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In a previous blog, I surmised that the diversity of students within theological education is one of its greatest strengths and one of its deepest challenges. One reason that theological institutions comprise among the most diverse student populations in higher education is access. Comparatively speaking, theological schools have fewer barriers to enrollment versus other graduate schools in terms of acceptance rates and tuition costs.In 2023, the average acceptance rates for Master of Divinity and Master of Arts admissions across all member institutions of the Association of Theological Schools was 68 percent and 72 percent respectively. In the same year, the average acceptance rate for law school admissions in the United States was roughly 42 percent. Some law schools, such as Yale and Harvard, had acceptance rates under 10 percent. The cost of theological education is also significantly lower than many other graduate programs. For example, the annual tuition of Harvard Law School ($77,000) is more than double the annual tuition of Harvard Divinity School ($31,000) and more than triple the annual tuition of Columbia Theological Seminary ($22,000), the school where I teach.Theological schools therefore enroll students of all ages, races, ethnicities, abilities, genders, and nationalities. Over the past twenty years or so, many theological institutions have also taken further steps to include a wider range of students through the implementation of additional learning modalities, such as fully online degree programs, alongside in-person education.I have witnessed several evolutions in my seminary classroom over the last dozen years. The first change largely consisted of more diversity across race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and denomination. Straight cisgender white Presbyterian students comprised the majority, but I was teaching more students of color, more LGBTQ+ students, and more students from various Christian traditions.The second change entailed increasing generational and vocational diversity alongside the ongoing demographic shifts due to the first change. There is now no one clear and discernable identity marker that represents the majority student population in my classroom. In terms of age, some students are in their twenties and thirties and others are in their forties, fifties, and sixties. Some will preach their first sermon at my seminary whereas others have been preaching for years. Some are working full-time in congregational ministries and other professions as they study at my seminary. Some are from the United States and others are from Brazil, Ghana, India, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, and other nations. Some belong to theologically liberal and progressive denominations whereas others worship in conservative and fundamentalist churches.These differences present rich opportunities for mutuality and reciprocity as well as potential pitfalls of misunderstanding and conflict in theological education. I plan to further engage these matters in future blogs, but I want to conclude this reflection with one aspect of diversity that I find simultaneously inspiring and perplexing: The rise of multivocational students who are pursuing their seminary education while also working full-time as well as caring for their families and fulfilling other important obligations.I am grateful that these students are in my classroom, and many have joyfully shared with me that my seminary’s commitment to greater access has made it possible for them to enroll. Because these students carry multiple responsibilities, some understandably struggle to complete assignments on time and adequately prepare for class sessions. Nearly all my students take three or more courses in our fall and spring terms because my seminary’s most generous scholarships covering the entire cost of tuition (and the entire cost of tuition and fees for African American students) are not available with part-time enrollment.When encountering unsteady student performance, it would be immature and harmful for theological educators like me to respond with petty expressions of anger and annoyance. Yet I also feel that it is my pedagogical imperative to effectively manage class participation and course engagement. I am keenly aware that a good number of my students, including some with the busiest schedules, are faithfully doing their work, and they are rightly discouraged when some of their peers are ill-equipped for face-to-face discussions and absent or perpetually tardy in online forums. Small group activities are probably the most dismaying and frustrating when there are varying levels of student preparation. I continue to grapple with how to lean into access and compassion without compromising my standards of academic integrity and excellence.

As I said in my earlier blog in this series, it can be a relief for teachers to know that making a course more antiracist isn’t only about introducing fraught topics and crossing one’s fingers that students have the self-awareness to handle them; antiracism can be present structurally, in much the same way that racism can be present structurally. In this blog, I will explore two practices I use in my own teaching to help promote a more antiracist learning environment, neither of which involve staging contentious debates or calling out individuals to speak on their experiences. While neither practice can suddenly create a perfectly antiracist classroom, they can help move one’s overall teaching farther along that spectrum.The first place to start is examining imagery usage in one’s class. I personally came late to PowerPoints in my teaching (only really becoming proficient in slides during remote-synchronous learning in the pandemic when writing things on the board was no longer an option), so imagery for me was initially confined to my online course structure in my LMS. I dislike “plain” pages with nothing but text, so I was habitually using stock images on assignments and pages to offer some visual breaks – close-ups of water, forest photos, and so on. This continued until I was slotted to teach Women in the Bible and started exploring imagery for the Biblical figures I planned to focus on. Initial Google Image searching yielded everything from cartoons to Renaissance oil paintings and everything in between – but the enduring theme was that most representations depicted Bible characters as white, white, white!This was irritating on multiple levels. Historical accuracy was certainly a factor, but even if we could all agree that nobody really knows what Ruth and Naomi looked like, why do so many artists seem to assume they were pale-skinned and fair-haired? (The answer, in short, is white supremacy and Eurocentric Christian bias, but if you’re reading a blog like this one, you probably already knew that). I was saved in that course by discovering James C. Lewis’s Icons of the Bible artistic photography series, a project that depicts Bible figures more accurately with models who are exclusively people of color. Sweet relief!Once slide decks became a more typical staple of my teaching techniques, then, I already had some experience realizing that the way I depicted people and communities on these slides would affect my students’ imagination. I teach at a women’s college, so I started by ensuring that my stock images included far fewer men than women, and then aimed to depict a wide range of racial diversity in each slide series. In teaching my class on Bodies in Christian Theology, I also learned to emphasize size diversity, visible disability, and visible queerness to continually enforce the implicit curriculum that Theology is for everyone and is done by everyone. For those who mostly use slides for text, I encourage you to experiment with the color and liveliness that comes with human images – and to use two or three stock photos rather than just one at a time. PowerPoint’s Design function can help you work them in tidily, and you have another subtle antiracist practice in your toolkit.

I was the only Hispanic student in my elementary school. In high school I was always in some kind of conflict because I was still the only Hispanic. My whole life I have had to learn to navigate a culture in which I stood out for various reasons. This in-betweenness has characterized my life since then. It is like living in the hyphen between Hispanic-American.[i] I have studied and gained my education where I was a minority. I have dealt with microaggressions and full-out aggressions of various sorts since I was a child. So now that I have a PhD and am a Director at the institution where I am employed, have things changed?No. I am now the “Hispanic Professor.” Some students come to my class guarded and assume that I am “liberal” just because I am Hispanic. Some people have the audacity to think that I am a “token” professor and am here although I really did not earn my place. As Hispanic/Latin@ my point of view is not the same as theirs and naturally, since Hispanics do not have education and are not educated, my viewpoint carries less weight than that of other professors. As a corollary, my judgment as a program director is faulty since Hispanics don’t think. People come to my office and are surprised that I am “tall for a Latino.” I have been asked “Are you really Hispanic?” simply because I speak English relatively well. However, the question I am most often asked is, “Where are you from?” Like, “Where are you ‘really’ from?” It is as if people just want to pigeonhole me, label me, and keep me in their neat little place in their social constructs, especially that social construct that sees Hispanics as wetbacks, illegals, foreigners, and not truly American.I read The Merchant of Venice in High School. The lines I remember most in this play are when Shylock the Jew states,Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?[ii]Shylock was making an important self-discovery. Was he a villain just because of his Jewish heritage? Did he not also have feelings, passions, and senses and live like everyone else? These lines help us understand Shylock’s posture throughout the play. But for me, they point to something that I have longed for since childhood. At some point, I want to be known by everyone as a fellow human being. I do not wish to be limited by my bronze skin, ethnicity, or the nationality of my parents and grandparents.I am always mindful of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech, “I Have a Dream.”[iii] Please do not misread me, I have not faced any of the cruelties that he or those in the Civil Rights struggle did. Nevertheless, his speech is a constant reminder that our mental schemes need transformation. What hits home with me are these lines: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.”This is the cruelty of our own society. We assume all kinds of mental and social constructs based upon the mere outward appearance of a person. The outward appearance is but one of the many dimensions of a human being. It does not account for the mind, the psyche, the spirit, or the soul of a person. It does not take into account the personal story of that individual and the experiences that have shaped him or her. It does not take into account the spirituality and faith of these people and the beauty and creativity of the Black Church, or the Latina Church.[iv] While a person’s phenotype may reveal some things, a common history, a common ancestry, it does not in and of itself define the totality of that human being. And as those who study humans know, humanity has a powerful soul that dares to dream, that challenges the status quo, that questions the way things are, that invites the divine to enter their lives to rearrange our brokenness into the image, likeness, and goodness of God.So, I am one of the most educated Hispanics/Latinos in my community. I still am reminded on a daily basis of the need for humility and patience with my fellow human beings, who, having much less formal education than me, have pigeon-holed me into the mold of “the Hispanic professor.” Notes & Bibliography[i] Sarah Menkedick, “Living on the Hyphen,” October 14, 2014,https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-86-fall-2014/living-on-the-hyphen. See also Justo González, Santa Biblia: The Bible Through Hispanic Eyes (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 79.[ii] William Shakespeare, “The Merchant of Venice,” 3.1.57-66. References are to act, scene, and line. https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/the-merchant-of-venice/read/3/1/#line-3.1.57.[iii] National Public Radio, “Read Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech in its Entirety,” https://www.npr.org/2010/01/18/122701268/i-have-a-dream-speech-in-its-entirety.[iv] Church in Spanish is iglesia, a female term, hence “Latina.”

If you teach long enough, you will teach a course that feels flat, has low morale, or even fails.  While a totally ruined course is rare, there are moments when the sinking, the malaise—yours and that of the students, happens.  We all know this experience.If you have never taught a course that has tanked, then you have likely been a student in a course that has. No real need to recount or describe all the ways a course can fail—the ways a course can “go south” are legion. The more important emphasis is to know that when a course is collapsing it can be rescued. When you feel the course sinking …...do not blame yourself.do not blame the students.do not blame the administration.do not blame your family.do not blame your pets.do not blame the moon phase.do not blame the state of the nation.do not blame the national economy.do not blame climate change.Blaming is ineffective. Finding fault, placing fault, shaming, guilting or scapegoating rarely corrects the problem. Sinking courses are not saved through blame.Do not ignore the situation or pretend that, without adjustment, it will mend. If you sense that there is trouble with the course, the students know there is trouble with the course. When you find yourself watching the clock during your own class session – this is a clue that something needs to be adjusted, altered, changed.Resist the impulse to knuckle down, grin and bear it.Resist the impulse to stay-the-course, stick to your guns!Resist the impulse to “right-fight” and believe whatever you planned, how you planned, is best and “be damned!” anyone who will not comply with your plans.Consider that rescuing a course might take a multi-pronged approach. The recovery of the course might need support from others. Don’t be a hero - please ask for help. If you feel as if the course is weak, ask for help. If you feel lost or disoriented, ask for help. If you do not know how you feel or what to do, ask for help.What help?Get a new perspective, fresh eyes, a more seasoned approach, an empathetic listener. Talk to colleagues. Talk with a trusted colleague at your school, or a trusted colleague beyond your school. You might talk just once, or you might talk several times. Describe the incident or incidents and ask them to listen to what might be changed to strengthen the course.Consider asking a trusted colleague to observe your teaching and then assist you with reflection. These talks are not for confessing to being an imposter. Resist reducing these conversations to disclosing your deep-seated anxieties about public performance (save that for your therapist). Use these conversations to troubleshoot, problem solve and strategize for better teaching and strengthening of your course design.Consider, at the beginning of the semester, creating a small reflection group of colleagues (3 or 4 people) for a semester long conversation so when the course feels like it is not going well you have established conversation partners. The group might be organized around studying teaching resources, together.Talk with a trusted student to get feedback. Talk with a small group of students and ask their opinion. Perhaps, take class time to ask the entire class for feedback and suggestions.Talk to human resource personnel, consult the faculty handbook, know your Title IX procedures. Sometimes bullying behaviors are the culprit in troubled classroom environments.What might be needed?Consider that you might need to recast elements of the syllabus. Consider creating different assignments, adjusting timelines, subtracting some readings or adding new kinds of readings. Add a field trip. Invite a guest speaker.Ask yourself about yourself. Are you too tired to teach well? Are you bored in your own course? Are you anxious? Are you distracted? Are you disappointed, grieving or just sad? Do you have an experience of belonging in your institution and in your own classroom? Your vibe radiates to the students and permeates all aspects of the course.Are the materials in the course too advanced for the students or too inconsequential? Are the materials culturally aligned and relevant to the students’ experiences and expectations? What story are you inviting the students into—is it a story of their imaginations and aspirations?What are the larger happenings of the school, community, region and country that are affecting your classroom? What would it mean to weave these happenings into the conversation?Perhaps it is the students - by which I mean – perhaps you do not know the students and their lives well enough. In what ways can you get better acquainted with your students. Do your students come to class tired after a long day of work? Are your morning students tired after having worked all night? Are they taking too many courses? If they are rested, are they hungry while in your class? Awareness of the conditions of your students might help with addressing some of the malaise.Do not be surprised when a course tanks. It happens to the best of teachers. When a course is “not going well,” do not abandon it or your students. Learn, by experience, how to adjust and adapt to create a meaningful experience for your learners and for yourself.

Student course evaluations can be fraught. Many of my friends don’t even look at theirs, either because it’s so stressful/shameful or because they don’t think there’s anything to be learned in them. Course evaluations are, after all, only one (admittedly limited and often problematic) data point.I do look at course evals, and I tell students I look at them. I think it’s important to consider what the students—that is, the primary audience of and for our teaching—actually experience. That doesn’t mean students get the final say. That doesn’t mean we have to make every change they desire. But it does mean that I want to know how they experienced the course, and it’s a bit hard for me to know without checking.But it’s not often that anything surprises me. It’s usually the same old, same old. This class is a lot of work. Too hard for a required course. Picky grader. Great prof. Class is fun. She really cares. I love our community. I’ve read it all before.But, last semester, I received something new, from a student in my upper-level Religion and Disability class:Emily Gravett assigned course materials that allowed me to critically think about my views on religion and disability. However, as someone who is Catholic the way she explained course material did not align with what all people of that religion believe…. The way she portrayed religious people made it appear as if religious people had it out for people with disabilities. This takes away why people are a part of a religion…. By what I read about this class I thought we were going to go in further in depth about the beliefs of religions. Instead, we read content from opinion–based sources that bashed everything about the religion. I think the way the content was addressed was very inconsiderate for people that belong to a religious group. If the whole class is about accepting others and taking in other points of view, why is every positive view of religion being bashed? Overall more theology should be incorporated with the course instead of throwing opinions out in lecture. Now, this was just one comment. None of the other students said anything like it and I did have other religious (including Christian) students in that class, just like in any class I teach. Certainly, instructors shouldn’t focus overly much on the one-offs or outliers in our course evaluations, especially the more negative ones. Yet I felt this student was expressing something important, which I wanted to take seriously—something perhaps other students had felt, but had not dared to express.It’s certainly never been my intention to make anyone feel badly about their religious convictions. I don’t set out to dissuade anyone from their identities or commitments, just in the same way I wouldn’t proselytize. It should also go without saying that I certainly don’t represent religions as (very bad) monoliths—this is a key concept of the course, that religions are diverse—but clearly this student experienced the course as being very critical and negative toward religions, perhaps specifically her own. And, I have to admit, she may not be wrong. Religions (on the whole, and in the specific) haven’t been great on disability—and this was what the course reflected. The Bible often treats disability as something to be fixed/cured to demonstrate God’s great power. Disability is understood as the result of bad karma by many Hindus. The choreography of Muslim daily prayer is rough or even prohibitive for some bodies. In this class, we read a piece in which a well-known disability scholar critiqued the pope—the head of this particular student’s religion—for singling out a disabled man for a blessing. My guess is that this was the day I lost her.So, what responsibility do I have to how religions are represented or come across? Do I need to couple every negative portrayal, example, or opinion with a positive one? Do I need to make sure I am presenting rosy or complimentary views of religion, regardless of topic? Do I need to be very selective or cautious with the critical pieces I assign? I admit there’s a lot I don’t know what to do about this student’s concern. Here’s what I’ve tried to implement in my current Race and Religion course (which faces some similar issues, given the way that Christianity has influenced conceptions of race, in this country and globally):Added a statement to the syllabus, which I read aloud in class, that clarifies that I don’t agree with or endorse every single piece I assignForecast that there will be some critiques of religions in this class—and acknowledge this may be (understandably) unsettling or even upsetting if you are a part of that religionReminded students that learning can be uncomfortable and that exposure to ideas that you disagree with is an important (an essential??) part of development and lifeIntroduced the notion of meta-cognition and asked them to reflect on certain activities or materials in terms of what they were thinking and feeling during themContinued to reiterate that religions aren’t just one “thing” and that, of course, for all the bad, there’s also quite a bit of goodAssigned pieces on religion being both/neither good or bad, such as Appiah’s TED Talk as well as material demonstrating a range or diversity within traditionsClarified that much of what we discuss in terms of religious people’s behavior is also just human behavior—that is, that it’s applicable to everyone; religious people are usually not different or specialEmphasized to students that it’s okay to stick with values, beliefs, or groups, including the religious, that are imperfect/critiqued (because nothing is perfect)Continued to offer caveats when leading a session that was more based on criticism, such as “of course reasonable people will disagree” or “this may be interpreted differently within the community” or “obviously this doesn’t represent the whole”Assigned more companion (or both-side) pieces for every topic (e.g., “what is Critical Race Theory?” as well as a critique of Critical Race Theory)But I am still grappling with this issue. The reality is that religions aren’t all good (whatever we even mean by this). Robert Orsi, one of my favorite scholars, who grew up Catholic and has written extensively about the study of religion, has written powerfully on just how disgusted he is by the history of Catholicism, that “in the long perspective of human history, religion has done more harm than good and that the good it does is inextricable from the harm.” I think I would be doing students themselves a harm if I pretended otherwise.

How are you doing with taking chances? Are you engaging the wonder in your students, or are you still grading participation posts? If you read part one then you know what I’m talking about. For today’s episode of what Miss Frizzle teaches us about teaching, we learn about making mistakes. Not learning how to make them per se (because let’s face it, we all have plenty of experience) but what to do when we make them.Mistakes are inevitable. They will happen. Part of the reason we fear them so much is because we are still recovering from the trauma of unrealistic expectations from our graduate programs, or from our education in general (I’m looking at you formerly “gifted and talented” students). It may seem redundant then to be told to do the thing that you have already done and will certainly do in the future. But the advice to make mistakes isn’t about intention, it's about adaptation (cough…taking chances…cough).  In a world where failure and risk are old friends…If I had to choose one thing that scientists and entrepreneurs have in common, I'd say it's that both understand that failure is information. Scientists have revolutionized their fields by using information gained from failed experiments. Think of the countless medicines that didn’t work for the illness they were intended for, only to produce an outcome that changed the medical field. In the same way, entrepreneurs are learning about trends, marketing, supply, demand, and a whole host of other things when they start something that doesn’t work out. If you are going to be a person to take risks (go ahead honey, take a chance!) then you will have to embrace making mistakes. But wait, you say, a failure and a mistake are not the same thing! A failure is when you do something and it doesn’t work out, while a mistake is doing something wrong. And you’d be correct. A failure focuses on the outcome, while a mistake focuses on behavior. This is why you can make mistakes but you cannot be a failure (go ahead and read that again). And while mistakes made along the way can aid to the result of a failed outcome, several other factors, many beyond your knowledge and control, makeup that failed attempt.  Let’s play a game… Where it's all made up and the points don’t matter.So, how and why would you be intentional about making a mistake? Remember, the lesson isn’t about intentionality per se, it's about adaptation. Being intentional about making mistakes means being intentional about taking chances and risks. One of the best and easiest ways to do that is through the act of play. Playing a game is about creativity and knowing which of the rules you want to keep, bend, or break (every UNO player understands this). You are willing to push the boundaries or cross them to meet the games’ goals creatively, or to make a better play experience. One of the best examples of this is improv. Improv thrives on making mistakes. Nothing is wasted, and the space feels limitless. You can say the wrong word, or get caught off guard by another’s response, or even fall off the stage, and there will be someone there, not necessarily to catch you, but to use your “mistake” to continue the time of play. This communal act of play creates a kind of generativity that encourages you to make mistakes. So, what does this have to do with Theological Education? Much of our objectives in theological education feel daunting. We want our students to say something meaningful about the divine, or about implications on our world. We train them to lead others in matters of the heart, mind, and spirit. We do deeply meaningful work. This is the kind of work where mistakes matter. Where we are held accountable for the implications of our theology. Our theological intentions land somewhere, usually in the lives of other people. I recognize that asking someone to make a mistake in this context is no small thing. But that is exactly why we need to encourage it in our classrooms. I approach all of my classrooms as part of a grand experiment. Students are encouraged to “say the weird thing” (IYKYK) then work-out what that means in community. If I didn’t encourage my students to make mistakes, then how am I preparing them to lead? Preach? Teach? How can I teach them to adapt if I attempt to create a space with no obstacles for them to adapt to? If students say or bring up concepts about God that cause tension, we work through it. I help them understand the implications of their theological actions. And yes, they make “mistakes.” So do I. But because we do not forsake play in the classroom we learn to adapt. Taking chances means making mistakes. And like scientists we learn from the outcomes. We discover the ways theology can help us change the world, especially in ways we didn’t originally intend. We do this because we’ve learned that mistakes do not automatically end in failure. They create a possibility to open up a new pathway we didn’t originally plan. They generate new lessons we didn’t know we needed to learn. And for that, they will always be worth making.

It’s a relief to some professors to find that making their course antiracist is not simply about introducing heavy and sometimes politicized topics into class discussion. I find that moving one’s course further along the antiracism spectrum can, and should, start with the syllabus!None of the below suggestions can magically turn a course antiracist – my experience is that antiracism is a lifelong journey, consisting both of moments of inspiration and, perhaps more often, moments of face-palming as you realize the way you’ve done something for years is problematic, but you literally never noticed it until right now. This is part of why I think many professors shy away from explicitly naming their own journey in antiracist teaching – it requires you to feel embarrassed about the way you used to do things and then using that embarrassment to fuel something better. But the glorious thing is that it does produce something better!The first thing to do with your syllabus is to take stock of the racial representation of your authors. If you use one or a few textbooks, this will likely be easy. If you rely on a variety of resources, it’ll take longer, and often require a bit more research. When you tally up who students are primarily hearing from, what voices are most prominent? Do white men win the day? Or is there substantive authorship from people with other racial identities?In my department, we calculate these totals every semester based on course days. Basically, what days are students only hearing from white people, and what days are they hearing from people of color? (It could be advantageous to do this in a more granular way too – examining how Black authors compare to Latinx authors, etc., but unless your percentage of authors of color is fairly high, you may not have enough data to draw meaningful conclusions). We submit our percentages every term, and part of our annual assessment is examining if we’ve met our minimums and if we’ve increased racial representation or lost ground overall. The fact that we can work in hard numbers here also tends to encourage something of a gamification of our syllabi – seeing if we can beat our last “high score” is motivation to make our authorship more racially diverse each semester. A single replaced reading feels like a victory in this context – and it is!Once that work is completed for the term, the next step is to ensure that it’s visible to students and that they understand why it’s significant. I do this in two ways: including relevant expertise and identity markers, including race, along with the link to the course readings, and telling my students directly about what I’m doing with authorship in the course. The first involves setting up Canvas (or whatever LMS) with more than just links to required text. I include the link, and then provide context after it about the writer. For example, “______ is a Black woman and a seminary-level professor of Theology,” or “______ is a white male journalist who primarily writes on religious topics.” This is part of an overarching lesson that people’s context is always relevant, and that nobody writes without bias. It’s also a practice I royally screwed up the first time I tried it – I only included the racial identities of authors who weren’t white and didn’t mention race for white authors. You know, because white is… normal? White default bias for the fail. Thankfully I caught that one halfway though the semester and worked feverishly to remedy it on the day that awful realization struck me.Finally, I like being transparent with my students about the “why” of my teaching – it makes them feel trusted and included, and it helps hold me accountable for doing what I say I will. On the first day of class, I show the students our hard numbers for the course and explain that the field is historically and currently white-dominated, but that our program values students learning from a variety of perspectives and voices, so we’ve made a particular effort to use and highlight authors of color. For whatever reason, this is the moment on day one when students will actually take their eyes off their syllabus and look at me directly. I find that there’s power in critiquing your own field, and doing it right away – it helps students feel more able to offer critique and criticism when they feel it necessary.So, there you have it – if you want to be a more antiracist teacher and aren’t sure where to begin, start with your course authorship and make your choices explicit to your students. It’s far from perfection, but it’s a starting point for the journey.

Recently I attended the Wabash Center’s Curiosity Roundtable, where we heard from Dr. Iva Carruthers in one session. Her presentation was titled “AI and Ubuntu in the Age of Metanomics.” She had us thinking about what it means to be human and how we talk about humanity in this new age of AI—in all its forms—and what theology has to offer and how different sources of knowledge, different intelligences, all contribute to our being. Is being human about knowledge or about wisdom? About thinking or about relationship? It was a rich conversation that didn’t once bring up how we deal with issues of students using ChatGPT in class.As I thought about our prompt—what do I do with this conversation when I return to my institution?—my initial response was: resist the AI! And then I thought more deeply. The question is really how to ground ourselves more deeply in what it means to be human. The short answer is that we engage more in the world and with each other, but how do I do that? How do I help my students to do that?Unsurprisingly, my answer is to spend more time outdoors together. So now I have another reason in my backpack to use evangelizing for outdoor teaching. Hear me out.The best teaching happens outdoors because it’s a broader sense of teaching than mere lecture content. It’s the things I’ve been talking about in this blog. Students are more likely to play outdoors because they feel a freedom in the wind and the sun and “getting away with” not being “in class” as they’ve always understood classrooms. Play is a deeply important part of learning to be human. Children play at being adults long before they are adults, and the play, which is about imitation and experimentation in spaces of controlled risk, develops the skills of adulthood in the child. It’s similar for students. They play with ideas—imitate and experiment in a low-risk space—and so, grow into their understandings.In addition to content, they play with, students play with each other more readily outdoors. The freedom of movement makes getting into groups easier as well as interaction with group members. They sit closer together and find themselves more present to one another when they only have to focus on each other and the space—with its greens and blues, its warmth and wind—is calmer and less distracting than any video screen. Longer immersive classes do this even more (see my previous posts on the way immersive classes facilitate presence and community), but even shorter classes outside the normal environment will help students see one another as humans and create bonds.Play is also, as I understand it, an important part of learning to be an animal (see this chapter by Kay Redfield Jamison: “Playing Fields of the Mind” in her Exuberance: The Passion for Life [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004]). So, we learn to be more human and at the same time become more connected to other animals who also play, being reminded that we are part of creation. Along with this, when they are outside students are more immersed in the material world, and their phones are less attached to them. They are distracted by more interesting and more real things than whatever is on their screens. When people have a greater immersion in the real world, they gain more ability to discern the fake aspects of AI because they know the real thing.When students have to work together, especially in an immersive trip where they depend on each other physically (like on a wilderness trip), they learn what real friendship and connectedness look like and perhaps can distinguish the real from the fake in virtual worlds. In a good outdoor class—or a good indoor class that requires students to work together to create something—they learn what humanity looks like in all kinds of forms beyond what AI with its implicit biases is telling them. They learn empathy and compassion and relationship, the stuff that makes human beings human and which AI can only “know” about, or at best imitate. These are the things teaching outdoors and prioritizing interactions with the material world and with real people unmediated by screens does. My version is outdoor teaching, and I won’t stop evangelizing for it, but we can just as easily think of this as out-of-the-classroom teaching. Any place where we can encourage (or require) students to engage their worlds and the people in them is a place we are saying that our AI world is not the final word. Requiring some community engagement as part of the class or a museum visit or a technology fast or a group project that must be done only in person—all of these encourage play and presence and learning to distinguish reality from virtual reality. And if our clergy and theologians were trained this way, what a real world we might have. May it be so.

Like so many others during the pandemic I picked up a new hobby. Breadmaking was already claimed by two others in my family, so I decided to turn to houseplants. Gardening has always been therapeutic for me, so I sensed I would like getting my hands dirty indoors as well, and I had always found beauty and a sense of peace in homes filled with a variety of plants.I began pretty haphazardly, just buying plants I found on sale and watering them when they looked bad. I soon learned that water isn’t always the best solution for a dying plant. There is such a thing as overwatering, and I learned that lesson the hard way—by killing a lot of plants.It probably took me a year or so to learn the needs of different plants; for example, how much sun, humidity, and water they require. Now almost four years into my new craft, I rarely kill a plant. My eight-year-old daughter even recently declared: “Mommy, it’s starting to look like a jungle in here!” That’s when I knew I was getting good and that I had achieved the aesthetic I was going for.I’ve learned a lot of good lessons in becoming a plant person. In fact, I was reminded of my deleterious overwatering the other day, when I was making plans for my sabbatical this coming fall.This sabbatical will be the first one I’ve ever had the luxury to take, and to say that I’m looking forward to it would be an understatement. I’ve been teaching for fourteen years, and for the last two years I have been increasingly involved in administration.My fairly new administrative work has not left me much time for research. And when I think of that area of my academic life, I think of a wilted, dried out plant. I’ve pulled as much life out of my previous research as possible, and it’s parched.Always an overachiever, I know my tendency will be to over-plan for and overschedule my sabbatical time. I intend to write a new book. I want to read, research, and write; and I want to travel in Europe for my research. I also want to take pictures and videos during my travels for my classes.When I was charting this all out the other day, I was overwhelmed. My (too-high) expectations left me feeling panicky. I also started feeling the pressure of thoughts like: “Given the landscape of higher education, this might be your first and last sabbatical.” In short, I was setting myself up for burnout!Of course, this defeats the point of sabbatical. Isn’t it supposed to be a magical time in which one can finally achieve the sweet balance of rest and productivity?But how does one achieve this? I suppose the answer is different for everyone. It’s like caring for the different needs of different plants.Taking a tip again from my plants, I reflected on the following questions:1) What do I really need right now?What I need is some time to slow down and rest. I need some time to breathe, to re-center myself. I need to establish a new workplace (away from my institutional office), where I can be free from distractions. I need an easy routine with the time to be creative and to explore new ideas.2) What do I really want?What I want is to have some new life breathed into my intellectual project. I want to use the privilege of this precious time wisely. A semester free of classes and meetings provides me with the opportunity to travel for my research. I’ve always wanted to visit the monastic sites and places in Germany of the medieval writers who I study, and to talk and pray with the contemporary nuns that currently live there. Now I can!I also want to get several chapters of a new book written. This “want” competes with the other. Of course, planning for a trip and taking it will hinder my writing productivity, at least in the short term. I’ve had to come to grips with that fact, and remind myself that I can write anywhere and anytime. I can get some writing done on sabbatical, and continue the rest later.3) What will sustain me?What I need for my scholarly labor to be sustained, during this sabbatical and going forward from it, is for it to engage my intellectual passions. My last book was published four years ago. The world has changed since then, and so have I. One of the first things I need to do before starting in on a new research project is to give myself some time to reflect on some perennial questions. I have bookmarked Dr. Nancy Lynne Westfield’s blog “Articulating Your Intellectual Project,” which contains questions like:     What is the intersection of your gifts/talents with the mighty needs of the world?     At the end of your life, when you look back over your long and illustrative career, to what did you say yes?I plan to use the questions she provides therein to help encourage and bring about clarity for the focus of my project and its intent.And then I plan to get to work (at a restful pace)!