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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.

You know who has a lot of spare time lately? Nobody. You know something that wastes time when you’re a student? Finding yourself in a class that is definitely not a class you want, because no one gave you a heads-up about Dr. Lester. Someone should give them that heads-up, and it should be me. How better to do so than by telling them all of my dearest hopes and dreams... before they sign on the enrollment line. Just because a student wants to take Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, it doesn’t mean they want to take it from me. Better to figure that out before week one, rather than week five or six... agreed? I listen to our admissions director and to our dean of students, and the word I hear over and over is “precarity.” The lives of our students are more precarious than ever. (Yes, so are yours and mine, but let’s keep our focus on the students.) On the first day of the term, a student likely comes into my class with no wiggle room in their life. If my approach is not what they’re after, then this relationship is costing them money and more than that, it’s wasting their time. See, I don’t just have a lot of knowledge about the Hebrew Bible and its study; I also have all these ideas about them. And not just ideas—I have feelings, and passions, and convictions, and reckonings. Many of these are commensurable with those of other instructors at my institution and its partners in cross-registration, but they are not identical. Professor So-and-So and I may agree broadly about the subject matter and its study; we may devour each other’s research about it and may laugh at each other’s jokes about it; we’re sympatico... and a student might find heaven in their course and hell in mine. To put it in terms of course design, I have “big ideas” that animate my course and its units. (For what follows, see Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, Understanding by Design, Pearson, 2006.) These big ideas are one major source for the understanding, knowledge, and skills that I hope learners will develop in their engagement with the Hebrew Bible. Wiggins and McTighe describe a big idea as a linchpin, and as “conceptual Velcro”: a big idea unifies several pieces of “related content knowledge” in a way that is core to understanding the subject at hand. For example, here are some of the big ideas that animate the units in my Introduction to the Hebrew Bible: Cross-Culture: reading the Bible is always a cross-cultural experience. Competing Claims: biblical texts will disagree with one another about God, God’s ways with the world, and what God wants. Not You: biblical texts are not talking to you—they speak to their own time and place, in order to make specific things happen in their circumstances. History is Storytelling: histories, like any stories, use strategies for reasons: characterization, plot, point-of-view, omission, misdirection, rhetoric of every kind. The Story is not the History: the “world behind the text” is not the “world in the text.” In Understanding by Design terms, these big ideas correspond to “essential questions” that do not call for a single knowable answer, but rather prompt further questions and open-ended inquiry: Can competing claims about God both be true? What makes a claim true? What does it mean for a text to “speak to” a hearer whom the text never imagined? To what is a history accountable? What makes a cross-cultural experience “authentic”? You start to get an idea, don’t you? These overlapping big ideas and essential questions motivate the course design... and, not incidentally, tell you a lot about me and what it might be like to spend thirteen weeks doing my assignments and adapting to my feedback. If this isn’t what a learner expects of an Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, they can ask themselves some questions. Are they surprised and delighted? Are they cautiously curious but wonder what other offerings of this course might look like (at my institution or elsewhere)? Are they repulsed or offended? Would they like to chat? However this goes, we are well on our way toward a week one roster of forewarned, well-informed, consenting participants. But only if this information is available in a timely way, and that means the day that registration opens. Any lesser commitment means a waste of time for prospective learners who don’t have it in the bank.

Having practiced on my first-year students for a few years [Race in the Classroom #1   Race in the Classroom #2], I felt brave enough to add several readings on race at once to my junior level course, Is God Dead? It was a good time to do it because I was revising the course anyway, converting it from a philosophy elective into a Catholic intellectual tradition course, fulfilling a gen ed requirement here at my small and mostly white Catholic college in the Northeast (I’m white too). In revising, I had to go outside traditional philosophy – the standard philosophy of religion course reader has no readings on race or on Catholicism. I ignored the fact that I’m a philosopher and looked for resources in theology instead. I soon stumbled into Black theology. Then I used Google. A lot. I’ve included race in two units on my syllabus so far: 1.Re-imagining God: Metaphors for the 21st Century I revised my old unit on metaphors about God into Re-imagining God: Metaphors for the 21st Century. We discuss the role of metaphor; we ask whether literal descriptions of God are possible; we consider better and worse metaphors. I added several readings on how images depicting God and Jesus as white men dominate religious art, asking if and how that matters and why it may be important to depict them as people of color and/or as women. We look at how this issue came up in the civil rights movement and how it has reemerged more recently. This unit quickly became one of the strongest parts of the class. The students like it because it is relevant and has pictures. I like it because invites reflection in three areas that are crucial to my course goals: Self: Students quickly notice that even though they believe that God has no body, they find images of God as anything other than a white man jarring. What does that mean, how does this automatic association of power and white men affect their actions and attitudes, and what can we do about it? Society: These images include some and exclude others, and they both reflect and reinforce existing power structures. How does that power structure affect people’s lives inside organized religion, and how can we make things better? Should we insist on diverse images in our churches? Relationship with God. Our initial reactions in encountering a nontraditional picture God highlights our tendency towards idolatry. We constantly confuse our image of God with God. Since the images fall short and can have such a negative social impact, would we be better off without images of God? Maybe Jews and Muslims are onto something here? This semester, my class added another question: Are we obsessing too much about images? The students pointed to a religious and a social danger: If we focus too much on what Jesus looked like, we may neglect his message. If we worry too much about visual representation, we may settle for symbolic change. 2.Black suffering A work in progress: I’m adding readings on black suffering to the Problem of Suffering unit. William Jones argues that given how much and how disproportionately blacks have suffered, it’s reasonable to conclude that God is a white racist. James Cone disagrees. I haven’t taught this unit yet. But I will! 3.Learning more myself without going crazy The voice in my head saying that I don’t know enough to teach this stuff is still there, but I’m resolutely ignoring it and teaching anyway, remembering that my students know a lot less about it than I do. I’m also educating myself one small step at a time. I read a couple of articles on Black liberation theology over the summer so that I would at least know more than what’s in the Wikipedia entry. Last spring, I stuck to Wikipedia. It worked. I still know much less than I’d like. I want a better idea of how we ended up with our current images of Jesus. (I get why he is white, but why the long hair?) I’d like to understand how white mainstream theologians responded to black liberation theology. And I’d like a better sense of the Catholic church’s position and record on race. But I didn’t figure any of that out over the summer. I needed to rest, and I had other responsibilities too. Next time!   See the PART #1 and PART #2 of this series. Resources Metaphors for the 21st Century Braxton, Edward K. “The Racial Divide in the United States: A Reflection for the World Day of Peace 2015.” Cleage, Albert B., Jr. The Black Messiah. Reprinted in Black Theology: A Documentary History, Volume I, 1966-1979. Edited by James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore. New York: Orbis Books, 1993. (Selections) Douglas, Kelly Brown. The Black Christ. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 2019. (Selections on Cleage) Massingale, Bryan N. “The Challenge of Idolatry for LGBTI Ministry.” DignityUSA.org, 2019. NCR editorial staff. “Why white Jesus is a problem.” National Catholic Reporter, June 30, 2020. Rosales, Harmonia. The Creation of God (a recreation of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam). Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art, 2018. Schaeffer, Pamela, and John L. Allen Jr. “Jesus 2000.” National Catholic Reporter, 1999. The Problem of Suffering William R. Jones. Is God a White Racist? A Preamble to Black Theology. New York: Anchor Press, 1973. Cone, James H. God of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury, 1975. (Selections) Standard Philosophy of Religion course reader Pojman, Louis, and Rea, Michael. Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology. 7th edition. Stamford, CT : Cengage Learning, 2015.

Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary (LTSS) of Lenoir-Rhyne University in Columbia, SC sits in an African American neighborhood impacted by policies of food apartheid. For several years the faculty has listened for our vocation, hoping to create a seedbed for fresh food and racial repair in our community. As a part of this discernment, my colleague, Rev. Dr. Ginger Barfield, Onnie Jackson, a board member of the asset-based development nonprofit Koinonia of Columbia, and I attended a training by the nonprofit, Life Around the Table, on their curricular framework called Eating Together Faithfully (ETF). While at the training and on a hike, the words “grow my garden” came to me. As I shared this experience with my LTSS team, we wondered what it might mean, and if the Holy Spirit might be up to something among us. Those enigmatic words stayed with me as we (Ginger, Onnie, and I) started a pilot group using the ETF framework in March 2020. Twelve community members gathered around the table—seminary professors, students, leaders of Koinonia of Columbia, the principal of the Title 1 elementary school across the street, and leaders in Axiom Farms, an organization dedicated to teaching and practicing sustainable agriculture. Keith Alexander, the founder and leader of Axiom and a third-generation farmer in South Carolina, shared his profound knowledge of the injustices of the food economy and his proactive work to farm differently. A tall man with a soft-spoken manner, Keith Alexander described his sharecropper grandfather and his decades-long vision to “grow food that tastes like justice” by cultivating a food hub in our neighborhood. My eyes opened and my head jerked up from the table. “This is the garden God wants to grow,” I thought. “Food that tastes like justice—on the ten-acre campus of an historically white institution that is currently only growing a monoculture of grass.” During the pandemic 2020-2021 school year the campus’s land lay fallow, but we cultivated relationships in our local food economy. I taught ETF to our students online, and Axiom Farms, Koinonia of Columbia, the Columbia Food Policy Committee chairperson, and other community members involved in food justice work came into our Zoom squares. The students, by engaging in conversation with farmers and food activists and by preparing a meal from local produce each week, learned how to eat justly. Meanwhile, the seminary, through the leadership of our dean, Mary Hinkle Shore, applied for and was approved for grants from the In Trust Center for Theological Schools and the North Carolina Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to grow a garden on our campus. Dean Shore and I, through conversations with the leadership of the Methodist Theological School in Ohio, learned about their exemplary work on their campus farm and their curricular integration of theologies of ecotheology, sustainability, and justice. By fall 2021, Keith Alexander and his Axiom Farms team began plans for a sustainable garden and became the food service vendor of our campus—with the vision to become a farm-to-table restaurant for the community. Alexander said, “We’ve entered a partnership with Lenoir-Rhyne to bring a food hub and farm to campus. We already have a relationship with the community. People in the community are excited for us to open and have access to fresh food.” Alexander and his team plan to offer agriculture classes to the community and to eventually offer produce boxes from the campus garden. In September 2021, as a part of learning about creation care, my Christian Ethics class met at the new garden site with Keith Alexander. As we stood in a circle, he described his quarter of an acre plot design with the use of grow bags, which offer maximum yield and minimal labor using high-quality soil and without the need for weeding. Students shoveled rich, loamy black soil into the grow bags. Other students placed cardboard on the ground as a weed preventative. Later in the semester, Alexander came into the classroom to converse with students on the differences between organic and industrial farming, racism in farming, and to reflect on practices of sustainable agriculture. A student who had taken the ETF class and Christian Ethics said, “It’s amazing to see this garden dream taking place, and to have gotten my hands dirty in the soil of it.” Students are learning anti-racist discipleship and community partnership by getting their hands in soil and by listening to wise teachers like Alexander.  In a service, we dedicated the garden and by winter 2022 our campus and community will begin to eat collards and kale from the grow bags. Those three words “grow my garden” have taken root on our campus grounds, in our seminary, and among community members. The Holy Spirit is indeed up to something, and it’s going to taste like justice. 

One day my father asked my brother and me why we had stopped roller skating. In those days, roller skates were constructed out of skin-bruising, abrasive metal. The design of the skates required a metal key. By turning the metal key, the skate adjusted by lengthening or widening to fit to the child’s sneakers. Once the adjusted metal clamps were tightened on the shoe, the leather strap was buckled around the ankle. Even with the key and the straps, never was the fit precise. Notoriously and painfully, the metal skates would fly off of your foot in mid-skate thus hurling the skater into walls, into trees, into parked cars. Or, the ill-fitting skate simply tripped-up the skater and you landed on the concrete sidewalk – sometimes face first. Skating was more dangerous than it was fun. We told dad we stopped skating because the skates did not work well. We told him that they kept falling off. We told him we were tired of getting hurt. With this conversation, my brother and I were hoping for new skates – the kind that were all-in-one with the attached shoe. These better skates had a rubber attachment on the toe to help the skater slow down. I wanted the white skates and my brother wanted the black skates. My dad saw other possibilities. I do not remember if it was hours, days or weeks after the initial conversation about the under-used skates that my dad redesigned our toys. The next time Brent and I saw our skates, Dad had turned them into scooters. Dad dismantled the skates, used found items from our basement, and his own ingenuity. Dad made three scooters.  One scooter had a metal milk crate as its console, was low to the ground, and meant to be ridden on one knee. The other two were ridden while standing up – one with a wooden handle bar to grip while attempting jumps or fish-tailing. The third scooter was more like a modified skateboard that required excellent balance. All the scooters had metal wheels – no key or leather trap was needed. My brother and I, plus all the kids in our neighborhood, played with those scooters for years and years. As I look back, my dad’s nurturing of the possible was quite remarkable. My Dad had a thing about wheels for children.  Dad believed children should be able to go! They should be able to travel, to have adventures, to explore – to see what there was to see. For him, wheels were a way for children to experience the world with imagination and possibility. Dad thought children should be in motion; he thought a child’s impulse to go! should be kindled. The rule in our house was that once your feet could reach the brake and gas pedals and you could see over the steering wheel – you could drive the car. My brother and I started driving when we were age 10 and 11, respectively. Dad’s ethic of go! did not stop with his parenting but was part of his vocational sensibilities. Dad was a school psychologist, special education teacher and reading specialist. He was, for more than thirty years, employed by the Philadelphia Public Schools. At his retirement party, I heard his co-workers tell story after story after story of the ways my father rescued children from incorrect placements in remedial education classes. Countless times, when other psychologists would deem that a child had no possibility to learn, to read, to excel – Dad saw possibility in the child. My father retested children who other colleagues had previously tested. Often, his report would be that the children had a higher IQ and fewer learning obstacles than previously diagnosed. My father was regularly called as an expert witness in Family Court to dispute the misdiagnosis and misplacement of children in private educational systems. My father was an advocate for children because he could see them. Dad was known by his colleagues to be able to see the possibility in even the most dulled child.   I am not saying that my dad was optimistic or hopeful or even cheerful. Most days he was none of these things. What dad modeled for our family, and gave to the children he worked for in the public schools, was much more substantive. My dad was imaginative. He would see possibility – in skates and in children. He could see children labeled as retarded or learning disabled as being productive, normal, healthy, contributing members of our community with value, worth and dignity. An unwritten responsibility of teaching is to see the possibility in students that they cannot see in themselves. Seeing the possibility in students is not a mystical gift reserved for only a few intuitive teachers. Seeing the possibility in students is about thinking up options, designing opportunities, engineering alternatives, redesigning what is offered, resisting rules that would stymy and oppression, and setting people in motion. It is about providing wheels and the permission to go! Seeing the possibility in students is about looking at the student, then looking beyond the student knowing the wheels you provide are taking them into their future and it is into that future that they must go.

Self-care has become a familiar concept and an area of interest in faculty development and in student life. For many, self-care has become the substance of our reflections about personality traits that stem from our family of origin to concerns about longevity in our professional and vocational lives. The call to care for self does not go unheard, and for many there’s puzzling about hobbies, a reluctance to make the necessary changes to squeeze self-care into our already overloaded schedules, and perhaps even an eschewing of the import of self-care. A lot of people attempt to find an activity to take up for a couple of weeks (think New Year’s resolutions) that will quell the inner voice reminding us to check yet another box on the to-do list because of an intuitive sense that self-care is indeed a healthy practice. Why write a blog about something that doesn’t seem to require much deliberation? After all, isn’t a response to the invitation to care for self a simple yes or no? I have spent the past eight years piecing together a professional response to vocation. While I pursued a terminal degree envisioning a full-time faculty position somewhere, this picture of my ideal professional life has taken a much different turn. For a few years and holding on to my dream, with each cycle of yet another academic year and another application submitted, there was hope that a full-time faculty position, or any full-time job in a seminary, would eventually materialize. In the meantime, I was a busy adjunct instructor and pastoral minister, all the while juggling the demands of family life. With each year and with each declined application, I found myself in a cyclical pattern of saying yes to adjunct work for the following academic year because I was uncertain that I would have other opportunities. Clearly, this was not what I had expected after many years of hard work, nor did I think this was a way to honor the village that showed up so that I could complete the degree and graduate. Don’t get me wrong, there IS immense gratitude for the enriching opportunities to work and I continue to learn best teaching practices, even in areas that aren’t explicitly in my wheelhouse. With little to no job security, teaching and prepping for each new work opportunity is demanding because an invitation to teach again the following year is dependent on performance and whether there is a need. Increasingly and with significant changes in the terrain of theological higher education, graduates with doctoral degrees are required to reexamine their professional aspirations and shift their expectations according to the reality that there may never be a full-time teaching opportunity. From navigating different institutions as an outsider to developing and teaching new courses, individuals in part-time, contractual, and non-tenure track positions amass a full-time workload with hours accrued from various employers. And so, a resolute and affirmative response to the invitation to care for self in this professional adjunct reality is tempered by the constraints that come with financial strain, the emotional toll of job insecurity, the psychological weight of challenges to self-esteem, and the body’s physiological responses to stress, to name a few. None of these adjunct realities negates the import of self-care, and contractual, “part-time” adjuncts are in no way exempt from the need to care for body, mind, and spirit. Burnout is real and an accompanying and worrisome symptom of burnout is apathy. If an outcome of burnout is that instructors no longer have the capacity to care about students and all the good that happens in physical and virtual teaching spaces, then it’s imperative that teachers and institutions alike look closely at institutional culture and professional location to examine the particularities behind resistance to and an inability to say yes to self-care. Whatever the season and context of teaching, administration, church ministry, or any of the myriad ways people are employed, rather than judgement and shaming for the decision to forego self-care because of sheer exhaustion, lack of resources, and the unrelenting pressure to produce in order to matter, the invitation of this blog is to examine professional location and how this supports or obstructs your ability to practice self-care. And if the good work of theological education is meaningful, life-giving, and worth the marathon, perhaps it’s time to dig deep, to unplug, and to access all our grounding sources for a spaciousness that reminds us that we’re more than what we produce and that we’re worthy of care.

I came across a book during graduate work whose title still haunts me: When Work Disappears by William Julius Wilson (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). The book is not without controversy as it argues how poverty came to exist in west Chicago because of manufacturing company flight. I am not writing, however, to discuss this argument or its controversy. I am writing about the title, which I cannot shake. It feels all too real; it is all too real for so many of us in theological higher education. This morning, I had a conversation with a good friend of mine, a colleague at another institution with whom I have walked during the last fifteen years in this field. They, unlike many aspiring and newly-minted PhDs, have full-time work. But they, like many PhDs already in the field, face the harrowing prospect of needing to find work elsewhere if they are going to make a living wage. It feels like a sucker punch to the gut when you confront the likelihood of needing to find work in a field that seems to get smaller by the year. You have trained numerous years only to be left facing the reality that full-time work is disappearing, and you wonder if a vocation can be had in a profession and field such as ours. I have more questions and curiosities than I do answers or proposals. Undoubtedly, you are reading this as I am writing it, with wheels turning about different macro-analyses and complexities to explain this upheaval: decreasing involvement in organized religion, generational attitudes towards the cost-value of (theological) higher education, the return on investment of this kind of education in future employment, and so on. This is not a tidy blog post that looks for answers or surefire solutions to very legitimate and far-reaching concerns. The primary intent of raising this topic is that I want to name publicly what many of us feel privately or at least discuss in smaller circles with trusted people. Our collective grieving is happening whether we widely acknowledge it in our respective learning communities, institutions, and guilds or not. Of course, there are theological academic institutions which will survive all of this. The financial wealth of some institutions, coupled with the social investment and concern for keeping these institutions alive, will help them weather the changes in the field. Innovative curriculum and flexible pedagogy might even stave off closure. These are promising trajectories. I wonder, though, how educators collectively, and individually, continue to keep vocation alive when they see their work disappear. Let me put it directly: When you lose (or are on the verge of losing) your faculty position or see colleagues lose theirs, what does this do to your vocation? There are many reasons why we get into the profession of teaching, mostly noble ones. I imagine that, at the heart, we get into teaching and become educators because of vocation. There is something in us that comes alive when we make an impact on the world and people through our teaching and scholarship. What then do we make of our vocation when our professional opportunities close? I do not ask this from afar. I experienced the disheartening reality of a school closure. I have worked on a vocational statement for the last thirteen years. I come back to it every so often as a probing and aspirational exercise. I ask whether this statement continues to describe who I am (probing), while I also look to the statement to guide me in who I am becoming (aspirational). After many revisions and wording changes, the commitment remains the same: my center, call, vocation, and fuel, is to help people live flourishingly. This is more challenging in today’s landscape because work is disappearing. I am adjusting as many of you are too. Checking in with a colleague, serving as a reference for someone doing all they can to secure a position, and having truthful conversations with colleagues as to why you voted to close the degree program they oversee—these are ways to currently express our vocation. There are other small and significant ways you and I keep vocation going. These are not novel ideas, but they take on a deeper quality because of the severe reality that collectively faces us. And if there is a shared vocation in theological higher education today when work disappears, perhaps this is it: that amid our vocation to teach and form is also a vocation to grieve loss in our field and to humanize people who make up and (hope to) carry out the field.