot of The Wiz. I was first introduced to Oz as a recently arrived immigrant child from the Caribbean in the 1970s. Classmates in my elementary school in Toronto told me, and other newly immigrated children, that The Wizard of Oz would be televised. Before the advent of cable television, streaming services, and the Internet, the viewing of the 1939 MGM musical starring Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale was regarded as a yearly ritual amongst my childhood friend group. Reading L. Frank Baum’s books followed after viewing the 1939 film. This was my first introduction to the world of Oz, and the story of Dorothy’s mythic journey, as something other than casual viewing for entertainment. Unbeknownst to me and my playground friends, the viewing on television and its discussion and reenactment at recess the next day was part and parcel of a ritual of retelling and performance in which the story became our own. We were thrilled when The Wizard of Oz was chosen as our school’s musical play in the mid-1970s. Cast as Dorothy, sixth-grade me saw more than a glimmer of my own story of uprootedness, as a recent immigrant from the Caribbean to Toronto, in Dorothy’s plight as a stranger in a strange land trying to find her way home. The messages of empowerment, good overcoming evil, strength in the company of friends who are with you on a long and challenging journey, and help from wise, good, and powerful beings like Glinda, were comforting. While we learned iconic songs from the 1939 movie like “Over the Rainbow,” and “Follow the Yellow Brick Road,” we also heard references to Oz in the rock group Toto’s “Tinman,” and Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” Significant, too, was the popularity of an adaptation of the myth of Oz in the Broadway musical, The Wiz, and its film adaptation in 1978. These were among the first broader popular cultural references to the myth of Oz. Decades later, in January 2000, I introduced an undergraduate course, “Religion and Popular Culture,” at Wilfrid Laurier University. In designing the course, I returned to my earlier fascination with the mythos of Oz. This time, through the lenses of religious studies and cultural studies, I viewed Oz as mythos – recognizable in its symbols and storylines yet malleable enough to be reinterpreted from multiple vantage points. In teaching that course, I was able to focus on broader themes of mythmaking and American civil religion through exploring Oz as a kind of urtext of American popular culture, visible in multiple movie and theatrical productions since its initial introduction as a novel by L. Frank Baum. Oz was both a mythical landscape of terror, wonder, and possibilities as expressed in numerous theatrical and film productions and popular songs, and a secular sacred text of the United States. Its endurance is enabled by the malleability of meaning attributed to its symbols. L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was the first in a series of books. The children’s book, featuring its story of young Dorothy Gale living with her aunt and uncle on a Kansas farm who gets whisked away by a cyclone to the magical land of Oz, has become a touchstone of American fantasy literature. There are nods to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. These books feature young girls who are whisked away to other landscapes beyond the mundane and everydayness of their daily lives. They must endure trials during their journeys and eventually return wiser and stronger in some way. Oz is revealed to be a carnivalesque huckster hiding behind gimmickry. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” says Oz, as Toto, Dorothy’s animal companion, pulls the curtain to reveal his fraud. Baum’s narrative uses fairytale elements evident in the British late-nineteenth-century children’s literature genre but places them in a specifically American landscape – the Midwest and the state of Kansas. The element which pulls Dorothy to another world is drawn from the midwestern landscape itself – a cyclone which whisks her up and out of the farm and Kansas. From there, Dorothy’s adventures begin with her landing on and killing the Wicked Witch of the East and acquiring the magical shoes coveted by the witch’s sister, the Wicked Witch of the West (they are silver in the book but red in the film). She confronts her adversary, the witch’s sister, and begins her journey. Dorothy does not realize that she has had the power to return home all along because of the magical properties of the shoes. Her companions – the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion – who accompany her to meet the purportedly all-powerful Wizard of Oz also have desires which they hope that Oz can fulfill. The friends eventually discover that what they desired was within them all along. It is that quality of self-discovery and empowerment from within which, arguably, is the source of the power of the myth of Oz. This emphasis on empowerment from within resonates with notions of self-mastery and/as self-discovery which are key elements of the American Dream when articulated as the perfectibility of the individual self in the best of all possible worlds.

One of the great paradoxes of my life at the moment is that I am writing a textbook (on religion and disability) while slowly moving away from using textbooks in my own courses, from lower-level intro classes to upper-level electives. Textbooks have been hard to wean myself from. They are so helpful, so convenient, so… soothing. I feel comforted knowing they have been authored and edited by people who I always assume are way more expert than me. (Hello, imposter syndrome!) I feel like I can assume some standard of quality, accuracy, and coherence. It certainly takes me way less time to decide which one textbook to require than it does to search for and sift through dozens of case studies or examples drawn from books, scholarly journals, news outlets, personal blogs, YouTube videos, Netflix movies or shows, social media, university webpages, local religious sites, podcasts, Google images, Spotify playlists, guest speakers, and more. I find it so easy and efficient to lay out my course schedule with different textbook chapters corresponding to different units, weeks, or days. The tests fall, similarly, smoothly into place. (Sometimes the textbooks even provide tests for us, so we don’t have to create them ourselves!) Likewise, the students just have to keep track of one thing. So why am I starting to move away from them? Well, for one, they can be extremely expensive. Search around online and you come across the word “scam” pretty quickly in discussions, articles, and sites devoted to textbooks. My university now even has a place in the students’ registration system where classes that have low-cost or no textbooks are clearly indicated. Of course, some things are worth a high sticker price—for example, the Trek mountain bike I’ve used exactly twice, obviously—but if we’re wanting higher education to be available to everyone, cost must be a consideration. As inclusive as this rationale is, however, I have to admit it isn’t my main motivation. Rather, I fear textbooks give students the erroneous impression that all there is to know about a particular religion (or any other subject) can be found in those thirty or so pages of each written chapter. After all, it’s supposed to be an introduction! As if the material is complete, comprehensive, and closed. Yet some textbooks spend too much time on one religion (Christianity, usually), while neglecting others. I like Religion Matters a lot, for example, but the current version doesn’t contain anything on African religions—an omission I’ve heard its author, Stephen Prothero, is rectifying in the next edition. Or, some textbooks, in an attempt to fulfill their presumed charge of trying to capture an entire religion in the limited space allotted, end up making sweeping generalizations, like “all Muslims must…,” which contradicts exactly what I’m trying to teach students about the diversity of all religious traditions. Of course, I can—and do—point out the problematic nature of such assertions to my students, but still…. Textbooks are also written works, though they may be supplemented with beautiful visuals and online materials. Yet, as Jin Young Kim writes in “Embodying World Religions in the Classroom,” religion is a lived sensory experience. David Morgan’s publishing career has been basically one big reminder of the material nature of religion (through books, of course!). Some religions like Hinduism, textbooks will even claim, are more about practice and experience than any specific set of beliefs, dogmas, or creeds. But, of course, Muslims move when they pray. Meditation involves the body, the breath. Challah is eaten. The Vatican is a place people go. What impression do we leave with students, then, if our predominant material for class is the written word? This bias can be especially distorting when dealing with traditions that are primarily oral. I was able to find a written source for Little Dawn Boy, a Navajo story about disability, but the one-page PDF was not nearly as captivating, or illuminating, as watching and listening to Navajo member Hoskie Benally, Jr., tell the same story. Guess which one I assigned to my students this term? Students also get the unfortunate idea from textbooks that there is only one position—the author’s/authors’—to hold about whatever topic is being addressed. The textbook was written by experts, after all, professors with PhDs. Who could argue with them? Textbook authors sometimes try to stave off this problem by including phrases like “scholars disagree” or “some scholars believe,” but in the absence of multiple sources or examples, I have watched such nuances go right over students’ heads. Sometimes I find myself assigning excerpts from different textbooks, just to show students discrepancy and debate, to clarify that even experts disagree, and to convey how a field can evolve in its understanding of a subject. I also fear that textbook use is out of alignment with my general approach to teaching, which is less lecturey and more interactive. Using a textbook seems like it supports an older “sage on stage” model, where we, the masters of a subject, convey our vast wisdom (in books and from behind lecterns) to the passive recipients in our courses, our naive and novice students. Read Chapter 1, pages 3-19. Take notes on what the professionals think. Study the key terms in the glossary (further condensed into one paragraph for ease!). Listen to the lecture. Download the PPTs. Take the test. You’re all set. Of course, textbooks usually have study questions at the end, and of course, professors can enliven or shift this process to become more dialogic in their classrooms, building off of or troubling what the textbook presents. But, in general, the way most textbooks are written still feels a bit too one-directional to me. This brings me to my final point, which is that a lot of textbooks are booooooring. For as much as they try to be exciting, with their images and interviews and bolded terms and online supplements, they sometimes just aren’t. Students struggle to get through the assigned material, the overviews of millennia’s worth of global history can be overwhelming and convoluted, there are a lot of specifics to sort through, and the relevance and applicability is not always clear. Now, I’m not saying learning always is, or always has to be, exciting. Sometimes you just have to put in the time, grind it out, do it for the extrinsic motivation. And I’m certainly not a proponent of the edutainment/edutainer idea. But I do think learning has the potential to be interesting, provocative, thrilling, even. After all, how many of us got into the field because we found it…dull? Many of these issues are what I’m trying to remedy in my own textbook, filling it with more questions and prompts than with answers and assertions, crafting prose that sounds more like casual conversation with a co-learner than a data dump from a master, including invitations and encouragements to seek out media and experiences elsewhere, presenting disagreements and differences of perspective. Until more textbooks approach their subjects in this way, I’m afraid I am going to have to let them go.

The best thing anyone ever told me in graduate school rings as clear and true today as it did then. It was during the first year of my doctoral work after one of my classes that my instructor pulled me aside and said matter-of-factly, “Mark, you’ve got a chip on your shoulder, and you need to do something about it.” We had finished one of her class sessions when I followed her out of the classroom and wanted to ask some follow-up questions from our discussion. I could tell she was frustrated with me from the tone of her voice and the directness of the message. I paused. My lips began to quiver and my eyes started to well with tears, and yet I will be forever grateful for the truthfulness of those words, for their bite, and their ability to catalyze a sorely-needed recalibration in my life. Up to that point, I was a student who had learned to verbalize my thoughts aloud by asking questions and offering many comments. I was curious and it helped me work through my questions. It also made me look and feel smart, or so I believed. Looking back on those days, my academic insecurities resulted in a lot of unnecessary verbal processing and quite frankly, some badgering. The formation of an academic scholar cuts both ways. On the one hand, I learned in different graduate schools to look at reality and theory from multiple angles. Interpretations and understandings are usually more complex than any single reasoning and a thorough search of these multiplicities is not only scholarly, but integrous. It takes careful tending for an academic to hone their craft well in areas of curiosity, observation, research, and reasoning. And this refining results in one of the best parts of academic formation, which is to see and name complexity. On the other hand, untended graduate academic formation has the potential to harm. The very skills that afford us the capacity to rigorously research a matter can ironically produce in us a rigidity that locks us into our arguments and reasoning. We may cease to consider an alternative explanation, or worse, adopt inflexible forms of argumentation and reasoning for the sake of being clearly the only right one. Having clarity and conviction while holding complexity isn’t an issue; neither is the practice of logic and debate. Rather, an underlying and often unnoticed dynamic of needing to be right, or to be the smartest one, or the recognizable one, is what is troubling about this kind of formation in an academic. This is why tending to our formation while in graduate school and beyond is so important for those in the academy. In graduate school we are introduced to, and then eventually hold on our own, many powerful tools and capacities that can help to heal, transform, and harm. What my instructor did for me that day was to awaken me to things I could not see about myself and how I held myself in graduate school and our learning community. My hunch is that she knew she could do this because she was not only my advisor, but also a mentor. My hunch is that in some way, she knew she had to take this step for other community colleagues and for my future. Her truthfulness cut right through any theory or concept and hit home because it came out of a good, and frustrated, place where I could receive this difficult word well and sit with it for days. In some ways, I should not have been surprised by this encounter because my academic trajectory had reached a point where being the one who asked (unnecessary) questions and offered tiresome rebuttals was sadly powerful. I needed this demonstration of love and care though I did not know I needed it until it actually happened. My personality is such that I will always have an edgy, passionate, and direct side to who I am as both a professional and an academic. However, because someone in graduate school took the time to tell me something I really needed to hear, I find that I can hold these parts of who I am more reasonably now. I am working on not always having to respond to statements I do not agree with and finding other ways to contribute to the process than with unnecessary words, and I am (and I think others around me are) the better for it. So, what is the best thing anyone ever told you in graduate school?

This blogpost is a conversation between Kimberly Diaz, University of California Riverside, Michael DeAnda, DePaul University, and Neomi DeAnda, University of Dayton. KIM: Neomi, how did the Loteria session at the AAR come to be? NEOMI: This year marked the twentieth anniversary of the first time I attended the American Academy of Religion (AAR). Having a background in education and strongly believing that humans learn differently, I always questioned the ninety-minute and two-and-a-half-hour session format of presented papers for all sessions. Five days of these sessions bookended with breakfast meetings and receptions has always felt exhausting to me. Over the years, the suggestion of doing something different has arisen. While I have participated in other types of sessions like roundtable discussions and generative sessions, I wondered how I could entertain comments about doing something radically different at multiple sections’ business meetings. Last December, I found the game Millennial Loteria: Gen Z Edition at a big box merchant in Chicago, Illinois and Dayton, Ohio. I initially bought the game to incorporate into my Latina/Latino Religious Experience undergraduate course at the University of Dayton. This game provided an in-class common experience from which to build the semester. The course participants enjoyed, appreciated, and questioned the game. That same day, I posted a picture of the game on social media, igniting a quick discussion about the game itself. I was overjoyed to see such a response about something both so close and so new to my Tejana experience. The topic of immigration often takes center stage when the AAR and Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) meet in San Antonio. I am often frustrated about the lack of thought given to the plurality of possible topics which could thrive while meeting at this particular geographical location. Horacio Vela, session panelist, astutely remarked, “Loteria helps us appreciate the historical and evolving nature of Mexican-American cultures, identities, and religions. It also opens our eyes to the ways that Latina/o/x communities have handed down and scripturalized stereotypes about race, ethnicity, and gender.” The conversation on social media presented one such opportunity. From there, the idea was born to play the game at a session of the AAR. MICHAEL: How did you envision the format of playing Loteria in a conference session and what did you do to prepare? NEOMI: Carmen Nanko-Fernandez connected me with the co-chairs of the Religion, Sport and Play Unit, Kimberly Diaz and Jeffery Scholes. They were very amenable to helping me work through a proposal to submit to their call. The Experiential Session Playing Millennial Gen Z Loteria which was held Sunday, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM in the San Antonio Convention Center-Room 225C (Meeting Room Level) came from that accepted proposal. The proposal recommended the following format for the session: play the game panelists respond group discussion. The day for the session arrived. I had conjured prizes from various tables in the AAR/SBL book exhibit and from a Wabash Center luncheon the day before. Keri Liechty from the Louisville Institute brought swag from their office. MICHAEL: Very cool. That’s a nod to kermeses, a site where Loteria is often played and the prizes are often donated tchotchkes and trinkets fished out of storage. Your approach is totally emulating the found-and-sourced prizes spirit. Tell me how the session went? NEOMI: The tone in the room was different from the beginning as game boards and emoji tokens (instead of frijoles) were handed out to session participants. I set the rules. Structured play. The play during the session would end when the last of the prizes was collected. After two rounds, it seemed the third round could be the last. The participants changed the rules when play was going to end sooner than they wished. During the session, the energy in the room dampened between playing the game and the initial responses. So the session followed a modified format: play the game initial responses from three panelists play the game group discussion. The emoji tokens were later labeled chingaderitas by panelist Gilberto Cavazos-Gonzalez. Session participants remarked about the relaxation they felt from play during an AAR session. I noticed the session attendants, most of whom did not know each other upon entering the space, quickly formed a community to continue play. NEOMI: Any reflections on theory, Michael? MICHAEL: It’s interesting to see how incorporating the game into this session really invited the play spirit for the entirety of the session and appropriated the space. It’s like you went total kermes at the AAR! This is what I love about games: They can be tools to restructure and rethink what’s possible. In your case, Loteria provided enough of a ludic structure to bring energy into the room, invite people to socialize, and allow people to unmask. I want to note that it was smart to pivot at the request of players, granting them agency in this. Furthermore, for critical game play, multiple rounds of playing a game are important. The first playthrough we are often consumed by the game, so this was a great way to familiarize people with the game. The initial responses then primed participants to approach gameplay with the criticality to then contribute to the group discussion. Games are ludic structures with potential to reimagine how we make meaning. It’s the meaning that we create in and through games that make them so potent. Think about a game like Ticket To Ride, for example. The literal actions sound quite lackluster (drawing cards, placing blocks on a board). However, the hermeneutics give meaning to these mundane tasks: laying blocks emulates building railroad tracks. Games of chance are good for providing just enough of a ludic structure while still allowing for socializing, but not too much that it’s all people focus on. So, folks can chat, and if they reach a lull in the conversation, they can lean on playing the game during the shift in their conversation. It’s also worth mentioning that play extended beyond the game Loteria in the session. This included participants playing with the format of the session, players influencing the restructuring of the session, and playing with language deployed at a conference (yes, the swearing). As we play, we perform and we also confront truths about ourselves. Horacio commented, “Playing and talking about loteria in the AAR session brought back memories of growing up in south Texas. It was also a welcome and refreshing alternative to the typical AAR/SBL panel, with just as much, if not more, scholarly discourse and analysis.” Horacio continued, “Newer versions of loteria challenge us to discuss, critique, and reshape our communities and cultures, which have always been characterized by diverse experiences and interpretations.” NEOMI: Kim, please tell us about your experience immediately following the session as well as your thoughts since. KIM: The experiential session of playing Millennial Gen Z Loteria was immediately followed by the business meeting for the Religion, Sport, and Play Unit. In between the sessions, I rushed to my unit co-chair, Jeffrey Scholes, eager to exchange thoughts about having just played Loteria at the AAR. Instantaneously, we agreed that this experiential session encouraged us to take a more practical approach to the third integral aspect of the unit: play. As far as we both knew, the Religion, Sport, and Play Unit had always approached play in terms of discourse, especially in the context of organized athletics, but never with the actual practice of play during a session. At the beginning of the business meeting, our first order of business was to confirm the ongoing use of experiential sessions of play at future AAR annual meetings. The way in which the experiential session of Loteria radically transformed the trajectory of the Religion, Sport, and Play unit demonstrates how actual play within the conference setting can help ground the decolonization of academia. As Neomi observed, Loteria participants quickly transformed from serious individual conference attendees into a group of light-hearted players who cared more about playing together than claiming the prizes and ending the game. Recalling my own experience, I vividly remember being hunched over, placing tokens on my Loteria card as Neomi called out Millennial Gen Z phrases from a stack of shuffled cards. My body positioned itself as it needed to, helping optimize my gameplay rather than unconsciously following Western constructs of professional bodily posture (such as sitting up straight with my legs crossed). Overall, this experiential session of play fostered a communal space where participants transcended the optics of Western professionalism and became immersed in the carefree spirit of play. Playing Loteria at the AAR was not merely a form of escapism, but, like every decolonial praxis, existed in the liminal plane between colonial hegemony and resistance. Throughout history many decolonial efforts have been led by women of color and Neomi leading the experiential session contributes to this history. But decolonial efforts should not be the sole responsibility of those on the margins, such as women of color in a heavily white/male dominated field. NEOMI: Great point connecting back to this year’s AAR theme of “La Labor de Nuestras Manos”! KIM: Yes. Why should we, as women of color, be the ones to bear this responsibility, especially in a way that caters to the comfortability of those beyond ourselves? What about exploring other generative effects, like discomfort and unfamiliarity, initiated by the more privileged rather than the labor of the oppressed? To continuously move toward resistance, particularly in the context of experiential sessions, religious studies scholars must actively challenge the pretense that their scholarly work inherently makes the world a better place, and become intentional about practically contributing to decolonization, especially as it transcends the comfortability of their own individualism. In the words of black lesbian poet Audre Lorde, “Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.” NEOMI: Fascinating! I did not see it as a decolonial praxis but as living in my own Tejana space. I honestly saw the session as something that comes from being Mexican-American, Chicana, Tejana. I loved being able to bring cookies as prizes to share, cookies which our parents had made during Michael and my father’s occupational therapy, as he learns to live life after stroke. The convention center was no wiser that I did not ask permission or order the cookies from their vendor. As Gilberto Cavazos-Gonzalez, session panelist, noted, “I was happy to be a part of this Loteria session. Although I did not recognize the Loteria images (I missed my Chalupa) it was still a trip down memory lane and the importance of play in family life and spirituality. It also helped me make the connection to the importance of cultural connections for Mexican Americans living in a sometimes hostile and racist U.S.A. environment.” There is something about play which allows for simultaneous space (re)creation, mockery, and truth-telling. MICHAEL: Play is like alchemy: it has deep transformative potential. Kim’s reflection on decolonizing underscores this, especially when she draws attention to exploring generative effects, as does Neomi’s approach to developing the session to reflect and live in Tejana space. Games afford ludic structures for play to happen.

Recently I led a workshop at a church. I was asked by the pastor to address the topic, “What is Biblical Literacy?” Of particular note, congregational leaders wanted to know how to get millennials and Gen Z back to church. With the apparent drop, no, plummet in said groups’ attendance, this particular body was seeking any handles, tips, or miracles to reach persons in these age brackets. According to some attending the event if church members could become more biblically literate, they could help twenty- to forty-year-olds see how relevant the Bible is here and now. Of course the aforementioned congregation is not alone. Any number of churches, temples, mosques, and religious institutions are struggling to get persons born circa the 90s in seats. This is not to paint a broad stroke as there are indeed exceptions to the rule. However, documentaries on God, Faith, and Millennials continue to highlight said challenges. It is clear that millennials, many of whom are current seminary or divinity school students or graduates, are pushing the religious envelope. They long for environments where attention to social justice, sexuality and gender, personal story, and spirituality shape conversation and praxis. During my workshop the dialogue around biblical literacy led to exchanges between various religions, honoring their sacred texts. In this Christian context, the question of whether this specific church was “promoting a different path beyond Jesus as savior” arose. Boom! At this point I shared with attendees what I often note in the classroom. It is important to treat what happens in academic settings with intellectual hospitality. This is never to aver that contexts outside of the hallowed halls of academia are not intellectual. They are indeed!   What I was purporting to those astute members during the seminar is that as professors we must be mindful that not everything we teach should be shared in other contexts. Not all readings, ideas, and theories are applicable to the work of faith-forming religious institutions outside of graduate theological institutions. Some matters need to stay in the classroom while others are apropos for the Sunday School or for the training ground for one’s religious beliefs or spiritual development. I dared not answer that one question posed to me because it was not my place. That was the work of the pastor. I am an ordained preacher. Intellectual hospitality calls me to know my scholarly assignment as a professor, adhere to the directives given for any invitation, and sojourn with leaders of religious institutions seeking to ensure the survival of their congregations and communities.