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The University of Chicago made news recently because of a letter sent by its Dean of Students to inform its incoming class of freshmen that the University, given its commitment to “freedom of inquiry and expression,” does not support “trigger warnings,” cancel controversial speakers, or condone creation of “safe spaces.”  Responses to this letter run the whole gamut from celebratory cheers to condemnatory curses.  Some see this as the University’s honorable refusal to shut down difficult discussions of sensitive subjects; others see it as the University’s hypocritical and covert attempt to forestall student activism on campus to challenge conservative speakers or oppressive rhetoric. I have no way of knowing the “real” motivations or intentions of this letter.  I do notice, however, that subsequent conversations, whether in support or in protest of the University of Chicago’s letter, tend to assume that “free speech” will necessarily trump or preclude “safe space” or “trigger warnings” without clarifying what those terms may mean or how they may be put into practice. As an educator who likes to encourage and enable students as well as myself to think again and think differently, I am all for free speech; free speech is, in fact, indispensable to classroom discussion and learning.  We do not learn well if we feel like our thoughts and ideas are being suppressed; we also cannot learn if we are not allowed to make mistakes.  Nobody’s commitment to Black Lives Matter, neither mine or any of my student’s, should keep white students in my class from articulating their disagreements with or dislike of James Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power.  Similarly, advocates for LGBTQ rights, including myself, cannot silence students who want to push back against Marcella Althaus-Reid’s Indecent Theology.  Every student in my classroom should have the space and time to express their thoughts and views, even if I think they are dead wrong; to deprive students of such is to take away from them an opportunity to hear and learn through feedbacks and responses.  We must also not forget that persons from traditionally marginalized groups do make mistakes and can also be misguided in their thinking.  Whether this commitment to free speech and the idea of the classroom being a safe space can coexist depends on what one means by the latter.  I cannot guarantee that no one will feel uncomfortable, unsafe, or threatened in my classroom since I cannot control how one feels or deny what someone is feeling.  Hearing new ideas that you have not considered before, especially if it contradicts or challenges what you have held dear deep down and for very long, can indeed be very alarming.  I have also heard faculty of color and female professors saying that they themselves did not feel safe at times with their students.  When students are even allowed to carry guns legally on some campuses, how can I feign the power or ability to keep everybody safe in my class? I can, however, promise that students in my courses will have a safe space to speak freely, meaning only that they will be able to say what is on their mind and in their heart, including saying, “I am feeling rather threatened!” or “I feel under attack and unsafe right now.”  This kind of safe space is not one that shields students from being challenged, feeling offended, or experiencing wound or harm; it is, however, one that does not frame “free speech” and “safe space” as mutually exclusive by definition. Having a safe space to speak freely also does not, in my view and practice, necessarily cancel out the desire or the need for trigger warnings.  A person does not have to run over other people verbally just because she or he has something important to say that others may find difficult to hear.  I am not able to verify if it is true that persons of color, because of all the discrimination and marginalization, have developed thicker skins than average Whites, I will only say that some experiences, including oppressive and unjust ones, may also make someone more sensitive to other people’s feelings and she may hence become more thoughtful and more gracious about giving trigger warnings.  Trigger warnings, when given clearly and concisely by a teacher on her own initiative in the classroom, do not function to shield students from but prepare students for difficult topics or challenging ideas.  After giving a trigger warning, I have never once asked my students, “Is it okay to talk about this now?” or said to them, “You may leave the class if you do not want to hear or think any more about this.”  More importantly, those of us who are teachers should remember that we have the responsibility to guide and guard the tone and the emotion of a classroom even or especially when we push for honest and genuine exchange of views and opinions.  Let’s remember also that what we do may become models for our students to emulate.  They, like us, need to learn how to disagree, debate, and argue passionately, thoughtfully, and respectfully. Instead of following or (even in dispute) allowing the University of Chicago’s letter to set the terms of the conversation, I see the possibility for “free speech,” “safe space,” and “trigger warnings” to exist alongside each other in my classroom and in my universe. Oh, one more thing: While a school can—and should—refuse to cancel an invited speaker with controversial viewpoints (whether the speaker is Ann Coulter or Jeremiah Wright), students and teachers can also continue their activism to speak freely against what they understand to be unjust or unacceptable.  The point of activism is not to shut people up or shut people down, but to push for rethinking, reexamination, and further conversation.  After all, is this not what teaching and learning is about?      

Have you ever thought you knew something, only to discover, with the passing of time and the acquisition of experience, that there was more depth, breath, and nuance to the idea or situation than you had previously thought?  Or, worse yet, have you ever found out that something you thought you knew was simply –  inaccurate, outmoded, or outdated?  Physicists are still working to understand the nature of light as well as the nature of gravity. Every 100 years or so there is a break-through which brings new clarity, more scientific accuracy, a better grasp of the basic concepts of light and gravity. Each time there is a new discovery, fellow scientists work to refute, amend and/or build upon the fresh claim.  The intricacies of the universe are still being uncovered, discovered, created.  I want my students to approach their work of ministry like these physicists.  I want them to work at contesting the current conventions of church/theology/faith as an obligation of discipleship.  I want them, as part of their role and responsibility of religious leadership, to work toward new approaches, perspectives, and worldviews which will evidence the profound complexity of praising God and serving neighbor for such a time as this.  Alas, too often my students simply want me to tell them what to think – “just tell us the truth/the recipe/the formula” …. as if truth and theology are static, or even knowable. I am trying to get my students “to think new thoughts about old ideas” (an Emilie Townes phrase). I am trying to get my students to think as if the context of the digital age has made us pioneers in a new social and religious experiment – because I actually think it has.  I want my students to yearn to know better.  Re-examining what we thought we knew, nurturing curiosities for what others say is important, realizing that multiple, even opposing perspectives are likely simultaneously “right” while other tried-and-true perspectives need to be abandoned often leaves students flustered – especially those who came looking for the one true truth and the one true religion to match their own one call to ministry.  Defending “one” in the age of multiplicity is like lashing yourself to the ship’s mast in a high-tide thunderstorm.  I am aware that my students quickly learn rote answers to deep questions.  They quickly read the culture and politics of the academy and substitute their churchified answers for answers provided by faculty.  This is not increasing their knowing better.  This is simply trading the milk cow for the bag of magic beans. Knowing better demands a suspicion that all there is to know has not yet been interrogated.  It leans heavily upon the notion that God is mystery and God reveals God’s self in God’s own pace and rhythm.  Students talk about God as if “he” is the uncle in the attic; as if all we need to know about God is known; as if the repertoire of God has been performed.  Save us oh God from our lack of curiosity about you and your ways. Knowing better is important to me, in part, because of my mentor Charles Foster.  I am a womanist, an outspoken, unorthodox, sometimes Christian scholar shaped and influenced by a reserved, white, man who passionately believes in the redemption of the world through the gospel of Jesus.  People who do not understand the racial identity politics of the USA or of the racist/sexist academy are surprised to know my beloved mentor is a white man.  My knowing better about speaking out against racism, sexism - the hegemonic forces of the US society is possible, in part, because of the loving and steadfast nurturing I received from Chuck. A man of his convictions, he believed the New Testament writers who envisioned the Kin-dom of God as something other than a land of patriarchy and white supremacy. Even though he is not a womanist, Chuck gave birth to a womanist.  The ways of God are remarkable – a holy mystery! During the first session of Introduction to Educational Ministries Chuck was on my mind.  I thought of this quote.  Charles Foster said, “…the most serious threat to any community’s future occurs when its education can no longer maintain its heritage into the present or renew its identity or vocation for its changing circumstances.” More than anything, I want my students to be able to maintain the changed and changing Christian heritage while finding new and needed ways to renew its identities and vocations all the while surviving in the unprecedented liminality of the 21stcentury.  If we are to be Christian in the future, we need to pay attention to Chuck’s wisdom in the present. I want my students to be more than lukewarm church bureaucrats whose primary question of ministry is “Do the people like me.”  Knowing better entails having an urgency about the relevance of a Christian vision for a pluralistic and technological global village – I learned this from Chuck.

In the quest for understanding the dynamics of Muslim societies, understanding Islam is not always the key. This was the theme of my last post on Islam and Decolonization. I would like to offer more thoughts on a related topic: racism, or at least racial and ethnic prejudice, in the Muslim societies of West and Central Asia that I focus on in modern history classes I teach. (To be clear, I most often focus on Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Turkey, and Soviet Central Asia.) My purpose is to demonstrate that Muslim societies are in several respects not so very different from our own. I’m sure I’m not alone in finding that some of the students, especially undergraduates, arrive in the classroom with a spoon-fed narrative about Islam that is disturbingly unitary: Islam, which is a tangible thing, has certain characteristics wherever it has spread, including shari’a (also a tangible thing), oppression of women, rejection of modernity (another thing!), and, probably, violence. This uniformity is so resolute that it sometimes even elicits admiration. Whatever differences exist across the Muslim world are not as important as these commonalities. Talking about ethnic conflict, and the very real ethnic hatreds, prejudice, and stereotyping that I have encountered in every Muslim society I’ve lived in or visited, is a valuable endeavor in its own right as a tool of historical inquiry, and also a helpful way to complicate the unitary Islam narrative. The problem is the vast majority of my students understand ethnic conflict through one prism, “racism,” which cannot be avoided in the classroom. To say the least, “racism” is a loaded term, one that, for many students at my university, carries all kinds of historical baggage with little direct relevance for the societies I deal with in class. To eschew the term entirely, however, would represent a missed pedagogical opportunity. It is true that ethnic conflict in many Muslim countries lacks the characteristics of racism in North Carolina. However, many of my students have no other frame of reference for understanding a different society (aside from the framework of unitary Islam). My goal is to help students relate to the countries whose history we are studying in terms that are understandable and familiar. An example: one topic that comes up frequently in my classes is the relationship between Turks and Kurds in post-Ottoman Turkey. After students have done the assigned readings, my starting point is to ask: what is a Turk, what is a Kurd, and why is there tension today between these groups? In a dynamic session, several themes begin to emerge in discussion: language, region, culture, rural/urban origin, religion, and class. After exploring these themes in detail, it is possible to talk about the role of ethnic nationalism, the Turkish state’s language and education policies, and the social impact of rural-urban migration. The fact that region and class attract the lion’s share of attention in our discussions is meaningful. These are two themes that all of my students understand. My approach resembles that of my hero Miss Marple, who tackled every new case by framing it in terms of the characters living in her home village. It can be risky to ask students to learn about different societies through the frames they are most familiar with. But I almost always find that, if nothing else, students come out of my classes disabused of the fantasy of unitary Islam. In an insightful recent post, Sufia Uddin wrote about the implications of the “racing” of Islam in media and politics. I am interested in the possibilities and pitfalls of talking about race, and racism, among Muslims in the Islamic world. Where does our understanding of racism apply, and where does it not? How can American frames of reference be harnessed for students’ benefit, without reducing the complexity of other societies in their eyes? I welcome your suggestions and ideas.

Not too long ago I was invited to join a panel with the ambitious aim of putting into context for the campus community the rising tide of anti-Muslim sentiment and the Islamophobia industry behind it. I was specifically requested to open the gathering with a 10-minute Islam 101 in order to dispel common misconceptions of Islam and Muslims. The event was well-intentioned, but the initial framing of the event and my role in specific, I realized, would only serve to reinforce that religion and Muslim religiosity somehow lie at the heart of the problem. The part that was asked of me implied that there exists a mainstream, normative, conventional understanding of Islam that did not warrant prejudice. As this line of thinking goes, anti-Muslim sentiments would surely subside if only more people knew about this safe, good, and moderate Islam. According to this narrative, there is a right kind of Islam out there and the burden of responsibility lies with those right-thinking Muslims to push back and make themselves heard. What this narrative leaves unaddressed is the complicity and accountability of the larger majoritarian society in uncritically perpetuating anti-Muslim sentiments. Instead, religion is foregrounded as what matters most. This line of thinking eerily echoes the deeply problematic expectation that race issues in America are a “black problem” in which the burden of change lies with black communities. In both cases, the larger systemic social, political, legal, and economic issues are overlooked or worse, exonerated. My argument is not that Islam or religion is altogether irrelevant or unimportant in conversations like these. What is problematic is the continual recourse to find answers (and false comfort) in explanations centered on religious motive and identity when conflicts, crises, and tragedies transpire. When a discussion is framed narrowly around Islam or religion, we end up missing the bigger picture. The above event I described, which was eventually productively reframed, brings to the fore a particular pedagogical challenge that many scholars of Islam face. In the few minutes I was granted, how could I speak beyond the lens of religion to highlight other structural problems of greater significance? Part of the dilemma is one of time. When I think of my role as a teacher, I often take for granted the generous amount of time I have with my students each semester. Instead of a mere fifteen minutes, my students and I engage in conversation and critical inquiry on a wide array of topics related to Islam and Muslims over the course of fifteen weeks. With each class meeting we progressively build our knowledge base, nuance our language, and continually circle back to thorny issues with keener questions and alternative perspectives. When we are invited to speak we remain committed teachers, but we must carry out our work without the benefits that a semester of engagement affords. Moreover, we do not have the ability to slowly build a thoughtful base of knowledge. Speaking opportunities are typically topical and the range of topics we are asked to speak on can be dizzying, if not outright perplexing. We are invited to speak on the deeply problematic categories of terrorism and radicalization. We are asked to provide background and context to wars and conflicts in Muslim majority countries. We are asked to weigh in or explain headline issues like the refugee crisis, the position of presidential candidates, anti-Muslim hate crimes, and most recently the burkini ban across Southern France. Because of our place and position, our “expertise” on Islam is sought – never mind what our areas of specialization actually are. Time and again, we are deployed, both intentionally and unintentionally, to reinforce religion – especially Islam – as the primary frame of reference. While respecting the request and good intentions of event organizers, there are several ways we can work to change or better the discourse. Structural Reframing: Whether speaking individually or on a panel, the typical expectation is that we will say our part and then field a handful of questions. I have found it useful to collaborate with organizers well in advance in imagining alternative models of engagement. Might colleagues in other disciplines be invited in addition to or in place of ourselves? Would a roundtable or town hall style conversation be better suited for a larger audience? When faced with a smaller and more intimate group, could participants be engaged through a service experience or could the discussion be facilitated around a more reflective and participatory fishbowl dialogue? Interventions like these at the organizational level can be used to introduce a different horizon of understanding, one that extends beyond religious reductionism, by simply changing the angle of approach or the terms of the conversation. Engaging the Audience: At one-off events it is often difficult to gauge where an audience is coming from. It can be worthwhile to quickly poll or even pose direct questions to those in attendance to better understand their expectations and concerns. At times it can even be helpful to even call into question problematic premises or assumptions about the role and significance of religion. For example, questions of scriptural interpretation arise frequently at many events, especially those concerning violence. The assumption is that somehow the Qur’an directs the actions of its readers. Of course, human behavior is hardly driven by such a crude correlation of text to action. Moreover, texts, even scriptural ones, are incredibly malleable and open to interpretation. By simply spotlighting erroneous assumptions, the audience can be prompted to explore the many other factors and influences at play. Speak Beyond Religion: For a variety of reasons, strategic planning is not always possible. In fact, more often than not, I only have at my disposal the speaking time I am given and the content I choose to convey. In these situations, I believe it is still important to push past an exclusively religious frame of reference. Religion is only one identity marker that inflects the realities we face today, and yet the singular attention to religion in our attempts to understand these realities serves to obfuscate more pressing systemic problems that underlie them. We may be scholars of religion, but as our research and work in the field continually demonstrates there are many other intersecting power structures shaping the persons, societies, and ideas that we study. What structural inequalities are peoples responding to? What role do state actors and colonial histories have in creating, perpetuating, and worsening the situation in question? How is religion or Islam being coopted or instrumentalized? What are the identity politics at stake that continue to draw religion or Islam into suspicion? Speaking about religion and Islam is not just a matter of content, but also one of context. By drawing connections to wider cultural, social, political, and economic questions we can raise the level of discussion and deepen the narratives at work in the public discourse.

I am starting a new job at Union Theological Seminary in New York city. It is a joy beyond measure for me. As we know well, when we start a new job, our new position comes with lots of expectations, insecurities, hopes, and power. It is incredible how an institution can make us feel more or less powerful. The moral and historical weight of some institutions have a deep impact on our psyche. In this time of adjustment, I am busy settling in and getting prepared for my first of everything: faculty and student meetings, all kinds of meetings, chapels, classes and so on. I am getting very anxious. Not a surprise, this anxiety found a place in my dreams. Last week I dreamt that it was time for Convocation (I am supposed to speak at convocation this year) and I was running late. I walked to the chancel where the faculty was seated and I had no robe and was walking barefoot. You now have all you need to go anywhere you want in interpreting my dreams. Email me if you want to give me tips. However, the fundamental interpretation of my dream is mine. Contradictory to its pieces, a vague possibility of meaning can be: walking late is my anxiety with being here and not follow things properly; walking barefoot might be that I am relaxed and able to be myself; and walking without my Doctoral robe can be the eternal impostor syndrome that affects so many minority teachers, I am not sure what people might think of me and one day they will discover me, since I am an impostor. In any case, the sharing of my dreams is to say that my full being is entrenched in the very craft of teaching. Our inner life is never detached from our outer life. We feel and think together, our bodies are part of a much larger scheme of things, we get sick when workplaces are dysfunctional. Thus, my class is just a fold within many folds of correlation in the lives of my students, the school, and this country/world. Our classrooms have deep implications associated with the social, racial, sexual, religious, cultural, economic conditions of our students. No text is a text that stands on itself. Every reading is a dialogue, some better than others of course, with worlds opening and/or closing, colliding in many ways, and in all of the teaching/learning exchange life is figured, disfigured, and refigured. Extending the many folds of our classrooms, our schools are enmeshed in specific economic models, models that are changing our craft in so many ways. The neoliberal system that presses any institution into turning a profit, moving education and health systems into forms of gaining money, is transforming practices and conversations about education. Schools are becoming pawns of the market and its educational strategies are more often in the hands of economists or market specialists than educators. Without money, we can’t do anything. While it seems and feels that this is fundamentally right, the results in my view are desolating. For the students: students receive a narrow education; mostly to perform specific functions in the market; students become customers and teachers become the student’s employees. For the professors: faculty receives cumulative work for administration with the same or larger teaching loads, the disappearance of tenure -- especially when minorities are raised to tenured positions, increasing adjunct positions, a loss of worker’s rights, smaller salaries, and reduced benefits. All of this suggests how expansive a classroom can be and how anxious it can become. Nonetheless, when we check the borders of our classrooms, we realize that no pedagogy is neutral, or objective. Neutrality is often a form of pretending we are not supporting a political, economic system. Objectivity has been, in the words of Adrienne Rich “little more than male subjectivity.” In some ways, very small ways, the borders of our classrooms, both the content and the frame, can help shift worldviews, forms of living and help create new worlds. Critical pedagogies engage students to criticize the inequality of our class system, undo many forms of coloniality, contraband knowledges, create common spaces of differences, debunk ideas, demise economic systems, break down blind consensus, shift some circles of feelings that serve capitalism, challenge political views, confront ignorance and break chains of oppression. If our classes, whatever classes we teach, do not aim at undoing injustices, confronting capitalism/globalization/imperialism and serve the poor, it will tend to maintain conformity and complacency with the powers that be, sustaining class structure and inequality. Capitalism is eating us alive! We cannot let it go without criticism and action. We need teachers who know what their classrooms and pedagogies can do! Peter McLaren says the following: This is because naming let alone questioning the social, political, cultural, and economic arrangements under capitalism constitutes a form of political intervention and activism that for many educators is simply too risky. Instead, many engage in a form of “soft-radicalism” that scantly scratches the surface of the mechanisms of the dominant ideology. Here, protests reverberate like distant eructations from the bar stools of the local pub. Other colleagues may hide their class and race privileges in an obscure political and ideological discourse and language that leaves little room for actually addressing the material needs of those in our society who permanently live on the margins and the periphery.[1] Educators have to be aware of the many borders that clearly mark their classrooms. In this very short post, I just want to remind us how, from dreams to social class exploitation, from syllabi to gender troubles and sexual fluidities, from course evaluations to race and class struggles, from advising to students' loans and debts, from class discussions to being under neoliberal economic systems, everything is part of our daily craft. Either we see and talk about it, or not. For me, we have a moral responsibility to address it.   [1] McLaren, Peter; McLaren, Peter; Farahmandpur, Ramin (2004-11-23). Teaching against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy (p. 7). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Kindle Edition.

It was by now a pretty well-known social experiment. A man dressed like a homeless person collapses on the street and is ignored by pedestrians; when the same person puts on a business suit and collapses on the same street, however, a number of strangers quickly come to his aid. Unfortunately, appearance does matter, and it matters also in the classroom. Let me turn now to share my own experiences with two students in my very first course that I taught as a full-time professor. Student One It was literally my first day of class in the seminary. I was both anxious and excited. After giving out and going through the syllabus, I followed my lesson plan on which I had worked tirelessly all summer long. When time was up, I was secretly congratulating myself for making what I thought to be a wonderful first impression, especially when a couple of students came up to me and said that they were really “psyched” for the course. Then a white woman student who looked to me to be in her fifties introduced herself to me with not only her name but also her credentials. She said that she had a doctorate in adult education and that she could tell that I had little knowledge or experience with adult education (of course, I had told everyone at the beginning of the class that this was my very first year teaching at the seminary). She followed up and commented that my syllabus was too long and too intimidating and that I talked too fast, gave too much material, and failed to provide students any handouts. I was floored and a little embarrassed, but I managed to keep myself calm and said something to the effect that I would try to provide some handouts and that I would always be available for conversations if she had any questions about the course. Unfortunately, my “invitation” resulted in one after-class encounter that has remained vivid in my memory even almost twenty years later. I had just returned a written assignment to the class, and this woman came up after class again and asked me why she got a particular grade. (It was not a bad grade, as I remember that it was in the B range.) Since I always provide ample comments on student papers, I pointed those out and explained that her paper could be better and more tightly organized. To my surprise, she responded by saying that my “problem” had to do with the fact that English was not my first language and that I did not understand that there was a kind of writing “in the West” known as stream-of-consciousness. Would she feel the same liberty to approach a white male professor and say something like this if she got a B-range grade from him? I think not. Student Two It was time to look at my very first set of course evaluations as a full-time professor. This time, I was more anxious than excited. One particular student comment stood out among the—thankfully—many affirmative and encouraging evaluations that I had received. This student basically said he or she had gotten to the classroom feeling very tired from a long day of work as well as feeling rather frustrated as this was his or her first day in seminary. Sitting at the back of the classroom, this student said he or she felt even worse when I walked into the classroom and stood behind the lectern as the instructor for the course. I could not repeat it verbatim but it went something like this: “I could tell it was going to be a disaster as soon as I saw him, but then Professor Liew started to speak and I was immediately energized and engaged.” I am grateful and glad that, based upon a very positive evaluation, this particular student was able to learn from me and with me, but what this student assumed upon just seeing me is most telling. Why would he or she make the foregone conclusion that the course was going to be bad as soon as I showed up? Yes, there is another “appearance” that one cannot change as easily as putting on or taking off a piece of garment. These two students taught me early on in my teaching career that students carry all kinds of assumptions, racialized or otherwise, with them into the classroom, and so I have to be prepared for them. Of course, we as teachers are not immune to this: we have assumptions that lead us to think, act, speak, and make evaluations in particular ways with particular persons. If teaching is truly one of the best ways to learn, I want and need to learn from these early experiences in my teaching career how students may also need to prepare for class in ways that go way beyond what are listed on their syllabi.  Allow me to share the following video by some students at the Rhode Island School of Design as we all work to plan and prepare for the beginning of a new academic year (note that the video contains strong language that some may find offensive). The video raises a host of issues and questions to consider. What questions arose for you as you think about your own teaching? What might it mean for students and teachers to “veil” themselves in classroom contexts?  Social DNA comes with the bodies that enter our classrooms, but it can also be addressed and even changed by what we do in our classes.