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What happens at the Wabash Center is not meant to stay at Wabash. This is not a statement about confidentiality nor about alleged indiscretions. By design, the unambiguous gift of the Wabash Center to faculty colleagues in religion and theology remains conversations to support the life of teaching. Our workshops, colloquies, digital salons, and consultations create conversations to open new, and reinvigorate old, dimensions of teaching. It is our hope that the gleanings, learnings, new perspectives, reaffirmed approaches, needed information, refreshing analyses, renewed skills, modeled competencies, newly introduced notions, and the sheer fun of gathering together in hospitality and camaraderie will be implemented into classrooms as well as reinvested into faculty ecologies. What happens at Wabash is meant to be shared, taught, imparted, imitated and made public. As such, we hope our most recent workshop will be mined for distribution and circulation. The workshop was “Breaking the Academic Mold: Liberating the Powerful, Personal Voice Inside You.” It is a new collaboration with the Collegeville Institute. The online cohort gathered to learn the practices of creative non-fiction writing. We were led by Sophfronia Scott, Director of the Masters of Fine Arts Program, Alma College and Michael N. McGregor, Collegeville Institute faculty. A complete description of the workshop is on our website. The premise of the workshop is that learning to write in creative genres will improve teaching. The depth and critical importance of our conversation was revealed in the kinds of questions we raised and explored. Here are examples of our wonderings: What if developing your writing voice simultaneously assisted with developing the teaching voice? What if learning to operate in your power as a writer impacted your teaching capacity? What if by learning to claim the agency and power in creative writing you ignite your teaching? What if the skills, competencies, capacities of creative non-fiction writing had direct bearing upon your pedagogical decision making and judgement? What if getting a better handle on the human condition meant writing about it, then teaching about it - or vice versa? What if deeper understanding of religious experience was inherit in learning to write beyond the academic genre of writing? What if the hermeneutical challenge of our teaching can be best met through better story telling? What if developing and improving writing skills is a way to better communication and organization skills often lacked in the classroom? What if learning to write so that readers are emotionally moved would improve the ways we design courses or teach a session? What if freeing your imagination for writing contributed to freeing your imagination in teaching? What if the narrow and humdrum restrictions of academic writing was maintained as much by scholar’s self-policing as by the guild’s rigid expectations? What if writing was a tool to narrate yourself into new life as a teacher? What if the power and ability of voice could be unlocked by learning creative writing? What if moving people into new understandings and new grapplings with old ideas, meant harnessing the power and ability to write creatively? What if strengthening the voice for personal expression resulted in more authentic scholarship? What if through creative non-fiction writing our ideas were made more accessible to a wider audience who are asking similar questions as our students and colleagues about religion and theology? During the 6-day workshop we were afforded the luxury of large chunks of time to write into these questions, or to write about anything else we desired. It was a joy. These provocative, permission giving, and counter-cultural questions permeated our workshop and shaped our conversation in generative ways. Questions bubbled and were engaged in daily plenary discussions. The two workshop leaders made themselves available for one-on-one sessions where these questions were answered in private and focused on the personal. These questions surfaced in the sessions where we workshopped one another’s writings. Three times during the workshop each participant read aloud his or her original writing. One of the sessions was dedicated to the entire group providing constructive feedback to each writer while the writer listened to the critique (There are no tears during workshopping sessions!). Hearing from generous and care-filled colleagues about new writing was an act of trust and vulnerability. Providing feedback to colleagues during their writing process was a genuine act of confidence and collaboration. The mutuality, solidarity, and shared wisdom gave me a renewed sense of creativity and hope. I am able to provide a first-hand account from inside the workshop because I was a participant. It was my privilege to learn and grow alongside my peers. As Wabash Center Director, I want to continue to actively learn about teaching. Even at this advanced stage in my career, I want to learn more about teaching and the teaching life. I want to learn to write better, more accessibly, and with a more authentic voice. I have no doubt that by improving my teaching and my writing I will clarify my vision for the Center and lead us to a more generative future. After the workshop, I returned to my desk with this quote resonating in my spirit. It captures my experience in the workshop as well as provides me with clarity as we move into our future. Ralph Marston wrote: “Go often to where you have the indisputable knowing that life is good. Do, again and again, those things that affirm your highest hopes and best instincts … Touch, taste, feel, see, hear what compels you to care. Let life be good in ways that drive you to make it even better.” Thank you Sophfronia Scott and Mike McGregor. Thank you, Collegeville Institute. I hope our collaboration grows.    A special thanks to my fellow writers and workshop participants for this adventure!

Sufia Uddin Associate Professor Connecticut College No better time to teach how Islam is “raced” than now. Comments by the likes of Donald Trump provide excellent fodder for discussions about race, religion, and racism. It is also true that the kinds of questions asked by journalists and the stories they

Steed V. Davidson Associate Professor of Old Testament Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and Church Divinity School of the Pacific Each night I watch Jeopardy. Occasionally I am thrilled when Tobago or Trinidad features in a clue. This thrill comes from knowing that the island where I grew up (area of 116 square miles) has found its way into the knowledge required of Jeopardy contestants. I take this small thrill, and I am painfully aware of how small it is, because for most of my life I have been told that the intellectual knowledge that matters consists of material outside of..

I like questions. Interrogatives entice me. Answers are low-hanging fruit. Social media lends towards making everyone an expert, and experts tend to have all of the answers. However, questions can change the course of a conversations. Inquiries make space for new ideas, new practices, new programs, and new ways of being. As a biblical scholar questions from this text appeal to me. God asks Cain, “Where is your brother Abel? (Genesis 4.9)” The Lord inquires of Ezekiel, “Can these bones live? (Ezekiel 37:3)” Jesus quizzes the crowd, “Who touched me? (Luke 8:45)” Each question respectively provides a lesson on communal accountability, national atonement, and social acceptance. Questions can change the course of a conversation. Questions allow one to pivot an approach to pedagogy. Before I begin class, I often ask my students, “How are you? How’s it going?” There is no rush to exegesis, cultural studies, biblical interpretation, or any path to hermeneutics. I frequently start our sessions checking in and making space just to sit, hear, and be. It is challenging to process words and thoughts of people distant from us when we are wrestling with trauma and pain close to home. Since March these moments have taken on more meaning. It is one thing to pause not knowing what is unraveling in another person’s life. It is quite another to stop when what stumps you, also stumps me. To begin class unaware of any individual difficulty presents one type of challenge. However, when there is a communal, national, global vicissitude that is no respecter of persons, the classroom becomes a place where traditional pedagogical hierarchy is impudent and irrelevant. Yes, there is the professor, and of course, there are students. Yet, an invisible pathogen called COVID-19 has compromised all displays of visible power. In our current context asking, “How are you?” takes on new meaning. As I ask my students about their well-being, it gives me the space to ask myself, “How am I doing?” Such fragile moments thrust professors to center stage of navigating self-care and classroom-care. In this pandemic when each day there is a startling increase in cases, a rising death toll, and still little progress towards a vaccine, pedagogy and pastoring have become strange bedfellows. Such times call for professors to tap into emotional reserves while discerning portals of spiritual connection. Our tasks before reading essays, facilitating conversations, or sharing our slides via Zoom, require that we don ecclesial attire, access priestly garb, and step into the role of professor-pastor-priest-rabbi-iman-cleric-shaman-spiritual sage. I am not belittling these much-needed roles by suggesting they are easily or readily adaptable. These professions require much credentialing and processes. As an ordained National Baptist and Disciples of Christ minister, I know this from experience. I must admit that prior to this COVID-19 crisis, I kept “Rev.” out of the classroom so “Dr.” would carry the day. Today is a new day. Both must enter fully in light of this global disease and dis-ease. Now I ask new questions before we dive into the gospels, epistles, Jesus, or the mother of James and John. Here are the inquiries from which my pedagogy now proceeds: What gives you joy? Social media and health reports make it the default to dwell on the negative. To seek joy in a death-dealing context is fodder for educational reform. Our coronavirus-context focuses on the pessimistic. The classroom should be the place for cultivating the positive even when its opposite seems overwhelming. As a professor, I want my pedagogy to challenge the norm, even as we live during abnormal times. What worries you? We do not teach in a socio-political or socio-economic vacuum. Students had worries and angst pre-COVID-19. But now, families, finances, challenges to faith, physical wellness, and friendships have all undergone some shifting. Our students’, and our, anxieties about these and other matters are more pronounced. While wrestling with this pandemic, students remain curious about finishing the semester. I wish . . . Okay so these last two are not questions, but they seek information nonetheless. Fill in the blank queries offer a way for students to express how they feel. To engage in wishful thinking provides a forum for helping us see that things won’t be like this always. A pedagogical pivot to wishing helps us ponder and put into place what we project for the future. I am grateful for . . . When the gravitas of sheltering in place can weigh heavily on all of us, finding something for which to be grateful is paramount. This should not be an exercise in comparison or competition, but an act of contemplative practice in chaos. This is a practice of thanksgiving in the center of turmoil. Questions can change the course of a conversation. Questions allow us to pivot our approach to pedagogy. Questions help us pray through until we get through. *Original blog published April 23, 2020