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I have always thought that a course on spirituality should take place in a supportive environment, and it is best done in person. But something happened that changed my mind. Last fall, I attended a webinar organized by Kosen Gregory Snyder at Union Theological Seminary. The webinar invited a Native American, a Buddhist, and a Christian leader to discuss the ways that religious and spiritual traditions can address our ecological crisis. This webinar was just what I needed, as I was over-stretched by work and speaking engagements. I was exhausted and depleted. I felt a sense of accompaniment as each speaker shared their spiritual wisdom and paths. So when I was asked to offer my spring online course “Spirituality for the Contemporary World” to the community, I accepted the invitation with enthusiasm. For over two decades, I have taught courses on various aspects of spirituality in Boston and Atlanta and have accompanied hundreds of students on their spiritual journeys. I saw offering this course to those who may need it during the prolonged pandemic as a vocation and a challenge. I had not taught a course on spirituality online, let alone taught it for both students at my school and members of the community. The first challenge was how to translate the practice-oriented pedagogy to an online format. I include meditation, breathing exercises, Tai Chi movements, singing, arts, and rituals in my spirituality courses. I emphasize learning by doing and not just listening! How could we do these things in a Zoom setting? As we know by now, even the simple thing of group singing is a challenge on Zoom. To learn how I might do some of these in my class, I consulted my colleagues at school who have expertise in digital learning. They have given me a lot of encouragement and sound advice and the school will provide production help and equipment if needed. I welcome the challenges of teaching this class as a growing edge of my teaching. I have taught this course in person numerous times, and I am eager to find out what I can learn by teaching it online. The pandemic has disrupted higher education and its impact will last for years to come. According to a study by Instructure, the company that created the online platform Canvas, the demand for online and hybrid courses skyrocketed, even as in-person learning resumes. Thus, scholars in religion and theological educators need to be better prepared so they can teach these courses well. I know that many seminaries and divinity schools have already used online and hybrid learning for some time and the learning curve may not be so steep. When the pandemic closed my school and forced our classes to go online, the school has provided training and support for the faculty. One of the challenges was learning how to use the Zoom platform, which was originally designed for business, to create an interactive and participatory learning environment. I learned from my colleague Sarah Bogue, who offered useful tips and exercises for building community through online learning. I intend to use some of her suggestions in my spirituality class. Since the community participants in my class do not have access to the school’s academic teaching technology, I decided to create a website for the course. At the beginning of the pandemic, when everything shifted online, I helped the network Pacific, Asian, and North American Asian Women in Theology and Ministry update our website, open Twitter and Instagram accounts, and create a YouTube channel. I feel good that I can transfer what I have learned in my community work to my online teaching. The course website has a blog. I posted the first blog, explaining why I am teaching this course at this time. Many Facebook friends posted prayers and thoughts about the new year in the first week of January and I asked for permission to share a New Year prayer and photos taken to show nature’s beauty on the blog. Participants in the class will be invited to contribute blog posts to share with the class. The course will have its own Facebook page. I will post the questions to be discussed each week. I plan to use this space for participants to share their practices, such as photos of home altars, places for meditation, and nature walks, as well as spiritual poetry and writing. While my students have their assignments, the posts on Facebook will allow me to gauge community participants’ interest and engagement in the course. An altar I created To avoid Zoom fatigue, I will not give long presentations and will minimize the almost routine use of PowerPoint in Zoom teaching. We must justify why we need to have synchronous meetings at all if the meetings are not interactive. Instead, I have invited guest speakers and artists to lead a range of activities, including Notes of Rest, artwork, and learning to write poetry. Some of them have taken my spirituality courses and they are delighted to help as I offer this course to the community. As a seasoned teacher, trying something new in teaching stretches my pedagogical imagination. We have been in the digital age for decades, and teaching can’t remain the same if we are to catch up with the digital natives, who are well versed in digital technology. Two weeks before the course, I began setting myself in the spirit of teaching this course. I paid attention to my daily rituals (the design of daily life) and practiced Pilates for seniors. I always enjoy teaching spirituality courses because I need them as much as my students do!

Those of you with kids, or those of you who have simply been spending way too much time on your Netflix account since the pandemic began (no judgement!), may have heard of the movie called Yes Day, released in 2021 and starring Jennifer Garner. The premise of this film, based upon a book of the same name, is simple: “A sunny family of five agrees to a day where a mother and father must consent to whatever the kids want in this broad Netflix comedy” (NY Times review). The parents will say “yes” to their kids’ wildest requests (after a few ground rules have been established) for a whole day—a welcome reprieve to a life normally filled with “no.” As a parent myself, I find it an interesting, if not somewhat terrifying, idea. As an educator, I am reminded of a more serious possibility, one that Margaret Price, who is an OSU English professor, disability studies scholar, and author of the book Mad at School, raised in a recent talk. In “Everyday Survival and Collective Accountability,” Price shares the experience (recounted to her in a research interview) of an instructor with a disability who needs the temperature of her classroom to be less than 80 degrees or she experiences numbness, dizziness, nausea, and eventually, fainting and seizures. One day, this instructor arrived to find her classroom “stiflingly hot.” Fortunately, she was able to find the building manager and asked him to turn the temperature down. And “the building manager just did it,” which surprised Price. She goes on: The thing that really struck me about this story is how simple the actions required were, and how incredible, how incredibly rare it is to have someone simply believe you when you say “Hey, I need something.” This is an interesting thought experiment to practice if you want to kind of try out one of these over the next few days. Stay alert for expressions of need that might be shared with you and imagine what would happen if you simply said “Okay,” instead of saying, “Well, why do you need to miss class?” or “Why is that the particular software that you need,” or “Say more about why this would be the optimal decision.” And, again, I’m not saying we all should, like, this is not a radical “yes to everything” improv kind of proposition. I’m much too uptight for that. It’s more of just a thought experiment. What would happen if someone told you they needed something, and you just said, “I believe you”? Many of us academics are trained in a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” We are known for our sharp critical thinking skills. We are taught to interrogate, to question, to analyze, to require evidence. Being humble is hard for us. Jumping quickly to critique is much more comfortable. But do these dispositions, these impulses, these habits, interfere with our ability to believe, to empathize, to care—to recognize the real, complex, imperfect human beings in front of us? Who is harmed when we are skeptical or distrustful? Who do we alienate or exclude? Who refrains from coming to us, from sharing their stories with us, from asking us for our help? While Price was focusing on faculty with disabilities in her talk because this is the population she studies (and identifies with), the same point could be made about colleagues of ours with other identity markers, and also about the students in our—virtual or in-person—religion courses. Higher education creates barriers and inhospitable conditions for many students—a veritable landscape of “nope” for far too many. The disclosure process for students with disabilities, for example, can be expensive, cumbersome, intimidating, embarrassing, and, sometimes, just not worth it. First-generation students have a heck of a time figuring out the “hidden curriculum.” Students of color face “stereotype threat” and have to worry about a “sense of belonging,” not to mention more serious issues. Despite advances from movements like #metoo, women still don’t come forward to report experiences of sexual harassment and assault because of a fear of not being believed, a fear of having to “prove” the trauma and relive it all over again, a fear of backlash and negative consequences. And, of course, identities intersect and experiences of marginalization, discrimination, microaggression, and oppression compound. I have heard these stories, and more, from undergraduates in my own religion courses, even at a university that ostensibly cares about “diversity.” In many ways, our educational institutions are like life as usual for the family in Yes Day. Yet I imagine a different way—a more open and charitable and flexible orientation—would be especially beneficial for these students, while, of course, benefiting everyone. A few weeks ago, I checked in with my students in my upper-level race and religion seminar—something I like to do every so often, in class or online, to express care. I asked, simply, “How are you doing?” The biggest (i.e., most common) responses in the word cloud were “tired” and “stressed.” Students are exhausted, overwhelmed, and anxious (like a lot of faculty I know!). Even worse, though, was that they told me I am the only one of their professors asking how they are doing, asking what I can do to help them. All semester long, students have contacted me about missing class because they’re sick or attending funerals, asking if they can leave early for doctors’ appointments or job interviews, turning in the wrong kind of assignment because they misunderstood the instructions, and more. The Emily of two years ago would have found these requests exasperating, eyeroll-inducing. Excuses! Mediocrity! Laziness! Entitlement! The pandemic has radically shifted my thinking about these moments. I hope this lesson remains with me. What if we simply believed our students (not to mention our colleagues)? What if we simply cared about them, first and foremost, as human beings? What if we didn’t require doctor’s notes or other forms of evidence to make them have to work to prove they’re having a hard time, on top of the hard time they’re already having? What if we just granted deadline extensions, what if we just allowed re-do’s, what if just we cancelled class when it was obvious that everyone needed a break? What if we conveyed, in a wide variety of ways, that we trust them, that we recognize their lives are hard (right now, sure, but also, for some students, all the time), that we value them? What if we said “yes” to them—not for a day, as in the movie, but every day, for a semester, all the time, as a matter of default or principle? To be sure, Yes Day is fictional and its antics seem to have resulted in “cartoon-style chaos” and, at best, lukewarm critical reception. And, of course, when applied to the college classroom, we may have considerations and worries that go beyond glitter-filled Mom makeovers (e.g., but what about our beloved “rigor”?) Like Price, however, I encourage us to engage in the thought experiment, even if just for fun. What could a “yes” approach look or feel like in our religion classrooms? What possibilities exist? How could it improve the learning experience, especially of those from underserved populations? How could it transform our interactions with students, our teaching, our own experiences as an instructor?

I avoided teaching our gen ed Catholic intellectual tradition courses for years at my small Catholic college in the Northeast. I’m not a theologian. I’m not Catholic. And teaching these courses sounded challenging because our students’ impressions of the Church are both negative and muddled: “The Church is hypocritical, sexist, and anti-gay.” “It reads the Bible literally and it rejects evolution.” “It thinks that it’s bad to examine your religious beliefs.” “Having faith means having no doubts, and it requires that you don’t question your religion at all.” Many of our students are former Catholics who suspect that these courses are intended to bring them back into the fold. And they resent that. I told myself that this mess is not my problem. Not my fight. I got pushed into it though, and to my surprise, the course I developed has become one of my favorites. I decided that for the course to work, I needed to get the students’ hostility and emotions out on the table from the very beginning. To make that possible, creating the right atmosphere was crucial. Otherwise, students would worry about hurting my feelings and their own grade, and they wouldn’t speak openly. To create a space for honesty, I use my non-priest and non-Catholic credentials for maximum effect. Before I even hand out the syllabus, I explain that I’m not Catholic and that I have no interest in making them more—or less—Catholic. I tell them that I disagree with the Church’s positions on LGBTQ issues and that I have feminist objections to the Church—and to a lot of organized religion. At that point, I have their attention. Then I describe what I admire about Catholicism. The logic and intellectual rigor. The two thousand years of applying reason to religion, of brilliant theologians and philosophers wrestling with difficult questions, arguing, and disagreeing with each other. I explain that they don’t have to believe a single word of any Catholic teachings, but that they do have to know what they are, think them through carefully, be as fair and openminded as possible, and then articulate their criticisms and responses clearly. Our first reading is Jean Twenge’s “Irreligious: Losing My Religion (and Spirituality),” which lays out survey data and discusses possible reasons for why so many Gen Z members are leaving organized religion. I ask if the reading resonates with them and ask them to share some of their own experiences with religion. Then I brace myself and get out of the way. So much anger. So much frustration. So many painful stories. One of my students was an altar boy and his priest handed him a brochure about conversion therapy and told him to try it. Another student was kicked out of his religious education class for asking too many critical questions. A third was asked to leave his church along with his family because he has two moms. I listen, empathize, and learn. I explain that their local priest may not have accurately represented the diversity of views and complexity of theology available in the Church. I tell them that people who teach religious education classes usually don’t know as much theology as I would wish and that they sometimes badly misunderstand Church teachings. We look at the Catechism’s statements on homosexuality, I explain that I know several priests who are gay and that they somehow make it work. I point them to James Martin, S.J.’s work, noting that he is a priest in good standing. This discussion takes up a full week. During this time, I repeat that I’m fine with them being atheist, theist, or agnostic but that I want their position to be based upon good reasons and on a deep understanding of the intellectual possibilities of a theism. I don’t want them to reject religion because they have only been exposed to narrow and simplistic versions. After all that, we’re ready to engage with the “real” course materials. We study the argument from design and the Church’s position on evolution. We clear up misunderstandings about doubt and questioning. We read about Mother Teresa and her dark night of the soul. We tackle classical philosophical problems about suffering, miracles, pluralism, the gap between language and God, and the function and limitations of images. This has become one of my favorite classes to teach because it responds to a real need. My students desperately need an opportunity to explore their spirituality and religiosity (or their absence!) and to reflect on their relation to the religions around them. And they need somebody to correct some of their most cumbersome misunderstandings about religion, showing them that there is space for them to be Catholic if they want—even if they are LGBTQ and even if they like science and reason. Will this bring them back into the fold? I doubt it—but I hope it will help them see possibilities that they didn’t know were there.   Read Race in the classroom: #3: Bringing in race in a Catholic Intellectual tradition course.   Sources Catholic Church. The Catholic Catechism. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1993. Gould, Stephen J. “Nonoverlapping Magisteria.” In Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, edited by Michael Rea and Louis Pojman, 494-502. Stamford, CT: Centage Learning, 2015. Paul II, John, Pope. “Faith and Science: Lessons from the Galileo Case and Message on Evolution.” In Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, edited by Michael Rea and Louis Pojman, 502-507. Stamford, CT: Centage Learning, 2015. Martin, James, S.J. Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity. New York, NY: HarperOne, 2017. Martin, James, S.J. Building a Bridge. Directed by Evan Mascagni and Shannon Post. New York, NY: Tribeca, 2021. Massingale, Bryan N. “The Challenge of Idolatry for LGBTI Ministry.” DignityUSA.org, 2019. Pinter, Brian. “A Fundamental Challenge: Three Ways to Combat Biblical Literalism.” America: The Jesuit Review, Sept. 12, 2011 Sullivan, Meghan. “Uneasy Grace.” First Things, April 2014. Twenge, Jean. “Irreligious: Losing My Religion (and Spirituality).” In iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us. New York, NY: Atria Books, 2017.

Sometimes teaching strategies that seem newly discovered have been with you all along. When I was in the last stages of writing up my doctoral dissertation, I had just moved to the Canadian Maritimes. I was living on the outskirts of a small village in an old and drafty brick house overlooking glistening tidal mudflats. Beautiful but isolated and with no distractions, all that stood between me my PhD was a completed thesis. With this knowledge, I set about pursuing a whole variety of unrelated activities: I learnt to bake bread; I split 8 cords of firewood; I shoveled more snow than I had ever seen from the driveway; and I refinished, with great care, several nondescript pieces of old furniture. I also spent time creating hand-bound books. Twenty years on, while my circumstances have changed considerably, bookmaking has proven to be more than a mere distraction. Indeed, bookmaking has formed an enduring connection to my academic work and has shaped my teaching practice. It seems those early days of making books were prescient, in that over the years my academic interests have become increasingly concerned with biblical reception. I am fascinated by the ways sacred texts are continually being created and recreated, unbound and repackaged, unfurled and gathered up. Bookbinding manifests an applied, even somatic, example of these textual journeys. In a world of e-books and hypertext, one might consider bookbinding a quaint if not archaic practice, but that would overlook it as a very practical way of participating in the text. It involves doing something that actively shapes and changes the text. As the binder works the pages with their hands, the text literally takes on characteristics of changeability, pliability, and plasticity. Understanding textuality more broadly prompted me to consider the ways the biblical text functions, not only within the parameters of, say, John’s Gospel or the letters of Paul, but also as these narratives course their way through various points of reception within our cultural context. We read texts, we live texts, and we bind these texts into our experience as they trace paths through the familiar stories of our times. The ancient art of bookmaking offers a way of marking this capacity of the text to exceed the covers of the “Good Book” and extend its influence, traveling beyond its origins in unanticipated ways. This is a path of beauty, of craft and skill. It is a way of marking a journey that acknowledges a past and opens to a future. It also asks us to consider our relationship with the text. As the book accompanies us, where do we end and where does the text begin? Is the text passive or does it act upon us? Alternatively, are we the passive recipient, or the active shaper of the text? Are we a part of the text, our stories, contexts, interpretative reference points? In dealing with the Bible, it is not just about discovering a book, it is also about continuing to make and remake this book, to bind it up with our experience and to consider the future possibilities of both. What happens, then, when I ask my students to create books as part of their learning? When setting one alongside the other, how will the physicality of the book impact and direct their intellectual journey? Will the materiality of the book work to ground and open up the nonmaterial insights we often privilege in higher education? Making books is not just something fun to do, it is a way of using the material to open up the nonmaterial, and exploring the connections between reader and text. Just a few years ago, as part of my regular teaching of our department’s theory and methods course, I asked students to use portfolios to track their learning. The subject matter of this course tends towards abstract ideas, technical definitions, and counter-intuitive perspectives on the study of religion, and sometimes the “translation” of this learning into future courses is not as successful as I would like. My hope was that the practice of making a book would help condition and ground the course materials by adding a physical dimension to the learning experience, one that would connect learner and learning in transformative ways. In their portfolios, students were asked to create a book that gathered together concrete evidence demonstrating the development of their understanding, their acquisition of key skills, and the building of scholarly perspective. I chose learning portfolios because their flexible, evidence-based process allows for individual curation and creativity: they are an ideal venue for self-reflective learning.  In one particularly memorable example, a student submitted a portfolio in the form of a soiled, slashed, and scorched wedding album—she had clearly used a sharp blade and set it on fire. The portfolio focused on the theme of post-modernism and religion and while the content was excellent, the form of the book itself gave expression to the ambivalence the student felt towards this particular theme, the threat it posed for “traditional values,” and the sense of loss it implied for established cultural practices. The covers of her album spoke of the struggle and the challenge of learning and the feelings of disillusionment that can sometimes accompany understanding and insight—particularly for a student of faith within a secular university context. Needless to say, the album brought to mind my own experience in that old house on the hill with this example of a student binding together a rich range of perspectives about who they were and what they were studying and grounding their learning journey in the familiar materiality of a book. Expressed in this album were sentiments that may not have been communicated via a traditional paper but were unmistakable as part of the material context for her work. The physical book provided a means for her to bind her learning journey, her experience, and her identity into a space that was richly layered and uniquely hers.

I took a deep breath and stepped out of my office dressed as the Greek goddess Athena. My historically inaccurate Amazon purchase had me in a “Roman Spartan Costume Helmet,” a “Roman Empress” costume over my clothes, holding a large plastic spear and a “Wonder Woman” shield. It was the best I could piece together online, and it would have to do—and this was for fun! In our Reacting to the Past (RTTP) game, The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 B.C., the students had to self-start their first Athenian Assembly debate by reenacting a pig sacrifice (pig picture torn in half) while priestesses of Athena offered prayers. The president sat at his table, ready to start the proceedings. They were nervous. I was nervous for them.  So, in a flourish of polyester and plastic I stomped into the classroom. I banged my spear on my Wonder Woman shield and stood behind the shocked priestesses. I whispered, “Go for it!”  Student faces were a mix of shock and amusement; I was certainly not cool enough for a couple of them. But who cared? My priestesses pulled it off, the pig was sacrificed, and the president called the meeting to order. They debated and voted. The next week I gave extra credit for showing up in a toga, and about 20 percent of the class came wrapped in random bed sheets. In preparation for our five-session role playing game I told them repeatedly to “just have fun with it!” and fun was had! At the end of the game I had students fill out a “Win Sheet” where they discussed what they accomplished and reflected on their own game play. Paraphrases of some responses ranged from “I didn’t think that this would be fun, but it was,” and “I have never liked history before,” to “I normally don’t speak up in class, but this helped me overcome that” and “I met new people and made friends.” I took that for a win. For this church history professor assigned to teach Western Civilization, the RTTP role playing game provided a way to make a notoriously boring class engaging (for all of us). As it turns out, I had stumbled upon a “ludic pedagogy” or the “pedagogy of fun”: Sharon Lauricella and T. Keith Edmunds’ post, “A Serious Look at Fun in College Classrooms” discusses how the rigor of education is not lost in a fun environment, rather it lowers the cognitive load and increases intrinsic motivation and learning.  It is probably no surprise to you that studies show that by making learning fun, student stress decreases and learning increases. The bigger question most professors ask isn’t, “Should I try this?” but rather, “What would this look like in my classroom?”  Here are some ideas that I have tried: We reenact a house church with dollar store decor and food. During review week, students write either three church history characters or the attributes from them that they want to have in their own life on a dollar store Christmas ornament.  At the end of the class around a common question, “Why do we have so many denominations?” I have students create their own church with their denomination of choice, or none. They design a building, pick a symbol for the logo, choose the music, governance style, etc. They are creative, and they enjoy the in-class activity “for fun.”  When studying the Desert Fathers and Mothers, we learn to make prayer ropes from a YouTube video. The joy in this is that the knot is almost impossible to make, so we have a good laugh trying. Pre-pandemic, we went for pizza and then visited a Russian Orthodox Church together. A class did the Reacting to the Past’s “Trial of Anne Hutchinson.” (There was burning at the stake!) The Reacting to the Past “Council of Nicaea” role playing game is on my radar for the future. NOTE: These RTTP games are not intuitive to lead, you’ll need all summer to prepare. I highly recommend joining the association and the Facebook group for help. Plan on the game taking four to eight weeks of your semester.  Clearly this is not an exhaustive list and many of you have your own successes to add. If you could take a moment to write down some of those in the comments, this could make it a very helpful space for all of us searching for new ideas. 

You know who has a lot of spare time lately? Nobody. You know something that wastes time when you’re a student? Finding yourself in a class that is definitely not a class you want, because no one gave you a heads-up about Dr. Lester. Someone should give them that heads-up, and it should be me. How better to do so than by telling them all of my dearest hopes and dreams... before they sign on the enrollment line. Just because a student wants to take Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, it doesn’t mean they want to take it from me. Better to figure that out before week one, rather than week five or six... agreed? I listen to our admissions director and to our dean of students, and the word I hear over and over is “precarity.” The lives of our students are more precarious than ever. (Yes, so are yours and mine, but let’s keep our focus on the students.) On the first day of the term, a student likely comes into my class with no wiggle room in their life. If my approach is not what they’re after, then this relationship is costing them money and more than that, it’s wasting their time. See, I don’t just have a lot of knowledge about the Hebrew Bible and its study; I also have all these ideas about them. And not just ideas—I have feelings, and passions, and convictions, and reckonings. Many of these are commensurable with those of other instructors at my institution and its partners in cross-registration, but they are not identical. Professor So-and-So and I may agree broadly about the subject matter and its study; we may devour each other’s research about it and may laugh at each other’s jokes about it; we’re sympatico... and a student might find heaven in their course and hell in mine. To put it in terms of course design, I have “big ideas” that animate my course and its units. (For what follows, see Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, Understanding by Design, Pearson, 2006.) These big ideas are one major source for the understanding, knowledge, and skills that I hope learners will develop in their engagement with the Hebrew Bible. Wiggins and McTighe describe a big idea as a linchpin, and as “conceptual Velcro”: a big idea unifies several pieces of “related content knowledge” in a way that is core to understanding the subject at hand. For example, here are some of the big ideas that animate the units in my Introduction to the Hebrew Bible: Cross-Culture: reading the Bible is always a cross-cultural experience. Competing Claims: biblical texts will disagree with one another about God, God’s ways with the world, and what God wants. Not You: biblical texts are not talking to you—they speak to their own time and place, in order to make specific things happen in their circumstances. History is Storytelling: histories, like any stories, use strategies for reasons: characterization, plot, point-of-view, omission, misdirection, rhetoric of every kind. The Story is not the History: the “world behind the text” is not the “world in the text.” In Understanding by Design terms, these big ideas correspond to “essential questions” that do not call for a single knowable answer, but rather prompt further questions and open-ended inquiry: Can competing claims about God both be true? What makes a claim true? What does it mean for a text to “speak to” a hearer whom the text never imagined? To what is a history accountable? What makes a cross-cultural experience “authentic”? You start to get an idea, don’t you? These overlapping big ideas and essential questions motivate the course design... and, not incidentally, tell you a lot about me and what it might be like to spend thirteen weeks doing my assignments and adapting to my feedback. If this isn’t what a learner expects of an Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, they can ask themselves some questions. Are they surprised and delighted? Are they cautiously curious but wonder what other offerings of this course might look like (at my institution or elsewhere)? Are they repulsed or offended? Would they like to chat? However this goes, we are well on our way toward a week one roster of forewarned, well-informed, consenting participants. But only if this information is available in a timely way, and that means the day that registration opens. Any lesser commitment means a waste of time for prospective learners who don’t have it in the bank.

Having practiced on my first-year students for a few years [Race in the Classroom #1   Race in the Classroom #2], I felt brave enough to add several readings on race at once to my junior level course, Is God Dead? It was a good time to do it because I was revising the course anyway, converting it from a philosophy elective into a Catholic intellectual tradition course, fulfilling a gen ed requirement here at my small and mostly white Catholic college in the Northeast (I’m white too). In revising, I had to go outside traditional philosophy – the standard philosophy of religion course reader has no readings on race or on Catholicism. I ignored the fact that I’m a philosopher and looked for resources in theology instead. I soon stumbled into Black theology. Then I used Google. A lot. I’ve included race in two units on my syllabus so far: 1.Re-imagining God: Metaphors for the 21st Century I revised my old unit on metaphors about God into Re-imagining God: Metaphors for the 21st Century. We discuss the role of metaphor; we ask whether literal descriptions of God are possible; we consider better and worse metaphors. I added several readings on how images depicting God and Jesus as white men dominate religious art, asking if and how that matters and why it may be important to depict them as people of color and/or as women. We look at how this issue came up in the civil rights movement and how it has reemerged more recently. This unit quickly became one of the strongest parts of the class. The students like it because it is relevant and has pictures. I like it because invites reflection in three areas that are crucial to my course goals: Self: Students quickly notice that even though they believe that God has no body, they find images of God as anything other than a white man jarring. What does that mean, how does this automatic association of power and white men affect their actions and attitudes, and what can we do about it? Society: These images include some and exclude others, and they both reflect and reinforce existing power structures. How does that power structure affect people’s lives inside organized religion, and how can we make things better? Should we insist on diverse images in our churches? Relationship with God. Our initial reactions in encountering a nontraditional picture God highlights our tendency towards idolatry. We constantly confuse our image of God with God. Since the images fall short and can have such a negative social impact, would we be better off without images of God? Maybe Jews and Muslims are onto something here? This semester, my class added another question: Are we obsessing too much about images? The students pointed to a religious and a social danger: If we focus too much on what Jesus looked like, we may neglect his message. If we worry too much about visual representation, we may settle for symbolic change. 2.Black suffering A work in progress: I’m adding readings on black suffering to the Problem of Suffering unit. William Jones argues that given how much and how disproportionately blacks have suffered, it’s reasonable to conclude that God is a white racist. James Cone disagrees. I haven’t taught this unit yet. But I will! 3.Learning more myself without going crazy The voice in my head saying that I don’t know enough to teach this stuff is still there, but I’m resolutely ignoring it and teaching anyway, remembering that my students know a lot less about it than I do. I’m also educating myself one small step at a time. I read a couple of articles on Black liberation theology over the summer so that I would at least know more than what’s in the Wikipedia entry. Last spring, I stuck to Wikipedia. It worked. I still know much less than I’d like. I want a better idea of how we ended up with our current images of Jesus. (I get why he is white, but why the long hair?) I’d like to understand how white mainstream theologians responded to black liberation theology. And I’d like a better sense of the Catholic church’s position and record on race. But I didn’t figure any of that out over the summer. I needed to rest, and I had other responsibilities too. Next time!   See the PART #1 and PART #2 of this series. Resources Metaphors for the 21st Century Braxton, Edward K. “The Racial Divide in the United States: A Reflection for the World Day of Peace 2015.” Cleage, Albert B., Jr. The Black Messiah. Reprinted in Black Theology: A Documentary History, Volume I, 1966-1979. Edited by James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore. New York: Orbis Books, 1993. (Selections) Douglas, Kelly Brown. The Black Christ. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 2019. (Selections on Cleage) Massingale, Bryan N. “The Challenge of Idolatry for LGBTI Ministry.” DignityUSA.org, 2019. NCR editorial staff. “Why white Jesus is a problem.” National Catholic Reporter, June 30, 2020. Rosales, Harmonia. The Creation of God (a recreation of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam). Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art, 2018. Schaeffer, Pamela, and John L. Allen Jr. “Jesus 2000.” National Catholic Reporter, 1999. The Problem of Suffering William R. Jones. Is God a White Racist? A Preamble to Black Theology. New York: Anchor Press, 1973. Cone, James H. God of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury, 1975. (Selections) Standard Philosophy of Religion course reader Pojman, Louis, and Rea, Michael. Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology. 7th edition. Stamford, CT : Cengage Learning, 2015.

How fitting it is that as I began the final edits on this post, I ended up clenching my jaw, tensing my shoulders, and generally doing just the opposite of what I’m trying to say in this piece. My goal is to bring the benefits of self-care into the classroom. Self-care are two words I don’t use. But, fifteen years ago a Wabash Center mentor said, “You are really good at self-care.” My modes of self-care have morphed over the years, and now the main one is my visual art practice. What I am considering now are ways to facilitate artistic self-care among students. What might it look like to create space in classrooms for students to make art as a way of learning religious studies? How might students not only learn religious studies, but have the learning experience mimic the calm, creative moments of making art? I’m not saying that art is just about feeling good; no, it’s hard work, but a very different type of work than writing papers. I didn’t grow up drawing a lot, but I majored in art, sort of, and then dropped it after a year. The last two summers, I focused intensively on developing my art practice. Rather than thinking, “I really should be doing something else with my time,” I thought about how my linework asked questions; how the calming effects of artistic processes opened space to imagine my art as doing research. Of course, there would be a written element, but the art itself became the primary source for the writing. I was also preparing for my first solo gallery show, which was on hold for more than a year due to COVID-19. My research/artmaking for the show began with the question, “What would it be like to draw as a Buddhist?” Obviously, that question simply leads to innumerable other questions, but that’s part of the point: the merging of drawing and doing research. During my artist talk, I was describing the central piece—a five-by-ten foot vertical triptych—when I spontaneously blurted out, “This is not a hobby. This is who I am at the core of my being.” My next thought was, “Whoa. Where did that come from?” That moment solidified my resolve to facilitate similar experiences in the religious studies classroom. Yes, I’m dreaming a bit here, but it’s a dream I’m actively pursuing. I named the triptych, “Forgetting the Ox,” which is the seventh of ten stages on the path toward enlightenment, according to the Ten Ox-herding Pictures commonly used in Zen. My drawing illustrates—rather loosely—some parallels between my becoming an artist and the struggles of the ox-herder in locating his “true nature.” It didn’t take long for me to imagine an entire course designed around art-making as doing religious studies. I already regularly have students draw their metaphor of being a college student, their religious or moral autobiography as a one-page, six-panel comic, or an image of the Buddha without looking at reference material. These exercises feel like “easy days” from a student’s perspective. Honestly, sometimes these exercises feel like I’m not really teaching. But there is plenty of learning taking place: students relax, laugh, tell stories about their religious upbringing, and gain confidence in sharing more of themselves as they describe their drawing to their classmates. The metaphor drawing, in particular, leads to students taking risks and becoming vulnerable; for many this is their first time drawing anything in years. Class becomes self-care, if only for a short time. So why not build upon those experiences to learn course material, moving well beyond personal metaphors? What if, for instance, in order to learn about Buddhism, students were to create a series of images of the Buddha? In the process, they would make new connections to the course, and likely retain information far longer than normal. Plus, they would add the somatic/artistic element. I’m not ready to forgo writing assignments, but the writing would now incorporate a discussion of their artwork and how it integrated with their research. My own metaphor as a professor is radically different from the one I drew many years ago in a Wabash Center pre-tenure workshop. At the time, my drawing depicted a long winding path filled with obstacles. Today, I would draw a group of students on winding paths, with me off to the side, in awe of their creativity, ready to help them figure out their paths for themselves. The new metaphor is less about me, and more about empowering students as they create their own journey of self-discovery.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had untold impacts on our shared work of teaching and formation. For those whose institutions have continued in-person instruction, no matter the degree of precaution taken, the risks of transmission have added fear, stress, and uncertainty to teaching contexts that already include significant challenges (which I need not enumerate here). Our challenging circumstances have also provided unique opportunities, though. And many have responded with admirable flexibility and resiliency. I have heard inspiring stories from friends and colleagues who have been able to facilitate safe learning and are sometimes even thriving, within the constraints and possibilities of our specific situations. I always have butterflies when a new school year begins, but in August of 2020 I felt paralyzed. How could I ensure that I was doing everything I could to keep my students safe while also facilitating the possibility of learning and growth within the unique stressors of the moment? I decided that, as long as I could ensure accessibility, all of my classes would meet outside, weather-permitting, as often as possible. In this first blog (of three), I will introduce the practice of outdoor teaching and reflect on its significance for theological education in our current circumstances. Two subsequent blogs will explore significant experiences and takeaways from my own outdoor instruction since August of 2020.[1] As I noted above, my fundamental motivation for outdoor teaching was to ensure a safe learning space. To be sure, walls and a ceiling offer safety and protection from the elements. When indoor spaces become places of more significant risk, though, we can experience what is normally protective as oppressive. The masks and distancing required for safety in enclosed spaces also raised literal barriers to communication and to nurturing the sense of community which I strive to facilitate for my students. Meeting outdoors allowed us all to breathe more freely, and in turn, to communicate and cultivate community more intentionally and with greater effect than would have been possible behind masks, socially distanced, and wary of the threat of a pathogen spread much more easily in enclosed spaces. Outdoor education has a long and storied history. While it has not always been adequately inclusive in western contexts, indigenous peoples have long emphasized the importance of learning within, and from, places of inhabitance. Our current climate crises demand that educators in theology and religious studies intentionally practice and foster connections with our more-than-human natural world for the sake of its well-being and for the sake of our own survival. Such intentionality is a matter of spiritual, religious, and moral concern for me as a Christian theologian. Though I have yet to teach a course directly on issues of creation care, teaching outside has already provided me with countless opportunities to connect my students to the natural world. Aside from providing an occasion to help meet the exigencies of responsible stewardship and living justly in creation, I have found that outdoor teaching is profoundly humane. Our built environments have the potential to make us forgetful of our dependence, contingency, and even capacities for embodied learning. However, as Jennifer Ayres writes, “When learners are invited outside the four-walled classroom, . . . their sensory experience of nature, particularly when paired with caring mentors who can accompany the learners as they make sense of their experience, can be transformative.”[2] When we resumed face-to-face instruction in the fall of 2020, I told my students that I suspected that our shared work together during the 2020-2021 school year would likely make for the most challenging and most poignant year of their educational journey. It was certainly the most difficult and most transformative school year yet for me. Teaching outdoors has provided me countless opportunities to reassess and improve my abilities to empower and instruct my students, to discover and promote cross-curricular and intellectual, moral, and practical connections, to appreciate the privilege of the work that I am able to do, and to marvel at and encourage the courage, attentiveness, resiliency, and creativity of my students. Though the uncertainty of the pandemic continues—I write these words just days after the discovery of the Omicron variant—because of the countless benefits both I and my students have experienced in classrooms without walls, I cannot imagine going back inside again full-time. I will be relieved if and when we are all able to breathe, speak, and listen more freely indoors, but all of my future teaching will include the fresh air of my classroom without walls. [1] I am grateful for the opportunity to share what I have learned in the hopes that others might benefit. That said, I must acknowledge that the privileges of my embodiment (as a cisgender white male) and my institutional circumstances (a campus with infrastructure amenable to outdoor instruction) mean that what I have been able to do may not be possible for others. Even so, the experience of meeting outside has reminded me of things I had forgotten and taught me new things about pedagogy that are worthy of consideration, even for those unable to teach outside. [2] Jennifer R. Ayres, Inhabitance: Ecological Religious Education (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2019), 76.

Talking about race in the classroom makes me nervous. What if a white student says something awful and I don’t know how to handle it? What if I don’t know the facts? What if something blows up and I end up in big trouble? And isn’t it irresponsible of me to teach something I don’t know enough about? Since race is so charged and complex, it’s tempting to leave it to experts. But I’m teaching at a small and predominantly white Catholic college in the Northeast (I’m white myself), and I largely teach gen ed to first-year students. We regularly teach outside our areas of expertise. And since very few of us specialize in race, our students won’t learn anything about it if non-experts avoid the topic. That seems unacceptable, so I’m teaching race even though I’m uneasy. After all, fear isn’t always a good reason to avoid something. I tell my students that all the time. I also believe that my fears are out of touch with reality. Of course, awful outcomes are possible. But they aren’t likely. I’m a good listener, I’m tenured, and my students are decent human beings who try to be kind, considerate, and non-racist. And I don’t have to stay ignorant: I can read, listen, and practice. Since I started engaging the topic of race in my classes,  I’ve improved. I know the subject better, I can sometimes anticipate what students will say and how and if to respond, and I’m better at managing the conversation. Most importantly, I’ve figured out how to create a reasonably safe classroom in which to have these conversations: We don’t start with race. Many of my first-year gen ed students have a hard time speaking in front of the class. They need to practice speaking and they need to trust me and each other before we tackle more controversial topics. My syllabus says that I’m still learning and that I expect to learn from my students, and I tell them that repeatedly. They don’t believe me, so I demonstrate it. I mess up and thank them when they correct me. I ask them to explain things I don’t know, and we build on those explanations whenever possible. When they tell me something cool, I write it down. I show them that I’m still engaged in the messy process of learning and that I’m willing to learn from them. We establish guidelines for discussions early on, and we revisit them before we embark on trickier topics, like race. I mention my discomfort and let them confess theirs, and then we talk about why it might be important to talk about difficult subjects anyway. I give them several ways of providing feedback and to ask questions, and I make some of them anonymous. I request feedback, especially if I suspect there’s a problem. If I don’t know how to handle something, I ask them (and others) for ideas. When I screw up, I apologize and try again. I learn and I grow. Through it all, I keep a nervous eye on my students of color. I might be worrying too much about the impact of these conversations on them. It’s uncomfortable for some of them, and of course I want to minimize their suffering. But my fears tell me that they could break. And that seems unlikely. They have almost certainly heard much worse. Still, students of color are badly outnumbered in my classroom, and while some of them are fine talking to a room full of white people about race, others aren’t. I email them beforehand and give them options: Let me know if it gets too uncomfortable. It’s OK if you don’t want to say anything – and it’s OK if you want to talk a lot too. Some say they’re fine, and some don’t answer. But some acknowledge that it will be difficult, and then we come up with ways of making it a little easier. Some of them end up talking a lot, others stay quiet in class but write to me, and others yet stay entirely silent. I make space for those who want to speak and then get out of the way as much as possible. In the spring, one of my quiet black first-years wrote a paper about our classroom discussion of race. She criticized my talking about discomfort, arguing that white people’s fears about discussing race express white fragility and that we need to get over it. She made a good case. So I’m trying to get over it and I’m reflecting on how to incorporate her insights into my course. Both the course and the getting over it are works in progress. Baby steps. *Read the first blog of this series here. **Watch for the third blog in this series in January.