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CREATIVITY IS… Learning in the theological academy needs to be liberated. It has been held hostage by standards of appropriateness authored by voices and ideologies long gone yet holding on. They can be quite static and unmoving. The solution? Creativity. But I’m not sure if theological institutions are truly ready for her, for she asks for too much. Within theological education, Creativity needs honesty. She requires both desire and attention to possibility as well as a sense of duty to hold failed systems of current practices accountable. She is bold and voluminous; veracious enough to name when she does not have the appropriate room to thrive. She will, without hesitation, mention how crowded institutional elephants can make a room (no offense to elephants, they are simply not spatially conducive to a healthy theological education environment). Creativity does not hold her tongue, for limit might deter her potential. She announces how holding on to ill-fitting things and anachronistic ideas takes space away from her truest emergence. And theological education is, unfortunately, a space unaware of its spatial misappropriations. Colonial roots can do that to you. Well, what can faculty do to welcome her into their classrooms? “Faculty in theological education,” Creativity would say without pause, “are captives to the institutionality of teaching.” That’s not the answer we were expecting. “I can’t work well, here,” she would continue. “Here, I need the opposite, a spirit of the apophatic. I can tell you where something is by naming where it is not, how it is by how it is not. Here, I need partners who understand the beauty of this refusal—of crafting the necessary in the midst of a mantle of negation. I need dreamers willing to be anti-institutional within their institutions. This clash, of refining through refusing, is where I am.” We can ask her for elaboration: “What does it mean to be anti-institution?” “It means to be me,” she will answer with nonchalance. “But how can an anti-institution institution exist?” we will surely press. “Have you checked the margins?” she will rhetorically inquire.   ANTI-INSTITUTIONAL Check the margins. What will you find? Who will you find? Those who have historically been made the least of these. By virtue of their existence, many know Creativity and her bold requirements quite personally. To be creative in the theological academy means to actively resist the lure of traditional institutional priorities: maintaining the status quo financially and otherwise, re-enforcing institutional standards of rigor and knowledge, and continuing in the practice of institutional “speech-acts,” as Sarah Ahmed brilliantly calls them, where institutions claim their worded hopes of inclusion, diversity, and innovation as actual truth, though the world is aware they are not.[1] Creativity is naming where God is by illumining where God is not; remember, an apophatic spirit. To be sure, Creativity can exist within institutions; she has for years, but has she existed well? Freely? Is she permanent dweller or occasional guest? Is it possible, let alone desired, to make her host instead of hosted? To give her full reign of an institution? No. She is too risky. Total creative power would mean granting room for the ways of being and knowing that have always been in the room but have only known suppression. It would mean granting those who have been forced to make the margins their homes shared space in the center. And no one with institutional influence and say is interested in giving up the center. Creativity considers the historical pawns the priority instead of laborers towards the bottom line. The bottom line of budgets are amenable foes but not the only ones. The bottom line of certain standards of academic rigor, the bottom line of grades as the only means of intellectual analysis, the bottom line of fortifying academic structures created for the white men for whom theological education was created. Creativity wants—no, needs—not only the space of the classroom to leave a deep impression, but say over the entire structure of the theological educational system. Unprepared to acquiesce to such a demand, institutional heads will ask if it’s OK if she appears in the individual efforts of underpaid doctoral students, job-insecure adjunct educators, and exhausted minoritized faculty persons. She will reluctantly agree, or more like make do, but never stop asking in a nonchalant, rhetorical, inquiring tone, “Have you checked the margins?” There is a message in the margins: the classroom could be a space of influence—influence not synonymized as power, but a space where relationships between students and teachers, different forms of knowledge, and measures of intelligence can be reimagined. It can be a space where students’ experiences are taken seriously and where teachers do not have to take themselves so seriously. “Have you checked the margins?” How can the classroom become a platform for the periphery? What must be undone so that there is room for better? Many theological institutions still believe they must keep academic tradition for a church traditionally understood; Creativity instead asks, “What happens if minoritized students were the center in the classroom and institution as a whole? Do institutions want to learn their students? Do they trust marginalized experiences to be a true expression of the church universal?” “Have you checked the margins?” then is another way of asking, “Have you asked yourself?” [1] Sara Ahmed, “The Nonperformativity of Antiracism,” Meridians 7, no. 1 (2006): 104-126, especially 104.

A college friend of mine took his life by suicide when he was only twenty-two years old. The death occurred just weeks before I began seminary in 1987. Theological study offered me a refuge in which to grieve Bill’s death and to try to make sense of it. I wrote papers and talked with friends. I had dreams that allowed my psyche to release the burden of guilt and responsibility. Questions asked with intensity have lingered for years. Why could I not have stopped him from making this choice? Why did he do it? Recently, as I completed a book on embodied spiritual care, I realized that theological questions which try to make sense of suffering have over time opened a deeper awareness of the need to listen to and tend to our own bodies. Such engaged listening practice allows us “to keep on keeping on” when we cannot make sense. It also attunes us to our own pain and the pain of others. I teach listening skills in online and face-to-face classes. When I have modeled listening in the physical classroom, course participants always mention how little I speak. Given the chance, some of them would want to fill in what feels like a vacuum. Pastoral caring and spiritual listening requires attentive presence that leaves space for people to express themselves, to hear their own voices, and to sense God in the story. We also need to learn how to listen to our own bodies. During those role-plays, I pay keen attention to my body by noticing feelings and thoughts, whether and where anxiety is being experienced, and images that come to mind. The debriefing of a role-play in the classroom becomes an occasion for teaching how to pay attention to and make use of one’s own internal process. I draw on my body story and experience to teach others how to pay attention to their own. Over the years, I have used different strategies for teaching embodied spiritual practices. In a course on the spirituality of pastoral care and counseling, I once invited participants to engage in slow meditative walking within the courtyard at my school. Zen Buddhists call this practice of listening with the body kinhin, which means sutra walk. The students willingly gave it a try, but I quickly realized my own self-consciousness around exposing the class to the watchful eyes of staff and onlookers. I have since learned the value of teaching from a place of vulnerability and giving students the choice of how they want to participate. Experience in pastoral ministry informs my sense that listening to our bodies matters for the ability to care with others. Cultivating practices such as yoga, qigong, focused breathing, body scanning, and labyrinth walking, among many other possibilities, helps to access and release frustration, stress, sadness, and anger held in the body. The practices also help us to tap into delight, hope, and joy. Tending our own body story opens listening possibilities for receiving the whole of another person’s or a community’s story and experience. Pastoral ministry calls for such listening. Seminary classes and instructors have a role in curating experiential learning to undergird it. Online asynchronous classes offer valuable opportunities for embodied listening. In the privacy of a secure learning space without anyone watching, students may engage practices that help them tune in to their own body story and experience. On a cautionary note, I urge participants not to engage or to halt a practice if a traumatic response is hooked. This component of the class is completion graded. Full credit is given for briefly describing how or why a practice may or may not be beneficial. My observation is that experiential learning carries transformative power as students give themselves to the process. While I have fully expected some students to go through the motions on the exercises, I have been quite moved at the personal and theological insights most participants share. Some note working through reluctance or resistance to a practice only to find themselves surprised by what opens for them. Some dislike or do not connect to a particular practice and share their honest reactions. Others rediscover a practice that once sustained them. These are profound and not perfunctory reflections. I revel in reading them. Pastoral ministry calls leaders to embodied listening that is genuine and real in their encounters with others and the Holy. This teaching method facilitates listening to ourselves, to our bodies, as a base for that vital practice.

My dissertation advisor and I were discussing my recently written chapter. She believed the chapter needed more work, needed a rewrite. I was passively resisting her advice believing my words were …. good. In a stern tone, my advisor said to me, “You must learn to kill your babies.” Her tone of voice and message caught me off-guard and shook me. The gruesome phrase threw me into the grasp of “student-fear” – that crushing fear that grips learners when they think their teachers are disapproving and likely to abandon them. Until this moment I had known her to be enthusiastic about my work, supportive of my writing. I knew she believed in me and the book I was composing. In that moment I did not have a response to her command/suggestion/demand. In my silence, my advisor explained that everything that I write cannot be deemed by me as being precious. I listened over the landline phone trying not to disclose my disagreement. She chided me that everything I write need not be prized nor saved. I folded my arms across my chest trying not to drop the phone. I distanced myself from her words as she spoke them. She cautioned me that clinging to every word as I write restricts me, encumbers me, and does not allow me to fully engage that which I am writing. In a muffled voice, I disingenuously thanked her for her feedback. This advice was given me in 1998. I am still thinking about the meaning and still trying to live into the intent and wisdom.  It has taken several years to say I agree with her, and even more years to practice this necessary skill of creativity and homicide. The creative process, whether writing or teaching, is only narrowed by the unwillingness to get it wrong. It has taken time for me to learn not to archive that which I delete from a manuscript. The best lesson was when I lost many, many pages of copy (irretrievable copy - computer error!) only to realize that the rewrite was stronger, clearer, and more articulate. When I was foisted into this situation, I began to learn the full lesson of “kill your babies.” My advisor was right. On November 26, 2021, Stephen Sondheim died at the age of 91. Sondheim is rightfully considered one of the titans of Broadway whose music and lyrics elevated the American musical landscape. Sondheim was an artistic genius. He was a prolific observer of people. He used his observations as a pristine storyteller to make the ordinary exciting. His body of work is a creative triumph. I was watching Sunday morning tv when the news of Sondheim’s death was reported. The newscaster, seemingly a genuine admirer of Sondheim’s craft and legacy, recounted a quote. Apparently, Sondheim was famous for telling students and budding musicians, “You must learn to kill your darlings.” Of course, in this moment, my dissertation advisor reappeared to me. Sondheim, like my dissertation advisor, believed that until you doubt yourself and the world, you cannot bring forth real change, genuine artistry, and ingenuity. Until you are able and willing to discard the feeble attempt can the creative process assist you to write, sing, or teach the masterpiece. Too often the first attempts to emerge in the creative moment is the expected, the known, the tried and true. These are the darling babies for which there can be no time or attention. These babies must be killed. Getting rid of the darlings creates space for the un-expected, the new adventure, the genuine self-expression and needed voice. Too often the first attempts are reliant upon the contrived response, the constructed environments, the established rules, and accepted conventions. Creative triumph is not born out of complacence and mediocrity. As teachers of religion and theology, our imaginations have a responsibility to bring forth new expressions meant to engage the questions of the world with new answers. Let us not stand in our own ways by curtailing, restricting, or confining the creative process. What course(s) in your portfolio needs to be discarded and re-envisioned? What lectures in your introductory course need to be done-away with and reconceived? In what ways will we assist our students in learning the skill of killing their darlings?

Recently, I was sharing with my children that one of the first purchases I made when moving to a new city or state was a map. In the not-so-distant past (circa 1995), obtaining a map was of utmost importance for daily travel to visit restaurants, stores, and especially the homes of new friends and colleagues. This need for a map diminished when directions became accessible online, but I still relied upon step-by-step printouts from MapQuest in the days before smartphones. For the entire duration of my children’s lifetimes, which is roughly a decade, the notion of traveling with maps or printouts has been obsolete. Directions to and from anywhere are available at our fingertips. When we are driving to an unfamiliar location, my children are accustomed to instructions emanating from an automated voice on a mobile phone, not the crinkling sounds of a human peering at a paper map. When my children begin driving in a few years, I do not anticipate teaching them to read maps in the same way my parents taught me a generation ago. Rather, I will likely provide reminders about devices being sufficiently charged and issue warnings about the perils of multitasking on the road. Technological developments over the past twenty years have transformed our access to information in a myriad of areas, ranging from shopping for household items to researching academic subjects. This information explosion has altered nearly every facet of our lives, but I wonder if theological education is one arena, at least in some classrooms, where the teaching and learning operates as if we were still in the twentieth century. Although much of my journey as a masters-level seminary student coincided with the advent of the information explosion, my experience entailed a lot of rote memorization with a heavy emphasis on comprehension of content, such as the ability to regurgitate information, often in dreaded blue books, about significant persons, dates, ideas, and movements, without notes. I was also required to analyze this content, but only after I demonstrated an adequate grasp of the foundational data. For example, it was important that I knew from memory the chronological order and specific dates of Martin Luther’s theological writings before I offered commentary on the import, impact, and differences between Luther’s three treatises in 1520. My teaching as an historian of Christianity in the United States has eschewed any requirement of rote memorization. I believe it remains valuable to possess a clear trajectory of religious developments and some historical facts from memory, but I also recognize how the information explosion has made it possible to shift my pedagogical priorities toward method, praxis, and application. Access to historical facts is no longer confined to visiting physical libraries or purchasing books because this information is readily available online. But because history is a contested endeavor pursued from multiple perspectives and sometimes with malicious agendas, my aims are to meticulously cover historiography and trace with my students how history gets made. This includes comparisons of written histories utilizing different sources, such as the different presentations of world missions from the viewpoints of white missionaries from the United States and local Christian leaders across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. I don’t want my teaching to be “two-thousand and late,” which is a colloquialism derived from a song by the Black Eyes Peas criticizing modes of thinking or doing that are hopelessly outdated. I cannot teach with some of the same approaches as my predecessors and former professors. I am grateful for the ways they sparked my curiosity and stirred my mind, but my students and I are learning today amid an explosion of information, misinformation, and disinformation. A pedagogy centered on lecturing about historical content for three hours every week and then mandating that my students reproduce this content from memory feels as archaic as printing out directions from MapQuest. It is more exciting and effective to interpret, analyze, and apply the historical content together with my students. In studying the history and legacy of U.S. participation in world missions, we are grappling with the pernicious results of colonization and evangelization alongside the courageous and anti-imperial witness of some individual missionaries. After my students graduate, they may not remember when or where exactly these missionaries served overseas, but they can immediately recall this information on their phones and computers. What I want them to remember, as they plan short-term mission trips in their congregations, is our deep engagement with the moral questions and immoral failings of world missions, including Jomo Kenyatta’s observation: “When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.” Because I don’t want my students to repeat the mistakes of the past in their ministries, I must continuously adapt and revise my teaching to create more opportunities to connect historical content with contextual praxis.

For Gloria Anzaldúa, the borderlands are rooted in US-Mexico geopolitics in which the border wall is both a socializing project and an everyday policing structure. Although Anzaldua’s activist hermeneutic of the borderlands has a state of transcendence in view, it remains politically grounded given that her experience with borderlands is inextricably tied to a US-inflicted social wound on the people and the landscape. Here, political activism functions as a spiritual exercise, which, for Anzaldúa, was achieved through the power of the pen. In essence, her recourse to writing as a political act stemmed from her understanding of the power that archives have in defining identities and shaping social realities. In this sense, the border wall functions as an archive of US imperialism, racism, and anti-immigrant sentiments. Through her writings, therefore, she aims to trespass on this archive, or more specifically cross the border wall by offering a counter-reading of the history, culture, and beauty of ethnic Mexicans. The notion of border wall as both politics and an archive speaks to how borders and walls in general are the result of a cultural value system and shared social beliefs about the Other. The southern border walls separating the US from Mexico are a reality based on the widespread belief that ethnic Mexicans are entirely inferior and hence more prone to criminality. The genealogy of such myths can be traced to the mid-nineteenth century and the expansionist ideology of Anglo-American Manifest Destiny. This ideology relied heavily on a theology of providence, which, in turn, made the Anglo Protestant Church its most ideal ambassador. Thus, any trespassing on the archives that legitimate the current southern border wall must be attentive to the North American Church and its scientific and literal uses of scripture. For those churches acting more as agents of the state, crossing the border wall is considered not just a crime against the state but even more a sin against God. This conflation of state agenda and divine will is also operative in chaplaincy services provided in US immigration detention facilities, to the extent that convicted border crossers are led to accept detention and deportation as part of their Christian duty. In the US-Mexico borderlands, border-crossing points to a transgressive act; yet for an activist hermeneutic of the borderlands, this act of transgression can be harnessed in a methodological way, especially as it pertains to the interpretation of scripture and its interpreters. Just as Anzaldúas’ notion of borderlands helps us to reframe the hermeneutical enterprise as an awareness of and interchange with otherness, taking up border-crossing as a decolonizing reading strategy cannot avoid the US-Mexico border writings of Américo Paredes. Because Paredes’s border-crossing strategy operates primarily as a response to US expansion over Mexico’s northern territory, it is attuned to not only “border wall as archive” but also to “border wall as a colonizing discourse.” When applied to an activist hermeneutic of the borderlands, border-crossing as a strategy for reading scripture implies a transdisciplinary engagement with the biblical text and its interpreters. Although crossing and converging multiple-theoretical discourses is essential, the lives of everyday people in the borderlands attunes our social justice gaze toward the material and spiritual suffering of people rather than ideas alone. As Paredes reveals in his discursive border-crossings, the lived experiences of border people often fall out of view in the professional theoretical literature and hence in the classroom. The cultural values and rules of self-making that govern disciplinary boundaries tend to dismiss the cultural productions of the colonized Other, arguing that they lack critical-thinking skills, leadership instincts, and refined aesthetics. Crossing over the borders that regulate the dominant hermeneutical enterprise with the cultural archive of those wounded by US border walls is not only a transgressive move but more importantly a liberating strategy for minoritized communities of faith. Their lived experiences with empire, violence, and forced migration serve as a vital commentary to biblical texts that bear witness to some of the same wounds. Here the lived commentary of border people and the human traces in the biblical text interact in kinship ways, from common themes to the postcolonial traumatic condition. By transgressing the boundaries of the dominant hermeneutical enterprise in this way, readers expose the synthetic nature of various Western scientific methods and their inability to deliver on their positivistic promises. Also, the lived commentary of border people emerges with increased value within the professional literature, which, in turn, may lead to their revaluation in the social justice realm.

I’m teaching about race more and more these days. That wasn’t my plan. My training is in ancient Greek philosophy and I used to love teaching Aristotle and Plato. But things changed. Ten years ago, the ancient thinkers were great at helping the first-year students at my small Catholic college in the Northeast reflect on the world, society, and themselves. I can’t get it to work anymore. Because my first-years don’t read very well, the ancient writers are increasingly inaccessible to them. And they keep requesting more readings by people of color, women, and people who identify as LGBTQ. This befuddled me for years. I wasn’t assigned a single reading by a person of color in my philosophy grad school program, the only women we read were commentators, and all LGBTQ writers we studied were closeted, at least in their writings. None of this bothered me. I was interested in ideas, not people! Three things changed. First, I realized that marginalized people added different ideas to the conversation. They stressed different issues, and they challenged shared assumptions. Second, my students did better work when I assigned a more diverse set of readings. Third, our students of color began asking us to teach students more about race. They politely didn’t add that white faculty members like me should learn some stuff about race too, but it was implied. All this took on new urgency with the rise and power of the Black Lives Matter movement. I realized that to make sense of the world and their own role in it, our students need to understand race better, and they need to get better at talking about it without getting defensive or shutting down. And of course, I need to get better at it too. But how do I teach anything connected to race in a responsible manner when I know so little myself? This stumped me for a long time. I had trouble finding readings that felt right to me. And when I came up with something, I remembered that including only one thing by an author of color is tokenism, a sin possibly worse than an all-white syllabus. And then I was paralyzed again. I eventually decided to live with tokenism and to start small and simple: I just added Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” to my first-year gen ed class, combining it with Plato’s Crito to create a unit on civil disobedience and nonviolence. Once I felt comfortable teaching King, I gradually added other materials: Malcolm X’s “Ballot or the Bullet.” Selections from his Autobiography. Veena Cabreros-Sud’s “Kicking ass.” This semester, I added King’s arguments for nonviolence. Next semester, I might add a discussion on anger or a chapter by James Cone on nonviolence and Christianity. And I’m hunting around for a good video on the civil rights movement. I still feel like an imposter teaching this unit, especially when pedagogy requires me to speak as Malcolm X (I sometimes worry that there are secret videos). But I also know that it’s usually one of the most effective units in the class. Students who have seemed bored are suddenly interested. My (very few) black students get a chance to show off because unlike most of my white students, they usually know something about Malcolm X. Students bring up connections to the Black Lives Matter movement, and we try to think through what has changed and what remains the same. I still don’t know enough. My course could be diverse in a better way. Right now, all the black authors are talking about race, they are in a single unit, and they are almost all men. It’s a work in progress. But most of my white students have never heard of Malcolm X or a sit-in. What I do is much better than nothing and I learn a bit more each time I teach it. Perfectionism is the enemy here. It usually is. It’s OK to start small. Add a single piece. Don’t worry about how it fits into the course as a whole – students usually don’t see the overall structure anyway. Try and see how it goes. Next time, do a little more, do it a little better, or try something different. Learn. Grow. *Watch for two additional blogs in this series in December and January.   Resources Cabreros-Sud, Veena. “Kicking ass.” In To be real, edited by Rebecca Walker. New York: Anchor Books, 1995. Cone, James. Martin and Malcolm in America. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992. Cone, James. God of the oppressed. New York, Seabury Press, 1975. (See especially Chapter 9: Liberation and the Christian Ethic.”) hooks, bell. “Killing rage: Militant resistance.” In Killing rage: Ending racism. New York: Henry Holt, 1996. King, Martin Luther, Jr. I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches that Changed the World. New York, HarperCollins, 1986. (In addition to “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” see also chapter 15: “Nonviolence,” and 18: “Where Do We Go from Here?”) Mantena, Karuna. “Showdown for Nonviolence: The Theory and Practice of Nonviolent Politics.” In To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Srinivasan, Amia. “In Defence of Anger.” Four Thought, BBC Radio 4, 2014. X, Malcolm. “Ballot or the Bullet.”1964. (Transcript here and audio here.)

“This class goes soooo fast!” “Wait, we just started! … It’s over?” “Doc, time in this class flies by.” Recognizing when students are learning and when they are not can be a challenge. The above student comments are the kinds of feedback I yearned to hear. I would listen for how my students were engaging the materials and how the materials were engaging them. And, equally as important, I was listening for feedback concerning their experience of the course. Student feedback, even in the immediacy of a comment, can convey as much about student learning as reading their essays or grading their tests. When student comments were like those above, I knew I was achieving what I had planned. I knew I had suspended time in my classroom. Suspending time in the classroom has less to do with planning the content of a course and more to do with sculpting/choreographing/composing the learner’s experience in the course. We know that form and function are important to any kind of design. In using our artist’s eye, we know that form and function are operative dynamics in all teaching sessions. Function, clearly and normally in our wheelhouse, is attended to through learning outcomes, prescribed disciplinary literature and overall school curriculum. Form, attended to only sparingly and only by a few, needs our awareness and much work. Better learning happens when teachers intentionally plan the forms of learning activities rather than relying upon the stale and traditional. Better forms of teaching invite learners into experiences of being engrossed, immersed, or swept up – into new ideas, provocative assertions, or deep examinations of relevant problems, aspirations, and new knowledge. An indication that we have selected the better form for teaching is when students report an experience of time being suspended. We plan to suspend time in our classrooms so that students might become, for a little while, completely unself-conscious.  Orchestrating and choreographing learning activities to assist students with being less incumbered, less distracted, and less fearful during class requires teachers who are aware of and who revel in the flow. Entering into the flow is a common part of the creative process – a common part of daily living. Playing games like bid whist, backgammon, or video games where, at the end of the time together, it feels like time slowed as we enjoyed play, is a typical experience of the flow.  People report that while engrossed in common tasks like gardening, writing, reading, or spirited dialogue, they felt swept up or transported to a place of relief and joy. People watching sporting events, or those who participate as athletes report that during play worries melt, concerns are no longer burdensome, and they experience a sense of realness or even euphoria. The flow are moments of intensity that seem to defy time. Flow happens in classrooms when you and we love what we are working on and care about the students we are inviting into the mutual work of learning. An intensity is created. When we struggle to fall in love with our teaching work – when we can let go and work on what we are longing for, then classrooms have the possibility of giving way to flow, wading into flow, rocketing up to flow. Like the runner’s high or losing one’s self into the story while watching a movie, professors can create for students the feeling of being drawn up, swept up, in the best way. While there are many aims of teaching, few are as important as assisting students with being present, riveted, captivated while together in learning – experiencing the flow while learning in classrooms. A central goal of teachers is to learn to guide students into the ability to focus upon the task at-hand, the now, the here, the being with one another. The paradox is that we are trying, in the moments of being most present, to forget ourselves and our petty problems, and for that duration of a class session, work collaboratively on saving the world and our own lives. We are teaching so we and they can learn to let go. My suggestion for how to suspend time in classrooms might feel counter-intellectual. And, it might go against your pedagogical presumptions. My hope is that it will give you permission to tap more earnestly into your artistic self and creative processes. A key to assisting students in the classroom with the aim of better focus, resisting distractions, and being fully present, is, rather than demanding they think, invite students into activities of imagination, storytelling, and collaboration. Rather than reducing thinking to compliance with ideas and opinions, invite learners to work out complex ideas of injustice and formulate the activism, practices, strategies, and implications to do something about the injustices. There is no one way to suspend time for your students. And, the way one teacher achieves this magic will not be how another teacher achieves it. Each teacher will have their own way. Some colleagues make use of complicated student projects and learning activities. Other colleagues craft and hone their facilitation skills. I have vivid memories of being swept up simply by discussing taboo ideas, ideas for which I had not had previous opportunity to explore or consider. Complexity, provocativity, or any number of other techniques allow time to be suspended. “Professor! Where did the time go?”

Before I address the racism I experienced at Columbia Theological Seminary, I would like to introduce myself to those reading this. My name is DeNoire Henderson, I am a 26-year-old African American woman born and raised outside of Atlanta in two small towns, Stone Mountain and Snellville, GA. I received my B.A. in Communications and Culture from Howard University with a minor in Political Science. Before attending Columbia Theological Seminary, I spent three years teaching at a predominately Black and Hispanic school. My formal education from Howard University, personal experience teaching in the classroom, and my grade school education in a predominately white school district taught me the importance and impact of seeing yourself in the learning materials. There are hundreds of studies on the critical nature of increasing cultural diversity in classroom materials so that students “see themselves.” It is important that students’ cultures are represented, but it is equally, if not more important, how they are represented. During my time at Howard, I wrote a thesis on the indoctrination of inferiority and superiority complexes by television news media. Through my research, I discovered just how much representation impacts personal, social, and cultural identity. The scope of my work was limited to the impact of television news media, specifically, FOX News. However, my experience in education taught me that indoctrination in the classroom is just as powerful, maybe more so. In 2020, the world went through an incredibly difficult year. We were living through a global pandemic and suffering from all of the side effects: fear, trauma, sickness, grief, doubt, lack, depression, etc. Amid this, the world watched a defenseless black embodied man be murdered in broad daylight. We watched cities destroyed in the aftermath and continued to have the event replayed in our hearts, minds, and screens. As a black woman, this trauma ate away at me as I tried to find joy, peace, and community amongst my friends, family, and classmates while in isolation. Due to the nature of the pandemic, I saw my professors and classmates through zoom screens more than I saw my own family and schoolwork became one of the only constants in my life. Amid this, I received a letter from Columbia Theological Seminary in June of 2020 acknowledging their historical contribution to the oppression of those that look like me, stating they would be working to “repair the breach.” While I was proud of my institution for taking the stance of standing with me and those who look like me, I was not foolish enough to believe that the racism embedded in this institution would disappear overnight. However, I did feel safe enough to share my pain and hopeful about the potential healing that could happen in this place. Then, just eight months later, something happened that both shocked and rocked me to my core. In February 2021, during a theology lecture, my professor, Dr. Martha Moore-Keish, uploaded a lecture for the class to watch on the four stories of humanity. “First of all, I wanted to frame this week in terms of how it stands in relationship to the whole course and think about the concept of sin, and why it’s still something that is worth considering. The purpose of thinking about this concept of sin is simply to name as clearly as possible the alienation between ourselves and God. To name the brokenness of the world that has to do with the suffering of our relationship between ourselves and God and has to do with our harm that we do to ourselves, to one another, and to the world.” She then went on to share her screen to display images to help us see the four stories of humanity. This is the image she displayed to illustrate “what it means to be created beings, human beings as creatures created good and in the image of God. Creatures who are made in the image of God, who are also fully embodied. (12th-13th century Mosaic of Adam and Eve, Cathedral of the Assumption, Monreale, Sicily: https://www.christianiconography.info/sicily/originalSinMonreale.html)             This is the image that was used to illustrate “humanity as sinful having turned away from relationship with God therefore alienated from God’s intentions from the world and from our own well-being.” (PowerPoint Slide of Dr. Martha Moore-Keish, public domain source unknown)         This is the image used to illustrate “humanity as redeemed by God and Jesus Christ, drawn back into covenant relationship and made new.” (“The Return of the Prodigal Son” by Rembrandt (ca. 1667-1669): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_the_Prodigal_Son_(Rembrandt))             This is the image used to illustrate “human beings as oriented toward a future hope of perfect communion with God and with one another.” (“The Peaceable Kingdom” by Edward Hicks (1834): https://www.wikiart.org/en/edward-hicks/peaceable-kingdom-1834)             She then ended this portion of the lecture by saying, “So this just visually I hope reminds you of what we’re looking at over the course of the entire semester and to locate this week in the context of those four stories, now. This concept of sin has, I think we need to acknowledge, been harmful at some points to some people in human history, and so we need to acknowledge this.” In light of all that had transpired for me and was still transpiring for me, I saw my theology professor perpetuating the ideologies that made it possible for George Floyd to be murdered in the street. Black bodies represent “humanity as sinful having turned away from relationship with God therefore alienated from God’s intentions from the world and from our own well-being.” In isolation, the use of the black body to represent sin is not really the problem. This image juxtaposed with the other images of white bodies representing good, redeemed, and perfect humanity is the problem. I immediately closed my computer, too upset to finish the assignment. I screen recorded the lecture later that evening and sent it to other colleagues (some at Columbia and others studying and teaching elsewhere). I asked them to tell me what they saw, before telling them what I felt watching it. They all immediately saw the same thing. Some were as upset as I was, some were more upset, and still some more were apathetic, stating that they didn’t expect anything different from white people. “White people are incapable of seeing or being anything but racist.” I, however, refused to accept this as the norm. I was a student at a school committed to “repairing the breach.” I was being educated by professors who used culturally diverse theologians in their lectures, who attended marches, and wrote about decolonizing Christianity and dismantling Christendom. I would be lying if I said that the event did not make me angry. I was furious because my “well-meaning progressive white professor” was so insensitive to my soul embodied in black skin. However, this anger was not without purpose. It fueled a righteous indignation that forced me to speak up and email my professors. They were very receptive, and apologetic; however, Dr. Moore-Keish’s response (and current reflection) revealed that we have so much more work to do. She told me that she was blind to it and had been using the same images for several years. My anger then turned to sorrow for her, for the church, and for humanity. How deeply did racism have to be imbedded in such an educated being for them to miss this? She, the professor, the driver of the vehicle of our theological education, who had driven hundreds of students before us, was blindly leading. As I mentioned earlier, because of my formal education I am keenly aware of the value of my black body. I am keenly aware of the lies present in every level of our education system and society at large that tells me black is bad while white is good. My view of myself was not swayed by this distorted portrayal. However, I hurt for those who, like my professor, have not had their lens corrected and are leading others with blind spots that could be deadly. This situation is so much bigger than me, Dr. Moore-Keish, or Columbia. This zoom session represents a microcosm of a human issue. Dr. Moore-Keish rightly discussed the truth that our sin causes pain. I have reflected upon this for months and realize that while our sin does hurt others, it hurts us more than it ever could hurt others. While I walked away from this situation with more intentionality in how to pray that blind eyes be opened and hearts be changed, Dr. Moore-Keish walked away with shame. As she mentioned, many times, shame paralyzes us. In the following class, Dr. Moore-Keish didn’t even feel that she could pray to lead the class, her guilt and shame were that heavy. However, the sin of racism does not have the final say and neither does the shame that sin brings with it. I prayed to open class, not because I felt lofty and holier than though, but because I could see clearly. In this painful situation, I saw the grace of God and the blood of Jesus. I saw the cross. The heavy cross that looked like defeat to the natural eye but was truly victory. I saw an opportunity for generations coming behind me and everyone connected to those in this grief-stricken virtual classroom to learn the truth because of the cross that we came to in February 2021. Thank God for Jesus and the freedom of the cross that has the power to turn shame into surrender and surrender into sanctification. It is nothing but the redemptive power of Jesus that created the opportunity for us to write together about this event for the sake of helping and freeing others. The Bible says, “Confess your sins one to another and pray for each other so that you may be healed.” We are forgiven in Jesus but healed in community. A few verses before this text says, “And the prayer offered in faith will restore the one who is sick. The Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven” (James 5:15). So, we must confess, speak about the event, and pray for one another. Yet, there is another scripture that speaks about the activity of faith. “Faith without works is dead.” We can pray for racial reconciliation and the dismantling of racism until we are blue in the face, but we also must work to discern and avoid perpetuating systems that we are blincaud to. The work cannot stop with this reflection. Reflection must be continual and communal. It must be transparent to be transformative. It must be vulnerable to be valuable. It must be consistent to be effective. All of this would be in vain if this reflection is the only result. Education must continue, but not unchanged, unchecked, or unchallenged. Checkpoints must be implemented. Curriculum must be reviewed and revised, and not just in the imagery, but in the texts assigned, the examples used, etc. Is that more work for professors? Absolutely. But it is also more work for the disadvantaged. I type this paper after a long day of work, during my summer break, not because I want to add to the shame of my professor or pump my pride. It would’ve been easier for me to decline to speak about the event again. However, I have sight and feel obligated to walk alongside blind people who are trying to see because there are nations and generations following behind us that shouldn’t have to fall into the same pits we have. This moment was not about pictures any more than the crucifixion was about trees. The tree made the wood out of which the cross was constructed upon which my Lord was crucified. The cross was a mirror that showed the world its sickness and shame which the Lord died to redeem. Many saw a naked savior and felt defeat: Jesus felt the pain he bore but knew of the coming victory. He did not focus on the cross but made his focus the coming redemption. He did not become angry with the ignorant who nailed him to it but rather prayed, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” So, I won’t make this about the racist pictures we encountered upon the hill of theological education, because Jesus did not make his crucifixion about the cross. Instead, I will focus on the coming redemption and pray, “Father, forgive Martha, for she knew not what she did.” I will then accept and magnify the redemptive power of Jesus that was offered up when Christ arose from the dead as we rise from this. Sin was not eradicated when Christ rose, but the paralyzing power of the shame it brings was. *Read the accompanied blog by Dr. Martha Moore-Keish HERE

One photograph: a luminous dark body curved in upon itself, hands pressed to head. One photograph, chosen in haste and shown as part of a recorded lecture in theology class this spring. That’s all it took to bring me face to face with my own racism, and to trigger a torrent of shame. I offer the following reflections not to focus attention on myself, but to explore one particular experience of shame as a clue to what white privileged people might need to learn, in our bodies, about what it means to be human. I offer this as a testimony to what I am learning, dimly, in fragments, in my own body, about the pain we have inflicted on the bodies of others. I offer this as a snapshot of how shame might be an opening to the healing of racism. For the past 17 years, I have co-taught the two-semester introductory course in theology at Columbia Theological Seminary. Every time I teach on theological anthropology, I draw on a conceptual framework that I picked up long ago from Serene Jones to talk about the complexity of the human condition. There are four basic stories of humanity, I say to students, and all four are simultaneously true: we are created good in the image of God we are distorted (individually and collectively) by sin we are forgiven and redeemed we are drawn toward the future in hope for a day when all creation will be made new When we ponder the mystery of what it means to be human, it is vital to attend to all these dimensions to avoid major pitfalls in dealing with other humans. If we do not affirm that all are made good, in God’s image, we can invent division and hierarchy among different groups of humans, some imagined as more valuable than others. If we affirm that we are all made in the image of God but fail to grapple with the reality of sin, we do not tell the truth about the way that we wound each other, ourselves, and the world that God so loves. If we confront the reality of sin but do not also proclaim God’s forgiveness and transforming grace, then we have no hope. If we affirm that we are forgiven now but do not also announce the eschatological promise that God is not done yet, then we can lapse into complacency. We are complicated, fragile, wondrous, beloved, and unfinished creatures. Our theological anthropology needs to say at least this much. This is what I sought to remind students back in February, as we approached the week on the doctrine of sin. In my introductory recorded video, I repeated these four dimensions of humanity, each with an associated image to provoke reflection: an early mosaic of Adam and Eve in the garden (creation) a photograph of a (male) human being curved in upon himself (sin) a painting of the prodigal son welcomed home (forgiveness) a painting of the peaceable kingdom (eschatological hope) As you read this, you may already suspect the problem that emerged. But I did not. Not yet. Friday night, I recorded and posted the video, so that all the materials for the coming week would be available for students working ahead over the weekend. Tuesday morning, as soon as I turned on my computer, I discovered an email from a student naming the obvious racism in the images I had chosen as they were associated with the four stories of humanity: the images of Adam and Eve, the prodigal son and his father, and the little child in the peaceable kingdom all were portrayed as white. The only human being of color in the set of images was in the portrayal of sin. I had presented to my students the lie that white people represent goodness and forgiveness, while a Black person represents sin. Sick to my stomach, I could only shake my head in horror at my own blindness—my own sin. The student raised other concerns about the class as well, but it was the juxtaposition of images that was the trigger for their rightful pain and anger. That day and the days immediately following were a blur of conversations, confessions, and attempts to begin the long work of repair for the damage done. Nights did not bring much sleep. Over and over I replayed what I had done.             Why did I choose these images?             Why did I not see the implications?             I have used these same pictures before, and no one said anything . . .             Imposter. After careful consultation with colleagues, I posted a public apology and promised to try to do better. I listened as students described their pain. I tried, and failed, to focus attention on the harm I had done, rather than fixating on what I was feeling. Yet could it be that what I was feeling was itself an important clue to the harm I had done? The next day was Ash Wednesday. Lent came right on time. Almost immediately, I named for myself what I was experiencing with one word, in capital letters: SHAME. How could I have done this? How could I not have seen what my student saw? My grandfather spent a night in jail in 1930 to protect a Black woman from being lynched after she killed my five-year old aunt in a hit-and-run accident. My father worked in Selma in 1965 to register Black citizens to vote in the days following “Bloody Sunday.” My parents enrolled me in the first racially integrated preschool in the city of Tallahassee. I had been raised to protest all forms of racial discrimination. I knew better. I knew better. My knowing did not go deep enough. As I wrestled with shame, I sought wisdom from Brené Brown, who has spent years doing research on this emotion. Brown says that shame has two big tapes: “You are never good enough” and “Who do you think you are?” These are common tapes in my mental rotation, as I think they are for many women, including those in Black, AAPI, Latinx, and white communities.[1] These refrains reinforce my deeply held fear that in spite of the fact that I am trying my best, someone is going to find out that I am really inadequate to the task. I know these messages are harmful to me and they contradict my own theological teaching — that I am also good, made in God’s image, and am forgiven, justified, and free. The day I was confronted with my own racism, the Shame Tapes were all I could hear. I curved in upon myself, like the image I had chosen to represent sin. Never good enough. Who do you think you are? These loops stand in stark contrast to what scholars like Kerry Connelly describe as the story that many white Americans tell ourselves: that we are basically “good” people.[2] “Good people” do not intend to harm others. They mean well. More insidiously, as Connelly describes it, good people are “nice and never disruptive, and they value peace and comfort and the status quo.”[3] This tape, too, is well played in my head; though I rarely if ever describe myself as a “good person,” I often say it about others, to highlight their positive intentions even if a particular behavior was harmful. “They’re good people,” I might say, “They did not mean any harm.” This monolithic insistence on the goodness of the race one identifies with is obviously problematic, for many reasons. It reduces “goodness” to “niceness,” which has gotten twisted into “whiteness.” It confuses fundamental human value with nondisruptive human behavior that conforms to the status quo. In addition, it fundamentally masks the complexity of who we are as human beings—yes, created good in God’s image, but also deeply warped into patterns of behavior that harm ourselves, one another, and the earth. Despite Connelly’s focus on the tendency to see myself as “good,” on that day in February, and on the days following, it was hard for me to see any kind of “goodness” in myself. Instead, it was the shame refrain: “I am bad.” This is where Brené Brown focuses attention in her own research on shame. She points out that shame says, “I am bad,” while guilt says, “I did something bad.” Shame becomes a totalizing narrative enclosing a person in an identity as “bad,” while guilt focuses on a particular action as bad. Brown urges people to move from shame, which immobilizes, to guilt, which can motivate a person to change and do better. Brown has much wisdom here, rooted in years of research with people whose narratives of shame have prevented them from thriving as healthy human beings. Shame can be debilitating, even deadly. Too often, shame is connected with sexuality, particularly women’s sexuality. Young women are particularly vulnerable to being “shamed” for the way they dress or for engaging in sexual behavior. Shame in this sphere of life is surely problematic, reinforcing unhealthy views of gender and sexuality that need to be healed. Shame is also destructive in the world of addiction. My friend Jenn Carlier effectively documents the power of shame in her work on addiction and atonement theory. “The paradox of having some sense of agency and yet feeling compelled to keep drinking creates a space for the tremendous shame and self-loathing that perpetuate [drug] use. [One writer] says of her behavior, ‘I’m sick. I’m responsible.’ It is this combination of being sick and yet feeling the shame of moral failure that makes it so difficult for those struggling with addiction to get help.”[4] In the case of people suffering from addiction disorders, the experience of shame often becomes the driver for continuing to abuse substances, and the continuing abuse then feeds the cycle of shame. The constant reminder of being “never good enough” keeps people mired in patterns of self-destruction, preventing them from seeking help. Shame can clearly be destructive, especially when it is imposed by an external community that repeats the messages, “You are not good enough. You are a failure. Who do you think you are?” When these are the only messages that we hear, we hide from others. We curve in on ourselves, refusing to admit our need for help. It is especially problematic among marginalized communities, who often internalize messages of shame for “failing” to live up to societal expectations of financial success, behavior, physical appearance, or ability. This kind of shaming is not what I want to endorse. Yet I am convinced that the shame I experienced taught me something vital about myself, and about race and racism. While Brené Brown advocates moving from shame to guilt, I think that at least in some cases, and especially for those of us who carry privilege, shame is what we must face. Shame as a deep-seated, embodied encounter with my own failing is still the best word I can summon to describe what I experienced, and it revealed something I need to know. To call this simply “guilt” would be to reduce the problem to a single incident, an example of an action that I needed to confess, make amends for, and move on from. “Shame,” on the other hand, signals the depth and endurance of a problem in which I am implicated, for which I am partially responsible, and from which I cannot completely extricate myself. In this case, shame welled up as I confronted my own racist entanglement. It is precisely shame that reveals an important truth about who I am—and who we are. Wrestling with painful shame offered me a dim awareness of the horrific pain endured by members of the Black community—including the real pain of my own student, which I had exacerbated by my thoughtlessness thoughtlessness.[5] Further, shame does not have to immobilize us. A recent Rabbis for Human Rights essay offers this insight into the positive side of shame: “A remarkable teaching in the Babylonian Talmud (Nedarim 20a) reads: a person who has no shame, such a person’s ancestors did not stand at Sinai. I don’t read this as genealogical research, but as ethical teaching. To be heirs of those who stood at Sinai, to stand ourselves at the foot of the mountain, means not only to affirm identity. It means to take responsibility.”[6] Shame then, rather than immobilizing us, can ignite responsibility. I am starting to think that “shame” is another way of naming what some Christians have called a deep awareness of original sin: the truth that human beings are infected by inexplicable tendencies to harm ourselves, others, and the world around us, to turn away from the holy and loving Mystery we call “God.” In my case, shame shocked me into recognition of my own complicity in the sin of racism, as well as offering a tiny hint of the destructive kind of shame experienced by Black people and other marginalized persons. Shame, in at least this case, can be an engine for empathy and change. Of course, this is not the end of the story, but just a beginning. Much as I hate to admit it, I fully expect to run up against shame again, to be faced with my failings again and again, to feel that sickness in the pit of my stomach. I hope, however, that having named it this spring, I will be better equipped to acknowledge it for the revelation it is, and to hear the Shame Tape not as a single voice in my head, but as one truthful voice among others that I need to hear. The real danger is not the experience of shame itself, but the experience of shame by itself, as the only story of who we are. Just as it is problematic to tell a single story of “goodness” without the truth of sin, so too it can be deadly to experience shame without also being told “you are forgiven. You are still beloved.” The courageous student who wrote to me back in February to call out my racism in the classroom has shown remarkable patience and grace in our ongoing interactions. In spite of exhaustion and pain in the wake of that week’s presentation, the student continued to show up to class discussions, alert and engaged, ready to discuss the readings and offer insights. They also offered forgiveness (accompanied by an appropriate call to accountability). In so doing, this student enabled me to see myself not as locked into the narrative of shame, but as someone who might be transformed by grace. Mine is not a simple story of sin moving to redemption. Instead, my experience this spring has deepened my understanding of the complexity of what it means to be human. I am not just one story. Rather than telling a single story about ourselves, or simply moving from one story to another (with the corresponding risk of premature closure), I think it is more appropriate to recognize that we are complex creatures, living multiple stories. We are AT ONCE beloved and corrupted, forgiven and unfinished. Several years ago, one of my daughters shared with me the work of Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie, who gave a now-famous TED Talk in 2009 on “the danger of the single story.”[7] I’ve been thinking about this, too, in light of what happened this spring. Adichie reflects on her own experience of growing up reading British and American children’s books, which led her to assume that there was only one story of what books are, and what childhood is like. When she discovered African literature, she realized that there were other stories that could be told—stories that included people who looked like her and lived like her. Later, when she came to college in America, her roommate was shocked by Adichie’s elegant English because the roommate had a single story of Africa that shaped her perception of what all African people must be like. On her first visit to Mexico, Adichie confronted the danger of the single story in herself. “I was overwhelmed with shame,” she says, when she realized that she had assumed that all Mexicans were one thing: “the abject immigrant.” “I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself.” If we tell a single story about other people, it narrows our understandings of others into stereotypical assumptions, usually based on stories told by those in power. Adichie illumines this point powerfully. And she has helped me to see the further point that we need multiple stories not only of other people, but also of ourselves. I have taught this before, but shame has shown me the truth of it in a new way. If I do not affirm that all people are made good, in God’s image, I invent division and hierarchy among different groups of humans, some imagined as more valuable than others. That is what my image choices conveyed. If I affirm that we are all made in the image of God but fail to grapple with the reality of sin, I do not tell the truth about the way that we wound each other, ourselves, and the world that God so loves. That is the truth that shame is teaching me. If I confront the reality of sin but do not also proclaim God’s forgiveness and transforming grace, then I have no hope. That is the possibility of transformation that my student and my colleagues are offering me. If I affirm that we are forgiven now but do not also announce the eschatological promise that God is not done yet, then I can lapse into complacency. This is where my work lies. We are, all of us, complicated, fragile, wondrous, beloved, and unfinished creatures. Thanks to the student who called me out, I am learning more deeply the truth of what it means to be human.   *Read the accompanied blog by DeNoire Henderson HERE   [1] Recent psychological and sociological research is exploring how shame functions in distinctive ways in different cultural communities, but with similar messages of not being worthy or good enough. [2] See Kerry Connelly, Good White Racist? Confronting Your Role in Racial Injustice (Westminster John Knox, 2020). [3] Ibid., 11. [4] Jennifer Carlier, Finding God in the Basement: Addiction and Metaphors for Salvation, PhD dissertation (Emory University, 2021), 37. [5] Psychotherapist Joseph Burgo helpfully distinguishes between productive shame and toxic shame in a way that resembles my own hunch: https://www.vox.com/first-person/2019/4/18/18308346/shame-toxic-productive. In addition, many of the essays in On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency edited by Suzana Milevska (2016) are also working along these lines: https://mitpress.mit.edu/contributors/suzana-milevska. [6] Michael Marmur, Rabbis for Human Rights email newsletter, 5/13/2021. [7] https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en#t-10322.

How does my teaching connect the learning in my seminary classroom with congregations? As an historian of Christianity in the United States, I am aware that theological education has primarily adopted a trickle-down approach to answering this question—a trickle that flows from professors to students to congregations such that the students are the conduits connecting faculty like me to the many persons and messy challenges in their churches. The traditional method entails professors equipping students to take what they learn and apply it as religious leaders in their churches or church-related agencies. This model relies almost entirely upon students. The professor has one task whereas the student has at least two. Professors are responsible for teaching their subject matter with lectures, discussions, assignments, and exams. Yet, students must first demonstrate comprehension of the subject matter in the given coursework and then discern how to utilize what they have learned in their present and future ministries. The way that professors help to produce congregational transformation and social change in this paradigm is through their students. Professors teach their students well and these students then lead their congregations with the analytical tools in biblical interpretation, pastoral care, and theological ethics they acquired in the classroom. In other words, the instruction of the professors reaches a multitude of congregations through their students. When the semester is complete, it feels like the professor says to the student, “I can’t go with you to your congregation, but you have my lecture notes, required textbooks, and commentary on your research paper. All this, along with the grace of God, will be sufficient for you. And I guess we can stay in touch by email.” When I was a seminary student, the process of synthesizing and applying my theological education to my congregational ministry was entrusted to me to figure out by myself. The faculty at my predominantly white seminary conveyed little interest in my personhood as an Asian American and my ministry in a multigenerational, bilingual, and immigrant congregation. In some courses, I felt as though I left my personhood at the door before walking into the classroom to learn about the supposed superiority of theological frameworks and doctrinal formulations shaped by an assembly of white men in seventeenth-century England. Even in the courses in which my personhood was welcome into the classroom, there were not opportunities to integrate what I was learning there with the congregations I had come from and was headed to after graduation. Like my faculty colleagues in theological education today, I am committed to avoiding the mistakes of my past teachers and forging a better pathway for my students. None of us declare that we are going to do things exactly like they have always been done. And yet, how does our teaching directly and effectively connect the learning in our classrooms with the congregational contexts of our students? In the first few years of my teaching, I devoted time in every class session to prompting students to share about both their congregations and how the subject matter at hand would be received in their congregations. These discussions were insightful, raw, vulnerable, and generative. In recent years, I have made this kind of congregational synthesis and application more explicit in my pedagogy. In addition to discussions, I require students to reflect deeply about their congregational contexts and offer precise analysis connecting our lessons and assigned readings to their contexts, along with the opportunity to express moments of either detachment or potential division. For example, one prompt calls upon students to present a thick description of their past, present, or future congregation. The subsequent prompts ask students to first construct specific ways they would apply what they have learned from the assigned readings and lessons within such a congregation and then identify the promise and peril of their applications to uncover what is at stake for both their leadership and their congregation. My teaching confronts the long histories and ongoing legacies of racial prejudice, gender discrimination, economic exploitation, and LGBTQIA+ exclusion in American Christianity because I believe it is necessary for seminary classrooms to grapple with, rather than gloss over, past sins and present consequences. I am also convinced that my teaching must employ collaborative pedagogical processes in which my students and I work together to develop strategies and refine skills to help foster incremental change in congregations. Some of our congregations are committed to intersectional justice and social change whereas others are fiercely resistant to Christian approaches that disrupt familiar systems and theologies of race, class, gender identity, sexuality, and American exceptionalism. Bringing our congregations into the seminary classroom is therefore a sobering enterprise that is sometimes more dispiriting than inspiring. But too much is at stake to leave our congregations at the door.