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Hospitality does not begin faraway, but near. We learn what hospitality is by reaching out to persons near to us—persons we pass by every day, persons who share our highways and hallways, our sidewalks and side streets. This past fall, forty-eight leaders from around our community gathered to tell “near stories” to one another about their experience of race and racism, privilege and power in their lives. These community leaders included local judges, superintendents and principals of schools, CEOs of health systems, business owners, college administrators, and, notably, police officers—the very leaders shaping the response to the unholy trinity of Covid-19, systemic racism, and misinformation. This group of busy, highly educated leaders committed to twelve hours of honest dialogue about the history and ongoing impact of racism in our country and our community. The dialogue followed what is known as a “caring circle” model—a model that requires participants, first and foremost, to listen actively to one another without judgment. That is, it asks us to “hear each other to speech,” as the racial justice activist Nelle Morton exhorted. The difficult realities of our shared life together in the United States—things like our biases, the past and present ways in which we have discriminated against persons based on the identities we decided were most important, the ongoing effects of racial violence and trauma—are not always easy to hear into speech among friends, much less among powerful community leaders. But the dialogues didn’t start with these difficult topics. The conversations begin with questions designed to reset the frame of the relationships in the caring circle. Participants were no longer their job titles or their positions of formal authority, they were human beings subject in myriad ways to the fundamental need to belong. The circle began: Tell me an experience of when you belonged? Tell me an experience of when you felt excluded? Participants start by relearning in a highly structured, formal way how to practice hospitality to one another, and this allows them to hear each other to speech about what we know to be some of our most profound, shared needs as human beings: the need to be recognized as whole persons with complex, unique stories that have something to contribute to the “we are” part of “I am because we are.” At the same time, circles emphasize the need to recognize in others something of the “I am”—something that connects who I am deeply to who you are you, to what it means to be human. That is, they start with near stories that illumine in their very particularity something of the universal ties that bind us together. Though some might quibble with the phrase, they are religious stories in the sense that they aim to “re-bind” (re-ligare) us together—to reaffirm our shared commitment to hospitality in the face of hostility and reinforce the threads that bind us together in the face of the threats that tear us apart. I would like to believe that these dialogues and the relationships they established prepared our community to respond with greater integrity and humility to the systemic and institutional racism at the heart of the racial uprisings this summer. Like so many things in this moment, the justification for my belief may only be confirmed with the advantage of hindsight. But as I turn my attention more fully to this fall’s syllabi, I am even more convinced that my tendency to fill weeks with content needs to be mitigated by the foregrounding of process and the centering of relationships in the classroom. It is not that content is unimportant. The “deep dive dialogues” among community leaders included content—presentations about systemic racism, health inequities, and implicit bias locally, for example—but this content was embedded in multiple processes of relationship building throughout our time together. In this way, the intimacy of hearing each other to speech in our small groups became the starting point for listening to what the presentations had to teach. What I have been describing is likely familiar to many who have attended (perhaps even led) workshops and trainings related to racial justice. But all too often the pedagogical insight does not quite make the leap from the workshop to the classroom. Even among well intentioned faculty whose courses are most amenable to flipping the classroom and devoting several weeks to relationship building and near stories, content always threatens to colonize the curriculum; the participatory language of covenant gives way to convenience, transposed into the more expedient and expected legalese of a learning contract. When teaching courses animated by issues of social justice (are there any that aren’t?), we knowingly enter into a charged space—even before we take roll on the first day of classes. As we enter a Fall semester in which pandemics, politics, and protests will be carried daily into our classrooms—by both persons and pedagogies masked and unmasked—this is the question I find myself returning to in the design of my syllabi: how do we help set the conditions for what Parker Palmer describes as a necessary paradox, namely, a charged but hospitable classroom, one in which the practice of hearing each other to speech is as much a process as an outcome? If our religious studies and theology classrooms are to be places of preparation for creative engagement in this imperfect world, to borrow from Faith Ngunjiri’s understanding of servant leadership, then we do well to make ample space in our courses for modeling discursive practices that counter hate speech with hospitality, callousness with compassion, and the pathology of violence with the promise of peace. For me, one way to do this with integrity will be to commit to the caring circle model as a pedagogical anchor for the course and not merely an ice-breaker in the first week of class.

When I go to work in the morning, the first thing I do is read the Bible. I read a bunch of commentaries, take a bunch of notes, then prayerfully reflect on the text. Then I set to work coming up with a meaningful and compelling way of communicating my interpretation to my listeners. Then I lift the piano lid. You see, I’m a composer of sacred music. At its heart, my job is to present an interpretation of Scripture to my listeners in a way that is interesting, convincing, and spiritually valuable. Unfortunately, few Christians ever hear my sacred music. That’s because I don’t write choral anthems or praise songs. I write sacred concert music: classical works that responds to themes, ideas, and texts from the Christian tradition. I’ve written a piano trio inspired by the book of Job, a song cycle that sets Rilke poems, and a brass quintet that explores the concept of perichoresis. (Humblebrag: of this piece, Walter Brueggemann wrote to me: “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.” Be still my beating heart!) Now, if I wrote a lot of choral music, I wouldn’t be complaining nearly as much. But today, most of history’s great church music composers face the same problems as me. While we do hear choral works by Bach, Handel, and Mendelssohn occasionally on Sunday mornings, the place where we usually encounter their sacred music is in the concert hall. This is an example of a strange irony: though most of us have nearly unlimited access to the corpus of great sacred music–either live or on Spotify-we Christians rarely have the chance to intentionally explore its spiritual value in the context of Christian community. As a result, we are missing out on the many ways sacred music can contribute to our lives as Christians–beyond its role in worship. In this post I’d like to provide a case study of a way that a different approach to sacred music can contribute to our work as educators. First, take about 15 minutes to listen to three new musical settings of Psalm 148 (scroll down for texts and info about each setting). Each was written in 2019 by a contemporary composer representing a different Christian tradition: Roman Catholic, Evangelical Lutheran, and Armenian Apostolic. Now that you’ve listened, let me ask you a question: which of these pieces interpreted the psalm correctly? Obviously, this is not the right question to ask. Yet it’s a familiar one, as it’s the one that so many students initially bring to the task of Biblical interpretation. And as educators, we know that ridding a student of this hermeneutic habit is the very first thing we need to accomplish in our classes. Listening to these three musical settings makes this easy. Each piece is an authentic, honest, and personal response to a rich and mysterious text. Each provokes us to think about the psalm in a completely different way: not just encouraging us to provide different interpretations of the psalm, but to ask completely different kinds of questions about it–and of ourselves. Heard back-to-back, the three settings testify incontrovertibly to the possibility–and, I might add, the necessity–of complementary, mutually-enriching interpretations of the same text. If we are going to teach the next generation of pastors, theologian, and laypeople, we know that these are the attitudes toward Scripture that we need to promote. More than anything, we need to convince our students to devote themselves to a lifetime of continuous exploration and re-exploration of our tradition. Beyond that, we need to encourage them to develop an attitude of humility, an awareness of the contingent nature of our own interpretations, and the courage to ask complex questions and follow them where they may lead. Sacred music helps us accomplish these goals. It opens up the field of interpretation by inviting us to engage with the Bible in ways that are not ideological, simplistic, or narrow, but instead subjective, affective, and open-ended. But this can only happen if we think creatively about new ways to use it in our classrooms and our churches. My new organization Deus Ex Musica, which developed the project culminating in the videos you watched, is my own humble attempt. For more than a millennium, composers have given us unique, powerful, and provocative musical interpretations of Scripture. They continue to do so today. In a world that increasingly promotes simple, ideologically-driven solutions to problems, I think sacred music has the potential to remind us that our tradition is rich, mysterious, and resistant to easy answers. Whether you are an educator, pastor, or layperson, I encourage you to seek out opportunities to explore the ways it can contribute to your ministry and your life of faith. Thanks for listening!

Like many of you, perhaps, I’ve been involved in a lot of race-related conversations at my institution lately. These conversations are usually among folks who I might, if pressed, call “allies,” “accomplices,” or even “co-conspirators”—well-intentioned, social justice advocates who are wanting to make real change at our institution, particularly in the ways we support the learning, sense of belonging, mental health, retention, and success of our underserved student populations. Yet I’ve noticed a trend in these various conversations, which, frankly, I find troubling. The trend is this: the problem (and thus, implicitly, any solution) always seems to be located elsewhere, outside the meeting space, in the ones who are not “woke”—that is, students, colleagues, and administrators ‘over there.’ This move, and it is a one I recognize and have made myself many times before, only serves to distance ourselves from the need for critical self-reflection, for taking responsibility, for offering apologies, for tough internal change. Exploring, even confronting, ourselves is a crucial step in doing any kind of social justice work, including what we might want to be doing with students in our classes. How can we effectively lead conversations about, for instance, antisemitism or Islamophobia when we ourselves haven’t done the necessary inner work of racial justice? Professor of Law Rhonda Magee offers an “ecological model of social change,” which, yes, aspires toward interconnectedness and collective transformation, but which, first, depends on the work we do within and on ourselves. For Magee, the focus is on mindfulness, awareness, self-compassion, and resilience. What are our physical sensations? What are our emotional responses? What are our fears? What are our immediate judgments? For me, such increased awareness leads me to ask some tough questions: How am I complicit? How is my department? How is our discipline? A few years ago, I read Irving’s Waking Up White and, I’m embarrassed to admit, realized for the first time in my life that I was, in fact, white. This set me on a course to better understand “white privilege”—how being white has affected me, what paths it has smoothed over for me, what barriers it has removed for me—invisibly, seamlessly, without me even noticing or trying. I’ve read Oluo’s So You Want to Talk about Race, DiAngelo’s White Fragility, and Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist, and I’ve been unsettled, even disturbed, at some of the things I’ve discovered about myself. I won’t record them here, as I imagine they would be upsetting for some readers, but I assure you that this aspect of my social identity invariably affects how I show up as a friend, as a neighbor, as a colleague, as a team leader, as a teacher. When we talk about implicit bias, it’s not just “them,” it’s me. When we talk about microaggressions, it’s not just “them,” it’s me. When we talk about the problems, it’s not just “them,” it’s me. Ongoing self-exploration, “fierce moral audits” as a friend of mine likes to say, is necessary as we work with and alongside our students. There are wonderful tools and resources available online, such as this Anti-Racist Educator Questionnaire and Rubric. Folks of color (like those at yourblackfriendsarebusy) have been generous in curating, writing, talking, protesting, singing, illustrating, imagining. For me, these efforts are not to (continue to) center whiteness or to get kudos and congratulations for doing what is essentially the bare minimum; it is to better ourselves before attempting to better anyone else. In a recent blog post, Sarah Farmer wrote beautifully of her experiences with students: Justice-seeking conversations challenge students at the core. Students aren’t just grappling with social justice concepts theoretically; they wrestle with their very identities. I invite that wrestling in the class. I want the class to be a space where they can explore, discover, challenge, reconstruct, and dream of a better world and their participation in that world together. But each of these actions require courage. I imagine my classroom as a stage, one where students are invited to “try on” these new courageous ways of doing and being socially just. Her words work just as well if you replace “students” with “us” or “we.” This work is challenging for us. We are wrestling with our very identities. We are (or should be) exploring, discovering, challenging, reconstructing, and dreaming. Social justice requires courage—not just of them, but of us too.

Effective online teaching requires applying sound pedagogy, the same as those practiced in the classroom experience. One such practice is induction–and, you can never overdo it. When I was in parish ministry, our staff met weekly to do worship planning. In addition to reviewing text, sermon topic, music, hymns, and other components of the worship service we would always decide on the questions, “how will we enter the room?” and "how will we close the service?" That is, how and when would the worship leaders (choir, pastoral staff, etc.) enter the worship space so as to lead the congregation into the worship experience? How would we signal the "start" of the worship experience? We wanted to “set” the tone, affect, and focus of the worship experience by creating expectancy at the start, helping the congregants know how and what to pay attention to during the service, and moving them toward response and closure at the end of the service. The same principles apply to learning. In a learning environment, induction (or, “set induction”) refers to those actions by the teacher designed to introduce the students to the learning experience, be it a course of study or a lesson. Induction helps the learners relate their experiences to the objectives of the lesson or course (building on what they know to acquire what they do not). Using set induction will orient your students to the course (or lesson) and put them in a receptive frame of mind that will facilitate learning. Two purposes of set induction are: (1) to focus student attention on the lesson or course–-its purpose and relevance to the student; and (2) to create an organizing framework for the ideas, concepts, principles, or information which is to follow. Effective application of set induction will provide important instructional functions for your students. It will serve as an advanced organizer, create expectancy, and identify why the content is meaningful, which is an important motivator for learning. In a classroom setting many instructors use the course syllabus as a tool for course induction. Walking your students through a well-designed course syllabus will provide a framework for helping your students answer the Ws that are anxiously rattling around in their minds: who, what, when, where, and, how? Admittedly, most instructors do not take enough time using this technique. Which is why you may get asked several times during the course, “When is the final exam due, again?” Or, "what should I write my paper on?" When setting up your online course environment practice I.R.A. and use the Ws. I.R.A. stands for “Information Reduces Anxiety.” When your students begin a course, they have a level of anxiety and are looking to understand what the course is about and what will be expected of them as a learner. Front load your course site with as much information as your students need to answer their questions; but no more than that. When you design your introduction/orientation page, embed the Ws (who, what, when, where, why, and how). These are the questions for which they are seeking answers. As your course progresses, cut back on the course orientation content, reduce content coverage, and increase learner engagement activities and opportunities. Does your course introduction or orientation answer the following for the students? Who is this course for? What is this course about? What is its focus? What is the big idea? What are the expected student learning outcomes? What background knowledge, skills, or competencies does the student need to succeed in the course? What does the student need to do first to begin the course? When will this course start? When will it conclude? When are the assignments due? Where can the student find information and resources (course syllabus, schedule, handouts, readings, rubrics, links, etc.). Why is this course meaningful? Why is the focus of study important? How will the student successfully complete the course? How will the student demonstrate attainment of learning or mastery of skill? How will the student's work be assessed?

What comes to mind when I say the word “predictable?” The comfort of knowing that you will walk into the same class every day? Or perhaps repeatedly teaching the same (boring) thing? Often the latter negative interpretation wins out. But I’ve never thought of predictability as inherently bad, and the current pandemic and scramble to move into new modalities reinforced the importance of predictability as a stabilizing mechanism in times of crisis. Students crave a sense of normalcy in the classroom, which becomes apparent any time you want to try something new. It was particularly evident last spring when we had to swiftly switch to remote teaching and learning. I was able to make the transition relatively smoothly in large part because my courses were based around a few easily replicable principles: predictability and flexibility. Predictability during Normal Instruction Creating classes from the outset with these ideas in mind can help ease transitions between in-person and online learning. The most salient points are to: Integrate the Learning Management System: Use the LMS as much as possible in order to familiarize students (and yourself) with online course structures. Post all class readings, handouts, and PowerPoints and make students submit quizzes, papers, and tests 100% digitally. Use Diverse Teaching Strategies: Mix activities in every class to engage student learning: shorter lectures, primary text reading and analysis, recall of previous course content, brief videos, and small and large-group discussions. This variety creates students who can navigate quickly among many different activities by drawing on a relatively large repertoire of familiar course activities. Utilize Universal Design for Learning: UDL principles are key to shaping flexible in-person and online course structures. This can be done in part by using Backwards Design which helps eliminate extraneous work and streamlines classes down to the essentials to quickly convert between in-person and online instruction. Predictability in Crisis When we moved online, students adapted quickly, even remarking that they were happy the class could return to “normal” within three days, despite being completely asynchronous for accessibility reasons. To do this: Draw on Your Diverse Teaching Strategies: In Spring 2020, I gave virtual lectures of about 20-35 minutes with enhanced slides, additional outlines, and at-home activities. I also posted videos and readings we would have had in-class with guided questions. Engage Directly with Students: To replace in-class discussions, I created discussion boards on the LMS that I monitored and responded to once a week. I also created daily journals on GoogleDocs that I would respond to 2-3 times a week; this gave students predictable interactive time. Keep to the Schedule: Aside from pushing back a few students’ presentations, I kept all the due dates in the class the same. Students responded well by filling out their journals, turning (most of) their work in on time, taking quizzes, writing papers, etc. Accept Your Imperfections: One of the key things to my success was that I did not try to make anything perfect. Instead, I was predictable; I was the professor I was in class, complete with silly jokes, awkward pauses, and mistakes. By the time we made the switch, we had established a predictable yet flexible routine for learning that students could follow online. In fact, my classes were so predictable that when my videos didn’t appear one day by 8 PM, I got multiple emails from students asking if I was alright. What Predictability is Not I want to be clear, however, that being predictable does not mean avoiding crisis. Addressing crisis can take many forms within a predictable structure: discussion questions linking course content to current events or forums dedicated to student views on what is happening. Predictability means acting like the class we have is the one we want to have. As instructors, it is important to remember that we might be the one solid thing in students’ lives when everything else feels beyond their control. Making this fact central to pedagogical practice means being predictable yet willing to change the class in predictable ways when necessary. Using Predictability Wisely In times of crisis, it is natural for people to seek something steady, and our classes can be this. Still, I’m not going to pretend this was easy because it wasn’t. Predictability was and is in short supply, and the emotional and physical toll of the pandemic and recent campaigns for racial justice are extremely taxing, especially for Black, Latinx, Native American, and other minority groups. But the sense of normalcy in the class was good for both students and myself, giving us a structure to our days when everything seemed so strange. I’ll take this into the coming year which is bound to be (un)predictable.

Like most construction projects in the neighborhood where I live, education rarely takes place on an empty lot. A building is already present. It can be demolished and replaced, repaired, or enlarged; but a successful builder will not ignore it. Learners and teachers alike need to consider how new information relates to learners’ prior understandings. Learners ordinarily integrate new ideas and experiences within existing knowledge structures, but sometimes new information causes enough cognitive dissonance to motivate either a replacement of old understandings or a rejection of the new. Regular readers of this blog may remember that I am participating as a learner in a course on womanist hermeneutics taught by Dr. Mitzi Smith of Columbia Theological Seminary.[i] Dr. Smith knows from hard experience that teaching womanist hermeneutics typically requires much deconstructive as well as constructive work. Her most recent post, “Decentering Biblical Interpretation is Anti-Racism Work,” testifies to the taxing nature of that challenge, especially for an African American woman teaching in a majority white context. As a learner, I have the freedom and responsibility to decide whether and how I will change my understanding of hermeneutics. This work, too, can be emotionally and intellectually taxing. It can involve modifying or discarding beliefs that have been central to my identity and sense of purpose. Or it can require negotiating tensions while moving toward synthesis and integration. With the intensive portion of the course about to begin, I would like to survey some of my prior commitments in order to test their compatibility with womanist hermeneutics. Along the way, I will mention some pedagogical implications of those commitments. I interpret the Bible as a Christian immersed in the Anabaptist and Pietist streams of the Radical Reformation. “Seeking the mind of Christ together” is an essential goal in this tradition, and Bible study is one means to pursue that goal. For me, seeking the mind of Christ is analogous to other interpersonal relationships in which I attempt to learn how someone feels and thinks. Along with other disciples, I ask the living Jesus, “What do you think of this text, and how do you want us to respond to it now?” I ask similar questions when the interpretive process begins with a contemporary situation instead of a biblical text. For example, “What do you think of unjust policing, or of the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on people of color? How do you want us to respond?” Christ-centered hermeneutics allows for prioritization and critique of biblical texts. It is not a matter of doing whatever we want with scripture, but of prayerfully discerning what Jesus wants. When asked about a text, Jesus may answer, “You have heard that it was said . . . , but I say to you” (Matt 5:21-48); or “Go and learn what this means:  ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice’” (Matt 9:13; 12:27). Justice, mercy, and love are essential values in Jesus’ reading of scripture. Jesus is especially inclined to reject scriptural reasoning that reinforces unjust privilege and marginalization. Dr. Smith has offered a similar thought about African-American hermeneutics: “Critical engagement with the Scriptures could involve a resistance to and/or a rejection of some biblical texts and yet leave ‘my Jesus’ intact.”[ii] To imagine Jesus faithfully is often counter-cultural work. Although incarnated in a male body, Jesus does not conform to societal expectations of gender. Jesus has never been white. Thus, I am especially drawn to the image that Dr. Smith put at the top of her Moodle page:  Jesus, who is black, covers his eyes in dismay at the injustice around and within us. Although students may or may not share my Christ-centered approach, it affects how I teach them. I assume that another Teacher is present in the classroom (or wherever the students are). Jesus may speak through anyone, most often through people who have been marginalized. My academic training is a resource for students, but it gives me no claim to superior authority. Instead, my primary task is to lead students in the formation of an intersubjective and intercontextual community of inquiry where they can learn from one another, from me, and from a range of other interpreters. In such communities we can all hope to stand corrected as Jesus uses conversation partners to raise insights, questions, or objections that we might have otherwise ignored. The communal emphasis of Anabaptism warns against a complacent, individualistic approach in which any interpretation is deemed valid regardless of its impact on peoples’ lives or its relationship to the text. We need loving communities to correct unloving interpretations while teaching and modeling better ones. I am aware, of course, that communal interpretation is not a panacea. Entire communities might be wrong, and majority votes at church conferences might or might not bring people closer to the mind of Christ. Systemic injustices (racism, sexism, etc.) are endemic to many communities, including many denominations, congregations, and seminaries. These injustices distort both the processes and the outcomes of our discussions. In such circumstances, Jesus often speaks through prophetesses, iconoclasts, and activists to call for repentance by the majority.[iii]  My claim that some interpretations merit rejection does not mean that there is only one right interpretation. Jesus is free to inspire the multiple understandings that different interpreters need at different times. When communal conversations uncover more of a text’s “meaning potential,”[iv] interpreters are better able to discern which possible meanings are just and faithful for their contexts. As a professor I accept responsibility for designing and leading courses in ways that maximize the potential and avoid the pitfalls of communal interpretation. I strive to avoid any hint of systemic injustices in my courses, but I am not perfect in that regard. Sometimes I have allowed a few students to dominate discussions instead of ensuring that all voices are heard. Sometimes the best I can do is repent, apologize, and work to improve in the future. This survey has revealed some common ground between my Christ-centered, communal approach to hermeneutics and what I am learning from Dr. Smith. I, too, decenter the Bible to some extent, and I understand Christ to have an ethical agenda like hers. [i] Earlier blogs have introduced this learning opportunity. See Daniel W. Ulrich, “Learning Womanist Hermeneutics during Covid-19” at https://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/2020/07/learning-womanist-hermeneutics-during-covid-19/, and Mitzi J. Smith, “Change and the Baggage I Bring to This Collaboration” at https://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/2020/07/change-and-the-baggage-i-bring-to-this-collaboration/. [ii] Mitzi J. Smith, Insights from African American Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017), 66. [iii] See Mitzi J. Smith, “‘This Little Light of Mine’: The Womanist Biblical Scholar as Prophetess, Iconoclast, and Activist,” in I Found God in Me: A Womanist Biblical Hermeneutics Reader, ed. Mitzi J. Smith (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015), 109-127. [iv] Brian K. Blount, “The Souls of Biblical Folks and the Potential for Meaning,” Journal of Biblical Literature 138 (Spring 2019): 6–21, esp. 14.

In a webinar on “white allies” moderated by Dr. Lynne Westfield, her guests Drs. Melanie Harris and Jennifer Garvey discussed their collective anti-racism work. Dr. Harris stated that she feels called to work with white colleagues around anti-racism, but that white colleagues must do some preparatory anti-racism work before engaging black people in conversation or enlisting their help. I do not sense a call to anti-racism work with or for white people, but I find myself in the thick of it every time I teach a class open to all students and more so in a seminary where white students are the majority. When white students arrive in my courses, they find that black and brown scholars and our scholarship are centered, thereby decentering whiteness. A question that some white colleagues and students ask after reading my womanist work for the first time, which is the case with this “African American Biblical Interpretation and the Gospel of Luke” course I am currently teaching, is “how do we know when we have gone too far?” (implication, you have gone too far?). Or they assert that “we must find the original meaning of the Bible before we can apply the truth” to contemporary contexts. I have never expressly articulated my work as a womanist biblical scholar as anti-racism work prior to this collaboration between a white male professor, Dr. Dan Ulrich (as learning professor in the course) and the dominantly white Bethany Theological Seminary/Earlham School of Religion where he teaches. This collaboration is my most labor-intensive anti-racism work in the classroom to date. Teaching biblical studies as an African American female has never been without the challenges of sexism, racism, and classism. I am sure that this isolation required of me during this pandemic has lowered my threshold for racism, but I maintain my composure. Whether it is intentional or not, decentering whiteness while teaching as a black woman is emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, and physically taxing. White people in general are oblivious to the impact of anti-racism work on black scholars as teachers and colleagues. In one breath, many white people position themselves as both progressives and gatekeepers of Eurocentric approaches to interpretation. When the participants (white and black) in this course were polled about how many books they had read by African American biblical scholars prior to this course, many named black theologians like James Cone or Delores Williams. One white male participant wanted to use his knowledge of Martin Luther King Jr. to demonstrate how radical my work is. King is only palatable to most white people and many nonwhite people post-mortem; in his later years King was regarded as radical. To racism, black bodies are easily interchangeable. As the instructor, I can muster the bandwidth to challenge racist assumptions and ideas or I can preserve my energy for other things. Dr. Harris asks herself “what is the garment I must place on my mind, my body, on my spirit to work with white students today?” Yes, so true.  Our consultants to this collaboration, Drs. Marcia Riggs and Mary Hess, asked me how I plan to create empathy among my students for people experiencing homelessness. My response was through stories, guest speakers (one of whom experienced homelessness and is now the founder/director of Love Beyond Walls in Atlanta), and Matthew Desmond’s book, Eviction. In a Consciousness-Raising document I constructed, one of the questions is “have you ever experienced trauma?” and “… or homelessness?” Quite a few said they had not. In Eviction, Desmond shares the stories of poor white people (living in a trailer park in the North side of Milwaukee) and poor black people (living in an apartment building on the South side of Milwaukee). Through their stories, readers witness the violent intersectional impact of systemic poverty, racism, and sexism. The question that also arises is how does one create empathy for the plight of black people? The deaths of too many black and brown women and men have been videotaped and circulated on social media; they were suffocated or shot to death by police officers ‘before our eyes.’ George Floyd was not the first; the killers of Breonna Tylor have yet to be arrested. It is unclear whether most white people marching with BLM and SayHerName protests empathize with black people, it is popular now to do so, and/or the pandemic allows for and compels their participation. In this course, how do I create empathy for black people and encourage a need and desire for becoming anti-racist when white people believe they can have their Eurocentric exegesis cake and be progressive or progressing toward unmitigated anti-racism that both empathizes with black peoples and their lived realities with systemic racism and acknowledges (and exposes) sacralized rituals that perform whiteness? John Warren argues that “education relies on maintenance of imagined purity, that education effectively treats and reproduces the cultural logic that bodies of color represent a disturbance in a culture of power, a contaminant against the performative nature of whiteness as a pure and perfect ideal . . . education is a social process and that social process often works in violent ways to erase and inscribe violence on the bodies it encounters.”[1] Whiteness and its performance must be named, made visible to be displaced. One cannot empathize with black people and marginalize the black people’s stories, epistemologies, wisdom, and historical and contemporary experiences. Feminism centers women’s experiences and voices; this alone is troubling to exegesis born in the womb of eurocentrism, androcentrism, and racism. In a recent womanist reading of the story of the so-called “woman caught in adultery,” a white male biblical scholar asked why I must rescue all women. Yesterday, I made the comment “Yoho Must Go” on the YouTube video of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s response to Rep. Yoho. Someone responded to my comment by calling me a “FemiNazi.” I laughed out loud, but sexism, racism, classism, and homo/trans/queer phobia are no laughing matters; oppression is traumatic, debilitating, and death-dealing. The majority students in this course have been indoctrinated to believe that exegesis is the scientific method that yields the truth and/or truths about the Bible; it is the sine qua non to biblical truth. In another student poll, I placed in the Moodle course for the week of July 20, majority students responded with certainty that exegesis is the opposite of eisegesis, as reading out of the text versus reading into the text. How does one encourage empathy for centering black women and our communities, our epistemologies, and our approaches to biblical interpretation that challenge what students believe is objective science (or subjective but superior)? There were no scientists at the table during the Enlightenment when European white biblical scholars invented exegesis as the antithesis of eisegesis. We all read into texts; we bring our biases, our training, the impact of our culture and ecclesial affiliations, to the task of reading. Most students believe exegesis is a skill; a few responded that it as a gift. Exegesis is a skill that is taught and with much practice is learned. But it, of course, is not a science with a guaranteed outcome/truth provided one uses a set formula, as evinced, at least, by the hostile arguments among biblical scholars over in/correct exegetical truths. Let’s be honest; few students leave theological schools with the ability to write a good exegesis paper, but our institutions persist in their efforts to inculcate the notion that exegesis is the best and/or only legitimate approach to biblical interpretation and to claim to be doing anything but exegesis is unacceptable; only the uneducated or miseducated perform eisegesis. Seminary graduates interpret biblical texts variously on Facebook, for example, and label them ‘exegetical’ and themselves ‘exegetes’; often they are doing anything but exegesis. Labeling their efforts at interpretation as exegesis legitimizes them and their readings. Religion often dismisses common sense questions as not spiritual, but I am committed to challenge students with probing questions, such as “what is at stake?” “who loses?” and “what is the impact?” I hope to encourage or compel them to re/consider their assumptions and assertions. But it is also necessary to directly refute or challenge racist beliefs, assumptions, and assertions. [1] John T. Warren, “Bodily Excess and the Desire for Absence: Whiteness and the Making of (Raced) Educational Subjectivities,” Performance Theories in Education: Power Pedagogy, and the Politics of Identity, eds. Bryant K. Alexander et al., (NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005), 86.

New learning that counters established or accepted knowledge is challenging. My “Global Read of the Bible” course introduces students to different interpretations by Christians from around the globe. Many global Bible readers are critical of the relationship between western colonialisms and the role of the Bible as a tool of oppression. In my first-year teaching, a very thoughtful and engaged white female student reacted emotionally, strongly dissociating herself and her ancestors from western colonialism. In another class, when I discussed how some biblical texts had silenced women, a black male student asked how a woman professor can teach and have authority over men at a seminary!  If education is to be formational and transformational, how can we deal with difficult topics related to the privilege and oppression internalized in the teacher and students? This big question is even more complicated when we consider intersectionality and the complexity of identities, but “unlearning” may open the way to approaching this question. The word “unlearn” means discarding or nullifying what we have learned when it is wrong, false, or outdated; to “forget your usual way of doing something so that you can learn a new and sometimes better way.” Yet often, we cannot conveniently remove what we know. What we learn through oppression is inscribed in our bodies. Defining feminist work as memory work, Sara Ahmed argues: Experiences … seem to accumulate over time, gathering like things in a bag, but the bag is your body, so that you feel like you are carrying more and more weight. The past becomes heavy….” (Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 23) Previously experienced or continued oppression may lead to suppressing the feeling of shame. You learn to be un- or less affected, or try to forget what should not have happened. So, the definition of “unlearn” is half right when it applies to oppression. Students, as well as the teacher, come to class as embodied beings. Some have unforgettable memories of violence and ineradicable experiences of oppression. In her House Floor speech on July 23rd, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded to Rep. Yoho’s non-apology over his vulgar insult of her on the steps of the Capitol. She had encountered that type of harassment many times—at restaurants, on the streets, and in the subway, just like other ordinary women. Yet, she stood up for other women and girls using her privilege. The power and pain of the speech lie in her remembering all those past events. Her hearers gathered their own memories and connected them into a fuller picture of women’s status and humanity.   Unlearning also applies for the privileged. We gain knowledge in interactions with the social body—societal systems and institutions that give power and opportunity to specific groups of people. So, the privileged learn and embody their privilege without recognizing that they have it. Whiteness is such a privilege. By naming the privilege and internalized superiority, we begin the unlearning process. My conscientization came in my undergraduate “Sociology of Education” classroom. The professor told us that studying at the prestigious women’s university was a privilege, which was made possible at the expense of other women of our age. I was shocked. Surely, I hadn’t done anything wrong to them. And, my parents had to work so hard to pay for their daughter’s tuition. Yet, this powerful education has helped me to always ask what privilege(s) I have over others in different contexts—even as a racial/ethnic minority woman in the U.S. Borrowing Ahmed’s words, I would say unlearning is a memory work. Unlearning is a work—a work “to remember what sometimes we wish would or could just recede” (Ahmed, 22). If the space is safe enough for such work to take place, it can generate tension and conflicts among students. Still, my students are encouraged and willing to listen to others and unlearn their privileges, a conscientization that they will use to benefit others. Although such discussions do not have to be personal, what we teach and learn—even seemingly abstract ideas—are grounded in people’s lives and social realities, including past and present marginalization and oppression. The pandemic has exposed such disparities among peoples so that unlearning occurs not only in the classroom but also in public squares and virtual spaces. We see the potential of our (un)learning as collective and social. I imagine the student who responded to other people’s suffering defensively nonetheless continues her journey toward the liberation of herself and others among her communities and the masses.

“Listen to my words, YHWH, consider my lament. Hear my cry for help...” (Psalm 5:1-2) We are living in unprecedented times. Not only are we still reeling from the global COVID-19 pandemic, but nationally we are just beginning to reckon with the current social uprising in response to police brutality and systemic racism. People throughout the world are crying out, raising their voices in protest and lament, seeking hope and solace. In so doing, we join the voices of generations past, who sought authentic and creative ways to express their deepest yearnings, turning to their spiritual and cultural traditions for guidance and inspiration. Ten weeks ago, the two of us—one rabbi and one minister—decided that we wanted to explore the biblical Book of Psalms—a collection of beautiful, gritty, desperate, and uplifting prayer-poems—in our time and place. And so, we conceived PsalmSeason: An Online Encounter with the Wisdom of the Psalms. Over the course of the 18-week cycle (the numerical equivalent of the Hebrew word for life—chai), a diverse group of religious leaders; cultural critics; musicians; poets; artists; and activists explore the Psalms, bringing these time-worn texts into dialogue with life in the here-and-now. Like the ancient Hebrew writers, we seek to express our anger, dread, and sorrow, while also giving thanks for the preciousness of life and recommitting ourselves to actively work for a more just, compassionate, and sustainable future. Why is it that so many people have turned to the Psalms over the centuries, particularly in difficult moments? In her elegant introduction to PsalmSeason, Dr. Ellen Davis of Duke University writes that one feature of this biblical book that makes it so compelling is that “the Psalms speak directly from and to the human heart.” Further, as Davis notes, “The book of 150 Psalms speaks with the most consistently personal voice in the Bible, often in the first person (‘I’ or ‘we’).” These ancient Hebrew poets model for us the power of calling out to God, to ourselves, and to our communities in different—often extreme—moments of life. While it is true that for centuries Jews and Christians have turned to the Book of Psalms, there have been far fewer opportunities for members of these two communities and others to explore these sources together as fellow seekers. What do we share in common? Where do we differ? How might reading these texts through the lens of the “other” impact our understanding of life and our struggles at this time? What do we hear, for example, when listening to the poet Drew Drake’s new lament “Searching My Rage,” which he wrote just days after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police officers? What do we see when looking at Debra Band’s illuminated painting of the pastoral landscape of Psalm 23? How might the words of Nina Simone’s psalm-like song “Come Ye,” performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock, inspire us with its repeated refrain of “Come ye of hope”? Throughout the PsalmSeason cycle, we focus on one psalm a week, offering several different forms of commentary—music, poetry, personal reflection, and visual art. In addition, we offer broader reflections on major themes in the Psalms or significant cultural creations inspired by these legendary texts. We also host live events on topics related to the Psalms. We are tremendously grateful to the more than 50 contributors from several different countries that have lent their talents and skills to this project, particularly during such a difficult and precarious moment in human history. We invite all who visit the PsalmSeason website (hosted on the Interfaith Youth Core’s Interfaith America site) to consider taking three simple actions: Reflect quietly on the biblical texts and interpretations offered on our site. What are they key insights or questions that emerge for you as you read today? Share your insights and questions with at least one other person. Who might be a helpful companion on this journey? Who might benefit from such a conversation? Create your own commentary on the PsalmSeason materials you explore, be it in the form of poetry, music, dance, or drama. How might this process help you grow as an individual and contribute more deeply to a world in dire need of healing? Please share your experiences on Twitter using #PsalmSeason and tagging us—@millercenterHC and @ifyc—or in a post on our Facebook page. To paraphrase Psalm 90: may the work of all those working for peace and justice, health and wholeness, be blessed.

In a recent survey about the past spring 2020 semester, 65% of the college students surveyed said that they had much fewer opportunities to collaborate with other students when classes went online. 50% said that the online classes did worse, or much worse, at making them feel included as members of their classes. Honestly, I’m surprised that the numbers weren’t higher! I worry about how we’ll build community in our classes in the fall when we’ll have to start classes remotely or with strict social distancing rules in place. I worry about the quality of learning in my discussion-based courses because I know it decreases sharply whenever class members do not trust me and each other enough to have real conversations. And I worry about my first-year students because they don’t have any existing relationships on campus. How lonely will their first semester in college be, and how damaging will that be to their learning and their mental health? Helping our students build relationships with each other and with us may be our most important task in the fall. So how can we do it? Here are my best ideas so far: Stable small groups I’ll divide my classes into groups of 6 to 8 students, and they will work together regularly for at least the first month. They will: Interview each other and introduce each other to the rest of the group in a blog post, a piece of art, a podcast, or video. Post responses to course materials to a group discussion board, respond to each other’s posts, and build on that interaction in class discussion. Review and respond to group members’ paper drafts. Meet with me or the TA during office hours as a group. Meet with me as a group during class to discuss course content (using a tutorial format). Reflect on and trouble-shoot group dynamics: What role do you play in your group? Who talks the most? The least? How can you improve things? Develop explicit norms for how to interact with each other. Keep an eye on each other and let me know if somebody is struggling. Create space to discuss how they are doing College students across the nation were already struggling with mental health issues like depression and anxiety and, not surprisingly, early data indicates that the past six months have made it worse. So, in the fall, I’ll focus more on how my students are doing. I plan to: Assign and discuss course materials on mental health early in the semester. I’ll show that I’m aware of the issue, that I understand how important it is, and that I recognize the stress that they are under. Practice what I preach: Be flexible and compassionate and when possible give them the benefit of the doubt. In the beginning of each class, ask how they are doing and listen carefully to the answers. Avoid rote by mixing up the question: How did you sleep last night? What will you do for fun this weekend? What do you wish your professors knew about your life right now? Play with different ways for them to answer: small groups, poll, share with the class, or write anonymously. Make clear that I understand that some of us are more private than others and that they don’t have to share if they don’t want to. Email individual students to check in or to give them feedback: You were unusually quiet today, are you okay? I loved your deep question about Buddhism, thank you! Thanks for bringing Mary’s idea into the conversation and for opening a space so that she could speak. Refer them to campus support services when needed. I’m not qualified to be a therapist. Take care of ourselves The past six months have been difficult for most of us, and the work I’m calling us to do takes time and energy. Don't be a hero. If you take this on, skip other stuff. What stuff? Well, here’s what I'm skipping: I’m not adding any content to my classes and I’m not revising any assignments (except as mentioned above). I'm using class time for the community building and mental health work instead of doing it outside of class. Content coverage will suffer, and I’ll learn to be okay with that. Most of all, I’ll keep reminding myself that I'm teaching during a crisis. Perfection isn't needed and I won't strive for it. Works cited Suddenly online: A national survey of undergraduates during the COVID-19 crisis. Digital Promise, July 2020.