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Perhaps one of the most painful memories I have of my early years in teaching was election night 2004. The pain comes from my too late realization that in my advocacy for a progressive outcome for the election I had semi-wittingly politicized my classroom in a way that still haunts me. I’d like to reflect for a bit on what happened and what I learned. What happened was quite simple. I was a progressive who was against the war in Iraq and the convulsions caused to our common life by extraction of our common wealth to finance massive tax cuts. Put simply, I was ardently against Bush and made no secret of it. In the weeks leading up to the election and the evening of the it, on which I had a class meeting, my advocacy had had the effect of drawing a political line along which members of the class sorted themselves. A consequence was that for the few weeks remaining after the election my pedagogical space consisted of political partisans and not a community of learners. What I learned from that was three-fold with the full effect being felt in the recent election. The first thing I learned was that I had spent insufficient time or energy teaching about my values, what they meant for how I understood the faith, and thus, how I constructed the task of teaching theology. Here I don’t mean to imply that I understand my role as being teaching my theology. Rather I want to suggest that it is good to realize that our values are being taught whether we are explicit about it or not. Being explicit means that I can reflectively engage students and materials in ways that shape our common experience. By focusing on values I can invite more people into our space than if it is a matter of politics. I did not do this work. The second learning was that I had spent insufficient time clarifying how I integrated scripture, faith, values in the work of theology for myself. So, while I am sure that I demonstrated a sort of integrity for my students it was not sufficiently reflective to build my teaching around. Certainly, the project to which I am dedicated as a theologian was/is clear and finds expression through my teaching but, at least at that point, the integrity at the center of teaching and that project were not clear. From this learning I changed my pedagogy radically. Teaching theology and not about it became my guiding pedagogical principle. The upshot of this change was that questions of the integration of scripture, faith, and values as the work of theology were at the center of every course from its beginnings. In the two classes I taught following the recent election I began with an observation that we as Christian theologians were being called into the public square at this moment for several very specific reasons. First, the candidate who won had made very specific promises about bringing harm to the weakest and most vulnerable among us, our neighbors. By placing promises to register our Muslim neighbors, round up and deport the stranger among us (immigrants), and the imposition of what amounts to martial law (a national stop and frisk policy), at its center the Trump campaign made the political theological. It is just here that my learnings of the past few years made it possible for our class(es) to grapple with our responsibility in this moment in ways that did not immediately devolve into partisan positions. We were able to draw on scripture, the various theologians we read, and our experiences of faith to imagine how to move forward. This was quite a bit different than in 2004. This then was my third lesson. By making the ongoing thread running throughout each class the explicit integration of our faith and values, it was then possible to interpret the political moment as a matter of faith and not partisan politics. A student summed up well what we had discovered on our journey: “loving and protecting our neighbor is a type of politics.”

Since the start of the twentieth century, Christian religion scholars from the dominant culture - specifically ethicists – shifted their focus on how to live the Christian life via praxis toward the nature of ethics, wrestling more with abstract questions concerned with what is the common good and/or which virtues to cultivate. An attempt is made to understand the world, but lacking the ability to differentiate within disenfranchised communities between a “blink and a wink,” à la Geertz, their final analysis lacks gravitas. Teaching religion has become a process which [de]liberates not liberates. While abstract deliberations at times might prove sympathetic to the plight of the oppressed, the first casualty of abstract thought is rigorous academic discussions concerned with how to construct a more just social structure based on faith claims.  A move to the abstract has, as my dissertation chair John Raines constantly reminded me, made the [class]room an appropriate name which signifies what occurs. This “room of class” becomes a space where students learn the class to which they belong, and how to assume the responsibilities associated with that class. During a visit to Yale, a student reminded me that while most seminaries train ministers for churches, Yale trains future bishops and superintendents. I doubt if such an attitude is limited to just one of the Ivies. Those with sufficient capital or connections to attend certain “rooms of class” on prestigious campuses are afforded opportunities normally denied to others (predominately students of color) who attend rooms at less prestigious locations. To occupy [class]rooms attached to power and privilege means that what is taught focuses more on the abstract as opposed to praxis designed to subvert power and privilege. To some degree, most eurocentric approaches to pedagogy at prestigious [class]rooms, more often than not, focus on explaining what is religious. But for those rooted in (or in solidarity with) disenfranchised communities relegated to the underside of prestigious [class]rooms, the question is not so much to determine some abstract understanding of religion, but rather, in the face of dehumanizing oppressive structures, to determine how people of faith adapt their actions to serve the least among us.  Some professors who embrace a more liberative approach to pedagogy recognize there is no such thing as a neutral education system. Rather, students, depending on the [class]room they attend, are either conditioned to domesticate or be domesticated. A theological education serves to normalize and legitimize existing power structures within the faith community and society. A liberative pedagogy instead seeks to cultivate the student’s ability to find their own voice by creating an environment where collective and individual consciousness can be raised. The starting point is not some truth based on church doctrine or rational deliberation. Instead, the starting point is analyzing the situation faced by the dispossessed of our world and then reflecting with them theoretically, theologically, and hermeneutically to draw pastoral conclusion for actions to be taken. To function in the [class]room as a scholar-activist is usually to be dismissed, especially if one chooses not to engage in the methodologies acceptable to eurocentric thought. A division, unfortunately, exists where those concerned with the importance of maintaining their privileged space in [class]rooms oozing with power insist on lessons revolving around the thoughts and ideas of mainly dead white scholars (and those soon to join them) dismissing scholar-activist and the scholars from marginalized communities who inform their own thoughts. Simply peruse the reading lists on syllabi at prestigious [class]rooms to notice how scholars from disenfranchised communities are ignored – except, of course for that one elective class offered to check off the political correctness box. The [class]room space is protected with a call not to engage in the politics of our society, but instead to limit our thoughts to the polity that is the church, usually a homogenous church which more often than not misses the mark. The calling to be a scholar-activist is a recognition that by seeking solidarity with the stone rejected by stale builders regurgitating dead thoughts incapable of saving anyone, one finds themselves among the cornerstone of relevant, cutting-edge scholarship capable of revolutionizing society, literally turning the world upside-down.   

I help people have difficult conversations for a living. I facilitate dialogues–usually in communities deeply divided over issues that touch on people’s values and worldviews. I have spent much of the last three years working with professors as their classrooms increasingly fit that description. In Jill's terms, I help people wobble, but not fall down. Jill talks about wobble in terms of letting something happen and getting out of the way. That is a piece of it for sure, but there is a choreography to wobble, a delicate but purposeful crafting of space, time, language, movement, and furniture that makes wobble possible. The purpose is to break people out of the conversations that hold us back from seeing complexity in ourselves and others. It is meant to crack the surface conversation to reveal new possibilities, to deepen understandings of values and lived experience, and to unmask our own assumptions. I call it “choreography” because every choice we make while facilitating a conversation invites some responses and discourages others. And every choice we make leads people to focus either on us or on each other. If we call on people, it invites people to raise their hands and wait for us to conduct. If we don’t, it invites people to give and yield focus as they move in and out of the conversational space. It is choreography at its most subtle. If we ask people to sit quietly and reflect for two minutes before answering, we invite the second and third thought that someone has, not just the first. The work of dialogue is disruptive of old patterns. It disrupts dynamics of dominant voices monopolizing the space–including ours. It weakens the power of the first speaker. It breaks the pattern of asking questions we already know the answer to while our students try to read our minds. It invites silence as a space of intention and reflection rather than of fear and disengagement. It invites empathy rather than judgement. It prompts uncertainty rather than certainty and curiosity rather than declamation. It allows for wobble rather than steady motion along the straight and narrow. When I visited Jill’s class, I stood up and talked about dialogue in front of rows of chairs, with people raising their hands and I called on them–ironic. It was a fine conversation. But when I sat down to watch the rest of the class, Jill didn’t just allow or encourage wobble, she choreographed it. Jill asked the students to move the chairs into pairs of arcs facing each other. A wobble happened. Then Jill sat outside the circle. Another wobble. Outside the circle is one of those places that disrupts the old pattern, a place of intellectual humility. It disrupts the pattern of students relying on us for the prompt, the answer, the nod of approval. Then she asked a question she didn’t know the answer to. Wobble. She gave people a chance to reflect before speaking. Wobble. This is not just allowing something to happen; these are a set of choices we make–a choreography that when done right makes possible a new kind of conversation that breaks the dominant polarized and divisive rhetoric or silencing that we see so often in our discourse. What happens when we choreograph wobble is that students rise to their own power and possibility, and move through their own wobbling moments to muster the momentum to move together. In Jill’s class, the conversation had to be interrupted after 40 minutes to announce something about papers, but it would have gone on. Even if Jill and I had quietly snuck out of the room, it would have gone on because the students had turned toward each other and engaged.  Whether we recognize it or not, much of our public discourse is designed for simple, polarizing, escalating episodes of attacking and defending well-worn positions. We have opportunities to design and incubate a new discourse, one designed for the generation of ideas, the exploration of new ground, the contemplation of complexity. The patterns we have to break are strong and so our choices must reflect that. Our choreography must reflect the need of this moment; the need to turn to one another with curiosity, complexity, and care.

Daniel Madigan, my mentor when I first began teaching Islamic studies, considers his introductory course an opportunity to help students understand Islam as a religious choice and vision. This, in contrast to a politicized framework wherein Islam, is a problem to be solved. Marshall Hodgson also refers to the vision of Islam early in volume one of his series, The Venture of Islam. He writes, “Islamicate society represents, in part, one of the most thoroughgoing attempts in history to build a world-wide human community as if from scratch on the basis of an explicitly worked out ideal.” In an earlier blog post, I recommended the use of graphic novels and comics in teaching Islam because they are substantive and because students benefit from the engagement with visually rich, multimodal texts. Courses in religious studies have an unfortunate tendency toward abstraction. Separating ideas from their cultural expression is a disservice to our students and Islamic or Islamicate culture itself, which represents the “highest creative aspirations and achievements of millions of people;” Hodgson again. If we are to help students appreciate a vision, we must show them how that vision is lived, and the cultural heritage it has built over the centuries. In this post, I want to highlight some of the online resources available through museum websites, particularly the website of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and provide ideas for how these tools could be used in the classroom. In conjunction with a virtual exploration, it would be ideal to send or accompany students on a museum visit but this is not always practicable. Fortunately, museums are committed to education and the advancement of knowledge in their mission statements and their online resources are often exemplary for that purpose. Teaching is sometimes isolating because it can be accomplished in isolation. A busy professor can close off the classroom and get through the term without doing the work of engaging outside institutions. But to do this job right, we need partners whose missions intersect with our own. In my experience, museum professionals are eager to help and they have created a wealth of resources to draw from. A small investment of time spent researching museum offerings or reaching out to a museum education office can pay huge dividends in terms of student learning and engagement. In fact, a more student-driven classroom can save time in the long run. Letting students take charge of their own learning means they are doing more of the work. Anyone who has visited The Metropolitan Museum of Art knows it is an overwhelming experience. Thanks to a sense of direction that allows me to get lost in my own neighborhood, I have spent the better part of an hour just trying to find my way to the right wing in the Met. Their website can provoke a similar experience. It requires a certain amount of detective work to identify the right online resource for your students and a significant amount of scaffolding to guide them to its best use. But there are unique opportunities to be found! Five decades of Met publications are available to search and download, sometimes in their entirety, for free. This collection includes a full online copy of Art of the Islamic World: A Resource for Educators that pairs well with an online lesson plan on “Arabic Script and the Art of Calligraphy” suitable for modified use in the college classroom. The Met website is also home to 82nd & Fifth, a series of two-minute videos in which curators discuss works of art that changed the way they see the world. These videos, including an engaging presentation on the official signature of Süleiman the Magnificent, are also available as part of a YouTube playlist. Projects like this provide useful modeling for classroom activities. A student can be tasked with exploring Islamic art and creating their own short video on how it has changed the way they view the world. The most powerful resource on the Met website is the ability to search its collection as a whole. Students searching for “Islam” will bring up thousands of entries, including photographs, historical information, and links to related objects and textbooks as available. This is a fantastic opportunity but it must be used wisely. Casting students into this sea of information without a clear purpose is not likely to be successful. As a colleague once instructed me, “Throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks is not a sound pedagogical strategy.” Certainly, the Met collection can inform garden-variety research papers and projects begun in the classroom but it can also provide an initial inspiration for detective work. Students might start with an item from the collection and generate questions based on its features and provenance. Finding an elaborate illustration of a drunken party from the Diwan of Hafiz, students may wonder about the relationship between intoxication and mysticism. Confronted with a folio from the Blue Qur’an, they might want to know more about the aesthetic and practical features of other Qur’anic manuscripts. The key is that students are puzzling over museum objects and formulating their own paths of inquiry leading to a more holistic understanding of Islam. Advancing toward the highest, creative and comprehensive level of Bloom’s Taxonomy, you could ask students to curate their own virtual exhibition using an online collection. Seeking out meaningful threads of continuity between temporally and geographically disparate objects is an enormously challenging task but the rewards for a job well done are great as well. Such an assignment, carefully wrought, has the potential to help students consider the vision of Islam as it was realized in material culture; not in abstraction, but as a source of creative renewal and inspiration across time and space.

I am a cyclist.  I ride a hybrid commuter bike to work most days and have a road bike that has taken me up mountain passes and on to country roads outside of Dallas where views of fields and livestock replace the asphalt jungles of the Metroplex.  I picked up cycling almost a decade ago when it became clear that I needed some kind of response to the combined stresses of pre-tenure professional life and young children at home.   I got on the bike for outside time, physical challenge, and personal space.  I’ve stayed on the bike for all of these reasons, and also for what time on the bike has taught me about attentiveness, mindfulness, thinking spaces, and more recently, about wobble:  those moments when things slow down, or haven’t quite started up; when direction, volition, and commitment are in play. In cycling, wobble happens when mounting, dismounting or moving slower than 2 miles per hour, often during a turn.  As things go, this is also when it happens in classrooms.  When conversations aren’t strictly guided, when listening replaces lecture, when a set authority structure is open to flux, intellectual patterns can come a little out of balance and preconceived ideas can change.  Put another way, transformative learning can occur.  Without the wobble, feet firmly on the ground, we can never get on the bike and ride. My interest in wobble stems from some conversations about diversity and intellectual humility I’ve been having with colleagues from various places and disciplines,  and also from a recent workshop for faculty and graduate students here at Southern Methodist University on conflict and conversation in religious studies classroom spaces (thanks to Wabash for funding this with a small grant).  The workshop focused on understanding why contentious issues can be difficult to talk about, and also offered concrete methods for facilitating useful conversations across difference.  John Sarrouf, an experienced facilitator and Director of Strategic Partnerships at Essential Partners, led that workshop for us.  John was also kind enough to come and speak to my undergraduate class about the work he does.  It was in that encounter that I saw wobble in action. John greeted the class and then asked if they were talking about the upcoming presidential election.  My otherwise talkative, engaged, and engaging students shrunk at the very suggestion.  Shoulders hunched, faces turned to their desks, they shook their heads.  They were thrown off balance, visibly uncomfortable, almost at a standstill.  Then, John asked what it would take to be able to have those conversations.  Under what conditions could they speak?  Their heads came up, they made thoughtful suggestions, and by the end of John’s 10 minute time, they had recalled productive discussions around Black Lives Matter, religious differences, and their experiences in our class.  They had turned an intellectual corner and were up and riding (thinking) again.  In an online discussion post that followed, one student mentioned a change in his thinking in response to a suggestion John made about talking to understand rather than to persuade.  Something in the wobble allowed him to hear, consider, and embrace a suggestion.  He learned something. As in mounting and dismounting a bicycle, the wobble needs to be controlled.  Too much and forward momentum turns into a crash, too little and we never get that second foot off the ground.  Now that I am attentive to wobble, though, and have learned to use it by letting silence happen in discussions — by getting mindfully out of the way, or by not shying away from controversy when it arises — I have come to recognize its real potential.  Or more accurately, I can see it for what it is.  Before I saw discomfort or disengagement, things I wanted to minimize.   Now I am more likely to see the beginning of forward momentum.  I see the beginning of transformative, interesting thought, even around topics as challenging as religion. I hope my students can see the same.

In 2015, the Department of Education reported that 1 in 5 women in the US is Latina. By 2060, this number is projected to be about 1 in 3 women. As a Latina, I was surprised by these numbers because I did not expect the current Latina population to be near 20% of the entire US female population and over 10% of the entire US population![1] In 2010 and 2015, 50.8% of the population in the US was female.[2] That means that over 10% of the entire US population is Latina and that percentage could be around 18% in 2060 if the projection is correct and the male/female ratio remains the same in the US.[3] But I was also alarmed by these numbers. Why? Because of other statistics about this population: While Latinas earn more bachelor’s degrees than their male counterparts, they still earn less than these men in the labor market. (Latinas earn only 56 cents on the dollar in comparison to Anglo/Euro-American males.)[4] About 33% of Latinas become pregnant by the age of 20.[5] Latinoa teens have consistently higher suicide rates than their black and white counterparts - 18.9% have seriously considered attempting suicide; 15.7% have made a plan about how they would attempt suicide; 11.3% have attempted suicide.[6] What does this have to do with teaching, religion, and politics? Well, if Latinas account for over 10% of the US population, and 60% of the Latinoa population[7] are citizens of the US, then we are saying that at least 6% of US citizens are Latinoa. Yet, I find few syllabi or resources at the university and seminary-level that are engaging issues of concern for Latinas. The dearth is especially obvious in general education courses. This is significant because misperceptions of Latinas leads large numbers of US citizens to think that the majority of Latinas are not citizens and should be, depending on one’s political affiliations, treated accordingly. Many of my students in the Midwest have lived without engaging the Latinoa population and I have found in my teaching at the University of Dayton, and other institutions, that they do not know about the complex and varied realities of Latina life in the US. When I share with them that most Latinas are born citizens or born to citizen parents and then naturalized, students have told me that they thought most Latinas came to this country by crossing the Mexico/US border on rafts. I am concerned that talk of sanctuary spaces in response to statements made by the President-Elect will focus student attention on creating these sanctuary spaces with little regard to either the diversity of Latina life or the social issues which affect them. In other words, sanctuary spaces are not enough for us to fix the social ills of the pueblo. Our systems of education do not help to make these connections either. But, I believe we religion scholars have a special role to play in teaching and learning with and about Latinas.I am listing some resources below to start the discussion about this topic. What other resources do you know/have you used to teach with and about Latinas? Resources Ada María Isasi-Díaz. Mujerista Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996. Jacqueline Hidalgo. Revelation in Aztlán: Scriptures, Utopias, and the Chicano Movement. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Lara Medina. "Nepantla Spirituality: An Emancipative Vision for Inclusion" in Wading Through Many Voices (2011). Latinitas – www.laslatinitas.com – This Texas-based organization empowers young Latinas through media and technology to become strong and confident leaders. Maria Pilar Aquino, Daisy L. Machado, & Jeanette Rodrguez. A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002. Various authors in Orlando O. Espín. The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Latino/a Theology. Hoboken: NJ, 2015.     [1] [2] [4] http://www.nationalpartnership.org/research-library/workplace-fairness/fair-pay/latinas-wage-gap.pdf [5] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db136.htm [6] [7] http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/jul/29/jose-diaz-balart/majority-hispanic-population-us-born-says-jose-dia/; http://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml

On November 8, 2016, I watched Ana Navarro telling ABC News that “there is a White America and there is a Brown and Black America, Chinese America, Muslim America.” Muslims, of course, are white, brown, black, Chinese, and many other things as well, so from a historical standpoint it is surely curious, if nothing else, to see how adherents of a major world religion have been squeezed into the “non-White” umbrella of the American racial classification scheme. Navarro’s comments got me thinking about my own research on Islam in the Soviet Union and the question of how large, cosmopolitan, majority non-Muslim societies have resolved the problem of finding a “niche” for Islam. I see many parallels between the political context of Islam in America today and discussions that took place in the colonial empires in the late-19th and early-20thcenturies. America is not an empire. Yet, like the British, French, and Russian empires, the U.S. is cosmopolitan, multiethnic, multifaith, and hosts a growing and prominent Muslim minority. The British, French, and Russian empires have a legacy of incorporating and dealing with Muslims that our society should be aware of. This legacy should be especially important to anyone teaching or talking about, the history of the modern Islamic world, anywhere. On the one hand, the elites of these empires, like many members of the American elite today, were firmly convinced of the inherent fanaticism and insularity of Islam, though they disagreed vehemently on whether such fanaticism stemmed from Islamic dogma (whatever that might be), or the historical and cultural circumstances of Muslim societies. The fact that these elites were Christian, secular, or some combination of the two, obviously colored their views about Islam, but so did the reality that their geopolitical interests placed them in an adversarial relationship with large swathes of the Islamic world. On the other hand, there was a vital and compelling need to extend Muslims some sense of belonging in the polity. Across the 19th century, the British, French, and Russians all sought to institutionalize Islam through the patronage of religious scholars, foundations, and shrines, and through various attempts to codify or otherwise make sense of Islamic law. With the right kind of interference, it was hoped, Islam could be civilized into a form that would make it worthy of inclusion and protection in the imperial framework. Why does this legacy matter in today’s college classroom? It is only a small overstatement to say that the current liberal/conservative impasse about Islam is a reiteration of an old colonial debate. Take, for example, the comments of Newt Gingrich who stated that “sharia is incompatible with Western civilization. Modern Muslims who have given up sharia—glad to have them as citizens.” It is perhaps fitting that Gingrich has a Ph.D. in history—though I realize I’m giving him too much credit here—because these two sentences are a crude restatement of the old colonial accommodation with Islam: join the imperial polity, but for God’s sake, practice the kind of Islam that you can show up to the Club with! In my classes on 20th-century history, which focus heavily on Muslim countries such as Afghanistan and Iran, we do not regularly discuss American politics or current events. We do, however, talk a lot about colonialism, and I try to make my students see the past through prisms that are relevant to their own lives. As it turns out, this has been relatively easy when it comes to the relationship between Islam and the state.

Have you noticed?  The lexicon of the American mainstream media has shifted.  Before the campaign season, the news only sparingly discussed notions of race.  Any allusion to race was vague and superficial.  Reporting of race was primarily reserved for assuring the public that criminals are either African American or Latino/a.  Whiteness was rarely mentioned. White supremacy, which saturates US society, was mentioned even less.  Any media analysis about the identity politics of race, class, gender, or religion was typically reserved for the interviewee to initiate or was the purview of “liberal” media.  Occasionally, “the Black view” (as if there is the “normal viewpoint,” and the sole counterpoint is “the Black view”) would be brought into the conversation in the month of February or when discussing issues of “the inner city.”   Overt acts of anti-Semitism or blindingly vivid acts of racial hatred had to be the headline story in order for a reporter to mumble an analysis which suggested hegemonic forces might be operative in US society.  Most mainstream reporting treated each act of violence as if it were an isolated event.  Hardly ever was there analysis and dialogue that suggested oppression is systemic, historic, and ongoing in our beloved democracy. Then it happened... The presidential campaign brought such bold, constant, and unrelenting hate-speech, outrageous acts of demeaning other-ed human beings, and outright, unfettered arrogance that the media was forced to change the run-of-the-mill lexicon by adding words usually heard in my graduate classroom setting.  Reporting accurately so confounded the media that a different vocabulary had to be deployed.  Words used sparingly, or if at all, are now common-speak in the public arenas: xenophobia, patriarchy, misogyny, bias, islamophobia, homophobia, prejudice, racism, sexism, classism and alt-right swirl through the everyday news reporting.   My ear is refreshed to hear my preferred analytical vocabulary finally in the public and being nationally engaged.  My heart is sick knowing that if these words are so commonplace and routine in the democratic dialogue of a pluralistic society, then we are near a brink of unprecedented social upheaval. I am, in an ironic way, appreciative that the national discourse was so overwhelmed with the need to describe the in-your-face hatred that it reached for important words.  Pressing this new lexicon into extended service is paramount to our national dialogue on freedom and government.  Until now, twenty-first century forms of racism, sexism, classism and heterosexism had morphed into expressions that were palatable to those whose highest values are niceness, pleasantry, and conformity.  I am hoping this new lexicon is sparking a needed curiosity and that the new lexicon will assist persons to label their oppressive experiences for which they previously could not name but under which they suffer.  Succinct naming of our fears and anxieties as well as interrogation of the structured hatred that perpetuates the “isms” is a powerful shift – we who teach, minister, and lead must sustain it.  OMG! Then something else happened… Recently, the TV was on while I was busying doing something else other than watching it.  My focus was jolted to the media broadcast when I heard a surrogate of the President Elect say to an interviewer, “The word racist no longer means anything.  It simply means an angry, old [white] man.”  The new lexicon had been noticed.  Those who use post-truth hegemonic strategies are making efforts to redefine, distort, and garble these terms.  This deceptive definition of racist has extracted race, power, domination and victimhood.  The new definition infers white women do not have the power to be racist (Ugh!).  Racism is now, literally, being defined as toothless, impotent, and ignorable.  We are living in tumultuous times when words of hatred, corruption, exploitation and dehumanization can be redefined by those who reap the benefits of white supremacy and patriarchy.   We must recognize the power of words and keep these tools in our own quiver – in public ways. The vocabulary that usually only inhabits my classroom spaces is now in the living rooms of average American citizens.  We must not squander this moment.  Those who are painfully acquainted with this vocabulary must take the time to assist those who are newly acquainted to these ideas and concepts.  I suspect many people are hearing these words for the very first time.  We must pause to discuss, define, and nurture this new public discourse clamoring to make sense and make meaning of all that is happening in the identity politics of our democracy.  Listen for the new words in the media.  Make a list, and then talk with your family, friends, teachers, students, parishioners, employees, etc. about their definitions and their importance as tools of liberation at this moment.  Listen to the use of the words. Are they being sanitized? Are they being coopted to new meanings that give the impression that oppression is not vicious or evil? We who feel the gravity of current national politics cannot squander these teachable moments.  Finally, to those of us who have the privilege and responsibility of regular interaction with students in classroom settings, let us integrate this lexicon into our classroom dialogues.  Please do not hide behind the excuse that your academic discipline or course topic does not lend itself to a conversation which includes identity politics and injustice.  Please do not rely upon the faculty of color to carry the burden of this conversation for the curriculum.  Please do not depend upon the students of color to ask you a question after class.  Being serious about this teachable moment will take your initiative, and perhaps, even a new approach to your own teaching and scholarship. In this moment of the new public lexicon, let our teaching struggle to stay abreast of the shifting political landscape and let us work-at a new sense of relevance and urgency for the formation of our students.  Especially in our classrooms where our judgment is trusted, we must disentangle, expose, and de-fang the burgeoning pseudo-methodology which would intentionally distort and misrepresent the meanings of critical terms lest this dishonesty become preferable to our students. Our freedom deserves these conversations.

Sometimes classrooms feel like our family living room, with our families around, exposing all kinds of political positions and emotional responses, all of us trying to respond to some events that are going on in the world. We look at each other for help, or to hate, we hope for some understanding and make some sense of wild things. Our schools are in some ways, the extension of our common life and there we try to figure out our lives together. Porous as they are, schools and classrooms breathe and vibrate the world outside of them - subjectively and objectively. We get anxious about what is going to happen to our schools and if we are going to be able to cope and survive. Minorities feel the intensity of worldly events in particular ways. Thus, schools and teachers must be aware of social political events going on around us and respond to them in careful ways. When institutions offer a collective response, with open spaces and written documents, it is easier to deal with the expansive classroom responses. Let me provide two examples of what I have experienced in the US: September 11, 2001, and the election of Donald Trump in 2016. The first event was my first day of class at Union Theological Seminary in New York and the second was my first semester as a teacher at Union Theological Seminary. September 11 was a dramatic anxious day in NYC. We were lost without information and feeling so afraid. Classes were canceled and a gathering in chapel at noon was called. As we gathered, our school “pastor” started with words of assurance, sustenance, and support. We had people leading us in prayer, silence, and sharing words of wisdom for such a time as this. At the corner of the chapel, professor in Late Antique and Byzantine Christian History & Professor of Byzantine Christian Studies, and Orthodox Priest John A. McGuckin stood at a corner of chapel holding a long prayer bead and a cross that was swinging back and forth while his body moved back and forth in prayer for the world. I remember holding hands with now Prof. Jackie Hidalgo and finding solace in her company next to me. At some point, an airplane flew over our heads and we didn’t know what to expect. The whole chapel went into a deep silence as we waited for the airplane sound to disappear. We were together for about two hours and we left with more information about what was going on, how to protect ourselves and to learn how to rely on each other as the day went by. In 2016, one day after the election of Donald Trump, the whole school, surely a very liberal school, went into an emotional and political shock. Classes were not canceled but a call to gather in chapel was issued to occur after the chapel service. The worship service for that day had to be reimagined as well with lots of meditation. After worship, we were to talk about the post-effects of the election that we thought would never happen. Dr. Su Pak and I were called to lead that time and we divided the time into two main blocks: mourning and hope.  We started with an introductory word from our president Serene Jones and started singing the South African song: “the journey, the journey, the journey is long… walk with me for the journey is long.” We then proceeded by opening up the floor for anyone who wanted to express their emotions, their feelings about the results of the elections in their own bodies/souls, their communities and the possible consequences of this election. This time we had Muslim and Buddhist professors and students around, as well as other (non) religious affiliations. After a long time sharing an immense variety of emotions in the warmth of a community, we opened up the space for the possibility of hope and sustained commitment to justice and peace. We left singing “the journey, the journey, the journey is long… walk with me for the journey is long.” While fragile in its approach to the immensity of these times, these collective events served as a sense of communal support that was fundamental for gaining a larger perspective, to voice our own feelings, to know we needed to support each other, especially minority communities at higher risk, and to help us keep going. After these collective events, the work that was to continue in our classrooms was somewhat easier. No classes should go without pausing to attend to events such as these and to give voice to those either agree with us or are opposed to us. For someone to voice their support to Trump at Union was not an easy thing and we teachers have to hold them in their right to speak and honor their place in our midst. In times such as these, we are tempted to demonize the ones we are disgusted with by their practices and cultivate hidden feelings that desire their sheer disappearance. It is easy to feel trapped in these opposed dualisms. However, to live with the contradictions of this seems incredibly absurd. Yet, this reality is what drives us to continue to engage each other, keep safety as a priority, and protect the most vulnerable and fight for what we believe. It is a daunting, even haunting task for the teacher in his/her classroom. If educational institutions can provide open spaces to deal with our fears and doubts and find support, we will be better teachers. At the American Academy of Religion last month, there was a space provided by some groups and led by the Liberation Theology Group that did just that: an open space was provided for conversation, to find out what to do, to learn with each other about the best ways to address political issues ourselves, with our peers and when back to our classrooms. This blog is such a public space as well. Throughout these blogs posts, we will gain a better sense of how to access and engage our realities, of how to listen to one another and make classrooms open spaces that will better prepare our students, and ourselves, to deal with our burning world.

Laughter is an important ingredient in my classroom. I bank on my ability to make students laugh with my often-droll sense of humor, but I also frequently rely on professional comedians through the magic of the Internet. The status of Islam and Muslims in political satire, specifically in the genre of comedy news, provides ample fodder for this need, through projects like The Onion, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Full Frontal (and as much as I cherish Last Week Tonight, John Oliver rarely explores the topic of religion). Indeed, humor also has a long tradition in Islamicate history as well—ranging from the likes of Joha/Nasreddin Hodja to Azhar Usman—but in this blog post, I want to focus on the portrayal of Islam and Muslims in Western satire, sometimes called “fake news.” For better or for worse (often for worse), moreover, the appetite for fake news stories (which at times genuinely fool people!) may also be on the rise. Although this trend can have dire consequences, it renders the genre all the more fertile for generating understanding in the classroom. Lots of learning takes place through the slow, careful, and sometimes tedious (even boring) study of details, but cathartic moments can have a uniquely lasting impact on students. I often seize the moment to employ humor in the classroom not only as a way to keep students interested, but also as a means of transformation. Indeed, things are often funny because they are subversive, because they surprise us—kind of like being tickled. It doesn’t work so well to tickle yourself; because you expect it, there’s no surprise. This element of surprise works particularly well, I find, when combined and contrasted with more traditional modes of pedagogy, such as textual analysis, historical inquiry, and site visits. Accordingly, I select short video clips that I use in class bearing in mind what questions they may generate about a given issue. Some of my favorite examples follow: One of the few Last Week Tonight segments that deals with Islam focuses on a Supreme Court case about the permissibility of inmates growing beards in federal prisons. The clip portrays the Supreme Court Justices as talking animals, as a way to self-consciously heighten interest in the Supreme Court—which not only induces at least a few chuckles, but also offers a meaningful opportunity to discuss First Amendment issues in the context of American religion. Why oh why don’t the “moderate” and “peaceful” Muslims speak up? This clip from Full Frontal with Samantha Bee explores this question as well as myths that Muslims don’t cooperate with law enforcement, or that they hate the United States. The Daily Show’s “Senior Muslim Correspondent,” Hasan Minhaj, has a smart bit about Southwest Airlines’ removal of a Muslim passenger for allegedly speaking Arabic. That Minhaj himself is a brown Muslim speaks to the rhetorical role of his character as well, and he offers a semi-comical but mostly sober reaction to Trump’s election victory. This segment raises an important chicken or the egg question about the nature of political satire: do political motivations inform comedy news or is comedy a way to express political messages? Regarding hysteria over Muslims conspiratorially taking over the United States with their “shari‘a law,” this clip from The Daily Show about mosques and this clip from The Colbert Report about “radical Muslim snacks” (i.e., halal food) have proven successful and provocative in the classroom, by effectively positioning the level of public paranoia in relation to what kinds of practices Muslims actually promote. Clips like these allow me to ask a real but also rhetorical question to my students (who are formally studying Islam): would any of you feel pretty comfortable and informed about defining “shari‘a” on a national news program in front of millions of viewers (who haven’t formally studied Islam)? (Routinely, no one volunteers.) Where do you think the “real news” anchors get their information about this stuff? They probably Google it, I suggest, as food for thought. And people always interpret Google results with wisdom and measure, right? Is Obama a Muslim? No, he’s not. And never was. He even jokes about this, for example, during his remarks at the White House Correspondence Dinner. One of my all-star comedy news clips to use in class comes from the archives of The Colbert Report. It focuses on the aftermath of the 2011 massacre committed by Norwegian Anders Breivik, whom many media outlets quickly identified as a Middle Eastern Muslim, despite coherent evidence. To quote Colbert, “Just because the confessed murderer is a blonde, blue-eyed, Norwegian-born, anti-Muslim Crusader…does not mean he’s not a swarthy ululating Middle Eastern madman.” I find this clip particularly effective as a teaching tool because it not only highlights the absurdity of how sensation-driven journalists reacted to the event, with flamboyantly transparent anti-Muslim bias, but it also pushes the envelope past what the viewer might expect, by presenting a sequence of awkwardly cathartic punch lines. On the unmeasured way in which mainstream media covers religion and violence, this segment on “decoy Muslims” from “The Onion News Network” pushes the envelope by suggesting baby Muslims should be murdered for fear of their possible ties to terrorist attacks. In my experience as a teacher, this kind of humor, which rides the line between grotesque offense and revealing reflection of popular perceptions, can open doors for frank dialogue about complex issues that even engaged students may otherwise find unapproachable because of political sensitivity. Finally, as a spoof on TSA terrorism prevention, this Key & Peele skit offers an ridiculous but lucid critique of airport theater in which a bunch of would-be “Muslim terrorists” in a cave plot to deceive security officials but find themselves stymied by restricting themselves to a 3.4-ounce bottle of toothpaste, as opposed to the 3.5-ounce bottle on which they modeled their attack. Importantly, this flagrantly flippant skit doesn’t downplay the important of national security, but rather invites inquiry: How might the nation achieve this security? Where does one draw the line between personal liberty and public safety? What about non-Muslim terrorists? In conclusion, I have always found humor an effective pedagogical tool in the classroom. And as the onslaught of violently misleading media attention to Islam and Muslims, consumed by our neighbors and students alike, appears to be speeding up, I think the right combination of satire, subversion, and laughing out loud can provide a uniquely powerful classroom presence and learning experience. What are your favorite comedy news clips? Please share them in the comments section below.