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As a theological educator, I’m used to having to make a case for why studying the history of religious movements in the United States is exciting. It’s very common to hear students say at the beginning of a course that history is boring or tedious or not worth their time. “The history of religious movements is in a lot of ways old gossip,” I counter, “Sex, violence, power, persuasion, reversals of fortunes, adventures, and misadventures—who doesn’t want to hear about that?” More often than not, students come around to my way of thinking. While history often gets (erroneously!) categorized as a “boring” field, until recently I took for granted the idea that democracy was inherently interesting to students of religion in the United States. The long, sometimes inspiring, often problematic history of rejecting monarchy and the divine right of kings in favor of democratic self-governance had theological underpinnings from the start, and many historians argue that the United States is so religious and also so creatively religious in part because of its democratic form of governance. I discovered, entirely by accident, that some of my Millennial and Gen Z students—many of whom come from privileged, white, middle class, Protestant families—are bored by democracy. Last year, before a session of my course on American religious history, I overheard a group of students discussing an essay they had been assigned in another course: Václav Havel’s “Forgetting We Are Not God.” In his speech given to an American audience, Havel, the leader of the Czeck Republic’s nonviolent “velvet revolution,” argued that thriving democracies depend on “reverence and gratitude for that which transcends each of us singly and all of us together.” I expected vigorous debate among them. Was Havel’s claim that democracy depended on a sense of the transcendent sound? Did it make sense to give democracy this kind of theological construction? Would Havel’s work hold up in an increasingly diverse citizenry? Was Havel’s democracy good for the world? What were the downsides when it came to public life in the 21st century? What were the benefits?  “I’m sorry,” said one student, “but I don’t get this. Democracy, ok, it’s a big deal.” Several others agreed. Two shrugged. They moved on from the topic. Dear reader, I was stunned. I was ready for disagreement and debate. I was not prepared for disinterest.  Every professor probably experiences a “kids these days” moment, and this was mine. As a Cold War kid raised during the Reagan era, I took for granted the idea that my students would be interested in evaluating American democracy. Like many others of my generation, I had been inundated with a distinct anti-fascist, anti-communist imagination through film. Indiana Jones punched Nazis in the face. Maverick—undisputed Top American Gun—bested Soviet fliers. Scrappy American kids in Colorado sabotaged communist invaders.  The net result for many who came of age in this era could be described as a very flawed pro-democracy imagination. American Cold War blockbusters offered a moral universe that was jingoistic, imperialistic, consumeristic, offered a cartoonish portrait of alternative systems of government, and was often just plain silly. But, especially for young watchers, it was also vibrant. The heroes were cowboys in one way or another, and the villains were vanquished through explosions, punches, and the heroes’ anti-communist, anti-fascist swagger. Children may not have learned much about democracy and its virtues and vices, but most kids watching blockbusters in the 80s knew which side they wanted to be on: the side of cool jets, the Holy Grail, and, of course, democracy.  The moment I saw my students shrug in response to Havel’s claims was the moment when I realized that for most of my students, the enthusiasm for the United States as a democratic “city on a hill” that characterized so many films from the Reagan era has been replaced by different imaginative worlds. The students I now teach do not name Nazi-defeating archaeologists or Soviet-busting US Navy fighter pilots as their cultural touchstones or moral influencers. When I ask what pop culture has shaped their understanding of the world, they are more apt to name the magical worlds of Harry Potter or the post-apocalyptic adventures of The Hunger Games.  I also learned that theological educators in general, and historians of religious movements in the United States in particular, are especially well-positioned to explore democracy as a generative theological concept.  If the last national election taught us anything, it’s that democracy is a contested concept in the United States. A few months ago, Rev. Sen. Raphael Warnock gave a robust 21st century theological argument for democracy on MSNBC News. “I believe in democracy,” he stated, “I believe that democracy is a political enactment of a spiritual idea. This noble and amazing idea that all of us have, within us, a spark of the divine, the imago dei some sense of the image of God and therefore we ought to have a voice in the direction of the country and our destiny within it.” In his soaring rhetoric, Rev. Sen. Warnock gave voice to one of the biggest “big ideas” that has shaped religious life in the United States. For Warnock, democracy was and is an energizing theological concept as well as a form of governance. Indeed, some of the most pivotal figures in American public life—Roger Williams, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer, and many, many others—have also voiced strong opinions about whether or not the nation was living up to its democratic ideals. 

As we finish this semester, it might be a good exercise to look back and see what worked, what didn’t quite work, and what will never work. Student evaluations often convey needs or anger or unfocused frustrations; very little that can actually teach us, so we must ponder our own little achievements and many frustrations. At each semester’s end, it would do us good to ponder what a classroom might be and what we can do in that environment in relation to the larger social-political arena we live in now. In a short excerpt from an interview,[1] Gilles Deleuze speaks about the classroom less in terms of mediating processes of apprehension and comprehension, and more in terms of movements and processes of becoming. He contends: “A class does not have as its sole objective total comprehension [of a subject matter] . . .  A class is an emotion . . .  It is not a matter of understanding and absorbing everything. It is a matter of awakening in time to capture that which is meaningful [to our own realities].” In his Difference and Repetition, Deleuze speaks of experiences that force us to awaken, to feel, not merely to comprehend something novel: “this something is an object not of recognition but a fundamental encounter,” he writes.[2] The arts are capable of generating such encounters—they undo the seams of our limitations, habitual circumstances, belief systems, values, and knowledge to weave the invisible back into the perceptible. Beyond a representation of subjects, facts, history, data, encountering art affectively allows us to sense and not cling to the world as it is but to imagine it more expansively, with further potential becomings. As such, the arts require the totality of our beings-in-bodies to be present and to co-create our realities anew—whether in classrooms, art galleries, the streets, or in the intimacy of our closest communities. Artistic manifestations often allow us to access and connect, individually and collectively, with what is meaningful, potentially generative, and ultimately transformative. It is less about fully understanding the world as such and more about being alert to discover the opportunities that this world offers us. For that to unfold, we must rise, we must awaken! We must be willing to co-participate in this unfolding. There is no room for passive observation here. We must be willing to move from dormant complacency into the position of co-creators, conjuring up new possibilities of being. Julia Kristeva describes this aesthetic awakening with a reminder that our bodies must take part in the experience with art not only to contemplate the art object but also to sense it. She writes: “The ultimate aim of art is perhaps what was formerly celebrated under the term of incarnation. I mean by that a wish to make us feel a real experience [in the body]” through lines, colors, sensations, abstraction, volume, textures, and participation.[3] The arts are poised with the power to remind us to celebrate our body-realities. As Mayra Rivera puts it, works of the imagination allow us to move beyond the limits of our earthly flesh and encounter God as we strive to transform this world. Seeing and touching and moving and speaking and feeling is participation in theopoetics—an articulation of the character of God understood through our embodied, affective experiences.[4] Brazilian visual artist Lygia Pape’s performance piece entitled Divisor (1968) does just that: it probes the limits of our sensorial and psychological conditions, relying heavily on the physical, embodied, affective, and—most importantly—collective participation of viewers. Divisor is at once performance and sculpture, interweaving bodies of spectators/participators, physical space, mobility, and artwork in a literally moving piece.[5] Originally performed in the city of Rio de Janeiro in 1968, this performance was re-enacted in the streets of New York on March 26th, 2017, in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[6] Comprised of a 30-meter, white cotton fabric in the shape of a square, the piece has two hundred holes symmetrically perforated in the fabric through which viewers are invited to “wear” the sculpture, so to speak. Once 200 co-participators and co-creators are properly positioned, they are invited to enact a procession while wearing the artwork. Pape’s white fabric reposed over the shoulders of the participants, isolating the rest of the body, allows a commanding procession to take place. The effect is both poignant and powerful: a multitude of differently “bodied” people, unified by what takes on the shape of undulating waves, moves through the public arena in a procession. Their movement transmutes precariousness into potency. The work of art highlights the simultaneity of the shared life of those present: their bodies both tied to one another and acting upon one another, are transformed by one another. Such “imbrication of bodies in the fabric of the world,” as Rivera puts it, facilitates a union of sorts. What works of art such as this require of us is an awakened presence that is able to move forward in solidarity, entanglement, capacious resistance, and, most importantly, with response-ability, to borrow Catherine Keller’s language. How can we teachers conjure up opportunities in our classrooms that resemble the communal potency of Divisor? As the semester draws to a close and we reflect on strategies for learning and teaching and living, we ask ourselves: how can we wake that which is dormant inside of us? If another reality is possible, how can we work towards its actualization? How can we even keep the love of teaching when our very schools are crumbling down? How can our very understanding of education continue to produce a teaching-wonder and teaching-resistance that is so fundamental to the fullness of our lives and our communities? Knowing the dazzling possibilities of education and the dangers entailed in it, we are required to place the practice and the thinking of education in relation to the structures of our time. And we don’t live in the easiest times. Educators are rapidly becoming dispensable people who are supposed to teach whatever it is that has no critical engagement. In Brazil, for instance, a growing number of people are calling Paulo Freire to disappear from curricula. He is accused of being an ideologue, a communist whose education project aims only to destroy the values of family and country. Just recently, Judith Butler was almost physically attacked at the Sāo Paulo airport by a Brazilian woman who saw in Butler’s feminist and queer theories a threat to what she understood as the “traditional” Brazilian family. In the US, education, like health insurance, religion, among a great number of other things, has come to be understood as a private value dependent on individual efforts. Having been taken hostage by neoliberal systems, education must “produce” something, preferably at a profit. In this model, students must be treated like customers—education is less about formation than production, like an assembly line. The assaults by the Department of Education, the constant push to make education a matter of corporate profit and endless student debt, the targeting of colleges as a bad thing for the life of the country, the cutting of educational budgets for the sake of “austerity plans,” the creation of prison systems, the loads of money the Koch Brothers injected into higher education, the Senate Tax Bill that was passed recently, all form a narrative worthy of Dante’s Inferno. If education should only serve to produce people to fulfill the lines of jobs, the endless testing and precise measurements of syllabi begins to make sense. No wonder many of us in the classrooms have become apathetic and anesthetized. If one was able to go to AAR this last November and paid attention to the conversations that happened in between the academic sessions, you would know that the plight of so many educators is dire. I heard a professor saying to a friend at the exhibition hall: “I have been battling for 3 years now and I can’t continue doing adjunct jobs. This is my last year trying to find a job, or I will have to find something else to do. I can’t keep living this way, I have a family.” If the classroom and school bring daily struggles, embarrassment, precariousness, and even humiliation to our colleagues, how are we to keep our love of teaching? It is easy for me Cláudio to say, let us keep on loving our teaching and do it the best way we can. But I have a good job with great colleagues. Yohana who co-writes this blog post is a Ph.D. candidate. Will she ever find a good job? We need to engage our profession with a more critical sense of what it means to us, and how it can be made more expansive and sustaining. How can we support and accompany our colleagues who contest the violence of a plutocratic state, the erosion of our communities, the criminalization of protest, rising poverty, constant blaming of the poor, debt, emotional and physical exhaustion of those who are poor? There are no easy answers. There were never any easy answers. Perhaps we can start by thinking that our classrooms are places where we can still be awakened, that every time we meet we can raise up what was dormant in us. Perhaps we can discover that we need to pay attention to our emotions, our bodies, the communities that are formed in each classroom. Perhaps we ought to find better and more sustainable technologies of self and communal awareness, or spiritual practices that can become resources for our constant battle against the empire and its neoliberal systems. Perhaps we can also see our gift to teach as a way of positioning ourselves: first within ourselves, and then as a way of positioning ourselves in the world. Perhaps . . . . [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ln2A0fkA78 [2] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 139. [3] As quoted in Stephen Bann, “Three Images for Kristeva: From Bellini to Proust,” in Parallax, 1998, vol. 4, no. 3, 64–65. [4] You can see more of this articulation in Rubem Alve’s work. [5] Fernanda Pequeno, Lygia Pape e Helio Oiticica: Conversações e Fricções Poéticas (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Apicuri, 2013). [6] Metropolitan Museum of Art *Blog Originally Published on December 14, 2017

Have you ever asked a question in class for which you did not know the answer; a question for which you did not have THE one answer in mind? Have you ever planned an assignment or designed a learning activity that was so freewheeling that you did not know what was going to happen? What kind of teaching requires the teacher to be comfortable not knowing what will happen next or ever? I suspect it is teaching which is attentive to the personalities, dreams, capabilities, fears, and know-how, of each student in particular, and the entire class as a whole. Knowledge of each student allows for learning activities, group assignments, selected reading materials, and course aims which are sophisticated, risky, and precisely designed for the times at hand and the diverse contexts for which the students must be prepared to lead. My hunch is that we too typically create assignments for which the answers and outcomes are forecastable because we have not taken the time to know who is in our classroom. We have specific ideas, standards, and quantifiers for the student to “get it right” with little understanding of the student’s individual life experience or knowledge base. Students in turn, while navigating the current educational system are brilliant at analyzing each professor’s wants, then giving that and only that. Professors’ quirks are a text that is read, understood, and traversed as much or more as the content materials of our courses.  Hallway gossip and faculty reputations assure us that adult students are experts at studying the grading habits and personality types of teachers. In other words, teachers teach with strict disciplinary maps and scripts - a strict adherence to formulaic curriculum – a kind of one size fits all students. The questions and the answers are charted out and planned before gathering with students. Students strain as much to learn the formula of the prescribed script as they do to learn the content of the script. They ask, “Is this going to be on the test?” They say, silently or out loud, “Just tell me what you want me to tell you back?” Students learn the ways of gaming the system better than they learn the content of our courses. What if our prescribed assignments are a detriment to our student’s ability to be effective in the workforce? What if scripted outcomes serve only to further domesticate learners? What if the lack of open-ended exploration champions mediocrity rather than excellence? I suspect it will take creative bravery to reshape, rethink, reconceive our classrooms. And not just creative bravery in-general, but bravery which prioritizes learning our students, their uniquenesses and their potentials. The good news is that creative bravery is commonplace among artists and people who understand creativity as a way of life. The challenging news is that this kind of bravery is suspect and punished in the current educational system. A clip that went viral on social media depicted the ritual of an elementary school teacher meeting his students each morning at the doorway of their classroom. The daily ritual was to shake hands with each student each morning. Each student had a unique handshake for greeting the teacher and the teacher knew the unique handshake for each student. Some of the handshakes were simple – one or two gestures. Other handshakes were complex – looking more like a dance between student and teacher than a traditional handshake. It was clear to me that this kind of welcoming communicated to each student that he/she/they were seen and known by the teacher. This was a powerful expression of a teacher who understood the necessity of each student feeling their distinctiveness, being in relationship with the teacher, and knowing they were seen.   When students feel seen, known, and welcomed in classrooms, learning improves, deepens, and becomes more meaningful. The myth of teaching for one-size-fits-all is possibly the worse practice of our teaching craft. We must grapple with finding ways to identify and honor that which each student brings into the classroom because each brings uniqueness. In a jazz band, no one expects all the musicians to play the same instrument – that would be ridiculous. No one criticizes the drummer for drumming or the saxophone player for playing the sax. Each musician is expected, required even, to bring what they have in the way that they have it; in their own voice. Each instrument is required to make the sound of that instrument. Consider then, that each student should be expected to bring their unique voice and particular understanding to the collective composition of the classroom and that the teacher must welcome all the different kinds of voices. Creativity requires diversity. The band leader’s job is not to strip the musician of their uniqueness or their sound, but to blend, sculpt, highlight, spotlight and listen. The leader’s job is to know the many voices and create ways of showcasing each potential contribution.  One of my ongoing frustrations while I was on a teaching faculty was that by the end of my introductory course I felt as if, now, I knew my students well enough to teach them, but our time was up. It took time, a semester or longer, to learn to hear them, to be able to sense their concerns, learn their sensitivities and sensibilities, and to relate my expectations for their learning. By the last day of class, I knew their patterns, their vocabulary, their senses of humor and how to alleviate some of their fears. By the last day of class, it felt as if I could NOW shake their hands or ask them truly open-ended questions or give them innovative learning assignments for which I had crafted with each one in mind. Forming relationships with our students takes time that is so often not built into our typical models of education.  There is an intimacy that occurs between learner and professor that only happens in the relationship of teaching. It is a profound experience to be seen by a respected teacher and told that, as a learner, you have what it takes. These relationships are potentially life giving and life changing. These relationships are not formed when classrooms operate on a factory mentality where student needs are relatively inconsequential to the teaching. The intimacy shared between teacher and learner makes vivid the humanity of each. Classrooms are spaces where the vulnerability and openness of the adult learner can be met with hope, empowerment, reinvigoration of curiosity, and healing imagination.  This pedagogical intimacy was made vivid to me the first time I read a letter of recommendation written for me by my graduate school professor, advisor and mentor. The letter described many of the attributes and capabilities I knew I possessed. It also discussed his vision for my potential, my promise, my likely successes as a scholar and religious leader. Much of the budding possibility that he described - I was unaware of. And, until reading his letter, I was unaware that he had seen me so well. My mentor, for the three years of study, had paid attention to me in our courses and as I worked as a research assistant. This letter humbled me and set an expectation for which I have been striving.  In contrast, as a reader of applications for jobs, grants, or other high-level projects, I have read letters of recommendation which demonstrate the writer has no passion or knowledge of the applicant. The letter is perfunctory – a kind of mechanical formula which might fit any person who sat through a course and for which, now, there is an obligation for recommendation based upon an exemplary grade.  I have actually read the same prose in a letter submitted by one recommender for two different people (oopsie!). It is clear that the writer of the letter did get to know the student and cannot earnestly recommend the applicant. Many awards have been denied based upon the weakness of a flimsy recommendation by a person who wrote a one-size-fits-all recommendation. If we do not get to know our students, we cannot recommend them for anything. Teaching at a distance during quarantine has strained and taxed our teaching communities in ways we have not yet fully lived. I suspect we have lost intimacy with our students. The physical separation of teaching synchronously or asynchronously coupled with the lack of casual interaction in the hallways, cafeterias, and school assemblies has frayed our relationships and weakened our educational communities. The content of our courses is paramount, but without deep relationships with our students, teaching rings like a hollow bell.  There is something intangible and irreplaceable about being face-to-face with students as they learn and grow. What would be needed to get to know students who are enrolled in your course before planning the course? What exercises might you plan for the first weeks of a course which would enable you to see, feel, and hear the potentials of our students so that lesson planning might be more precise? What learning activities can be tailored to the uniquenesses of each student?  What would it mean to plan a syllabus which can be refined as students become more vivid to you throughout the semester?  What kinds of community activities will need to be designed for those who entered degree programs during the quarantine resulting in only being known through online mediums? If you are teaching huge classes, what strategies will enable you to get to know students? The risk of  getting to know our students is, I suspect, well worth it.

In Interfaith Justice and Peacemaking, an integrative core class which explores the history of tolerance, intolerance, and interfaith efforts in the United States, one of the core texts we use is Eboo Patel’s Out of Many Faiths: Religious Diversity and the American Experience (2018). Central to Patel’s argument is that America needs new, more inclusive civil religious narratives. His book chronicles some of the ways in which Americans have expanded civil religious narratives in the past, however imperfectly, through the invention of the phrase “our Judeo-Christian heritage” in the mid-twentieth century as well as through expanding notions of whiteness. According to Patel, we are at a pivotal juncture in our nation’s history. We need new narratives. Without them, whole swaths of people will continue to feel unwelcome and alienated, and since the health of our civil society depends on civic participation from all of its citizens, our failure to create new, more inclusive stories of who we are could have disastrous consequences. In Out of Many Faiths, Patel focuses on the Muslim-American experience in particular, highlighting ways in which Muslims have been excluded from American society, not unlike what Jews and Catholics experienced at other moments in our history. He also highlights ways in which Muslims are working to expand our civil religious narrative. The somewhat off-color and yet unexpectedly unifying SNL monologue delivered by Aziz Ansari the night after Donald J. Trump was elected president is, according to Patel, one such example. Towards the end of the semester this year, I invited students to highlight other recent examples in the media of artists and performers and making efforts to expand our civil religious narrative. One student presented on Jennifer Lopez’s performance of “This Land is Your Land” at the Biden/Harris inauguration. He argued that Lopez’s performance of this important American folk anthem expands the civil religious narrative by linking a population of people who sometimes feel unwelcome—Hispanics—with a powerful and pervasive American symbol, suggesting that they are. Another student presented on the Black Eyed Peas’ 2009 release of the song “Where is the Love?” featuring black and brown Americans against the backdrop of one of the most prominent of civil religious symbols, the American flag, to the tune of the powerful lyrics calling for unity and love. Just days after these presentations, I attended our university’s commencement in which a Jewish student was asked to deliver the invocation. Given that my university is Jesuit Catholic, this felt like an important moment. I was moved to tears by the eloquence with which she invoked a spirit of blessing upon our community. I’m not sure asking this student to deliver the invocation was an expansion of our civil religious narrative, given that Americans are already generally comfortable with prayers from Christian and Jewish traditions. It did, however, feel like a possible expansion of what it means for us to be Jesuit. Perhaps inviting students of various faiths to lead us in prayer is not a watering down of our Jesuit identity, but rather a truer expression of who we are. Or was it merely token, even exploitative? Did asking her to represent herself in this way cover up all the ways in which we have failed and continue to fail to build a more inclusive community? As part of a faculty reading group on Khyati Joshi’s new book White Christian Privilege (2020), several of us have been discussing the question, how is Regis Catholic? On a micro level, it’s the same question I have been asking my students to think about all semester, how are we American? In other words, what values hold us together? And can those same sets of values be used as a source of inspiration to build a more inclusive and religiously diverse community? My students in Interfaith Justice and Peacemaking struggled to answer this question. When discussing the narratives we tell about who we are as a nation, some identified with Nikki Haley’s speech at the 2020 Republican convention, where she argues that “America is not a racist nation,” or, as she describes, at least not fundamentally so. Other students found Zenobia Warfield’s (2021) story of America, “This is America,” more compelling. In it, Warfield argues that the white supremacist insurrection on the capital wasn’t un-American as many claimed; it was in fact emblematic of who we are as a nation, as “this country was founded on violence and desecration.” This was a difficult, emotionally-laden conversation to facilitate, the kind Khyati Joshi urges educators to engage with, rather than shy away from. For we all have different levels of investment in the systems that uphold religious and racial hierarchies and dismantling these systems requires emotional introspection (209). In the faculty reading group on Joshi’s book we reflected on our recent participation in our university’s commencement ceremony, discussing all the moments when we were asked to participate in both civil religion and the traditions of our Jesuit university. Not all of us were comfortable removing our hats, or standing for the national anthem, and though moved by the invocation performed by our Jewish student, some of us worried she had been used. We do not have consensus about what it means to be a Jesuit university, and thus how we should represent ourselves at such a ceremony. Nor is there consensus about who we are as Americans. If we want to expand our civil religious narrative, how do we go about doing so? Do we need to build consensus first? Does that begin in the classroom? Does it take place in the planning of commencement ceremonies? There is a lot of emotional investment in these questions. Fears will surface when we start to talk about changing the narrative of who we are at a national or collegiate level—fears that reshaping, or expanding, will result in something being lost. I would argue that neither our national identities, nor our religious identities (at the personal or college level), need to be lost in order for us to become more inclusive, but identities do need to change, and there will be growing pains that come with that change. It is my hope that Joshi’s approach, of foregrounding the emotional together with the intellectual, can provide us with useful resources as we navigate these growing pains. Image #1         Jason Leung @ Unsplash  Image #2         Lucas Alexander @ Unsplash  Image #3         Jordan Crawford @ Unsplash  Image #4         Koshu Kunii @ Unsplash 

As a writer and a teacher I am always looking for ways to inspire my creativity. This summer I have committed to a practice of getting out in nature. I will be visiting national parks, state parks and doing some cabin stays. The goal is to incorporate the sounds and sights of nature as I seek times of solitude, stillness and quiet as keys to my inspiration. The first such trip this summer was to The Getaway two hours north of Atlanta, with a stop by Chattahoochee– Oconee National Forest. The video below shares my experience. My hope and prayer is that you might be inspired to find the practice of being in nature, solitude, stillness and silence as a means to fuel your creativity as a teaching professor.  Photo 1: CHATTAHOOCHEE–OCONEE NATIONAL FOREST @RALPH BASUI WATKINS Photo 2: THE GETAWAY @RALPH BASUI WATKINS  [su_spacer size="20" class=""] [embedyt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuhjCWFrAic[/embedyt] [su_spacer size="20" class=""]

At Nashotah House Theological Seminary, a crucial element of our participation in the seminary’s Anglo-Catholic tradition is the student body and faculty’s regular presence at morning prayer, mass, and sung even-song. In the seminary’s beautiful chapel, surrounded by stained glass and hand-carved wooden statues, we sit in the antique wooden choir stalls lining the chancel and join together in worship. As a junior faculty member, I quickly learned a Nashotah House tradition: your choir stall is not yours to determine. The seats are assigned based on seniority, and priority is zealously guarded. Where you sit matters. This tradition of established place carries its own ethical challenges and requires its own ethical interrogation. What assumptions regarding hierarchy and privilege in our tradition and amongst our student body and faculty does it underwrite? To provide one example, our tradition has come into conflict with our commitment to ensuring that students with mobility challenges have equal opportunity to participate in worship, requiring questioning and ultimately changes to our tradition. Teaching social justice in a tradition requires inviting students to engage in a similar (although broader) excavation of that tradition. Of course, a crucial part of this teaching involves learning alongside my students how to step outside the tradition to critically confront the moral and ethical failure of Anglicans, such as the use of Anglican theology at times to support slavery and colonialism. This critical engagement requires accepting that our seats often are gained at the expense of others, and may require change and even surrender on our parts. These moral failures have been well documented and extensively explored, so excavating the resources for critique has been fairly straightforward. An unexpected joy of this type of excavation, however, has been how many good and constructive resources for social justice remain to be uncovered in the tradition. The Oxford Movement which launched Anglo-Catholicism accompanied liturgical revision with a serious theologically-grounded commitment to working for social justice, spanning generations of the movement and manifested in many different forms. Excavating these resources provides the opportunity to invite students into a different form of engagement with the tradition. Students have become imaginatively engaged in questioning their own social assumptions and career aspirations by reading about the so-called “slum priests,” for example, whose commitment to “ritualism” was equaled by their commitment to working to challenge the economic, social, and political structures which created and justified the appalling living conditions suffered by the poor of British manufacturing cities. Students have learned how to connect social critique and advocacy for justice to Anglican theology through reading the works of the great reforming Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple. Of course, exposure to works of Anglicans such as Pauli Murray and Bishop Desmond Tutu have expanded their conceptions of Anglicanism’s work for social justice beyond Anglo-Catholicism and the British Isles. One of the most fruitful resources I have found for retrieval within the tradition are the editions of the British Critic—the journal edited by John Henry Newman in the early days of the Tractarian controversies. Along with discussion of history, doctrine, and liturgy, the pages of this Christian socialist leaning journal are filled with essays of social critique and challenge. One of the essays, written in 1842, which has engaged and challenged my students the most is a long theological critique of the practice then common in British parishes of renting pews to the social elite. The author describes how the poor, walking in and seeing the great boxed pews lined along the front of the parish church, are confronted with an image of the priority of wealth and privilege which runs exactly opposite to Jesus’s message of the priority of the poor in the gospel. Rather than encountering “the image and pattern of heaven” in the church, they see “the world, the flesh, and the devil apparently in full possession.” As part of the Anglo-Catholic liturgical revival, the author calls for the removal of these pews and the restoration of the parish to the poor and needy whom Christ intends to possess it. Through this image, students begin to encounter the connection between the Anglo-Catholic tradition of beautiful worship and architecture with the beauty of justice and service. Over my time at Nashotah, I have realized that our tradition of choir stall seating incorporates not only seniority, but also service. At every service, one of the sacristans (the student-leaders with the most authority in worship) always forgoes sitting in choir to sit by the back door of the chapel—he or she is placed there by the tradition to greet, care for, and assist any guests who might join in the service. My hope for my students is that they leave our seminary having learned that Anglo Catholicism not only provides choir stalls, but also provides models and methods to emulate, just like the sacristans sitting at the back of the church ready to serve and care for others. Where you sit matters.

“The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing something unfamiliar or an abstraction in terms of something familiar and concrete. Thus, our language is an incredibly intricate web of definitions of one thing in terms of another.”[1] Mary Ylvisaker Nilsen’s expansive definition of metaphor applies to teaching—helping students understand unfamiliar subjects, defining one thing in terms of another, communicating abstract information. Good teaching, then, involves the use of good metaphors. So, let us apply an over-arching, controlling metaphor to the life of Martin Luther. It’s a metaphor intended to interpret the sixteenth-century German reformer for college and seminary students—learners who are aware of the Olympics and YouTube and need to know more about history and the history of theology. The metaphor comes with readily accessible videos, so the teacher can provide students, whether they snowboard or not, a visually impressive image with which to define “one thing in terms of another.” The hope here is to describe the Reformer’s life in terms of risk (edges are inherently dangerous) and unintended consequences (he did not intend to split the church). An edge can also be a threshold and an entry to something new (like the modern era). The presentation of Martin’s life, then, rises and falls, twisting and turning, carried forward by forces he did not create or foresee. There’s another connection here, for a creative teacher: our present time of pandemic, insurrection, and big lies. We confront dangers all around. Unforeseen outcomes startle us. Something new seems to be emerging in our world. If so, Martin Luther can help us. His remarkable life exemplifies wisdom and confusion, courage and cowardice, faith and doubt. A critical engagement with the life of Martin Luther is not simply a journey into the past of long ago and far away. Martin’s successes and failures have much to teach us now. “Martin Luther, Shaun White, and a Life on the Edge” Martin Luther and Olympic snowboarding—not often paired together. Or not often paired together enough. When an elite athlete drops into the half-pipe, there’s crazy risk everywhere, with no turning back. Picture Shaun White at the PyeongChang games in 2018.[2] He had to come down that mountain, one way or another. White’s incredible run ended in epic triumph, but it easily could’ve ended in the hospital or the morgue. No matter what, he had to come down. The whole business is fraught with peril. It takes no small amount of courage to seize such a moment, accept the risks, push through to the end. Edgy, on so many levels. Kind of like Luther’s life, when he came careening down the half-pipe of history. To survive, he pulled off some amazing stunts; improvising at break-neck speeds, keeping his balance (barely), figuring it out as he went. Crazy risk everywhere. He didn’t intend to shred the Reformation mountain, but once Luther dropped in, he could not not finish the run. A life on the edge if there ever was one. However, there’s a huge difference between Mr. White and Mr. Luther. Shaun intentionally did what he did that day. He practiced and trained—even invented a move for the occasion. Martin, however, had little or no idea what he was getting into. He spent much of his life doing what good Saxon boys from good Saxon families did in those days. A smart kid, he went to the schools chosen for him by his Dad. He went to college a couple of towns over, at the University of Erfurt. He studied law; a degree that would make his Papa proud. An obedient son if there ever was one. And Luther was also a dutiful son of the church—the only church in town, the Church of Rome. Eventually, Martin followed the lead of his Mother; his Mother Church, that is. He became an Augustinian Brother. And a priest. He sought comfort in the bosom of the Church—praying, studying, preaching, and teaching. All of that because he’d taken a vow to obey his superiors. The responsible Augustinian brother and junior professor dutifully put one foot in front of the other. He didn’t know he was getting close to any edge. He didn’t even know there was an edge. And then he walked off it. [1] Mary Ylvisaker Nilsen, Words that Sing (Des Moines, IA: Zion Publishing, 2012), Kindle Edition, location 2265ff. [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=he03dVkhLTM  Photo by Philipp Kämmerer on Unsplash

Democracy is the principle of governance marked by every person’s fair and equal treatment. In democratic societies, everyone has the same unfettered access to public goods and shares fairly in public life. Trust undergirds and upholds systems of democracy and these systems disintegrate when the people no longer trust. Importantly, this dependent relationship between democracy and trust exists in the public square and in the seminary classroom. Before I reflect upon democracy and trust in the classroom, I must share a bit about myself. I come to the work of religious and theological education from a career in corporate marketing. My understanding of the teaching and learning experience stems from my years in consumer brand management, during which I developed “muscle memory” in identifying a need, determining how my product uniquely meets that need, and presenting my product in ways that encourage a particular action (usually a purchase). During my time at corporations like the Ford Motor Company, Nabisco, the Fort Howard Paper Company, and The Coca-Cola Company, I was rewarded for my ability to assess my product’s performance knowing market conditions change. As it was with automobiles, cookies, facial tissue, and carbonated beverages, so it is with religious education. As a seminary professor with an eye towards democracy in the classroom, I recognize that classroom environments have shifted in ways that make trust an even more critical part of my pedagogical offerings. Trust must undergird democracy in my classrooms. In what follows, I share my thoughts on some of the actions I take to help build democracy through trust in my classrooms. Trust in the Virtual Classroom This year my fall semester students operated with a heightened sense of anxiety; more of them fixated on the smallest details of the syllabus and their performance. At first, I thought this was a life-stage function as we had many students who matriculated directly from their undergraduate experience. Upon further reflection, I determined that life stage was not the primary driver of this anxious student behavior. This group of students began their seminary journey with no in-person learning; they were 100% online. The lack of in-person interactions brought on by COVID-19 safety protocols (let alone being unable to see or encounter professors or each other outside of the classroom) contributed to students’ anxiety and distrust. I am a Biblical studies professor, currently teaching introductory courses and specialized electives. Students in my introductory class—which is required for the MDiv degree—began online instead of in person. Many of these students applied and were accepted to seminary before the COVID-19 pandemic and had no intention of attending seminary online. My fall 2020 students were all new to the seminary, and I was one of their first seminary professors. Most were new to online learning and they were different when it came to trust in my course.  Their levels of trust were lower, and their levels of anxiety were higher than my former students’, who met in-person in traditional formats. Over the Christmas break, I was intentional about modifying my syllabus and reassessing some of my pedagogical practices to account for issues of student trust and anxiety. Consistency is critical when creating trust, allaying anxiety, and nurturing democracy in the classroom. Small details are essential in matters of classroom trust; therefore, I was careful to make sure the templates I used for lecture-discussion looked alike. While it is easier to repurpose material from other presentations, I converted presentation slides, so they matched visually. The title slide from my early “Ancient Near Eastern Context of the Hebrew Bible” presentation looks exactly like the title slide for my latter “Wisdom Literature” presentation. Something is comforting about seeing patterns.  I imagined my students thinking,  “I recognize this. Dr. Russaw has projected a slide that resonates with last week’s information presentation. This experience is not something new I have to manage in my day. I can relax and learn.” Secondly, I structured class sessions in the same way each week. Each session began with a centering moment and ended with “good words” of encouragement. My teaching assistant took responsibility for each week’s centering moment, and arranging for volunteers for the closing words. These consistent rituals did a couple of things. Students knew the centering moment signaled the official start of class. It was not uncommon to hear deep sighs at the end of the centering moment. It was as if students were saying, “Okay. I am in a (virtual) space where I feel comfortable. I can relax a bit and lean into the next couple of hours of learning.” Giving students a way to participate through volunteering to offer closing words helped build democracy because all students had an equal opportunity to participate, or not.  We all, professors and students, live in a time of great uncertainty, and that uncertainty makes for anxiousness and distrust in the classroom.  I hope that by attending to small actions we can take in our classrooms, our students will learn to trust and will be able to flourish in their learning.

[audio mp3="https://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Perichoresis.mp3"][/audio] John of Damascus, one of the most important theologians of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, writes the following about the relationship between the three Persons of the Trinity: [They] dwell and are established firmly in one another. For they are inseparable and cannot part from one another, but keep to their separate courses within one another, without coalescing or mingling, but cleaving to each other. For the Son is in the Father and the Spirit: and the Spirit in the Father and the Son: and the Father in the Son and the Spirit, but there is no coalescence or commingling or confusion. And there is one and the same motion: for there is one impulse and one motion of the three subsistences, which is not to be observed in any created nature. The Greek word “perichoresis” has come to refer not only to this multi-dimensional, incomprehensible unity, but to a particular metaphor describing this relationship: that of a “divine dance” between/among/within the Trinity. My composition Perichoresis[1] is my musical impression of this “divine dance.” Its overall mood is joyous, an ecstatic whirling-about in which all three members become lost in the ecstasy of divine fellowship. At the exact moment of the dance when one member moves, the other fills in the spot left vacant. Seen from afar, the effect might be like looking at a spinning wheel whose spokes disappear from view, yet which retains its speed, energy, and power. Musically, this occurs through the technique of giving each of the five instruments their own, equally important roles to play. In the fast sections there is no clear melody that dominates the texture, relegating the other parts to mere accompaniment. Instead, each musical “voice” contributes its own unique and independent strand, each often winding around the others in a musical version of indwelling. The complementary rhythms and melodies often make it difficult to distinguish these layers, yet the absence of any one of them would leave an obvious hole in the musical fabric.  Musical textures create a sonic example of an ideal community: one body, many parts, and none more important or unique than the other. Unlike visual art-forms, music brings to life these types of complex relationships in ways that make sense to us humans. Music allows us to hear individual parts at the same time as we hear the whole that they create. The bassline of a Beyoncé track is 100% funky without anything else. Yet, when part of a family of horn riffs, drum loops, background singers, and lead vocals, that constituent element takes on a new identity. It is the same as it was, yet completely different: a new thing, yet not new at all. Its beginning is its ending, its Alpha already its Omega. The Trinity expands upon this idea by challenging us to imagine a mutual interpenetration of the parts and the whole. As a teacher, a composer, and member of the Body of Christ, this is the model of community for which I strive. In the classroom or the rehearsal studio my goal is to create an environment in which my students and I take turns leading the “dance.” But this only happens when I get out of the way, when I recognize that my students are not small-scale versions of myself, but rather young people whose lived experiences are fertile sources of knowledge. In the classroom, this happens when I allow a discussion to take on a life of its own, skipping down paths I didn’t even know were on the map. In orchestra rehearsals it happens when a French horn player’s phrasing opens up a new dimension of musical interpretation, changing the way I conduct an entire passage. In both situations, the requirement is that I stop trying to hear the content of my student’s ideas, and instead listen to the ways those ideas express their full humanity—when I listen through or beyond their words to understand who they are. When this happens, the space I vacate does not remain empty, but is immediately filled with a presence: a person whose life is both similar to mine and different, and with whom I can now collaborate as co-learner and co-teacher. As in the classroom and the rehearsal hall, however, there are many moments in Perichoresis when certain parts come to the fore and others step back. In the slow middle section, a lyrical melody ebbs and flows, sometimes played by one instrument and sometimes joined by a partner. But even in these moments we don’t lose sight of our ideal vision of community. The melodies only sing because the ground beneath them allows them to stand. Conversely, the accompanying chords draw their notes from the melody, taking a line and turning it into an object: something solid and substantial. When I’m lecturing or leading discussion, I try to remember that I don’t need to be the melody. While my voice may be the most prominent at those moments, thinking of myself as the accompaniment is a way for me to recontextualize my role. My words can be the fertile soil for my students’ nascent ideas, the ground on which they can learn how to stand. I don’t always get there. As a teacher, husband, father, or church member, I often find myself singing the melody before I’m even aware of it! As I learn how to undo years of uncritical acceptance of my importance as a white guy, it’s helpful for me to look to music as a model: it is, after all, the most evanescent of all artforms, a will-o’-the-wisp that disappears as quickly as we hear it. Its fundamental weakness, however, belies an extraordinary power: power that can change hearts and minds—but only if we allow it in, if we really listen to it. My hope is that listening to my composition will help you think in new ways about the Trinity. Perhaps it will help you imagine how three Persons can be One, or One Person can be Three. And perhaps, the next time you listen to music, you might even be inspired to take it as a model for your life as a teacher, leader, or community member: a model based on relationships, mutual indwelling, and the joy of the dance. [1] Composed by Delvyn Case, and premiered by Boston’s Triton Brass Quintet, Perichoresis has also been performed by the Grammy-winning Chestnut Brass Company. Of this piece, theologian Walter Brueggemann wrote, “I am not a great theologian but have pondered ‘perichoresis’ for a long time. This is the finest exposition of that thick idea that I have encountered.” The audio is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GoHExKMJLk. IMAGE: Photo by Sheng Dai (Chicago) on Unsplash

I teach a course on the ethics of world religions which takes a narrative approach. Rather than just focusing on the text and tenets of religions in relationship to ethics, the course also highlights the life stories of “exemplars” from various religious perspectives. These have included civil rights activist Malcolm X, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, and Liberian Nobel Prize winner Leymah Gbowee. The advantage of using this approach is that it gives flesh to sometimes abstract principles, demonstrating that all ethics are situational and depend on one’s positionality. These are complete human beings, so they show both human potentiality and human frailty. One particularly thorny exemplar we focus on in the course is Mohandas Gandhi. Students study his life, from his early years to his education in Britain, work in South Africa, and finally his years of leading the movement for Indian independence. They also read selections from his writing, delving into his views on ahimsa or non-killing, satyagraha or “truth force,” the caste system, and his tactics of nonviolent noncooperation. Gandhi’s negative views of Black South Africans when he lived there are an issue in his history that cannot be ignored. Invariably the question arises, was Gandhi a racist? Throughout the course, I emphasize the value of dialogue over debate when discussing religious perspectives; I wanted to create a forum where students could engage this question in a way that developed their ability to give careful attention to others’ perspectives—a space where dialogue around these differences could lead to greater understanding. The process I use to accomplish this learning strategy begins with dividing the students into pairs and providing them with two short newspaper articles on the subject. While these are not opinion pieces, each article has a particular bias—one towards naming Gandhi as a racist and the other towards seeing him as evolving on issues of race over his lifetime. Each student in the pair is asked to read one of these articles, and to identify the “slant” of the author and the particular points that support the author’s perspective. Each student in the pair then presents this view to their partner as if the view was their own. In other words, one student presents the view that Gandhi had racist views and should be held accountable for them while the other student argues that his views on race evolved and he remains of role-model for social change. We then move to a large group discussion where I pose the following questions to the class: How did you feel about the position to which you were assigned? How did it impact your reading of the articles? Did any point made by your partner make you think differently about the topic? Every time I lead this activity, students are able to name various points made by their partners that provide fresh insights into the controversy. Finally, I create a continuum in the classroom, with one end being “Gandhi was racist” and the other end being “Gandhi is a role-model.” I invite students to stand up and place themselves somewhere on the continuum and share the reason they have placed themselves at that point. I use the continuum because it permits students to nuance their opinion, to move away from binary, either/or thinking on the issue. This past fall, the activity took on added significance given that our campus is only a few miles from the site of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police. Since the student population of Augsburg University is nearly 60 percent BIPOC, questions of race and racial justice are not merely academic ones. This activity provided students with a space to explore the mixed history of religions on racial oppression in a manner that neither excuses that history nor uses it to dismiss the positive impact of religions on social justice movements. In the final analysis, students may not change their views about Gandhi’s legacy around race, but their views often become more nuanced and they increase their ability to recognize complexity and ambiguity around these issues. The ability to embrace complexity, ambiguity, and the humanity of all is important for understanding religions as well as for our current fraught and polarized political environment.   Photo by Claude Piché on Unsplash