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In October 2024, the Wabash Center hosted a “Curiosity Roundtable,” which I was honored to attend. The goal was to offer us experiences to help us; to encourage us to think outside the boxes that trap us as scholars, institutional citizens, and pedagogues. It was an amazing time, with voices that I am still thinking about, but, oddly, the experience that resounds, again and again, in my thoughts is the Porsche Experience.The group toured the Porsche Experience Center in Atlanta, GA. Those of us who did not get motion sickness—not me, dang it!—experienced driving the Porsche of our choice in the Simulator Lab. It was the tour, however, that had the impact on me. As the informed and enthusiastic guide showed us around, we were able to see, for example, the elements of making a Porsche. We saw a wall with the multiple tones of paint one could use on a Porsche body—some so subtly different that the guide said all buyers were urged to use a specialist in car design. We handled the key fobs and touched leathers used for interiors—just a few items among drawers of exquisite features. Then, we saw beautiful cars, on loan from collectors. What struck me was the flawlessness of these machines, but also, that they had very little mileage. These were cars that barely had been driven, mostly under 200 miles—they were tested, I thought, loaded for delivery, and put in a garage to gaze upon. Beautifully wrought, but, to me, kind of useless, except as possessions—though sort of like the excess of books in my library, I had to admit.It was the race cars, however, that made me see why the Wabash Center’s Executive Director, Dr. Lynne Westfield, brought us there. These cars tied the remarkable beauty of the collectable cars to function. One Porsche slogan is “Passion in Every Detail.” The Porsche desire includes “detailed craftsmanship, cutting edge innovation, and sheer passion.” That, I think, is what, we as devoted and innovative teacher-scholars practice and is what I saw in in the race cars. Those cars, like the Rothmans Porsche 962 on exhibit, were banged up, used over and over, and were examples of design reworked. These were the workhorses—like us professors—driven in 24 Hours of Le Mans, an endurance sports car race. I learned there why my daddy always bought Goodyear Tires. The Goodyears were so sturdy in the Le Mans that they had to be changed only once. These tires marked an adjustment, and what fascinated me were the adjustments: the redesigns. In the Rothmans we saw, the engine, first, was under the seat—not a great placement.As the guide talked about that, I said, “Someone died,” and he nodded.So, without losing speed or power, that one had to be adjusted.Beauty and function brought about through knowledge and innovation and carried out with passion—that is what kept running through my mind as we walked around. Every teacher in that group has been recognized, I know, as passionate about his or her subject matter and skilled: we are beauty in action. Beauty and function, carried out with passion, are the goals of great teaching. As teachers, I think we aim for the good, the true, and the beautiful. The classical Platonic understandings of those may not be same as they were for Plato, perhaps, but we seek to craft the vehicle that is so beautiful that it is utterly compelling—beauty draws and improves us, Plato argues--to our students that they will take the ride with us and risk encountering what we consider to be good and true. As Elaine Scarry reminds us in On Beauty and Being Just, a liberal arts education is the perpetuation of beauty. As human beings, we seek to copy the beautiful, and as we do so, we revise our own locations and beings. The beautiful, Scarry argues, helps “incite the will toward continual creation” (8). And, fairness, in terms of beauty, can lead to fairness, equality, in terms of justice: to being fair, to seeking “‘a symmetry of everyone’s relations to one another’” (95).The design of intellectual experience, as Patricia O’Connell Killen calls it, is the same as the design of those Porsche cars in another space. We go from finding and observing beauty to creating it ourselves in our syllabi and classrooms, to, as we teach, helping our students to see and create beauty themselves. Every piece in the collectable cars was a masterpiece of beauty—from the door handles to the key fobs. As a craftswoman teacher, I want my classes to be that way, beautifully constructed. The beauty embedded in the experience of reading, writing, and, yes, testing, which, as we saw in the Rothmans, is a dangerous but necessary process. Porsche made me see that our work is a wrought beauty: one made from years of doing and redesigning. I really want my teaching to be like those race cars, able to be adapted so that it can hug the ground—as Charles Long used to say, face the nitty gritty of human experience, and round the track.Those battered race cars stay in my imagination. The other day, I looked at my teaching notes for my Theory and Methods course, which I have taught, now, for over thirty years. The notes carry a lot of my late professors, Charles Long, Ruel Tyson, and Nathan Scott, and of others who taught me, but they show my growth in understanding and my adjustments, as my voice emerged and changed. Marginal notes, updates from my reading, and new thoughts that my students had as we rounded the track add more pages and sticky notes every year. These beautiful pieces gather. My teaching, if it were a Porsche, would look, I hope, like those race cars: a beautiful thing, the pinnacle of human ingenuity and engineering, yet banged up in use and adjustment. What I teach is remade different every time I encounter a new group of students from a new generation or read something that challenges and changes me. I must move the engine or change the shape of the seat or stop and figure out how to find my own, nearly indestructible Goodyear tires.The guide told us that they do not open the doors on those race cars because we would smell the odor of the drivers, embedded in the cars, even after all these years—drivers who had done twenty-four hours of duty in a car. That fact stuck with me hard. That smell is a mark, a reminder or memory that the beautiful and functional thing needs a driver, and that the driver bears the pain—marks and is marked. I thought of the odor of sanctity that comes, particularly, from the wounds of saints.We teachers are the like these drivers, these cars, but most of us do not get what we either need or deserve for the work we do. As my Peer Mentoring Cluster and I found during COVID and as one of my dear colleagues, one long out of this business, reminded me recently, institutions spend a lot of time thinking about students and about the institutions themselves. Most are not as committed to beauty as Porsche, and they do not spend much thinking about those driving the car—us teachers. But I think we prevail. Plato argued that the children of dreams outlive the children of the flesh. In the beauty we make, we are and put the first instrument of our dreams in children’s hands.*My drawing teacher said: Look, think, make a mark.Look, I told myself.And waited to be marked… She said: Respond to the heaviest partof the figure first. Density is form. That I keep hearing destiny is not a mark of character. Like pilgrimageonce morphed to mirage in a noisy room, someone so earnest at my ear. Then marriage slid.Mir-aage, Mir-aage, I heard the famous poet let loose awry into her microphone, triumphant. The figure to be drawn —not even half my age. She’s completely emptied her face for this job of standing still an hour. Look. Okay. But the little dream in there, inside the thinkthat comes next. A pencil in my hand, its secret life is charcoal, the wood already burnt,a sacrifice.[1] Notes & Bibliography[1] Marianne Boruch, “Pencil,”https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/55555/pencil.

“Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy!” – Miss Frizzle Now, I know what you may be thinking, “Miss Frizzle?!?! The teacher from the Magic School Bus? Really?” Or, better yet, I’ve just aged myself and what you’re actually thinking is, “Who the hell is Miss Frizzle?” Either way, extend a bit of grace and just bear with me for a bit. Miss Frizzle is the main character and teacher in the famed Magic School Bus books and cartoon. In the series, Miss Frizzle takes her third-grade class on some unique adventures, immersing them into the worlds that represent their lessons. Want to learn about the solar system? Let’s take a trip into space! Curious about the way food moves through the body? Well, if we make ourselves small enough, we can take the journey ourselves. With a bit of magic, anything is possible. While I personally don’t have a magic school bus, as a kid I was always fascinated to go on crazy adventures with Arnold, Keesha, and the rest of the class. Now that I am older and an educator myself, I recognize that the lessons still abound! There is still much to learn from Miss Frizzle, and these days I find that her pedagogical genius is often overlooked. The gap between teaching elementary-aged children foundational lessons and teaching adult seminary students may seem stark, but the best lessons Miss Frizzle offers us is culminated in her signature saying, “Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy!” So, for this series we will explore each of these lessons in detail. Taking chances: There are a lot of rules when it comes to teaching. Rubrics, curriculum, and syllabi all help us to remain accountable to the metrics created to determine whether or not we are where we should be. So much of our time is spent trying to prove these metrics, creating objectives and curating expectations for both our students and our deans. But what does it mean to be creative in what feels like such a restrictive space? How are we to understand our possibilities when we are inundated with obligations to our limitations? Miss Frizzle understands this. You wouldn’t know it by the way she conducts her classes, but she understands this dynamic so well that she is able to get to the heart of the matter by breaking and bending the right rules. Her class objective is to get students to learn in a way so that they are not only excited about the material, but they are able to integrate it into their real lives and utilize the knowledge in impromptu situations. These are our objectives as well. Theological education isn’t just learning facts about God, the church, and the history of theology. Theological education is about shaping leaders who are excited about God and spirituality, who can integrate these lessons and excitement into their lives, and who can walk with others as they do the same. What to keep, break, and bend: When it comes to rules, we often believe we must choose between two extremes – we either uphold them, or we break them. But here’s a secret I think everyone should know: all rules are made up. Rules (hopefully created in community) help us to hold one another accountable to do what we set out to do. They can protect us, and can help create lines of clear communication and boundaries. But they only work when they help a community thrive. When they don’t, they become restrictive and oppressive. I’m reminded of this when I think about online participation posts. I hate participation posts, both as a student and as a professor. Ideally, these assignments help us measure how students participate in class by tracking their offered insights on reading and responses to other students. This intent isn’t a bad thing, but it often creates a forced conversation that trades its organic freedom for obligation. It may track the fact that students participate, but it may also diminish the conversation in the process. What do you do when you have a rule that feels too important to break (we need to track participation in online classes), but feels too restrictive to uphold (no one likes participation posts)? This is where bending the rules becomes key. This is where Miss Frizzle asks us to take a chance. What are some of the ways you bend the rule of participation that doesn’t restrict excitement and the flow of engagement? In my courses, I ask students to participate in a section I call MOOD, which basically captures the mood or essence of the course. Divided into four sections (Listen, Watch, Read, and Visit) I start by including resources that expand the conversation and encourage students to add to the ever-growing list. I even include a playlist for students to collaborate on. I often get posts from students like, “I was visiting this museum and it made me think about the reading from last week,” or “This movie really allowed me to think more about our conversation!” By inviting participation in a different way, students are not only engaging each other and the course, but they are encountering elements of the class in their own contexts. What is wisdom without wonder? The question at the heart of taking chances is one I often ask myself and my students: what is wisdom without wonder? So much of our education is about proving knowledge. Even in theology, our metrics track what one can prove about God, or at the very least how we have mastered the history of this quest. Even as we seek to measure the tools our students learn that can directly (and indirectly) translate into their professions and vocations, we are often left with a knowledge that lacks nimbleness, a proficiency without play. What would it look like to track the wonder in our students? How many of your assignments require a thesis that explores the crevices of a question as opposed to proving a point? Miss Frizzle’s adventures were less about proving points and more about practicing possibilities. I wonder what theological education would look like if we did the same?

Creating new courses just keeps getting harder. Today I finished drafting the reading list for my new course on Ethics and the Good Life for first year students. It was supposed to be easy because my research and writing is about ethics. And it was supposed to be fun because I have the luxury of teaching whatever I want in this course.But it was awful. Partway through, I understood why Barry Schwartz argues that having too many choices makes us less happy. I found myself envying people who teach a set curriculum with an assigned reading list.I quickly became overwhelmed by the infinite number of possibilities and then I made it worse by going online and looking for a bigger infinity of choices. I bounced back and forth between sample syllabi, texts, videos, and podcasts for hours. I felt guilty because I wasn’t familiar with enough of it. And I got more and more tense.My list of possible materials just kept growing. And it was taking forever. I used up the time I had set aside for this project, and more. A lot more.Part of the challenge is that we no longer agree about what should be in a course like this. When I started teaching at Stonehill College, we had a historically-based philosophy curriculum, and the reading list for an introductory ethics class was a given: Aristotle, Kant, Mill, and Nietzsche.It took philosophy much longer than the other humanities, but the boundaries of our discipline are finally expanding. Most of the time, I am glad that we’re bringing in new approaches and formerly excluded voices. I’m one of the people in my department who have been pushing those boundaries (starting once I understood how limiting our approach was – and once I was tenured). But I miss having clarity about what my courses should and could contain. So. Many. Choices.Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus got me out of the spiral. Hari points out that more and more information is pushed at us every day:1986: the equivalent of 40 eighty-five-page newspapers2007: 174 newspapersNow: unknown, but probably more.Hari quotes Sune Lehmann who likens it to drinking from a fire hose.That hit home. We can’t do it. Seriously. I can’t even skim the 1986-era 40 newspapers a day. And here I am, voluntarily seeking out additional information, turning the pressure in that fire hose up beyond today’s 174+ daily newspapers.Of course I can’t do it. I just googled “ethics and the good life syllabus” and there were 30,800,000 results.It can’t be done, and it’s not my fault.The inevitability of failure reassured me.I had no choice. I had to select course materials from a limited subset of possible materials. This gave me permission to take a different approach: Instead of looking around, I’m limiting myself to what I’m already familiar with.I set a timer for two hours and turned the internet off (the Freedom app – the best invention since the mute button). I told myself firmly that I’m an authority on ethics (hey, they let me teach it to college students). And then I asked myself two questions:What is the main goal of the course? Students will reflect on their life, their values, and on the ways they might not be living in a manner that reflects those values. If things go well, the course will help them live a little better.Given that goal, which of the issues that I am familiar with should the class consider? I wrote a list:How smartphones get in the way of our happiness: body image, our ability to pay attention, our relationshipsWhat happiness is, with a deeper dive into the role of money, friendship, and meaningHow (some) adversity benefits usWhat we owe other people, both friends and strangersHow we can better balance caring for ourselves with helping othersWhat makes something right or wrong?How we might relate to people who disagree deeply with us about what mattersSome of the ways in which we are biasedWe won’t do all the units – I’ll give the students some choice.Turns out, I know a lot and I already knew enough to put together a course. More research was unnecessary and unhelpful. It so often is. I wish somebody had reminded me of that while I was trying so hard to drink from the fire hose.

“I’ve got the love of Jesus down in my heart!”“Where?!”“Down in my heart!”“Where?”“Down in my heart to stay!”We sang as we sat around the campfire at our Minam Lake campsite in the Wallowa Mountains. It was a discovery. So many of us knew the same camp songs, even though we’d all grown up in different places. Mark started it. Sitting in our camp chairs waiting for our quinoa-pistachio-apricot-cardamom dinner to cook – which takes a little while on a backpacking stove – Mark said, “I’ve got this old song stuck in my head: I’ve got the love of Jesus…” Bob merged his voice, “Down in my heart!” Nicole shouted back, “Where?” and suddenly everyone was part of it.I joined in as I stirred the quinoa and watched my colleagues – yes, nine of my faculty colleagues – finish one song and start another. We had a good old-fashioned camp song sing-along on our last night on the trail. As we’d gotten to know one another over the past four days, we’d grown more comfortable with each other, willing even to venture into silliness because we felt cared for by one another. We’d found the joy of relationship and connection.Last year I proposed to my dean that I offer a summer backpacking trip for faculty focused on wilderness spirituality. I lead these January-term courses for students, so why not offer them for faculty, who also need care and connection? My dean told me to run with it, and the Wabash Center graciously approved a grant for the experience. So here we were, ten colleagues in the Eagle Cap Wilderness of the Wallowa Mountains for five days. Some colleagues had backpacked before, some hadn’t. Some knew each other to varying extents; one person knew no one at all. But here we were on the last night, singing camp songs together because we had discovered shared experiences of faith formation and malformation and deep bonds of friendship and colleagueship. We knew we were in this together.That’s been the big takeaway from the trip: We are now more together in our work. I’ve written a lot in this blog series about how outdoor and immersive classes bring students together and enhance learning. Turns out, they do those things for colleagues, too. We began as generally collegial with one another, but now we have experiences of having to rely on one another. We have experiences of being (appropriately and by choice) vulnerable with one another. We built a space of trust where being vulnerable felt like a valid option, whether that vulnerability was needing help when the trail was steep, sharing a personal struggle with faith on a partnered walk, or just being free and silly with one another. We experienced laughing together and talking about things other than work. We worshiped together with morning and evening liturgy.When we came back to work this fall, those experiences stayed with us, and we found ourselves gravitating to one another during opening faculty days. We look for each other when we need support. We look for each other when we need a laugh or a camp song. We look for each other when we need to know we are understood. And so, we enter the service of our students and our other colleagues from a position of mutual support, which makes us all feel able to serve from reserves rather than from the fumes of energy long gone. We have space for creativity and imagination, and so we are thinking once more about new ways to teach and work than how we always have.A wilderness trip does these things in part by the nature of what the trip requires – interdependence, participation, risk, challenge, struggle, presence – and what is absent – normal rhythms and distractions, phones, any pretense about who we are (when you live in tents with your colleagues for a week, you can’t hide much from one another). Good facilitation and the willingness of participants to engage in these practices is also required to bring about the care and connection. But none of these things are limited to a wilderness trip. Gathering with colleagues in any place outside of normal work spaces in an immersive experience that requires a little bit of trust in one another; any setting that requires people to need each other; any experience of being present, away from normal distractions, and of talking about something other than teaching, scholarship, and service will do these things.As much as I like to think of the trail as magic, it is not. The magic is simply intentionality and imagination. All of us need care from and connection with one another, and most of our financially-strapped schools are unlikely to provide it. Who among your colleagues could you start with? What could you propose you do together? Can you think of ways to structure a group challenge or even talk about a challenge you are already in together? If you’ve done a Wabash Center workshop or roundtable, think of the ways they’ve build meaningful connection among faculty and try to imitate what you’ve experienced, as leader instead of participant. With a little intentionality and imagination, we can connect with our colleagues in meaningful ways that make our institutions places of possibility rather than places of staleness. They might even become places of spontaneous singing.

(An audio version of this blog may be found here.)We were not gathered to analyze the problems facing systems of education, societal storms, weaponized misinformation, wars around the globe, or climate change. We were not convened to solve problems of organizational structures or craft new and much needed policies and procedures to salvage educational enterprises. Rather, this was a gathering of Wabash Center leaders—highly credentialed colleagues, experts in their own fields, invested in the art and innovation of teaching.Wabash Center leaders assembled, as the invitation read, “to whet appetites, inspire new thinking, beckon the muse, provide new insights, rekindle the imagination, move us out of the constraints of boxed/hobbled ideas, and encourage new kinds of experiments in our classrooms and curriculum. Specifically, we gather with prominent thought leaders from other fields than religion to grapple with this meta-question:What are the possible futures of teaching religion and theology, and how do we imagine and create those possibilities?  Our discussion centered on the belief that the map/plan/direction to the new world is in our shared imaginations and risk-taking capabilities.  For the sake of possibility, we assembled to nurture our collective curiosity.Our presuppositions were not new or novel. We need a new vision if we are to have educational paradigms adequate for a democratic society in the coming future. We know that it is not enough to tweak, patch, or cling to, hollowed-out traditions of the current operation of higher education. If we are to establish systems of education which can sustain a flourishing society into the future, we must be about the business of casting new visions, pursuing new longings, and seeing new approaches. For this, we need curiosity, clarity of imagination, better communication concerning unusual approaches and a willingness to open ourselves to originality. We need detailed dreams and concise dreamers who will, with precision, help wean us from our dogged reliance upon the tired, ineffective paradigm. We convened to prepare for a future that is much different from our now.The Curiosity Roundtable gathering did not disappoint. Feedback from the participants told us that we convened a worthwhile conversation. Here is a sampling of the feedback from participants:  Using an approach related to curiosity wherein none of us was expected to be the experts, opened spaces for authentic engagement, laughter, reflection and community building.The opportunity to connect with others and engage in a different set of carefully curated conversations really accomplished the task of awakening our curiosity.I was surprised, but shouldn’t have been by now, at the vision of the Wabash Center to bring a set of unexpected conversation partners to the group – the Porche experience, an artificial intelligence sociologist and activist, a racialized socialization of children expert, a spoken word poet, and artist salon conveners. It worked! It worked in ways that will keep working on me, and I trust the whole group, in our own ways.Throughout our conversation we identified practices to foster curiosity. Here are a few of the ideas which bubbled around during the conversation:Push yourself to experience the wild, untamed, unfettered, out-of-the-box, unplanned spontaneous, improvisational, and undisciplined.Stay rested. Know what your body feels like when rested. Pursuing curiosity requires rest and calm.Learn to pay attention to daydreams, sleeping dreams, nightmares, desires, fantasies, and wishes. They might be as important or more important than aims, goals, and outcomes.Read beyond your academic discipline. Become an interdisciplinary agent. Read novels, short stories, creative nonfiction, stories of all genres.Write novels, short stories, creative nonfiction of all descriptions.Surround yourself with creatives—people who are unafraid of painting, sculpting, creative writing, film making, dancing.Practice new artistic expression(s) then pursue them passionately.Kindle the joy of being deeply moved by beauty or freedom. As best you can, avoid the ugliness of participating in oppression, exploitation, and the marginalization of people – especially if it is to your benefit.Practice silence, stillness, meditation, and contemplation.Attend to the health of your body as if you love it and need it to thrive.Attend to the health of your mind as if you love it and need it to thrive.Attend to the health of your soul as if your life depends upon it.Kindle relationships with family, friends, neighbors to surround yourself with love, care, and mercy.With regularity, make believe, pretend, fantasize, and goof off.Practice compassion because it is good education.The Curiosity Roundtable concluded with the challenge to each participant to develop a praxis project inspired by our conversation which will continue to unbridle their curiosity. The proposals are due in a couple of weeks. I suspect the projects will transform our world for the better!