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Last semester I spent two weeks in Zambia teaching a Doctor of Ministry course to students from eight different African countries. This was an important experience for me because it magnified many of the similar cross or intercultural exchanges that I have experienced in the classroom here in the US. Of concern to me was the notion of cultural competency in order to have a creative classroom experience that enhanced students’ learning. Cultural competency may be defined simply as “the ability to successfully teach students who come from cultures other than our own.” It has also been defined as “the ability of a person to effectively interact, work, and develop meaningful relationships with people of various cultural backgrounds.” The first definition is a bit too utilitarian for me. It is measured simply by teaching students, and students learn all kinds of things from us—including sometimes what they do not want to be like. The second is a better definition, since the focus is on the interaction between the teacher and students. I think it is important to study our students and learn as much as possible about them, in order to build rapport with them and creatively relate our course content to their lives and contexts. As I prepared for this experience in Zambia, there were many contextual aspects to consider. First, I was clearly an outsider. Even upon arrival at the international airport, individuals looked at me and could tell I was not only different, but also an outsider. Many of the students came from countries that suffered under the yoke of colonialism, and much of my training in the Academy has sensitized me to its effects and the necessary work of conscientization among the oppressed.  Secondly, I had to consider how distance would affect us. In African countries, students are generally used to getting to know the instructor and spending time with them. I had met the students virtually via online discussion boards, but their cultures require a person-to-person engagement. Several students had limited internet services and/or sporadic cellular services. Sometimes their cities experienced brownouts or blackouts that limited their online engagement and even their submission of assignments in a timely manner. Being present with the students made a difference and they made it known to me how much they appreciated me being there in person.  This type of situation can be frustrating. Conflict may arise unnecessarily. My ethnic background is that I am Latinx and specifically of Honduran heritage. I have also been immersed in North American education culture for most of my adult life. The Academy has its own culture and expectations. I constantly asked myself how I was to navigate these cultural differences and build bridges to students with completely different experiences and expectations in the classroom. The heart of the matter was that I first had to get over myself. I am Latinx, but even among my community I have always heard things like “hay que mejorar la raza” (“we must improve the race,” meaning we must act European and live among “whiter” races); or “trabajar como negro para vivir como blanco” (“working like a black person in order to live like a white person,” implying that white people always live better than black people). Work among people from different ethnic identities and cultures requires humility. We must have a posture of asking questions and learning from the other—not passing judgment. We must become students of our students. I went into the Academy to be ever inquisitive, to seek out new experiences, to have new ideas, and to somehow make this a better world. This meant that I also had to move beyond my own stereotypes of Africa. Colonizers referred to it as “the dark continent.” One of the first references I had to Africa was seeing hunger portrayed on television through human disasters in Ethiopia and Somalia. More recently, a president referred to countries outside the US as “s—hole countries.” Our mental sketches and mental images need deconstruction. But deconstruction is the easiest part of the process. Anyone can tear down, criticize, or point out flaws and errors. The hard part is to reconstruct a new just and fair structure or mental scheme once the previous ones have been torn down. As for creativity, on the first day of class I asked my students to create a list of positive African values and ideals that they strove to live for. Among the many things they shared were Ubuntu and music. Ubuntu is a South African term that means “I am because you are,” or “humanity towards others.” It is a philosophy adopted by many people of Africa that emphasizes relationships, listening, and being heard. Ubuntu gives them a sense of satisfaction or fulfillment in their relationships with others. Music stood out to me because music is everywhere in Africa. Through drums, in their ministries, and in their homes, my students in Zambia love music. I asked myself how I could use these values to create a classroom environment that would appeal to my students. Our classrooms in North America tend to be cold, dry, and stale. We tend to see education as disseminating the right information so the students can think the right way and act the right way in this world. It is a manner of doing education that prioritizes intellectual ability to the detriment of students from different cultures. The students in Zambia appeared to be pointing me in a direction through Ubuntu that was warm, relational, and alive. The concern was not only in receiving the right information or learning the right way of doing things, but in being in the world and being in right relationship with one another. Music accentuated the quality of pathos, in the sense of evoking emotions or affections that seemed to satisfy a desire to be in right relationship with one another. After finding out what the students valued, I decided to tweak my lesson plans and include activities that were more dialogical and that included music. In my following blogs, I will continue discussing specific ways in which Ubuntu and music helped establish a positive rapport with my students from African countries.

Like most of my colleagues, I’ve noticed a sharp drop in my first-year students’ writing and reading skills during the pandemic. And they are unfocused. Forget herding cats—trying to keep a classroom of first years on topic now feels more like herding bumble bees. More of them skip classes or disappear altogether. And of course, they struggle with depression and anxiety. Mental health, focus, and academic performance are interconnected, and the problems feed each other in messy and complicated ways. But I suspect that increased cognitive load plays a key role. The pandemic increased the cognitive load for all of us in three significant ways: It disrupted our routines, forcing us think carefully about tasks that we otherwise do on autopilot. Fear and uncertainty increased our anxiety, and anxiety makes it harder for us to process information effectively. It added a number of new tasks and distractions. Students are dealing with that and more: Their job is learning, and to help them do that, they have several professors. But since their professors also suffer from cognitive overload, students are getting more confusing directions, less clear feedback, and more last-minute changes than they normally would. Since students are academic novices, they are less capable of putting the intellectual skills they are learning on autopilot. They have to think about each step. And let’s not forget the cognitively, socially, and emotionally demanding task of starting college. It’s too much at once. As long as excessive cognitive load operates as a confounding variable, we won’t know what’s causing our students’ problems. We need to help students bring their cognitive load down, both because it causes suffering and because bringing it down will help us identify and address the other significant problems. So how do we do that? Not by dumbing things down. But we often unintentionally create unnecessary cognitive load for our students. They end up working on unimportant things. And so, here’s my big teaching question for this summer: What unimportant things am I making my students think about, and how does that distract them from working on what matters? To address this, I’ll focus on three different areas: Reduce anxiety and uncertainty about my course and about grading. First-year students spend way too much energy trying to guess what we want, and they often guess wrong. And that makes them spend way too much time and energy on unimportant things. I’m going to revise the rules for my classes over the summer, making them as transparent as I can. In the fall, I’m going to explain them more clearly and more frequently. I like my students to get a headache from all the deep thinking they do in my class, not from worrying about how to format their bibliography or about whether a bad paper grade will mean that they fail the class (it won’t). Use lots of routine and repetition to let my students put as many basic tasks on autopilot as possible. I’ve been resisting too much routine and repetition because it seems boring, both for me and for them. But I think it will go a long way towards reducing anxiety and cognitive load, so I’m going to use more of it this fall with my first years: I’ll consider making all reading assignments due on Tuesdays and all writing assignments due on Thursdays. I’ll use a single simple set of instructions for all papers and one for all informal writing. I’ll ask the same three questions about each reading: What is the author saying? What do you think about it? How does it connect to our other readings and discussions? I’ll start each class in the same way: How are you doing, really? Put away electronics (unless you have special permission), you need your book, notebook, and pencil, here’s the plan for today. I’ll end each class the same way: Please write down a takeaway and a question from today; here’s the assignment for next class, come talk if you have questions. Include fewer details. Eliminating course content is painful. We love our disciplines, and we want to include key distinctions and nuances, those beautiful and intricate details. So we keep packing things in. But as much as it pains me to admit this, my first years don’t need to learn the correct way of citing Plato and Aristotle (Stephanus and Bekker pages be damned). They don’t even need to know what a Stephanus page is. They need to understand basic MLA and they need to know why one cites sources. Eliminating details in our instructions is difficult because students mess up in so many ways. It’s tempting to include all the ones we’ve come across so far. But detailed instructions are counterproductive because our students simply cannot process ten unfamiliar and challenging things at once. I’ll include two or three crucial ones. A friend just introduced me to Picasso’s animal drawings. Each captures an animal with a few simple lines. There is no background, no detail, no color, but they are crystal clear and impossible to misunderstand. I want to teach like one of those drawings. [caption id="attachment_251280" align="aligncenter" width="554"] Animal Drawings by Picasso[/caption]   Further resources Jarrett, Christian. 2020. Cognitive Load Theory: Explaining our fight for focus. BBC. (I draw on his analysis above.) Brief overview of the differences between novices and experts here. Picasso animal drawings here. Two of my blogs: How to provide feedback on papers and how to use nudges.

Reading. Our family was a reading household. Newspapers, magazines, books – purchased and borrowed from many kinds of libraries – were sprinkled throughout our home. Each day three newspapers were delivered to our house: the Philadelphia Enquirer, the Bulletin, and the Daily News. On Tuesdays and Thursdays my dad purchased the Philadelphia Tribune from the corner store. On Sundays, my mother received the New York Times for the fashions and crossword puzzle. Also, our list of magazines subscriptions was plentiful. Each month the postman delivered: Psychology Today, Ebony, Jet, Better Homes & Gardens, Reader’s Digest, Life, National Geographic, Journal, Good Housekeeping, and Redbook. My brother and I shared (fought over) Highlights. We also regularly purchased comic books, coloring books, and puzzle books. When my parents purchased a set of the World Book Encyclopedia and proudly displayed them in the living room for guests to see, my brother and I were baffled by their excitement. We made use of those encyclopedias for many, many years. ~~~~~~~ We think of literature as being divorced from people, when in fact, people are intimately connected by reading. What we choose to read is often cherished. I didn’t realize it as a child, but now I know that connections between family members, friends, and colleagues are strengthened, deepened and improved by reading. We can, a little bit, glimpse an individual’s inner-self by understanding their reading choices. ~~~~~~~ The required reading in courses speaks about who the teacher is. ~~~~~~~ By the time I was age 10 or 11, the periodical I read most consistently and thoroughly was Psychology Today. Some of the content I understood. Most – I did not. I was aided by the well-placed photos, bold sub-titles, and the frequently included colorful charts and grafts. I read the magazine because my dad read it. My dad was a school psychologist. Every two weeks, he checked-out books from the library on child and adolescent psychology, pedagogy, epistemology and anthropology. At the library, I helped him in the card catalogue search using the Dewey Decimal system. Of course, when I tried to read his library books, I could not understand them – too dry and no pictures. But I quickly learned that I could read, at least a little bit, the Psychology Today magazine. I read what my father read to better understand his curiosities, interests and concerns. Reading what he read helped me glean his love for teaching and his commitment to children. ~~~~~~~ Reading illumines. For several years, I took Master of Divinity students with me to the professional guild meeting and conference of scholars of religion. Together, we attended the American Academy of Religion and the Society for the Study of Biblical Literature (AAR/SBL). The best part of attending the conference with my students was their joy in meeting the authors of the books we assigned in courses. When they met the authors, asked for their books to be signed, and took selfies (yes – it was that kind of moment!) – my hunch is that the students’ respect and perspective about the texts deepened. One such joyous moment was when a group of students gasped, then ran down the hotel corridor to meet Dr. James Cone. Dr. Cone, flattered, paused, took selfies and signed all their books. Many other scholars at the meeting received similar “star” treatment. We had fun. ~~~~~~~ What we read does not float in the ethers untethered from their authors and readers. ~~~~~~~ At the start of my courses, soon after rehearsing the syllabus, I would show pictures and or have my students view TedTalks and YouTube videos of the authors of the assigned texts. Throughout the course I invited the authors of the texts as guests – either live or on zoom. I wanted students to experience the authors’ voice, personality, and quirkiness. Inviting authors into the classroom brought an excitement and added dynamism to the conversation. It matters who wrote the book. Knowing the author’s social location, political bend, and intention assists the student in reading critically, emphatically, and with deeper meaning-making possibility. Hearing directly from the author about their scholarly lives and writing made learning more human. I wanted students, especially when the authors were BIPOC colleagues, to know that people who write books are as assorted as the books themselves. ~~~~~~~ Ask your students what kinds of texts they routinely like to read and why. Ask yourself what you like to read and why. ~~~~~~~ I have learned that an effective way to gather people, have good conversations, establish relationships, is to start a reading group.  Twice, just after moving to a new town where I knew hardly any one, I started a reading group. Both groups, in relative quick fashion, coalesced into a group who enjoyed one another’s company. In both cases, even though I no longer live in either place, I still maintain friendships with the people who were members of those groups. The intimacy of reading, discussing, sharing, sometimes arguing and fussing, together, is the stuff of friendship and collegiality. ~~~~~~~ Invite students to texts they would not find on their own. The magic of reading is that it can and does connect, expand and illumine all of us.

Yesterday I was doing my walk and I found this little newborn bird on a sidewalk. She was alive and gasping for food. Her eyes were still closed and there were only few very thin feathers on her back. I was so lost I didn’t know what to do. I looked around to see if there was a nest nearby, but there were no trees or signs of any other birds around. Flies were already buzzing around his tiny body, so I took my shirt off, wrapped it around him, and brought him home. On my walk back I started searching Google to know what to do. I couldn't find any rehabilitation place to take him. I learned that wet dog food and a boiled hard egg could serve as food. I placed her in a cardboard box, got a thick winter pair of socks, and covered her body to keep her warm. I finished preparing her food and when I got it to him, he was eager (opening her mouth widely) for food. I was so happy he was eating. From six p.m. to midnight I fed him every fifteen to twenty minutes. But just before going to bed she stopped eating. This morning she wasn’t moving much or gaping for food anymore. I sang to her, I whistled to her, I tried to move her so she knew food was there for her. But to no avail. I went to check on her again and she wasn’t breathing anymore. He died. As I did her funeral, I realized how my spirituality has changed. These recent connections with the living and the dead, the human and more than human, are throwing me into loops that have taken me into so much that is unknown and confusing. The amazing part is that the more confused I become by the presence of other beings, the more I unlearn and the more I open myself up to other forms of spirituality. The more I lose my forms of knowing, my bearings, the more strangely free I become. I start most of my classes by opening the windows and asking my students to listen to the birds. If we can’t listen to the birds, we simply can’t listen to what we often call “ourselves,” that is, a discrete form of an individual being. The need to listen to the birds is to listen to our own songs. For we are never autonomous individuals but inter-relational ones, living in what Thich Nhat Hanh calls interbeing. Listening to the birds is a form of spirituality that blurs what might be inside and the outside.  I am searching for spiritualities where all of my senses engage other forms of life, affected by ways of paying attention to other living beings around the landscape I am a part of. I am having more trouble with forms of spiritualities that are primarily ingrained in the mind without much attention to the body, or are even the mind with the body but removed from the surroundings and relations with broader ecosystems. I am having problems with spiritualities that are more attached to buildings and things than to the fullness of life outside and the vastness of the natural worlds with its patterns, relations, connections, and complexities. Spiritualities that are attentive to a set of beliefs and practices that are disconnected from the land are becoming more difficult for me. Spiritualities that are way too human, with a God who mainly relates to humans, that is also becoming difficult to relate. I am learning to deny these forms of spiritualities while also recognizing other forms of life of the Spirit through the patch of land where I live. In other words, a spirituality where the land orients the ways of believing and being. What one might call a more enchanted form of (local) living.  The spirituality I was taught never helped me to pay attention to my landscape, to other forms of life around me, to what was underneath my feet. That spirituality made me look to the sky to search for heaven but never paid attention to birds, to the top of trees, to clouds, to rain, to stars and planets. Moreover, the theology of my spirituality taught me about class struggle but had nothing to do with nonhuman forms of life or with other species. I know how to talk about agri-business and the power of capital. I know how to set up a critique of a higher colonial class destroying the worlds of poor people. But I never learned to talk about the ways in which the poison of agribusiness fills the soil, runs to the rivers, and spreads in the fields, killing communities of people but also communities of plants, vegetation, fish, bees, and so many other living species. I never realized that the monoculture proposed by the agribusiness is the same erasure of diversity within cities, that the destruction of biodiversity is the same program that operates in jail systems.  Bees, fish, soil, plants, and animals are deeply correlated with indigenous, black, brown, and poor people and women. They must all be part of my class struggle analysis. As I said, when I saw this newborn bird, I was lost. I grew up in São Paulo and learned to walk around beggars and animals. Stopping for a newborn bird was immensely surprising to me. In my lostness, my spirituality was challenged to relate more deeply with the breath of this little precious creature. To help this little bird is to help that living being to survive. But also, to help his bird is also to sustain the environment, the whole mutuality within the systems where s/he belonged. But most fundamental perhaps, it is to learn to see myself as part of this system, imbricated in this system, responsible for this system. I was wondering about the natural gaping movement of that little bird, her own ancestral knowing searching for food, and the forms and movements of knowing in our classrooms. How do we search for that which keeps us alive? What is it in us that is still related to the movements of the earth that orients our gaping, our longings, and processes of mutual formation? In classrooms, perhaps teachers gape for respect and positive responses, for a place where they are seen as the ones with power holding some sort of knowledge. Perhaps students also gape for respect and positive responses but know they are there to receive knowledge. A friend pictured the classroom as a nest. I was wondering about that too. How so? Who brings the food and who gapes? Is this a one-way movement from teacher to students? Aren’t we also gaping? We are all gaping for something. Our desires are shaped by the world we live in. Our education system is a Cartesian system becoming a neoliberal product where we are taught to gape for efficiency, for objectivity, for calculation of measures and results, for precise syllabi, for clear learning outcomes, for the ability to say that this class will fulfill items 2.1, 3.7, 4. 3, and 7.5 of the educational mission of the school and give the results (profit) promised. There is very little life in this nest. Or perhaps there is only gaping for a certain food, just like the bird needs a very specific food to survive.  I always return to Rubem Alves who said that teaching is the production of espantos: wonders and awe! I wonder about a pedagogy of affections, a pedagogy of the heart. This bird provoked a thousand espantos in me. And so much sadness. That connection affected me and changed me. Perhaps this is what I hope to do in the nests of my classrooms: find connections, be affected, and create affections; change my way, my heart, and perhaps even change the class assignments, readings, final work, and so on. I am slowly learning that classrooms are not this calculated event where students show their acquired knowledge to the teacher. It is more about the heart, and the knowledge they need to gain for themselves.  In this pedagogy of affections, I might need to continue to keep listening to the birds. Can we hear them? What are they saying, singing, uttering? So much I need to learn. But one thing I know: they are singing our songs, they are ourselves “out” there.

In my previous post (the second in a series of three) I reflected on deep learning as part of the formative educational process. I explored what it might look like to focus on students and the world they live in rather than on teaching our own particular (and often narrow) expertise. I suggested that part of the responsibility of forming students’ selves and lives involves commitment to our own personal and institutional growth. My institution (Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University) holds out a vision of a world transformed by God’s love, mercy, and justice and names as its mission to educate and inspire people to serve God’s diverse world as leaders in churches, the academy, and public life. We claim to value “Scholarship that engages churches, the academy, and public life; Justice that enhances diversity, flourishing and wholeness; and Practice that enlivens intellectual, spiritual, and professional growth.” I resonate deeply with these values. I came to Brite, in part, because of these values. I long for any conversation among my colleagues about how we accomplish these in the classroom and in the lives of our students (and in our own lives, for that matter). I want to hear more about how they model careful listening, how they dignify diversity as a desirable norm, ways in which they manage to draw underrepresented voices out, and how they model effective conflict management in classrooms and hallways. How do they they help students learn to identify the implications of what they learned for engaging the suffering world? What skills and tools, what ways of being do they try to model? How do they enact justice and engage their work toward wholeness in the classroom and beyond? How do they enliven personal, spiritual, and professional growth? How do they teach toward cultivating a more flourishing world? These questions would likely sound ridiculous to many of my colleagues. “It is my job to teach them a discipline,” they might rejoin, “not teach them who or how to be.” Fair enough, I suppose. This is, after all, how most of us were trained. We learned to read, to dissect an argument, to analyze, and maybe to construct. Many of us never had a course in pedagogy, studying neither its purpose(s) nor effective practices. Our doctoral programs had us focused on content rather than process. We have gotten comfortable there and have had to continue the habits we learned as graduate students to have any chance of succeeding in the academy. I get it. I have done it, too. But I want to suggest that what we imagine our role as theological educators to be exposes how we think of our students and our responsibilities to them. Do we see them as students needing to learn biblical exegesis or history or psychoanalytic theory? To what end do we teach these? Would it change how we teach if we understood that our students are the future, the potential embodiment of God’s work in the world, a potential source of resistance, hope, and healing? Surely even those of us who have not studied pedagogy have heard of explicit curricula (what we claim to be teaching, what we focus on) and implicit curricula (what we teach by being ourselves, by the choices we make in the classroom; what we include and do not include on a syllabus; how we engage students and the teaching and learning community, etc.). Perry Shaw asserts that students learn more through the ways schools function—and in the way they experience the classroom—than they do from any verbal or written content they receive. Shaw quotes pedagogical theorist Robert Ferris as saying, “the faculty are the curriculum” (Transforming Theological Education: A Practical Handbook for Integrative Learning [Langham, 2014] 10, emphasis added). If Ferris is correct, then many of us have some serious unlearning to do. Most of us are not training future academics; rather, we are teaching students who will soon be parish ministers and other religious leaders, leaders of not-for-profit organizations, community organizers, and activists. They are or may be parents, partners, neighbors, and leaders. And yet many of us (myself included) teach the way we were taught. We teach the way(s) we are familiar with. We teach as professional scholars. But our students need something different. They need something more. They deserve something more. So does the world we all share. If the faculty are the curriculum, then our students are watching. They are absorbing our ways, our values, and our commitments. They are being shaped by the outlines of our own lives. I won’t speak for you, but my life as an academic is often pretty narrow, focused, and insular. As noted above, it has had to be, in order to gain and keep any status in the academy that I have “earned.” I am comfortable in my habits, the rhythms of my days, and in my heady work. But if Ferris is correct, I should be alarmed by what I am modeling. The academy can be a competitive, self-absorbed, and zero-sum place. The coin of the realm is critique and challenge and jostling for distinction. Is this what we want our students to take from their time with us? If we played out Kant’s categorical imperative, what kind of world would we be helping to create? Such a question invites us teacher/scholars to ask ourselves why we do what we do and to what we want to contribute. It calls us further than that, though. It invites us to ask what kind of being human we are modeling for our students, what we want to be modeling, and what hard and intentional work it will take to close the gap. I am a trained psychotherapeutic clinician, so the idea of sitting with someone to explore the stuck places in myself, to engage my potential areas of growth and change, and to face the wounds I carry does not hold stigma for me. Others will find their own way, and I support that—as long as we can all arrive at the same place: understanding theological education as a formative endeavor, whether we are clear and intentional about the ways we are forming ourselves, our communities, and our students or not. Deep learning is usually referred to in positive ways, but I worry about the kinds of deep lessons our students are taking with them without our intention, our consent, or even without our awareness.

[caption id="attachment_251233" align="alignright" width="424"] A “glacial erratic” on Skidegate, Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, Canada (photo by author)[/caption] “Could God create a stone too heavy for God to lift?” This question may be familiar to those of us who teach about the traditional qualities of God in the philosophy of religion classroom. The so-called “paradox of the stone” is a pithy yet fascinating riddle that helps unpack the inconsistencies and logical incongruities at the heart of the notion of omnipotence as a divine attribute. And yet, over the years I have found that even with questions as crisp and deceptively simple as this one can be, students find it hard to relate to ideas like these as anything more than abstract intellectual exercises. If students don’t know or don’t care about the Christian God, or even much about Christianity, why would they care to explore the labyrinthine twists and turns this question implies? I have found that one of my key challenges as an instructor is to create fruitful connections and open easily traversed pathways that bridge gaps between what can seem like archaic or overly abstract ideas on the one hand and familiar, even urgent, issues from our contemporary cultural discourses on the other. These, it seems, may not only be the problems of a philosophy of religion class in 2022, but are reflective of the deeper challenges that the study of religion faces in the secular liberal arts context. I teach a second level introduction to Western religious thought to undergraduates, most of whom have little if any substantive knowledge of Christianity—let alone the questions posed by religious studies. In this class, I engage with issues of faith and skepticism and the complex relationship between the two with undergraduate students from across the university. It is common to have, say, biology majors alongside fine arts students interacting with English majors who are in turn working on minors in international relations. The context is interdisciplinary and diverse. Few of these students are familiar with the broad intellectual and spiritual traditions of Christianity and yet all come to this class with their own set of questions. My role, in a class that can tend towards the abstract, is to provide points of connection where the tradition meets their contemporary experience and to guide a conversation where this encounter can be unpacked and more clearly understood—even if rarely resolved. For example, arguments for the existence of God are a staple part of any introduction to philosophy of religion. Not surprisingly, I cover the basics with Anselm and Aquinas, but I also bring in an ancient Sumerian beer recipe, a science fiction short story by Arthur C. Clarke about the nine billion names of God, and a poem by Emily Dickinson comparing train tickets to knowledge of heaven. Later in the course, we deal with another topic involving the significant challenges of the classic Problem of Evil. In addition to the traditional formulations, and various logical and evidential approaches, we look at William Nicholson’s play, Shadowlands, exploring the experience of writer C. S. Lewis and the untimely death of his wife Joy Gresham—rendered so poignantly in Richard Attenborough’s 1993 film of the same name. Interestingly, the challenge here is not necessarily to defend the existence of God in the face of clear evidence of evil. It can sometimes seem more of a challenge to convince students that it is worth arguing the case in the first place. By the time we get to this topic, it is important to have a sense of value for what religion can be and do, culturally and practically speaking, before wrestling with the tricky paradoxical puzzles that the problem of evil brings into stark relief. By the end of the course, as one topic builds on another, my hope is that students will appreciate such things as the difference between probability and possibility and the relationship between the sacred and the secular. I want them to understand that religious thought exists entwined and enmeshed in our cultural experience in ways that thwart our neat secular/sacred division. But most of all, I want them to appreciate, with as much vividness as I can manage, how religion continues to “speak” to the perennial challenges of human experience and interaction. In the most recent iteration of this course, as we approached the final weeks of semester, my students requested a topic of their own. As we passed the second-year milestone of the pandemic, they wanted to discuss the pervasiveness and power of conspiracy theories that seemed to have proliferated in the face of the ongoing global disruption that had so impacted their lives. For the students, the character of conspiracy theories appeared to parallel some of the major issues we had been developing through the course. I was certainly open to the suggestion. Typically, I would end the course with something topical, a current issue that served to draw together the various strands we had explored though the semester in practical and easily identifiable ways. But this time, I was fascinated to consider this alternative: a contemporary riddle that seemed for them so urgent and at the same time so challenging to account for. In our final discussions, I asked students to describe what was happening in those of-the-moment conspiratorial conversations. I asked them to consider scholarship on “conspirituality” and associated key examples that traced their way back to elements evocative of the New Age movement and the tragedy of 9/11. There they discovered issues of community and identity, of disenchantment and re-enchantment, and of faith and apocalyptic hope. Regardless of our conclusions in these final classes, it was apparent to me that they had located their own “paradox of the stone.” In these culminating conversations I found myself amongst the most engaged cohort of students I had ever encountered, dealing with the issues from the course in complex and applied ways in collaborative, lively discussions that really mattered to them. Indeed, inspired by my students, I went on to teach a full course on the topic of “conspirituality.” In some ways, this culminating moment around the phenomenon of “conspirituality” exemplified the challenge of teaching in the secular liberal arts context, the increasing difficulty of “translating” religious tradition for a contemporary learner, and it also offered a moment to celebrate. For me it was solid affirmation of my pedagogical efforts to bring the traditional and the contemporary together as a way of creating a flashpoint of engagement. But it was also a reminder that the classroom is a community of learners of which I am a part. Little did I anticipate that it would be the students, the focus of my teaching strategies, who would be the bridge builders, providing me with this most effective and evocative example.

Staying at Trippet Hall on the Wabash College campus always feels like a treat. It was my privilege to go back and stay there for a week earlier this summer as a participant of the early career workshop for theological school faculty. We were the first group that Trippet hosted in three years, yet every corner of the building looked ready to welcome guests again. Amenities in guest suites, white table linens in the dining hall, and snacks and beverages in Clifford Lounge. Everything was in place. It was Thursday morning. At the very moment when I had just started shampooing my hair, a fire alarm went off. I hoped it would stop after a few beeps, but no, it kept going. “Oh dear, I can’t go out like this,” I thought. I decided to finish the shower as quickly as possible. With the shower faucet turned off, it became clear that all the fire alarms on the entire third floor of Trippet Hall, including my room, were going. My heart was beating fast. I hastily reached my hand to the towel hanging on the bathroom door, thinking, “Is this from the kitchen? What if this is something serious?” Right then, someone banged on my door, “Fire department! Open the door!” My heart was now pounding. “Give me a second!” I shouted. No time to take real, presentable clothes out of the closet. I picked up my pajamas lying on the bed, barely put them on, and snatched my phone and wallet. Ready to evacuate, I finally opened the door, and there was a burly firefighter standing in front of my room. “Just wanted to make sure nothing’s on fire in your room,” he said, with a big smile on his face, even. It was simply an alarm malfunction. The following day at around the same time, I was shampooing my hair again, and all the fire alarms on my floor went off, again. As soon as I got out of the shower, I rushed myself, recalling what had happened yesterday. Putting on clothes, I thought, “A firefighter will be here soon. I’ll be so ready this time. Lesson learned!” I even felt a bit proud of myself. Ten minutes passed; nobody came. It turned out that they were testing the alarms to fix them. What does it mean to be “ready” in theological education? Our disciplines have trained us to understand readiness as being about control. To be ready to teach is to be in control—of the material, of the classroom dynamics, of what’s going on in our field. Our readiness in the academy is enfleshed in the authority we build and exhibit through degrees, publications, rank, and service. It is often assessed by the number of checkboxes we check: How many degree programs are you able to teach? How many languages or subjects? How many committees are you willing to join or lead? How many students will you advise? Often, we let this “control” mode dictate our pedagogy as well. One certain page number on my lecture notes, although I know I will never get to that page in class, seems to prove that I have prepared enough. More details in my syllabus and rubrics, although I know they cannot wholly assess students’ learning and engagement, seem to ensure my grading is fair and informed. We often come to teaching with the assumption that more control means more expertise. In Trippet 301, I had to pivot to a different kind of readiness to open the room door and let the firefighter know at the right time, there’s no burning object in my room and everything is fine. What does it mean to be “ready”? At one time, I thought having my framed PhD diploma on the wall would indicate I was ready to teach. Though it conveys that we have completed onerous work, that does not equate readiness. Over time, I have learned that we become more ready as we open ourselves to unlearning what we know and how we were trained. We become more ready as we open ourselves to surprises and challenges and let them form us. We become more ready as we center students’ processes and learning, rather than necessarily their outcomes and proficiency. In the end, our readiness is built upon our intentional and habituated openness. Because the line between teaching and learning is always porous.

My family spent a lot of time this summer traveling in our car. As we drove up and down several eastern and southern states, with stops in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, the thing we dreaded most was traffic. We groaned and sighed when coming to a sudden stop as the smartphone displayed a bright red line along our route. Even when Siri tried to comfort us, indicating that we were still on the fastest route, we exchanged looks of disgust and exasperation with one another. But traffic did not deter us from travel, and we were always relieved when we made it to the next destination in our journey. Ultimately, we accepted that the traffic we encountered was inevitable and paled in comparison to the joyous experiences we shared together. Reflecting on traffic evokes the faculty meeting at my seminary and probably other seminaries as well. Here is an obvious and perhaps irrefutable thesis statement: Theological educators do not like faculty meetings. In fact, many of us despise them. We think faculty meetings are ineffective misuses of time (cue the “This could have been an email” meme) and sometimes dangerous spaces abounding in microaggressions that stem from intercultural missteps and interpersonal conflicts. But we accept that the faculty meeting is part of the job. When I talk with colleagues from other institutions, we commiserate about the faculty meetings at our respective seminaries and observe how they lack the collaborative spirit and invigorating dialogue we have experienced during the Wabash Center’s workshops and gatherings. At my seminary, I have offered an expression that is part smile, part frown, and all dread with colleagues when bumping into them on the way to a faculty meeting. The expression is hard to describe in words, but I will venture to suggest that many theological educators can empathetically visualize my look with ease. Over the past two academic years, I have taught an interdisciplinary course with one of my colleagues that serves as a concluding capstone for Master of Divinity students in their final semester of study with us. Because the learning aims include synthesizing lessons from other courses and preparing students for vocations in pastoral leadership after they graduate, my co-instructor and I ask the class at the onset what topics they would like to engage together and what kinds of guest lecturers they would like to hear from in the final weeks of the course. One of the topics that arose was church administration, with a question about how to facilitate meetings with laypersons, such as deacons and elders. In the denomination to which my seminary belongs, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), one of the responsibilities of a pastor is to be the moderator of the session. The denomination’s Book of Order explains that the session is “composed of those persons elected by the congregation to active service as ruling elders, together with all installed pastors and associate pastors.” It is therefore not surprising that some of our graduating students have session meetings in mind and desire to learn more about exercising leadership in meetings. What is surprising to some of my students is the reality that our seminary does not provide an exemplary model for meetings. One student divulged how it confounded them that the faculty at our seminary, with many professors they admired so deeply, struggled to conduct creative and productive meetings that were different from the corporate world and other secular professional contexts. It seemed to them that their professors were not practicing what they were teaching. Another alumnus, a few years after graduation, told me that they had outgrown some of their naivety about the seminary as an idealized church-related institution. When this alumnus was a student, they would have given anything to be a “fly on the wall” at a faculty meeting. Now they would never want to attend one because they believed that there was no joy in witnessing their former professors at our collective worst. Can the seminary faculty meeting be saved? I do not know (probably). But here are two recommendations that I have learned from my experiences with the Wabash Center. The first is the importance of clear objectives. Because the Wabash Center convenes faculty and administrators from a wide array of colleges, universities, divinity schools, and seminaries, the leaders at every workshop I have participated in have communicated their goals, hopes, and expectations with precision, care, and consistency. If one goal of a seminary faculty meeting is to ensure that all voices are heard and included, then two expectations are that the participants receive the preparatory materials with sufficient lead time and the meeting itself is moderated in ways that foster mutuality, equity, and reciprocity. Seminaries also need to be honest about their adoption of hierarchical systems from the academy. If the culture of a seminary is such that untenured faculty members listen and do not speak, then it is unreasonable to hope that faculty meetings embody the principles of inclusion and cooperation. If the purpose of a meeting is to simply vote on quotidian matters that require faculty approval, then the expectation ought to be modest and sights should be set on no more than a perfunctory meeting that moves forward the ordinary business of the seminary. The second lesson I gleaned from my experiences with the Wabash Center is the generative energy that results from collaborative leadership practices. I observed a leadership team with several persons sharing authority with one another and inviting every participant to enact their distinctive gifts. Each of us were given opportunities, with ample advance notice, to provide leadership that displayed our experiential insight, intercultural intelligence, and distinguishing pedagogy. The spotlight was rarely on one leader for a prolonged amount of time and the leaders wore their authority lightly. When a participant talked too much, or was the first to speak on several occasions, they were encouraged to take a step back and make room for others who may not process as quickly and needed a few moments of silence before fully engaging the discussion at hand. We met in various spaces and with diverse formats that fit the stated objectives of the sessions and cultivated a spirit of imagining and envisioning together. Of course, our seminaries are not the same as the Wabash Center. The context of a seminary faculty meeting differs from a Wabash Center workshop, but perhaps there are principles from the latter that we can apply to the former. However, I am unsure whether seminaries like mine want to change. At some of our theological institutions, the faculty meeting is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Education prepares learners for a world that educators cannot possibly anticipate. This has been true for longer than most educators would like to admit but it is even more the case today. Learners are viscerally aware that they inhabit a rapidly shifting landscape that calls the relevance of our courses and institutions into question. These shifts have become all the more dramatic and unpredictable in the last few years since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.  The relevance of education in theology and religion is made even more precarious when we present ourselves as a—or even “the”—source of information. To be a source of information is superfluous in the digital information age. Content is googleable. Students have a boundless source of information at their fingertips should they seek it. They are in urgent need of something more important and less accessible: the skill set to critically assess and creatively apply that information while remaining curious for more.  When my children first started school, this was the kind of education I wanted for them: a student-driven, experiential education in 21st Century Skills that would take their voice and agency seriously. I found it in classrooms practicing Problem and Project Based Learning (PBL), an approach to teaching and learning that has long been used in medical and engineering schools and that is increasingly present in elementary and secondary contexts. PBL confronts learners with real life complex problems, asking them to seek out and apply the necessary skills and information to address them. In that way, the course content becomes the means rather than the goal, resulting in increased relevance and retention. The learner is implicitly formed, not by receiving the content but by creatively applying it towards a concrete result. This formation takes the learner’s knowledge and experience seriously and encourages them to utilize it so that they can do the same in whatever landscape they inhabit or enter. What better approach, I thought, for teaching and learning in theological education and religious studies.  I began experimenting with what a PBL classroom would look like in an introductory religious education course in the spring semester of 2020. With trepidation, I began with a sparsely populated syllabus that provided structure and a set of broadly applicable readings, but left time for students to collaborate in small groups around the problems that were most important to them as I circulated, supporting them in seeking out the necessary content to address the problems about which they were most passionate. One group focused on creating Brave Spaces while others wanted to consider how to nurture spirituality in the classroom or apply what they had read about multiple intelligences. Our end goal was not a group presentation of research on the topic; they were to teach the class by doing, not talking about, what they had been working on collaboratively. In the final classes before spring break, they took leadership of the classroom to work toward Brave Space, nurturing spirituality, and engaging multiple intelligences. We planned to return in two weeks to begin a second set of projects focused on formation through experiences outside of classrooms. It was fortunate that we had completed those first projects when we did. When we returned to class, we did so on Zoom. After a lengthy check-in it was apparent that every learner in the virtual space had an urgent real-life complex problem to address in religious education and it was the same problem I had: how could we teach if we couldn’t meet in person? We chucked the entire second half of the syllabus. We spent the next several weeks being and finding resources for one another. Each learner’s problem became not just real-life and complex but took on the specificity of their context so that their ways of addressing them were as varied as the communities they served. They took seriously that they were the content experts in their own contexts. I rewrote the rubric for the final project. At the end of the semester each individual instead of each group took on leadership of our virtual classroom so that we could share in a peer-led online learning activity. My goal had been for them to learn about teaching by doing it; in the process we became a community of learners. In the two years since that first semester when PBL went from theoretical to urgent I have continued to adjust my approach so that I gradually hand over the leadership of the (now multiplatform) classroom. The pernicious prevalence of the PowerPoint presentation motivated me to model experiential teaching and learning in a variety of forms at the beginning of the semester before asking everyone else to do the same. When asked to teach asynchronously, it became clear that I would also need to model experiential asynchronous teaching so that I could ask learners to teach one another asynchronously. Instead of weekly interactive class meetings, I listed a different interactive asynchronous learning activity engaging each unit’s content at the outset then asked all enrolled to do the same for their own passion projects and assess one another’s learning activities in conversation on the discussion board.  It takes courage and humility to move from a content-centered course to a PBL classroom. I love my content. Every reading I am accustomed to assigning feels urgent, as if I cannot send learners out into the world unless they are equipped with it. But the real-world complex problem I am living with is that I am not sending them out at all; they are already living into a world that is shifting under their feet and the ability to creatively shift with it is far more urgent than anything I could ever assign. Interestingly enough, they end up discovering that they need the content along the way and cherish it all the more for having made that discovery themselves. 

“When we heal the earth, we heal ourselves.” This quote from environmentalist David Orr expresses the importance of our interconnection with our earth. For my undergraduate students, especially in the midst of the COVID pandemic, an immersion into nature contributes to both physical and mental wellness. The idea of inclusive care—for self, for others, and for the environment—extends human rights and highlights the political and spiritual dimensions of ecojustice. In my teaching experience, these connections are best made with community partners. Students in my Religion and Ecology class work in practicum teams as a key component of the theory and praxis focus of the course. One partnership is with the Agnes Scott Center of Sustainability. Student teams work with the staff on a practicum project in several areas: horticulture (organic garden), seed library (with the college library), trees, Audubon sanctuary area, green buildings, alternative energy, waste diversion, and sustainability education in dorms. Some of the projects are research and development for the future, such as for the renovation of the college greenhouse. Depending on the semester and the needs of the Center, students have done invasive species removal, built birdhouses, created a campus bird guide, designed an organic landscape for a grassy area over a large geothermal unit, written a proposal for natural landscaping (a “green” campus lawn), built fairy houses, designed an aromatherapy garden, written a proposal for connections of the dining hall with local organic gardens, among other things. Connecting the course material with a hands-on project is a way for students to explore concrete ways of being part of sustainability work on our campus. Trellis Horticultural Therapy Alliance, a local Atlanta nonprofit organization, also provides practicum opportunities for community partnership. Trellis’s mission is “using the power of gardening and nature to improve the lives of people living with disabilities and chronic illness by providing purpose, fostering independence, and creating community.” The partnership began with an invitation to the organization’s founder, environmental scientist Rachel Cochran, to be a guest speaker in class. The purpose was to raise awareness on the practice of therapeutic horticulture and the benefits of gardening and immersion in nature. Trellis (Trellis Horticultural Therapy – Planting Seeds of Possibility) is a member of the American Horticultural Therapy Association (American Horticultural Therapy Association). This partnership provides students with opportunities to engage a variety of wellness and social justice issues, including: food insecurity, nonprofit organizing, climate change, sustainable living, resilience and mental health, as well as experience working in non-profit organizations (including grant writing, leadership, and career exploration). Students work in various locations: the Ability Garden at a local arts center that services seniors, veterans, disabled adults, and children with autism; a local community garden plot with men in a drug and alcohol recovery program, and the Dignity Garden behind a day center for seniors with dementia at a strip mall (and a student project of a fundraising video for Georgia Gives Day that raised $9000 for the organization). Several students continue to volunteer with Trellis or do internships after the semester ends, including one summer internship with their program at an organic farm at a transitional correctional institution for women felons. A basic pedagogical concept is that students become agents of knowledge about the local issues around ecojustice and climate change. They also become visionaries of the possibilities for change. Students often encounter institutional blocks: around certain traditional aesthetics of campus lawns, around the demands of the local movie industry that frequently uses our campus for filming, around issues of funding (a renovated greenhouse would also require rejuvenating the faculty position in Botany), around issues of acceptable community partnerships, and around the general limits of how far an institution will invest in environmental justice. Amidst the general apocalyptic mood of global warming and dangerous (albeit EPA approved) pesticides in our campus grass, sprayed by poverty-wage outsourced staff, the course framework of environmental racism in the US South and the moral failure of a capitalist system, there is also the wake-up call and solutions of Project Drawdown, and course readings from Braiding Sweetgrass to Georgia Interfaith Power and Light to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. The issues around ecological justice can be overwhelming. Clearing paths for wheelchair accessibility in a garden, planting and harvesting kale, preparing an organic dinner with men in a recovery program, or crafting with middle schoolers and seniors can provide new vision and energy, and shared community and wellness.