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When I began my first full-time professor gig in 2008, I quickly learned to be fiercely protective of my own time. I understood that the long game of an academic career necessitated the publication of my first book. I loved teaching, but I intentionally restricted my own preparation and grading time in order to turn my thesis into a book. This protection of time was particularly difficult as a new faculty member embodied as a Korean American, and facing the faculty service minority tax. Over time, I published that first book, received tenure, and eventually promotion to full professor. With the security of tenure, I was more open to paying the minority tax, but not out of burden. I would happily serve in ways that are generative for Asian American communities, while protecting the time of junior scholars. I understood this service as an expression of my vocational call as a theological educator and biblical scholar. In 2020, I accepted a position at a new institution in Atlanta. In the midst of pandemic, nearly all of my classroom and service interactions were online and via Zoom. These circumstances severely limited my visibility to the dynamics of my new school. Accordingly, I deliberately planned to spend my first-year learning and acclimating to the institutional culture. But the horrific events of the March 16 Atlanta spa shootings forced a pivot. All of a sudden, my institution had to confront this terrible tragedy within our city limits that symbolized anti-Asian racism, patriarchy, Orientalization, and class oppression. I no longer had the option to sit back, learn, and acclimate. With my vocational call and protection as a mid-career faculty member, I pivoted to accelerate my own service to the community. In the ensuing days, I made sure to mention the shootings in each of my classes, if only to allow students to see my own grief and anger. I recognized that many of these students had limited exposure to AAPI perspectives. This tragedy begat a commensurate responsibility at the institutional level. I was grateful to be part of diverse faculty with several fellow professors of Asian descent. I ended up doing quite a bit of public and private care in the week following the shooting. I had speaking events on three consecutive days: recording a sermon for a future chapel, giving the devotional message at a prayer vigil of remembrance, and participating in a panel discussion on anti-Asian racism with over four hundred participants. Of course, I was also teaching a full-time load. By the end of the third event, I was exhausted. The weekend after the panel, a national organization held a major AAPI rally in Atlanta to address the shootings in the context of the surge of anti-Asian violence. A friend flew in from Chicago to speak at the event. Another friend was driving in from Nashville to attend. The rally was held fifteen minutes from my house. I did not attend the rally. If you are anticipating that I used this time to catch up on grading or work on my research, then you are going to be disappointed. I did none of those things. I used the time to rewatch episodes 7 to 9 of Star Wars and cook Korean pork belly for the family. I needed that time to restore my emotional and physical strength. A pivot is not a 180 degree turn. Rather, a pivot is merely a shift. Although the shootings compelled an urgent commitment to service, I did not abandon my commitment to a vocational life that is centered and sustaining. I have tried to honor these values from the beginning of my career. I plan to continue to honor them in the future when I pivot to senior scholar. This is how I commit to the long game.

Twenty-five springs ago I sat in a class on African American literature. On a small, rural midwestern campus, this course was taught by a white professor. Two of the seven Black students on campus at that time were in the class, the remaining twenty-five or so students reflected the demographics of our predominantly white institution. One Monday we filed into class and learned that a fight had taken place over the weekend. The details were still emerging, but one of the seats in our classroom was empty. The one detail that had been confirmed: racist slurs were a precipitating factor for the physical violence. In this moment, the professor faced a choice: to continue apace with our scheduled reading of Beloved, A Gathering of Old Men, and other, now canonical works, hewing close to the text; or, to break the fourth wall and talk about what happened, call us to the uncomfortable acknowledgment that we could not confine our discussions of race to the characters in books that could be sold back to the bookstore when the course ended. Like most students, I suspect, I was largely unaware of all that went into that deceptively simple choice. This past week, as I prepared for a class discussion on Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist and Fania Davis’s synthesis of racial justice and restorative justice, my class and all other classes were canceled by our administrators in a show of support for a student organized walk-out. The walk-out was a response to a blatant act of racist hate speech that targeted one student. Hundreds gathered on our main courtyard to listen to their peers speak their truths about being a person of color on our campus. For many students at our predominantly white institution this was, as they later acknowledged in class, the first time they had heard unfiltered, unmediated stories about the lived experience of blackness from people they actually knew (or thought they knew?). The night before the walk-out, I thought about my own professor’s choice twenty-five years ago. I had no doubt we would center the incident and the campus response in the coming weeks in our class discussions. And I have no doubt that my immediate clarity on this choice owes a debt to the professor who chose discomfort over distance, modeling the way in which good teaching demands recognition of the explicit and implicit ways the world consistently breaks into our classrooms. With so much political hand-wringing about conflating activism and academics and looking over the shoulder as some iterations of  “cancel culture” paralyze our classroom discussions, tempting us towards pedagogical paths of least resistance and convenient half-truths, I am left to wonder if our classrooms can still serve as activating spaces, as spaces where the world doesn’t just break in, but where we prepare students to break out into the world. I want to believe that this is possible, realizable, and not just part of the trite, pedagogically elusive language of university mission statements and branding slogans. But I confess that one-on-one conversations with students after class this week—in a course intentionally focused on racial equity—have tempered my optimism about the classroom as an activating space. Or, perhaps it has once again reminded me of the perennial, now hyper-polarized and politicized, challenge of teaching: what activates one student often deactivates another. With its now ubiquitous undercurrent of subtweets and their offline consequences, is the classroom the right place for these conversations? For the moment—no, for the movement—my answer has to be yes. The impossible possibility of conversations about race in the classroom remains for me a pedagogical, even if paradoxical, imperative. Like Reinhold Niebuhr’s impossible possibility of the love ideal, conversations about race in the classroom confront us with what we know to be true and right in our assertions of basic human dignity, even as these conversations remind us of how often we fail to fully actualize the ideal by which we are guided. In recognition of that gap and our moral obligations as teachers to stand in it, I share, with no small amount of trepidation, the email I sent to my class the night before the walk-out, my own attempt at reclaiming the classroom as an activating space not in spite of, but in the midst of its impossibility. Message to Living in a Diverse World Class, March 2021 Hello Students, I had planned to address the hate incidents in our class discussion tomorrow. The tragic irony is not lost on me that our focus in this week’s reading is the intersection of racial justice and restorative justice as outlined in the chapter by Fania Davis. In the days and weeks ahead, I ask that you consider what is your role to play in supporting students directly and indirectly impacted by this incident as well as in addressing the elements of our campus culture that give rise to these types of incidents. The framework of restorative justice centers the needs of the victims even as it makes clear that harms caused by acts of hate and violence extend out into the community and, therefore, require both individual and community responses. We are all trying to sort out how it is that we have come to this moment in history when hate speech is too often conflated with freedom of expression. And, tragically, we are bearing witness on our campus and in our wider culture to the normalization of violence this conflation inevitably leads to. In this moment, I want to challenge us to move back into the uncomfortable space of talking directly about racism and anti-racism as they manifest offline in our very midst; it is, for me, one necessary way we must hold ourselves accountable. This is not about reducing these incidents to a “teachable moment.” This is about the distance we too often try to maintain between the classroom and the world. And how these incidents reveal this distance for the illusion that it is. The “world” breaks into our classroom, regularly. Our denial of this fact is, itself, a form of white, heteronormative privilege. In these moments, I think it is also imperative that we ask: can the classroom also break into the world? Can what we do together in class the remainder of this semester be responsive to, and a form of taking responsibility for, the injustices that shape individual students’ lives on our campus in radically disparate ways? At a minimum, I think we owe this to one another in our class, but more importantly, we owe this to those targeted by the hate and violence. In closing, I offer I drafted in response to national racial and religious hate incidents over the past couple of years, words I had hoped (perhaps naively) would never be needed as a response to incidents on our campus: Let us stand together committed to forming our lives in this community, daily, through practices of hospitality and not hate, in acts of compassion and not callousness, and as witnesses to the promise of peace and not the pathology of violence. While our various religious and spiritual traditions call us to imagine a world when this daily work is no longer necessary, they are not naïve to the world as it is. As wisdom from the Jewish tradition reminds us: “It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but neither are you free to refrain from it.”

Sex, money, politics: all the things we are told not to talk about. However, as the ethics professor at an Episcopal/Anglican seminary which draws diverse students from across the theological spectrum, teaching on these controversial issues is an important and challenging part of my job. As a professor, it’s easy for me to believe that my responsibility in teaching on controversial issues extends only to giving a compelling lecture or leading an animated discussion. However, unless controversial issues are presented in a context in which the students and I are open to learning and changing, there is always a risk that the class simply confirms the students who already agreed with me in their convictions and alienates the students who disagree, making their future openness to change even less likely. Rather, true transformational pedagogy requires not just teaching concepts, but incorporation into a community which creates the conditions for transformation. In February of 1940, Dorothy Day considered the transformation required in order for the members of the Catholic Worker to confront the difficulties of working for “a new heaven and a new earth, wherein justice dwelleth.” Day described how this work depends on God’s grace, but also demands radical change on the part of the human participants. In fact, it requires “indoctrination”—bringing people into the doctrine of the “mystical body of Christ.” Indoctrination is not simply the reception of information, but actual incorporation—becoming one body—with the community. Incorporation requires formation, which is achieved in part through shared practices such as worship (daily attendance at Mass and communal rosaries), community (carried out in kitchens and at the table), and external engagement (political activism and care of the poor). In the rest of this post, I will consider how these same practices are key for developing a community in which transformative pedagogy regarding controversial issues is possible. First, Day examines how the practice of worship highlights the “correlation” between the spiritual and the material while also emphasizing the primacy of the spiritual. Looking beyond the physical to the spiritual expands the imagination by “quicken[ing] the perceptions” to appreciate other material and spiritual experiences than one’s own. Creating fertile ground for engagement with controversial issues in the classroom requires exactly this type of transformation of the imagination. In addition, worship teaches patience and charity. Confronting our own limitations in contrast to God’s goodness should ensure that “we will not lose faith in those around us, no matter how stumbling their progress is.” In Christian seminaries in a liturgical tradition such as my own, communal practices of worship provide the perfect opportunity to encourage students to look beyond their material circumstances to seek “the presence of God” in their analysis of controversial issues. However, any pedagogical practices which move students beyond the classroom into a mode of reflective engagement—with the beauty of art or nature especially—can also prove valuable resources in a nonreligious or interfaith setting for transformation of imagination and expansion of perspective. Day’s description of the communal practices of kitchen and table point to the context which prepares people to engage with controversial questions. In the time of COVID, we have come to realize how important eating together is to create the bond and trust required for vulnerability. In addition, the cooperation of cooking together or other shared creative activities strengthen and reinforce a communal bond. Creating space for students to engage in these types of activities, whether as a whole class or in small groups, creates the conditions for true openness regarding challenging issues. Through these communal practices, students and professors begin to experience the reality of their identity as a communal body. Like a body, students incorporated in the community will start to feel the hurts and joys of one another as their own—preparing them to approach controversial questions which impact the lives of others with new empathy and urgency. Finally, Day describes the practices of service and activism which are the outgrowth of communal and spiritual practices. These actions, especially those which engage the community in service with the poor, build on the first two categories, as well as providing the end which guides them. Of course, these practices are more easily obtained in service-learning programs. However, even taking advantage of opportunities to genuinely serve others in the community can enhance solidarity within the community while also expanding the participants’ awareness of the sorrows and challenges of the world. Through shared engagement in these practices, students and professor gain a deeper understanding of the impact of controversial questions on people’s lives, confront the limited nature of solutions currently available, and come to appreciate the need not only for knowledge, but action. Will all these practices make teaching controversial issues easier? Not necessarily. In fact, they may complicate emotional engagement and can add to the administrative burden. In addition, they require the professor to surrender pedagogical illusions of grandeur or omniscience. However, as Day reminds us, “little works” matter, and through these small practices both we and our students may change and ultimately grow.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuHStsvmaG8[/embedyt]

Democracy, in its essence, and genius, is imaginative love for and identification with a community with which, much of the time and in many ways, one may be in profound disagreement. ~ Marilynne Robinson[1] These words hung like a silent invocation on the threshold of my Truth, Beauty, and Goodness class this fall. They appeared overnight as the election neared, scripted elegantly on a scrap of paper and tucked with intentional inconspicuousness into the door plate of our fifth-floor classroom. Robinson’s words were a sentiment I had shared with students often throughout the past years as we tried to make sense of, well, everything, I guess. I was grateful for the daily reminder—and the “guerilla gardening” of the student who planted these seeds of wisdom in hallways and stairwells around campus. For weeks, this class of mostly first-year undergraduates checking off their philosophy credits had been carefully cultivating our capacity for dialogue across difference, employing a weekly community of inquiry model to probe issues like kneeling for the national anthem, the removal of statues and monuments, and the place of religion in the public sphere. The weekly community of inquiry was set up with a short, accessible article that provided an example of the theoretical perspectives we were exploring that week. For example, during a week focused on public memory and art, we read a local news article on the removal of a large artistic rendering of a Native American chief that had, for over half a century, looked out over the Mississippi River, just a mile from our campus. I have attempted versions of communities of inquiry before but not as the primary pedagogical ground for a course. This, however, was a new class in a newly designed major, Ethics, Culture, and Society. And, well, it was 2020. It would be too much to claim that this consistent, student-driven, structured conversation resulted in the airing of all perspectives on an issue, though based on student evaluations, I do think we often approached that Aristotelean “mark of an educated mind”: the ability “to entertain a thought without accepting it.” In so doing, perhaps we bent a little bit further towards Robinson’s generous vision of democracy—if not love for, at least identification with those whom we disagree. If any class was primed, then, for a post-election conversation on November 4, it was this one. But an hour before class, I balked. Walking into class, I pulled the Robinson scrap (secular mezuzah?) from its perch, read it aloud to the class, paused, read aloud passages from books I had hastily pulled from my shelves—books that had always grounded me and helped me to understand, in the words of Ellen Ott Marshall, “moral agency under constraint.” I told the students we were not going to talk about the election. Instead, I tasked them with finding poems and passages, songs and speeches. We were going to animate our classroom space with the voices of those who help us imagine and bring into being the world we want to live in—in my mind’s eye an attempt, however naïve, at some kind of performative utterance. After ten minutes, students read aloud from their excavations of hope; no commentary, just the words given audible breath. There would be time and space later for inquiry and dialogue—for example, a letter to the next president expressing their individual hopes for binding up the morally wounded nation, a group project focused on the possibilities of truth and reconciliation processes as response to specific events in the U.S. But for the moment, we needed to be a community of invocation, not inquiry, (re)making our classroom as sacred space insofar as it was set apart from the distorted vocabulary and disordered pathos of our contemporary political discourse—distortion and disorder that make identification with, much less love for, those with whom we disagree an improbability. Walking out of class that day, like many other days, I wasn’t sure if I had made the right choice. There were no obvious, immediate signs from students. They had participated dutifully, the mood of the class largely subdued—in part, I suspect, because many of these first-time voters had stayed up most of the night watching, waiting for a certainty that has, until recently, remained frustratingly elusive. Later that day, though, I received an email from a student: “I was nervous to come to this class after all the election stuff going on because others are very out there with their opinions and it sometimes freaks me out to talk in the class. So, wanted to say thank you!” As seems true of most classes, this student had other kindred spirits in the classroom, peers hesitant to make publicly known their perspectives during the semester on a politically fraught topic. But this day in class, many of these same students found their voice for the first time by invoking the words of others, a tentative first step, perhaps, in the movement towards exercising a kind of moral agency under constraint. And this has given me pause to consider the conditions necessary for creating and sustaining a community of inquiry in our classrooms during this tumultuous time. Going forward, one of those conditions in my classroom will be consistently holding open space for students to perform public speech acts that give voice to their perspectives, not merely as imitation, but as invocation. Notes [1] Marilynn Robinson, “Imagination and Community,” in When I Was a Child I Read Books (New York: Picador, 2013), 27-28. Also excerpted and reprinted at https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/imagination-community

COVID-19 forced a long-overdue reckoning with various problematic aspects of the academy. Ranging from creating equitable classrooms and workspaces to securing meaningful job placements for Black, Indigenous, and Latinx faculty, the issues that we are now dealing with “out loud” are ones that many of us have been contending with for a long time. Considering the challenges students face in this COVID-19 world, I suggest that we take close stock of how we communicate with one another. What kind of language is in the welcome sign we are holding out for our students during these unprecedented times? I propose that we begin our journey toward pedagogical justice with our syllabi. Specifically, I want to remove punitive language in higher education syllabi. For context, I arrived at this topic as a result of the move to online learning in the spring of 2020. Due to the pandemic, higher learning institutions across the country quickly transitioned to online learning when it became clear that social distancing must be enacted immediately to “flatten the curve” of coronavirus transmissions. The summer offered a reprieve from the chaos of the spring. Many institutions launched programs to equip faculty to teach online, some for the first time in their careers. I was hired as a facilitator by a university to learn and deliver a standardized online teaching curriculum to a cohort of nearly thirty professors in the humanities. The end goal was for professors to revise their fall syllabi to reflect some of the best practices they learned during their three-week crash course. While reviewing the syllabi my cohort submitted, I noticed a trend that starkly stuck out to me because of the temporal proximity to the police killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tony McDade, and Rayshard Brooks. Professors, both junior and senior in tenure, were using punitive language in their syllabi. I was shocked by the use of words like “penalty” and “penalizing.” This made me wonder, “Are professors actually comfortable using punitive language and punishment as a fear tactic for control of their classrooms when instead they could say “points will be deducted?” The etymology of the word “penalty” originates circa 1500. By the 1510s, “penalty” came to specifically mean “the punishment laid out by law or judicial decision for a violation of the law.”[1] The etymological example for “penalty” suffices to get my point across without going down a rabbit hole about the origin of other terms or on a Foucauldian tangent about punishment. The words we use matter. As a scholar of religion, this concern is about more than semantics. The discipline of religious studies spends an inordinate amount of time defining terms and unpacking language. Personally, I have lost count of the number of classroom hours I spend debating the meaning of terms and arguing for the continued use or disuse of certain words. Like other disciplines in the humanities, religious studies is one where language and context matter. In light of the pandemic, issues of social justice, and police violence against Black bodies that arose in 2020, I want to understand why professors continue to use punitive language—which clearly ties into the penal system—in their syllabi. I also want to advocate for removing punitive language as a necessary first step of pedagogical justice. The words “penalty” and “penalize” convey that the power differential between teachers and students is so great that teachers not only have the ability but somehow the right to inflict punishment on students if they fail to perform to a certain standard. I am equating the use of the words “penalty” and “penalize” to punishment not just based on etymology or contemporary definitions, but instead based on how I saw them used in syllabi. The samples below illustrate my point: “Late assignments are penalized.” “You may miss one meeting without penalty.” “I will penalize students who merely pretend to be present in the synchronous meeting…” No matter what privileges a teacher has bestowed upon them, punishment should never be one of them. Effective and just pedagogy is a two-way street where learning and teaching are always in constant motion, coming and going side-by-side. This means that while the academy might differentiate between teacher and student, the apt educator knows that this difference is arbitrary and detrimental to the dialogical nature of effective teaching. While this issue of language should have been addressed before the pandemic and the most current police violence events, we must tackle this head-on as scholars of religion at this particular moment in history. As a result of the pandemic and the needs of her students, Yohana Junker suggests, “A set of pedagogical choices that are trauma-informed may prove helpful in designing our fall courses as the global pandemic has barely subsided, [and] our communities continue to be in danger…. A trauma-informed approach would not only affirm that suffering, pain, and distress is present among us but would also seek to actively mitigate or foresee potential challenges.”[2] Through an approach like Junker’s “pedagogy of affection,” the real-world concerns of students take center stage in the classroom. Socially-just pedagogies are crucial, particularly in times of peril. In order to heed the reminder by Cornel West that “justice is what love looks like in public,” we must show love for our students and communities by changing syllabi language.[3] bell hooks reminds us that “all the great movements for social justice in our society have strongly emphasized a love ethic.”[4] Love is the root of pedagogical justice. According to Paulo Freire, the dialogical nature of effective teaching and thus pedagogical justice would not be possible if love were absent from its core, “Because love is an act of courage, not fear, love is the commitment to others.”[5] My commitment to pedagogical justice is rooted in love, both for students and the field of study. Through this commitment, my pedagogy seeks to contribute to liberatory practices that counter oppressive systems that invalidate and devalue ways of being and knowing that differ from dominant educational paradigms. Punitive language in syllabi impedes us from crafting pedagogies that allow our students and ourselves to heal. Ultimately, if we want to practice socially-just pedagogies, then we have to understand the impact that our communication choices have on students. Syllabi are the first encounter students have with their instructors. As such, we must be mindful of how we construct these documents for this particular COVID-19 moment and for the long term if we are interested in pedagogical justice. Removing punitive language from syllabi is one of the first steps we must take towards pedagogical justice. By taking this step, we begin to break the cycle in the use of violent language as a means of disciplining or coercing students to comply with constricted ideas of what it means to provide and receive education. Using exact language to say what we mean, which in most cases is a grade deduction, shows our students that language matters. If syllabi are contracts between instructors and students, they must reflect the type of world that we want to see for ourselves. Words that are life-giving instead of punitive allow us to create learning experiences that help our students flourish. If there are consequences for students who turn in late assignments or miss class sessions, let us name them using clear and precise language. We must never forget that we are educators, not judges or wardens. Punitive language has no place in the classroom, pre- or post-COVID-19. The pandemic and the circumstances it engenders make our awareness and attentiveness to these issues much more critical. The worlds we create are formed by the words we use. We carry our socialization into the classroom. Therefore, we need to change how we use language and the language we use if we want our pedagogy to embrace and contribute to social justice. Notes [1] “Penalty," Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=penalty&utm_source=extension_submit. [2] Yohana Junker, “Pedagogies of Affection: Designing Experiences of Presence and Regard,” accessed October 20, 2020, https://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/2020/08/pedagogies-of-affection-designing-experiences-of-presence-and-regard/. [3] Cornel West, "Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public," Facebook, October 28, 2010, https://www.facebook.com/drcornelwest/posts/never-forget-that-justice-is-what-love-looks-like-in-public/119696361424073/. [4] bell hooks, All about Love: New Visions (New York: William Morrow, 2000), xix. [5] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 2000), 89.

How can theological education help students deepen their empathy for people who lack permanent homes even while a pandemic makes face-to-face conversations on streets and in shelters unsafe? Dr. Mitzi J. Smith of Columbia Theological Seminary and I have reflected on that question together with Drs. Marcia Riggs and Mary Hess as part of a small grant project funded by the Wabash Center. This post contributes to our answer by reviewing another resource that Dr. Smith employed effectively in her August 2020 intensive course on African American Interpretation and the Gospel of Luke.[1] The resource is Lost Angels: Skid Row Is My Home, a 72-minute documentary directed by Thomas Napper in 2010 and available on YouTube.[2] Based on students’ survey responses, this film was very effective in deepening students’ empathy for people experiencing homelessness (ave. rating of 3.9 on a scale of 1 to 4, n=14). It also effectively informed students about homelessness, including its causes, consequences, and possible solutions (ave. rating, 3.7). The documentary describes the Skid Row neighborhood of Los Angeles through interviews with eight residents interspersed with video footage of those residents negotiating life on the streets. Also included are interviews with researchers who have studied the neighborhood and with leaders of local nonprofit agencies and ministries. The documentary makes a strong case that Skid Row “is an endangered low-income residential community”[3] where many people struggling with poverty, addiction, prior incarceration, and mental illness have found the only housing options they can afford. Gentrification is the principal threat to the availability of affordable housing. The city government supports gentrification through discriminatory policing that essentially criminalizes homelessness. The Safer Cities Initiative, which began in 2005, was proposed as a solution to crime but in practice functioned as an effort to displace poor residents. Much money was spent on policing but very little on the social support that had been promised for residents. The added officers confiscated property and harassed residents with fines for such crimes as jaywalking, carrying alcohol, or possession of illegal milk crates. Resident Kevin Cohen (called K. K.) observed that poor people cannot survive on Skid Row without breaking the law, whereas in richer neighborhoods police smile and wave at people who are doing similar things. K. and his close friend Lee Anne are among the most sympathetic people interviewed in Lost Angels. Lee Anne, who had lived on the streets for twenty-four years, appeared elderly and walked with a stooped posture. Her mission was to make sure that the neighborhood’s cats and birds had clean water and food. K. K. empathized with her love of animals and never judged her other eccentricities, such as collecting and storing trash. In addition to accompanying Lee Anne, K. K. often welcomed homeless friends to shower and eat in his apartment. It was, he said, “how I get my blessings from God.” Another Skid Row resident who impressed our students is General Dogon, whose story in some ways mirrors that of Malcom X. While spending eighteen years in prison for armed robbery, Dogon formed a commitment to work against injustice. He became a human rights organizer for LA Community Action Network and a bold prophet against abuses by the police. Residents like General Dogon belie the title of the documentary. Although “Lost Angels” is a clever play on the city’s name, it wrongly implies that the people featured in the film were “lost.” Most of them were working, despite many challenges, to make Skid Row a better place to live. To illustrate the impact of Lost Angels on students’ learning, let me refer to Hope Staton’s excellent paper on Luke 6:37-42. Hope is an MDiv student at Bethany Theological Seminary who has given me permission to discuss her work. She interpreted the Lucan text against the backdrop of judgmental stereotypes that are rooted in racism, sexism, and classism in too many white middle-class Christian communities. One of the logs that we may need to take out of our own eyes is a tendency to judge people experiencing homelessness as lazy or sinful. Hope also engaged in critical dialogue with the good-evil binary that appears right after her passage in 6:43-45. As part of that effort, she used General Dogon and K. K. as counter examples to the idea that people can be classified as either good or bad trees who consistently produce good or bad fruit.[4] Citing a comment in Lost Angels, she asked, “What does it say about the state of the church that those in situations of homelessness often find more comfort and welcome with less judgment on the street than they do in our congregations?”[5] Although several students addressed judgmentalism, issues of personal safety were not as prominent in their writing. In a post-pandemic context when we can again require face-to-face interactions with people experiencing homelessness, discussions of safety might surface more readily. While continuing to prioritize physical safety for everyone involved, we could ask more explicitly how racism and classism influence the ways we, our students, and our institutions perceive danger. Lost Angels would be a useful resource for addressing such issues. For example, a critique of the Safer Cities Initiative could include a conversation about whether “safer” is code for “whiter” or “more affluent.” We could also ask to what extent fearful but false stereotypes keep us from engaging in meaningful ministry with people like Lee Anne, K. K., and General Dogon. Notes [1] See also my review of Matthew Desmond’s book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (New York: Broadway Books, 2016), at https://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/2020/11/a-resource-for-building-empathy-and-understanding/. [2] Thomas Napper, director, Lost Angels: Skid Row is My Home (Cinema Libre Studio, 2010). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB_P3eljq1Y&feature=youtu.be. [3] Alice Callaghan of Las Familias del Pueblo offered this description in Lost Angels: Skid Row Is My Home, minute 41. [4] Hope Staton, “Removing the Log of Systemic Racism, Sexism, and Classism from the Eye of the Church to Enable Healing for the Homeless” (unpublished paper, August 28, 2020), 10. Staton is an MDiv student at Bethany Theological Seminary. [5] Staton, “Removing the Log,” 13.

Rubem Alves was a Brazilian theologian who became a psychoanalyst, educator, and writer of children’s stories. In one of his short stories called Happy Oysters Don’t Create Pearls, he tells the story of an oyster that was different from all the others. This oyster could not be happy like the others and was always very sad. The cause of his sadness was a grain of sand that had entered his body. He felt that excruciating pain day and night. As a way to survive the pain he sang sad songs. His songs were so sad that they tormented the oysters that sang happily. “Why is he so sad?” they asked. But the truth was that he had to live with the pain caused by the arrival of that unexpected grain of sand that was plaguing his life. One day, a fisherman threw his nets and took all the oysters, the happy ones and the sad one too. At dinner, the fisherman was eating oyster soup with his family when he felt something hard inside his mouth. When he took that stone out of his mouth, he realized it was a pearl! And he gave it to his wife. Rubem Alves then says that happy oysters do not produce pearls, only those that suffer a piercing pain in the flesh. In the Bantu and Yorubá traditions, it is said that the Orixá Obaluaê, also called Omulu, is the Lord of the Pearls. There is a story where Iemanjá, the Orixá of the seas, adopts Omulu when he is sick. She washes his body and heals his body with the water of the sea. But Omulu, who goes around the world offering healing and producing plagues, is poor and sad. Iemanjá takes compassion on him for she doesn’t want to see her son poor and his body covered with wounds. Iemanjá gets all her riches, her pearls, and makes beautiful necklaces to cover Omulu’s body so he could go around shining. These two stories can help us figure out a certain pedagogy of astonishment. Four ways to think about it: First, education as an oyster space that listens to human suffering The stories of Alves and Iemanjá and Omulu, in such different and diverse ways, tell us that pain and suffering are central issues of our existence. We must be attuned to the ways of suffering in our time. We are seeing so much suffering everywhere and COVID-19 has not only eroded so much of what we knew but also expanded poverty, stretching the already frail social threads of our communities. Our political and economic organizing systems are creating forms that deny the ways we recognize pain. We live at a furious pace of life, giving more to get much less. We are so alienated from nature. Our illnesses shift and expand in uncontrollable proportions. We live in a world of depressions, refluxes, panic attacks, heart attacks, barbiturates, anti-depressants, antihistamines, and painkillers. We medicate every form of feeling and morbidity, we lose the capacity for wonder. More than ever, we need to find “oyster spaces,” to transform our sadness into pearls and songs of sadness and joy to sustain our lives. Education thus can be this oyster space, when hearing and exchange provides possibilities for the remaking of ourselves. Education becomes this oyster space when the hearing is also seeing, understanding, going deeper, creating empathy and compassion. When that happens, the classroom becomes this oyster-like environment, conducive to the metabolization of pain in other forms of life, sustenance, imagination, resistance, and forms of living in the world. For the pearl is that amalgam of the body, mind, heart, and soul that learns from itself, and is able to remake itself from the experiences of pain and suffering. If the oyster is that place of astonishment that turns itself into pearl, the attentive classroom can also help us wonder, turning the pain of life into a delicate and strong stone, rare and beautiful. In this way, each teacher who feels and even perhaps can come close to understanding the pains of the world and the pains of the students, is also a therapist who listens and engages in the process of transference; the teacher is also a healer who offers symbolic exchanges; is also a clown who activates other forms of lightness and laughter; and is a magician at reordering worlds so that the life inside the oyster can continue the symbiotic movements of life. In this oyster space, the pearl becomes the capacity for continuous amazement with the potential of life that is continuously remade. Second, education as the oyster place to produce beauty Omulu had his body covered with sores and that is why he lived hidden under his straw clothes. Iemanjá, as an affectionate foster mother, wants to see her precious son shine with his healing gifts. The queen of the sea creates pearl necklaces that cover Omulu’s entire body so he would be honored, and live happily and proudly. His body would continue to be marked by the wounds of his scars, but now he shines the light of pearls, that like white flowers adorn his skin; the shiny stones made from the pain of oysters now caress his skin and adorn his suffering body. From here, we can regard education as the care of Iemanjá for her son Omulu. Education as production of beauty that helps us to move around the world. Educators as oysters, who use their own pearls, gestated by the symbiosis of their bodies in pain, and offer their precious, beautiful, luminous pearls to decorate their student’s lives. The same way in which students offer their own beautiful pearls to decorate their teachers’ lives. Often educators cannot change the situation of their students, but they can pay attention to their wounds, hold their bodies in care, enlarge their thoughts, help their knees to walk and fly, strengthen their hands, illuminate their eyes with the sparkle of astonishment, bewitch them with words of life in resonance with the words of death, and pace their heartbeats in a rhythm other than the destruction and annihilation that often surround their worlds. The educator is not all-knowing of everything. The hope is that the educator has already learned to be in awe with life and has been astonished in many ways. If that has already happened, then the educator becomes a double path, or a bridge, that helps others to be astonished and is wide open to be astonished by others. If the educator is ready to engage this double path, pause and listen, be astonished by the very presence of the student, the educator will see this encounter always as a thrilling surprise, as the production of desire that changes and transforms, creates mutuality, brings spells, charms, and chistes to life, providing tools of defiance and self-sustenance, building paths for new trajectories. In this way, the educator and the classroom as this oyster space will not be voyeurism of one’s suffering, but rather be a mutual singing of songs of sadness, a mutual creation of pearl necklaces for mutual survival. The healer in history is not Iemanjá. Omulu receives healing from the forest and from Olorum. But it is Iemanjá who takes care of the healing symbology, covering Omulu’s wounds in beauty so his joy would be full. In the same way, we educators must strive to be like Iemanjá, looking for beauty, for pearls in the sea to put on the wounded bodies of our students. Pearls that come from inside our own bodies like oysters that learned to make pearls, pearls that come from the history of our people and other people, pearls from ancient wisdom, pearls from below, and pearls produced by the students themselves. The pedagogy of astonishment is thus the crafting of necklaces of thousands of forms of beauty in multiple pearls and of several places for entire bodies, both individual and collective, to shine. Third, education to open ourselves to engage the different, the uninvited grain of sand Fourth, education that helps us hear the suffering of nonhuman forms of life. To be continued…

For the last few years, in teaching about racial justice, I have consciously decided to incorporate into my syllabi an opportunity for critical reflection based on Stephen Brookfield’s theory of “ideology critique.”[1] In short, Brookfield defines ideology critique as “part learning process, part civic action”; it “focuses on helping people come to an awareness of how capitalism, White Supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, heterosexism, and other ideologies shape beliefs and practices that justify and maintain economic and political inequity.”[2] As Brookfield describes it, ideology critique is a helpful tool for framing discussions about the unjust beliefs and assumptions that dictate the unequal ways in which society is organized: “(1) that apparently open, Western democracies are actually highly unequal societies in which economic inequity, racism, and class discrimination are empirical realties; (2) that the way this state of affairs is reproduced as seeming to be normal, natural, and inevitable (thereby heading off potential challenges to the system) is through the dissemination of dominant ideology; and (3) that critical theory attempts to understand this state of affairs as a prelude to changing it.”[3] As I understand and use his theory, the ubiquitous and dominant nature of unjust ideologies, like racism, demands that every subject area question its foundational assumptions, in order to pave the way for real and lasting societal change. Assignments designed to teach ideology critique also help us model that habit of mind with our students and let them practice it as well. In order to use this theory in my courses effectively, I need to connect the critical reflection with course content in a way that is responsible for the methods and objectives about which I am hired to teach (i.e., Catholic Systematic Theology). One of the most effective strategies I’ve designed is the following written assignment. In one of my introductory theology courses, I ask my students to write a critical evaluation of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) most recent document on race, “Open Wide Our Hearts: A Pastoral Letter Against Racism,” issued in 2018. To prepare students for the assignment, we spend a few class sessions analyzing the social realties of racism and white privilege based on the work of scholars like Ibram X. Kendhi and Robin DiAngelo. We then turn to a Catholic theological perspective written by Bryan Massingale, a Black Roman Catholic moral theologian and priest, who also has recently come out as gay. I have students read Massingale’s critique of prior USCCB documents and list both the substantial deficits and limitations that he identifies. To do this, they read a chapter from his groundbreaking book, Racial Justice and the Catholic Church, which was published in 2010, eight years prior to the writing of the most recent “Open Wide Our Hearts” document. Then, in their written assignment, I ask the students to apply Massingale’s critiques of the prior USCCB documents to their own analysis of the current one. This assignment has been effective for a number of reasons. First, it allows students the chance to explore how racism has been embedded not just in economics and politics, but in religion—something of which they are not always aware. In particular, they often identify how even a theological document that denounces racism is itself entangled with assumptions based in patriarchy, heterosexism, and White Supremacy. For instance, many times students remark on how the USCCB document is written by a predominately White group of people, all of whom are men. In recent student papers, two different students made this critique and bolstered it by mentioning how the National Black Catholic Clergy Caucus (NBCCC) approved a statement in April of 1968 that described the Catholic Church as a “white racist institution.” Second, it often leads students to see how theology and religion have the opportunity as ideologies to promote civic action, as was the case with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s religious convictions, but how they can also be problematic—particularly if they promote reconciliation without justice. For example, a recent student’s paper made this critique by remarking on the 2018 USCCB document “Open Wide Our Hearts” in this way: The Catholic Bishops think that racism will be overcome by education, dialogue, and moral persuasion. They think that if everyone is educated on racism that it’ll just magically disappear, but it’s not that simple…. Racism has been with us for many, many years now and it’s deep in our roots. It’s not something you can change overnight by having a different mindset. I wish it were that easy, but unfortunately it’s not. The student is recognizing that racism goes beyond an individual’s acts, and that it is also a widespread and deeply entrenched, systemic issue. Another student went further in their analysis and considered why the Bishops might not have promoted real systemic change in their document: I think that the Bishops might be concerned with not crossing any boundaries and having too strong of an opinion that would align themselves with a certain political party. The idea that there needs to be a separation of church and state has been a saying for a long time and people believe that it is an important part in democracy. This concern is valid but I also think that the idea of all people having equal rights is not only a Catholic belief and should be a belief held by both political parties. Finally, and here’s where I hope the assignment is most effective: the assignment teaches students to begin to develop and adopt for themselves a process of ideology critique outside of the classroom. For instance, after discussing the widespread issuing of #BLM statements by nearly every retail company, with no real call to action, one student made a similar critique of the 2018 USCCB document as the “church’s feeble attempt to get ahead of a problem instead of being deemed as ignoring the problem.” When students are able to identify how racism has been shaped and maintained in other documents, beliefs, and practices, including but not limited to religious ones, I know the assignment has accomplished its objective. Notes [1] This post continues reflections that I began in a previous post. I am grateful to Dr. Jessica Tinklenberg, who encouraged me to develop this post in such a way, and to include anonymous student comments. She also worked with me on a fuller piece which will be include in the American Academy of Religion’s Fall 2020 edition of Spotlight on Teaching. [2] Stephen Brookfield, “The Concept of Critical Reflection: Promises and Contradictions,” European Journal of Social Work 12, no. 3 (September 2009): 298-299. [3] Brookfield, 298.

We walk into our classrooms, be they virtual or face-to-face, and we see the eyes of our students with screens in front of them. Those screens may be laptops, desktops, tablets, or phones but the screens are there. On those screens our students spend an average of four hours per day, engaging moving and still images. We then ask them to read and process something that was written by someone they will never see or hear. We expect them to be fully engaged by the reading. The social justice issues they are reading about are hidden beneath text on a page. While reading is essential, it is limiting, and it especially limits the mental capacity of the students we teach today whose minds are wired to engage moving and still images via stories. Our students need to see to fully connect with that we are studying. If we are to teach to their strengths we need to show them the subject matter. The way we show them is by using documentaries as the foundation of course design. Listen to Albert Maysles as he speaks on the power of documentaries: [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_yABhT20Hs[/embedyt] Documentaries put students in the midst of the social justice issues we are studying. They can see, feel, and connect, not just with the issue, but also with the real people who are affected by injustices. Nick Fraser says in his book Say What Happened: A Story of Documentaries, “docs have morphed into contemporary essays, becoming a form whereby we get to experience highly provisional stabs at reality, but, far more than fictions, which are usually finished and fixed in their own reality, they are also transformed by it.”[1] Documentaries are the new essay; we have access to a new type of reading made just for the generation of students we are teaching. We need to honor them by showing them and in the showing they are seeing what was, what is, and what can be. We work in an industry that values the written and spoken word over the visual. We were taught to plan our classes starting with the reading—readings that were written years before our time mostly by dead white males. I always found these readings alien to me when I was a student, and even those I connected with were usually written by people many years my senior. There was still this disconnect because of the faded pages from which I read; I was removed from them by time and space. None of what I have said makes these works irrelevant or useless but it highlights the limitations of readings. When I think about the students I teach today who view more than they read I see that they are deep thinkers, they are intelligent, they can read and write, and they also bring a more expansive set of communicative and interpretive skills to the classroom than I did when I was a student. The question I am raising in this blog is: How do I engage what my students bring to the classroom so that I can show them what I want them to learn? Yes, show them. To answer my question, I am suggesting that we show our students the social justice issues we are discussing in class while showing them how movements work by engaging documentaries as the core content for our courses. I am not dismissing books and readings, but I am displacing their historical place of privilege. Why documentaries? Documentaries speak to the head and the heart. Documentaries help students see and feel by eliciting the emotive response in the visual. More centers of the brain are activated by sound, movement, light, story, and real life characters who lived in the movement. Students see history and how they can make history. I have also found that conversation after a documentary is democratized unlike those after reading discussions. Reading discussions privilege certain types of students whereas discussion around documentaries has a way of leveling the playing field. Students feel more equipped to talk about that which they have seen, engaged, and understood. As Cathy Chattoo says in her book Story Movements: How Documentaries Empower People and Inspire Social Change, Documentary is a vital, irreplaceable part of our storytelling culture and democratic discourse. It is distinct among mediated ways we receive and interpret signals about the world and its inhabitants. We humans, despite our insistence to the contrary, make individual and collective decisions from an emotional place of the soul—where kindness and compassion and rage and anger originate—not from a rational deliberation of facts and information. By opening a portal into the depth of human experience, documentary storytelling contributes to strengthening our cultural moral compass—our normative rulebook that shapes how we regard one another in daily exchanges, and how we prioritize the policies and laws that either expand justice or dictate oppression.[2] Documentaries connect with us because we are wired for story and true stories told well speak truth to us and set us free to be part of the freedom movement. So if we are to start with documentaries as the foundation of our courses, and use readings to complement the documentaries, where do we start? Let me offer a few questions that might get you thinking: What do I want my students to see? Why is the visual experience of this course as important as the reading(s)? What do I want my students to hear? What do I want my students to feel? Why is it important for my students to engage the sights and sounds of this experience so as to bring to life that which we are studying together? What do I want my students to do about social injustice as a result of experiencing this course? How can I create and curate a visual experience that is buttressed by quality readings that will make this course be more than memorable, but will make it serve as a launching pad for social justice initiatives and actions in the real world? How can I make the viewing experience a communal experience and make it as unlike the isolating experience of reading as possible? What documentaries are worth my students’ time, in that they are well told stories, well researched, historically accurate, factual, and emotionally stimulating? So now you might ask what could this look like? What are some documentaries one might consider? There are of course many but allow me to offer a list I have used for courses where the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s has been the foundation of the course. The list below is just one such list to get you thinking about what a curated list of documentaries would look like, and about the order which they would be engaged. A Civil Rights Course Lineup (in this order): The Murder of Emmet Till (2003) 53 minutes Directed by Stanley Nelson The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords (1999) 86 minutes Directed by Stanley Nelson Eyes on the Prize: Season #1 – 1952 to 1965 (1987) 42 minutes each Directed by Henry Hampton and others Mavis (2015) 80 minutes Directed by Jessica Edwards 4 Little Girls (1997) 102 minutes Directed by Spike Lee Mr. Civil Rights: Thurgood Marshall & The NAACP (2014) 57 minutes Directed by Mick Cauette Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (2015) 115 minutes Directed by Stanley Nelson Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin (2003) 90 minutes Directed by Nancy D. Kates and Bennet Singer Movin’ On Up: The Music and Message of Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions (2008) 90 minutes Directed by Phillip Galloway Freedom Riders (2010) 117 minutes Directed by Stanley Nelson John Lewis: Good Trouble (2020) 96 Minutes Directed by Dawn Porter King: A Filmed Record Montgomery to Memphis (1970) 240 minutes Directed by Sidney Lumet King in the Wilderness (2018) 111 minutes Directed by Peter W. Kuhardt The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 (2011) 92 minutes Director Göran Olsson Wattstax (1973) 103 Minutes Directed by Mel Stuart Chisholm ’72: Unbought and Unbossed (2004) 66 minutes Directed by Shola Lynch I Am Not Your Negro (2017) 93 minutes Directed by Raoul Peck Documentary Associations and Resources: Fireflight Media http://www.firelightmedia.tv PBS Civil Rights Documentary http://www.pbs.org/black-culture/explore/10-black-history-documentaries-to-watch/ HBO Documentaries https://www.hbo.com/documentaries International Documentary Associations https://www.documentary.org Doc Society https://docsociety.org Odyssey Impact https://www.odyssey-impact.org Impact Field Guide https://impactguide.org American Documentary https://www.amdoc.org/create/filmmaker-resources/ PBS POV http://www.pbs.org/pov/ Netflix Best Documentaries https://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/6839 Notes [1]Nick Fraser, Say What Happened: A Star of Documentaries (London: Faber & Faber Press, 2019), 28. [2]Cathy Borum Chattoo, Story Movements: How Documentaries Empower People and Inspire Social Change. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020), 207.