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(Content Warning : mentions of vulnerability, death, and excrement)One cool, wet, overcast February morning we were leisurely circling a small retention pond, our pace mirroring the unhurried arrival of spring. The students were examining some Green Frog tadpoles (Lithobates clamitans), and an unidentified corixid (an aquatic insect with oar-like back legs) we’d temporarily detained when I found and netted a Six-Spotted Fishing Spider (Dolomedes triton) and brought it over. In the excitement and commotion at meeting this new neighbor, one student slipped down the embankment towards the muck. “Oh sh*t!” she exclaimed. Her right foot found solid ground just before water’s edge, her left knee firmly planted in the mud upslope. After confirming she was uninjured and helping her to both feet, we continued our work. It was a profound moment of vulnerability. Sh*t happens! Excrement is unavoidable in Creaturely Theology.[i] Suffering and death are too. Just a half an hour before that encounter by the pond, we’d discovered the carcass of a White-Tailed Deer (Odocoileus virginianus), a doe, tragically caught on a rusted, derelict barbed-wire fence in a thicket of non-native honeysuckle and privet. Even if she’d made it over, though, she would have still had to risk crossing the road. We don’t cross roads or barbed-wire fences. The most dangerous thing we do—at least statistically—is traveling by van for field trips. I always take every precaution to ensure the welfare and safety of all my students. No one is permitted to touch any animals or plants or fungi we cannot identify—or any medically-significant ones we can! Weather-and terrain-appropriate footwear and clothing are required in the field. We always move at a calm, careful pace—we’d miss out on so much if we rushed, after all. But risk and danger are inevitable. They are unavoidable in human life. Such realities play an important role in all human growth and education. In the Christian theological tradition, the fear of God, and our smallness in relation to God’s other creatures, are both instructive. The kinds of encounters we can have with the divine Other, and creaturely others, teach us our vulnerability and interdependence (see Job 38–41). In facing risks and dangers we can learn resilience, and we grow.  Spiders, centipedes, and snakes always elicit the most excitement from my students. On our first day outside in spring of 2025 I was privileged to introduce this year’s cohort to an impressive female Southern Black Widow (Latrodectus mactans). I gently excavated her from her tangled web with a long twig and coaxed her onto a small piece of white paper. Her jet-black body and legs gleamed in the sunlight, contrasting sharply with the brilliant red hourglass on her abdomen, a striking sign of her formidable venom. She barely moved as we admired her. I returned her to her rock lair, and we parted ways. Later the same day an Eastern Red Centipede (Scolopocryptops sexspinosus) danced excitedly from one end of a longer stick to the other as I steadily alternated hands, taking care to avoid the wiggling antennae on his bitey end. While I have never found a venomous snake on campus, we regularly encounter about a dozen harmless species.[ii] As long as a snake is calm—it is easy to tell whether any individual is overly stressed or not—I allow everyone a chance to touch or handle it.[iii] Such encounters have a transformative effect. As one of my students put it, “there is something so peaceful about holding a calm wild snake.” Far from increasing our fear, or even terror, such experiences of risk and vulnerability help to further ground us in this place, and in our vulnerable selves. Coming to know “the peace of the[se] wild things,” allows us, in Wendell Berry’s words, “to rest in the grace of the world, and [be] free.”[iv]             Notes & Bibliography: [i] For powerful and moving reflections on the relevance of scatological reflection for Christian faith and religious practice, I recommend Ragan Sutterfield’s excellent book, The Art of Being a Creature: Meditations on Humus and Humility (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2024). For more basic, introductory texts see Taro Gomi’s classic Everyone Poops, trans. Amanda Mayer Sinchecum (Brooklyn: Kane/Miller, 1993) and Steve Kemp and Robert Rath, Who Pooped in the Park? Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Scat and Tracks for Kids (Helena, MT: Farcountry Press, 2005).    [ii] I am very confident that neither of east Tennessee’s native venomous serpents, Copperheads (Agkistrodon contortrix) nor Timber Rattlesnakes (Crotalus horridus) live on Johnson University’s campus; I know that is profound comfort to most of my colleagues and students, but I have to admit that I find it at least a little disappointing! Even if we found one, though, here or on a field trip—I have seen both in the smokies where we have our retreat—we would admire such a neighbor respectfully from a distance. I am not the kind of Appalachian Christian minister who handles venomous snakes (except with proper tools and for good reason).[iii] Certain species like Racers (Coluber constrictor) and Watersnakes (Nerodia sipedon) are more pugnacious by disposition and are unreluctant to bite in defense. What they don’t tell you about harmless snakes, though, is that the bitey end is not the only end, or even the worst end, you have to worry about! Most snakes excrete a foul musk and feces or urates on their captors as a defense mechanism. [iv] Wendell Berry, The Peace of the Wild Things and Other Poems (New York: Penguin, 2018), 25. 

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).