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Jesus H. Christ: Be Aware of What Students HearI was walking into the Den at Le Moyne College when I was accosted by a colleague in the English department. He asked, “What the hell are you teaching in your religion classes?” While I often ask myself this same question, I decided to ask what he meant. He told me that a young woman in his class was also in my Introduction to Religion class. The students in his class were discussing Coleridge’s “Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement,” and they came across this line:          Sweet is the tear that from some Howard’s eye          Drops on the cheek of one he lifts from earthHe asked the students what they thought Coleridge meant. The student we shared in our classes was quick to say she thought it was an allusion to Christ. Intrigued, my colleague asked her how she came upon that idea. She replied that Professor Glennon had said Jesus’ middle name was Howard and that Coleridge was talking about the comfort Jesus continues to give to us from heaven.I chuckled. I told my colleague that this notion came up in a discussion on the Gospel of Mark when Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” Of course, the question of identity is often related to one’s name and one’s family. With tongue-in-cheek I asked the students what Jesus’s last name was. While many admitted they didn’t know, others said it was Christ. I suggested that, while it is true that title, “Christ,” is connected to Jesus’s identity as his disciple blurted out, it was not really his last name. It is more likely that his last name was bar Joseph, son of Joseph.But I pressed them further. I asked if any of them had ever heard their parents or grandparents, in a moment of anger or frustration, say “Jesus H. Christ”? Many students had. So I asked, “What does the H. stand for?” As you might imagine, no one knew. I decided to enlighten them and told them that the H. stood for Howard. Warily, they asked how I knew that. I responded that it was right at the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father, who art in heaven, Howard be thy name.”Obviously, most students recognized that this was a joke. In case you are wondering, the actual prayer says, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” But somehow this young woman didn’t catch on and took me seriously. She stored this “fact” in the back of her mind. When a few weeks later her English class discussed Coleridge’s reflection, she was delighted by the insight she could offer; the tear came from Howard’s eye because he was the one who lifts those who die from earth.The student and I, and even her mother, laughed about this for the rest of her time at the school. She learned that it is always good to check the information she received for its reliability and trustworthiness. I learned to be sure that whenever I tell this joke in class, which I do at times, that after I reveal the middle name, I look to make sure the students know it is a joke, just in case.Driving the Bus: What is Hell Like?In my classes, I want to make sure that the religious and ethical questions students bring to the classroom find their way into our discussion. I use a strategy I call the Question Bag. The students’ first homework assignment is to anonymously write any religious or ethical question they have that they would like us to talk about during the semester on a sheet of paper. At the beginning of the second class, I collect the questions in a paper bag. Periodically, we draw a question from the bag to discuss at the beginning of the class period. The discussion can take a few minutes or even the entire class period depending on how important the question is to the class.In one introduction to religion class, the question we pulled from the bag was “What is hell like?” I asked students to say out loud what their responses were. Some had obviously read Dante’s Inferno and so talked about the terrible suffering sinners could expect at the hands of Satan’s minions. Others, feeling a bit more enlightened, said it was the experience of forever being apart from the presence of God. Still others suggested hell didn’t exist. When you die, you die.At this point I interjected a few thoughts into the conversation. A few times during the semester, I had referenced the adage, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” I noted that some people who had religious and ethical disagreements with me declared that I was heading down that road; in fact, I was probably driving the bus. I mused that some people even say that we are living hell on earth. If so, I pondered aloud, is this really a terrible road to be on? After all, I was a tenured, full professor. I lived a relatively comfortable life, making more than enough money. As a department chair, I only taught two classes per semester with plenty of flexibility and free time. I even had four months a year to do the other things I wanted to do: travel, write, volunteer. I say things in class and people actually write them down!One student in the class, Becca, was a physically challenged and bound to a wheelchair. Although she had overcome many obstacles to get to where she was at the time, she faced them with courage, perseverance, and a good bit of humor. She was a young woman with deep faith and hope in the God she followed. She told the class that this was her question and she blurted out, “Fred, can I ride the bus with you?” Most students smiled but some eyes filled with tears. The students were very supportive of Becca within and without the class, and I would often see them talking with her, eating lunch with her, and encouraging her. Le Moyne students overall are really kind. They knew the challenges she faced and they offered help whenever she asked for it which, given her independent spirit, was very seldom.A year later, Becca decided to have surgery that, if successful, would allow her to become even more independent. She knew the risks, but she insisted on going through with it. Becca died on the operating table.When I think of her, which is often, I recall that classroom conversation and her response. A part of me wishes I had never come across as glib about this life being “hell on earth.” While we all have challenges in our lives, mine could never compare to hers. I never confronted what she did daily, nor have I faced the risk she chose with her surgery. Her faith in herself and in God was strong; I wish I had a fraction of the courage she showed.But one thought continues to give me hope. If the Christian understanding of God, Becca’s God, is a God of love and the promise of abundant life beyond death is true, I am certain that Becca is now living eternal life to the fullest, hopefully driving a bus down that heavenly road welcoming all on board. And, when my time comes, I hope to be waiting at the bus stop as she pulls up so I can ask, “Becca, can I ride the bus with you?”

Being Triggered as a ProfessorI have noticed that some students are quick to throw loaded terms without knowing exactly what they mean, or they erroneously assume they know what they mean. Maybe you can relate. For example, I was teaching a Contemporary Theologies course and I was discussing German theologians during and post-World War II. One of my students did not know the difference between fascism and communism. This student basically stated that the Nazis were socialists and by extension communists because their name was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (National-Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). The student could not get past the “Socialist” in the name and described anything left-leaning as fascist. As you and I know, the fascists and the communists could not stand one another. The only thing they had in common was the totalitarian form of government with strong dictatorships in power. However, their foundation and aim were different. I pointed the student to basic Encyclopedia Britannica articles on the political spectrum, fascism and on Nazism so that this student could better understand the difference between the two.I was taken back by the student’s confidence in his position and his willingness to correct me when he was so sure I had made a mistake. In the end I was surprised by having to endure a student like this who did not want to listen. In this case, this particular student came to the classroom with a mind already made up and not willing to dialogue with different or diverging ideas, or even those based on facts. Rather, this student was there wanting to reinforce preconceived notions of what is right and wrong, and in this case, what was left and what was right.I had another student in a different semester’s offering of the same course that really set me off—I lost it. This student refused to acknowledge racism and the effects of racism in US society. I had students of color who were emailing me of how deeply offended they were from the first day of class until the last day of class. This particular student firmly believed that the US was completely free of any type of racism. Consequently, Black people were lazy, Hispanics/latin@s liked to blame Caucasian people like him for all their problems. The student refused to acknowledge history, of things that happened in the Civil Rights Era, and problems that continue to affect minorities and people of color.I don’t know if you’ve ever been there, but I lost my patience with this student on the second day of class. Oh, my! It was going to be a long semester. I could feel my blood pressure rising. My muscles began to tighten. My heartbeat went up a few notches. It seldom happens, but at that moment I began to ask this student a barrage of questions and making statements about being intolerant and closed-minded to considering the perspectives of others and those from different communities who have suffered under unjust housing practices, and deeply ingrained attitudes and postures from those in power in society.[i] I wanted to say (but thankfully I did not), what in the world are you doing in graduate school if you don’t want to learn anything? What are you doing in graduate school if you already have the answers to life’s great questions?It is not a good place to be, being triggered and going off on a student. It sets a poor example. We are to model hard intellectual reasoning. Also, as a teacher, my vocation is to model a hospitable classroom environment—even with those that do not agree with me. Nothing gets accomplished in the heat of the moment with tense exchanges or when we get angry.As I was wrestling with this student and his lack of engagement, and taking into consideration our students of color in the class, I finally realized that I was not going to change this person. All I could do at this point was not react in the way that this student expected. The student was actually getting pleasure from being the unmovable object in the class. It was reinforcing his victim mentality and it was reinforcing his own belief that he was blessed as he was persecuted.Education is not going into a classroom to reinforce one’s own ideas or point of view. Part of the value of education is observation and the ability to take on multiple perspectives, having the common decency to put oneself in another person’s shoes and having empathy. Education involves some level of contemplation upon the world and my neighbor. It is a continual question included in the Gospels, “who is my neighbor?” in the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). One cannot help but realize that no matter the ethnic, cultural, or racial origins of my neighbor, that we are interconnected. Humans are spiritual beings and that compassion is one of the core values that we must demonstrate towards one another. There must be empathy, kindness, and humility towards the other. It is on this road that we can establish some kind of spiritual enlightenment about living in an increasingly diverse society. Either we enter with fear defending our way of life to the very end, or we enter with a holy reverence towards the other as a fellow human being in the imago Dei.In the end I also had to examine myself. I had a long day. The class was at night, I was tired. The other issue I had was that I had to try to defuse the situation. I had to model my sense of tolerance even for those who have different perspectives from my own. It is not the first time that this has happened nor will it be the last. Finally, I decided to trust the institution and my colleagues, knowing that through the whole process at any serious graduate-level institution, the student will continually be challenged to have a rational, modern, and well-informed outlook. We are seeking to form individuals who are deeply, spiritually aware of their vertical-horizontal relationships—to God, to others, and the self. In the meantime, I prayerfully continue to teach, knowing that transformation is ultimately not left up to me. So, I tried hard to let the conversations continue to be frank and honest and to let history and hard rational discussion tell the story, ultimately trying to model a positive affective disposition towards the other.Notes & Bibliography[i] See for example, Robbie W.C. Tourse, Johnnie Hamilton-Mason, Nancy J. Wewiorski, Systemic Racism in the United States: Scaffolding as Social Construction (Cham, Switzerland: 2018).

In my family’s tradition, dreams, visons, symbols, and signs are part of our knowing, understanding, and meaning making apparatus. I grew up with nightly dinner table conversation which effortlessly included sharing dreams, seeking out interpretations, then the habit of reordering a decision based upon spiritual in-sight. Our “cloud of witnesses” is a vivid and active part of our spiritual practice. We depend upon prayer, ancestral visitations, angels’ interventions, the protection of guides, and warnings by ancestors.My family’s religious and cultural tradition teaches that the world is more enchanted, magical, whimsical, unusual and unpredictable than typically is made room for by the wider culture’s narrow understanding. And since our classrooms are not siloed away from the world—I think that our classrooms, if we would learn to pay attention, are enchanted spaces. Along with this provocative assertion, I want to also say that I do not know, absolutely, what coaxes adult students into learning. I suspect learning, especially for adults, might be dependent upon enchanted happenings in our classrooms.My grandmother, Vyola White Bullock, was an elementary school teacher in the early 1900s. My grandmother use-to say, “All that is is not visible.” She would say this adage is particularly important in understanding our classrooms and in seeking more effective methods of teaching.If we are to consider the dynamism of the intangible (i.e. enchantment) in our classrooms - what do we pay attention to, respect, and do? In other words, what if more is happening in our classrooms than meets the eye? What if those happenings are more responsible for student learning than we know?  What if that which we ignore, or that which we have no knowledge of, is the catalyst for student learning and our successful teaching?Some teaching is known to open doors, create bridges, inspire students to realize and participate-in enchanted endeavors of learning. Equipping students with new ways of meaning making, allowing students to access ideas of freedom, connecting students’ dreaming to actuality and healing, can create sparks of intrigue, can create the fire of imagination and wonder that immerse students in new realities. Sometimes, encounters with new knowledges are so palatable that students are moved, literally, into other spaces and other times. My experience as a student, and more recently, my experience as a teacher, has shown me that from time-to-time, portals open. Some learning causes portals to open allowing brave enough students to step through.  I have seen portals open in classrooms.As a student, I have, many times, stepped through portals which opened during my study. I was introduced to the work of bell hooks in graduate school.  Studying hooks’ work was like time travel. I had experiences of remembering what I had not previously known. Learning from hooks’ work was a dialogue across the years, across the geographic divide. The first time I read Sisters of Yam I felt as if my bone marrow recognized an ancient truth. I was transported into her world which quickly became our world. I knew what I knew, even more.As a teacher, I have learned that portals do not always invite us into elegant spaces. Some portals offer struggle, fight, confrontation. A vivid encounter happened while teaching my Introduction to Educational Ministry course some years ago. At the beginning of a lecture in the second session, a student raised her hand—interrupting my lecture. She had a scowl on her face, her lips pursed, shoulders tense with anxiety. Seeing her raised hand, I stopped my lecturing, met her glare with a faint smile and invited her to speak. She said that she had read the assigned reading by bell hooks from Teaching to Transgress. As she spoke, her voice was shrill and loud. She said the reading infuriated her. She said the reading was so maddening that she hurled the book against the wall. Her declaration of angst and anger instantly shifted the mood of the other students in the room to one of caution and concern. I heard one student sigh in impatience not wanting to give time for this woman to speak her experience of disorientation and pain.I paused before I answered her. I asked the woman what she had done after throwing the book against the wall.The student said, “I walked over, picked it up, and kept reading until the end.”I shouted, “YES!”My shout startled the class. The student’s sour expression turned to wide-eyed confusion.I said, “We must, even if it breaks a hip, wrestle with these ideas until daybreak in hopes of receiving the blessing. And you did that! You wrestled! You went through the portal and wrestled for your blessing!”  (This, for Bible reading students, was a recognition that the woman had had the experience like that of Jacob in Genesis 32:22-32.) I recognized this student’s report as an experience that had taken her into a portal.From the tradition of my family, this student had been transported and blessed and was telling the story of learning through consternation and dismay.  Some portals teach through skirmishes and brawls for understanding and growth.Portals operate through words and beyond words, with explanations and beyond explanation, with knowledge of the possibilities and beyond our imaginations. Students yearn for vivid experiences that connect them, make them more voiced and more visible. Stepping through the portals provides an immersive experience where the intangible becomes tangible with clarity and needed purpose.Reflection questions for communal dialogue:How do teachers recognize when a portal opens for learning?What would it take to plan or choreograph a portal to open for learning?If portals cannot be choreographed, what does it take to coax or summon open the doors of the portal?What kind of teaching stops portals, that would open, from opening?What do we do that closes the portals prematurely?

In October 2024, the Wabash Center hosted a “Curiosity Roundtable,” which I was honored to attend. The goal was to offer us experiences to help us; to encourage us to think outside the boxes that trap us as scholars, institutional citizens, and pedagogues. It was an amazing time, with voices that I am still thinking about, but, oddly, the experience that resounds, again and again, in my thoughts is the Porsche Experience.The group toured the Porsche Experience Center in Atlanta, GA. Those of us who did not get motion sickness—not me, dang it!—experienced driving the Porsche of our choice in the Simulator Lab. It was the tour, however, that had the impact on me. As the informed and enthusiastic guide showed us around, we were able to see, for example, the elements of making a Porsche. We saw a wall with the multiple tones of paint one could use on a Porsche body—some so subtly different that the guide said all buyers were urged to use a specialist in car design. We handled the key fobs and touched leathers used for interiors—just a few items among drawers of exquisite features. Then, we saw beautiful cars, on loan from collectors. What struck me was the flawlessness of these machines, but also, that they had very little mileage. These were cars that barely had been driven, mostly under 200 miles—they were tested, I thought, loaded for delivery, and put in a garage to gaze upon. Beautifully wrought, but, to me, kind of useless, except as possessions—though sort of like the excess of books in my library, I had to admit.It was the race cars, however, that made me see why the Wabash Center’s Executive Director, Dr. Lynne Westfield, brought us there. These cars tied the remarkable beauty of the collectable cars to function. One Porsche slogan is “Passion in Every Detail.” The Porsche desire includes “detailed craftsmanship, cutting edge innovation, and sheer passion.” That, I think, is what, we as devoted and innovative teacher-scholars practice and is what I saw in in the race cars. Those cars, like the Rothmans Porsche 962 on exhibit, were banged up, used over and over, and were examples of design reworked. These were the workhorses—like us professors—driven in 24 Hours of Le Mans, an endurance sports car race. I learned there why my daddy always bought Goodyear Tires. The Goodyears were so sturdy in the Le Mans that they had to be changed only once. These tires marked an adjustment, and what fascinated me were the adjustments: the redesigns. In the Rothmans we saw, the engine, first, was under the seat—not a great placement.As the guide talked about that, I said, “Someone died,” and he nodded.So, without losing speed or power, that one had to be adjusted.Beauty and function brought about through knowledge and innovation and carried out with passion—that is what kept running through my mind as we walked around. Every teacher in that group has been recognized, I know, as passionate about his or her subject matter and skilled: we are beauty in action. Beauty and function, carried out with passion, are the goals of great teaching. As teachers, I think we aim for the good, the true, and the beautiful. The classical Platonic understandings of those may not be same as they were for Plato, perhaps, but we seek to craft the vehicle that is so beautiful that it is utterly compelling—beauty draws and improves us, Plato argues--to our students that they will take the ride with us and risk encountering what we consider to be good and true. As Elaine Scarry reminds us in On Beauty and Being Just, a liberal arts education is the perpetuation of beauty. As human beings, we seek to copy the beautiful, and as we do so, we revise our own locations and beings. The beautiful, Scarry argues, helps “incite the will toward continual creation” (8). And, fairness, in terms of beauty, can lead to fairness, equality, in terms of justice: to being fair, to seeking “‘a symmetry of everyone’s relations to one another’” (95).The design of intellectual experience, as Patricia O’Connell Killen calls it, is the same as the design of those Porsche cars in another space. We go from finding and observing beauty to creating it ourselves in our syllabi and classrooms, to, as we teach, helping our students to see and create beauty themselves. Every piece in the collectable cars was a masterpiece of beauty—from the door handles to the key fobs. As a craftswoman teacher, I want my classes to be that way, beautifully constructed. The beauty embedded in the experience of reading, writing, and, yes, testing, which, as we saw in the Rothmans, is a dangerous but necessary process. Porsche made me see that our work is a wrought beauty: one made from years of doing and redesigning. I really want my teaching to be like those race cars, able to be adapted so that it can hug the ground—as Charles Long used to say, face the nitty gritty of human experience, and round the track.Those battered race cars stay in my imagination. The other day, I looked at my teaching notes for my Theory and Methods course, which I have taught, now, for over thirty years. The notes carry a lot of my late professors, Charles Long, Ruel Tyson, and Nathan Scott, and of others who taught me, but they show my growth in understanding and my adjustments, as my voice emerged and changed. Marginal notes, updates from my reading, and new thoughts that my students had as we rounded the track add more pages and sticky notes every year. These beautiful pieces gather. My teaching, if it were a Porsche, would look, I hope, like those race cars: a beautiful thing, the pinnacle of human ingenuity and engineering, yet banged up in use and adjustment. What I teach is remade different every time I encounter a new group of students from a new generation or read something that challenges and changes me. I must move the engine or change the shape of the seat or stop and figure out how to find my own, nearly indestructible Goodyear tires.The guide told us that they do not open the doors on those race cars because we would smell the odor of the drivers, embedded in the cars, even after all these years—drivers who had done twenty-four hours of duty in a car. That fact stuck with me hard. That smell is a mark, a reminder or memory that the beautiful and functional thing needs a driver, and that the driver bears the pain—marks and is marked. I thought of the odor of sanctity that comes, particularly, from the wounds of saints.We teachers are the like these drivers, these cars, but most of us do not get what we either need or deserve for the work we do. As my Peer Mentoring Cluster and I found during COVID and as one of my dear colleagues, one long out of this business, reminded me recently, institutions spend a lot of time thinking about students and about the institutions themselves. Most are not as committed to beauty as Porsche, and they do not spend much thinking about those driving the car—us teachers. But I think we prevail. Plato argued that the children of dreams outlive the children of the flesh. In the beauty we make, we are and put the first instrument of our dreams in children’s hands.*My drawing teacher said: Look, think, make a mark.Look, I told myself.And waited to be marked… She said: Respond to the heaviest partof the figure first. Density is form. That I keep hearing destiny is not a mark of character. Like pilgrimageonce morphed to mirage in a noisy room, someone so earnest at my ear. Then marriage slid.Mir-aage, Mir-aage, I heard the famous poet let loose awry into her microphone, triumphant. The figure to be drawn —not even half my age. She’s completely emptied her face for this job of standing still an hour. Look. Okay. But the little dream in there, inside the thinkthat comes next. A pencil in my hand, its secret life is charcoal, the wood already burnt,a sacrifice.[1] Notes & Bibliography[1] Marianne Boruch, “Pencil,”https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/55555/pencil.

“Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy!” – Miss Frizzle Now, I know what you may be thinking, “Miss Frizzle?!?! The teacher from the Magic School Bus? Really?” Or, better yet, I’ve just aged myself and what you’re actually thinking is, “Who the hell is Miss Frizzle?” Either way, extend a bit of grace and just bear with me for a bit. Miss Frizzle is the main character and teacher in the famed Magic School Bus books and cartoon. In the series, Miss Frizzle takes her third-grade class on some unique adventures, immersing them into the worlds that represent their lessons. Want to learn about the solar system? Let’s take a trip into space! Curious about the way food moves through the body? Well, if we make ourselves small enough, we can take the journey ourselves. With a bit of magic, anything is possible. While I personally don’t have a magic school bus, as a kid I was always fascinated to go on crazy adventures with Arnold, Keesha, and the rest of the class. Now that I am older and an educator myself, I recognize that the lessons still abound! There is still much to learn from Miss Frizzle, and these days I find that her pedagogical genius is often overlooked. The gap between teaching elementary-aged children foundational lessons and teaching adult seminary students may seem stark, but the best lessons Miss Frizzle offers us is culminated in her signature saying, “Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy!” So, for this series we will explore each of these lessons in detail. Taking chances: There are a lot of rules when it comes to teaching. Rubrics, curriculum, and syllabi all help us to remain accountable to the metrics created to determine whether or not we are where we should be. So much of our time is spent trying to prove these metrics, creating objectives and curating expectations for both our students and our deans. But what does it mean to be creative in what feels like such a restrictive space? How are we to understand our possibilities when we are inundated with obligations to our limitations? Miss Frizzle understands this. You wouldn’t know it by the way she conducts her classes, but she understands this dynamic so well that she is able to get to the heart of the matter by breaking and bending the right rules. Her class objective is to get students to learn in a way so that they are not only excited about the material, but they are able to integrate it into their real lives and utilize the knowledge in impromptu situations. These are our objectives as well. Theological education isn’t just learning facts about God, the church, and the history of theology. Theological education is about shaping leaders who are excited about God and spirituality, who can integrate these lessons and excitement into their lives, and who can walk with others as they do the same. What to keep, break, and bend: When it comes to rules, we often believe we must choose between two extremes – we either uphold them, or we break them. But here’s a secret I think everyone should know: all rules are made up. Rules (hopefully created in community) help us to hold one another accountable to do what we set out to do. They can protect us, and can help create lines of clear communication and boundaries. But they only work when they help a community thrive. When they don’t, they become restrictive and oppressive. I’m reminded of this when I think about online participation posts. I hate participation posts, both as a student and as a professor. Ideally, these assignments help us measure how students participate in class by tracking their offered insights on reading and responses to other students. This intent isn’t a bad thing, but it often creates a forced conversation that trades its organic freedom for obligation. It may track the fact that students participate, but it may also diminish the conversation in the process. What do you do when you have a rule that feels too important to break (we need to track participation in online classes), but feels too restrictive to uphold (no one likes participation posts)? This is where bending the rules becomes key. This is where Miss Frizzle asks us to take a chance. What are some of the ways you bend the rule of participation that doesn’t restrict excitement and the flow of engagement? In my courses, I ask students to participate in a section I call MOOD, which basically captures the mood or essence of the course. Divided into four sections (Listen, Watch, Read, and Visit) I start by including resources that expand the conversation and encourage students to add to the ever-growing list. I even include a playlist for students to collaborate on. I often get posts from students like, “I was visiting this museum and it made me think about the reading from last week,” or “This movie really allowed me to think more about our conversation!” By inviting participation in a different way, students are not only engaging each other and the course, but they are encountering elements of the class in their own contexts. What is wisdom without wonder? The question at the heart of taking chances is one I often ask myself and my students: what is wisdom without wonder? So much of our education is about proving knowledge. Even in theology, our metrics track what one can prove about God, or at the very least how we have mastered the history of this quest. Even as we seek to measure the tools our students learn that can directly (and indirectly) translate into their professions and vocations, we are often left with a knowledge that lacks nimbleness, a proficiency without play. What would it look like to track the wonder in our students? How many of your assignments require a thesis that explores the crevices of a question as opposed to proving a point? Miss Frizzle’s adventures were less about proving points and more about practicing possibilities. I wonder what theological education would look like if we did the same?

Creating new courses just keeps getting harder. Today I finished drafting the reading list for my new course on Ethics and the Good Life for first year students. It was supposed to be easy because my research and writing is about ethics. And it was supposed to be fun because I have the luxury of teaching whatever I want in this course.But it was awful. Partway through, I understood why Barry Schwartz argues that having too many choices makes us less happy. I found myself envying people who teach a set curriculum with an assigned reading list.I quickly became overwhelmed by the infinite number of possibilities and then I made it worse by going online and looking for a bigger infinity of choices. I bounced back and forth between sample syllabi, texts, videos, and podcasts for hours. I felt guilty because I wasn’t familiar with enough of it. And I got more and more tense.My list of possible materials just kept growing. And it was taking forever. I used up the time I had set aside for this project, and more. A lot more.Part of the challenge is that we no longer agree about what should be in a course like this. When I started teaching at Stonehill College, we had a historically-based philosophy curriculum, and the reading list for an introductory ethics class was a given: Aristotle, Kant, Mill, and Nietzsche.It took philosophy much longer than the other humanities, but the boundaries of our discipline are finally expanding. Most of the time, I am glad that we’re bringing in new approaches and formerly excluded voices. I’m one of the people in my department who have been pushing those boundaries (starting once I understood how limiting our approach was – and once I was tenured). But I miss having clarity about what my courses should and could contain. So. Many. Choices.Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus got me out of the spiral. Hari points out that more and more information is pushed at us every day:1986: the equivalent of 40 eighty-five-page newspapers2007: 174 newspapersNow: unknown, but probably more.Hari quotes Sune Lehmann who likens it to drinking from a fire hose.That hit home. We can’t do it. Seriously. I can’t even skim the 1986-era 40 newspapers a day. And here I am, voluntarily seeking out additional information, turning the pressure in that fire hose up beyond today’s 174+ daily newspapers.Of course I can’t do it. I just googled “ethics and the good life syllabus” and there were 30,800,000 results.It can’t be done, and it’s not my fault.The inevitability of failure reassured me.I had no choice. I had to select course materials from a limited subset of possible materials. This gave me permission to take a different approach: Instead of looking around, I’m limiting myself to what I’m already familiar with.I set a timer for two hours and turned the internet off (the Freedom app – the best invention since the mute button). I told myself firmly that I’m an authority on ethics (hey, they let me teach it to college students). And then I asked myself two questions:What is the main goal of the course? Students will reflect on their life, their values, and on the ways they might not be living in a manner that reflects those values. If things go well, the course will help them live a little better.Given that goal, which of the issues that I am familiar with should the class consider? I wrote a list:How smartphones get in the way of our happiness: body image, our ability to pay attention, our relationshipsWhat happiness is, with a deeper dive into the role of money, friendship, and meaningHow (some) adversity benefits usWhat we owe other people, both friends and strangersHow we can better balance caring for ourselves with helping othersWhat makes something right or wrong?How we might relate to people who disagree deeply with us about what mattersSome of the ways in which we are biasedWe won’t do all the units – I’ll give the students some choice.Turns out, I know a lot and I already knew enough to put together a course. More research was unnecessary and unhelpful. It so often is. I wish somebody had reminded me of that while I was trying so hard to drink from the fire hose.

“I’ve got the love of Jesus down in my heart!”“Where?!”“Down in my heart!”“Where?”“Down in my heart to stay!”We sang as we sat around the campfire at our Minam Lake campsite in the Wallowa Mountains. It was a discovery. So many of us knew the same camp songs, even though we’d all grown up in different places. Mark started it. Sitting in our camp chairs waiting for our quinoa-pistachio-apricot-cardamom dinner to cook – which takes a little while on a backpacking stove – Mark said, “I’ve got this old song stuck in my head: I’ve got the love of Jesus…” Bob merged his voice, “Down in my heart!” Nicole shouted back, “Where?” and suddenly everyone was part of it.I joined in as I stirred the quinoa and watched my colleagues – yes, nine of my faculty colleagues – finish one song and start another. We had a good old-fashioned camp song sing-along on our last night on the trail. As we’d gotten to know one another over the past four days, we’d grown more comfortable with each other, willing even to venture into silliness because we felt cared for by one another. We’d found the joy of relationship and connection.Last year I proposed to my dean that I offer a summer backpacking trip for faculty focused on wilderness spirituality. I lead these January-term courses for students, so why not offer them for faculty, who also need care and connection? My dean told me to run with it, and the Wabash Center graciously approved a grant for the experience. So here we were, ten colleagues in the Eagle Cap Wilderness of the Wallowa Mountains for five days. Some colleagues had backpacked before, some hadn’t. Some knew each other to varying extents; one person knew no one at all. But here we were on the last night, singing camp songs together because we had discovered shared experiences of faith formation and malformation and deep bonds of friendship and colleagueship. We knew we were in this together.That’s been the big takeaway from the trip: We are now more together in our work. I’ve written a lot in this blog series about how outdoor and immersive classes bring students together and enhance learning. Turns out, they do those things for colleagues, too. We began as generally collegial with one another, but now we have experiences of having to rely on one another. We have experiences of being (appropriately and by choice) vulnerable with one another. We built a space of trust where being vulnerable felt like a valid option, whether that vulnerability was needing help when the trail was steep, sharing a personal struggle with faith on a partnered walk, or just being free and silly with one another. We experienced laughing together and talking about things other than work. We worshiped together with morning and evening liturgy.When we came back to work this fall, those experiences stayed with us, and we found ourselves gravitating to one another during opening faculty days. We look for each other when we need support. We look for each other when we need a laugh or a camp song. We look for each other when we need to know we are understood. And so, we enter the service of our students and our other colleagues from a position of mutual support, which makes us all feel able to serve from reserves rather than from the fumes of energy long gone. We have space for creativity and imagination, and so we are thinking once more about new ways to teach and work than how we always have.A wilderness trip does these things in part by the nature of what the trip requires – interdependence, participation, risk, challenge, struggle, presence – and what is absent – normal rhythms and distractions, phones, any pretense about who we are (when you live in tents with your colleagues for a week, you can’t hide much from one another). Good facilitation and the willingness of participants to engage in these practices is also required to bring about the care and connection. But none of these things are limited to a wilderness trip. Gathering with colleagues in any place outside of normal work spaces in an immersive experience that requires a little bit of trust in one another; any setting that requires people to need each other; any experience of being present, away from normal distractions, and of talking about something other than teaching, scholarship, and service will do these things.As much as I like to think of the trail as magic, it is not. The magic is simply intentionality and imagination. All of us need care from and connection with one another, and most of our financially-strapped schools are unlikely to provide it. Who among your colleagues could you start with? What could you propose you do together? Can you think of ways to structure a group challenge or even talk about a challenge you are already in together? If you’ve done a Wabash Center workshop or roundtable, think of the ways they’ve build meaningful connection among faculty and try to imitate what you’ve experienced, as leader instead of participant. With a little intentionality and imagination, we can connect with our colleagues in meaningful ways that make our institutions places of possibility rather than places of staleness. They might even become places of spontaneous singing.

(An audio version of this blog may be found here.)We were not gathered to analyze the problems facing systems of education, societal storms, weaponized misinformation, wars around the globe, or climate change. We were not convened to solve problems of organizational structures or craft new and much needed policies and procedures to salvage educational enterprises. Rather, this was a gathering of Wabash Center leaders—highly credentialed colleagues, experts in their own fields, invested in the art and innovation of teaching.Wabash Center leaders assembled, as the invitation read, “to whet appetites, inspire new thinking, beckon the muse, provide new insights, rekindle the imagination, move us out of the constraints of boxed/hobbled ideas, and encourage new kinds of experiments in our classrooms and curriculum. Specifically, we gather with prominent thought leaders from other fields than religion to grapple with this meta-question:What are the possible futures of teaching religion and theology, and how do we imagine and create those possibilities?  Our discussion centered on the belief that the map/plan/direction to the new world is in our shared imaginations and risk-taking capabilities.  For the sake of possibility, we assembled to nurture our collective curiosity.Our presuppositions were not new or novel. We need a new vision if we are to have educational paradigms adequate for a democratic society in the coming future. We know that it is not enough to tweak, patch, or cling to, hollowed-out traditions of the current operation of higher education. If we are to establish systems of education which can sustain a flourishing society into the future, we must be about the business of casting new visions, pursuing new longings, and seeing new approaches. For this, we need curiosity, clarity of imagination, better communication concerning unusual approaches and a willingness to open ourselves to originality. We need detailed dreams and concise dreamers who will, with precision, help wean us from our dogged reliance upon the tired, ineffective paradigm. We convened to prepare for a future that is much different from our now.The Curiosity Roundtable gathering did not disappoint. Feedback from the participants told us that we convened a worthwhile conversation. Here is a sampling of the feedback from participants:  Using an approach related to curiosity wherein none of us was expected to be the experts, opened spaces for authentic engagement, laughter, reflection and community building.The opportunity to connect with others and engage in a different set of carefully curated conversations really accomplished the task of awakening our curiosity.I was surprised, but shouldn’t have been by now, at the vision of the Wabash Center to bring a set of unexpected conversation partners to the group – the Porche experience, an artificial intelligence sociologist and activist, a racialized socialization of children expert, a spoken word poet, and artist salon conveners. It worked! It worked in ways that will keep working on me, and I trust the whole group, in our own ways.Throughout our conversation we identified practices to foster curiosity. Here are a few of the ideas which bubbled around during the conversation:Push yourself to experience the wild, untamed, unfettered, out-of-the-box, unplanned spontaneous, improvisational, and undisciplined.Stay rested. Know what your body feels like when rested. Pursuing curiosity requires rest and calm.Learn to pay attention to daydreams, sleeping dreams, nightmares, desires, fantasies, and wishes. They might be as important or more important than aims, goals, and outcomes.Read beyond your academic discipline. Become an interdisciplinary agent. Read novels, short stories, creative nonfiction, stories of all genres.Write novels, short stories, creative nonfiction of all descriptions.Surround yourself with creatives—people who are unafraid of painting, sculpting, creative writing, film making, dancing.Practice new artistic expression(s) then pursue them passionately.Kindle the joy of being deeply moved by beauty or freedom. As best you can, avoid the ugliness of participating in oppression, exploitation, and the marginalization of people – especially if it is to your benefit.Practice silence, stillness, meditation, and contemplation.Attend to the health of your body as if you love it and need it to thrive.Attend to the health of your mind as if you love it and need it to thrive.Attend to the health of your soul as if your life depends upon it.Kindle relationships with family, friends, neighbors to surround yourself with love, care, and mercy.With regularity, make believe, pretend, fantasize, and goof off.Practice compassion because it is good education.The Curiosity Roundtable concluded with the challenge to each participant to develop a praxis project inspired by our conversation which will continue to unbridle their curiosity. The proposals are due in a couple of weeks. I suspect the projects will transform our world for the better!

I recently returned from an overnight trip to see some old family friends. They live about four hours away by car, so I only make it for a visit once every year or two. My friends have seven children, ranging from teenagers to young adults. So, there’s usually a milestone to celebrate in one of their kids’ lives, prompting me to make an annual trip. This year, it was the wedding of their oldest son.Their celebrations are always casual and relaxed, backyard parties including lots of food and drink. By the end of the evening, people either congregate around a bonfire or make their way into the living room.Their living room always makes an impression on me. Not because of its furniture or décor (it includes a well-worn couch and old piano, and is without a TV), but because of the way it welcomes and nourishes so many people.The room is typically full of people of all ages, races, and walks of life. It includes family members, old friends (like me), new neighbors and acquaintances, local migrant workers, single teenage mothers, children they are fostering (sometimes long-term, sometimes short-term), and even pet reptiles (this time I was introduced to an elderly snake who was struggling to deliver infertile eggs).The room provides a place to meet new people, to sing and dance around the piano, and to have conversations that relish in both the beauty and hardships of common humanity.Whenever I leave my friends’ house, I try to tell them how much grace I feel in their living room; I’m just so impressed by how a home created by two people can touch countless lives.And without a doubt, after each visit I reflect on my own life and reflect on how I might emulate some of their radical inclusivity and hospitality.I’ve been thinking about radical inclusivity quite a bit lately, anyway. Not so much in relation to my home, but to my classroom. I got to thinking about this while reading a new book by a former colleague of mine that notes how many diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and trauma-informed care trainings within the academy “remain entirely cognitively driven” and “situated within a deficiency praxis.” She says these programs are “not integrative or radical because they do not create ‘safe’ spaces for those of us who actively embody and allow our sensitive, intuitive implicit selves to be present”[i]The major insight I have taken away from this book is that in order to create these “safe” spaces, those of us within the academy need to resist the age-old structures of cognitive and colonial-patriarchal knowledge that have deemed all other ways of being and knowing as deficient.As a white tenured professor, I have certainly benefitted in many ways from this model. But I have also been reminded of the ways in which I have not measured up to this model: I am a woman, my family is blue-collar; my academic training has not been elite or traditional; and I have a proclivity for religion, and spiritual and embodied ways of knowing. That I have not been good enough has been said to me both directly and indirectly (in the form of jokes and insults) by professionals in the field, sometimes over “collegial” drinks and dinners, and sometimes as direct feedback in rejections from academic programs and teaching positions.Perhaps, because of these experiences, I have wanted something different for my students. I have wanted each and every student, regardless of their academic preparation, socioeconomic background, sexual orientation, or racial, gender, or religious identification, to feel welcome in my classroom and to have the opportunity to learn.Up until now, I’ve been trying to create this safe space mostly by my attitude and as a teacher. As much as possible, I try to connect with and meet each student where they are at. I do this by learning and using their chosen names, creating a space for them to connect their life experiences to course content, respecting differing opinions, and devoting some time in each class to checking in with how they are doing as people (not just as students). I also try to avoid using academic jargon, or ways of speaking which are unfamiliar to first-generation students.This, I hope, creates a safe and welcoming vibe similar to that in my friends’ living room: a space that is free from pretense, and in its simplicity allows for a deeper recognition of the diverse beauty and hardships of human experience, which comprise our common humanity.Something interesting about my friends is that one of them is a medical doctor, but nothing about their home, mannerisms, or even the company they keep indicates this to others. They intentionally live a radically simple lifestyle, without concern for status, possessions, or notoriety. Their home embodies a space that is free from the paradigms which are typically used to measure human worth. This, of course, is a sign of resistance, and is perhaps the main reason that people from all walks of life feel so welcome and comfortable in their space.This is a type of resistance that I can introduce to my classroom practice to make the space even safer. Beyond a welcoming presence, and course material that is representationally inclusive, I’m now considering how to reimagine the cognitive structures in which my courses are based. How might I measure learning and construct assessments in ways that are, dare I say, nonacademic? How can I create a space where first-generation and prep school students alike are on the same footing? What would an assignment in a first-year theology course look like, that allows people to learn in ways more unique to them and less-determined as deficient by old paradigms? How can I signal a deep valuing and respect for diverse and embodied ways of knowing?I look forward to suggestions from others! Notes & Bibliography[i] Iris Gildea, The Poetry of Belonging (Toronto: Mad and Crip Theology Press, 2024)