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Diversity is the standard for theological education. One of the dimensions of courage that we must have in our classrooms is the ability to see multiple perspectives. To word it differently, we must have the ability to put ourselves in another person’s shoes. I am reminded of the poignant song and video by Everlast, “What It’s Like.” Part of the problem in religious circles and in society in general is the complete lack of empathy. Empathy is defined simply as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” It contrasts with sympathy, defined as “feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune.” Empathy means you are in (em) their suffering (pathos), and not only with them (sym) in their suffering (pathos).In online environments it is difficult to create empathy. After all, we are not in brick-and-mortar classes. We sit comfortably behind a screen and are not interacting in person. However, there are still opportunities to create a sense of empathy, and consequently being present, with one another – even if we are from different walks of life and from different parts of the world. In one of my classes I had students from Africa, Latin America, and the US. The students from the US in this class also reflected an incredible amount of diversity. My students are Black, Caucasian, Hispanic/Latin@, and of mixed race heritage. We are challenged to walk with one another and, at the very least, to understand each other’s perspectives.On the first day of class I strive to help my students get to know each other. Knowing is not merely knowing information about one another, but to enter into a relationship with one another (an affective move). The best way to do so is to listen to each other’s stories. For the last few years I have asked students to post a video of themselves in which they show an object that represents their personality and the significance of faith in their lives. I learned this tactic in a Wabash Workshop for early career faculty. Since then, I have found it to be a very helpful exercise. Most students have discussed a Bible that was gifted to them. Others post pictures of significant family members.This tactic presents opportunities to enter into another’s reality. One of my Black students posted a video where he quietly and soberly described the only gift he ever received from his father when he was three years old. It was a small jacket his father bought while stationed as a soldier in Vietnam in 1966. It had a map of Vietnam with place names and surrounding countries embroidered on the back along with the year, 1966. The student’s name was on a front pocket of the jacket. Except for occasional visits and this lone gift, his father was completely absent from this student’s life. For my student this reflected a lack – of stability, of responsibility, of keeping one’s own word, and of a loving family.My student later shared that when his dad passed away his thoughts toward him changed. He started missing him. He also started thinking about the opportunities he had missed with his father. The father’s own racial background and his experience in Vietnam meant his life had been marked by trauma, instability, and many struggles. Somehow, this jacket created an opportunity to empathize with his dad and to forgive him. My student stated that because of this experience, he desired to be a present male figure in his own son’s life.Two things stood out to me. First, I thought of all the pressing contextual issues in the life of my student’s father. The country was going through the Civil Rights movement (1954-1968). His father had been shaped by segregation, Jim Crow laws, and all the psychological harm of racism.[i] Black colleagues have shared that due to moving and different circumstances they cannot trace their ancestry back for more than one or two generations. His father was also a soldier in one of the most unpopular wars. The year 1966 was marked by mounting casualties and a sense of futility as superior US firepower could not break the resolve of the Vietcong. To create a sense of community and empathy in class, I encouraged my students to think of the trauma that this father had endured and of the courage that it took for the student to be transparent and vulnerable enough to share about this object.Second, I thought of the courage it took my student to forgive his father and to deal with this trauma as he built his own family. I thought of the resilience he demonstrated to be able to make sense of his own situation even though he may not have fully understood his father’s situation. Faith has played an important role in my student’s life, giving him language and ideas to deal with his own difficulties, and with his absent father. It also empowered him to take ownership of the situation and to pour out what he never received into the life of his own son.My student is a living testament to the courage reconciliation requires. The classroom made us walk together with this student who had a very different history from all of us. The online classroom required us to be present with him. My comments and responses were paths to give him necessary attention and models for how to respond to those who reveal trauma and become vulnerable to us. Most importantly, I, a Hispanic/Latin@ faculty member from a different generation, was able to empathize with this student. Hopefully, this distinct affective move was able to model a way forward in our conflicted cultural milieu. Notes & Bibliogrpahy[i] Robert T. Carter and Thomas D. Scheuermann, Confronting Racism Integrating Mental Health Research into Legal Strategies and Reforms(Routledge, 2020).

I am writing this blog post with my 8-year-old daughter’s voice still ringing in my ears: “Yes—it’s difficult, but it’s fun.” As a student, she said it during a violin lesson after wrestling with a new bow technique. Anyone who has practiced an instrument may know the scene—scales repeated until fingers ache, a teacher correcting the same motion for the tenth time. We often tell our children (and our students as well), “Practice makes perfect,” but the road to perfection is slow, repetitive, and occasionally tedious.My daughter’s shy voice—“difficult, but fun”—captures what philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre calls an internal good: a genuine joy experienced only inside a repetitive practice. External goods certainly loom large in my daughter’s world—a coveted seat in the district orchestra, a résumé line that thrills her parents. For her, slow and repetitive practice is “difficult”: she may desire a “shortcut” to finish practice quickly and play with her friends. And yet, in the middle of that drudgery, she found a deeper joy: the quiet thrill of coaxing one clear note from stubborn strings. Here, (slow) formation, not (fast) efficiency aimed at external validation, is the point.Technologists assure us that artificial intelligence will free us from menial work so we can focus on more meaningful and creative work. When I asked ChatGPT about its educational role, it offered the usual optimism, focusing on efficiency:"AI can be a powerful tool to enhance human productivity and creativity. Rather than replacing us, it can augment our abilities, making work more fulfilling. In this way, AI doesn’t just make life easier—it helps us reimagine what work means and empowers us to spend more time on what truly matters."The pronoun us jumped out at me. AI speaks as though it already shares human aims. But does it grasp what makes learning formative rather than merely efficient?Let us picture a humanities classroom. Reading primary texts—Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, for instance—often feels like violin practice: dense, slow, and sometimes tedious. A student can now upload the text, prompt an AI for a synopsis, and receive an instant outline. Hours saved, concepts clarified, quiz scores boosted—external goods secured.Yet that shortcut bypasses the internal good of reading itself. Lingering over a paragraph is not wasted time; it is the learning. More importantly, as we read, the text also reads us: a paragraph questions an unspoken assumption, an unfamiliar idea enlarges imagination, a story strangely mirrors our own. None of that occurs when we outsource reading to the so-called “efficient” AI.When we reframe reading as a powerful practice of formation, tedium turns into joy. While we move through the words, we are simultaneously moved by them—seen, challenged, and reshaped by voices from centuries ago or a continent away. Out of that slow interaction emerges the joy of reading for its own sake. It becomes an interior reward that resists quick translation into productivity metrics.Such formation extends well beyond the classroom. Someone who once wrestled patiently with Aristotle may later join a neighborhood book club simply for the pleasure of shared discovery. The capacity to be transformed by texts—through a time-consuming, attention-demanding encounter—is a deeply human gift that no algorithm can replicate.On the other hand, from a social ethics perspective, I am concerned about the issue of accessibility to this formative dimension of education. As AI more embeds itself in education, the formative joys of slow learning might risk becoming a privilege. Students juggling multiple jobs or heavy caregiving duties are the ones who would be more tempted to outsource reading to generative AI tools. If engagement is priced in hours only the well-resourced can spare, we reinforce inequities that we, as educators, claim to resist.Although we continue to work on this challenge, it is crucial for us as educators to foreground formation—particularly communal formation—in our pedagogy. Yes, AI can be a powerful tool. And it can help students in many ways. For example, AI may serve as a tutor, offering personalized learning experiences. Nevertheless, we need to re-claim the distinct human gift in the slow, shared process of learning. It is the dimension of education that makes us who we are, as individuals and communities, and that AI simply cannot provide. Yes, it is difficult, but fun!

In my first blog on this topic I tackled the question of how to create attendance policies that are suitable for the class content and context. But all this focus on the students neglects one more important factor – what about an attendance policy for the instructor?This was not a major concern of mine when I began teaching, but in the years since, I have had children and communicable illnesses have become a substantially more regular part of my life. I also began my current role in Fall of 2019, just before the pandemic began, which changed much of our larger discourse about “pushing through” illnesses and being present no matter what. But the same issues arise for any instructor who discovers they have to cancel a class unexpectedly – anyone who needs to do more complicated travel to get to a conference than expected, who is invited for a guest lecture with limited lead time, who is on the job market and might get a coveted on-campus interview. How do we cancel classes well?Now that I have a preschooler and a kindergartener, I cannot get through a semester without a cancellation due to their illnesses (which invariably become my illnesses). This term, I finally wrote an attendance policy for myself that I included in my syllabi. Here are a few things I considered while creating my expectations:As with any job, advance notice is best. I have promised my students that I will let them know class is cancelled as soon as I possibly can – which sometimes means I need to make a decision the night before rather than the morning of. When in doubt, I err on the side of cancelling if I’m sick – nobody needs my lecture enough that it’s worth them getting ill.I will not require my students to do any “makeup” work that takes more time than a normal class would have; whenever possible, I will keep makeup assignments significantly shorter than class time. Piling on unexpected work just feels unfair to me, but this standard is also key since I may not have an alternative assignment available by their usual class time. I need to respect that the hours students carve out for my course might be all the time they have, and additional work may cost them time they have to allocate elsewhere. I can show respect for my students’ complex lives by keeping things concise.When alternate assignments are needed, I use methods that students are already familiar with so that they are not wasting time trying to explore a new technology when I want them to be focused on course content. If I don’t use discussion boards in a class, I don’t ask students to use a discussion board for a cancelled day. Typically, I record my classes and rely on the video to create a shortened lecture.Sometimes, just skipping the day is fine. This won’t be possible for all sorts of courses – when classes are composed so that prior concepts need to be fully understood before moving on, skipping may never be an option – but my own course design is more iterative and removing any one day isn’t going to collapse the structure. I always mourn when I have to pull out a day of content that I love, but sometimes it’s better for my students and myself to move on without stressing about covering every single idea and story that I hoped for.We don’t plan our syllabi with last-minute changes in mind, but having a few priorities when imagining cancellations – and taking a moment to craft your own instructor attendance policy – can save you time and headaches when things don’t go as planned.

If I have learned anything in this life of teaching, it is this: the emotional labor of teaching is genuine. Routinely, class sessions left me exhausted. After most sessions I would need to sit in silence for an hour to regain my energies or have a meal to replenish my body. The depletion was never from a lecture, but from the intensity of conversation with students. The emotional labor of teaching occurs due to the full engagement of body, mind, spirit, guts, wit, intuition, intellect, and humor, all summoned in the teaching encounter.When we do our teaching work well, classroom conversation can be powerfully interactive—for students and for us. Teaching religion, in confessional or non-confessional institutions, can stir up cultural tensions, stretch personal beliefs, raise consciousness and reenforce ethical obligations. Classrooms where the pursuit of truth is passionate, enthusiastic and exciting can take an emotional toll on the teachers because of the emotional investment in the endeavor. Interactions with students are often fulfilling but never neutral. The intensity of the conversation when students are expressing curiosity, thinking deeply, connecting previously disconnected ideas, and experiencing new insights can tax our emotional reservoirs.Emotional labor in the classroom is not a flaw, nor a side effect. Teachers who extend themselves, make themselves available, and open their hearts to students must realize that emotional presence—from delight to disappointment—is part of the work of teaching. Regardless of the season in one’s career, navigating identity, belief, and culture without falling into advocacy or detachment is hard. Vulnerability can be costly.For those of us who must contend with the disrespect, disregard and indignity foisted upon us by students who judge us as inferior due to our gender, race, nationality, age, or physical ability, the emotional toll assumes the jagged dimensions of discrimination and injustice. Classroom spaces riddled with unfair bias can be debilitating.To further complicate the challenge, students’ habit of coaxing teachers into boundary-blurring or insisting upon role overload can be aggravating. As an African American woman, students would treat me like women in their families or in their churches. Too often I was relegated to the status of deaconess, mother of the church, pastor’s wife, auntie or favorite cousin. Students, because of their lack of familiarity with an African American woman as a professor, and to appease their nervousness, would think of me as their counselor, lover, therapist, or friend. Many students would signal that I was like a familiar TV character—Florence Johnston, Oprah Winfrey, Aunt Viv or Clair Huxtable. I refused this status. I rejected the blurring and projection of these roles. I was their teacher. Being a teacher is a status, role, and an obligation worthy of pursuit and needs no appendages, additions, or attachments.The emotional labor needs to be monitored, nurtured, and attended to. Over long periods of time, the labor can erode us. Burnout, disengagement, cynicism, ill-health, or depression must be avoided.  Here are some strategies I have learned over the many years.Practical StrategiesPractice Grounding Ritualsmeditate and pray before class to center myselfstart class with breathing or meditationPlan the emotional rhythm of the semesterplan for low intensity class sessions, e.g. a trip (on or off campus), showing a film, guest speaker, art activity, playing a gameplan for time during the semester for rest and reflectionParticipate in peer support groups or professional support sessionsroutinely talk with colleagues or friends throughout the semestercontract a therapist, spiritual director, cleric, or counselorBe aware of burnout symptomsknow the symptoms of depression, burnout, fatigue and monitorjournal concerning your emotional health as pertains to teachingBe mindful of your own humannessmake sure you do not teach while over-tired or sleep deprivedbe well hydrated and not hungry in the classroomdress in clothes that make you feel confident and that are comfortableWe must find ways to stay emotionally connected while attending to our own needs. The emotional strain of teaching is part of the job but does not have to be a detriment of the job.Reflection QuestionsWhat are the moments that renew you in teaching? How can you plan for those moments?How do you plan your sessions so there is a rhythm to the semester?What conversations or practices help you stay grounded?What habits, practices and behaviors help you sustain your truest self in the classroom?What toolkit can you build for your emotional health and wellbeing?

* Karen Yourish, Annie Daniel, Saurabh Datar, Isaac White, and Lazaro Gamio, “These Words Are Disappearing in the New Trump Administration,” The New York Times, March 7, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-federal-agencies-websites-words-dei.html.

A former student recently got in touch with me to catch up after a few years of silence. He said I was one of the few people who made him feel truly seen, and that’s what he needed right now. As we chatted, he asked about my Jan term backpacking with students in an Arizona canyon. When I described it to him, he replied, “That should called ‘Being in Awe 101!’ Actually, I think all of your classes should be titled that.” I like it. Being in Awe 101.He picked up on a particular element of my pedagogy that is always a goal but is especially potent in my outdoor courses: wonder. We know that children are great at this. They wander around the world enthralled, wondering at everything. We know as teachers that if we can only get students to wonder about something, then they can learn – that they learn much better if they are curious than when we tell them that they have to memorize this thing they find boring. We know the power of wonder in a classroom.Taking my students outside facilitates more wonder among them than I can generate in the classroom. I hear the question: Does making my students sit in the garden outside the English department building really make them wonder better about the reasons for the Council of Nicaea? Well, yes. When my students sit outside for class, they are generally more open. They feel like they can breathe and even, often, like they’re getting away with something. I’ve said as much before. That sense of freedom and of getting something past the authorities helps them drop their guard, be less armored about what they think is being asked or required of them in class. That openness allows the material to get past the bouncer in their brains. That openness is space for wonder.Sometimes quail run through the outdoor classroom and disrupt us in a way that makes us all laugh but also takes us out of “I’m a student and have to learn this thing my professor is saying” mode. Sometimes their internal bouncer gets wondering about the butterfly that floats near them and then is willing to wonder about the conversation happening in their group work. Even just noticing the colors of the flowers in the garden or the smell of the mulch is enough to cause that disruption. And once they wonder about one thing, they’re in a posture of wonder. Then, perhaps, they wonder about the discussion we’re having about the reading.We know we can inculcate wonder under the fluorescent lights, too. We associate with the Wabash Center because we care about creative ways to induce wonder. I only suggest that taking students outside can be a shortcut. Unless it’s raining. A good hike in the rain on a lengthy backpacking trip can still invoke wonder with the right attitude, but I admit that taking a normal class out in the rain will be more distracting than wonder-ful. Sometime I’ll tell you about the time I lost an entire class because the first day of rain that semester was in November and they didn’t know where our classroom was. Even that was the kind of disruption that calmed the internal bouncers.At one Wabash cohort workshop in Crawfordsville, I was excited that canoeing was an afternoon option because canoeing is maybe my favorite thing in the world. One of my cohort colleagues and I ended up in a canoe together. We had a lovely conversation at one point along the river about being awake to God. About that time a bald eagle soared overhead. We wondered together awhile. I watched my colleague – already a joyful, brilliant, fully alive person – become even more alive in her wonder. Months later she told me how she carried that moment of wonder back to her family and her world and the effects it had.The wilderness surprises us. It disrupts our “normal” with its “normal.” We are less able to pretend we’re in control when this happens, and I think this is why it is a place ripe for wonder. Our eyes are more open. They have to be, or we’ll miss the surprise. Or we’ll be surprised by something that feels more like an attack. We keep our eyes open outside and look closely at what’s around us. We see more clearly. This is the wonder.I suggest that as important as wonder is for learning, wonder is more important for being a decent human being among other human beings. It’s not enough to wonder in order to learn; we must also wonder about others in order to see one another clearly, in order to delight in one another. Wonder is the posture we need for awe to take root, and also delight. As we take our students outside to facilitate their wonder, they are practicing for more than the exam. We give them an experience of seeing deeply and of being deeply seen, and the wonder that produces will generate even more wonder. Perhaps then we’ll stand a chance in this world of wonders.

We live in a world fraught with compartmentalization. Work outfits vs. weekend wear. Neighborhood friends vs. work colleagues. Convocation vs. chapel. I get it. We like to orient our world based on neatly stacked boxes where we can stuff the various facets of our lives. The problem is this doesn’t reflect the design principles that surround us or the various environments in which we live and operate. We know from a study of nature that everything is connected to everything else. Callenbach reminds us that there is a mutualism or symbiotic relationship in natural ecologies that prevents compartmentalization. He asserts, “Nothing alive exists in isolation from its ecological context. . . . Symbiotic relationships . . . are a universal way in which life forms survive and coexist.”[1] Each of the various ecological elements mutually interconnect with one another. As Taylor reminds us, “Apparently, there is little rugged individualism in nature.”[2]A few summers ago, I took up gardening. More specifically, I attempted to grow my favorite tomato variety, Celebrity. I found planters under the deck with some soil already in them and plopped my seedlings into those boxes. I found a shady spot by the house where they could thrive. I finished my project and waited to see what would happen! However, the saying “out of sight, out of mind” very much applied to my situation. They were out of sight, so watering wasn’t a priority. I barely even tended to them other than to impatiently check for growth. You can probably guess what happened to my hopes of a plentiful tomato crop. I discovered that tomatoes need a lot of sunlight. They also need regular watering, proper soil nutrition, and ongoing tending. This includes removing suckers, staking the plants, and checking for blossom end rot. Everything in that tomato’s ecosystem impacted everything else. Sadly, we didn’t eat a lot of tomatoes that summer, but I learned some important lessons: nothing thrives in isolation and intentionality is critical to growth.These lessons from the natural world apply to teaching and learning. We may think that teaching is a disconnected enterprise, but just like the tomato garden, it is part of a larger ecosystem or constellation of interconnected elements. Our students are connected to one another in a variety of ways including their families of origin, friends, neighbors, co-workers, faculty, staff, communities of faith, and to the broader world. They bring all these social connections and relationships like checked baggage to our classrooms. Not only that, they also take what they have learned back to their respective relationships, responsibilities, and even life contexts. The reciprocal dynamic at work in all natural, social, spiritual, and learning ecologies nurtures growth because of the impact bi-directional engagements have on the teacher and learner.[3] The learner isn’t an isolated element in the classroom but rather brings a number of connections from their social networks, life experiences, ministry opportunities, and adult responsibilities. Bronfenbrenner used the language of nested ecologies to describe the various levels or environments in which a person engages and develops.[4]These complimentary ecosystems interconnect with each other as a way of facilitating and stimulating mutualistic growth.When learning is connected to the student’s multi-contextualized realities, we see impact not just in test scores or nicely articulated papers but also in a holistic approach to navigating the world around them. In one class I teach, my students learn how to develop and use a modified form of Hartman’s ecomap[5] called an ecoplan. In this plan, they must identify a daily strategy to address an activity or a way of being, centered around all six dimensions of a whole person formation model, (physical, mental, emotional, social, moral, and spiritual) first proposed by Ted Ward.[6] For example, on Mondays, they will commit to some form of physical activity, intellectual exercise, emotional engagement, social practice, moral obligation, and spiritual discipline. Something similar is identified for each day of the week. At first it seems overwhelming to them but once they start implementing their plan, they’re often amazed at how easy it is to incorporate an integrated approach to how they live. They begin to understand that what happens in one of the dimensions impacts and is impacted by all the others. They see that proper attention to physical activity has an impact on emotional health. Similarly, intentionality with respect to spiritual practices has an impact on their relationships to one another, and healthy emotional habits may influence mental health as well.In all that we teach, we should be mindful that there is an inherent and inescapable connection between the content we deliver, the teaching that we facilitate, and the way in which students live out what they are learning. When our teaching accommodates these human ecosystem dynamics, we create a far richer learning experience and one that potentially creates lasting impact. Teaching, from this perspective, shifts from content management to formative integration of content.Once we understand that the educational compartments we construct have to be permeable and connected to others, we have an opportunity to radically reshape teaching and learning paradigms. Here’s to a bumper crop of tomatoes andintegrated learners! Notes & Bibliography[1] E. Callenbach, Ecology: A Pocket Guide (University of California Press, 2008), 134.[2] W. Taylor, “Significance of the Biotic Community in Ecological Studies,” The Quarterly Review of Biology 10, no. 3 (1935): 296.[3] S. Lowe, and Lowe, M., Ecologies of Faith in a Digital Age: Spiritual Growth through Online Education (IVP Academic, 2018).[4] U. Bronfenbrenner, The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design (Harvard University Press, 1979).[5] A. Hartman, Finding Families: An Ecological Approach to Family Assessment in Adoption (Sage Publications, 1979).[6] T. Ward, Values Begin at Home (Victor Books, 1989).

Watching news of ICE arrests and protests in Los Angeles, I cannot help but think how we have got here. The perception of many people who voted for President Trump is that there are too many “illegals” in this country. The reason for this impression, perhaps, is that the Latino presence in some states has increased exponentially in the last few decades. Towns with minimal or no Latino presence now have significant immigrants. The image below demonstrates this change in non-traditional Latino states, where the unprecedented growth has taken place.[i] According to the U.S. census bureau, between 2022 and 2023, the Hispanic population accounted for just under 71% of the overall growth of the United States population.[ii] Hispanics of any race grew to just over 65 million, an increase of 1.16 million (1.8%) from the prior year.[iii] This growth significantly contributed to the nation's total population gain of 1.64 million in 2023.[iv]I live in the small town of Cleveland, TN. I remember first arriving in Cleveland when I was in the first grade. I have been in and out of Cleveland since I was six years old. Back in those days—and aside from my sister—I was the only “Hispanic” kid in the school. No one knew much about me except that I spoke Spanish and that I was learning English. I may not have been fluent in English, but I was good at learning things and came to the classroom with strong abilities. Though I did not have the language skills to keep up with my peers at the beginning, a particular instance let me know that I could do what my peers could do. I remember the teacher gave out a math worksheet on my first day of class that I finished before all my peers. I also got all my answers correct. Later, I steadily learned English and spoke it fluently within a year. In fact, I spoke English with a southern accent. One time, my parents recorded a greeting to send to my grandmother on a cassette tape. When I visited my native Honduras in the late 1990s, my sister and I found the exact cassette tape with the recording on it. When we listened to it after all those years, we laughed because we had a thick southern accent.            I am now in my 40s, and the school system has changed. There are many more children of Latin American descent, as well as other heritages. My son’s middle school has a lot of Hispanic students. He played soccer on his team with children whose parents were 1st generation immigrants of Argentine, Chilean, Dominican, Honduran, Guatemalan, and Mexican heritage (among many non-Latin American backgrounds, of course). He would sometimes come up to me and ask me questions about what certain Spanish words meant. Here I am, nearly forty years after I first arrived in Cleveland and things have changed in this small town. But even though all the children I have met here have arrived through the proper channels or are born U.S.-citizens, there is a strong anti-immigrant sentiment in my community.            This is xenophobia: the dislike of or prejudice against people from other countries. Just because a person is brown, it does not mean that they were or have been “illegal.” Seeing ICE arrest U.S. citizens even after providing proper ID is a clear sign of racial profiling by those who are supposed to keep us safe. Seeing the military deployed at protests is a politicization of the military. The way that these politics are working out makes me wonder if brown people will ever be perceived as true U.S. citizens and equal. The Latino community has increased exponentially. It is nothing to fear. And even if one day they were to become a majority in the U.S., like the case of Blacks in South Africa, it appears they would still be a minority in terms of economics and/or power. I am a Christian and there are two important elements of faith that are important for us. The first is hospitality as a qualifier for leadership in the local church (1 Peter 4:9; 1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:8). I would also argue that it is a mark of a true Christian and a Spirit-filled life (Hebrews 13:2). The other element is compassion. If we remember the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10), good will and compassion extend beyond cultural, ethnic, racial, socio-economic, and nationalistic barriers. The radical nature of the Samaritan’s aid to the Hebrew man cannot be understated. The immigrant—whether legal or “illegal,” documented or undocumented—is our neighbor. We must now consider what it means for them to be our neighbor and what hospitality requires of us. Notes & Bibliography[i] US Census Bureau, “Percentage Change in the Hispanic or Latino Population by Country: July 1, 2022 to July 1, 2023,” https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2024/comm/hispanic-population-change.html, last accessed June 19, 2023.[ii] US Census Bureau, “New Estimates Highlight Differences in Growth Between the U.S. Hispanic and Non-Hispanic Populations,“ June 27, 2024, https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/population-estimates-characteristics.html (last accessed June 5, 2025).[iii] Ibid.[iv] Ibid.

Like so many of us, I’ve spent the past two years in a paralyzed panic over artificial intelligence’s effects on my classroom. I teach undergraduates, mainly gen ed philosophy courses, and writing has been a key component of all my courses. When ChatGPT hit the mainstream, it became a constantly looming presence, threatening to devour every part of teaching that I care about. I didn’t “wrestle” with it. Nothing so active and dignified. I went on an emotional roller coaster of ignoring it, freaking out, wishing it away, catastrophizing, and then ignoring it again.It didn’t work. AI was still there. I tried writing about it, but that just made me feel worse. And my writing was awful, page upon page of “Oh my god, the sky is falling.” Depressing, unhelpful – and bad writing. I trashed every single page.Some of my colleagues argue that we must incorporate this wonderful new tool into our teaching. We should encourage students to use AI for “basic” tasks like summarizing texts and outlining arguments, freeing them up for more advanced work. Others point out that summarizing and outlining are advanced tasks for many of our students since they don’t know how to do either, and that students need to first acquire skills like summarizing in order to later acquire more advanced skills. To make that learning possible, they argue, we need to build protective walls to keep AI out of our classes. Several want our Writing Center to ban Grammarly and its ilk.I agree with the second group that our students usually don’t summarize or outline well. And I agree that allowing students to outsource tasks they haven’t yet mastered to AI will make it harder for them to learn to read, write and, most importantly, to think critically. I’d love to operate in a sheltered space behind protective walls. But I don’t think the walls will hold.Hence my freaking out. But after two years, I have finally managed a few moment of calm thought, aided by James Lang’s wonderful blog post. I’ve come to the following key conclusions:AI-assisted writing isn’t going away. Damn it.We aren’t reliable AI detectors and we don’t have reliable automated AI detectors (although we can catch blatant and unskilled uses).If we continue to assign take-home essays, some of our students will use AI to write them. We won’t know how many or how much they will use it, and we won’t catch many of them.Take-home essays are important pedagogical tools, and I don’t as yet have any promising substitutes.My immediate task is to figure out how to navigate my classroom spaces with all this and my own teaching goals in mind. What do I want to prioritize, and what am I willing to sacrifice?It is tempting to prioritize not being duped. And making not being duped the priority has the clear advantage of producing simple action steps: No more take-home essays. Switch to lockdown browsers or old-school blue book exams.Following James Lang, I am not switching, at least not yet. This is because I think there are more important things at stake than minimizing the risk of cheating.As I listen to colleagues who are switching to in-class exams, I am thinking about why I’ve been avoiding them for my entire teaching career: They do not test what I want to teach.Switching from essay-writing to in-class exams requires moving from messy and open-ended discussion towards lectures. I don’t want to make that move. My students have enough lecture classes. They don’t need another one from me. But they do need what I am good at teaching. My students need a class that focuses on discussion and self-reflection, inviting them to engage each other and the materials and think through their own lives, actions, and values. I want to teach those classes, and then I want my assessments to provide opportunities for students to chew over things we’ve talked about and the views they’ve encountered in class, developing arguments, reflecting on their experience, pursuing thoughts and objections, and seeing where it all takes them. Take home essays do that.But assigning those essays leaves me wide open to cheating. So what do I do in my classes to reduce the risk?I include more low-stakes writing.I make the papers worth less and include plenty of scaffolding and in-class work on them.I grade a little differently, rewarding bland, generic, but correct writing less and messy and creative writing more.I add some quizzes – and I am experimenting with using AI to draft multiple choice questions.I keep an eye out for obvious AI misuse and I use the built-in detection software. But I try not to obsess about it, and I try to be OK with knowing that some students will get away with things they shouldn’t (this part is definitely a work in progress).Most importantly, I try to connect with my students and I try to convince them that I want to hear what they think, and that their opinions matter to me and to the world. I encourage them to draw on class discussions and their own experiences when they write, and I encourage them to say what AI cannot say because AI is not them.I’m also looking around for guidance from others. Reading a Chronicle of Higher Education newsletter, I just came across Kimberly Kirner’s writing assessments. She sets out to help her students develop their own voices, and she grades based on the students’ progress towards goals that they develop together. I plan to learn from Kirner and others like her over the summer and experiment with her assignments next semester.AI is here to stay and our students have access to it. It’s not the situation I would have chosen but it is what is in front of us. It will be on us as educators to guide students so that they can still develop as critical thinkers and writers. That work has many parts, and thankfully we don’t all have to do all of it. Despite the peptalks from the AI-optimists on my campus, I don’t see myself working with students to help them write better AI prompts, and I don’t yet see a good role for AI in my courses. But reading Kirner and Lang reminds me that there is important work here that I am suited for and that I care about: I can help students see that they and their voice matters and I can help them develop their voices and become better informed so that they can speak and write more effectively. Notes & BibliographyKimberly Kirner is Professor of Anthropology at California State University at Northridge.James Lang is Professor of Practice at the Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Notre Dame.

On a Sunday morning in mid-April, my students and I gathered around the firepit in the open-air Council House at the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont. Light drizzle pattered on the roof and danced through the open smoke vent, speckling the dust and ash at our feet. Just out of sight the Middle Prong river thundered, singing to us through a grove of Hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis), Sycamores (Platanus occidentalis), and Tulip Poplars (Liriodendron tulipifera). The deciduous trees were leafing out, sprouting and unfurling fresh, vibrant spring greens. They would’ve been blinding in the sun, but the clouds softened and dispersed the light so it felt as though the whole world had been dyed green. Soon pale yellow and orange tuliptree flowers would explode from buds to beckon hummingbirds and bumblebees into the bustle of spring.“The body of Christ, broken for you,” I addressed each student. “And the blood of Christ, the cup of salvation, given for you.” We ate and drank, tasting and seeing, overwhelmed by the goodness of creation and her Creator. Our shared experiences throughout the semester and during that retreat weekend transfigured the embodied, communal practice of eucharistic thanksgiving. We’d seen many broken bodies together – I remembered the sun-bleached skull of a buck, its flesh long returned to the soil. And there’d been at least some blood shed, mostly my own, given to thorns and briars in our adventures and exploration.While that Sunday service was especially powerful, the “normal” religious rituals of prayer and Scripture reading that began each class session took on new resonances as we learned outside. I probably should not be as surprised at these developments as I sometimes still am. The Bible is “an outdoor book . . . a hypaethral book . . . a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better,” according to Wendell Berry.[i] While Berry denies that he is “an accredited interpreter of Scripture,” I have been learning and practicing the tools of disciplined, responsible, faithful biblical exegesis now for two decades.[ii] The work of considering the words of Scripture outside has had a greater transformative effect on me, I have to admit, than the whole sum of my academic research and theological reflection.[iii] My eyes have been opened anew to the power and beauty of the creaturely imagery of Sacred Scripture. Study and even religious reading inside now often feel sterile, and sterilizing, to me. One student commented that while she’d never before considered reading the Bible from the imagined perspective of a plant or animal, now she could never imagine going back to the way things were before.Last year, on Earth Day, my Creaturely Theology class invited fellow students and colleagues to join us in a new tradition. We chose not the conventional activity of planting trees – though our future work will certainly involve much planting – but instead to uproot. There are times for both (Eccl 3.2), whether in farming, or faith, or academic formation. In the outdoor classroom of Johnson University’s campus, non-indigenous privets (Ligustrum sinense), honeysuckles (Lonicera japonica and L. maackii), pears (Pryus calleryana), and tree-of-heaven (Alianthus altissimua) are abundant, especially on borders between fields and forest. They obscure the vision of the goodness of this place and crowd out the native lives that once thrived more freely here. Ivy (Hedera hylix), kudzu (Pueraria montana), and wintercreeper (Euonymus fortunei) smother large patches of soil, devouring all available nutrients and making it impossible for indigenous plants, fungi, and animals to dwell where they once did.One must first have eyes to see to identify such obstacles, and then one can work to uproot them, making possible renewed thriving and good growth. Practicing seeing and reading, giving and receiving, outside, even especially in the traditional practices and words of our faith, has caused scales to fall from our eyes. It has transformed and is transforming us to see, believe, and be empowered to get to work in trust that the God who has begun such work in us, and in God’s world, will be faithful to bring it to completion. Notes & Bibliography[i] Wendell Berry, “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,” Cross Currents 43, no. 2 (1993), 155.[ii] See Wendell Berry, Our Only World: Ten Essays (Counterpoint, 2015), 168.[iii] This is not to repudiate or downplay any of that work, which I still stand behind. See Joseph K. Gordon, Divine Scripture in Human Understanding: A Systematic Theology of the Christian Bible (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019) and also Joseph K. Gordon, ed., Critical Realism and the Christian Scriptures: Foundations and Readings (Marquette University Press, 2023).