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In the last several years, I have been pondering the purpose of our work as theological educators. This seems especially pertinent because many mainline churches which both send and receive our students are dying, theological education institutions have found it difficult to attract new students, most of these institutions are in budgetary crisis, and more schools are closing every year. I have wondered what is important about theological education, what value it adds, and what about it lasts. In the process, I have considered my own experience in seminary and graduate school. It has been 29 and 26 years, respectively, since I entered those programs and I have been reflecting on what has stuck, and what made the time, money, and effort worth it. I admit that I don’t remember many specifics unless I scan my shelves for the books that I read in those programs; they are old friends and evoke a difficult season when I was undergoing a major gestalt shift—a time when old paradigms were losing their power for me. These books remind me of a time when I began to understand more deeply something I had been struggling to clarify. They are old friends who introduced me to new horizons and opened new possibilities in my thinking and doing and being. I have kept these books not because I ever imagine using them in a classroom myself or because I need them for a writing project (they are too outdated for either of those): I keep them because they represent significant—even lifechanging—moments of my life. I remember my professors, my classmates, our discussions, the papers I wrote, the meetings in faculty offices where I engaged the ideas in these books. I think about the arguments I wrestled with, developed, let go of. I remember wrestling with my own understandings, and with teachers and peers, as I felt myself changing, growing, emerging. I don’t value these books and the memories of my time in seminary and a doctoral program so much because of the career they have afforded me; I value them for who they helped me become. I have been playing with the idea that perhaps the benefit of theological education is less in the information we educators impart or the professional training we provide, and more about the kind of learning and experiential communities we build together. Perhaps our value in the world as theological educators is less about the preparation for a particular ministry, the ordination process, or further schooling, and more about the kinds of opportunities we afford students to be formed, to be changed, to grow as people, no matter where they end up or what they do in their professional lives. Students will be formed by all the new information they are exposed to, of course, but also—and maybe more importantly—students are formed by the relationships with people and ideas they develop while in our programs, by the ethos of curiosity and the room to ask gnarly existential questions, by the freedom to interrogate life and the world and themselves and God. The goal of formation emphasizes who people are becoming: how they think, how they behave, how they treat others, what they value, their level of emotional intelligence, the ways they respond to God in and for the world. What if theological education institutions had as their mission to be sites of exploration toward the formation of people so that they—and those they engage—can flourish? Willie Jennings’ book After Whiteness (Eerdmans, 2020) is one of the most important books on teaching, learning, and organizational leadership I have read in recent years, and I want to be a part of what he is imagining. I want to see what could happen if theological education institutions come to be seen as places to belong, to grow, to change, to be creative, to think hard, to come alive in one’s own faith, hope, and love. What would it take for them to become places that explore formation as good people rather than primarily to impart knowledge or deconstruct embedded theologies? Jennings assumes—and I agree—that all human beings yearn for a place to belong and a place to learn how to flourish, and to have that modeled for them. What if theological education institutions became those places? What if they were places people came to first to explore rather than pursue? In the process of this work, of course, we must name what is going on in the world, what is wrong, what impedes flourishing. As Jennings notes, this requires the difficult and painful work of understanding our current condition(s), exposing and decentering and deconstructing the dominant (white, often male) view. This is something divinity schools like mine excel in. But people yearning for flourishing need to understand something else, too. We need to lean into hope, love, faith, grace; to understand all people as beloved, as having the imprimatur of God, as having voices that need to be heard, that deserve to be heard; to have the tools to enact justice. Theological educators in this model would need to have an explicit vision of flourishing, a sense of what could be, of what surely the Divine Urging is calling all of us toward. Those of us teaching theology and religion have an opportunity and, I think, an invitation to hold out such a vision, a creative imagining of who and what God is, and for what that God longs, for her creation. So many of our students live fragmented, trauma-filled lives. They come to our programs from homes, schools, communities, and jobs that are toxic, stressed, and struggling and, often, oppressive. What if we invited them to join us in seeking something more grounded, more life-giving, more whole, and helped them, for example, resist the neoliberal impulse for mastery, control, organization, ownership, separation, and possession (even of ideas)? What if we not only taught such a way but modeled it ourselves as well? Would that change our focus and our practices in the classroom? Would that shift our criteria of “success”? In this playful imaginary, theological educators and the administrators of our institutions would be normative, prescriptive, and committed to their own formation and growth as well as that of students, and of the communities of which we are a part. We could do this while also being critically analytical of the ideas we promote. We might ask explicitly, for example, what the sacred texts tell us about flourishing. We might examine what various religious/faith/philosophical traditions have to say about the good life. We might wonder aloud what is the story of the Good as witnessed in the sacred texts. We might inquire how to sift through all the broken humanness in the sacred texts to get to a message of hope, love, grace, redemption, care. If a deep understanding of flourishing and formation toward such a life and world became the goal, I wonder how that would change how we teach our students to read sacred texts, and whether it would influence how we teach the histories of Christianity. Would such a goal change how we teach pastoral care in our complex world? Would the flourishing of ourselves and our students as the goal influence how we teach ritual and religious practice? Would it change how we teach theology? Would it change how presidents and deans lead the institutions of which we are a part? Would it change whether and how we create community together? I am not suggesting we become proselytizers: I want to retain and exercise my critical thinking, even in relation to the commitments I hold dear, but I sense that a shift in our mission and focus might change some of the ways we do things, moving the emphasis from production to exploration. I yearn for more conversations among ourselves as theological educators and with our students about what we might do differently that might help heal ourselves, each other, our institutions, and maybe even our particular corners of the world. These kinds of conversations take work and intentionality, to be sure, and it would take effort to alter our emphasis from education as information to education as formation toward flourishing. For starters, we would want to develop some shared understandings of what flourishing looks like, what it requires, and how theological education could contribute to it. And, of course, formation and information are not so distinct; it is more a matter of alterations to emphases and processes and outcomes I am pondering. How/would an emphasis on formation to enable flourishing reconfigure our curricula, our faculty, our teaching practices, and the students who might be interested in joining us in that exploration? We might continue to attract fewer and fewer students seeking ordination credentials, it is true, but it is also true that we may spark the desire to join us in people who don’t know exactly what they will do with their time with us, people with tangled existential questions who are looking for a place to belong and explore and grow. And if they joined us in these efforts, who knows what old friends they might take with them?

I have always thought that a course on spirituality should take place in a supportive environment, and it is best done in person. But something happened that changed my mind. Last fall, I attended a webinar organized by Kosen Gregory Snyder at Union Theological Seminary. The webinar invited a Native American, a Buddhist, and a Christian leader to discuss the ways that religious and spiritual traditions can address our ecological crisis. This webinar was just what I needed, as I was over-stretched by work and speaking engagements. I was exhausted and depleted. I felt a sense of accompaniment as each speaker shared their spiritual wisdom and paths. So when I was asked to offer my spring online course “Spirituality for the Contemporary World” to the community, I accepted the invitation with enthusiasm. For over two decades, I have taught courses on various aspects of spirituality in Boston and Atlanta and have accompanied hundreds of students on their spiritual journeys. I saw offering this course to those who may need it during the prolonged pandemic as a vocation and a challenge. I had not taught a course on spirituality online, let alone taught it for both students at my school and members of the community. The first challenge was how to translate the practice-oriented pedagogy to an online format. I include meditation, breathing exercises, Tai Chi movements, singing, arts, and rituals in my spirituality courses. I emphasize learning by doing and not just listening! How could we do these things in a Zoom setting? As we know by now, even the simple thing of group singing is a challenge on Zoom. To learn how I might do some of these in my class, I consulted my colleagues at school who have expertise in digital learning. They have given me a lot of encouragement and sound advice and the school will provide production help and equipment if needed. I welcome the challenges of teaching this class as a growing edge of my teaching. I have taught this course in person numerous times, and I am eager to find out what I can learn by teaching it online. The pandemic has disrupted higher education and its impact will last for years to come. According to a study by Instructure, the company that created the online platform Canvas, the demand for online and hybrid courses skyrocketed, even as in-person learning resumes. Thus, scholars in religion and theological educators need to be better prepared so they can teach these courses well. I know that many seminaries and divinity schools have already used online and hybrid learning for some time and the learning curve may not be so steep. When the pandemic closed my school and forced our classes to go online, the school has provided training and support for the faculty. One of the challenges was learning how to use the Zoom platform, which was originally designed for business, to create an interactive and participatory learning environment. I learned from my colleague Sarah Bogue, who offered useful tips and exercises for building community through online learning. I intend to use some of her suggestions in my spirituality class. Since the community participants in my class do not have access to the school’s academic teaching technology, I decided to create a website for the course. At the beginning of the pandemic, when everything shifted online, I helped the network Pacific, Asian, and North American Asian Women in Theology and Ministry update our website, open Twitter and Instagram accounts, and create a YouTube channel. I feel good that I can transfer what I have learned in my community work to my online teaching. The course website has a blog. I posted the first blog, explaining why I am teaching this course at this time. Many Facebook friends posted prayers and thoughts about the new year in the first week of January and I asked for permission to share a New Year prayer and photos taken to show nature’s beauty on the blog. Participants in the class will be invited to contribute blog posts to share with the class. The course will have its own Facebook page. I will post the questions to be discussed each week. I plan to use this space for participants to share their practices, such as photos of home altars, places for meditation, and nature walks, as well as spiritual poetry and writing. While my students have their assignments, the posts on Facebook will allow me to gauge community participants’ interest and engagement in the course. An altar I created To avoid Zoom fatigue, I will not give long presentations and will minimize the almost routine use of PowerPoint in Zoom teaching. We must justify why we need to have synchronous meetings at all if the meetings are not interactive. Instead, I have invited guest speakers and artists to lead a range of activities, including Notes of Rest, artwork, and learning to write poetry. Some of them have taken my spirituality courses and they are delighted to help as I offer this course to the community. As a seasoned teacher, trying something new in teaching stretches my pedagogical imagination. We have been in the digital age for decades, and teaching can’t remain the same if we are to catch up with the digital natives, who are well versed in digital technology. Two weeks before the course, I began setting myself in the spirit of teaching this course. I paid attention to my daily rituals (the design of daily life) and practiced Pilates for seniors. I always enjoy teaching spirituality courses because I need them as much as my students do!

Those of you with kids, or those of you who have simply been spending way too much time on your Netflix account since the pandemic began (no judgement!), may have heard of the movie called Yes Day, released in 2021 and starring Jennifer Garner. The premise of this film, based upon a book of the same name, is simple: “A sunny family of five agrees to a day where a mother and father must consent to whatever the kids want in this broad Netflix comedy” (NY Times review). The parents will say “yes” to their kids’ wildest requests (after a few ground rules have been established) for a whole day—a welcome reprieve to a life normally filled with “no.” As a parent myself, I find it an interesting, if not somewhat terrifying, idea. As an educator, I am reminded of a more serious possibility, one that Margaret Price, who is an OSU English professor, disability studies scholar, and author of the book Mad at School, raised in a recent talk. In “Everyday Survival and Collective Accountability,” Price shares the experience (recounted to her in a research interview) of an instructor with a disability who needs the temperature of her classroom to be less than 80 degrees or she experiences numbness, dizziness, nausea, and eventually, fainting and seizures. One day, this instructor arrived to find her classroom “stiflingly hot.” Fortunately, she was able to find the building manager and asked him to turn the temperature down. And “the building manager just did it,” which surprised Price. She goes on: The thing that really struck me about this story is how simple the actions required were, and how incredible, how incredibly rare it is to have someone simply believe you when you say “Hey, I need something.” This is an interesting thought experiment to practice if you want to kind of try out one of these over the next few days. Stay alert for expressions of need that might be shared with you and imagine what would happen if you simply said “Okay,” instead of saying, “Well, why do you need to miss class?” or “Why is that the particular software that you need,” or “Say more about why this would be the optimal decision.” And, again, I’m not saying we all should, like, this is not a radical “yes to everything” improv kind of proposition. I’m much too uptight for that. It’s more of just a thought experiment. What would happen if someone told you they needed something, and you just said, “I believe you”? Many of us academics are trained in a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” We are known for our sharp critical thinking skills. We are taught to interrogate, to question, to analyze, to require evidence. Being humble is hard for us. Jumping quickly to critique is much more comfortable. But do these dispositions, these impulses, these habits, interfere with our ability to believe, to empathize, to care—to recognize the real, complex, imperfect human beings in front of us? Who is harmed when we are skeptical or distrustful? Who do we alienate or exclude? Who refrains from coming to us, from sharing their stories with us, from asking us for our help? While Price was focusing on faculty with disabilities in her talk because this is the population she studies (and identifies with), the same point could be made about colleagues of ours with other identity markers, and also about the students in our—virtual or in-person—religion courses. Higher education creates barriers and inhospitable conditions for many students—a veritable landscape of “nope” for far too many. The disclosure process for students with disabilities, for example, can be expensive, cumbersome, intimidating, embarrassing, and, sometimes, just not worth it. First-generation students have a heck of a time figuring out the “hidden curriculum.” Students of color face “stereotype threat” and have to worry about a “sense of belonging,” not to mention more serious issues. Despite advances from movements like #metoo, women still don’t come forward to report experiences of sexual harassment and assault because of a fear of not being believed, a fear of having to “prove” the trauma and relive it all over again, a fear of backlash and negative consequences. And, of course, identities intersect and experiences of marginalization, discrimination, microaggression, and oppression compound. I have heard these stories, and more, from undergraduates in my own religion courses, even at a university that ostensibly cares about “diversity.” In many ways, our educational institutions are like life as usual for the family in Yes Day. Yet I imagine a different way—a more open and charitable and flexible orientation—would be especially beneficial for these students, while, of course, benefiting everyone. A few weeks ago, I checked in with my students in my upper-level race and religion seminar—something I like to do every so often, in class or online, to express care. I asked, simply, “How are you doing?” The biggest (i.e., most common) responses in the word cloud were “tired” and “stressed.” Students are exhausted, overwhelmed, and anxious (like a lot of faculty I know!). Even worse, though, was that they told me I am the only one of their professors asking how they are doing, asking what I can do to help them. All semester long, students have contacted me about missing class because they’re sick or attending funerals, asking if they can leave early for doctors’ appointments or job interviews, turning in the wrong kind of assignment because they misunderstood the instructions, and more. The Emily of two years ago would have found these requests exasperating, eyeroll-inducing. Excuses! Mediocrity! Laziness! Entitlement! The pandemic has radically shifted my thinking about these moments. I hope this lesson remains with me. What if we simply believed our students (not to mention our colleagues)? What if we simply cared about them, first and foremost, as human beings? What if we didn’t require doctor’s notes or other forms of evidence to make them have to work to prove they’re having a hard time, on top of the hard time they’re already having? What if we just granted deadline extensions, what if we just allowed re-do’s, what if just we cancelled class when it was obvious that everyone needed a break? What if we conveyed, in a wide variety of ways, that we trust them, that we recognize their lives are hard (right now, sure, but also, for some students, all the time), that we value them? What if we said “yes” to them—not for a day, as in the movie, but every day, for a semester, all the time, as a matter of default or principle? To be sure, Yes Day is fictional and its antics seem to have resulted in “cartoon-style chaos” and, at best, lukewarm critical reception. And, of course, when applied to the college classroom, we may have considerations and worries that go beyond glitter-filled Mom makeovers (e.g., but what about our beloved “rigor”?) Like Price, however, I encourage us to engage in the thought experiment, even if just for fun. What could a “yes” approach look or feel like in our religion classrooms? What possibilities exist? How could it improve the learning experience, especially of those from underserved populations? How could it transform our interactions with students, our teaching, our own experiences as an instructor?

I avoided teaching our gen ed Catholic intellectual tradition courses for years at my small Catholic college in the Northeast. I’m not a theologian. I’m not Catholic. And teaching these courses sounded challenging because our students’ impressions of the Church are both negative and muddled: “The Church is hypocritical, sexist, and anti-gay.” “It reads the Bible literally and it rejects evolution.” “It thinks that it’s bad to examine your religious beliefs.” “Having faith means having no doubts, and it requires that you don’t question your religion at all.” Many of our students are former Catholics who suspect that these courses are intended to bring them back into the fold. And they resent that. I told myself that this mess is not my problem. Not my fight. I got pushed into it though, and to my surprise, the course I developed has become one of my favorites. I decided that for the course to work, I needed to get the students’ hostility and emotions out on the table from the very beginning. To make that possible, creating the right atmosphere was crucial. Otherwise, students would worry about hurting my feelings and their own grade, and they wouldn’t speak openly. To create a space for honesty, I use my non-priest and non-Catholic credentials for maximum effect. Before I even hand out the syllabus, I explain that I’m not Catholic and that I have no interest in making them more—or less—Catholic. I tell them that I disagree with the Church’s positions on LGBTQ issues and that I have feminist objections to the Church—and to a lot of organized religion. At that point, I have their attention. Then I describe what I admire about Catholicism. The logic and intellectual rigor. The two thousand years of applying reason to religion, of brilliant theologians and philosophers wrestling with difficult questions, arguing, and disagreeing with each other. I explain that they don’t have to believe a single word of any Catholic teachings, but that they do have to know what they are, think them through carefully, be as fair and openminded as possible, and then articulate their criticisms and responses clearly. Our first reading is Jean Twenge’s “Irreligious: Losing My Religion (and Spirituality),” which lays out survey data and discusses possible reasons for why so many Gen Z members are leaving organized religion. I ask if the reading resonates with them and ask them to share some of their own experiences with religion. Then I brace myself and get out of the way. So much anger. So much frustration. So many painful stories. One of my students was an altar boy and his priest handed him a brochure about conversion therapy and told him to try it. Another student was kicked out of his religious education class for asking too many critical questions. A third was asked to leave his church along with his family because he has two moms. I listen, empathize, and learn. I explain that their local priest may not have accurately represented the diversity of views and complexity of theology available in the Church. I tell them that people who teach religious education classes usually don’t know as much theology as I would wish and that they sometimes badly misunderstand Church teachings. We look at the Catechism’s statements on homosexuality, I explain that I know several priests who are gay and that they somehow make it work. I point them to James Martin, S.J.’s work, noting that he is a priest in good standing. This discussion takes up a full week. During this time, I repeat that I’m fine with them being atheist, theist, or agnostic but that I want their position to be based upon good reasons and on a deep understanding of the intellectual possibilities of a theism. I don’t want them to reject religion because they have only been exposed to narrow and simplistic versions. After all that, we’re ready to engage with the “real” course materials. We study the argument from design and the Church’s position on evolution. We clear up misunderstandings about doubt and questioning. We read about Mother Teresa and her dark night of the soul. We tackle classical philosophical problems about suffering, miracles, pluralism, the gap between language and God, and the function and limitations of images. This has become one of my favorite classes to teach because it responds to a real need. My students desperately need an opportunity to explore their spirituality and religiosity (or their absence!) and to reflect on their relation to the religions around them. And they need somebody to correct some of their most cumbersome misunderstandings about religion, showing them that there is space for them to be Catholic if they want—even if they are LGBTQ and even if they like science and reason. Will this bring them back into the fold? I doubt it—but I hope it will help them see possibilities that they didn’t know were there.   Read Race in the classroom: #3: Bringing in race in a Catholic Intellectual tradition course.   Sources Catholic Church. The Catholic Catechism. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1993. Gould, Stephen J. “Nonoverlapping Magisteria.” In Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, edited by Michael Rea and Louis Pojman, 494-502. Stamford, CT: Centage Learning, 2015. Paul II, John, Pope. “Faith and Science: Lessons from the Galileo Case and Message on Evolution.” In Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, edited by Michael Rea and Louis Pojman, 502-507. Stamford, CT: Centage Learning, 2015. Martin, James, S.J. Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity. New York, NY: HarperOne, 2017. Martin, James, S.J. Building a Bridge. Directed by Evan Mascagni and Shannon Post. New York, NY: Tribeca, 2021. Massingale, Bryan N. “The Challenge of Idolatry for LGBTI Ministry.” DignityUSA.org, 2019. Pinter, Brian. “A Fundamental Challenge: Three Ways to Combat Biblical Literalism.” America: The Jesuit Review, Sept. 12, 2011 Sullivan, Meghan. “Uneasy Grace.” First Things, April 2014. Twenge, Jean. “Irreligious: Losing My Religion (and Spirituality).” In iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us. New York, NY: Atria Books, 2017.

Sometimes teaching strategies that seem newly discovered have been with you all along. When I was in the last stages of writing up my doctoral dissertation, I had just moved to the Canadian Maritimes. I was living on the outskirts of a small village in an old and drafty brick house overlooking glistening tidal mudflats. Beautiful but isolated and with no distractions, all that stood between me my PhD was a completed thesis. With this knowledge, I set about pursuing a whole variety of unrelated activities: I learnt to bake bread; I split 8 cords of firewood; I shoveled more snow than I had ever seen from the driveway; and I refinished, with great care, several nondescript pieces of old furniture. I also spent time creating hand-bound books. Twenty years on, while my circumstances have changed considerably, bookmaking has proven to be more than a mere distraction. Indeed, bookmaking has formed an enduring connection to my academic work and has shaped my teaching practice. It seems those early days of making books were prescient, in that over the years my academic interests have become increasingly concerned with biblical reception. I am fascinated by the ways sacred texts are continually being created and recreated, unbound and repackaged, unfurled and gathered up. Bookbinding manifests an applied, even somatic, example of these textual journeys. In a world of e-books and hypertext, one might consider bookbinding a quaint if not archaic practice, but that would overlook it as a very practical way of participating in the text. It involves doing something that actively shapes and changes the text. As the binder works the pages with their hands, the text literally takes on characteristics of changeability, pliability, and plasticity. Understanding textuality more broadly prompted me to consider the ways the biblical text functions, not only within the parameters of, say, John’s Gospel or the letters of Paul, but also as these narratives course their way through various points of reception within our cultural context. We read texts, we live texts, and we bind these texts into our experience as they trace paths through the familiar stories of our times. The ancient art of bookmaking offers a way of marking this capacity of the text to exceed the covers of the “Good Book” and extend its influence, traveling beyond its origins in unanticipated ways. This is a path of beauty, of craft and skill. It is a way of marking a journey that acknowledges a past and opens to a future. It also asks us to consider our relationship with the text. As the book accompanies us, where do we end and where does the text begin? Is the text passive or does it act upon us? Alternatively, are we the passive recipient, or the active shaper of the text? Are we a part of the text, our stories, contexts, interpretative reference points? In dealing with the Bible, it is not just about discovering a book, it is also about continuing to make and remake this book, to bind it up with our experience and to consider the future possibilities of both. What happens, then, when I ask my students to create books as part of their learning? When setting one alongside the other, how will the physicality of the book impact and direct their intellectual journey? Will the materiality of the book work to ground and open up the nonmaterial insights we often privilege in higher education? Making books is not just something fun to do, it is a way of using the material to open up the nonmaterial, and exploring the connections between reader and text. Just a few years ago, as part of my regular teaching of our department’s theory and methods course, I asked students to use portfolios to track their learning. The subject matter of this course tends towards abstract ideas, technical definitions, and counter-intuitive perspectives on the study of religion, and sometimes the “translation” of this learning into future courses is not as successful as I would like. My hope was that the practice of making a book would help condition and ground the course materials by adding a physical dimension to the learning experience, one that would connect learner and learning in transformative ways. In their portfolios, students were asked to create a book that gathered together concrete evidence demonstrating the development of their understanding, their acquisition of key skills, and the building of scholarly perspective. I chose learning portfolios because their flexible, evidence-based process allows for individual curation and creativity: they are an ideal venue for self-reflective learning.  In one particularly memorable example, a student submitted a portfolio in the form of a soiled, slashed, and scorched wedding album—she had clearly used a sharp blade and set it on fire. The portfolio focused on the theme of post-modernism and religion and while the content was excellent, the form of the book itself gave expression to the ambivalence the student felt towards this particular theme, the threat it posed for “traditional values,” and the sense of loss it implied for established cultural practices. The covers of her album spoke of the struggle and the challenge of learning and the feelings of disillusionment that can sometimes accompany understanding and insight—particularly for a student of faith within a secular university context. Needless to say, the album brought to mind my own experience in that old house on the hill with this example of a student binding together a rich range of perspectives about who they were and what they were studying and grounding their learning journey in the familiar materiality of a book. Expressed in this album were sentiments that may not have been communicated via a traditional paper but were unmistakable as part of the material context for her work. The physical book provided a means for her to bind her learning journey, her experience, and her identity into a space that was richly layered and uniquely hers.

[text_only_widget] Author’s Note:  My use of the word “diversity” is with reluctance. It is an overused and often misunderstood word. In this case, by diversity I mean difference. I am concerned with the difference that is revealed in our body sizes, shapes, shades, smells, tastes and sounds. Diversity exists between cultures when minoritized peoples are compared to the status quo, or when white, western, male, straight culture is normalized as superior. By diversity I mean to imply the innovation that is needed to meet the needs of classrooms when curriculum, rather than ignoring minoritized students, shifts to include, accommodate, incorporate and value new meaning making, new knowledges and new ways of being together. Where there is diversity there is likely conflict. Diversity, whether by institutional intent or by happenstance, complicates our ability to see students. [/text_only_widget] Peekaboo! I see you! Infants and parents all over the world play some version of this game. In view of the infant, the adult hides their face, pops back into view of the infant, then says Peekaboo! … I see you! This game, full of surprise and expectation, results in the infant’s squeals of delight and amazement. For infant and parent, being seen is joyful. Like in the peekaboo game, teachers understand the value and joy of conveying to our students that “I see you.” It is important that each student in our classrooms have the experience of being acknowledged and welcomed. Each soul wants to be seen. With comparatively little effort on the teacher’s part, students with similar aspirations, similar race, similar culture, and similar economic class, easily find their place in the classroom tableau. It is less complicated to teach a course whose student population is homogenous than it is to teach in diversity. In sameness, the assumptions, the presumptions, the conventions, the ascribed values and the norms function without need for explanation, or clarity and typically without threat of contestation. “Everybody knows …” is the working premise - and rightfully so. In the diverse classroom, “everybody knows…” falls short because now every body is not the presumed same body. In diversity, the bodies vary, the knowledges and know-hows vary. Differing bodies bring different music, clothing, hairstyles, lifestyles, languages, value patterns, religions, foods, history, and family situations.  That which could be presumed as being normative can no longer be presumed and often demand a stretching of our thinking, being, understanding and doing.  Our language, social labeling, and identity politics bares out our societal patterns of inclusion and exclusion. “In this country American is white. Everybody else has to hyphenate,” said Toni Morrison. When our white classrooms shift to include hyphenated persons, we are unprepared. Those students who, with their very presence, create diversity are often the students who go unseen and who are rendered un-seeable. Regrettably and commonly, seeing minoritized students means policing them. The surveilling gaze, the suspicious stare, the apprehensive look, or the disapproving glance lets him/her/they know of the hostility and the relegation to being as a stranger. Or worse yet, students who create diversity in the school’s population are erased, made invisible, removed completely from the sighted reality of the teacher. These students are ghosted – absented in classrooms. Their differences are not recognizable as adequate. Differences do not mean deficiencies. As teachers, we choose which students we will see and which students we will disregard, look past, or look away from. This is a challenging realization. It is dis-ingenuine for any teacher to say that he/she/they pay attention to all students, that they are able to see all students, that they are attentive to all students. Even the most caring teacher has students for which giving their attention is a strain. We all have biases, prejudices, and cultural insensitivities. This does not make any teacher a bad teacher. It does make us human beings who must learn to stretch beyond our prejudices, shallow cultural boundaries, and narrow sensibilities. Homo sapiens. “(Wo)Man who knows.” Or rather, “human who is conscious.” Human who is conscious that he/she/they does not know. We are our most human when we make choices, when we exercise the power of choice. Teaching is a testing ground, and learning place, for our own humanity. In teaching relationships, we succeed, or we fail miserably, by choosing to see some students and refusing to see others. It is this choice that makes us human and this choice that makes us good, bad, or growing teachers. In our humanness we are both vulnerable and afraid. The challenge is to muster the courage to see all the students – those like us and those so different from us that we shrink back and recoil.  As courageous teachers, we ask: What does it mean to teach in such a way that the erased student rematerializes? What does it mean to teach in such a way that the invisible-ed student reappears? What does it mean to teach in such a way that the unseen or overlooked student comes into focus? What does it mean to teach in such a way that the hiding or hidden student peeks out from behind their wall? What does it mean to teach in such a way that the voiceless student comes to voice? Can we teach in such a way that the learning experience for all would not make sense or would have no meaning if there was an erased student in the conversation? What would it mean to teach with such precision that lessons, to be successful, need the input, participation, knowledges, voice, and creativity of all the students? What kind of teaching relates to the diversity of students in the classroom without asking that every student normalize or centralize the white, male, straight, wealthy culture? What if teaching in diversity is too difficult, too demanding – creates too many problems? Then what? Still embroiled in the global pandemic, we are teaching online, we are in classrooms donning masks, and we are still reeling with societal uncertainty and fatigue. We, in these COVID riddled years, have a legitimate excuse to not see those who are erased, those invisible-ed, and the hiding students. Even though it is more work, more effort, more stress - now is precisely the time we must find ways to see them, all.

Before the pandemic, one of the most pressing subjects for discussion and debate in my context, teaching at a freestanding seminary, was the transition to online education. I recall lively conversations engaging the merits and challenges of “moving online” in formal faculty meetings, and the sometimes more important informal tête-à-têtes with small groups of colleagues in hallways and offices. One line of thinking warned that the pedagogy employed in certain courses and disciplines would not be as effective online. Another approach suggested that the future of theological education would be online, especially for freestanding seminaries, because of the shifting patterns in enrollment. There were less “traditional” students seeking residential or in-person education and more “non-traditional” students pursuing fully or mostly online degrees. Both perspectives presented harbingers of ruin, identity loss, and irrelevancy. Then came the pandemic. We all became online instructors. Chapel services and committee meetings also migrated to virtual spaces in which everyone appeared in little rectangle boxes. For a while it was fun to experiment with different virtual backgrounds, such as picturesque beaches, majestic mountains, and Dunder Mifflin. Although the pandemic is not over, I believe the questions about capacities for online education have largely been resolved at my seminary and elsewhere. All our courses can be taught online. Each of our schools can offer fully online degrees. I suppose the question moving forward is how many more of our institutions will do so. Pastors experienced a similar phenomenon as the congregations they served also migrated online. At one level, the past two years have revealed new possibilities for ministry utilizing virtual tools, such as enabling closer remote contact with previously isolated parishioners with less access to physical gatherings. Yet at another level, it is also clear that a robust online ministry is not a panacea. The fact that everyone can participate in a worship service from their own homes does not make preaching any easier. Moving online does not sufficiently address the existing interpersonal conflicts, harmful theologies, and spiritual wounds within a congregation. Therefore, my pedagogy continues to connect the history of Christianity in the United States with the praxis of congregational ministry today. One promising topic I continue to cultivate with my students is the gap between seminaries and congregations regarding biblical interpretation. For many of us, it is daunting to apply what we learn about the Bible, such as historical-critical approaches to the authorship of various books and womanist reconstructions of problematic narratives, in local congregations accustomed to the hermeneutics of inerrancy and literalism. In these classroom dialogues with students, we stress the virtues of an authentically incremental approach in which new pastors seek to build trust, develop relationships, and more fully understand the histories, complexities, and strengths of the congregations they serve while remaining true to their personal convictions. Pastoral leadership is an exercise of one’s gifts with humility, openness, courage, and determination. I do not want to speak for all freestanding seminaries, but I will venture to propose that online education is likewise not a panacea. I believe the time that I have invested in developing and refining my pedagogical skills for online instruction is a worthy investment, but I also recognize that seminaries like mine need more than good online courses. What about our oppressive structures, longstanding hierarchies, painful ambiguities, and underexamined practices? My point is not to be a naysaying critic of either my institution or theological education writ large, but it is to ask an important question that defies easy or universal answers: Can we practice what we teach? Or put another way: Can theological faculty be agents of institutional change? One painful ambiguity in some contexts involves whether a seminary is a school or a church. Of course, a seminary is an academic institution and not a church. But it gets confusing when we pray before classes and meetings, worship together in chapel services that feel no different than being in a church on Sunday morning, and educate students for congregational ministry. Therefore, the notion of the seminary as model church is not an unfounded or unreasonable expectation. But the organizational systems of seminaries are unlike congregations. Professors are not the pastors of a seminary. In my denomination, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), a session comprising elected lay leaders (ruling elders) and installed pastors serve as the “council for the congregation,” which means a pastor works together with laypersons to exercise oversight and leadership of the church’s affairs. Seminaries are academic institutions in which the responsibilities of oversight and leadership belong to administrators and a board of trustees. A pastor is almost always “in the room where it happens.” A professor is in the classroom, not the boardroom. This does not imply a negative answer to my question concerning whether theological faculty can be agents of institutional change, but I am hoping to provoke further exploration of how faculty can practice what we teach.

When I was writing this post, an American congressional representative is being criticized for Islamophobic remarks about a fellow member of Congress in what is just the latest example of anti-Muslim sentiment in American culture. In a widely publicized video, Colorado representative Lauren Boebert claims that she had a chance encounter with representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, the first Somali American and one of the few Muslim women in Congress. Describing the moment when the two representatives found themselves in the same elevator, Boebert concluded that there was no threat to her life because Omar wasn’t wearing a backpack. Boebert’s reliance on Islamophobia to galvanize political support reveals how entrenched anti-Muslim racism is in American culture. Negative and discriminatory attitudes towards Muslims, and anyone perceived as Muslim, is a historical and continuing problem that needs to be addressed in the religious studies classroom not only by scholars of Islam, but by anyone teaching about religion in its historical, sociological, and political dimensions. In several years of teaching about Islam in the American university classroom and in public outreach, I have used diverse approaches and materials to educate about the problem of Islamophobia as a historical trend and as a part of contemporary culture. In this post I will describe how highlighting an often-overlooked aspect of American history is an effective method to challenge primary claims about Islam and Muslims created by Islamophobic attitudes in an American context. In short, teaching the history of the earliest American Muslims is a key strategy to combat anti-Muslim sentiment because their lives and contributions undercut arguments that Islam, and Muslims, are un-American or foreign to American culture. Many students are surprised to discover the long history of Muslims in the Americas, which has its origins in the seventeenth-century slave trade. Scholars estimate that anywhere from ten to twenty percent of the Africans forced onto slave ships bound for the American colonies were Muslim. Many of these Muslims were raised in West African Sufi communities and educated in religious sciences such as the Qur’an and the hadith literature. They were also often multilingual and knew the native African language of their families as well as the Arabic necessary for competency in reading Islamic texts and commentaries. The stories we have are mostly of Muslim men, who were often regarded as exotic because of their literacy and entrepreneurship. While many Muslim slaves were forced to convert to Christianity or pretended to in order to survive, others were respected for adhering to a religious tradition that, like the Christianity of slave owners, was monotheistic. Some of these Muslims became celebrities during their lifetime, such as Yarrow Mamout of Georgetown, who was able to purchase his freedom due to a successful brick-making business. Omar ibn Sayyid is known as the first Muslim slave to compose his autobiography in 1831. This document, written first in Arabic and later translated into English, offers a unique perspective on history, self-expression, and religious identity in the context of the bodily and intellectual domination that slavery required. The stories of emancipated Muslim slaves living on Georgia’s Sapelo Island offers evidence of women’s religious lives in terms of the ritual prayers they engaged in, and the traditional saraka cakes they made as part of West African Muslim celebrations. Acknowledging the earliest histories of American Muslims is an important step that undercuts Islamophobic claims that Muslims don’t belong in American society and cultural life. Put simply, African Muslim slaves lived in what would become the United States before that idea had been fully articulated and independence from Britain had been declared. It is also important to point out that these Muslim slaves, like all of the enslaved, literally built the American nation with their labor. The lives of these Muslim men and women also help to complicate mainstream assumptions regarding the identities of the enslaved, from their socioeconomic backgrounds in Africa to their literacy and their religious identities. There are many ways to extend these threads introduced with examination of the earliest American Muslims. One could follow this with a unit on how Muslim histories, values, and texts served Black Americans during the twentieth-century Civil Rights movement. Muslim communities in cities such as Chicago offered crucial safety and security to Black women who sought refuge from gendered discrimination and benefitted from vocational training provided by Muslim organizations such as the Nation of Islam. I draw on the lives and leadership of prominent Black American Muslims such as Noble Drew Ali, Elijah Muhammad, and Malcolm X to show how Islam offered an empowering identity that was, crucially, not the Christian identity of many white Americans opposed to racial equality. I also believe it is important to use these histories to show that the religious character of the Civil Rights movement is more than the Christianity that informed the work of Martin Luther King Jr., among others. Learning about the role of Islam during the Civil Rights movement shows students how Muslims inspired by Islamic concepts helped to shape civic discourse at a formative moment in American history. Highlighting these histories in the classroom provides an opportunity for students to rethink how they define Islam and how they define America. It raises awareness of the fact that Muslims helped to build some of the very institutions that are the foundation of the American nation. The Muslim history of the United States is an essential and valuable tool for educators looking to help students criticize the problem of growing anti-Muslim racism in our current political and cultural moment.

I took a deep breath and stepped out of my office dressed as the Greek goddess Athena. My historically inaccurate Amazon purchase had me in a “Roman Spartan Costume Helmet,” a “Roman Empress” costume over my clothes, holding a large plastic spear and a “Wonder Woman” shield. It was the best I could piece together online, and it would have to do—and this was for fun! In our Reacting to the Past (RTTP) game, The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 B.C., the students had to self-start their first Athenian Assembly debate by reenacting a pig sacrifice (pig picture torn in half) while priestesses of Athena offered prayers. The president sat at his table, ready to start the proceedings. They were nervous. I was nervous for them.  So, in a flourish of polyester and plastic I stomped into the classroom. I banged my spear on my Wonder Woman shield and stood behind the shocked priestesses. I whispered, “Go for it!”  Student faces were a mix of shock and amusement; I was certainly not cool enough for a couple of them. But who cared? My priestesses pulled it off, the pig was sacrificed, and the president called the meeting to order. They debated and voted. The next week I gave extra credit for showing up in a toga, and about 20 percent of the class came wrapped in random bed sheets. In preparation for our five-session role playing game I told them repeatedly to “just have fun with it!” and fun was had! At the end of the game I had students fill out a “Win Sheet” where they discussed what they accomplished and reflected on their own game play. Paraphrases of some responses ranged from “I didn’t think that this would be fun, but it was,” and “I have never liked history before,” to “I normally don’t speak up in class, but this helped me overcome that” and “I met new people and made friends.” I took that for a win. For this church history professor assigned to teach Western Civilization, the RTTP role playing game provided a way to make a notoriously boring class engaging (for all of us). As it turns out, I had stumbled upon a “ludic pedagogy” or the “pedagogy of fun”: Sharon Lauricella and T. Keith Edmunds’ post, “A Serious Look at Fun in College Classrooms” discusses how the rigor of education is not lost in a fun environment, rather it lowers the cognitive load and increases intrinsic motivation and learning.  It is probably no surprise to you that studies show that by making learning fun, student stress decreases and learning increases. The bigger question most professors ask isn’t, “Should I try this?” but rather, “What would this look like in my classroom?”  Here are some ideas that I have tried: We reenact a house church with dollar store decor and food. During review week, students write either three church history characters or the attributes from them that they want to have in their own life on a dollar store Christmas ornament.  At the end of the class around a common question, “Why do we have so many denominations?” I have students create their own church with their denomination of choice, or none. They design a building, pick a symbol for the logo, choose the music, governance style, etc. They are creative, and they enjoy the in-class activity “for fun.”  When studying the Desert Fathers and Mothers, we learn to make prayer ropes from a YouTube video. The joy in this is that the knot is almost impossible to make, so we have a good laugh trying. Pre-pandemic, we went for pizza and then visited a Russian Orthodox Church together. A class did the Reacting to the Past’s “Trial of Anne Hutchinson.” (There was burning at the stake!) The Reacting to the Past “Council of Nicaea” role playing game is on my radar for the future. NOTE: These RTTP games are not intuitive to lead, you’ll need all summer to prepare. I highly recommend joining the association and the Facebook group for help. Plan on the game taking four to eight weeks of your semester.  Clearly this is not an exhaustive list and many of you have your own successes to add. If you could take a moment to write down some of those in the comments, this could make it a very helpful space for all of us searching for new ideas. 

At the end of November I experienced a disastrous event: I lost about 1,600 files from my computer. For reasons I’d rather not discuss, all I know is that years of heavily curated material and so much hard work are gone. All of the books I’ve written are gone. All my syllabi, my class preparation, my texts—everything is gone. Some things from many years ago remain, but I don’t even have the courage to go look. It will only show what I don’t have anymore. Four years ago, I made a huge turn in my scholarship and am now trying to learn from the earth and working from a perspective that could be called the law (and lore) of the land. This deep change has shifted me and all my ways of knowing: classes, readings, pedagogies, resources, and relations. Entire worldviews! During these four years I took classes online and placed huge amounts of resources and readings in files, some of them with thirty, fifty, even a hundred pages, with journals, articles, websites, magazines, newspapers, list of books, and lots of references. Gone. I have written so much and given talks, some more academic and some less; all sorts of format and content of texts. All gone. I was working on a book that was missing just the introduction. Gone. My sabbatical proposal with the full first draft of an extensive play I was working on. Gone. A book I was writing about my experience of becoming a father to my three adopted kids; five years of texts and notes. Gone. As the days went by, I realized I had to teach a workshop without any materials at hand. I was reminded that I had to teach an intensive online seminar to graduate students in Brazil and again, I had nothing to rely on. I will stop here. I was so desolated I didn’t know what to do. I went to see Wonder, the tree I always visit to talk and listen to. While I was there, I realized that crusts were growing on her which belong to a family of fungi that live on “dead wood.” Wonder—my companion, the one who had been teaching me about my relation to the earth—was dying, or had died, I don’t know. My heart fell to the ground. If I had had a map under my feet, now this map had disappeared. There was nothing to guide me, or to turn back to, in terms of “where” my thinking, my writing, and my teaching were. Those who write, teach, speak, work, and play with words know that to lose what you write is to lose yourself. For writing becomes our body and soul; it is all biographical, even if not necessarily about ourselves. A very specific way of knowing shapes us into who we are and how we make everything meaningful and life possible. In fact, the where of knowledge has pursued me for a while. As a liberation theologian, the where has always been fundamental to how and with whom I think. Ecological thinking helped me realize that I need to think beyond the humans around me. It is interesting how we have replaced knowledge and memory from local, oral history to paper, books, cabinets, and libraries, and then to online files and the cloud . But when we lost our oral history, our bodies where detached from the land and it was as if our memory and knowing was placed elsewhere. Not fully within us anymore and “us” here means the whole landscape we live in. Thus, to know is to go somewhere else to reach a certain knowledge: a school, a class, a book, a library. The knowledge that we carry within us has been replaced by the knowledge we gain elsewhere, and it is only formally channeled by proper forms of scholarship. Surely, knowledge is always relational and we learn from one another. Surely Gramsci’s notion of the organic intellectual as the movement between formal and popular knowledge is fundamental. But what I am thinking here is more about how plantation and modernity have shifted knowledge from the land, and our relation to each other and to other species, to an outside abroad place. Colonialism and capitalism have turned us into renters of spaces and knowledges. We buy to know. This outside place is embodied by slave owners and the specialist, both of whom master the field. I cannot be a fully respected scholar if I don’t master my field. This process has also replaced our forms of memory. Uprooted from the land, we don’t carry the memories of the land anymore. We carry the memory of books or a file that holds the place of a certain knowledge. We have forgotten bodily (land/human/more than human) forms of knowing, practices where our knowledges lean on bodily knowing in relation to plants, animals, cells and are intrinsically implicated. This dis-location of knowledge creates various forms of anxiety. Entangled in a catch-22, this way of knowing comes with years of placing my knowledge elsewhere, in a place that is neither fully me nor fully outside of me. It hangs somewhere and I access it through my ability to buy a book, enter a school, or remember where it is in my computer. But now, without that imaginary/physical/online location where everything I have was placed and was lost, I do not know what to know anymore. One thousand six hundred files gone. Professor Marc Ellis said this to me: “It might be a prompt to move to another level of consolidating and deepening your thought.” I didn’t want to hear that, but something in me knew he was right. I am still battling this loss, but I think that what happened to me was not only about the evil online machinery spirits. It was actually me saying: I can’t take this weight of academic control, this burden of mastery, this desperation to know the field(s), this much running after knowledges, this much anxiety of knowing. For knowing in this modern process, is not about being, but being included. So, this can actually be a chance for me to change, even though I don’t know how exactly. But I know I have to pay attention to the where I live and that will suffice: it has to be in my body in relation to what is around me. I now want my body to know in relation with non-human species, perhaps I need to do far closer readings, pause, and go slower than I have ever gone. While one’s knowledge(s) are always in relation, it is only a perspective from a point and from that point we understand everybody else’s worlds. Each world in relation to many other worlds do not compose a totality under which a seamless background unites all the worlds. Rather, my point of perceiving is oriented and transformed by thousands of other worlds of other species also in flux and relating with thousands of other worlds composing different perspectives. None of these with any center to hold. I need a view of the world that is not only human. Another grammar of perception, a bodily one. I need to learn to see but also learn to be seen by the animals, for example. What do their eyes do to me? As I learn the names we give to plants, I need to learn the names those plants give to me. What do their bodies/feeling/being do to me? We breath because they created the oxygen! How do I learn the laws of the trees more than the laws of my religion? I want to be able to listen to the birds whom I feed in my backyard, to try to get to know them better. I am trying to get the food they like best, trying to understand their own perspective in relation to me and other worlds with which they relate. I want to live with them and with other species: plants, animals, beings. Entire worlds of knowledges! Stories of many worlds together! Yesterday I went to the store to buy seeds and the guy said: Use this so the squirrels will not come. And I said: But I want them to come! I want as many worlds together as possible. What about that possum? Oh, can we all live together? I don’t know what to do with mice—I have this utter fear of them, and I have kids at home. I put some poison out for them. Tragic! I want to know why so many worms are now out of the grass and frozen on the cement. I am struggling with the very few birds we have since it is winter. It’s brutal not to hear them loud every day. Rachel Carson always rings a cold sound in my heart when I can’t hear the birds. The bees are more often absent. The Codonoquinet river near my house; I need to know about this ancient presence and what makes a river possible. I am grateful for the many scholars in other fields and community leaders who are helping me known better now. I recently went to visit my mother in Brazil and I walked around my neighborhood paying attention to the trees I grew up with. In fifty-two years, it was the first time I paid attention to those who saw me growing and gave me a world to live in: the trees around my house! There were about thirty different trees in four streets! Ten of them had fruits! The memory of my father being a clown also visited me again. I realized I need to let my clown come out more fully and bring joy to myself and my kids. That makes me pause. To pay attention to my students differently. Do they carry any form of happiness that will help them brave through this difficult world we are living in now? A clown teacher? Other forms of imagination and creativity. No more demanding readings or results. Rather, unfolding worlds together… Learning to remember like the seeds do and to walk in the pace of the cows. Coming back from the data recovery store in downtown New York, I hopped onto the subway and there was a homeless man in front of me. He was eating. Not a single grain was left behind. He was so well organized, keeping his five small plastic bags near him. Perhaps that was all he had. I kept looking at him. I tried to make conversation with him, but he didn’t want to talk. He finished eating and put his head down. The train arrived at my station and I left. Coming out into the cold I was searching for some bird singing, but I couldn’t hear any. Only one thing captivated my mind: I lost one thousand six hundred files, but this man only has five small plastic bags.