Resources

Recently, I discovered “tea mindfulness,” the term I use for turning the time used in making and drinking tea into moments of meditation. While I have enjoyed tea mindfulness as a means of intentionally thinking and reflecting, I wanted to move beyond the personal practice and engage others in mindful conversation. I started imagining what tea mindfulness might look like in community. Making and sharing tea is an act of hospitality. I thought intently on how to be mindful, intentional, and hospitable while incorporating the practice of drinking tea with my students and colleagues. I considered my Human Diversity course where we encounter, engage, and explore difficult topics which sometimes lead to cognitive dissonance. In a nutshell, Human Diversity builds cultural competence by increasing student’s self-awareness and cross-cultural awareness. Modifying a tea mindfulness practice in the classroom by focusing on mindful conversation and group engagement seemed like a winning strategy for cultivating cultural competence. It would give us the opportunity to engage meaningfully while nurturing appreciation for each other. Thus, the beginning of “Tea, Connections, and Necessary Conversation.”As students entered the classroom, they would encounter a tea station with hot water, an assortment of teas, sweeteners, creamers, lemon wedges, and snacks. At each student’s seat I placed a menu highlighting the variety of teas available, along with an index card. Students moved toward their seats, wondering what was going to happen next. Once everyone had arrived and was seated, I welcomed them to participate in Tea, Connections, and Necessary Conversation, offered directions, and facilitated the process for each student to prepare their tea of choice. One by one they approached the tea station, requested their tea bag, doctored their drink, and engaged in small talk before returning to their seats. After everyone was served, the connections began. Present were: Daniel and DeAndre, twin brothers and basketball players from Metro-Detroit; Josephina, a business major from Grand Rapids; Carl, a thirty-five-year-old non-traditional student who serves as a resident assistant on campus; Abbie, a homeschooled freshman in her second semester; Aisha, an exceptional athlete, who is making her mark on the women’s basketball team; and Eli, a student from a homogenous rural community in Northern Michigan.[i] These are a few of my Human Diversity students whose differences brought them together at Kuyper College. My intention for Tea, Connections, and Necessary Conversation was to provide an opportunity for the students to link up, interface, and join together in dialogue to learn more than surface-level information through engaging, exploring, and experiencing an interchange of thoughts about their similarities, differences, and even points of cognitive dissonance.As students paired up I simulated a “speed dating” activity. I asked a series of questions, where students could enter into short conversations to compare and contrast their interests, insights, perspectives, and experiences. Following two to three minutes of interaction, students would find a new partner and begin a new conversation. The classroom buzzed with excitement, motivating the shyest students to share and dialogue in genuine ways. Questions/prompts included:Tell me about some traditions or rituals your family participates in? Are there new traditions or rituals you would like to introduce to your family?Identify three things you and your conversation partner have in common. Although you share these commonalities, how do you express them differently?What is one word in the English language that irritates you when you hear it? What is another word you could use to replace it?With each question, communication grew deeper, mutual respect increased, and opportunities for connection beyond the classroom became a possibility. The start of necessary conversations began with tea and connection and continued throughout the semester.Human Diversity is a challenging course; it encourages reflection on the difficult truth that we harbor bias and prejudice, engage in racist thinking, and use microaggressions in our daily lives. We spend time confronting these fallen parts of ourselves and identify ways to become our best selves with the Holy Spirit’s advocacy. By engaging and exploring the seven dimensions of diversity (gender, age, ability, religion, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, class) and the oppression associated with each one, we covenant to love God, others, and ourselves, and seek liberation. This is not an easy task, but Marianne Williamson encourages us by saying – “As we let our own light shine, we consciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others” (A Return to Love [HarperCollins, 1996]).Necessary conversations are those dialogues that are initiated after the introduction of stories of hard history, culture, and personal experiences. Asking questions, actively listening, and sometimes agreeing to disagree, we grow in self-awareness and cross-cultural awareness and build our cultural competence. Tea, Conversation and Necessary Conversations intentionally provided opportunities for some students to speak to each other for the first time, hear each other’s stories, gain an understanding of one another, and have fun. In one student’s words, “While drinking Jasmine Green tea, relationships became deeper, joy came forth, friends were made.” Notes & Bibliography[i] Names of students changed to protect privacy. 

Diversity is the standard for theological education. One of the dimensions of courage that we must have in our classrooms is the ability to see multiple perspectives. To word it differently, we must have the ability to put ourselves in another person’s shoes. I am reminded of the poignant song and video by Everlast, “What It’s Like.” Part of the problem in religious circles and in society in general is the complete lack of empathy. Empathy is defined simply as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” It contrasts with sympathy, defined as “feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune.” Empathy means you are in (em) their suffering (pathos), and not only with them (sym) in their suffering (pathos).In online environments it is difficult to create empathy. After all, we are not in brick-and-mortar classes. We sit comfortably behind a screen and are not interacting in person. However, there are still opportunities to create a sense of empathy, and consequently being present, with one another – even if we are from different walks of life and from different parts of the world. In one of my classes I had students from Africa, Latin America, and the US. The students from the US in this class also reflected an incredible amount of diversity. My students are Black, Caucasian, Hispanic/Latin@, and of mixed race heritage. We are challenged to walk with one another and, at the very least, to understand each other’s perspectives.On the first day of class I strive to help my students get to know each other. Knowing is not merely knowing information about one another, but to enter into a relationship with one another (an affective move). The best way to do so is to listen to each other’s stories. For the last few years I have asked students to post a video of themselves in which they show an object that represents their personality and the significance of faith in their lives. I learned this tactic in a Wabash Workshop for early career faculty. Since then, I have found it to be a very helpful exercise. Most students have discussed a Bible that was gifted to them. Others post pictures of significant family members.This tactic presents opportunities to enter into another’s reality. One of my Black students posted a video where he quietly and soberly described the only gift he ever received from his father when he was three years old. It was a small jacket his father bought while stationed as a soldier in Vietnam in 1966. It had a map of Vietnam with place names and surrounding countries embroidered on the back along with the year, 1966. The student’s name was on a front pocket of the jacket. Except for occasional visits and this lone gift, his father was completely absent from this student’s life. For my student this reflected a lack – of stability, of responsibility, of keeping one’s own word, and of a loving family.My student later shared that when his dad passed away his thoughts toward him changed. He started missing him. He also started thinking about the opportunities he had missed with his father. The father’s own racial background and his experience in Vietnam meant his life had been marked by trauma, instability, and many struggles. Somehow, this jacket created an opportunity to empathize with his dad and to forgive him. My student stated that because of this experience, he desired to be a present male figure in his own son’s life.Two things stood out to me. First, I thought of all the pressing contextual issues in the life of my student’s father. The country was going through the Civil Rights movement (1954-1968). His father had been shaped by segregation, Jim Crow laws, and all the psychological harm of racism.[i] Black colleagues have shared that due to moving and different circumstances they cannot trace their ancestry back for more than one or two generations. His father was also a soldier in one of the most unpopular wars. The year 1966 was marked by mounting casualties and a sense of futility as superior US firepower could not break the resolve of the Vietcong. To create a sense of community and empathy in class, I encouraged my students to think of the trauma that this father had endured and of the courage that it took for the student to be transparent and vulnerable enough to share about this object.Second, I thought of the courage it took my student to forgive his father and to deal with this trauma as he built his own family. I thought of the resilience he demonstrated to be able to make sense of his own situation even though he may not have fully understood his father’s situation. Faith has played an important role in my student’s life, giving him language and ideas to deal with his own difficulties, and with his absent father. It also empowered him to take ownership of the situation and to pour out what he never received into the life of his own son.My student is a living testament to the courage reconciliation requires. The classroom made us walk together with this student who had a very different history from all of us. The online classroom required us to be present with him. My comments and responses were paths to give him necessary attention and models for how to respond to those who reveal trauma and become vulnerable to us. Most importantly, I, a Hispanic/Latin@ faculty member from a different generation, was able to empathize with this student. Hopefully, this distinct affective move was able to model a way forward in our conflicted cultural milieu. Notes & Bibliogrpahy[i] Robert T. Carter and Thomas D. Scheuermann, Confronting Racism Integrating Mental Health Research into Legal Strategies and Reforms(Routledge, 2020).

In a previous blog, I surmised that the diversity of students within theological education is one of its greatest strengths and one of its deepest challenges. One reason that theological institutions comprise among the most diverse student populations in higher education is access. Comparatively speaking, theological schools have fewer barriers to enrollment versus other graduate schools in terms of acceptance rates and tuition costs.In 2023, the average acceptance rates for Master of Divinity and Master of Arts admissions across all member institutions of the Association of Theological Schools was 68 percent and 72 percent respectively. In the same year, the average acceptance rate for law school admissions in the United States was roughly 42 percent. Some law schools, such as Yale and Harvard, had acceptance rates under 10 percent. The cost of theological education is also significantly lower than many other graduate programs. For example, the annual tuition of Harvard Law School ($77,000) is more than double the annual tuition of Harvard Divinity School ($31,000) and more than triple the annual tuition of Columbia Theological Seminary ($22,000), the school where I teach.Theological schools therefore enroll students of all ages, races, ethnicities, abilities, genders, and nationalities. Over the past twenty years or so, many theological institutions have also taken further steps to include a wider range of students through the implementation of additional learning modalities, such as fully online degree programs, alongside in-person education.I have witnessed several evolutions in my seminary classroom over the last dozen years. The first change largely consisted of more diversity across race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and denomination. Straight cisgender white Presbyterian students comprised the majority, but I was teaching more students of color, more LGBTQ+ students, and more students from various Christian traditions.The second change entailed increasing generational and vocational diversity alongside the ongoing demographic shifts due to the first change. There is now no one clear and discernable identity marker that represents the majority student population in my classroom. In terms of age, some students are in their twenties and thirties and others are in their forties, fifties, and sixties. Some will preach their first sermon at my seminary whereas others have been preaching for years. Some are working full-time in congregational ministries and other professions as they study at my seminary. Some are from the United States and others are from Brazil, Ghana, India, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, and other nations. Some belong to theologically liberal and progressive denominations whereas others worship in conservative and fundamentalist churches.These differences present rich opportunities for mutuality and reciprocity as well as potential pitfalls of misunderstanding and conflict in theological education. I plan to further engage these matters in future blogs, but I want to conclude this reflection with one aspect of diversity that I find simultaneously inspiring and perplexing: The rise of multivocational students who are pursuing their seminary education while also working full-time as well as caring for their families and fulfilling other important obligations.I am grateful that these students are in my classroom, and many have joyfully shared with me that my seminary’s commitment to greater access has made it possible for them to enroll. Because these students carry multiple responsibilities, some understandably struggle to complete assignments on time and adequately prepare for class sessions. Nearly all my students take three or more courses in our fall and spring terms because my seminary’s most generous scholarships covering the entire cost of tuition (and the entire cost of tuition and fees for African American students) are not available with part-time enrollment.When encountering unsteady student performance, it would be immature and harmful for theological educators like me to respond with petty expressions of anger and annoyance. Yet I also feel that it is my pedagogical imperative to effectively manage class participation and course engagement. I am keenly aware that a good number of my students, including some with the busiest schedules, are faithfully doing their work, and they are rightly discouraged when some of their peers are ill-equipped for face-to-face discussions and absent or perpetually tardy in online forums. Small group activities are probably the most dismaying and frustrating when there are varying levels of student preparation. I continue to grapple with how to lean into access and compassion without compromising my standards of academic integrity and excellence.

When was the last time you had a student visibly start paying more attention because of something you said? What were you saying? What were you doing with your body? One of the things I do that most consistently causes certain students to perk up is reference other languages. When trying to define theology I compare it to the Spanish Dios, which is a lot closer to the Greek theos than the English “God.” Similarly, the Spanish iglesia sounds a lot like the Greek ekklesia (it derives from it via Latin), which is useful for helping students remember what ecclesiology is, even if the spellings are different. My students are used to teachers and professors introducing new vocabulary by referencing the roots of the words, and similar words, in English. Their bodies, the surprise on their faces, tell me they find it shocking to hear Spanish and other non-English languages used in the classroom. However, the bodies that make up my students reflect a need for a multilingual focus. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, sixty-six million Americans (21.5%) live in households where a language other than English is spoken. Most, of course, also speak English. This reality is reflected in our classrooms. In a recent term, my 130 students collectively spoke Arabic, Dutch, French, Gaelic, German, Gujarati, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Spanish, Tagalog, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. At one school where I taught, 26% of my students were multilingual to some degree. In a larger city, at another institution where I served, 49% of my learners claimed two or more languages. I don’t know how these numbers reflect the broader campus communities of the universities where I teach, or the percentages in higher education as a whole. However, language is central to learning. How can we teach well if we don’t consider what languages our students speak? How can we design curriculum if we don’t consider their cultural and linguistic backgrounds? How can we help them develop their proficiencies in their other languages if we are not open to incorporating other languages in our teaching? This is not just an issue of pedagogy. It’s an issue of justice. We invest a lot in helping white students learn a second language in school, but typically devote minimal resources to helping native speakers learn to read and write in their non-English languages. At worst, we bar them from using their native language(s) out of the utterly mistaken (so says the research) conviction that doing so helps them learn English faster. Believing that students who grew up speaking Spanish or Polish or Arabic should be able to read and write in those languages by the end of college should not be a radical or rare position. I imagine some of the surprise of my using Spanish and other languages in class is that, as a white person, I don’t look like I should speak them. They’re not wrong. I’m a product of the U.S. education system. A native English speaker, I am functionally monolingual despite having studied Spanish, German, and biblical Greek. That doesn’t mean I can’t find ways to signal that I know my classrooms are populated by multilingual students. This might mean making comparisons to words I know in other languages. Or, providing students non-English editions of required readings. Or, encouraging students to use their other languages when conducting research. The tongue is part of the body. Language is part of embodied teaching. If I want to embrace my students’ identities, using their languages is a good place to start. It is a counter-imperial gesture, one that challenges the hierarchy of languages that equates English with power.

Earlier this year, the song, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” from the animated film, Encanto¸ emerged as a viral sensation. The film’s protagonist, Mirabel, is seeking counsel from her reclusive uncle, the aforenamed Bruno, who is difficult to find because their family has ostracized him for his propensity to speak uncomfortable truths. Both of my children, one in middle school and the other in elementary school, reported that nearly everyone was singing this track. My eldest child even offered to show me some of the countless covers of the song on TikTok and YouTube.        In my experience teaching at a freestanding seminary, I have observed that there are also students that theological educators don’t talk about, or talk less about, whether within our own institutions or across guild contexts, such as the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature. Our conversations often focus upon two kinds of students: the ones who inspire us and the ones who terrorize us. Amid what almost always feels like a demanding academic semester, it is easy to talk about the students who are enlivening our classrooms and motivating us to sharpen our pedagogical skills. And we rightly seek collegial support concerning those students who abuse, antagonize, and aggravate us for a myriad of reasons, including discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender identity, ability, nationality, and sexuality.   I can think of two kinds of students that we don’t talk about as much as the terrific and the terrible. The first is the tired student. I teach at a denominational seminary with increasing ecumenical, ethnic, and racial diversity within our student population. The Master of Divinity degree is required for ministerial ordination in the denomination to which my seminary belongs, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Therefore, our Presbyterian students are generally not full-time pastors during their studies with us. More of our students from different ecclesial traditions are already full-time pastors and seeking further education to augment their capacities for ministry. Some are bi-vocational pastors leading congregations and balancing multiple responsibilities. In addition to working at least two jobs, they are also primary caregivers for young children, aging parents, and other family members. The tired student I am describing is also exceedingly thankful. During the nationwide racial reckoning in response to the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd two years ago, my seminary implemented a broad and comprehensive plan for Black reparations, which included new scholarships that cover the full cost of tuition and fees for every admitted African American student. In addition, my seminary offers generous scholarships that support the entire cost of tuition for every other non-Black student in a first-level master’s degree program. For some of the students in my classroom, these scholarships have made it possible for them to pursue a theological education. But because all these scholarships require full-time enrollment, I encounter the tired student who is juggling my syllabus along with other family, ministry, and work commitments. One pastor who I admire shares this wise counsel utilizing the metaphor of juggling: One must discern which balls are made of rubber and which are made of glass when prioritizing one’s schedule. The “glass” tasks must not be dropped because they will shatter whereas the tasks that are made of rubber can fall to the ground. For the tired student, I am aware that my assignments and class sessions are more like rubber than glass, especially in comparison to their other responsibilities. The tired student is sometimes unable to show up or perform well on an assignment. Or the cost of showing up and performing well requires a herculean effort with substantial costs in terms of the tired student’s mental, physical, and psychological health. The second kind of student we don’t talk about is the triumphalist student. It is more precise to describe this student as one who comes from a more theologically conservative ecclesial context in comparison to my seminary. Some of my students are unfamiliar with historical-critical methods of biblical interpretation, postcolonial theology, and progressive Christianity. They have not heard of scholars such as Katie Geneva Cannon, Walter Brueggemann, and Kwok Pui-lan. They are unaccustomed to theological inquiry that identifies and criticizes some Christian doctrines and practices. Their conceptions of church history revolve around a search for examples of Christians enacting courageous witness and exemplifying the triumph of God’s goodness over evil. Yet renowned church historian Justo González observes the story of Christianity, when told fully and honestly, includes beautiful moments of awe-inspiring faith and ugly episodes where it is difficult to discern the divine presence. As an historian of Christianity in the United States, the only way that I can teach a full and honest history is to confront the active participation and complicity of Christians who committed and perpetuated the sins of settler colonialism, slavery, sexism, nativism, and other oppressive injustices. And my lessons do not always have heartwarming endings that uplift the soul. There are certainly moments of reflection and application, but some chapters of Christian history are sinful and irredeemable.      There is diversity with the “triumphalist student” I am describing such that I do not want to present this kind of student as a monolith. Some students experience our seminary classrooms as liberative spaces where they can expand their ways of thinking theologically about themselves, God, and Christian ministry. Other students undergo a complex process of educational formation with stages of disorientation and deconstruction preceding reorientation and reconstruction. And a few students remain resistant to our methods of pedagogy. We talk some about the “triumphalist student” who testifies to a metanoia from our curriculum, but we need to talk more about how these students return to congregations that are unprepared to receive their transformed approaches to ministry and theology.          

A tense moment in my classroom captured some of the changing dynamics at my seminary. We were learning about the rise of higher criticism within the history of biblical interpretation in the United States. As we were analyzing a lecture that Charles Augustus Briggs delivered at Union Theological Seminary in 1891, some students found Briggs’s honest grappling with factual errors in the Scriptures invigorating and resonated with his push for new interpretive methods distinct from the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. They were surprised and encouraged to encounter a scholar who declared that the “theory of inerrancy” was neither located in the Scriptures nor sanctioned in the ancient Christian creeds. Over one hundred years ago, Briggs excoriated the doctrine of inerrancy as “a ghost of modern evangelicalism to frighten children.” As I moved our discussion from this primary source to the ecclesial divisions that transpired in Briggs’s denomination (the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.) due in no small part to his scholarship, we reflected on how and where we see these ruptures today. In 1909, one presbytery in New York ordained a handful of ministerial candidates who did not affirm a belief in the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. In the following years, Presbyterians vigorously debated whether it was possible to be a Christian without attesting to the virgin birth, Christ’s bodily resurrection, and the actuality of Christ’s miracles as recorded in the Gospels. Some students shared that these divisions persist in their congregations and denominations today. One student wondered aloud if their presbytery would allow a candidate to express a nuanced and complex position on the virgin birth today. But my classroom was not only buzzing with excitement and collaborative energy; it was also buzzing with trepidation and anger. Some students remained quiet and a few hardly looked away from their notebook computer screens. Finally, one student shared that this was not what they expected to learn at our seminary and that they thought any notion of Christianity without the doctrines of inerrancy and the virgin birth was heretical and dangerous. Another student expressed frustration with the trajectory of our discussion. They thought it was appropriate to learn this history, but how their peers were talking about the Bible deeply troubled them. The student added that conversations like this one were precisely why mainline Protestant congregations were in decline and losing members. Student populations at my seminary and other PC(USA) schools have shifted in the twenty-first century. In 2000, most of the students at my seminary were white, domestic, and Presbyterian. Since then, there have been large increases in the enrollment of international students and students of color. Black students comprised approximately 4/5 of the incoming class in 2021. There are now fewer Presbyterian students than students from other Christian traditions. In addition to educating students across wider diversities of race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexuality, culture, and national origin, students have a broader range of theological viewpoints. When my classroom was predominantly Presbyterian, there were certainly differences on matters of biblical interpretation and belief. As the PC(USA) wrestled over the full inclusion of LGBTQIA+ persons, so too did the students in my classroom. But after the denomination made changes in its polity to permit the ordination of LGBTQIA+ pastors and allow ministers and sessions “to use their own discernment to conduct same-gender marriage ceremonies,” the enrollment of PC(USA) students opposed to these changes declined and the number of LGBTQIA+ students grew. These students, along with others seeking creative ways to enact intersectional justice in familiar and new ministries, are enlivening my classroom as they prompt and provoke us to fresh analyses and more expansive understandings of humanity and the divine throughout creation. The anxieties around this discussion of the virgin birth illustrate another shift. There are more students from theologically conservative, evangelical, and fundamentalist traditions at my seminary today than there were twenty years ago. Some have deliberately chosen to enroll here because they too are yearning to expand their knowledge of God in an open and inclusive learning environment. They relish opportunities to excavate the depths of many theologies and ask the probing questions that they were discouraged from expressing in their churches. Others remain firmly rooted in their traditions and perpetually frustrated. They question why a seminary that is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion ignores their religious interpretations and cultural perspectives. As an Asian American with firsthand experience in conservative, evangelical, mainline, and progressive Protestant contexts, I am acutely aware of both the promise and peril of my changing classroom. The increasing diversity presents new possibilities for learning with a student population that more closely represents the breadth of Christianity locally and globally. Both the church and the world are bigger than the denomination to which my seminary belongs. Yet, there are chasms of difference between progressive and conservative Protestants on foundational issues of doctrine and human dignity. It can be difficult to find common ground when some of us stand so far apart from one another. However, the instruction in classrooms like mine must meet the demands of more complexity with more clarity about learning covenants and pedagogical commitments. My cultivation of a hospitable learning environment distinguishes between welcoming all students and facilitating the public expressions of their private beliefs to uphold my seminary’s intersectional commitment to the flourishing of women, persons of color, and LGBTQIA+ persons in the classroom. It also requires a differentiation between conversion and education. I must continually discern how my students are learning and acknowledge that, for a few, the gaps between their learning expectations and my teaching philosophy will remain significant.

WHAT DIVERSITY IS DOING If you are on the underside of it—on the wrong end of the seeming hospitable invitation—you are likely surviving diversity. Diversity is hardly a cordial experience. It is tolerated, lived through—sometimes agonizingly. To understand this sentiment, we must center the recipient of such an invitation—the one whose presence is absent and thus summoned to right the longstanding wrong of a monochromatic existence, institutional or otherwise. Minorities of all stripes know the damaging diversity dynamic all too well. A majority community’s desire for minoritized presence, voice, stories, or sharing of experience is merely ornament to the core of a preexisting context. The desire for diversity is not organic, but reactive. To process one’s being desired as an afterthought is frustrating at best. And it is so because diversity veils the reality that so many name without truly naming it at all: we all need each other. We all need each other. In many cases, the marginal person needs basic human recognition from the majority community because, whether or not they want it to, this recognition and basic respectful treatment means something to them. Marginalized people do not want to feel like additions to an environment already established, adornment on the exterior of a vocalized ambition to be “diverse.” In many instances the majority person simply wants to do the right thing, for doing the right thing implies that they are the right thing—that they are being good people. So, they arrive at a place where they want to “survey the land,” they do so, and decide it is too bland or monolithic. It needs people that don’t look like them; said people are subsequently invited into the space in order for it to not be bland or monolithic anymore because again, this is the right thing to do, and good people do the right thing. So, in the midst of parsing out what this diversity thing even means, we have people who long to feel like people and people who long to feel like good people. “Needing the other” is present in both camps. These deep-seated feelings of desire are genuine, complex, and even serpentine. Surviving another’s moral mission in order to conjure your existence in this world is a twisted venture. These desires are coded, tortuous, and agenda-ed, but I wonder if they are brave, for I believe that to broach a diversity conversation honestly, we need brave people.   BRAVE PEOPLE Brave people not only recognize that an imbalanced practice of desire is at work in diversity work, but they ask why: why do we need each other? They ask the hard questions and expect real answers. And when they don’t get them, they are not afraid to tell it like it is: we need each other because power structures and systems have designed social life in such a way that one group’s need is material and the other’s need is moral. Brave people ask how the moral and material are entangled—how one’s goodness is tied to another’s corporality, how right moral standing to one is signaled in basic human recognition of another. (The answer is connected to the religious, but that’s for another conversation.) Brave people see the connections others simply cannot acknowledge or refuse to acknowledge, for they are a little too close to the foundation of the life they’ve worked so hard to build. Brave people in the academy upon hearing the question, “How do we begin to tackle diversity in the classroom?” respond that it is the wrong question. They answer slowly explaining that it only is so because we have not even figured out how to acknowledge what the term “diversity” alone might do in people of the institution, students, staff, and faculty alike. Brave people ask questions assuming that we are all human—and thus we want human things like recognition, and thus do human things like avoid what is hard. Diversity in the classroom, they answer, begins with the teacher, a representative of the institution. What the teacher feels, what they emote, is what the students will feel. Look at the teacher; there is information there. Is the teacher surviving, too, or are they intellectually intrigued by this diversity charge? Do diversity initiatives tear away at their bodies, too, or are they energized and excited to be around something new? Is diversity draining to them, too, or entertaining to them? Do not look away: what is happening within the teachers reflects what lives inside the institution. Brave people ask: what is inside the institution? And, do we want it?   MASKS AND MAGIC To be clear: brave people can come from either group – more likely the diverse persons diversely “hosted” and not the majority persons “hosting” diversity—but they distinguish themselves by taking their line of questioning a step further than naming “what is.” They risk their voices to ask why what is has continued to exist, what it is propping up. Then they ask if we need that structure at all to live well in this world. Other brave people will say no, we do not this structure. Fearful people wearing brave people’s attire will worry about how to exist in this world without some kind of structure in place. Though they want to call themselves brave by agreeing diversity the right thing, their bravery is a mask. Since diversity is survived, we in the academy, especially the theological academy, need brave people. We need to empower them with influence like presidencies, deanships, VP positions, majority board demographics, abundant resources, and decision-making abilities. We need to let them live in a structure different than the conditions that warrant diversity in the first place. We need to take a step back (for several years—probably for decades or centuries) and see what magic their bravery can conjure. Maybe, then, we can be magic, too.

Originally, I was planning to write about “decolonizing”—our syllabi, our curriculum, our teaching. I had a title and everything. Thankfully, though, a colleague reminded me of Tuck and Yang’s important article “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor” (2012) and their argument that “decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools.” In a related post entitled “Do Not ‘Decolonize’… If You Are Not Decolonizing: Progressive Language and Planning Beyond a Hollow Academic Rebranding,” Nayantara Sheoran Appleton writes of how “decolonizing has been co-opted from a vibrant and critical engagement to an academic buzzword” and how such hollow engagement is “sloppy and opportunistic.” Ouch. And . . . she was right. I was planning to use “decolonization” in this more metaphorical sense, because it’s a popular term right now, but with no intention, as Tucker and Yang write, of mentioning “Indigenous peoples, our/their struggles for the recognition of our/their sovereignty, or the contributions of Indigenous intellectuals and activists to theories and frameworks of decolonization.” I’m thankful for this kind of “call in.” Okay, so what was I actually trying to write about then? Fortunately, Appleton offers labels for other valuable pedagogical efforts we might be pursuing (all, delightfully, d-words too): “diversify your syllabus and curriculum; digress from the cannon; decentre knowledge and knowledge production; devalue hierarchies; disinvest from citational power structures; and diminish some voices and opinions in meetings, while magnifying others.” Aha. It turns out what I was trying to work on was diversifying. In these efforts, I am guided by this “Inclusion by Design” tool, a worksheet for surveying your syllabus and course design, which was created by some of my very favorite colleagues (and which they’ve helpfully summarized in this Faculty Focus). Some questions from this self-evaluation tool that I use to critically examine my own teaching include: To what extent do some of the learning objectives aim at diversity- or inclusion-related knowledge, skills, or attitudes? To what extent do teaching activities meet the needs of diverse learners . . . ? To what extent do the course materials, such as readings, provide a full spectrum of perspectives on topics? To what extent does the course material represent a variety of voices? What unwritten messages does the syllabus convey about the course, content, and learning? Is there a “hidden curriculum” embedded in the syllabus? I appreciate the wide range of considerations that the tool offers here, from learning outcomes to teaching activities to course materials to even what might be “hidden.” In our course materials, it’s far too easy to march a parade of white, “Western,” men in front of our students: Durkheim, Eliade, Frazer, James, Tylor, Girard, Marx, Freud, Weber, Geertz, Smart, Tweed, J.Z. Smith, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Huston Smith, all the Smiths. How can I move beyond, or offer critiques of, this “canon,” to allow my students to consider other important contributions to (and omissions or silences from) the field? In my assignments, how do I privilege certain ways of knowing or representing that knowledge and how can I do differently? Do I inadvertently embody the characteristics of white supremacy culture, such as worship (no pun intended!) of the written word, in the way I organize class discussions, arrange our schedule, create my rubrics? And, of course, questions about my particular syllabus or learning environment can’t help but lead me to reflect on our field, as a whole. It’s no secret that theology and religious studies have some Christian, colonial baggage. (I like assigning the first part of this Schilbrack article to students on this very point.) There are no easy answers for any of us here—and I don’t imagine that I’ll have this all sorted out in the next month, by the time the new academic year begins. What I am committed to is this kind of critical examination and the diversification—not yet the decolonization—of my own teaching. Will you join me?

Education is the process of learning and knowing, an undertaking unrestricted to our schools, curriculums and textbooks. Rather, it is a holistic process that continues all throughout our lives. Even mundane, regular events and occurrences around us are educational in some way or another. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that our lives without education would be stagnant, hollow even. No change would occur, no milestones would be reached. We would float in the same place without meaning. Thus, we organize the dissemination of knowledge not just to give meaning to others, but to ourselves. When we educate a person, we can shift a world; to educate a person, passes on meaning from one person to the next; to educate a person, changes the world. Teachers possess such a power. We teachers and professors should find immense meaning in our work—especially when the role has been recently reconstructed to something radically new. We must challenge ourselves to find inspiration again during a time when teaching and education has been entirely digitized to muted chatrooms and emails, forcing the traditional to become innovative, and the personal to become impersonal. In this moment when the comforts and familiarities of regular life has been put on pause, and slowly started again, we reflect on how to make use of the sudden changes brought on during the pandemic. The fervent discussions about race in America remain at the top of our concerns. It’s timely that attention to the racial and economic divide during the crisis have turned this omnipresent national issue into an urgent and revolutionary world protest given that Covid-19 cases and deaths have targeted black and brown communities. It reminds professors that we cannot forget to tackle basic struggles, and inform others that such a struggle even exists. We must teach our students to be actively anti-racist, and even further, to understand how racism intersects with other forms of prejudice to create stronger forms of discrimination. Be it one’s gender, body type, economic status or sexual orientation, we must remind ourselves and our students that no one issue stands alone, but converges with others. Susan Shaw and I co-wrote a book, Intersectional Theology which talks about how there are no single axis issues, but multiple axis issues. Our identities are not dimensional but multi-dimensional; we understand ourselves through the very personal experience of our gender, sexuality, ethnicity, ableism, class etc., One’s identity is the converging of multi-axis identities. These identities all shape us and define who we are. But these identities are also points of justice as racism, patriarchy, homophobia embed themselves in the fabric of our society. In doing intersectional theology, we recognize that it comes with the requirement to create social justice. In the same way, we want our teaching to be meaningful, to address social issues and to further justice. How can we do this? The books that we need to advocate for students to read must be racially and gender diverse, written by a diverse breadth of writers, covering a diversity of perspective and subject matters. The history of theology is mostly written by men. It is crucial that we listen to voices other than white men’s to get a deeper and more expansive theological understanding. Therefore, pedagogically, we need to urge students to read non-white books[1]. We can strategically put them in our syllabus, include authors of color whose work touch on justice, and also select them for their assignments. Projects in class and outside the class can also incorporate social justice elements. I know in some seminaries and colleges, service learning is part of the curriculum. In those schools, part of the justice work is included in the courses throughout their studies. Early on in our schooling we are required to volunteer or participate in service learning, however this idea of justice work should also be upheld by professors in later education, adjusting the work for students studying for their bachelor’s, Master’s, or higher. Whoever the student or professor, whatever the format, setting or institution, informing and encouraging students to promote justice should be lifted as one of the highest priorities in our teaching. Going forward, we can utilize social media as a vital tool to share information and ideas. We can encourage students to blog (for their seminary, church or denominational blogsite), share, or write social justice posts. Social activism on the internet can be a powerful source of information sharing, encouragement and engagement. Political petitions are shared online, protest events are shared and organizations who do the work can also be shared. These elements can be tied into the course content and assignments. Another powerful tool is the media: movies, videos, music, etc. which used in teaching can make for a more poignant, dynamic tactic to promote social justice. I have used movies such as “Sophie’s Choice,” “God on Trial,” and “The Mission” to raise awareness of the social injustices such as anti-semitism, slavery, and colonialism and how to move forward. As we continue to teach during a pandemic, we can harness all the tools we have available online to express our plights, our activism, and our hopes for the uncertain future. We can be motivated by the challenges of virtual learning, and develop new ways to encourage community engagement, even at a distance. Community building, church building can be done online as COVID-19 continues to spread and spike across the United States. The professor has essential power not just in the classroom, but for the next generation. If the professor can also exemplify what they teach in their own lives, it will make a stronger impact in the classroom.  Practice what you preach can also apply to practice what you teach. Teaching should be meaningful and substantive—but above all, it should be transformative. Let yourself be open to the quiet, and grand transformations in the everyday; the ones that shift your consciousness and provide an experience to learn from and be shared. In this way, we, as professors and learners, can continuously provide pieces of wisdom to promote justice and demand change. [1]A few examples of books to consider reading and adding to your syllabus: De La Torre, Miguel, Burying White Privilege, (Grand Rapids:Eerdmans, 2018) Cone, James, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2011) Kim, Grace Ji-Sun, Embracing the Other (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015) Townes, Emilie, Troubling in My Soul, (Maryknoll, Orbis Books, 2015)  

Thanks to the collegiality of Dr. Mitzi J. Smith and the generosity of the Wabash Center, I have the opportunity to engage in learning that moves beyond professional development to include personal transformation. This summer I will participate as a learner in an intensive that Mitzi will teach on The Gospel of Luke and African-American Interpretation. Mitzi is J. Davidson Philips Professor of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary and a leading womanist biblical scholar. She and CTS have graciously agreed to include me and 21 students from Bethany Theological Seminary and Earlham School of Religion in the course. Mitzi and I are also co-directing a Wabash Center small grant project titled, “The Challenges and Effective Pedagogy of a Trans-Contextual Online Collaboration for an African-American/Womanist Hermeneutics Course during Covid-19.”  Dr. Marcia Riggs (also of CTS), and Dr. Mary Hess (Luther Theological Seminary) have joined the project as consultants, bringing expertise in the areas of ethics and education. The grant creates space for us to reflect on pedagogy and social justice in ways that go beyond our usual reflective practice. This blog is a way to make our learning public. Both the course and the grant project feel challenging to me--a white, straight, cisgendered male with a history of privilege. Unlike Mitzi and many of my students, I have not experienced biblical texts being used as a basis for marginalizing me, requiring me to be submissive because of my gender, or excluding me from leadership. In most churches I have attended, it is socially acceptable to ignore biblical texts that challenge my middle-class lifestyle, such as Luke 14:33. Students in my courses are welcome to “talk back” about the Bible with or without the “sass” that Mitzi encourages;[1] I, however, have been more inclined to emphasize that New Testament texts are inspiring and worthy of careful study despite their flaws. Mitzi’s hermeneutics of suspicion may challenge me to critique biblical interpretations and texts more assertively in light of core biblical values such as justice, mercy, and love. My approaches to hermeneutics and pedagogy have long emphasized inclusion of a wide diversity of interpreters with the understanding that Jesus often speaks through people who have been marginalized. My revised introductory survey course is now titled “Reading the New Testament Contextually,” and it includes True to Our Native Land as essential reading.[2] I am fluent enough to teach in Spanish and have enjoyed leading bilingual intercultural hermeneutics seminars in Puerto Rico and California. I have also had the privilege of team teaching with several Nigerian scholars through video-linked classrooms in Jos, Plateau State, and Richmond, Indiana. Those efforts, however, have not qualified me to foreground the experiences of African-American communities in all the ways that justice, love, and good teaching require. In order to understand and embody Jesus’ teaching faithfully in this time, I need to recognize the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on communities of color, especially on African-American communities. I need to speak out more forcefully against the discriminatory police violence that has continued unabated even as other activities shut down for the pandemic. I need to engage more deeply with African-American neighbors and biblical interpreters in order to hear what Jesus is saying now through them and through scripture. And I need to step up efforts to recognize and confront racism in myself as well as in society. In a recent consultation, Mitzi, Marcia, Mary, and I exchanged ideas for helping students become aware of their own contexts and identities, including their experiences of race. Marcia reminded us that storytelling rooted in personal and communal experience is an essential practice of womanist theology. Mary and Marcia each suggested prompts that could encourage students to write thoughtfully about the identities and experiences they bring to a course in African-American and womanist biblical interpretation. For example, “What are systemic patterns of racism that you observe in general society today? How do you participate (even inadvertently) in these patterns?”[3] We agreed that it is important for both students and professors to know their contexts, to remember their own stories, and to tell them in ways that create space for honest conversation. I plan to share more of my story and learning as the project continues, and I look forward to interacting with posts by Mitzi and other participants. As a reader of this blog, your constructive comments are also welcome as we journey together toward deeper understanding. Read about Mitzi Smith's Experience with Dan Ulrich   [1] See Mitzi J. Smith, Womanist Sass and Talk Back: Social (In)Justice, Intersectionality, and Biblical Interpretation (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018); also Mitzi J. Smith and Yung Suk Kim. Toward Decentering the New Testament : A Reintroduction (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018). [2] Brian K. Blount, ed. True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007). [3] Rima Vesely-Flad, “‘Saying the Wrong Thing’: Experiences of Teaching Race in the Classroom,” Spotlight on Teaching, Religious Studies News (November 5, 2018), https://rsn.aarweb.org/spotlight-on/teaching/anti-racism/saying-the-wrong-thing, accessed June 18, 2020.