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The best thing anyone ever told me in graduate school rings as clear and true today as it did then. It was during the first year of my doctoral work after one of my classes that my instructor pulled me aside and said matter-of-factly, “Mark, you’ve got a chip on your shoulder, and you need to do something about it.” We had finished one of her class sessions when I followed her out of the classroom and wanted to ask some follow-up questions from our discussion. I could tell she was frustrated with me from the tone of her voice and the directness of the message. I paused. My lips began to quiver and my eyes started to well with tears, and yet I will be forever grateful for the truthfulness of those words, for their bite, and their ability to catalyze a sorely-needed recalibration in my life. Up to that point, I was a student who had learned to verbalize my thoughts aloud by asking questions and offering many comments. I was curious and it helped me work through my questions. It also made me look and feel smart, or so I believed. Looking back on those days, my academic insecurities resulted in a lot of unnecessary verbal processing and quite frankly, some badgering. The formation of an academic scholar cuts both ways. On the one hand, I learned in different graduate schools to look at reality and theory from multiple angles. Interpretations and understandings are usually more complex than any single reasoning and a thorough search of these multiplicities is not only scholarly, but integrous. It takes careful tending for an academic to hone their craft well in areas of curiosity, observation, research, and reasoning. And this refining results in one of the best parts of academic formation, which is to see and name complexity. On the other hand, untended graduate academic formation has the potential to harm. The very skills that afford us the capacity to rigorously research a matter can ironically produce in us a rigidity that locks us into our arguments and reasoning. We may cease to consider an alternative explanation, or worse, adopt inflexible forms of argumentation and reasoning for the sake of being clearly the only right one. Having clarity and conviction while holding complexity isn’t an issue; neither is the practice of logic and debate. Rather, an underlying and often unnoticed dynamic of needing to be right, or to be the smartest one, or the recognizable one, is what is troubling about this kind of formation in an academic. This is why tending to our formation while in graduate school and beyond is so important for those in the academy. In graduate school we are introduced to, and then eventually hold on our own, many powerful tools and capacities that can help to heal, transform, and harm. What my instructor did for me that day was to awaken me to things I could not see about myself and how I held myself in graduate school and our learning community. My hunch is that she knew she could do this because she was not only my advisor, but also a mentor. My hunch is that in some way, she knew she had to take this step for other community colleagues and for my future. Her truthfulness cut right through any theory or concept and hit home because it came out of a good, and frustrated, place where I could receive this difficult word well and sit with it for days. In some ways, I should not have been surprised by this encounter because my academic trajectory had reached a point where being the one who asked (unnecessary) questions and offered tiresome rebuttals was sadly powerful. I needed this demonstration of love and care though I did not know I needed it until it actually happened. My personality is such that I will always have an edgy, passionate, and direct side to who I am as both a professional and an academic. However, because someone in graduate school took the time to tell me something I really needed to hear, I find that I can hold these parts of who I am more reasonably now. I am working on not always having to respond to statements I do not agree with and finding other ways to contribute to the process than with unnecessary words, and I am (and I think others around me are) the better for it. So, what is the best thing anyone ever told you in graduate school?

This blogpost is a conversation between Kimberly Diaz, University of California Riverside, Michael DeAnda, DePaul University, and Neomi DeAnda, University of Dayton. KIM: Neomi, how did the Loteria session at the AAR come to be? NEOMI: This year marked the twentieth anniversary of the first time I attended the American Academy of Religion (AAR). Having a background in education and strongly believing that humans learn differently, I always questioned the ninety-minute and two-and-a-half-hour session format of presented papers for all sessions. Five days of these sessions bookended with breakfast meetings and receptions has always felt exhausting to me. Over the years, the suggestion of doing something different has arisen. While I have participated in other types of sessions like roundtable discussions and generative sessions, I wondered how I could entertain comments about doing something radically different at multiple sections’ business meetings. Last December, I found the game Millennial Loteria: Gen Z Edition at a big box merchant in Chicago, Illinois and Dayton, Ohio. I initially bought the game to incorporate into my Latina/Latino Religious Experience undergraduate course at the University of Dayton. This game provided an in-class common experience from which to build the semester. The course participants enjoyed, appreciated, and questioned the game. That same day, I posted a picture of the game on social media, igniting a quick discussion about the game itself. I was overjoyed to see such a response about something both so close and so new to my Tejana experience. The topic of immigration often takes center stage when the AAR and Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) meet in San Antonio. I am often frustrated about the lack of thought given to the plurality of possible topics which could thrive while meeting at this particular geographical location. Horacio Vela, session panelist, astutely remarked, “Loteria helps us appreciate the historical and evolving nature of Mexican-American cultures, identities, and religions. It also opens our eyes to the ways that Latina/o/x communities have handed down and scripturalized stereotypes about race, ethnicity, and gender.” The conversation on social media presented one such opportunity. From there, the idea was born to play the game at a session of the AAR. MICHAEL: How did you envision the format of playing Loteria in a conference session and what did you do to prepare? NEOMI: Carmen Nanko-Fernandez connected me with the co-chairs of the Religion, Sport and Play Unit, Kimberly Diaz and Jeffery Scholes. They were very amenable to helping me work through a proposal to submit to their call. The Experiential Session Playing Millennial Gen Z Loteria which was held Sunday, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM in the San Antonio Convention Center-Room 225C (Meeting Room Level) came from that accepted proposal. The proposal recommended the following format for the session: play the game panelists respond group discussion. The day for the session arrived. I had conjured prizes from various tables in the AAR/SBL book exhibit and from a Wabash Center luncheon the day before. Keri Liechty from the Louisville Institute brought swag from their office. MICHAEL: Very cool. That’s a nod to kermeses, a site where Loteria is often played and the prizes are often donated tchotchkes and trinkets fished out of storage. Your approach is totally emulating the found-and-sourced prizes spirit. Tell me how the session went? NEOMI: The tone in the room was different from the beginning as game boards and emoji tokens (instead of frijoles) were handed out to session participants. I set the rules. Structured play. The play during the session would end when the last of the prizes was collected. After two rounds, it seemed the third round could be the last. The participants changed the rules when play was going to end sooner than they wished. During the session, the energy in the room dampened between playing the game and the initial responses. So the session followed a modified format: play the game initial responses from three panelists play the game group discussion. The emoji tokens were later labeled chingaderitas by panelist Gilberto Cavazos-Gonzalez. Session participants remarked about the relaxation they felt from play during an AAR session. I noticed the session attendants, most of whom did not know each other upon entering the space, quickly formed a community to continue play. NEOMI: Any reflections on theory, Michael? MICHAEL: It’s interesting to see how incorporating the game into this session really invited the play spirit for the entirety of the session and appropriated the space. It’s like you went total kermes at the AAR! This is what I love about games: They can be tools to restructure and rethink what’s possible. In your case, Loteria provided enough of a ludic structure to bring energy into the room, invite people to socialize, and allow people to unmask. I want to note that it was smart to pivot at the request of players, granting them agency in this. Furthermore, for critical game play, multiple rounds of playing a game are important. The first playthrough we are often consumed by the game, so this was a great way to familiarize people with the game. The initial responses then primed participants to approach gameplay with the criticality to then contribute to the group discussion. Games are ludic structures with potential to reimagine how we make meaning. It’s the meaning that we create in and through games that make them so potent. Think about a game like Ticket To Ride, for example. The literal actions sound quite lackluster (drawing cards, placing blocks on a board). However, the hermeneutics give meaning to these mundane tasks: laying blocks emulates building railroad tracks. Games of chance are good for providing just enough of a ludic structure while still allowing for socializing, but not too much that it’s all people focus on. So, folks can chat, and if they reach a lull in the conversation, they can lean on playing the game during the shift in their conversation. It’s also worth mentioning that play extended beyond the game Loteria in the session. This included participants playing with the format of the session, players influencing the restructuring of the session, and playing with language deployed at a conference (yes, the swearing). As we play, we perform and we also confront truths about ourselves. Horacio commented, “Playing and talking about loteria in the AAR session brought back memories of growing up in south Texas. It was also a welcome and refreshing alternative to the typical AAR/SBL panel, with just as much, if not more, scholarly discourse and analysis.” Horacio continued, “Newer versions of loteria challenge us to discuss, critique, and reshape our communities and cultures, which have always been characterized by diverse experiences and interpretations.” NEOMI: Kim, please tell us about your experience immediately following the session as well as your thoughts since. KIM: The experiential session of playing Millennial Gen Z Loteria was immediately followed by the business meeting for the Religion, Sport, and Play Unit. In between the sessions, I rushed to my unit co-chair, Jeffrey Scholes, eager to exchange thoughts about having just played Loteria at the AAR. Instantaneously, we agreed that this experiential session encouraged us to take a more practical approach to the third integral aspect of the unit: play. As far as we both knew, the Religion, Sport, and Play Unit had always approached play in terms of discourse, especially in the context of organized athletics, but never with the actual practice of play during a session. At the beginning of the business meeting, our first order of business was to confirm the ongoing use of experiential sessions of play at future AAR annual meetings. The way in which the experiential session of Loteria radically transformed the trajectory of the Religion, Sport, and Play unit demonstrates how actual play within the conference setting can help ground the decolonization of academia. As Neomi observed, Loteria participants quickly transformed from serious individual conference attendees into a group of light-hearted players who cared more about playing together than claiming the prizes and ending the game. Recalling my own experience, I vividly remember being hunched over, placing tokens on my Loteria card as Neomi called out Millennial Gen Z phrases from a stack of shuffled cards. My body positioned itself as it needed to, helping optimize my gameplay rather than unconsciously following Western constructs of professional bodily posture (such as sitting up straight with my legs crossed). Overall, this experiential session of play fostered a communal space where participants transcended the optics of Western professionalism and became immersed in the carefree spirit of play. Playing Loteria at the AAR was not merely a form of escapism, but, like every decolonial praxis, existed in the liminal plane between colonial hegemony and resistance. Throughout history many decolonial efforts have been led by women of color and Neomi leading the experiential session contributes to this history. But decolonial efforts should not be the sole responsibility of those on the margins, such as women of color in a heavily white/male dominated field. NEOMI: Great point connecting back to this year’s AAR theme of “La Labor de Nuestras Manos”! KIM: Yes. Why should we, as women of color, be the ones to bear this responsibility, especially in a way that caters to the comfortability of those beyond ourselves? What about exploring other generative effects, like discomfort and unfamiliarity, initiated by the more privileged rather than the labor of the oppressed? To continuously move toward resistance, particularly in the context of experiential sessions, religious studies scholars must actively challenge the pretense that their scholarly work inherently makes the world a better place, and become intentional about practically contributing to decolonization, especially as it transcends the comfortability of their own individualism. In the words of black lesbian poet Audre Lorde, “Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.” NEOMI: Fascinating! I did not see it as a decolonial praxis but as living in my own Tejana space. I honestly saw the session as something that comes from being Mexican-American, Chicana, Tejana. I loved being able to bring cookies as prizes to share, cookies which our parents had made during Michael and my father’s occupational therapy, as he learns to live life after stroke. The convention center was no wiser that I did not ask permission or order the cookies from their vendor. As Gilberto Cavazos-Gonzalez, session panelist, noted, “I was happy to be a part of this Loteria session. Although I did not recognize the Loteria images (I missed my Chalupa) it was still a trip down memory lane and the importance of play in family life and spirituality. It also helped me make the connection to the importance of cultural connections for Mexican Americans living in a sometimes hostile and racist U.S.A. environment.” There is something about play which allows for simultaneous space (re)creation, mockery, and truth-telling. MICHAEL: Play is like alchemy: it has deep transformative potential. Kim’s reflection on decolonizing underscores this, especially when she draws attention to exploring generative effects, as does Neomi’s approach to developing the session to reflect and live in Tejana space. Games afford ludic structures for play to happen.

Recently I led a workshop at a church. I was asked by the pastor to address the topic, “What is Biblical Literacy?” Of particular note, congregational leaders wanted to know how to get millennials and Gen Z back to church. With the apparent drop, no, plummet in said groups’ attendance, this particular body was seeking any handles, tips, or miracles to reach persons in these age brackets. According to some attending the event if church members could become more biblically literate, they could help twenty- to forty-year-olds see how relevant the Bible is here and now. Of course the aforementioned congregation is not alone. Any number of churches, temples, mosques, and religious institutions are struggling to get persons born circa the 90s in seats. This is not to paint a broad stroke as there are indeed exceptions to the rule. However, documentaries on God, Faith, and Millennials continue to highlight said challenges. It is clear that millennials, many of whom are current seminary or divinity school students or graduates, are pushing the religious envelope. They long for environments where attention to social justice, sexuality and gender, personal story, and spirituality shape conversation and praxis. During my workshop the dialogue around biblical literacy led to exchanges between various religions, honoring their sacred texts. In this Christian context, the question of whether this specific church was “promoting a different path beyond Jesus as savior” arose. Boom! At this point I shared with attendees what I often note in the classroom. It is important to treat what happens in academic settings with intellectual hospitality. This is never to aver that contexts outside of the hallowed halls of academia are not intellectual. They are indeed!   What I was purporting to those astute members during the seminar is that as professors we must be mindful that not everything we teach should be shared in other contexts. Not all readings, ideas, and theories are applicable to the work of faith-forming religious institutions outside of graduate theological institutions. Some matters need to stay in the classroom while others are apropos for the Sunday School or for the training ground for one’s religious beliefs or spiritual development. I dared not answer that one question posed to me because it was not my place. That was the work of the pastor. I am an ordained preacher. Intellectual hospitality calls me to know my scholarly assignment as a professor, adhere to the directives given for any invitation, and sojourn with leaders of religious institutions seeking to ensure the survival of their congregations and communities.

The following is adapted from a talk given by Dr. Townes during the 2024 Wabash Center’s BIPOC Faculty Luncheon at  the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). Self-care is within the matrix of our total health; how we care for ourselves—mind, body, soul, and spirit. Self-care is often the last thing for which the academic life makes allowances. We must decide that we will craft the habits of mind, heart, soul, and body. There is no one way to go about self-care, as we each have our own biorhythms and social contexts. But I believe there are things that we can all hold onto in the necessary work of taking care of ourselves; things that will also help us in bringing people whole in the classroom; things that serve our scholarship, our institutions, our families, and our kin. In thinking these things through, I have found myself revisiting a passage of sacred text that is apocryphal for me. Some may have heard me reflect on this before. This passage has the same kind of holy-fying (wholly-fying) impact on me. It is found in the film, Daughters of the Dust by the African American filmmaker Julie Dash, which tells the story of a Gullah family preparing to come to the mainland at the turn of the twentieth century. Tradition, change, migration, and bondedness to the land, are woven together in the story’s Peazant family. The memories of slavery and working in the indigo plantations of the island are the stuff of history books, written in the hands of the older members of the island and in the stories, they tell to the younger ones, the games the young and old still play, and in the African and Arabic words they continue to teach the children. The passage that I revisit are lines spoken by the character, Eula, who had been raped by a white man. The narrator of the movie, the Unborn Child, is Eula’s child. Only the audience knows that the child she carries is truly the one she conceived, in love, with her husband Eli. Eula calls the women to task for ostracizing Yellow Mary, a prostitute, who turned to this life after her own experience of rape. Yellow Mary had come home to the island to be with her family again and to heal. Eula reminds them all that the fate and hope of Yellow Mary is their own—no one escapes the ravages of evil, no on stands outside of the promise. Eula turns to the younger women and her words are for us as well. ‘There's going to be all kinds of roads to take in life.... Let's not be afraid to take them.  We deserve them, because we're all good women. Do you... Do you understand who we are, and what we have become?  We're the daughters of those old dusty things Nana carries in her tin can... We carry too many scars from the past. Our past owns us. We wear our scars like armor, for protection. Our mother's scars, our sister's scars, our daughter's scars... Thick, hard, ugly scars that no one can pass through to ever hurt us again. Let's live our lives without living in the fold of old wounds.’ It is within this constellation of possibilities that I want talk about self-care with you. The notion of all kinds of roads, and our willingness to take them. The fact that we are, most of us, good women (and men). We are the daughters and sons of those dusty things that Nana carries in her tin can—there are scars: glass ceilings and other discriminations based on gender, sexual orientation, weight, beauty, race, age, religiosity, culture.  And yes, we do wear some of those scars. For some of us they are like armor because we have discovered that we do need protection. But what does this do to us, ultimately, when we live our lives in the folds of old wounds? When we cannot see another way to be? These are the kinds of questions that come to mind when I am asked to talk about self-care. These are the kinds of questions that ask each of us to think through what it means to be responsible, to take responsibility for creating our health each and every day, to realize that taking care of ourselves is radical witness to God’s ongoing revelation—not only in history, but in the immediacy of our breathing. Indeed, God's presence is the very fabric of our existence, immanent and transcendent, and I think we must stay mindful that a key element of self-care is living our lives with integrity and faithfulness in God. This means coming to a sense of self, finding our identity, treasuring the gift of our lives. For me, self-care is an important component of health and healing in order to create whole and holy selves. So, we must take care that we do not spin our lives, our careers, our ministries around a success ethic that is grounded in measurable gains and regrettable losses. To practice care for ourselves, means recognizing that we can't run off with someone else's scholarship or appointment. Because even when we steal, that doesn't make it ours, it only makes it stolen. Self-care is about stretching into your deepest self to discover anew what restoration and healing can and must mean for you when it is grounded in grace rather than solely on the latest U.S. News and World Report model of success. I urge all of us to proclaim the blessedness, the sacredness of our lives. This can be a challenge. It is easy to lose sight of this in the midst of phones that ring without ceasing, calls that are never returned, e-mail after e-mail, and the oh-so omnipresent Zoom. But, if we think about the call to proclaim the blessedness, the sacredness, of our lives as a strength rather than as a virtue, we can draw comfort and sustenance. As a womanist, I believe that self-care must be embodied, personally and communally, as it brings together the historic force of our spiritual lives with the demand of the spirit to love our faith through our health and through taking care of ourselves as best we can. Self-care is not an abstract, sterile, utopian category. Health and redemption are tools to build bridges that actually go somewhere and give us redeeming time of sustenance building, so that we can continue to make bricks with no straw, if we must. We must, begin with the wounds, those scars, in Eula’s words, those of our mothers, daughters and sisters, thick and hard. We must start caring for those scars, the folds of those old wounds that have, in some cases maimed us with lies, secrets, and silences. These wounds that mark us, do not need to define us. For as wise folk, as people seeking wisdom, we must grasp a hermeneutic of suspicion. That is, we must examine our first works over and over again. Self-care comes in a variety of sounds and textures and I suggest that we need new visions of excellence and adequacy. Because holy boldness does not mean that we work ourselves to death right up to the pearly gates. We are not to provide racialized and gendered cannon fodder for a bureaucracy that likes to declare its holiness, or relevance, or scholarliness while colleagues engage in mind-numbing studious lint-picking from their sanctified navels; while some white male academics rail on about how white men can’t find jobs or a decent match to their self-anointed gifts and then look at all of us as if we should dignify such inane chatter; while issues of class go unaddressed every day and in every way; while “DEI” has suddenly become a four-letter word, while that very same diversity is helping to keep  many of our institutions afloat financially. Or, at least give us enough buckets to keep bailing water until the capital campaign begins to reap benefits. No, self-care means declaring that part of who we are is about seeking liberation of soul and body and intellect and spirit. It means that we must challenge ourselves to ask tough questions of ourselves and our religious homes and our academic institutions and our ministries. Self-care means that prophetic healthiness must be more than so many coins in a bankrupt economy that traffics in people's lives as so much loose change. Self-care means unpacking the gospel into living. So, how do we get moving in the direction of our self-care? There are many models for us. We have much to learn from each other. We should sit down with each other and give each other the important details of living, share with each other how we have survived, how we have thrived. This is not a time for pulling out an arrogant litany of braggadociosness about how successful we have been, or a heart-piercing recitation of how hard it is. No, this is a time for genuine lament, where we name the realities of our situations with as much accuracy and precision as we can so that our lamentations help us see that what is before us can be managed, if not transformed. Self-care, we do this communally—together. We seek, together, faith-filled ways to work it out, to care for ourselves.

(An audio version of this blog may be accessed here.) As scholar/teachers, we must have and be able to articulate our intellectual project. It is good if it happens in the early career stages of a scholarly career, but it is never too late. A scholar’s intellectual project is: the philosophical cornerstone of their scholarly career the 50,000 foot/big picture pursuit of their intellectual work the grounding of their work the perennial question, issue, the quest the epistemological guiding-star for decision-making toward that which the scholar works their entire career; their scholarly passion and intellectual haunting, that which they are interested in—regardless of their status or season of their career. The intellectual project is your big pursuit, your big idea. Your intellectual project is why you wanted to be a scholar and why you continue in scholarship. There will always be smaller, contributory ventures which engage, address, and actualize your central inquiry or question, BUT those smaller schemes are never the whole of your intellectual project. They may satisfy an aspect or element of your intellectual aspiration. However, the desire of your intellectual inquiry is bigger, much bigger, than any one expression created as a single book, journal article, course offering, or artistic rendering. The key is to be able to articulate the most basic description of your intellectual project. This is a necessary to your scholarship and to participating in a scholarly community. Your intellectual project, over the course of your career, and over the seasons of your work, will refine, deepen. The project might even shift and change. Regardless of these potential changes and shifts, your articulation of your principal project is paramount.   An intellectual project is not: a single job or your career; on the contrary, your places of employment are in service to your project a single grant proposal or committee accomplishment a single publication or panel participation defined by your approaches to your scholarship; the methodologies of engagement of your project are not the project dependent upon nor redundant to the conversation in your academic field; your project is meant to add to the conversation already in the field. You need a boiler plate speech. Your project must be articulatable in 3 to 7 sentences. You should have a succinct paragraph that describes, in its most basic, your intellectual project. This is as much for your own comfort and focus as for those who will ask you about your work. Knowing your project, as well as being able to succinctly communicate your project, allows you to work your project. This work is not easy. Your intellectual project’s articulation might feel elusive or vague. Intellectual projects can be bold/ “in your face”/dazzling. They can also be coy, temperamental, and evasive. Knowing your project is good—being able to articulate your project is what is needed; articulation may take time and great effort. Questions to spark, encourage, point toward clarity of articulation of your intellectual project: What is your curiosity? Or, to what are you compelled? To what are you called? What are your perennial questions? What are your big, philosophical, epistemological questions that are worth spending a career or lifetime pursuing? What issues would you study/explore/interrogate/pursue with or without salary? What agenda do you bring to every job? Toward what questions or issues do you bend every job, all writing, and all your courses? What has broken your heart and so now, to mend your heart, what will your scholarship be about? What is your immortal wound, and how are you saving your own life through scholarly pursuit? What, for a lifetime, will you resist, protest, contest, and fight against? What wrong will you right? What makes you so mad that you spring into action – especially the action of intellectual work and scholarly labor? What is your vision for the new world and how will this vision be embodied by your scholarship? At the end of your life, when you look back over your long and illustrative career, to what did you say yes? What is the pattern of your yes-saying and what can you glean as having been your project? Who is your inspiration and what was/is their project? How will you attach to it; fulfill it? What is the intersection of your gifts/talents with the mighty needs of the world? Why did your people send you to school? For them, what will be your scholarly accomplishment and contribution? How will your scholarship liberate your people? Intellectual projects are often vivid to other people, ask someone who knows you and your work. What do they believe your project is? Going through a search process routinely helps with clarifying your intellectual passion, focus, and intent. These processes force you to articulate your vision, perspective, aspirations, and scholarly itches. Consider applying for a job and see what happens with articulating your intellectual project. Beyond participating in a search process, consider the following to assist with coming to know and articulate your project: Write and rewrite a mission statement, write an elevator speech, write in simple prose, 3 to 7 sentences; practice those sentences on family, friends, and colleagues until they make sense to them and have resonance with you. In question format—create a list of 50 to 100 questions which frame your curiosity and pursuits, then cull the list down to the questions you want to pursue for years to come. In poetic or in creative forms, design a rendition of your intellectual project, then contemplate it; after contemplation, write your paragraph. If your scholarly project is woven into a course, assign students the task of mapping, charting, postering or displaying the basic concepts of the course. This allows you a perspective to see what you talk about when you talk about what you talk about. Often our students know our work of thinking better than we do. Invite several faculty colleagues to create public or digital displays of their intellectual projects then host a gathering to explore and celebrate the current and future work of the colleague. Plan several recorded conversations with a trusted colleague who will dialogue with you as you think through, think out loud, and articulate. Re-read your dissertation. Use that as a springboard to say what you are, actually, about.

How can we teach trauma and religion? If part of the human experience is the reality of imperfection, limitation, and wounding—if loss and grief are inevitable in our lives, how can we better address them in our classroom?  In this first part, we want to speak to the importance of recognizing the immense suffering which in so many cases is unresolvable yet integral to human experience. Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō calls life a “continuity of discontinuities”[i] which permeate reality itself. This sensibility urged us to reconsider the way we typically begin each semester with “learning expectations”: it asks us to instead cultivate a posture of “collective intentions,” especially when we address trauma in our classroom. In a sense, trauma-integrating pedagogy calls for a radical alternative pedagogical practice that propels us to reconceptualize teaching processes and outcomes in a longer time frame. We believe that this practice humanizes both instructors and students and moves us toward more holistic ways of relating.  According to Jim, the intention of a contemplative community can be known as modeling to each other “a sincerity of heart,” which is the doorway to spiritual growth in a person’s life. When our intentions guide us, it does not guarantee an outcome but rather gives a posture of receptivity to witness each other’s (often subtle) “awakening”[ii]—an experience of being interrelated with that which is beyond our own individual experiences. Together, the participants are invited to tap into the unknown. Spiritual awakening is a relational journey that requires intention, devotion, teaching, and community, and these foundations lead us into both the depths and beyondness of love itself.  Through an emphasis on collective intentions rather than expectation, we invite a more gentle and nurturing way to engage the intense materials of our classes, whether they are stories of violence in sacred texts, literature, and ongoing incidents, or the woundedness that Christian mystics often perceive as invitations to contemplate with a spirit of tenderness and to write down first-person narratives. Practically speaking, cultivating collective intentions invites us to read texts in a spirit of inner silence and deep listening, which allows the text to speak to the reader, not as mere information. Emphasis on interior listening guides students to share what arises in them, however subtly, through writing and class conversation. We then transition to community sharing which must be engaged nonjudgmentally in the class, even if higher education might frame this practice as anti-intellectual.  Herein, we are beginning to see the challenges that are birthed from an attachment to learning outcomes and evaluation processes, which are often required by institutions. We recognize that those may inadvertently reproduce classrooms that do not allow us to adequately address trauma. Of course, evaluations and outcomes are important. But how do we accurately “assess” learning as deep relational “awareness” which includes trauma, justice, and religion but is not bound exclusively to it?  Perhaps a trauma integrating pedagogy calls us to co-liberate ourselves a bit from our attachment to outcomes, which are part of the social norm of productivity. If we imagine our trauma-integrating classroom as a relationally accountable container, we also need to reimagine assessments and assignments, in order to find collective ways to encourage the interior movements of each other. While this may seem to be a challenging negotiation with our institutions, we believe that it is an essential update to a pedagogy, especially in teaching trauma in our times full of massive violence, forced migration, and climate intensity. A pedagogy of collective intentions allows us to respond to and think with the lives in motion—actual human beings—within our class, within ourselves, and in this rapidly changing world. It is a pedagogy of the continuous journey of learning to trust ever more deeply in ourselves, the O/other, and the uncertain process itself.  A pedagogy of communal intention has convinced us that building a nonviolent classroom is essential in approaching difficult topics such as trauma and violence, and in our classroom practice we learn to place high value on flexibility and receptivity. For instance, silence and contemplation can be a sign of active learning. Rather than focusing on dissemination and regurgitation of information, we want to encourage students to speak in and listen to their own authentic voices. Simultaneously, instructors must always remind themselves that we cannot control or impose students’ learning or “awakening”—rather, we are powerless to empower students to heal trauma, let alone to heal it within a semester. Perhaps nothing external will seem to result from our class other than students becoming sensitive to themselves and others. But perhaps in a time of massive collective trauma, this is one of the most important lessons of all.  As ones who are called to teach theology and religion, we do not want to abandon the hope that our learning, or awakening, may come alive within students, or for ourselves much later. In an age that constantly demands immediate results, we must remind ourselves that learning is a lifelong process, particularly regarding difficult topics. Over and over, we must return to a humble spirit of sincerity that we are all imperfect beings who are continually learning to take skillful action in a world that is unstable, unpredictable, and wounded. And saying yes, we are invited to be and become patient and persevering one step at a time. Part two of our blog will address this topic in further detail.   [i] See “Theory of the Historical World” at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nishida-kitaro/#TheHisWor. [ii] A term borrowed from James Finley, which he describes as the purpose of the contemplative life and details in The Contemplative Heart (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books, 2000).

I’ve been neglecting my scholarship since March 2020. That, in case you don’t remember, is when the pandemic hit, sending faculty off into a mad scramble of Zoom, hybrid teaching, mental health emergencies, and social distancing. Once vaccines allowed us to stick our heads back out, we began working on tasks we had neglected during that mad scramble. And all the while, wave after wave of terrifying news coverage hit. George Floyd. The invasion of Ukraine. “Don’t say gay” laws. More talk about bathrooms than I would have thought possible. The seeming inevitability of another Trump/Biden election. Ever increasing temperatures, metaphorically and literally. Wildfires in the West, in Canada, and on Maui. Gaza. In the middle of all this, I started my sabbatical. That is an amazing privilege, but it put me face to face with my demons because I hadn’t even looked at my scholarship since March 2020 (except for the frantic days last summer when I wrote my sabbatical application). I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to be working on. And when I reread my application, I realized that I didn’t care. How could my research matter, to me or to others, in a world that increasingly literally is on fire? The state of our profession made it even harder for me to delve into my scholarship. Majors and programs are shrinking, budgets are being cut, departments are closing. Every week seems to bring more bad news. At the same time, most of us need to rethink our teaching and learn new pedagogical techniques because more and more students need more basic instruction than we are trained to provide. And we need to figure out how teach in the era of ChatGPT. So yeah. It’s a lot. Under these circumstances, how should we approach our scholarship? What can we learn, write, and do that will benefit us, our profession, and our students? It depends. Some of us do find meaning by delving deep into traditional scholarship of discovery, examining the arcana of Greek and Hebrew terms, exploring manuscript variations and intricate scholarly debates, even while recognizing that few will read our work. Some are nourished by the intellectual challenges in that work and emerge refreshed and intellectually stimulated. Others don’t, but find themselves constrained by circumstances. They need to do scholarship to earn promotion or tenure or to have a chance of landing a teaching position. These are all good reasons to dig into the obscure references and produce additional journal articles. But what about the rest of us? There seem to be plenty of faculty who, like me, don’t find meaning and purpose in the scholarship of discovery. And some of us, like me, are tenured. If we don’t have to publish another peer-reviewed article, what else might we reflect on and write about? There is an opportunity in this moment of crisis and uncertainty, an opportunity to change course and to engage in scholarship that feels more meaningful. What that means will be different for different people. An increasing number of faculty are doing work in social justice. Some are turning their attention to climate change and the despair it induces in many of us. I am staying closer to home, focusing on some of the challenges in my own profession: I’m thinking about how academics in the humanities can move forward and how we can avoid burnout. How can we learn to live well despite having less stability and more uncertainty than before? Can we find good ways to grieve for the careers we thought we would have and for the fields that we love and then find meaning and joy in teaching new populations of students instead? Philosophers and religious studies scholars have deep resources to draw on here, thousands of years of reflecting on happiness, meaning, and the human desire for stability and permanence in a world of rapid change. I’m diving in, reading about acceptance, grief, and hope in Buddhist and Christian texts, in psychological research, and even in self-help books. And I find inspiration in an unexpected line from a psychology journal article: “Hope can be practiced by locating a deep desire, value, or commitment and taking a step toward it.”[i] For so long, I’ve thought that hope for our profession required believing that the numbers of majors, funding, and programs will increase again. That would be lovely, of course. But this line points towards a different understanding: Hope is the practice of teaching and working in a way that expresses our core values and commitments and continuing to do so even though the situation is changing. It is not all that I wanted, but it makes my work feel meaningful and important again. That may be enough.     Notes [i] The quote is from James L. Griffith’s “Hope Modules.” He is paraphrasing Kaethe Weingarten’s “Hope in a Time of Global Despair.” (I have not yet read Weingarten’s article yet, but it’s next on my list).

“Can we please go outside?!” my students begged. “Allow me to be your fully-formed pre-frontal cortex,” I told them. “In five minutes, you will be cold just sitting still, and none of you actually wants to sit in the snow.” An unusually long and unseasonably warm fall last year meant that my classes took place outdoors until the end of October. Then, in an unseasonably early snow dump, we were back inside. The students in my history of Christianity class were not pleased. They persisted: “We could do a walking class!” As our day on the crusades approached, I thought, I could make this happen. I told them to come prepared for an outdoor walking class. That morning, while I ran, I planned my adapted lesson. It was one of the best classes I have ever taught. If you had told me when I began teaching ten years ago that I would plan an entire lesson on a 35-minute run the morning of the class, I would have questioned your sanity. I needed detailed plans that I had read over several times so that things would move smoothly. I needed back-up plans for when something didn’t quite work right or an activity didn’t take long enough. I needed to know everything there was to know in case a student asked the question I hadn’t prepared for. Something had changed. Yes, some of the change is from teaching in general. Doing a thing long enough gives confidence, and teaching long enough teaches flexibility, or at least being okay with flexibility, because no plan survives contact with living, breathing students. But I have noticed that teaching outdoors has emboldened me as a teacher. So much so that I would try something as absurd as an Oregon-Trail-style role-play of the crusades in the snow—students kept dying of dysentery and cholera on our trek around campus. One reason teaching outside emboldens me is simply that I feel more myself outside. The more I feel like myself—or the more comfortable I feel—when I’m in front of a class, the more likely I am to feel the freedom to risk failure by trying something new or trying something I haven’t fully thought through. What space do you feel most comfortable, most yourself, in? Could you hold a class there? Could you make your classroom feel more like that comfortable place? Is it possible that our students might find it more comfortable too, that they might risk more? Another thing I’ve discovered is that when I’m teaching outside I feel like I’m getting away with something. So do the students. Class is supposed to be in a cinder-block room at desks with harsh lighting and cause extreme boredom. We almost whisper to each other as we head outside, “Don’t enjoy this too much or the administrators will find out and make us stop!” If I feel like I’m getting away with something, I’m a little exhilarated by the risk and willing to try more. There’s also a conspiratorial spirit I develop with the students: we’re all in this rule-breaking together, so let’s go for broke. They’re more willing to try things. Even better, if they feel they’re getting away with something, they drop their guard and are more willing to play, to try new things, to risk failure. They’re more willing to learn because it doesn’t feel like what they’ve been taught learning feels like. Finally, things are less likely to go to plan outside, so I have gained a lot of experience about decision-making and confidence. Did it start raining? Is it heavy enough to go inside, or do we wait it out? From those experiences and choices, I have learned that once I make the decision, I need stick with it, no going back and forth. Lawn mowers come too near? I have learned what points are most important in each lesson. Knowing that, I can have fun with the details. Did a student have a medical emergency on a backpacking trip? I learned I can handle real emergencies and think through the steps that need to be taken. These lessons transfer to the classroom as well, where I’ve become a better teacher for knowing my main points and sticking with a decision to keep momentum in a new activity (unless it’s really going poorly and needs intervention) and being able to react calmly to minor incidents. Having experienced a range of interruptions and impetuses for improvisation, I am emboldened to think that I can handle anything. Sure, I will still be surprised. I will still need help. I can’t handle everything. But the confidence—and also humility—that has risen from teaching outdoors has resulted in more creative lessons, more engaged students, and more effective learning. Emboldened to risk, my students are emboldened to risk, and that’s when all of us can learn. Even while we’re pretending to die of dysentery.   Appendix Crusades role-play walking class lesson plan Students have read Justo Gonzalez, Story of Christianity vol. 1, pp. 345-351, and Bernard of Clairvaux, “In Praise of the New Knighthood” Numbers are for a class of 15, but could be adjusted for a bigger class (i.e., could have 2 people play the pope collectively, have a couple of assistants to Bernard, etc.) Explain to the students that we will be role-playing today and walking around campus Assign major parts: 2-3 pilgrims returning from the Holy Land with reports of persecution Pope Urban: Will convene the Council of Clermont and lead 3-4 Advisors to the Pope: Advise at the Council of Clermont Bernard of Clairvaux: Will lead “knight training camp” Everyone else is variously council members, crusaders, knights *Since I was doing this for the first time, I asked two students who I knew were good at understanding the material they had read and who would be game for this kind of role play to be Pope Urban and Bernard, and asked for volunteers to be pilgrims and advisors. It could be done as all volunteer, but it’s good to have in mind who might be especially good and make a direct request as a way of avoiding silence when asking for volunteers. If I hadn’t had those two particular students, I would have needed to get my volunteers the day before so they had time to prepare. I led them walking around campus and stopped periodically to have an activity and lesson. First stop: Near the Holy Land 2-3 pilgrims run up to our group and tell us what it was like for them on their pilgrimage in the Holy Land—how they were treated, what difficulties Muslim rulers are causing, etc. When the pilgrims run out of their own ideas, ask the rest of the class to fill in While walking, ask students to think about how they would feel hearing these reports. Who wanted to do something about it and who didn’t? Assign them different kinds of life (farmer, knight, artisan, monk, etc.) and see what they might think. Second stop: Council of Clermont The Pope needs to convene the council and then receive reports from advisors about what needs to happen This stop is about getting at the reasons people wanted a crusade and the reason the pope ordered the first one (and then later ones) When advisors and pope run out of reasons, the rest of the class fills in further details again Pope makes a decision and begins the first crusade While walking, discussion of how many crusades there were and how they were different, what reasons were similar and different for each one *If group is too big to hear each other while walking, then make another stop quickly after this one to have this discussion. Also while walking, periodically point at a student and say “you have died of _____” fill in various ways and reasons they died so students get a sense of the futility of this. Dysentery, an infected cut, robbers, a battle, etc. Third stop: Knight training camp with Bernard of Clairvaux Bernard convenes knight training camp and leads the rest of us in how to be good knights, based on the “In Praise of the New Knighthood” reading. I also lead some discussion here about the monastic flavor of Bernard’s new knighthood and other things we need to pick up from the text. Help us understand the people who were doing this Wander some more, more discussion about the length and number of crusades, children’s crusades, etc. Continue with “You have died of…” End back at the classroom and ask how many are still alive, so they have a sense of the magnitude of deaths. Concluding conversation, reflections on the experience, final important points about content.

“I just do not know if I have it in me to write another paper” were one student’s words midway through my Hosea exegesis course. By this time, I was on my third semester of pandemic teaching. Zoom fatigue had set in alongside our unceasing grief for the daily Coronavirus death tolls. Hearing each other in a virtual space that seemed coerced and yet routine was not limited to a spotty Wi-Fi signal or faulty audio equipment. Our hearing—that kind we learn from—had fallen numb. Pre-pandemic, the design and pedagogical approach to my Hosea exegesis course had reached a sweet spot. I had a good learning balance between group work (contextualizing the biblical critic and reading in community) and individual final projects. As for the psychosocial dynamics of this space, it was easy to read the feeling states in the room—enervation, anxiety, but also, surprise, discovery, or intrigue. And by midway through the course, everything in my syllabus usually went as planned, barring a few late papers. As such, hearing to learn and learning to hear seemed to work harmoniously with our embodied practices in the classroom. The abrupt shift to pandemic teaching posed unique challenges to my hearing-learning reflexes. Upon reflection, the issue was not auditory but rather a stale hollowness of presence or what I call “the hollow hearing effect.” Arriving at this diagnosis of the learning experience was, indeed, a process, beginning with the shocking midsemester flip to online teaching to running a new learning platform to revamping my syllabi for a new virtual world of teaching Bible. Soon, the rhythms of my synchronized classroom felt random and sluggish, in part because of our connectedness to the globe’s misery but disconnectedness on Zoom. Then comes spring 2021, the semester of my Hosea exegesis course. Going in, I recall feeling optimistic about my redesigned syllabus. Instead of my usual “reading in community” group assignment, I had students contribute asynchronously to a video community commentary. Here, students created a ten-minute video in which they read their English translation of the assigned Hebrew verse, highlighted one major poetic feature, discussed two contrasting interpretations, and lastly applied their reading to a contemporary issue (e.g., trauma, migration, empire, gender, violence, justice). Below each uploaded video commentary, students had the opportunity to pose questions and offer constructive feedback. Each week, their online community commentary unfolded according to plan. Although their feedback fell between modest and missing, their videos showed a genuine and critical engagement with Hosea. I was especially moved by their applications of Hosea to various contemporary issues (white privilege, anti-black violence, family separation at the Texas-Mexico border, reproductive justice, the pandemic, etc.). Despite the decent success of this assignment, students were still coping with the constraints and hardships caused by COVID-19. While I could help them decipher the trauma in Hosea, I had difficulty reading their own learning woes online. By week ten, it finally became apparent that my syllabus’ mechanical precision did not exempt students from the grief-inducing complexities of a global pandemic. Their day-to-day angst of forced immobility and family separation were coupled with a weekly dose of prophetic texts rife with trauma, violence, and abuse. Add to this their application of Hosea to contemporary traumas, and the results were a learning breakdown. Once I was made aware of this, I felt like I do when I travel with my family through an international airport. Usually, I am leading the way to our connecting gate. Without looking back, I soon go from a steady walk to a marathon-style stride. Though I arrive on time, my family is nowhere to be seen. Out of breath, they finally arrive asking angrily, “Why didn’t you stop for us?” Hence, though I made it to week ten of my syllabus, my students were “crawling towards the finish line.” Unlike my airport marathon, I decided to put the brakes on my syllabus two weeks before my Hosea exegesis course ended. As a remedy to my students’ learning woes, I decided to offer them a second option for their final project. In lieu of an academic exegesis paper, students could submit an art exegesis project. Indeed, my recourse to art was not some random contrivance. From the standpoint of prophetic literature, the art of poetry served as a viable care-strategy for coping with the traumas of imperial conquest. Moreover, artmaking and the traumas of forced migration have been central to my advocacy work in the US-Mexico borderlands (see Arte de Lágrimas: Refugee Artwork Project). Thus, to turn to art for a final project made sense at a deeper level. In the end, every student in the course submitted an art exegesis project, which included original art, an art talk, and reflection. Here is an example of one student’s triptych art exegesis (oil paintings):   “I Will Tear” (Hosea 5:14)               “I will love them freely…And lengthen his roots” (Hosea 14:4-5)               “And Shall Arise among your people” (Hosea 10:14)           Among the responses, one student stated, “It revealed to me things about the text and about myself that I don’t think I would have seen doing my standard mode of exegesis.” As their teacher, it gave me a way of hearing my students that was far from hollow but rather healing.

I stopped dead in my tracks. I had been enjoying an early-Autumn walk, crunching my way through fallen leaves, while listening to a Wabash Center podcast in which Dr. Nancy Lynne Westfield and Rev. Dr. Steed Davidson were discussing how to “Future Proof Your Career.” I stopped walking when I heard Dr. Westfield declare: “I guarantee you, you will not have the career your mentor had. That career is over.” Later she remarked, “We need to adapt.” I didn’t stop walking because I was angry about having to change my pedagogy. To be honest, I enjoy that sort of thing. Neither did I stop walking because I was shocked. I know that small private liberal arts institutions and seminaries are facing enrollment challenges now, perhaps more than ever. And, for this reason, new adaptions and academic-adjacent careers are a reality for those of us teaching theology and religion, especially those of us who are in the beginning or middle stages of our career trajectories. I stopped walking because I was stunned by the clear and honest way Dr. Westfield had articulated something I had been thinking about a lot—and to be honest, wrestling with—in a couple of different ways in my current institution. I teach in the Theology department at a fairly small, private Catholic institution. Most of the students we teach register for our courses to fulfill a General Education requirement in the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. This context is quite different from one in which I formerly taught, comprised of students pursuing a theology degree for professional ministry. My current colleagues and I have been reflecting on the purpose of our department and its course offerings within our institution; in doing so, we have discussed how we primarily serve the General Education curriculum, rather than a curriculum designed for theology majors. While we have several majors graduate from our program every year, we need to make sure we are serving not only them, but also the bulk of the students in our classes who are not theology majors. Of course, a curriculum designed for majors needs to cover a range of diverse areas of study within its discipline, equipping students with the knowledge and skills necessary to pursue a career or further studies in its area. Content is critical. Certain topics in the discipline must be covered. However, in a curriculum designed for students taking a couple of courses in theology as a general education requirement, specific areas of content are less critical. Instead, courses are meant to introduce students to a discipline—not by covering all of its topics in a preliminary way—but by teaching students how to use the approach of the discipline, or to think with its lens. For example, in a content approach, I construct a course around the question: “What do students need to know about Christianity?” I then choose a textbook that covers these areas of knowledge that I have deemed necessary. The methodological approach, instead, asks: “How will I teach students to think theologically?” Often, when the course is a requirement for their graduation, I have to ask the additional question: “How will I get students to understand that learning to think this way is relevant to their lives?” One way our department has done this is to revise the introductory theology courses we teach. Rather than asking our students to fulfill their first theology course in an introduction to Scripture or Systematics, we designed a course that introduces students to Christian scriptures and theological disciplines through the lens of justice. This change in focus made us adapt the way we teach. Rather than simply teaching only about our content areas of expertise, we are teaching in ways that engage the contemporary questions our students (most of whom may be categorized as Gen Z) find relevant. This change, in my experience, has increased student engagement. For example, not many of my students—especially those who are not majors or care much about Christianity—find a unit on creation in systematics very interesting, at least on a personal level. Their lives aren’t invested in the doctrine of creation ex-nihilo and learning about pantheism and panentheism. However, if I introduce them to Christian scriptures and theology on creation with a primary focus on global warming, they are engaged almost instantaneously. This focus addresses something the world needs right now. More than increased levels of engagement, though, this new approach introduces students to a practice of applying theology to contemporary concerns. My hope is that by the time they leave my class, when religious ideas and concerns show up in contemporary events, they know how to evaluate and analyze them. How is scripture being used at an anti-immigration protest, for example? What we have done in our department resonates with a point Dr. Davidson made in the podcast. He mentioned someone who wanted to research gazelles in antiquity. This person eventually became interested in contemporary animal rights movements and wanted to bring that into their work, but the individual’s dissertation committee advised against it. (Most likely because the committee didn’t know how to direct it in that way). The point is that the questions in which the dissertation committee members are interested are not the same questions that those with future careers will need be to ready to answer, in order to thrive. The other way I (and some of my departmental colleagues) have been thinking about this question is in our upper-level courses. I’ll be honest, I’m attached to mine. I have a 300-level course on “Medieval Women Mystics” that I love because I get to introduce students to my favorite area of research and expertise. I’m beginning to understand, however, that it’s probably time to contemporize this course as well. It’s time to reframe this course around important questions of our time. Stay tuned.