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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).

“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.

“I see you!” is a trending colloquialism. It is prevalent on social media and tv commercials. Think Google Pixel commercials featuring Druski, Jason Tatum, Giannis, and other NBA and WNBA stars. “ I see you” says you are doing the do, handling your business. “I see you” is different from pejorative side-eyeing, nosy eyeballing, or shade. “I see you” is an optical-verbal pat on the back. I see your skills, your talent, and your moves. I see your humanity. I wonder, however, how do we see ourselves? Do we look in the mirror and offer the same affirmation? Or is our own internal self-talk lacking what we give to others? We will give a compliment while refusing to receive one. For some of us, there will always be something about ourselves we believe we can’t applaud. We have achieved, arrived, and accomplished, yet we are constantly looking over our shoulders waiting for “them” to “find us out.” Without question we have the title, desk, company computer, and business expense account. However, not a day goes by when you or I don’t hold our breath waiting for the ball to drop or the stuff to hit the fan. I see you. The ultimate question is how do we in the academy see ourselves?   Coined by Drs. Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in the 1970s, imposter syndrome is described as an “internal experience of intellectual phoniness in people who believe that they are not intelligent, capable, or creative despite high achievement.” It is the constant scrutiny, self-critique, position of doubt, posture of “I don’t belong,” and rewinding of being unsure and uncertain. Imposter syndrome evinces wherever a person feels they are not qualified notwithstanding credentials that testify otherwise. Yes, there was a lack of cultural competency and attention to race, class, and gender in the initial studies. However, since then many psychologists and researchers of African American, Asian, Latinx, and LGBTQ life and background have noted that imposterism can be found across existential realities. There are many series of external and systemic factors that contribute to the sense of fraud and “fake person” experience: work drama, email mayhem, blind copy bullying, a low grade in college when you were valedictorian in high school, coercion to turn on the Zoom camera, or a slight off-color comment. These are some of microaggressions that lead to macro-agitation, and maybe to macro-medication. Imposter syndrome is especially evident when discussing first-generation college students, women of color, people who are the first or only in a position, transgender siblings, and anyone who must thrive in contexts that are predominately white, cisgender, and male. A part of our duty as professors is to attend guild meetings. Such convening can be quite daunting for students who travel to present a paper for the first time or meet a “scholarly superstar” in person. Yet, I wonder how do we, as faculty, teach and sojourn with each other despite our own experiences of imposter syndrome? Our courses ought to help students see that their feelings of not being “good enough” do not rest solely on their shoulders. Classroom work should promote a pedagogy of decolonization which shuns imposter posturing and calls oppressive systems out for what they are. The greatest harm of imposter syndrome is how it causes professors and students to suffer, and this leads society to suffer as well. Our giftedness does not illuminate a dark, dank world when we doubt ourselves and dare not show up fully. “I see you,” says I see you—all of you.

I think we all have met them at one point in our educational lives. I call them “A” teachers because they hold certain qualities as educators. I saw it in Mrs. Akiyama, my second-grade teacher who, by some stroke of good fortune, I had as my third-grade teacher too. You could tell there was something different about her in the way she conducted class. Sure, I wouldn’t have articulated it then as I do now some fifty-eleven years later, but I sensed, even at that young age, a deep difference in how she held herself, formed her craft, and cared for her students. She exemplified the qualities I call the four “A’s” and I am convinced of their transferability and value for any field. Available: Do you make yourself available? We often hear people say they have availability on “these days” of the week and “at these times.” They put it on their syllabi; they tell person X to get in touch with their administrative assistant to set up a time to meet. Their schedule, my schedule, says that I have time to see you in these specific moments. Given the increasing responsibilities faculty persons wear now, a schedule perhaps is more gift than curse. It can keep us sane or at least ordered enough to move along. Of course, our schedule can feel like a curse in that it reminds us of how little time in our schedule we actually have. Approachable: Can I approach you? Availability was the bare minimum of what I saw in Mrs. Akiyama. We may have an open schedule, but what vibe do we give our students that communicates that we’re approachable enough that they would want to schedule a time to meet? The academy is filled with introverts. I’m one of them. And introverts are sometimes the best at exuding an approachable vibe. Approachability is not about availability. It is about being truly comfortable enough with oneself, with others, and with the vocation of teaching that you  can build a deep level of trust with students who can tell that you are for, and not against, their growth and wellbeing. We can be approachable even if our availability is limited. Accessible: Can you access yourself? Repeat with me, “I’m not a therapist,” “I’m not a therapist,” (unless of course, you are a therapist). But for the sake of this blog, I’m going to assume that most of us in theological higher education, as smart and as well-read as we are, (even if we like to dabble in junior psychology,) are not licensed therapists. I am not asking whether a teacher can psychoanalyze a student’s inner life. Rather, I am asking whether you, the person of the teacher, can access your own self? Do you know your limitations, your boundaries, your triggers, your personality, your emotions, how to self-regulate? Notice I did not ask if you know your theories, your interlocutors, or your content. This is about knowing yourself and in doing so, maybe knowing a little more about how you show up with others and in your teaching. Parker Palmer offers teachers good reflection material to help us do this work (start with The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life). Therapy is also a great way to get a better sense of one’s emotional landscape. I find that teachers who can access their own lives more readily seem less defensive and better able to handle imperfection in themselves and in their students. I think others sense this in them even if they do not know the terminology. Attunable: Are you attuned to others’ lives? Attunement is the idea that one (e.g., a parent) is keenly aware of another’s (e.g., a child) needs. This awareness goes beyond an apparent presenting need (e.g., a baby crying for food) to include those needs that a person has not yet articulated for themselves. Emphasizing again that although teachers are not therapists, really good teachers have a sense that the person in front of them is a ball of complex realities and experiences. They are attuned to the learning need for any given student. Don’t mistake this attunement for having poor boundaries or not offering feedback on poor performance. Somehow, attunable teachers know that there are many more things worth exploring about a student than gauging the student’s interest in their class or subject matter. I imagine you have had these kinds of teachers sometime in your educational life and I hope we can fashion some of these aspects in our own lives as teachers.

In addition to the general tips on teaching mysticism presented in the previous blog posts (part 1 & part 2), I would like to share some in-class and writing assignments I have used when teaching ʻAṭṭār’s The Conference of the Birds. One of the most successful in-class activities I have developed is a discussion of the birds’ excuses. I created a slideshow of the various birds discussed, both in flight and at rest, and we begin by looking at these images. I then ask my students write informally on the following questions: Which bird’s objections would match your own most closely, and why? Why do you think ʻAṭṭār selected this specific bird to represent this issue? (Look back to the hoopoe’s original description [if applicable] and look at the slideshow for images of each bird). What is the hoopoe’s response? Does it make you think more deeply about your own objection, or would you still decide not to go? After writing their responses, we discuss as many birds as time allows. This assignment allows for deep reflection as it asks students to consider their relationship to the poem as well as the success (or lack thereof) of the metaphor of birds. Students are able to reflect on how to represent human characteristics in animals. It also prompts consideration of whether the hoopoe is persuasive or not, and which types of rhetoric invite change versus types which cause people to double down on bad habits. The discussion of the hoopoe (as an allegory for a Sufi master) also allows for a conversation about whether or not a spiritual guide can have nefarious objectives, the potential danger of trusting someone else as much as the poem urges one to do, and why handing over control of one’s life is appealing to some people. The in-class activity of reflection on specific birds and their concerns can be extended to a formal paper assignment. I have asked students to argue which bird needs to go on the journey the most – which prompts them to consider what flaw they believe to be the worst and which personality types would most need the mystical path. My colleague Nancy Kelly asks her students to write a paper on this simple prompt: What excuse is missing? I have used this discussion question and find that it encourages students to think about the issues ʻAṭṭār may not have been able to foresee (such as distractions of technology) or that he simply overlooked or chose not to include (such as childcare, as Nora Jacobsen Ben Hammed observed in a 2021 AAR panel). Because students have found the valleys to be confusing, I developed a group activity to help them understand this difficult part of the text. I put students in small groups and assign each group a single valley. I then give them a worksheet with the following questions: What images does ʻAṭṭār use to describe this valley? Does this imagery fit intuitively with the valley? Why or why not? Why do you think ʻAṭṭār places this valley at this specific point of the journey? Do you think it would make more sense earlier or later in the trip? Based on his language, the images, and so forth, what do you think it would feel like to experience this valley? In other words, what emotions does it bring out for you, and why? Once the groups have finished working, we come together as a class and go through each valley one-by-one. This allows each group to feel more confident as they present a small section of the text, and when students hear the reports from other groups, they gain a new understanding of each valley. I mentioned emotions earlier, but I have found that students generally would feel anxious, scared, or unhappy. This activity prompts reflection on their anxieties around difficult situations and loss of control. In the past, I have turned this into a formal writing assignment by asking students what valley would be the most difficult for the bird they most related to. Their responses show engagement with the questions “Why are certain types of challenges harder for me? How can I prepare, or is it better to learn how to avoid these situations entirely?” Conclusion Mystical texts offer an excellent resource for encouraging deep self-reflection. It is my hope that readers of this series of blog posts (part 1 & part 2) will be inspired to incorporate The Conference of the Birds or another mystical text into a future course to facilitate such reflection with their students. Undoubtably, each reader will adapt these suggestions to the demands of their course, their teaching style, and institutional context. Though there are many other potential avenues for self-reflection through The Conference of the Birds, my experience and examples highlight how a mystical text can provoke insight on identity, whether taught by specialists or non-specialists. In the absence of an exhaustive account of how to teach a mystical text, I simply hope I have provided a glimpse of what the mystical makes possible in the classroom. Yet as ʻAṭṭār says at the end of his poem, “And I too cease: I have described the Way – Now, you must act – there is no more to say” (1984, 245). Notes & Bibliography ʻAṭṭār, Farīd al-Dīn, Dick Davis, and Afkham Darbandi. The Conference of the Birds. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1984.

As an educator, I seek to structure learning spaces that are caring, hospitable, and collaborative, nurturing a community of learners in search of truth under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Effective education involves concepts to be shared and critiqued (lectures, readings), cases to be solved (examples, case studies, supervised practice) and values-perspectives to be formed (dialogue, genuine conversations). We teach who we are, and a clear sense of identity in Christ is pivotal. My goal for the programs I lead is to equip pastors and educational leaders for teaching, discipleship, and missional church (Mt. 28: 18-20; Eph. 4: 11-16; Col. 1: 28).[1] Curriculum Theory & Teaching Implications “To teach is to have some content and a plan and some strategies and skills, to be sure. But to teach is also to make choices about how time and space are used, what interactions will take place, what rules and rhythms will govern them, what will be offered as nourishment and used to build shared imagination, and what patterns will be laid out for students to move among.” David I. Smith.[2] While many view curriculum as a predetermined list of subjects, Elliot Eisner defines it as a series of planned events with educational consequences.[3] Michael Connelly and Jean Clandinin emphasize the significance of "persons," "experience," and "situation" in curriculum. They consider the "teacher" as crucial because curriculum planning hinges on "teacher thinking" and "teacher doing." The teacher's role in orchestrating the interaction between learners and subject matter within a specific context is pivotal. For them, curriculum is something experienced in a particular situation (Fig. 1).[4] Allan Ornstein and Francis Hunkins view curriculum as comprising four common elements, which corresponds to Connelly and Clandinin. They are: (1) Objectives (outcomes); (2) Content (subject matter); (3) Learning experiences (dynamic interactions between teacher, learner, and subject matter); (4) Evaluation (quality of experience; achievement of outcomes). They emphasized that how these parts are arranged are never neutral.[5] Teaching as Structuring Learning Space and Developing Engaging Experiences Before I review the syllabus and requirements, I begin every course with a lecture, “Covenant, community and a culture of learning,” which outlines the values that structure my learning space, some basic educational theories, and need for active learning.[6] My values are as follows: (1) Care; (2) Hospitality; and (3) Community.[7] Care - Students begin by sharing their backgrounds, concerns, and hopes for the course. They use name cards for personalized interactions. [8] In online classes, students complete “our learning community" forum. I offer a personal welcome and use this information for weekly prayers for students. I also have a forum for prayer requests. Hospitality - Students are encouraged to be open to new ideas from readings, lectures, and group discussions. They are to listen to one another, promoting “genuine conversation.” [9] Community - I emphasize collaboration, not competition. I have invited each class to my home for a community meal since 2001 (until Covid-19 restrictions).[10] At the end of the course, students reflect on the values that structured their learning spaces and shaped their practices. My question is, are these educationally and theologically sound?[11] Learning as Participation in a Community of Truth “In its briefest form, the model asks teachers to consider how to see anew, choose engagement, and reshape practice” (author’s emphasis). David I. Smith.[12] “The hallmark of the community of truth is in its claim that reality is a web of communal relationships, and that we can know reality only by being in community with it” (author’s emphasis). Parker Palmer.[13] Mortimer Adler's Paideia Proposal consists of three key elements: didactic instruction for acquiring organized knowledge, coaching to develop critical thinking skills through problem-solving, and Socratic dialogue for deeper understanding through active discussions.[14] Parker Palmer critiques the "objectivist myth of knowing" and advocates for a "community of truth" where both experts and amateurs gather around a subject, guided by shared rules of observation and interpretation. Rather than absolutism or relativism, he encourages openness to transcendence with the practice of "educational virtues."[15] Some things I do in my classes: Introduce concepts through didactic instruction, with Socratic dialogue to illuminate the frameworks of understanding within which students operate. Jesus practiced both in his teaching ministry.[16] Facilitate and invite diverse viewpoints; encourage students to ‘embrace ambiguity.’ Often, the result is more questions than answers, but part of my work is to challenge the ‘objectivist myth of knowing.’[17] I adopt the “constructivist model” in teaching, which according to Mayes and Freitas, is most suited to seminary education (see endnote 15).[18] Case studies often spark good conversations, revealing the complexity of ministry. In INTD 0701: Internship, students present cases and we reflect biblically and theologically together in “ministry reflection seminars.” Assignments match learning outcomes, and encourage critical engagement with key texts and articles, with thoughtful applications. Carefully curate a “resource” section on Moodle for every course so students can explore related and updated research for further learning. Person of the Teacher & Teaching as Spiritual Act The goal of theological education is “the acquisition of a wisdom of God and the ways of God fashioned from intellectual, affective, and behavioral understanding and evidenced by spiritual and moral maturity, relational integrity, knowledge of the Scripture and tradition, and the capacity to exercise religious leadership.” Daniel Aleshire.[19] This book builds on a simple premise: good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher (author’s emphasis). Parker Palmer.[20] Jesus condemned the religious teachers for their hypocrisy (Mt. 23: 1-36). In this context, Jesus cautioned against accepting undue accolades (v8) or putting teachers on “pedestals” (v9). God is our only Father; the Messiah is our only teacher (vs 9,10). James cautioned that not all should be teachers because teachers would face stricter judgment (Jas. 3:1-2). As I endeavor to form pastors and ministry leaders not just with the wisdom of God, but with spiritual, moral, and relational integrity, here are some things I emphasize: Each class begins with a short Bible meditation; the class responds with sharing and prayer. Convinced that transformation is ultimately the work of the Spirit, I pray for my students as I prepare for class each week. I have a lecture entitled: “The person of the teacher and teaching as a creative, spiritual act” in CHED 0552: Learning to Teach; Teaching to Disciple. Since curriculum planning rests largely on “teacher thinking” and “teacher doing,” students present their “teacher chronicles” in CHED 0652: Curriculum Design for Learning & Discipleship to better understand their education and discipleship values.[21] We are fearfully and wonderfully made (Ps. 139:13-16; Eph. 2:10). We should know our gifts (and limits), and the dangers of ministering out of a “false self.” I also emphasize the crucial role self-care holds in ministry.[22] Palmer notes: “Good teachers possess a capacity for connectedness. They are able to weave a complex web of connections among themselves, their subjects, and their students so that students can learn to weave a world for themselves.”[23] I am vulnerable to share both “joys and failures” in ministry, and constantly seek to “join self, and subject and students in the fabric of life.”[24]     Notes and Bibliography [1] Graham Cray notes that “… a church is a ‘future in advance’ community … modeling and ministering an imperfect foretaste of the new heaven and new earth.” Quoted in Alison Morgan, Following Jesus (2015), 159. Edie and Lamport provides a succinct vision for Christian Education: “… [T]he preeminent task of Christian educators is to assist persons with (re)establishing their relationship to divine love, to connect biblical truth to life, to participate intimately in a community of faith, to examine their cultural surroundings in light of kingdom values, to embrace the call to obedience and sacrifice, and to critically reflect about God in the world, and in doing … to discover blessing in ‘the tie that binds’ to God, neighbor, and creation.” Fred P. Edie and Mark A. Lamport, Nurturing Faith: A Practical Theology for Educating Christians (Eerdmans, 2021, p. 24) [2] David I. Smith, On Christian Teaching: Practicing Faith in the Classroom (Grand Rapids, MI.: Wm. E. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2018), 19. [3] Elliott W. Eisner. The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluating of School Programs, 3rd edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ.: Merrill Prentice Hall, 2002), p. 31. [4] F. Michael Connelly and D. Jean Clandinin, Teachers as Curriculum Planners: Narratives of Experience (Toronto/New York: OISE and Teachers College Press, 1988), 6-10. [5]Allan Ornstein and Francis Hunkins, Curriculum: Foundations, Principles, and Issues. 7th edition (Pearson Education, 2017), 161. For example, depending on teachers’ views of learners (“receptacles” or “critical inquirers”), teachers would adopt different teaching approaches. [6] Eisner speaks of three curricula: “explicit, implicit and null.” While the “explicit curriculum” is the conscious intentions in the syllabus, the “null” is what is left out in a course. The “implicit curriculum” is a teacher’s values that determine educational procedures and create distinct classroom cultures. Eisner notes that this is often overlooked, but impacts learning significantly. Eisner, Op. cit., chapter 4. [7] Yau Man Siew, “Fostering community and a culture of learning in seminary classrooms: a personal journey,” Christian Education Journal, 3,1 (2006), 79-91. Since this publication, I have revised my lecture “Learning Covenant, rev. 2023” with updated research. [8] Carol Holstead asked 80 students in an open-ended survey what made them feel that a professor was invested in them and in their academic success. The number 1 response was “when the professor learned their names.” Carol Holstead, “Want to Improve Your Teaching? Start With the Basics: Learn Students’ Names,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept. 11, 2019. It is interesting that these “softer elements” are gaining attention in higher education. See John P. Miller, Love and Compassion: Exploring Their Role in Education (University of Toronto, 2018). [9] David Tracy notes that theological study involves “genuine conversation,” and the “hard rules” of genuine conversation require us “to say only what you mean; say it as accurately as you can; listen to and respect what the other says, however different or other; be willing to correct or defend your opinions if challenged by the conversation partner; be willing to argue if necessary, to confront if demanded, to endure necessary conflict, to change your mind if the evidence suggests it.” David Tracy, Plurality & Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (Harper & Row, 1987), chapter 1. Stephen Brookfield highlights that because adult cognition involves embedded logic, dialectic thinking, and epistemic cognition, it is imperative to create safe and hospitable spaces for them to share their experience, engage in critical reflection and debate. For adult learners, difference is good, even desirable. Stephen D. Brookfield, The Skillful Teacher, 3rd edition (Jossey-Bass, 2015). [10] Since the church is the body of Christ, we practice “community” now. In Summer 2023, I taught an intensive, in-person course and invited 19 students home for a community meal. The impact on student dynamics was significant. David I. Smith notes: “I suspect that one of the most important Christian practices that might sustain Christian teaching and learning is intentional community, learning continually with others and from others how to live out our vocation to be the body of Christ.” David I. Smith, Op. cit., 158. [11] David K. A. Smith notes that “behind every pedagogy is a philosophical anthropology.” David K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Grand Rapids, MI.: Baker Academic, 2009), 27-28. Also, David K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love (Grand Rapids, MI.: Brazos Press, 2016), 126-128. David I. Smith encourages us to reflect on “how our faith might shape pedagogy demands that we see our classrooms anew, letting a Christian imagination supplant mere devotion to technique” (author’s emphasis). David I. Smith, Op. cit., 149. [12] David I. Smith, Opt. cit., 82. Smith discuss these three aspects in detail, with many helpful examples in chapters 7-10. [13] Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach, 20th anniversary edition (San Francisco, CA.: Jossey-Bass, 2017), 97. [14] Mortimer Adler, The Paideia Proposal (Touchstone, 1998). It is interesting that Adler’s Paideia has similarities to the three models proposed by Mayes and Freitas: The “associationist model” (learning as the gradual building of patterns of associations or skill components through memorization, drill and practice), the “situative model” (placing learners within “communities of practice” where experienced peers help novices acquire habits, values, attitudes and skills) and the “constructivist” model (teachers help learners construct a cognitive framework so they can evaluate competing claims to truth and defend their intellectual commitments). Mayes & S. de Freitas, “Technology enhanced learning: The role of theory” in Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age, Editors. H. Beetham & R. Sharpe (Routledge, 2013), chapters 1, 13. [15] These virtues include welcoming diversity, embracing ambiguity, creative conflict, practice of honesty, humility, and freedom. Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach, 20th anniversary edition (San Francisco, CA.: Jossey-Bass, 2017), 102-111. Paolo Freire calls the “banking” model oppressive and violent; instead, he calls for “problem-posing” education where instructor and learners are “co-investigators” engaged in critical thinking in a quest for mutual humanization. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1970), 73. [16] While Jesus taught formally (Mt. 5:1-2; Lk. 7:28-29), his common method was informal with question & answer, dialogue, debate, observation, and reflection amid life. His parables were deliberately puzzling and opaque, demanding his hearers to make the mental effort to penetrate the surface to get deeper, spiritual meaning and find their place in the story. Keith Ferdinando, “Jesus, the Theological Educator,” Themelios 38, issue 3 (Nov. 2013). [17] Once at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, two NT professors debated “the place of women in the church.” They argued using the same passages but came to different conclusions. [18] While I adopt the “constructivist model,” I am eclectic in my educational philosophy. In a “Find your educational philosophy” test in David M. Sadker & Karen Zittleman, Teachers, Schools & Society, 5th edition (McGraw-Hill College, 2017), I scored high in “perennialism, essentialism, progressivism, social reconstructionism.” For a helpful overview of these philosophies, see Tables 1.1 and 1.2 in Allan C. Ornstein, Edward F. Pajak, and Stacey B. Ornstein, Contemporary Issues in Curriculum, 5th edition (Pearson, 2011), 6-7. In CHED 0551/CHRI 2213: Educational History & Philosophy and CHED 0652, I highlight strengths in each philosophy, critique them from a theological perspective, with implications for education in the church and academy. [19] Daniel Aleshire, Beyond Profession: The Next Future of Theological Education (Eerdmans, 2021), 73. [20] Palmer, Op. cit., 10. [21] Since the person of the teacher is most important in curriculum planning, Connelly and Clandinin encourage teachers to develop their “teacher chronicles,” narratives of key influences which shaped their teaching values. Connelly likely learned this from his doctoral mentor, Joseph Schwab at the University of Chicago. Cheryl Craig, "Joseph Schwab, self-study of teaching and teacher education practices proponent? A personal perspective," Teacher & Teacher Education 24 (2008), 1993-2001. [22] To better understand “false self vs. true self,” see James Martin, S.J., Becoming Who You Are (HiddenSpring, 2006). For self-care in ministry, see Matt Bloom, “Building Vibrant Ecologies for Pastoral Wellbeing,” Reflective Practice: Formation and Supervision in Ministry (May 2022), 7-20. [23] Palmer, Op. cit., 11. [24] Palmer, Op. cit., 11

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. – Arthur C. Clarke Technology appears to be a magic wand. It is not a magic wand. For those of us who have worked with technology for more than two weeks this seems obvious. It is not obvious. Technology continues to fool us all the time. I’ve been involved in library technology for thirty years and I am still fooled. Things that I have thought over the years include:      “This new system will solve our information finding needs.”      “This software patch will fix our problems.”      “Google will replace libraries,” (actually, a college provost told me this once).      “VR will replace libraries.” You get the picture. My first class in library school, back in the dark ages (pre web!) was with Herbert White, the legendary Dean of Indiana University’s School of Library and Information Science (now a part of the School of Informatics). I probably remember more from that class than any other. Herb told us that technology isn’t a way to save money; it’s a way to do new things. New things drive society forward and often improve our lives. But the temptation to think it will be cheaper or “magical” persists. The ability to do new things means that we must learn how to manage those things. Higher education now includes—and indeed cannot seem to do without—Student Information Systems, Learning Management Systems, WiFi, Firewalls, and people to run them. Asking “What have we lost along the way?” is almost meaningless. We’ll never know. We do know that education is different from five years ago, much less thirty.   “Lies, damned lies, and statistics” We have a plethora of measurement and assessment tools but still struggle to understand what those mean (perhaps it’s a quantum physics problem). An analogy might be useful: baseball has become increasingly driven by statistics. The book Money Ball shows how a small market team without much money was able to find a way to be competitive while being relatively cheap. For those of you who don’t know, they did it through using advanced statistical methods (“Sabermetrics”) and ignoring the gut feelings of grizzled scouts. Technology is great at keeping statistics. In baseball and elsewhere, it’s now often called “analytics” and has replaced ERA’s and batting averages with a player’s WAR (“Wins Above Replacement,” of which there are three types!). It can analyze pitching and hitting patterns more reliably than any human ever has. It has come to dominate the major league game. Similarly in libraries, we can now instantly see how many chapters, articles, and books have been downloaded. We can thus analyze the CPU (cost per use), realign our budgets and buying habits, and take some of the guess work out of collection development. These are not bad things. But it does tend to replace the “gut” or human aspects of baseball, librarianship, and other human endeavors. Why is that? I guess it partly means no one is responsible for choices (it’s the numbers boss!). I’ll let someone else, who probably never saw a baseball game, summarize this: The statistical method shows the facts in the light of the ideal average but does not give us a picture of their empirical reality. While reflecting an indisputable aspect of reality, it can falsify the actual truth in a most misleading way. This is particularly true of theories which are based on statistics. The distinctive thing about real facts, however, is their individuality. Not to put too fine a point on it, once could say that the real picture consists of nothing but exceptions to the rule, and that, in consequence, absolute reality has predominantly the character of irregularity. (Carl Jung) I think at least some of the motivation toward overreliance on statistics is based in fear. “The numbers show…,” “we ran an assessment of the data and…,” etc. We need to justify what we’ve done or are about to do to those with the power and money. This is not necessarily a bad thing! I think it’s merely incomplete.   Old Man Yells at Cloud I know this is how this might come across. It’s my version of Don Quixote I guess: to tilt at the windmill of postmodern life. Hear me out. Everyone has examples of technological failure. For example, Amazon music doesn’t seem to understand that there are TWO Eric Johnsons who do very different types of music. The same with Chris Knight. I recently got two tech giants, Amazon and Google, to fail simultaneously! My google cell phone slowed my data plan and it caused my Amazon Music app to drop, fast-forward, and reverse songs mid-stream. Ah, the future; It’s glorious! Information Technology can’t create meaning; it can deliver the tools for meaning to be created. IT can do many things more efficiently than manual processes: PCs were first adopted in business environments to be numerical ledgers (aka spreadsheets). IBM was called International Business Machines, after all. Computers as we know them replaced human “computers,” who carried out the arithmetic work in physics/engineering/insurance. Information technology is akin to Dustin Hoffman’s character in the movie Rain Man, an autistic man with savant syndrome. He could do astonishing mental feats of memory, but had seemingly no idea of what it all meant. This is what makes humans different from parrots or bears, who can be trained to memorize things and patterns. Meaning is what education is all about. Or more specifically, the creation of meaning in the mind of a person. Herbert White used Peter Drucker’s work in his teaching quite a bit. Drucker, the seminal business management guru, has probably been taught in more MBA courses than any other person. This quote has stuck with me: The ‘non-profit’ institution neither supplies goods or services nor controls. Its ‘product’ is neither a pair of shoes nor an effective regulation. Its product is a changed human being. The non-profit institutions are human-change agents. Their ‘product’ is a cured patient, a child that learns, a young man or woman grown into a self-respecting adult; a changed human life altogether. (Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Principles and Practices) Drucker was no dreamy-eyed academic and knew that education is fundamentally different than other fields. It’s different than manufacturing or baseball. It can create meaning.   Feelin’ UI-sed User Interface (UI) is a whole… thing. I was recently eating lunch with a colleague and we were discussing the dysfunction of much modern tech. “I refuse to use the self-ordering kiosk at McDonald’s! It’s too confusing!” I agreed and contrasted it with the Costco food court order kiosks. The McDonald’s design ethos seems to be that huge flashy animation is better. By contrast, Costco has opted for small and simple (granted they have a much more restricted menu). Costco’s works pretty well! McDonald’s looks great (35-inch screen in portrait mode) but the user interface is a nightmare. Wait you want a DRINK? New menu. Go back. Where is the actual order? Good luck on your food journey. (I have unkind thoughts about Marcos Pizza’s Android app as well, but will spare you my hunger-induced rage). My point is that the underlying tech is ahead of the interface design WAY too often. Perhaps they are designing these for people younger than me, but I see a lot of boomers and genXers in McDonalds. We all have gray hair and confused expressions on our faces. The electronic menu behind the counter, where no one is standing anymore, now rotates out every five seconds. How much is a double cheeseburger? No one, literally no one, knows. It was there a second ago. Now it’s part of the ether. Oh wait, it’s back. $2.85. Fries are… gone again.   The Attention Economy Gentle reader, I know that it feels like there is nothing we can do in the face of these forces but cope. In the words of Marcus Aurelius, The more we value things outside our control, the less control we have. True enough. However, I’m arguing, in a meandering way, for us to come to grips with what we can control versus what we can’t. We can control, albeit with difficulty, our attention to what’s important. The statistics can in fact help us focus on what’s important by showing us what we’re missing. If people are downloading a book that we have, that’s important data! There is a wonderful biblical scholar on TikTok (Dan McClellan) who wears a shirt that says “Data > Dogma.” It’s hard to argue with that sentiment. My worry, though, is that Data has become the new Dogma and has become too much of a focus of our attention. Use your stats to inform your UI, your collections and signage, not to replace your sense of what’s important to your users. The users are where the meaning happens. We may not have a magic wand, but we do have our abilities as humans to engage and empathize with our communities. The results, creating meaning and changing lives, are worth it.

The religious imagery in the movie Blue Beetle is arguably the most overt I have seen in a superhero movie.[i] This is so interesting because religious imagery is almost non-existent in the comic book series. One of my favorite parts of this movie arises in the character of Nana (who I would call Welita in my life – yes with a “W”) and others may call abuela. For years I have claimed that I am an abuelita theologian in training. I have taken the attributes of my own grandmothers as well as other elders who have mentored me and combined them into a nebulous image of what that means. Nana Reyes in the movie Blue Beetle is incredibly close to my imaginative conjuring. Yara González-Justiniano lists the grandmother trope as a “Feminist Theme” and claims, “The cultural and ethnic representation hint[s] at the untold stories of Latinx in US mainstream history, specifically, around military opposition and revolutionary movements. In the movie there is a breaking of the sweet abuela trope, … adding texture to the matriarchs that build these families and the layered histories of relationship to the US and Latin American countries of origin.”[ii] Twice before in the movie when other characters mention fighting, Nana calmly, quietly, with her trenzas raised, says it is not time. She comes across as a passive and unknowing grandmother. She is quietly sewing and listening to her Walkman when the scarab chooses Jaime and begins to transform him. However, when Jaime is most in need and it seems that the Blue Beetle superhero has lost all hope, the matriarch warrior nod to the adelitas Nana drops her trenzas and says this important phrase, “We have turned both cheeks. Now we fight.” This is a direct allusion to Matthew 5:39--“But I say to you, Do not resist the evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.” Biblical scholars claim that the author of the Gospel of Matthew is using hyperbole in this entire passage, which reads You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you: Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also, and if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, give your coat as well, and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to the one who asks of you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you. (5:38-42) In reading this passage as hyperbole one sees a power play, in that turning the other cheek is an unexpected move from the aggressor’s perspective. Up to this point in the movie, Jaime has used these unexpected moves when he is resisting the scarab’s desire to kill and Jaime’s freewill overtakes the power of both the aggressor and the scarab. In Nana’s phrase, “We have turned both cheeks. Now we fight,” an interpretation can be seen from the Gospel of Matthew’s use of the word “you” in this passage, “But I say to you: Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.” To be honest, every time I have heard or read this passage in Matthew prior to watching Blue Beetle, I have always imagined an individual aggressor slapping an individual person, humiliating and dehumanizing them. However, Nana says, “WE.” “We have turned both cheeks.” Woah! What? Que? Como? Que cambio aquí? We? She mentions a collective. In her warrior, militant, fighter-against-injustice mode, Nana foregrounds the collective. In highlighting the collective, she is not only underscoring the fight of the family to save Jaime, she engulfs all of the injustices perpetuated against her peoples for centuries – genocide, culturecide, epistemocide, lingocide, colonization, servitude, enslavement, racism, sexism…. Nana’s words are not a simple allusion to the Gospel of Matthew but a response as a rally call to live out the Gospel. To fight for justice. Nana’s words marshal us to work collectively for a greater possibility. She does not romanticize anything either. Her son was killed in an earlier scene in the movie. The family has lived in a perpetual state of fear due to documentation status unrecognized by the imagined national government. Their drive home includes a left turn on El Paso street in front of a series of pink crosses, a nod of remembrance of the 23 killed and 22 injured in the El Paso massacre of 2019. Wooden crosses such as these exist across the country remembering those who have died too young. Some of these crosses include those placed for migrants who have died in the path toward a better life, crosses placed for farm workers who have died too young from chemical sprays and brutal work, and so many more. The color pink of the crosses seems to be simply so they stand out behind the street sign. The sociocentric pueblo on a journey open to the Spirit synodal call of Nana can also be seen in another phrase repeated through the movie: “Animo.” It sometimes appears alone like the Milagros’ beautiful street art on the front of the Blue Beetle ship. It also appears in the phrase, “Animo. WE can do this!” Here you could make a bit of a Marianist leap to Mary’s “Yes.” The Marianist Charism has a strong basis in Mary’s response to the Angel Gabriel’s invitation to play a particular role in the Incarnation of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, Jesus. I do recognize that I am taking a little creative license, jumping Gospels to make my point. Yet, let’s think for a moment that in the phrase “Animo, We can do this!” not only has the family heard Nana’s response to the Gospel of Matthew as a rally call, they have also responded with mutual affirmation to their collective yes responses. Speaking of Mary, the imagery of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe is rampant. The largest of the many shrines in the Reyes house is one dedicated to La Guadalupana. This image literally takes center screen when Jaime is morphing into Blue Beetle and aligns eyes with the Guadalupan image. Much has been said about the eyes of Guadalupe, including what seems to be a reflection of Juan Diego and the bishop in her cornea. I do wonder about the use of this image to point to questions of mestizaje. Could the connection between Jaime’s and Guadalupe’s eyes be a recognition of the complexities of the blendings and intermixings of humans which carry a colonial violence, as is the case with the scarab taking over Jaime’s body? The voice of the beetle appearing just as Jaime is recognizing what is happening to him makes me ponder the different ways of interpreting this scene. Could this scene be pointing to large issues between religion and science which are often read as being diametrically opposed? Tío Rudy is both comedic trope and nerd. He is a new embodiment of the chapulín while also creating his own chapulín. He wavers between being a conspiracy theorist and truth-teller. So many of us have a Tío Rudy. My Tío Rudy’s name is José Pepe Joe Melendez. He was my mom’s youngest brother. He died in May of this year at far too young of an age. He spent his life as a semi-truck driver, a gadget collector, and a fiddler with many things electronic and mechanical. When I was young, his room at my grandmother/Godmother’s house looked like a mix between Radio Shack and a pawn shop. I remember him driving up to our house with that same la cucaracha horn! Rest in power, Uncle Joe! Tío Rudy also has a Guadalupe tattoo and is the wisdom leader and knowledge-bearer. He informs the younger generation of the history of El Chapulin and Blue Beetle as well as includes the references to Lucha Libre. Oh, the multiple masks of Mexicans and Mexican American imaginations![iii] Speaking of truth, Milagros declaration to her family – “He’s had his tacos, let him have the truth” – stood out to me, as someone who was the first in her giant extended family to go away to college, to this very beautiful place of St. Mary’s University. All of the way through my education, my family withheld information from me so I would not worry and do poorly in my courses. I saw this movie for the first time with my parents in El Paso this summer, and saw it again the very next day just with my dad. When Millie said this line, I let out a “MMMHMM” so loud in the almost-empty theater that the little girl sitting behind us asked her mom if she heard me. In this scene, Jaime had his taste of home literally in his tacos and figuratively with the entire return. Is it cultural to withhold the truth? Is the truth something to be shared only in certain spaces and places? Might there be an intimacy associated with sharing the truth which distance makes difficult? The family’s last name stands out as a religious symbol – Reyes. Of course this name is plural. It points to the reyes magos (and their camel, like the ones outside of Blume library). Various characters wear jackets with this name. It is the name of the family garage. The reyes magos are the gift bearers in the infancy narrative of Matthew. They are also the protectors. In a dream they learn of Herod’s evil plan and return home a different way so as not to disclose the Holy Family’s location. Also, Christians are baptized as priest, prophet, and king. Finally, because the name is a last name in Blue Beetle, not the singular Rey, it is also gender neutral.[iv] [caption id="attachment_252724" align="alignleft" width="362"] Nana Reyes[/caption] The gentle ebb and flow the movie uses to raise very difficult issues is among the reasons I have seen this movie at least five times. One theme which arises repeatedly can be extrapolated from the quote, “My name is not Sanchez...” This simple quote infers the theme of higher education mixed with all Latinx as being alike. An unspoken understanding exists that diversity includes one person of every racialized category on the US Census and maybe one of those falls under the umbrella of “Hispanic,” which I have been told (when someone has committed the sin of omission against this generic collective created by the same government), is not a race. Once that quota has been met, diversity has reached the level of excellence. And since everyone is the same within any given category, they must all have the same name – or those in power do not need to learn their name. Such is the case with el Doctor José Francisco Morales Rivera de la Cruz. Please note his name ends with “of the cross.” He is clearly a cross-bearer in making the difficult choices of using his education to better himself and probably the expectation of communal raising. He helps the villainous weapon manufacturer through his own research and knowledge, contributing to necropolitical systems which keep him employed and fed. I love that the family uses la bendición throughout the movie. My parents are living with us for the next couple of months. Dad had a stroke followed by a brain hemorrhage in May. They came to stay so we can work more collectively between jobs, housework, and therapy. We have all known that he and Mom would be with us these months. What I did not factor into the equation was the cross they would place on my forehead on Tuesday, blessing me for a safe trip and wisdom to share. I am forty-nine years old and my parents still give me la bendición. It’s a sign of care as well as of collectivity. My travels, work, sharing, and caring are an extension of them and of my community. Every time I used to leave El Paso for college, my grandmother/Godmother would make me get on my knees to give me a blessing. She would recite a litany off the top of her head that seemed to invoke the entire communion of saints. She would include as many of our ancestors as she could name and invoke her mother, aunts, and grandmother. I would begin to laugh, which was partially her goal – to turn a bitter moment to bittersweet. That bendición means I may go far and away but I do not go alone. It reminds me not to fear because I stand on the shoulders of giants, of generations of matriarchs and women leaders. ANIMO! WE CAN DO THIS!   [i] Thank you to Sudabée Lotfian-Mena for the research assistance. For more on the music of the movie Blue Beetle see “Soundtracking ‘Blue Beetle,’” by Sudabée Lotfian-Mena, Hispanic Theological Initiative Open Plaza, November 13, 2023, https://www.htiopenplaza.org/content/sountracking-blue-beetle. [ii] Yara González-Justiniano, “The Blue Beetle: ‘¡No contaban con mi astucia!’” Feminism and Religion, August 8, 2023, https://feminismandreligion.com/2023/08/24/the-blue-beetle-no-contaban-con-mi-astucia-by-yara-gonzalez-justiniano/. [iii] As a little side note, I found the connection between the bugs interesting – la cucaracha, el chapulin Colorado, and the Blue Beetle. I actually spent hours doing deep research on this topic and possible connections. For more, see: Ana María Quiceno Vélez, “De Barthes al Chapulín Colorado. Una Lectura de Los Héroes y Antihéroes Como Configuraciones Míticas,” Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2010, https://repository.javeriana.edu.co/bitstream/handle/10554/5525/tesis537.pdf ?sequence=1; Rodrigo Cervantes, “What Do ‘Blue Beetle,’ Quetzalcóatl, and Chapulín Colorado Have in Common?” Los Angeles Times, August 14, 2023, https://www.latimes.com/delos/story/2023-08-14/blue-beetle-love-mythical-Heroes; “From Satire to Folk Music, the Symbolism Behind ‘La Cucaracha,’” Nuestro Stories, December 1, 2023. https://nuestrostories.com/2022/09/from-satire-to-folk-music-the-symbolism-behind-la-cucaracha; Víctor Monserrat, “Los Artrópodos En La Mitología, Las Creencias, La Ciencia y El Arte Del Antiguo Egipto,” Boletín de La Sociedad Entomológica Aragonesa, no. 52 (2013): 373–437. [iv] The rejas – the iron rod designs on the window of the family home are shaped in the Sankofa. This Adinkra symbol of Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana is the heart shape seen in the wrought iron all over San Antonio, New Orleans, and many other parts of the lands we now call America. This symbol is often understood as a bird and interpreted as “Look to the Past to Understand the Present.” Scholars in Louisiana have found in their research that West African enslaved peoples many times interwove these designs into the wrought iron in New Orleans and other cities. Some claim these designs were a means of communication for the enslaved peoples. Most of these people were not paid for their labor and were considered property, often traded within the same streets where they worked and created their wrought iron messages. For more, see: Kaleena Sales, “Beyond the Bauhaus: West African Adinkra Symbols,” AIGA Design Educators Community, https://educators.aiga.org/beyond-the-bauhaus-west-african-adinkra-symbols/; Marcus Christian, Negro Ironworkers of Louisiana: 1718-1900 (Gretna: Pelican, 2002); Sidney Holmes, “Who Built New Orleans?: The Untold Story of Black Blacksmiths,” Very Local, March 4, 2022; Morgan Randall, “The Storytelling Ironwork of New Orleans,” Atlas Obscura, http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ironwork-new-orleans-french-quarter-pontalba-adinkra; Christel N. Temple, “The Emergence of Sankofa Practice in the United States: A Modern History,” Journal of Black Studies 41, no. 1 (2010): 127–50, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25704098; Kim Marie Vaz, The “Baby Dolls”: Breaking the Race and Gender Barriers of the New Orleans Mardi Gras Tradition (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2013).

Going to the local art supply store was something one of my cousins and I used to love to do as kids. I remember how she used to walk up and down every aisle looking carefully at all the different kinds of paints, brushes, and pencils. I could almost see her thinking about how she would use each one to improve her next project. While I liked going to the store, I never really used to think of myself as an artist. But I do now. I view teaching as an art. It involves carefully designing syllabi, assignments, classroom activities, and more. And I love to shop for new tools to improve this craft. I remember acquiring a simple but extremely helpful tool about ten years ago, during a Wabash Center Workshop for Pre-Tenure Theology Faculty. A member of the leadership team, Rolf Jacobson, encouraged us to read at least two books on teaching each year. Since then, I’ve adopted this advice as discipline. If I haven’t read my two books by the end of the academic year, I read them during the summer. I’ve found that reading about teaching not only keeps me up-to-date in the field, but it often prompts me to revise my syllabi or classroom assignments, which, at the very least, reenergizes my classroom presence and practice. I’ve also picked up another helpful tool from Wabash—probably the most useful one I’ve found to date: writing about teaching. I began this practice on a regular basis when I was first asked to contribute to a Wabash blog series back in 2014. I was given a schedule of deadlines for my contributions (around five over the period of a year or two). I found that the schedule encouraged a helpful rhythm for me throughout the academic year. Every few months I had to set aside some time to really reflect on my teaching and articulate it to others. I have the benefit of working in a department in which all of the faculty members are both collegial and dedicated to teaching. While we often chat about classroom experiences and things that either work or don’t work in our classes, these conversations are usually brief because we are all just so busy. Setting aside the time to write about my teaching, whether for a blog or in a journal, gives me extra space for processing and reflection. Sometimes this extra space is a necessity. Like the time when I fell down on the first day of class (!), or during the last several years when teaching during multiple pandemics and traumatic current events. In these instances, writing about teaching has helped me to discover, articulate, and distill lessons about myself as a pedagogue and ways to facilitate more engaged learning for students. Other times, I’ve found that writing about teaching has elicited valuable advice and feedback from others. Several years ago I reflected on whether or not it is helpful to display emotions in the classroom while talking about difficult topics like racism. I now understand that, as a white teacher, I was not seeing my own privilege in even asking the question. Comments and feedback on this blog helped me to grow. Receiving viewpoints different from my own allow this to happen. As is the case with research articles and manuscripts, writing and publishing about teaching puts my work out there for others to see. While this sometimes feels vulnerable, the critiques I receive often help me to come to a fuller, more accurate view of the topic or what I could be doing better. In other cases, I write about teaching because something beautiful happened! This happens when I see a “light-bulb” click on for one of my students, or when a classroom conversation takes on a life of its own and results in a moment of organic learning. Sometimes I see the Spirit move in unexpected ways in the classroom or I find that an assignment I designed worked well. Sometimes all of these things happen at the same time. These are moments of beauty. I write about them and read about how other teachers have experienced them in their own classrooms, so we can all appreciate the beauty. Like when my cousin uses a good paintbrush, I use writing about teaching to ultimately enhance the beauty of my craft.