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What is happening in the world is happening to each of us. On May 3, 2023, Dr. Vivek Murthy, United States Surgeon General, released an advisory calling attention to the public health crisis of loneliness, isolation, and lack of connection between people in our country. Disconnection fundamentally affects mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual health. Even before the COVID-19 quarantine, approximately half of the U.S. adults reported experiencing measurable levels of loneliness and isolation. Since the quarantine, we can imagine the sharp increase in isolation and fear. We, students/faculty/administrators, are part of this affected demographic. Newspapers, in small towns and major cities, provided news that fed democracy and linked people overwhelmed by otherness and isolation. In the recent past, print, and digital news provided a “watchdog” service aimed at holding our civic institutions accountable. The newspaper industry has reported a period of immense disruption and financial distress leaving news deserts across the country. Public service journalism that spotlighted the major issues confronting communities has shrunk. This leaves residents without the information they need to discuss and to solve their problems.  Whether delivered over the internet, airwaves or in print, the lack of vitality in local news coverage exacerbates our feelings of isolation.   Our loneliness is further compounded by the dichotomized assumptions promoted through social media. People depend upon memes, soundbites, and social media threads for facts, storylines, and information on complicated issues. Students/faculty/administrators, like the public, are immersed in social media culture. The rhetoric of “us versus them” has saturated our thinking and has become a presumed framework of discourse. The barrage of loss, hatreds, separation, grief, and rhetoric of division is affecting us – all of us. We are living in an extended and deepening national moment of blaming, clinched fists, gritted teeth, and suspicion for people beyond our chosen tribes, beyond our chosen communities, beyond those people with whom we agree and have chosen political affinity. There is growing suspicion of difference. There is a feeling that “the other shoe is about to drop,” without knowing when or what the shoe will be.  Here is the strangeness. While the country becomes more polarized and less informed - our daily lives and routines are relatively unchanged. How can it be – business as usual? Our everydayness continues relatively unscathed. We shop in the same grocery store. Go to the same big box stores. Perform the activities of employment. Participate in the same schools, churches, and mosques. Use the same online streaming services. While we suffer from profound loneliness, our everydayness has not changed much. We are simultaneously uninterrupted and fractured.  Division and social upheaval are smoldering while we operate in the relative customary school year start. School has begun. Teachers/students/administrators are re-convening with the same rituals, rites, and routines as always. Syllabi have been distributed. Lessons have begun. Committee meetings are back in swing. At-a-glance, we look fine. Yet, fear and uncertainty are palpable. We must be aware that loneliness, fear, and isolation tend to manifest, not where it is easily seen in our daily activities, but in our interior spaces.  Our fears are performed in relationships. Our isolation becomes apparent when we are with one another. Our trouble, pain, and turmoil are witnessed when we are working together and with others. The start of school makes us vulnerable to seeing and being seen. We are, when we gather-back, reconstituting our relationships while we are knee deep in our loneliness. Our relationships expose our fears, isolation and mental unwellness. Conflicts will soon arise. My caution is that, given the effects of the wider political climate, the veneer of calm and routine will soon dissipate. Are your classrooms ready for conflict? The most vulnerable people are those who bring diversity and difference into the faculty/student body/administration. For those faculties and student bodies who have, recently or over a very long period, accepted the challenge of diversity – this is potentially a very troubled moment for teaching. Diversity (race, class, political, gender, nationality, creed) is precisely what is not tolerated in the growing USA climate and yet diversity is what is needed to move us away from isolation and toward conversation, toward peace, toward community. The lack of tangible conflict, or the absence of specific dispute, does not mean that institutional fissures are not forming along the lines of diversity. Unaltered routines, unexamined practices, and undiscerning leadership will miss the hushed emerging crisis in community. Do not wait until difference turns into intolerance, vindictiveness, expressions of hatred, and war to invite your school into meaningful conversations. There are no recipes, formulas, or roadmaps for this brittle moment. Your school must engage its own communities as they are unique in the world and as you live together in this uncharted malaise. Gladly, there are some big ideas to which we can attend to help us make sense of the places where you teach and learn. Now, during the beginning of the semester, find ways to collectively reflect upon these kinds of questions in anticipation of conflict: What are the consequences of difference? What are the effects of difference? What meaningful project can we work on together? What sustains us through conflict? What is a good conflict and how are disputes processed with fairness, justice, and for maturity of community? Consider facilitating these kinds of habits and practices in your school or in your classroom: acknowledge the diversity and celebrate it; make the community aware of the diversities which exist; demonstrate how diversity strengthens the mission of community; attend to creating cultures of respect and regard for difference; create conversation groups across diversity to listen to one another; construct institutional processes and protocols before there is conflict; create an ombuds position; message into the community that difference is a strength and not a weakness; design new rituals and rites that support and honor diversity; facilitate conversations on the nature of hatred and the detriment of animosity; create policies of zero tolerance for hate speech; work on practices of solidarity; make a communal project of peace, empathy, compassion and forgiveness; admire courage and bravery; award truth telling; create artwork and expressions which honor difference; complexify dichotomous thinking; find ways for people to work together against divisiveness, objectification, and authoritarian assumptions. When, not if, the ugly expressions of hatred and entitlement bubble up in your community – be ready. You will not have the luxury of feigning surprise. Conflicts, subtle or violent, will arise along identity fault lines and your institution must be ready so that those targeted by the dispute are not severely hurt, ostracized, or killed.

“It’s like you’re crying out for them to trust you.” These insightful words were said to me nearly 10 years ago in a small group conversation at a Wabash Workshop for Pre-Tenure Theological School Faculty. I remember the conversation with gratitude.  We were sharing with each other what we had written down individually in response to reflection prompts about our experience in the classroom. The prompts had elicited some unprocessed emotions in me about my first few years of teaching. I was fortunate to get a teaching job the same semester I earned my Ph.D. I had some confidence in my abilities to do the job well, as I had graduated at the top of my class and gained some valuable classroom experience and mentoring in graduate school. But what little confidence I had was quickly shaken. After I had distributed and explained the syllabus in my first class, a student declared, “We’re going to run you back to Toronto where you came from!” Everyone laughed and cheered. This class was comprised mostly of men, ranging in age from 40-70 years old, with one year left in their graduate program before they were ordained to the deaconate in the Roman Catholic Church. I stood before them as a freshly minted Ph.D., who had just turned 30 years old, and had not yet had the time or experience to find confidence my teaching voice. The demanding syllabus I had crafted may have surprised them, given my age, gender, and long blond hair. I made it through that first semester, but I have the scars to prove it. I still remember one classroom discussion in which a student admitted, “I don’t know why I like to pick on you so much.” In another class, after a student bluntly told me that he didn’t know why I was teaching the way I was, I shouted, “I have a PhD!” In hindsight, over a decade later, I can see the situation for what it was. My body was not welcome in the space. Just by standing in front of the class, as a woman in a position of religious authority, I challenged their assumptions of credible leadership. It’s likely that my students asked the (un)conscious question, “If she can’t be ordained, can she teach those who will?” At the time though, the resistance I faced in the classroom, caused me to doubt my teaching vocation. “Maybe they’re right,” I worried. “Maybe I just don’t belong.” As a first-generation college student, I always felt like a bit of a misfit in graduate school. But now I was feeling for the first-time like a misfit in the church. Sharing these experiences with my Wabash cohort colleagues brought healing and affirmation of my teaching vocation. Each of us in the cohort were all so different in so many ways (i.e., personality, educational background, race, ability, religious affiliation, culture) but we shared a vocation (in addition to a lot of food and fun). Others had not been welcomed in spaces due to their embodiment, in far more violent, ongoing, and consistent ways than I had ever experienced. My cohort experience was also free from the academic pretense that so often deepened my self-doubt. I felt like I could be exactly who I was and that I was valued for it. I belonged. As I began to trust my vocation and my place in the academy and church, my eager desire for my students to trust me waned. It didn’t matter as much. While trust is necessary for real intellectual and spiritual formation to occur, it can’t be earned, begged for, or contrived. In fact, now I understand that the most certain way to gain this trust from students is by embracing who I uniquely am and being true to my vocation.

The mother noticed the boy tenderly. She said: My son, you are going to be a poet. You will carry water in your sieve your whole life. You will fill voids with your naughtiness And some people will love you for your nonsense -Manoel de Barros[1] If you have followed my two last blogs, I am adventuring into new forms of scholarship and for that I am entering into the realm of performance, clowning, and ecology. The play I am putting together is about a clown called Wajcha (Quechua for orphan) who is searching for Pachamama, his ultimate belonging. Since I am turning Wajcha into a clown, I need to understand the life of the clown. A note about Wajcha will come later in the process, but what is a clown? The figure of the clown has always enchanted me. My father was a clown, without paint, red nose, or big clothes. He had the Buddha’s smile. And he made everyone laugh. Because of him I learned to like the circus, which was cheap to go see, and I fell in love with the art. He loved cinema, did theater, and was a writer, poet, and musician. He played the violin, guitar, and harmonica. It was from him that I learned to laugh. With him I learned to like Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, and the Three Stooges. In Brazil, the clown that most marked me was named Arrelia. He always started everything by asking, “How are you, how are you, how are you?” And everyone said, “Okay, okay, okay.” It was the beginning of many laughs. Then I grew up, became an adult, grew stupid, and forgot about clowns. It was during COVID that the clown that inhabited my father his whole life came to visit me. There was so much sadness in the world that I needed joy and laughter. In this search, I had to wrestle culturally: to be a clown and to laugh are both cultural expressions. Living in the United States has changed me in ways I still don’t know. But what I know is that I found my voice here. Strangely enough, living here made me bigger, extravagant, multiple, and shameless, to the point of naïveté, and bold. It was through my immigrant persona that I found a deeper part of myself. On the other hand, living here also made me quieter, suspicious, and more serious, not knowing exactly who or what to trust. It definitely made me more fearful. And it is in between these two worlds within me that my clown showed up. My name should be “Clowndio”! The figure of the clown holds a multiplicity of selves: extravagance and exaggeration, silliness, lack of shyness, and excessive naïveté. How can one be a clown in a prudish, moralistic, and tense society? Or how can one be a clown in a very proper, serious, rational, academic world that also creates so much fear? While humor thrives in so-called proper places, humor does not survive fear. When humor is done with love, it stretches boundaries and casts out fear. If humor is connected with love, then as Saint Augustine says, “Be humorous and do what you want.” For humor is not “anything goes,” but rather a very careful craft of attending, paying attention to, and caring for those around you. Still, humor is not that simple. Humor is cultural and most of my Brazilian sensibilities do not fit here. My family here will say how embarrassed they often are with me. To find humor in another culture is to find its heartbeat and it is so difficult to get when you didn’t grow up in that place. And yet, humor is also universal in its specificities. I hate how clowns are portrayed on Halloween in the US. They are terrifying! I hate this relationship between clowns and horror. But after studying the history, I understand that it includes the the terror-striking clown. This helped me understand the Halloween clowns even though I can’t stand them. It is said that Stephen King wrote It, about the horrifying Pennywise the Dancing Clown, after he found out that clowns are what scare children the most. I couldn’t believe it! However, King was right to portray a clown as a shape-shifting monster dealing with a void, and with its own “macroverse.” That’s true! The clown is not just a sweet person; they carry within themselves abysses and monstrosities. I, however, want something very different! I want my clown to touch the horrors of the world and return them as laughter, lightness, and silliness. I want a clown who pays close attention to the disasters of the world but interprets these disasters in a way that people can engage with and not shut down. I am fine with boredom, but I can’t stand boring things. There’s nothing worse than boring people. I want to be funny, at least for a few! Funny, joy, laughter, silliness: these are all forms of power against capitalism, which is the most potent producer of sadness in our time! The current demand for happiness everywhere is a symptom of this very sad society. No, happiness is not the measure of a good life, but to laugh is an antidote to the forces of death that keep pressing us down into places lacking joy and energy.  My clown emerges as an anti-capitalist character wearing flowers and a green nose as he searches for Pachamama. Sure, Wajcha doesn’t know what he is doing, and in that way we are very similar! All he wants is to make someone laugh and pay attention to the land. The clown is a person who feels a lot, who feels more than they should. They feel something, as the song[2] says, That springs forth from their skin And they ask: What is it that happens to me? The clown knows that they need to go where the people are, where children (small or big) are. Then the clown may even paint their face and do some tricks and, if you ask why the clown does it all, they’ll say: I don’t know, I don’t know what this is springing forth from my skin. What is it that happens to me? that rises to. my cheeks and makes me blush? The clown receives the heart of someone and carries it with care. The clown blushes with joy, never with shame. Holding life is a unique event; the clown blushes with the charm of the simplest things. What is it that happens to me? that jumps out at me, betraying me? The clown sees too much but doesn’t realize that what they see multiplies and remakes itself into other things that no one else sees. The clown is naïve. The clown doesn’t work in linear ways, but keeps looping in symbiotic moves. The clown betrays systems of profit. Fully present in the place, the clown doesn’t have much need for anything. A little flower becomes the clown’s whole world! The clown follows a bee around the world. The clown falls in love with a cactus and makes their life in the desert. What is it that happens to me? that squeezes my chest and makes. me confess? The clown is a confessor of their own stupidities, mistakes, limits, naïvetés, disappointments, sadness, and loneliness... And as a confessor, the clown opens to the confession of all the frailties of the world. The clown is a collector of peoples’ stories. As Zuca Sardan said, “The clown is the ultimate priest.” A disguised prophet, a compassionate one, a coyote trickstering communities, an ambassador without citizenship, a foreigner without a country, the clown despises nations. What is it that happens to me? What can no longer be concealed? The clown is incapable of hiding; what you see is what you get. The clown is so honest that they can’t help but be a tremendous pretender. “He pretends so completely that he even pretends that the pain he really feels is pain.”[3] And he also pretends that it is joy that makes everyone laugh. What is it that happens to me? That's not right for anyone to refuse? No, the clown does not understand the refusal of a smile and is stubborn until they succeed. With their annoying galoshes! For the clown has only one law: It is declared that everyone is given not only the right, but fundamentally, the duty, to laugh! What is it that happens to me? That makes me a beggar? makes me plead? The clown leaves their home, paints themself, dresses in strange clothes as if begging for a smile, even if only from the corner of someone’s mouth. Every clown lives off the crumbs of other people’s happiness. And it is this joy that makes them beg for any smile. [1] Manoel de Barros, excerpt from the poem “The boy who carried water in his sieve,” in Exercicios de Ser Criança (São Paulo: Editora Salamandra, 1999). [2] This is a conversation with the song “O Que Será que Será” (“What Will Be Will Be”) by Chico Buarque. [3] Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems (New York: Penguin, 2006).

For many of my students, voicing themselves is not the issue. Mostly, they are terrified of revealing their authentic voice. Although I empathize with them, my role as teacher obligates me to keep them faithful to its discovery, even if their authentic voice is not a fixed thing. Hence, I approach this pastoral work with the understanding that their respective voices are dynamic and ever-changing, not along a linear trajectory, but within the messy cycles of their precious lives. In this way, my role as teacher is to inspire them to discover a self-authenticated speech power that when activated they can proudly hear and see themselves. And yet despite my good efforts, I inevitably have students who have despairingly succumbed to the notion that their voice is not worth hearing. Achingly, such devaluing of self is often the result of a combination of adverse and even abusive social, political, and economic forces that they have encountered over the course of their lives. For other students, the issue is not worthlessness but often anxiety in hearing those facets of their voices that expose their privilege and cultural bubble. To cope with either one of these voice-silencing impulses, students usually opt for a masking scheme that I call, the plagiarized voice. Here, the goal is to disguise their authentic self, with all its flaws, foibles, and flavors, by appropriating other people’s authentic voice. Beyond simply quoting word for word from another author without giving proper credit, which is a dishonest academic practice resulting in dismissal, students assemble a composite voice using a default collection of words and phrases. There is also the habitual deployment of go-to concepts and argumentation that are indiscriminately plugged into their writing. The entire production points clearly to the concealment of their authentic voice. Another giveaway to this masking tactic is when students carelessly employ—whether in their writing assignments or class participation—trendy keywords, particularly the kind that they think would trigger a better grade from me. Knowing that my scholarly voice reveals an ethical commitment to the themes of “postcoloniality,” “migration,” “trauma,” “empire,” “violence,” “colonialism,” and “marginality,” students surmise that by sprinkling their writing with these words enough times a higher grade will magically appear. It is not that these themes are off-limits in students’ writing, for I teach that they are critical to understanding the cultural, social, and political instincts of the writers of the Hebrew Bible. Furthermore, these inscribed instincts belong to the sacred otherness of the biblical text, and hence we should resist colonizing their language and cultural points of view. At issue here, however, is when these themes and concepts do not cross-pollinate with a student’s authentic self in ways that show their close reading, creativity, and courage. Indeed, the lived experience with imperial violence that permeates much of the Hebrew Bible requires attentive and respectful listening, such that the felt pain behind the text is not diluted by sanitized scholarly jargon. If pain and suffering are common to all humans across time and space, then students should be able to hear themselves in the stories and poetry of the Hebrew Bible. Likewise, theorizing on ancient forms of colonization also requires a spectrum of diverse dialogue partners, some with expertise in literary analysis and others who write about imperial violence from first-hand experience. In my view, inviting a mixed range of reading partners (preferably in nonhierarchical fashion) is vital pedagogical practice that allows my students to fine-tune their authentic voice. In other words, the aim is not to harvest a new collection of catchy phrases but to hear oneself in relation to a rich variety of other voices. For example, when students encounter a rape scene in the biblical text—troublingly, there are many to choose from—how do they respond to the expert critics who gloss over this egregious form of violence? Or if students hear from authors who write about their first-hand experience with exile, does their testimony strike a chord in ways that could help students better exegete the biblical text? Notably, teaching future pastors the Hebrew Bible at a Protestant seminary is in many ways about authentic voice, specifically the divine voice. It is this pursuit of authenticity that my students are expecting—and frankly pay—to receive. The divine voice is not something that can be reproduced through Generative AI, for the authenticity of God is revealed through the realms of faith. And in the end, they will be practicing this pursuit each time they take the pulpit. For it is here that their congregants gather, expecting to receive from them an authentic word from God. As a teacher, when I think of this sacred moment, liberating students from the plagiarized voice becomes even more urgent.

None of the women in my motherline drove a car regularly before the 1970s. To get to where they were going next in their lives, when they left where they were born, they navigated saltwater roads. They moved house; whole villages, islands, and continents receding in their wake. They lived as the newly arrived outsiders in other Caribbean islands, the United States, England, and Canada as they gave birth to us, the next generation. Before she got on the boat that would cross the Atlantic to England, my mother walked her island world just up the road from the deep-water harbour. My work as a teacher, scholar, and writer focuses on the religious lives of everyday folk in communities in the African Diaspora in North America and the Caribbean. The oeuvre of anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) helped me hone some essential items in my toolkit. Key among these is Hurston’s recognition of the centrality of oral traditions in southern US black communities. Her brilliance as a scholar and writer is based on her keen observation as an anthropologist and on her self-reflexivity as a member of the communities with which she worked. Her stance was unusual for the 1930s and prescient of the call for research reflexivity in anthropological and other social sciences and humanities which emerged later in the twentieth century. Hurston was also a traveler. She journeyed throughout the US South and the Caribbean including Haiti, the Bahamas, and Jamaica, to record the stories, songs, and folklore of black communities. She drove a car on her trips through the rural US south conducting research. In a memorable episode recounted in her 1942 autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston tells readers about her escape from a conflictual situation in a work camp by leaving late at night and driving away. She also wrote about a road trip and her drive across the Canada/US border from the state of Michigan into the city of Kitchener in southern Ontario. I was intrigued to learn that Zora Neale Hurston had driven through, or possibly even stayed, in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. I teach at a university in what is now called Kitchener-Waterloo. For years, I have tried to retrace her steps in the Kitchener end of town imagining where she may have stopped for a meal or an overnight stay. Did she park her car on Duke Street in downtown Kitchener close to where Canada’s first black lawyer, Jamaican-born Robert Sutherland (1830-1878), operated a law practice decades earlier? Did she stay at any of the inns or on the outskirts in nearby smaller towns? Perhaps she rested in a rented room with a black family using the informal word-of-mouth shared information which helped black travelers navigate racially segregated landscapes. Hurston enigmatically notes in her observations that life on both sides of the border looked very similar from her vantage point. What did she mean exactly? I interpret Hurston’s comment as referring to social as well as geographical landscapes. It is a sly indication that de facto racial segregation existed across the border in 1930s Ontario. Racialized segregation shaped her experiences on both sides of the US and Canada border. Hurston’s strategies of navigation as a black woman driver and traveler would have been needed in both places. Indeed, the Canadian historical record supports Hurston’s assessment. After all, Herbert Green’s Green Book, a handbook for black motorists on road trips published from 1936 to 1966, provided references to safe places not only in the US, but also across the border in Canada, in the province of Ontario. My search for Zora in the local and regional African diaspora is not only through textual and visual records but also literal as I walk the streets of small towns and drive rural roads in my very old car trying to match place names from old maps and memoirs with current locations. Sometimes I meet an empty field or a church building now repurposed as a home but on occasion I have visited buildings which are still standing and church communities which are vibrant even though their locations have shifted. Surrounded by rural farmlands and smaller towns, Kitchener-Waterloo is located on the traditional unceded territory of the Haudensaunee, Anishnawbe, and Neutral Indigenous peoples. As a British-born black woman of Caribbean heritage living in Canada, I have thought about how my own complex identity has been shaped by forced and chosen migrations of previous generations. In courses that I have designed, I ask students to read, think, and write about the local in connection to regional, national, and international historical and contemporary contexts. In doing so, they are encouraged to consider studying religion and culture beyond static notions of historical dates and immobile structures and fixed figures. This approach challenges ideas of “history” and “religion” happening to abstract, far away actors while the current local context remains unexamined, safe, and uncomplicated. Citations: Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991

writing about teaching means that i begin with thinking about teaching and why it has always been a part of my life. both of my parents were college professors, and the worlds of books and classrooms were a part of my life for as long as i can remember. some of my earliest tangible memories about teaching are walking from my grade school—fayetteville street elementary—to the biology building at north carolina college at durham for negroes (now north carolina central university) and sitting outside of my mother’s classroom and listening to her biology lectures. she had no idea that i was there until i talked about it in my installation address at union theological seminary when I was in my late 40s. i loved listening to her teach as she was in command of the material and the classroom, and her diction was impeccable. i knew a little about some of the topics she was teaching in those intro biology classes, but not always. and it was the not-always times that caused me to lean in more closely—what i now thing of as learning. writing about teaching means that i put myself into the classroom—either an imagined or tangible one—and think about why working with students in a teaching and learning environment is an honor and can be big fun. it’s also a challenge and i find that there are times when the pain or the joy that is being shared is also a time of both spiritual and pastoral prayer. logic and reason take somewhat of a back seat for a while as the humanity of the person(s) in front of me or seated around the table comes to the fore in visceral ways. writing about teaching helps me remember why i chose it as a profession and how, although i have been in administration since 2008, i never stopped teaching in its broadest sense as being a dean is, for me, about teaching as we learn together how to be a faculty, how we shape a curriculum, how we engage the worlds around us, how we must be as present as possible to the known and the unexpected, how we work with the churches and communities around us, how we hold ourselves together by tending to our spiritual as well as physical selves. and i am reminded, once again, that teaching is about caring and love.

Inspiration is a red balloon. My clear recollection of a film transporting me to another space and time occurred in the 2nd grade. I was a student at the George Washington Carver Elementary School in North Philadelphia. Our class, taught by Mrs. Cain, watched the short film The Red Balloon. Sitting at my desk, my 2nd grade-self was given over to the story, swept-up to another time and space, transported from Philadelphia to a life in Paris. While watching the film, I felt all the emotions, heard all the sounds, saw all the sights, and tasted all the smells. It was as if I was inside the story. Or it was as if the story was inside of me. In the 34-minutes, my life expanded. A red balloon in-spirit-ed me. During the film, I became the helium filled red balloon – beautiful and vibrant. I, while in the story as the balloon, possessed feelings, agency, will and awareness. The boy – kind, gentle and caring – was able to play and communicate with me. Together, we forged a deep friendship. Here is the plot of the film as my 2nd grade-self experienced it and as I still vividly remember it ... The boy and I wandered about the streets of Paris enjoying one another’s company. As we played, we drew attention from people – young and old. Adults were delighted at the sight of a red balloon following closely behind a boy. Other children were envious of our blitheful love. I was welcomed into the boy’s family. One Sunday, the boy’s mother asked me to remain at home while the family went to church. In their absence, I was very lonely. I found my way out of the apartment window, down the street and to the church. I entered through the opened front door and sat with my family.  In glaring meanness, a church usher nabbed me and threw me out of the sanctuary and onto the curb. My boy, in defense of me, left the church to comfort me. Then together we wandered around the neighborhood. My boy decided to purchase a treat from the neighborhood bakery. I willingly waited just outside the shop. A gang of older boys who were envious snatched me and ran with me – pulling violently hard on my string. With great effort, the boy got me back from the older boys but then the gang chased us through the allies. They were angry. We were terrified. The mob finally caught up to us. The gang pinned the boy on the ground as they shot me down with sling shots and sharp rocks. Then one of the brutes stomped me with the heel of his boot. I was destroyed. Just as it seemed as if my life was over, and all hope and love was lost – the boy looked up from his tears and devastation. All the other balloons in Paris had come to him. In celebration, the community of balloons formed a bunch and took my beloved boy on a joyful ride over the city. Teaching to inspire students can seem too lofty a goal until we remember the stories, people, and events who inspire(d) us. Our classrooms do not have to be boring with stale, flat moments where we tell students about life as if life happens away from learning. Engage students – mind, body, and spirit. Our challenge is to create learning experiences which immerse students into the lessons of life and of curriculum.   Our task is to help students make meaning with the tools of imagination, inspiration, and encounter. We know from our own lives that encounters with the arts, in many mediums, can be transporting and transformative. Recall a time when a story (through film, theatre, dance, poetry, painting, etc.) profoundly shifted your understanding of the world or of your place in the world. Recall a time when an offering of creativity (photography, sculpture, TV comedy, garden design, architecture, etc.) took you out of yourself or took your breath away or deeply moved you.  What was the last beautiful thing that moved you to tears, that inspired you to wonder, awe, or love? What has made you laugh to tears? What would it take to design courses which invoke and evoke these kinds of experiences for students? How might your introductory course be redesigned so your students experience being on the inside of the story? Invite students into new stories – they will be inspired. Take them on new adventures – they will be motivated to learn. Send them to foreign lands – they will rise to the challenge of exploration and discovery. Let the possibility of their learning be your inspiration for more imaginative teaching. Thank you, Mrs. Cain.

Early in the spring semester, I had another bout of feeling like an impostor in the classroom.  I cannot recall what exactly prompted it this time, but the feeling was familiar, the voice in my head saying, “you do not know what you are doing.  You are not the teacher these students need right now. They recognize your inadequacy, but they are just not telling you.” Later that same day, it came back with a vengeance in faculty meeting, where I felt surrounded by colleagues much smarter and more capable than I. An impostor is “a person who pretends to be someone else in order to deceive others, especially for fraudulent gain.” (Oxford Languages online) The older Oxford English Dictionary adds, “a fraud, a swindler, a cheat.” Since graduate school, I have recognized this feeling, popularly labeled “impostor syndrome.” One day during my doctoral work, I struggled to describe this feeling in the graduate student lounge with some friends, and I was startled to learn that many of my colleagues (most, though not all of them, women) had similar experiences. Many of us felt like we didn’t belong, like we are not enough. I began thinking about making a T-shirt: “We are all impostors!” There was healing in the recognition that this is a shared experience.  I am not alone in feeling like a fraud. While contemplating this idea a few months ago, I learned about this recent New Yorker article by Leslie Jamison. I learned that psychologist Pauline Clance and her colleague Suzanne Imes first published their research on “impostor phenomenon” in 1978. Sparked by their own experiences of self-doubt, they had interviewed over 150 “successful” women in academia, law, medicine, and social work, and discovered that they reported a common “’internal experience of intellectual phoniness,’ living in perpetual fear that ‘some significant person will discover that they are indeed intellectual impostors.’” This idea resonated with the experiences of many folks in the decades that followed (including my own group of friends in the graduate student lounge in the late 1990s). It is a relief to know that we are all impostors. And yet. There is a danger in this diagnosis, as a new wave of scholars have begun to point out. Jamison reports: “Lisa Factora-Borchers, a Filipinx American author and activist, told me, ‘Whenever I’d hear white friends talk about impostor syndrome, I’d wonder, How can you think you’re an impostor when every mold was made for you? When you see mirror reflections of yourself everywhere, and versions of what your success might look like?’” In other words, it is important not to confuse internal struggles with self-doubt and real external injustice that may cause one to feel out of place. So, I have begun to wonder: what is the good news and what is the bad news about the impostor phenomenon?  What can the feeling of being an impostor teach us, and what are its dangers?  The feeling of being an impostor can remind us of one important aspect of ourselves: we do mess up. We are not perfect. In an earlier blog, I used the term “impostor” to name my deep sense of not knowing enough or being good enough at what was needed in the classroom in a particular situation. This is part of the reality that we are complex creatures with multiple stories. This is not the only thing we need to know about ourselves, but it is one part of our truth. The truth is feeling like an impostor can open us to compassion for others who feel the same, and it can make us better teachers. Two Wabash blogs in the past two years offer good examples of this: Christy Cobb’s battle with impostor syndrome as a Southerner in academia, and the way it has made her a better teacher. Anna Lanstrom on feeling like an impostor teaching about race when she does not know enough, and learning to resist perfectionism. Knowing what it feels like not to belong can help us open doors to others who feel shut out. Identifying too much with being an impostor can obscure our ability to recognize truly harmful falsehoods, such as the structural obstacles that prevent colleagues from being fully valued. Samuel Perry, professor of religious studies at the University of Oklahoma, also warns of the genuine danger of “impostor Christianity” (see also Kristen du Mez’s helpful follow-up commentary on this piece). Focusing on an internal experience of “impostorhood” must not turn us away from naming external realities that unjustly make people feel like impostors. In the end, feeling like an impostor can be good news if it opens the door to greater compassion for others. However, it can be dangerous if it keeps us mired in self-doubt, failing to see and name the injustices that masquerade as gospel.

Part Three: Ritual Bring Us into a Divine Dance (the real-time, active participation in the transcendent, where the physical realm intercedes for the spiritual realm). A Divine Dance; ritual creates a divine dance between the guide and the participants, the teacher, and the learner. Ritual uses the spiritual nature of rhythm, coordinated actions and speech to invoke teaching and learning as a “divine dance.” A dance, between the life’s purpose and mission of both the teacher and the student is at the heart of the exchange. It goes beyond discrete knowledge or application of course content. Ritual, when it is intentional, steps into the spiritual realm to illuminate the lessons we came here to receive. Ritual recognizes that everyone of us comes into being to learn a set of lessons. The lessons that aid us in becoming (better) and in sharing our becoming with others so that we are all becoming (better) and belonging. Meaningfulness in learning is heightened when the learner can see and feel learning in alignment with purpose and the teacher sees and feels teaching as living-out purpose. Ritual not only pronounces this spirit work, but it also maintains this transcending dance while it seeks to intercede with earthly realities that would impede us from getting the lessons. Imagine this, a ritual lifting one’s life purpose and mission in ways that welcome, clarifiy, and situate the lessons as part of our Divine plan. Rituals create a Divine dance as expressions of wisdom and the gifts to be given as life’s mission are expressions of love. For both the student and the teacher, every teaching moment is an opportunity to learn a transcending lesson, or to give a gift.  What ritual does is enlist our active participation in the unseen as it negotiates what we can see, speak, feel, and touch.