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The Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective (FCHS) Critical Hindu Studies Seminar at Wabash Center Funded Retreat, May 2023 Top left to right: Marko Geslani, Jamal Jones, Vijaya Nagarajan, Shana Sippy, Harshita Mruthinti Kamath Second row left to right: Shreena Gandhi, Varun Khanna (Vishwa Khanna in lap), Rupa Pillai, Sailaja Krishnamurti Bottom center: Prea Persaud   In 2019, the Wabash Center for Learning and Teaching Theology and Religion funded a five-day gathering for five of us—Shreena Gandhi, Sailaja Krishnamurti, Harshita Mruthinthi Kamath, Tanisha Ramachandran, and Shana Sippy—to think about how we might approach the field of Hindu Studies from a critical feminist lens. Out of that retreat, the Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective (FCHS), also known as the Auntylectuals, was formed. Building off of the work we began at that retreat we published an article, “Feminist Critical Hindu Studies in Formation” (Religion Compass, 2021), laying out our ideas about what the field might look like if we, as racialized scholars of Hindu traditions, drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, engaged in a process of “disorientation,” which requires that we adopt a method we describe as “interrogative positionality.” In that piece, we argue that There is a long tradition of feminist scholarship that has challenged the false distinction between the personal and political, but it demands that the acknowledgment of positionality be understood as more than an empty performative gesture. Performative positionality is not enough. FCHS demands an interrogative positionality: an ongoing interrogation of our locations, orientations, and relationships to power. (FCHS, Religion Compass [2021], 2) We recognized that this work of interrogating our positionalities and reorienting our approaches was something that would be enriched were we to undertake the work with other racialized scholars of Hinduism. We convened a multiyear (2019-2024) Intersectional Hindu Studies Seminar that brought in several other racialized scholars in the field of Hindu studies. The core group includes ten scholars—Shana Sippy, Harshita Mruthinthi Kamath, Sailaja Krishnamurti, Shreena Gandhi, Varun Khanna, Vijaya Nagarajan, Jamal Jones, Prea Persaud Khanna, Rupa Pillai, and Marko Geslani—all of whom have different specializations, from ancient to contemporary and literary to ethnographic, within the field Hindu Studies. The Critical Hindu Studies Collective includes a PhD Candidate and both contingent and tenured faculty who teach at a broad range of institutions—from R1 research universities to small liberal arts colleges—in the US and Canada. Since our first convening, two large Wabash Center grants have nurtured our work together, enabling us to engage in ongoing learning, virtual workshops, and online and in-person collaborations. In addition to annual sessions during AAR, a Wabash grant allowed us to host a 2022 AAR preconference symposium, Critical Hindu Studies Intersectional Pedagogies, where we learned from and with scholars and activists focused on caste not only as it manifests in Hindu traditions but also in Christianity, Islam, and Sikhism in South Asia and North America. The Wabash Center grants have also enabled us to gather for two multiday retreats in August 2023 and May 2024 to continue to imagine our approaches to the field—pursuing pedagogies and scholarship that center matters of justice—and our work together. We have shared syllabi, facilitated reading groups, critiqued and workshopped course modules, discussed teaching methods, presented papers, engaged in workshops, convened all-day symposia, and imagined exhibitions. We have challenged ourselves and each other to think about the demands that our feminist, anti-racist, anti-caste, and anti-nationalist commitments place on us, our teaching, and our scholarship. While there are many things we have undertaken together as a collective, we have also found that this work has helped us to reorient our relationships to our own work and teaching. In what follows, we provide some short individual reflections on what these grants have enabled us to accomplish, reflecting back on our past gatherings, and thinking toward the future. We will share more about the specific pedagogical lessons and experiments that were facilitated by these grants in additional submissions for Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion publications. Here, we offer more personal reflections about how the relationships that began in our explorations of our teaching continue to shape us as individuals and as scholars. We recognize there is much more work for us to do; for example, to truly interrogate the ways Islamophobia and modes of supremacism—brahmanical, male, religious, and racial—have shaped the field and the ways it has been and continues to be taught. We know that our learning and unlearning together will continue and we are grateful for what the Wabash Center’s support has allowed us to accomplish together, in our teaching, scholarship, and relationships.   Shana Sippy, Centre College  This work has been generative for me in more ways than I can count. Above all, this work has been care work. Our engagements with one another stem from and are nurtured by relationships. Instead of centering a singular academic agenda or the advancement of personal and professional goals, we have centered process. Together we have remembered, reimagined, affirmed, and challenged ourselves to think about what we do when we are doing what we do, why we are doing what we do, and where we hope to go in our doings going forward. Yes, it has been about pedagogies and syllabi. Yes, it has been about asking questions about our deepest commitments and the contours of our complicities. Yes, it has been about rethinking the teaching and study of Hindu traditions, texts, and histories. Yes, it has been about all the troubling things that must be troubled and addressed—caste violence, racism, Hindutva, Islamophobia, homophobia, misogyny, and the legacies of colonialism in our field and the academy. Yes, it has been about building collegial relationships, and sharing assignments and readings for use in teaching. And yes, it has been about thinking through what it means to prioritize solidarity and envision the myriad ways activist scholarship might manifest. Yet, for me, what this Seminar and these grants have ultimately been about is finding people for whom I have profound respect. Through this process, I have connected with people whom I trust deeply, even though there is so much I don’t yet know about each of them. I have forged bonds with people who have supported me in different ways—personally and professionally—especially as I’ve found myself lost and sad, distraught and confused, as our world and the academy as a microcosm continues to implode in so many ways. It has been about knowing that I can pick up the phone and ask any number of these colleagues and friends to help me think about how to present challenging material to my students in a way that meets them where they are or seek advice on translating and interpreting a text or phenomenon that is particularly vexing. It has been about a process of continual reflection with people whom I feel I can always count on to simultaneously challenge and support me. I hope that I have offered a fraction of the care and affirmation to all of them in the measure to which I have received it. This Seminar has, above all else, been about relationships and I can think of no grant that I have ever received that has had such a profound and lasting impact—building academic community and deep friendships—as these ones that we have generously received from the Wabash Center.   Marko Geslani, University of South Carolina  For me, the central question that has been nourished by the Critical Hindu Studies Seminar has been “Who is it for?”—it being first my local field of training, Hindu studies, an academic formation that implicates religious studies and Asian studies (Asian religion), and, in its widest historical implications, Orientalism and Humanism. This has been an acutely personal question for me, a Filipino-American, and thus a uniquely underrepresented minority in a field that itself has increasingly—and problematically—claimed the function of minority representation. The present-tense version of this question bears immense potential, even in its irresolution. As a long archive of contested human collectivity, a cultural tradition of pan-Asian influence, and a historical confluence of imperial and Brahmanical power, one can hardly begin to prescribe the possible stakeholders of the study of “Hinduism.” As a set of bounded historical traditions and ungoverned discursive effects in the present, this field bears a seemingly inestimable global significance, or at least one far beyond its traditional White North-Atlantic/Brahmanical subjects. But to even fathom the range of these potential interlocutors, and what challenges are posed by widening the audience of our field, we must dwell on the past tense of the question: Who has it been for? Or why has Hindu studies been monopolized by a shared White and Brahmanical gaze? How can we understand our field as an effect of American Orientalism? Part of the work of Critical Hindu Studies then is to cast a critical gaze on the history of our subfield from wider interdisciplinary perspectives on the American university. Let me give one example from some research that Rupa Pillai and I have been doing on the history of Asian American studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In November 1990, six years before the founding of the Asian American studies department, Asian American student-activists at Penn demanded that the Department of Oriental Studies change its name. For them the department’s name presumed the study of a racial slur. As one student put it in the Daily News, “‘Oriental’ is for rugs.” What was at stake for these students was not whether they could study classical Chinese poetry, but more existentially, how to abide a university that organized human knowledge around a slur. Oriental did not represent the Asian; it could only serve to represent through a kind of negation. Most importantly, the students demanded, Oriental studies was not a substitute for Asian American studies. For some professors in the Oriental studies department who were resistant to the change, what was at stake was their identity as Orientalists. What was at stake was Orientalism as a discernable and venerable disciplinary tradition. Politicizing the literal meaning of Orient (via its Latin etymology), they argued that the term “Oriental,” which governed “the East,” near and far, was more embracing than “Asian,” a term which they took to refer predominantly to East Asians. Some professors worried, finally, about the repercussions of capitulating to “political correctness.” The disconnect between the two parties could not have been more stark. They disagreed on the meaning of “Oriental,” the value of Orientalist knowledge, and the very question of the relationship between knowledge and politics. The way in which the professors refused to admit that “Oriental”—whatever its etymological roots—could be a racial slur in 1990s Philadelphia is striking. Surely as Orientalists they possessed the means to verify such a philological question. But in refusing this task, they seemed to exercise their disciplinary privilege—also a Brahmanical one—to base epistemic power on access to the oldest etymology. Equally striking, is that one question that seemed to have been less important for the student activists, was the question of the value of Orientalism—the ancient repertoire of eastern humanism—to Asian Americans. It is almost as if they could not spare time to ask such a question so long as they were governed by the term “Oriental.” Critical Hindu Studies has been a site of ongoing reflection on the question of the Asian and the Oriental, terms that continue to collect and coordinate all of us. In its balance of safety and auto-criticism, it is one of the most hopeful collectives I have been a part of.   Rupa Pillai, University of Pennsylvania The Critical Hindu Studies Seminar has been an invaluable community in which I could grow as a scholar and rethink my responsibility as a scholar-teacher. I joined the Seminar soon after completing my PhD in cultural anthropology with no clue of what my future would be. While my graduate program had strengths in public anthropology, I was unclear about how to do that work and about the political stakes of my research. This Seminar was instrumental in helping me find that clarity. Reading with this community inspired me to think about how my scholarship should engage caste, anti-blackness, and Islamophobia. Conversations with this community have prompted me to consider how religious studies and area studies are linked to the origins and institutionalization of ethnic studies. Finally, as a collective, this community has modeled a different way to do scholarship that centers intention by slowing the pace of academic knowledge production. Rather than rushing to produce, the Seminar offered a space for us to think together, nurturing relationships of trust where we leaned into the discomfort to improve our ideas and consider the impact of our scholarship.   Prea Persaud, University of Florida—Swarthmore College/Haverford College  When I was invited to participate in the Critical Hinduism Seminar, I was unsure of my relationship to caste, but I wanted to take the time to learn more and think through my own personal and academic history. In our initial Seminar, after reflecting on the readings, we were asked if we would now say that we are implicated in and/or benefit from caste dominance. I raised my hand in the affirmative because I understood then that even if I was not sure of whether I was from a dominant caste, I still benefited from caste structures. But since then, thanks to our continued discussions, I have come to think of upper caste-ness not as some identity that one has or doesn’t have. Neither is caste dominance just a performance, that is, the performance of brahmin-ness that some participate in. As many have described white supremacy, caste is the water that we are all swimming in. It is inescapable and continually shaping how we understand and relate to the world whether we are conscious of it or not. Once I really started to comprehend this, I could understand caste in the Caribbean (the geographical focus of my academic work) in a very different way than I did during those initial conversations. Back then I was stuck on identifying who was caste dominant, or what were caste dominant practices, and what was my relationship with them/those practices. Caste is often talked about in terms of endogamy and occupation and those specific things become the center of debate as we begin to think about the existence of caste in the diaspora. Understanding caste to be about how we understand beauty, civility, class, fashion, and so forth, however, allows us to move past these constraints and dissect the ways in which things that we have thought of as “objective truths” are actually caste specific. So identifying the continued existence of specific caste identities is less important than untangling these ideas which have not only traveled in the diaspora but are actively cultivated. This realization would have not been possible without the continued conversations of this group. They have not only allowed me to carve out a new space for my academic work but they have also helped me define how I want to show up in the world as an activist scholar.   Varun Khanna, Swarthmore College I’ve been lucky that my field (Sanskrit) and department (Classics) is flexible enough to allow me to work on almost anything I want to. My body and positionality stand as a kind of yoke that holds threads going in a million directions where each thread is a valid area of research, writing, and/or teaching. In the last five years, I have been introduced to a completely new set of readings and theoretical material that have deepened my critical ability and complexify my thinking apparatus such that my work and teaching have become truly intersectional. There are two main directions that I have explored as a result of the last five years of thinking together with the members of the Critical Hindu Studies (CHS) Seminar. The first is the deep uncovering of caste as a system of power that operates on and through my body and the casted and outcasted bodies around me. I have had a chance to explore this area of study through the reading and discussion groups that we did together as well as through the formulation and teaching of my new course, Caste and Power. During this course, I studied how caste operates on us through various vectors such as gender, religion, class, race, food, love, language, and many others. The course was the crystallization of my effort to understand caste, but it also resulted in a student-led project to have caste acknowledged as a mode of oppression in our college’s non-discrimination policy. The second is the study of Sanskrit pedagogies with respect to the new understanding of caste. What is the relationship between Sanskrit and caste? How do we teach Sanskrit in such a way that it stops being a vehicle for the fortification of caste structures? Can we teach Sanskrit in such a way? I was inspired by the CHS Seminar to think beyond the mere reorganization of Sanskrit canonical sources and pedagogical practices and to instead attend to the actual transmission of Sanskrit as the locus of critique. As part of this process, I organized the “Sanskrit Dilemma” panels at the American Academy of Religion conferences in 2022 and 2023, which resulted in excellent discussions by racialized scholars of Sanskrit about the various dilemmas that they embody in the classroom. I wanted to push them to interrogate their own relationship to Sanskrit and what contradictions emerge when they include their own body in their analysis of the transmission of Sanskrit in their lives. Through this process, we discovered that the dilemma of Sanskrit is not only how to teach it while we are faced with the pressures of Hindutva on the one side and Orientalist academia on the other side, but rather it is whether Sanskrit can be recovered from its position as a vehicle for the propagation of caste, and whether we can use Sanskrit as a means for challenging that position. I was inspired by the Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective’s call for Hindu scholars to become more reflective, interrogate their positionalities, and examine intersecting processes of racialization, the regulation of sexuality, and the violence of caste to develop what might be termed a “Critical Hindu Studies.” Using this as a model, the Sanskrit Dilemma panels considered what a “Critical Sanskrit Studies” that actively engages with and critiques the above challenges could look like. The panels therefore served as a forum for panelists to discuss along with the audience their own positionalities with respect to Sanskrit studies and to examine these intersecting processes to think through the possibility of developing a Critical Sanskrit Studies, which has resulted in a small community of Sanskrit scholars who are invested in these analyses, the transformation of our pedagogies, and the possibility of collective publication in the future.   Harshita Mruthinti Kamath, Emory University The Critical Hindu Studies Seminar has undoubtedly shaped the trajectory of my research and teaching. In working with my colleagues for the past five years, we have been able to create a new field—Critical Hindu Studies—which brings together a range of racialized scholars to interrogate the study of Hindu traditions in the North American academy. The impulse for creating this community of scholars is articulated by the Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective, who ask, Who built this room? Whose labor was rendered invisible? Who benefits? And who is continually left outside? What can we gain from disrupting linear narratives that adhere to neat chronologies? In raising these questions, our aim is to challenge ourselves, and our colleagues, to imagine what it might look like to meaningfully commit to researching and teaching Hindu formations from an anti‐caste, anti‐racist, feminist perspective. (Religion Compass [2021], 11) These questions have become foundational for my own entry into our collective scholarly work, and I return to them frequently when thinking about the goals of the Seminar. As a result of my participation in the Seminar, I have focused increasingly on intersectional themes of caste, gender, sexuality, and power in my own scholarly work. For teaching, I have also begun to incorporate themes of caste in all of my courses. In Fall 2023, I taught MESAS/WGS 378W: Caste at Emory University with the explicit goal of adding caste protections to our anti-discrimination policy at Emory. The course was also inspired by my colleague Varun Khanna’s course, Caste and Power at Swarthmore College, which used the lens of power to introduce the topic of caste. Working with this group has been a source of joy—we have laughed together, cried together, written together, and very often disagreed with one another. My colleagues have served as models for me to think about how to write from a place of ethical commitment rather than a place of fear.   Jamal Jones, University of Wisconsin-Madison In the CHS Seminar, I have found myself in a community that has provided me with both permission and discomfort: the permission—or, better, the imperative and the encouragement—to think through the politics of studying Sanskrit literature and the discomfort that comes with asking the questions this studying prompts. In many ways, I have thought about my work as a project of both disenchantment and celebration. On one hand, I entered the field wanting to move beyond thinking of Sanskrit as a language of sacred literature alone. This language of religion and sacred literature, while valued, may also be seen as lacking a kind of rational or aesthetic seriousness. So, studying Sanskrit literature in this disenchanted way was meant to buck the stereotype—to show its intellectual and civilizational respectability, and support broader arguments for the “i” value of non-Western cultural materials beyond their hoary spiritual offerings. All the same, I have also come to see how such an orientation can easily lead to another type of triumphalism; or in the case of Sanskrit studies, it can very easily feed arguments that underwrite supremacist ideologies and undermine a politics and ethics of care and community. What’s the other direction for me? Beyond the questioning and critique of varieties of hegemony and supremacy, I am still working through the question of what there is to gain from thinking about or through Sanskrit literature. How does one bridge the gap between the technical analysis of archaic materials and the—let’s call them bigger, or general, or just personal—questions of how we ought to see the world, and what we ultimately hope the world can be? This particular problem—basically one of articulating the personal and political relevance of the work—has come to frame both my research and my teaching. For example: One of the major questions I have been wrestling with, at least implicitly, has to do with how we might think of the relationship between (political) identity and language. On the one hand, the predominant ideology of Sanskrit ties the so-called supreme language of the gods to the elite, dominant identity of the brahmin who is the only kind of person who can authentically, authoritatively, and correctly articulate its most powerful sounds. (Or else, picking up insights from Varun Khanna: Those who invest in learning Sanskrit acquire the privileged status and power to articulate essential truths.) Given its entanglements with caste politics, some are likely to find this essentializing view of the relationship between language and identity distasteful for the ways in which it reinforces structures of hierarchy and domination. On the other hand, there are notions of language—of literary voice and identity—for which I have more sympathy: Even if some audiences might disparage the idea that certain literature is valuable at least in part because it articulates truth in a language that can only be expressed by a particular—and perhaps marginalized—kind of body in a particular social location, I (and I think others) would say there is some real value. But how can we articulate that value—and our commitment to that value—without replicating the problems that come with the Sanskrit case?   Shreena Gandhi, Michigan State University This group has made me a better scholar. When I started my book revisions about a decade (!) ago, the manuscript was about how yoga has been raced, gendered, and classed in the US. After my book was torpedoed by some white male scholars, I lost confidence. While I no longer believe that my book was the worst thing ever written (as one white male scholar asserted), looking back, I feel there was always something missing from my analysis. At first I thought I should lean more into white supremacy, cultural appropriation, and the dynamics of whiteness. Yet I did not think I was doing a good job connecting the story of yoga in the US with the dynamics of yoga and colonialism in India. After joining/forming this group, I was frustrated that my scholarship seemed so far outside the boundaries of this group. But I knew there was a connection, I just was unable to see it… …Until a fabulous dinner this past November at Ruth Chris with three of my fellow Critical Hindu Studies comrades, Jamal, Prea, and Varun. Over medium rare steaks in the Vedic tradition of Hinduism, I had a realization: yoga in America is not just about white supremacy. The way yoga has come here is also connected to brahmanical patriarchy, the construction of Hinduism not as a religion, but as a philosophy or way of life (I think Hinduism has serious Buddhism envy in this regard), and that the combination of white supremacy and brahmanical patriarchy allows conservative ideas about the body, the possibilities of the body, and health, to be entrenched through the practice of yoga. Because of my inclusion in this group, which was made possible by the Wabash Center, I have a stronger book, one that I am confident about finishing and putting out into the world. I am also now a better scholar activist. At the recent Asian American Studies Conference there were quite a few panels on caste and the rise of Hindutva in India and the United States—our collective even had a panel on the impact of Feminist Critical Hindu Studies in our scholarship, teaching, and activism. I heard from colleagues that some older Palestinian scholars lament not looking deeper into the ways in which Zionism entrenched itself into American political and popular culture—they said they are glad to see so much attention being paid to Hindutva, because, as we know from recent reporting and scholarship, the wet dream of Hindutva-inspired organizations would be to have the influence of Zionism and the cultural capital to say that any criticism of caste, India, or Modi is Hinduphobic. So I think our work has political urgency—it’s always been political, but this moment has driven home that if we don’t do the work now, we’ll regret it later. And so, our work is intersectional and necessary, but also related to all seeking liberation from oppressive structures and ideas.   Vijaya Nagarajan, University of San Francisco This Seminar was an unexpected, rich boon in my scholarly life. To be with fellow racialized scholars of Hinduism was a revelatory kind of work that had, indeed, been extremely rare and intermittent throughout my life as a scholar. Hindu Studies was made up of mostly white scholars for decades, until very recently. When I began this work as a graduate student, decades ago, there were few scholars of Indian, or Indian-American, or Asian-American background who were studying religion or Hinduism; you could count them on one hand, or at most, two. So, for me, participating in the Seminar felt like coming to a rich well in an oasis in the desert of my life as a scholar in terms of fellow racialized scholars of the fields of South Asian and South Asian-American religions. Intersectionality has always been growing as an aspect of Hinduism in my work in terms of gender and environment, but the caste aspect was subsumed in a relatively unexamined way, until this Critical Hindu Studies Seminar. As soon as the Critical Hindu Studies Seminar came into my view and I was invited to participate in it, I realized how a well-examined and evolving understanding of caste is critically essential for understanding Hinduism and its diasporas. Caste has now become, for me, a vital and necessary way of understanding Hinduism. In terms of my own intellectual work, the individual and collective learning, deeper exploration, and understanding of caste have intertwined the following subjects: (1) caste, class, and race; (2) caste, dalit views, and ecology; and (3) caste and climate; and have all affected my syllabi in Hinduism: Hinduism: Climate, Religion, and Environment; Commons: Land, Water, Air; and more. Participation in the Seminar has also deeply affected my theoretical and ethnographic research on the relationships between Hinduism, ecology, climate, and the commons. All my work from now onwards will be shaped by critical concerns regarding caste. The Critical Hindu Studies Seminar has been a kind of intellectual, scholarly home I could hardly have imagined before it unfolded into existence, and now seems so integral to my work.   Sailaja Krishnamurti, Queen’s University This group has helped me to arrive at a sense of clarity about my work. I have more clarity about what I think, about my own theoretical frameworks, my ethics, and my politics, than I have ever had. I know more about what I am doing, and why doing it is important—and necessary. Through our work together, I’ve been inspired to begin a new book project on contemporary Hindu identities. I want to find pleasure in this work. A prolific friend and colleague told me that she is productive because for her, writing is relaxation. Will it ever feel relaxing to me? What do I need to get to that point? I am writing these words as I am on the brink of my first sabbatical after twelve years of full-time teaching. I am looking forward to experiencing writing as liberating rather than terrifying, stressful. I have the gift of one year. And it is a gift—it is an enormous privilege, a dying privilege, and one that I want to make use of as much as I can. I think of Mary Oliver and I want to ask myself: what will I do with my one wild sabbatical year? How do I make every single day count, and find the wonder in creating new ideas? What happens if I move away from this endless running, hamster wheel of administration, always behind schedule, to a mode in which I work on my own schedule, I am accountable to myself, and I can build my own capacity? The work that we have done together in Feminist Critical Hindu Studies, and later in this larger Critical Hindu Studies Seminar, has not only deeply impacted my own intellectual inquiries, but has profoundly impacted the way I conceptualize the work of academia. Thinking and working together and actively engaging in collaborative idea-making are forms of scholarship that are generally devalued in the humanities. But collaboration and collectivity are at the heart of my practice as a feminist, and I believe we have been able to bring these values into the intellectual home we’ve built together. The most important part of this group for me, without question, has been the sense of community and support that we have fostered for each other. I am realizing that we have not “produced” a lot, but resisting the impulse to race to the outcomes and deliverables has been crucial to our work together. What we have been doing, and the most important part, is the building of a new way of imagining being in and surviving the academy. I am anxious thinking about “what happens next” and how we will sustain this community in the next few years. I want to hold on to this space and continue to dream about new ways of working together.   Bios: Shreena Niketa Gandhi is a unionized, Fixed Term Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University in East Lansing Michigan. She is a founding member of the Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective. Marko Geslani is Associate Professor in Religious Studies at the University of South Carolina. In addition to his work in Critical Hindu Studies, he works on ritual and astral science in medieval Hinduism. Jamal Jones is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Harshita Mruthinti Kamath is Visweswara Rao and Sita Koppaka Associate Professor in Telugu Literature, Culture and History at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. She is a founding member of the Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective. Varun Khanna is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics teaching Sanskrit at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. He works on the history and culture of Sanskrit transmission. Sailaja Krishnamurti is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She is a founding member of the Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective (aka the Auntylectuals). Prea Persaud is a Visiting Instructor in the Department of Religion at Swarthmore College and in the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Concentration at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. Her research is on Hinduism in the Caribbean. Rupa Pillai is a senior lecturer in the Asian American Studies program at the University of Pennsylvania. Vijaya Nagarajan is an Associate Professor in Religious Studies and Environmental Studies at the University of San Francisco in San Francisco, CA. In addition to her research on Critical Hindu Studies, she works on Hinduism and Climate; On the Languages of the Commons: Land, Water, Air, etc.; and Autobiographies, Spiritualities, and Landscapes. Shana Sippy is Associate Professor of Religion, Chair of the Religion and Asian Studies Programs at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. She is a founding member of the Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective (aka the Auntylectuals). She has served as the Project Director for the two large Wabash Grants.

What Makes a Classroom “Safe”?

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)

You Blows Who You Is/Blow Yourself

It doesn’t sound nearly as poetic when I try to recount Louis Armstrong’s famous line about authentic self-expression after I return home from the week-long Creative Writing Roundtable hosted by the Wabash Center for a group of fourteen professors, preachers, and researchers. We spent the time deeply immersed in ourselves and each other—learning, chatting, eating, writing, and revising at a utopian biophilic retreat house in the Chattahoochee Hills of Georgia. Donald Quist, one of the writing mentors, had played us a recording of Louis Armstrong in a morning session on Style and Voice, sharing this line—“You Blows Who You Is”—while encouraging us to lean into narrating our visions of how the world works. The intimacy of being coached on the genre of creative nonfiction is inescapable; you are trying to hone skills in writing, “true stories well told,” and this means narrating the moments of your own life that have made the biggest impressions on you.[i]“You blows who you is” becomes “blow yourself” in my partial recall of the feeling the phrase evoked in me. I can’t remember the AAVE grammar structure of Armstrong’s words, and my translation sounds crude, sexually suggestive, maybe even like an insult. I laugh as the words come out of my mouth, tired from the plane ride back home after an intensive week. My spouse’s eyes widen with a smile as they turn their head. Their eyes say, “Oh, really!?”My foible transgresses a structure of dialect and a politics of sexual respectability; in this way, it is sort of like jazz, playing with form and exploring beyond the confines of racialized purity culture. This is not to say that my rendering conveys anything close to Armstrong’s original wisdom. But it does demonstrate a real-time example of how the same universal idea can pass through the fleshly vectors of another tongue, showing more ways of being while resonating with something much larger than a single speaker. This mistake made me reflect on some of the most powerful takeaways from a week of mentorship that helped a room full of academics recover their voices from the confines of academic writing in vulnerable, poignant, messy, and creative ways. I can only imagine how these skills may bleed into our classrooms, encouraging our students to find their own air flow and creative voice as we model more fully finding our own.Louis Armstrong’s sentence helped me clarify my own struggles trying to complete my PhD a couple years back. My own style of swirling storytelling that wanted to draw connections between anything and everything crashed against the dialect of linear, argumentative, academic writing. I frequently felt an intensifying squeeze in my throat being in conversation with Roman Catholicism, especially as someone who started identifying as queer and non-binary during my degree program. Writing against can sometimes reinforce the walls you’re trying to break down: women, be silent + same-sex attraction is a sin + the trans and non-binary people you are attracted to don’t exist + you don’t exist became an equation that loudly sent the message: be silent, sinner, you don’t exist. Adopting an academic voice to gain legitimacy was tempting, but something that I seemed unable to measure up to. I felt like I was shooting arrows in the dark, trying to hit an undefined target that others in my field seemed to perceive without the same struggles. During this week, I wrote about my partner’s gender transition, the magic of writing words that spark through the body, as well as witnessing a conflict with counter-protestors at a pride parade in San Salvador. The writing workshop helped restore my trust in my own voice, and gave me confidence to speak, even when such words might challenge the very norms of legitimacy we must navigate in the church, academy, and society.One of the great joys of this workshop was getting an intimate window into the air streams of other participants, seeing their creative writing voices emerge through vulnerable storytelling, hilarious observation, and heart wrenching reflection on themes that touched universal experience through the particular. Birth, death, grief, loss, illness, family feuds, leaving home, returning to a life that was once familiar, now different were themes that resonated deeply with me. One of the first things I wrote down from the workshop was Sophfronia Scott’s invitation to play with words through this creative writing genre. My colleagues shared their life wisdom through playful experiments of the written and spoken word, all the while encouraging each other to grow in our own unique forms of self-expression. On the final night when Lynne Westfield, Stephen Ray, and Rachel Mills joined us to hear people’s work in a final performance set up, we got to see each other blow who we are.I think of one time a few months ago when my bandmates were laughing about a scene from the movie I Heart Huckabees. One of the main characters repeats over and over, “How can I NOT be myself?” in an existential breakdown—or breakthrough. In academic writing, in the classroom, in our creative writing, it is important to remember that even if we are trying to sound different than our souls, or maneuver our air through instruments not designed for us, there’s a way that we actually have no choice but to blow ourselves, so to speak, if we are to attempt to show up and create in this world at all. This goes for our students as well: though we may give them formats, resources, or frameworks, when the deadline hits, we receive the resounding echoes of someone searching for themselves through the avenues we have made available. After a week with the Wabash Center, I am encouraged to open those avenues wide, for myself and my students, to make space to hear who we really are amidst the music of life’s swells and silences.Notes & Bibliography [i] Lee Gutkind, You Can’t Make This Stuff Up (Boston, MA: Da Capo/Lifelong Books, 2012), pp. 60.

Asking the Blind: Faith and Grace in a Delivery Room

As a seminarian in Louisville, Kentucky, I was challenged to discern what kind of ministerial vocation I wanted to pursue. I felt my “calling” was to teach, but even teaching, if done with care and concern for the students, could in some ways be “ministerial.” My greater concern was with what model my teaching or “ministry” would follow. Would I be the sage on the stage (or in the pulpit), imparting words of wisdom and knowledge? Or would it be more organic, flowing from the relationships I developed with my class or my congregation? Eventually, the model I chose was one I found in the gospel of Mark when Jesus encounters the blind man Bartimaeus (Mark 10:46-52). Jesus comes upon this blind man, one of the countless beggars asking for handouts at the gates of the city, and he asks him, “What do you want me to do for you?” Are your serious, Jesus? It is obvious to everyone there what Bartimaeus needs. He’s blind, and because of his blindness he has no way of making a living and must beg to survive. He needs to be cured of his blindness! But instead of assuming Bartimaeus’s need and helping him based on that assumption, Jesus, by asking the question, gives Bartimaeus a voice in the form and direction Jesus’s ministry (or teaching?) will take. And this experience, this opportunity, so empowers Bartimaeus that Jesus proclaims, “your faith has healed you.” This model has been crucial for me ever since, never more importantly than when I was a student chaplain at University Hospital in Louisville. One evening I was on call in the emergency room, my favorite place to work, when I received word from the delivery room that a Seventh Day Adventist woman who had just delivered a stillborn child requested that a chaplain come and baptize her child. I was the only chaplain around, but at the time I was a Baptist. You may or may not know that Baptists don’t believe in infant baptism, only in believer’s baptism. (Baptists still find a way to welcome children into the community—they just call it a baby dedication.) Moreover, I had never done a baptism before. How could I in good conscience baptize this infant? When I arrived in the delivery room, I explained my dilemma to the nursing staff, who, despite listening sympathetically, dressed me in a surgical gown and provided me with a basin of water. Apparently, they had done this before, and they needed the delivery room again for another delivery. Nurses are amazing at finding ways to get you to do the right thing even when you don’t want to. Upon entering the room, I saw a tired African American teenager lying on a birthing table lovingly caressing a fully formed, beautiful but lifeless, little girl. The woman’s older brother was there mumbling something about it probably being God’s will because the child was conceived illegitimately, which was clearly causing emotional pain for the girl. What is it with self-righteous older brothers? Why do they think they can speak for God words of judgment and condemnation to their siblings who are experiencing grief and despair (Luke 15:29-30)? Whispering to the nurse, I asked her to find a way to get the brother out of the room which she did with great skill and grace. Thankful for his departure, I came to the young woman’s side anxious about what to say, unsure of what to do, angry at her brother’s rantings. Yet as I looked into this woman’s tearful and soulful eyes, all I could think of was to ask, “What do you want me to do for you?” She looked at me and asked me to baptize her child so that her spirit and her daughter’s spirit could be at peace with God. Full of uncertainty and doubt about what I was doing, I took the child in my arms, asked what her name was, dipped my thumb and forefinger into the basin of water, and anointed her head with the water saying, “I baptize you in the name of the Creator, Christ, and Comforter.” Then I placed the child back into her mother’s arms. Baptists say there is nothing sacramental about the ritual of baptism; no saving grace comes from it. Perhaps. In that ritual act in that delivery room, however, I experienced the presence of God in a way I have seldom since, an experience I can only describe as grace. As I looked at the woman, I could see that she had experienced it as well. The peace the woman requested had come to her, hopefully to her daughter, and, unexpectedly, to me. And this experience enabled me to proclaim confidently to this young woman, “your faith has made you, made us, well.” Through this and countless other experiences, I have learned that if ministry or teaching is about enabling others to find wholeness, whether intellectual, social, or spiritual, then that work will best be accomplished when we take seriously the voice of those with whom we work. When we intentionally ask the blind, the homeless, our students, “What do you want me to do for you?” and respectfully incorporate their responses into our work, we affirm their worth and dignity, and empower them to have faith in themselves, in us, and perhaps in their God. And this faithfulness will go a long way to meeting human need and enabling all of us to become whole.

Passover 2024

An Author’s Note: October 7th represents one year since the Hamas attack on Israel and resulting Israeli military response in Gaza. This year, October 7th also falls during the Days of Awe, the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, during which Jews are called to engage in cheshbon hanefesh or “Accounting of the Soul,” during which we examine our actions and thoughts during the previous year and aim to do better in the coming year. In that spirit, my mind is drawn to a holiday earlier this year, Passover, my recollections of which I present here.   Passover 2024: We are not all Jewish, as many family members, including myself, have married non-Jews. Thirteen of us squished in together as the maximum capacity for my parents’ dining room table, the window propped slightly open to let out the heat from the kitchen despite the fears of letting the street noise in. The patterned white-on-white tablecloth has been brought out for the holiday, our China pattern at each setting, white with a red rim at the edges. The festive foods smell wonderful: the Matzah Ball soup, Pot Roast, and various other dishes my mom has slaved over for days in a tiny New York City kitchen. At the center of the table, the colorful Seder plate with spots for each item: the roasted bone, the roasted egg, the celery and parsley, the Haroset made to look like brick mortar, the horseradish, and the saltwater. A cup of wine for Elijah. A cup of water for Miriam. An orange, a modern addition representing feminism for some but more accurately stemming from queer Jewish concerns. My father—the consummate seder leader, who looks forward to it every year, scanning the internet each year for supplemental readings—calls us together, noting that this year, we will do something different. He hands out some excerpts from the supplemental readings he has found and has us read them aloud, going one by one around the table, seder style. The readings note that just as on Passover we ask, “Why is this night different than other nights?”, so this year we must ask why this year is different from all other years. They remind us that it is a mitzvah to expound on the Passover story during the seder. They call us to work for a better world. They remark on the irony of celebrating freedom as our hearts break for the pain of Israel and the suffering of Palestinians. They suggest new rituals, such as while breaking the middle matzah in two, crumbling one half to recognize that the world is crumbling and leaving the other half whole to represent the hope of a world rebuilt. They offer prayers to recall that all humans are created b’tzelem elohim, in the image of the Force that impels us towards goodness. They encourage us to engage in honest dialogue, to listen deeply to one another, and to share our thoughts on the war and on the campus protests. Drawing on the words of Interfaith America’s bridgebuilding curriculum, they implore us enter conversation in the spirit of curiosity, noting that we can disagree yet still respect one another’s views, noting that due to our love for one another, what matters to any of us matters to all of us. After these preliminary readings, my father announces, “Before we begin, let’s have an honest discussion about Israel and Gaza, with each of us expressing our own thoughts, uninterrupted.” So, we went around the table again…[i] I don’t know what to hope for anymore. I am convinced that the Zionist project is doomed. What started as a good idea, and did some good things, creating a modern society, has been done on the backs of others, and the voices that do not care about that are winning out.  That is why I left Israel and why I can’t support it. But I can’t say I hate Israel. In fact, I still love Israel; I do. I grew up there, and I appreciate all it has given me. It’s complicated. It had high ideals for a modern democratic Jewish state. But it was also about power. It was also a land grab. And it is untenable. Since October 7th, it is only more so. On social media, when I express my views, I am met with vitriol by other Israelis. They say horrible hateful things to anyone with a critical view, and we are shouted down, called traitors. I can barely speak to my family members. I understand that they are traumatized by October 7th. But they are so caught up in their own trauma that they cannot see what is happening to the Palestinians. And even those who used to care no longer care. I don’t see any possible good end to this.  So much of Judaism to me is about social justice, the prophetic call to help the oppressed, Tikkun Olam. I want to join in shaping that better world. But I don’t know how. Everything I do angers someone. If I stand in support of Israel in this time of trauma as a Zionist, I am viewed as a racist and colonialist. If I stand against it in protest, I am viewed as a self-hating Jew and antisemite. If I go to sign a petition for a ceasefire, it calls the situation a genocide, which I do not believe it is. And even liking a Ceasefire Now meme on social media gets friends angry with me who believe Israel must continue until the hostages are home. But liking a post about bringing the hostages home has other friends accusing me of spreading Zionist propaganda. I just want peace. I want everyone to live with human rights, opportunity, and a sense of security. In this situation, I don’t know where to begin. All I can do is hope for a ceasefire. This killing has gone on for too long. Over 30,000 innocent Palestinian lives have been lost. This is not the way. This has to stop.  But I don’t trust either the Israeli government or Hamas to secure a ceasefire. Neither has anything to gain. Netanyahu’s interests are served by prolonging the war, and as for Hamas, a ceasefire will make them irrelevant. Let’s say it plainly. This is all Hamas’s fault. They are evil. We need the hostages returned. We need the media to acknowledge the atrocities Hamas committed. The rapes, the murder of babies. I am sad that Palestinian civilians are being killed, but that is also Hamas’s fault. They are the ones using Palestinian citizens as human shields. Every time the media covers this as if Israel has no reason for what they are doing, are not being forced into these attacks by Hamas, I want to scream. Every time they gloss over the atrocities on October 7th to jump to the Israeli military attacks on Gaza with no context, without explanation, I want to pull my hair out. I am afraid of how I will feel reading the Passover story this year. This will be the first time that I will identify more with the Egyptian taskmasters than the Israelite slaves.  I am not sure I am prepared for that. I know many of you do not agree with me, but Israel is perpetrating a genocide on the Palestinian people. I can point you to scholars of genocide who have written on this and have come to that conclusion. Israel matters to me. I can’t abide being told that Zionism is racism. I listened to a podcast where the person being interviewed made that statement, and defined Zionism as wanting all of the Biblical land and wanting to remove all Palestinians from the land, and the statement went unchecked by the interviewer. Zionism is not colonialism. It is a belief in a Jewish homeland. It is our ancient place. It was a place of refuge for those fleeing Europe during and after the Holocaust. And we know what that means: my parents survived the Holocaust, but some of our other relatives didn’t. And some of our relatives survived by getting to Palestine. Israel continues to be a place we can go, no questions asked, if and when genocidal antisemitism rears its ugly head again, and antisemitism is on the rise.  What happened on October 7th was the largest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. What is the government supposed to do? Hamas has to be stopped. I hear people saying it shouldn’t be done this way, but is there another way to eliminate Hamas? If so, why isn’t anyone naming another way? I don’t know that I have it in me anymore to care about the Palestinians. They elected Hamas. They support Hamas, and that makes them a community of terrorists. I am done trying to help people who just want to kill us. They rejected every deal along the way.  The Israeli military is doing everything they can to avoid unnecessary deaths, to evacuate people. I support the IDF and donate to the groups treating soldiers. I have half a mind to go over there and volunteer with the Israeli army myself.  I can love all of you and disagree. I have expressed my opinions to many of you already in other conversations. We agree on many things and disagree on others. I too care about Israel. I think it is in Israel’s best interest not to use these military tactics. Beyond the obvious humanitarian issues, it alienates Israel from the rest of the world and makes it harder for anyone to support Israel. Do I have a plan for what they should have done instead? No. I am not a political or military strategist. But even on October 8th, when the Israeli military hadn’t struck yet, everyone knew what was coming, when that could have been a time for grieving. Maybe martyrdom would have done more for Israel than revenge, retaliation, self-defense, or whatever we are calling this. Maybe it could have brought the world to its side to generate a coordinated response against Hamas. This did not begin on October 7th. This was not an unprovoked attack. This began long ago, not only with the occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967, but with the forcible taking of Palestinian land in 1948 after a vote in the UN that no Arab member nation agreed with. Of course what happened on October 7th was atrocious, and a source of trauma that we all need to grieve. But people want to avoid the context, want to act as if there was no reason for Hamas to be as frustrated as they are with the open-air prison that is Gaza. They have no other recourse, and they had lost the attention of the world. Look at the situation in the West Bank. Palestinians are being terrorized there by angry settlers, and the government, police, and military are doing nothing about it. While everyone is focused on Gaza, there is yet another land grab going on in the West Bank. Right now my concern for the hostages takes priority. But the best way to see them returned is unclear. Is it through military actions, from which we have seen some of them rescued? Is it through temporary or longer ceasefires, which have also led to the return of hostages? We don’t know how many are alive or how they will ever be able to resume a normal life, but we can’t lose our sight of them. I am moved by symbolism of the hostages. The posters with their faces. The empty chairs at the table. When those on the far left deem those symbols as “Zionist propaganda”, I have to wonder whether they have completely lost the ability to empathize. I think the message we get from the Torah, and the message we get from events today, is that we can be simultaneously both the oppressed and the oppressors. We can be oppressed as slaves in Egypt and then oppress the Canaanites when conquering the promised land. We can oppress the Palestinians even as we are oppressed by Hamas attacks and by Antisemitism worldwide. Every group can be both oppressed and oppressors, even in the same moment. What bothers me about the protestors is that they have no understanding of the situation. They couldn’t even find Israel on a map. They don’t know the history, the context. They just want to be activists. And they are only targeting Israel, which is clearly antisemitic. You don’t see them protesting about human rights abuses in Sudan or Myanmar, only Israel. Why is Israel always held to a special standard? But those congressmen who called in the University Presidents out of so-called concern for antisemitism on campuses do not make me feel better. They have their own Christian Zionist agenda, and while they back Israel, they do not really care about Jews. These were the same people saying there were good people on both sides in Charlottesville as those protestors chanted “Jews will not replace us.” Nowhere feels safe right now as a Jew, not the right, nor the left. I do have hope. Maybe this will finally be what will bring the parties back to the table to figure out a peaceful way forward. Other Arab states are beginning to recognize Israel and its right to exist. This is part of why Hamas did what they did, knowing that as the world comes to recognize Israel, they will lose power. I hate the idea that the events of October 7th can finally lead to the two-state or one-state solution that we need for peace to take place. But after Israel militarized and securitized for so long, thinking they could push the Palestinian issue out of sight, they now realize they are still vulnerable. We need a political solution. This may finally restore those prospects.    My father thanks everyone for participating. We are all grateful to have been able to express ourselves and listen to others without having shouted one another down or coming to blows.  We begin our Seder.       Notes: [i] Here are the perspectives from the table. The dialogue may not be exact, but the sentiments are represented to the best of my ability. Some are recombined or incorporate views based on other conversations with friends and family around that time.

Common Questions 1

Welcome to the Common Questions, an exciting initiative brought to you by the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion. In this series, we bring together some of the most esteemed scholars and educators in the field to engage with a central, thought-provoking question. The goal is to challenge and inspire. By exploring these questions, we hope to create a dynamic platform for scholarly dialogue, illuminate complexities in education, and enhance our understanding of the transformative power of teaching and learning in these vital disciplines. Featuring a diverse range of perspectives, this effort is a means of expanding the borders of academic rigor with profound spiritual and philosophical inquiry.This time, we asked…“If school were in heaven, preparing souls for Earth, what would you teach, how and why?”Gathered here are responses from:Nicholas A. Elder, University of DubuqueEmily Kahm, College of Saint Mary, OmahaAHyun Lee, Garrett Evangelical Theological SeminaryOluwatomisin Olayinka Oredein, Brite Divinity SchoolYau Man Siew, Tyndale Seminary of Tyndale UniversityRichelle White, Kuyper CollegeMarvin Wickware, Lutheran School of TheologyIf you are interested in sharing you response to this prompt or future Common Questions, please reach out to our blogs editor, Donald E. Quist at quistd@wabash.edu.

Dare to Be an Amateur at Something

(An audio version of this blog may be found here.) My editor is one of my most ardent supporters and a beloved friend. We are working, together, on my next book. He has not, in many months, received any pages from me. At a recent gathering, he asked me if I had been writing.My editor’s question was not intended as chastisement nor judgement. His tone of voice was casual, even pleasant. Immediately upon hearing his question, I felt a pang of shame or guilt or embarrassment—one of those kinds of stomach feelings that confirms that you are doing something irresponsible or questionable or inappropriate. Thankfully, my stomach relaxed as quickly as it had tightened. I told him I had not been writing. My editor waited for the explanation or the details. I told him that in the last few months, the time I had previously devoted to writing is now being used for coloring. I expected him to be surprised, but instead he was quizzical.He asked me what I liked about coloring. I really didn’t have an answer—I had not reflected on “why” I liked it. Again, my stomach flinched as if I was childish/shy—pointlessly confessional. I realized that while I am greatly enjoying my new-found hobby, I question my time being spent in this way—especially if it means that I am not writing. Then he said (knowing me and my ways)—it’s probably meditative. I accepted his speculation, then I told him I wanted him to look through my coloring books, select the best pieces. I wanted to display my best pieces in my house. He agreed.Coloring has become my new jam! But I am cautious, hesitant…The impulse to color was strong during the quarantine, but I resisted it. At that time, the activity seemed frivolous and lacking in enough “productive merit” to warrant pursuit. Then in January of this year, a roundtable participant gifted me with a coloring book and colored pencils. During that meeting I began to color.  Since that meeting, coloring has become a major past-time. My hesitancy is that I still question my use of time for this enjoyable activity.When I color, I lose myself. It is a way to relax, enjoy the moment. I focus without concern or worry. When I color there is no cynicism or irony. There is no pursuit. I am not prey. The worries, sorrows, and nameless fears dissipate. While I know these merits and I need these moments, I still question my time being used in this way.In recent months, I have explored varieties of implements: pencils, pens, gels, glitters and markers. I now have opinions about fine lines, thick lines and double-sided utensils. Last week, while grocery shopping, I swung past the back-to-school display to see if there were any markers or colored pencils I was unacquainted with or any refills I might make use of. I made a purchase.My fascination with this newfound hobby is multi-faceted. I am captured by learning to work with color (itself). I am intrigued by the many tints, tones, hues, and shades of any one color, while also being annoyed that for our limited eyesight there are only a few colors in our spectrum. Yes, white and black provide a bit more variability, but not much. I have a very wide lexicon for the color green. I am getting more acquainted with red.I have learned that the more acquainted I am with a particular subject or object, the more detailed is my coloring of it. This is why I know green. I am a long-time gardener. I have deep knowledge of trees, flowers, vegetables, bees, birds, soils, rocks and weather. I noticed that when I color a forest scene or landscape a kind of intimate knowing comes into play. I have clarity for the colors I select and the mood I create. When realistic precision is not the aim, I enjoy coloring geometric shapes and patterns.  In these pages there are no preconceived ideas of how things “should” look. The freedom of coloring without rules or prescriptions is refreshing.So many of my administrative duties are managing, planning, supporting, and caring. We set goals, know our aims, and reflect upon our experiences. The hours I spend coloring are hours devoted to creating beauty without the incumbrance of metrics or the obligation of accomplishment. Surely, this is, indeed, time well spent?Several years ago, I was a participant in a mid-career workshop which provided us the opportunity to develop an art or a craft. During conversation about which art or craft each participant might pursue the discussions grew tense. As colleagues considered their project options, they became stressed and felt pressed upon.  There were tears. After too much discussion, consternation, and push-back, our wise leader said,“Everything you put your mind to does not have to be at the highest echelon. You can do something on an amateur level. You can engage in something for the simple pleasure of enjoying it. You can learn something or relearn learn something without pressuring yourself to be the best at it. You can play at something without becoming an expert at it. Pick an artistic expression that will bring you joy.”This lesson stays with me. This is why I color.I have not stopped writing. I have started coloring. Right now, expressing ideas in colors feels better than expressing myself in words. I suspect the words will soon return. I hope the colors never depart.

It is intimidating to write this blog because I am by no means an expert who has all the answers to the toughest questions about teaching in theological education. But I do want to offer these tips and hard truths. Some of what I share is a distillation of wise counsel I have received; all of what I provide is derived from my own striving and stumbling as a teacher.Be both fully prepared and fully present in the classroom. As important as it is to prepare one’s assigned readings, assignments, notes, and outlines, one must be careful to balance preparation with presence. If your only goals are to powerfully deliver your lecture and precisely execute your lesson plan, you may be missing what is actually happening in your classroom. Focus on how your students are learning. In addition to fielding their questions, be attentive to their body language and other verbal and nonverbal cues that signal curiosity, epiphany, confusion, and inspiration. Don’t sweat the small stuff. It often feels like there are a million teaching tasks. We all make a plethora of decisions every day that indicate our priorities. In determining what matters most and what matters least, I have made the conscious decision to care less about editing my teaching materials, such as my syllabi, slides, and handouts. I do not distribute sloppy or unclear documents, but I am unbothered by the occasional typo, glitch, or imperfection. If a word is misspelled or the format is slightly off, I make a note to fix it for future use and then move on to the next task. Prioritize opportunities for students to learn, process, and shine in the classroom. I think we sometimes emphasize the teaching artifacts that we produce, such as handouts and lectures, because we feel as though we can exert more control over the learning outcomes. But the true measure of our teaching effectiveness is found in how deeply our students are comprehending, processing, and growing. I try to cultivate different and diverse opportunities for my students to contribute their insights. One of my practices is the invitation for one or two students to prepare in advance and share a verbal, written, or artistic reflection on an assigned reading during the first several minutes of every class session. The diversity of students within theological education is one of its greatest strengths and one of its deepest challenges. Our schools likely comprise among the most diverse student populations in higher education. Almost every theological school enrolls students of all ages, ranging from their twenties to their seventies. Many of our institutions also educate students across sundry races, ethnicities, nationalities, genders, denominations, and theological viewpoints. It is enthralling to teach in classrooms abounding with such beautiful diversity. Yet it is also challenging because we must navigate pathways of learning amid complex matrices of cultural, generational, and theological differences. Figure out how much teaching matters to you and how much it matters to your institution. Even though the name of the game is theological education, you must discern how heavily teaching is weighted for promotion and advancement at your institution. I take no delight in frankly expressing that some schools only give what amounts to “lip service” to teaching. In some contexts, publishing is prized more than teaching. In other cases, the highest value is service to the institution and the ecclesial tradition to which it belongs. One must still teach adequately, but there are meager external rewards for becoming an exceptional pedagogue. One must therefore balance the internal joy and meaning derived from teaching with institutional realities. To further develop one’s teaching capacities remains a worthy investment, but it is unwise to do so at the expense of other responsibilities. Figure out how much writing matters to you and how much it matters to your institution. One of the strangest things about theological education is how hard it can be to decipher how much research and writing toward publication really matters at an institution. Every teacher engages in research and writes quite a bit, but many schools differentiate between research and writing to enhance one’s teaching and research and writing for the sake of scholarly publication. There is also ambiguity about publishing at some seminaries. For instance, you may be a teacher who carries a heavy instructional load and fulfills many institutional service responsibilities (and writing is rarely discussed in open at your school), but the pathway to promotion and advancement entails an external review in which an array of scholars is given instructions to assess your scholarly record strictly based upon your publications. Teaching and writing are not necessarily oppositional tasks because each practice informs and deepens the other. But there are only so many hours in a workday, and the tasks of teaching and writing are in fact different and doing both well requires intentional self-scheduling. Don’t say yes to everything. I co-teach an interdisciplinary “capstone” course for MDiv students in their final year of study and we have alumni who are exercising religious leadership in various contexts return to the classroom as guest speakers. One pastor recently shared a practical word of advice that was equal parts winsome and wise. The pastor told every student to habitually look at their driver’s license to confirm that the name on it was their own and not “Jesus Christ.” The point was that some people, whether worshipers in a church, patients in a hospital, or coworkers in a nonprofit organization, would make them feel as though their ministry required them to be as available, sacrificial, and indispensable as Jesus. We theological educators must also maintain boundaries to cultivate wellness and wholeness. You can’t say yes to every request of students, colleagues, and administrators. Don’t say no to everything. While it is untenable to say yes to everything, it is also imprudent to say no to everything. It is easier said than done, but I think the key is to keep a disciplined schedule without overcalculating to the extent that one exists in relative isolation. One must make time to mentor students, converse with colleagues, and participate in the broader life of one’s institution as well as in academic, ecclesial, and other communities beyond one’s institution. You can be grateful you have a job without letting your institution take advantage of you. One contradiction within theological education, and higher education generally, is the glaring inattention to the economic injustices within our own systems, such as the inequities of contingent faculty positions. At seminaries like mine, it certainly feels as though we want to address every structural reform in the church and the world except our own. Instead of engaging our injustices, one common refrain across theological education is to tell new faculty with tenure-track or renewable contract appointments that they should feel fortunate to have a job. Some administrators and senior colleagues wield this sense of indebtedness as a weapon when insisting new teachers fulfill this or that task. New teachers should parry this abuse of professional obligation with clear boundaries and a healthy understanding of self and one’s vocation. New teachers can also privately note that the administrators and senior colleagues promulgating the twisted logic of “You should be grateful you have a job” are the very individuals, with their higher compensations, who should be the most thankful to have their jobs. Be a lifelong learner as you continue teaching. I think it is vital to keep learning new things so that we are attuned to the wonder of discovery. Some in theological education engage interests that significantly contrast with our everyday practices in the academy, such as cooking or woodworking. Others acquire new skills and deepen our capacities in disciplines such as creative writing and digital scholarship. There are many ways to go about the journey of lifelong learning so that we retain a posture of humility and foster an unending hunger for growth.

Listening as Weaponized Incompetence

What Listening is NotIt will be obvious to some and painfully invisible to others, but it will lurk in quiet corners of the classroom. And it will grow and stretch and plant roots in many imaginations as being OK. Only some in the classroom will feel the discomfort and stagnation of its growing presence. Only some will notice this phenomenon hardening and forming a new wall that the privileged will be able to hide behind, marking it as their limit, as the end point of their journeys.Though teachers want growth in the classroom, I am not sure we want this type of growth; for this growth mislabels itself. It calls itself progress and progressiveness. It calls itself a sign of maturation and evolving, while what is actually unfolding is quite damaging.Listening as a practice of anti-racism or subverting one’s privilege, especially by white students (though this applies to all students with privilege), breeds a pernicious dynamic in the classroom – one of silence and thus of nonaccountability. It unfortunately encourages concealment. Students can take up a posture of “listening” to avoid the risk of addressing problems as they happen in the classroom.But listening is not silence.Silence is foe. It is not allyship. Silence dressed in the discourse of listening is clever avoidance. True listening is not stagnant; she is always active. She is not perpetually quiet. She emerges and course-corrects and grows into the right stance and posture. Listening is not a means of tapping out of the difficulty of a moment in the guise of passivity; it is to commit to addressing the awkward moments in the classroom in real time. It is a covenant to deal with difficulty.In its true form listening is quite loud.Silence has paraded around as listening too many times in progressive classrooms – and in the process it has harmed more moments and students than it has helped. There are No Silent ExemplarsIf change requires shift and movement, it is safe to assume that correction must be voiced. The right thing to do then, requires making a sound.Because of listening’s misinterpretation, the classroom can be a case study in how opportunities for change are missed. And these missed opportunities become cyclical.It is all too commonplace that a Black student’s white colleague consistently says the right thing about justice, oppression, racism, sexism, queerphobia, and so forth, when the intellectual moment presents itself in class. For the minoritized/marginalized student there is hope! The possibility that this classmate “gets it” first announces itself.But then something devastating happens. Another colleague or – if we are completely honest – sometimes the teacher, does not respond or react if something offensive, disturbing, biased, incorrect, assumptive, ignorant, or somewhat “off” is said or happens. People who are in the impacted group feel it. They feel compelled to correct the error. But they are also tired of defending themselves. They become apathetic, for they know this moment all too well. The silence is awkward; it is not productive but feels deeply regressive.But most importantly, it hurts. And the hurt grows. And grows.With each second that the articulate colleague or teacher allows to pass where the offense is not met with a pedagogical corrective, the wound burrows deeper, cementing itself in memory of the wounded: they will remember this the next time they have hope for those who boast the appearance of understanding in the guise of intellect. Listening as Weaponized IncompetenceWeaponized incompetence is not only a domestic dynamic. The push for majority students to “listen” to their minoritized peers in educational spaces has cleverly become the newest iteration of weaponized incompetence.Listening as a passive, benevolent act can do tremendous work for the moral appearance of change, transformation, and/or righteousness. The majority benefits from it while continuing to inflict harm on the minoritized persons in the learning space.Hearing transgressions and violations against another’s humanity, history, culture, aesthetic, tongue, way of life, or knowing, and settling into silence and inaction is not true listening.Listening must be redefined as practice oriented. It requires immediate and factual correction in and of moments where the incorrect narrative, perception, or action has been directed towards another. Listening demands activity; it means amending the error in real time no matter how challenging the moment.But the elephant in the room of this dilemma must be addressed: it is not only white students and students with privileged identities who employ silence disguised as listening over and against minoritized students. If we are completely honest, it is mainly teachers who do it.If teachers are serious about doing our jobs well with constructive results, we need to create and establish systems of correction and accountability within the classroom that take the pressure and responsibility off of our minoritized and marginalized students.Are we up for the challenge?What modes of accountability might teachers put in place at the beginning of each semester or term that ensures pedagogical challenge and expansion not only for our students, but for us?Might we model listening as active practice instead of a weaponized excuse?I hope we do. The future and efficacy of education depends on it.

Immersive Classes: Community Effort

My last blog was about the power of immersive classes to foster attention and presence in students. Here I want to focus on another aspect of learning that immersive classes are uniquely suited to produce: a community of learners.Let me set the scene: A group of hungry undergraduates and I have arrived at our campsite for the night and set up camp after ten miles of trekking with full packs. Because they’re perpetually hungry and I believe in luxurious trail meals (ask me sometime about our Mediterranean quinoa and Thai curry dinners), our food bags are full: enough for ten people for five days. And because we are in bear country, we have to hang the bags from a tree limb before we sleep. Not even the most macho of the students can pull the bags up on his own. (He tried. His name was Joel.) We need every person pulling on the rope. Or, on different trip, in an Arizona slot canyon, hanging our food away from bears was not an issue, but sleeping warm on a twenty-degree night was. We all snaked into our sleeping bags and then piled together like puppies snuggling against one another for warmth, never mind that most of us were strangers to each other that first night.Wilderness trips are by nature and necessity participatory ventures. Everyone is essential for a successful trip, at the level of making sure everyone eats and keeps safe as well as at the level of maximum enjoyment and meaning. It’s not unlike the most effective classrooms, where everyone’s voice is essential for everyone’s learning. The reality is just more obvious on the trail where you might genuinely need someone else’s warmth beside you on a cold night.Because of the visceral need for one another in daily chores or while crossing a river, students rely on each other much more quickly than in a classroom, and their physical need quickly becomes a need for one another’s ideas at class discussion around the campfire. Students see each other as human beings, as comrades, as companions, as fellow community members, because of the way of life on the trail. They have had to be vulnerable with one another and recognize their limits, ask for help, and so when they talk with one another, they already have a foundation of some trust. Plus, when we hike with someone side by side or one in front of the other, we can say more meaningful things because we don’t have to look each other in the eye. So students listen to and learn from one another, unthreatened by one another.I saw this on an immersive Jan-term that didn’t involve backpacking too. I took students to a monastery for three weeks for a class on the history, theology, and spirituality of monasticism. There they also had to rely on each other and on the sisters. The need was less immediate, but it was there in the shared work of washing dishes and shoveling snow. Then when a stomach bug ravaged us one by one we needed each other for basic things again. The bug hit me first, and I had to rely on the students too, just as I do on the trail. That example of dependence—of asking for help getting food or reaching out for a hand up a steep embankment—is something my students mark as invaluable. If their leader and professor is willing to throw in her lot with them, they can drop their guards and do the same with one another.Often this reliance on one another not only persists as we return from the trail and finish the immersive course (the rest of the Jan-term) at a monastery or retreat center, but even when students are back on campus the following semester. I see them around campus and hear how they are still talking together about course ideas. This spring my Jan-term group were competing together to see if they could collectively keep their screen time below a three-hour/week average. Building a community of learners on an immersive trip builds a community of learners beyond that trip. Certainly, students in the group are that for each other, but hopefully they are also able to see their next set of classmates as a community and be willing to risk needing them, transforming that classroom and their learning experience into something more than a grade or a checkbox.What kind of risks can you introduce in your classes that require students to need each other and so build a community of learners? Can you create a classroom that is by nature and necessity participatory? Better yet, can you begin class with an immersive experience that does this and binds students to one another in ways that will change their experience of your classroom for the rest of the semester? May you find experiences that do this, and may they transform your students’ learning.

Write for us

We invite friends and colleagues of the Wabash Center from across North America to contribute periodic blog posts for one of our several blog series.

Contact:
Donald Quist
quistd@wabash.edu
Educational Design Manager, Wabash Center

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