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With almost no leaves in the canopy above us, sunlight flooded the gently sloping hillside, penetrating and illuminating every open space in the leaf litter. My students and I had just spent some time—I don’t know exactly how long—inspecting a Dark Fishing Spider (Dolomedes tenebrosus) who was absorbing the warmth on the smooth gray bark of an American Beech (Fagus grandifolia). The spider—stretched out like a stereotypical beach bum—seemed to be enjoying the early spring warmth as much, if not more, than we were.“This doesn’t even feel like class,” one of my students exclaimed, taking a seat in the crunchy oak and hickory leaves. Indeed it didn’t. I had hoped for this.That experience was just one of countless precious memories during my first semester teaching Creaturely Theology in the spring of 2023. That course, an upper-level undergraduate theology elective, weds theological reflection on the more-than-human world, spiritual formation in nature, and biological and ecological surveys of the flora and fauna of Johnson University Tennessee’s campus.[i]In the fall of 2020, due to COVID risks, I began teaching outside almost exclusively. That experience brought immediate, unexpected pedagogical opportunities.[ii] While I continue to teach my regular courses outside as often as possible, “Creaturely Theology” has drastically enlarged my outdoor classroom. Now my students and I spend every Monday morning in the spring exploring the wild and hidden corners of Johnson University Tennessee’s 400-acre wooded campus. Increasing the physical dimensions of my “outdoor classroom” has required comparable growth in my pedagogical imagination and teaching repertoire.In this series, Creaturely Pedagogy, I will explore some of the exciting, life-giving lessons I am learning from my students, our non-human neighbors, and from the land itself through Creaturely Theology.All has not gone smoothly, I confess. The course has attracted significant attention, some of it negative.[iii] One social-media commenter, while generally supportive, called the course “lighter weight.” Every university educator and student has heard of the trope of the “blow off class.” Such courses ostensibly require little work on the part of students. They lack rigor. They are filler. Some even judge them to be a waste of time and resources.While I succeeded in creating a course that—at least sometimes—did not feel “like class,” it was not because Creaturely Theology wasn’t rigorous or intellectually challenging. I had to modify the schedule because of the density and difficulty of the required readings! The very distinction between serious and unserious courses, though, provides occasion to evaluate the ideals and goals of university education generally, and religious and theological education specifically, in our moment.In the recent past—with effects still relevant to the present—Western university education has idealized theory, technical content, control, and the abstract. In a word, education and competency have been equated with “mastery.”[iv] But none of the current educational disciplines that exist in university contexts today, not even the so-called “hard sciences,” can deliver mastery over their subject matter. In each there is an almost incomprehensible amount of material to examine, and new developments and discoveries happen all the time, even in the humanities, and, perhaps most shockingly of all, in theology! Education must involve developing competencies to think, speak, and work humbly and responsibly in a complicated world. And the work of coming to think and speak well about God and all things in relationship to God is rather involved work, after all.As readers of this blog know well, all human knowing is embodied. There is no human learning without sensation, and consciousness never happens untethered to underlying neurology and neurobiology. All learning involves feeling. All loving does, too. Creaturely Theology has allowed me to combine high-level theological reflection with unforgettable, hands-on experiences in the more-than-human world.In my forthcoming blogs in this series, I will often emphasize the importance of sensation and feeling in the work of theological reflection and learning. Future entries will explore the themes of naming, risk and fear, departures and arrivals, and ritual. I hope you’ll follow along.Notes: [i] Initial funding for the course came from the Science-Engaged Theology course grant competition in the St. Andrews New Visions in Theological Anthropology project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation.[ii] In a previous blog series, I shared some of the things that I had been learning from teaching outside.[iii] See “Johnson University’s New ‘Creaturely Theology’ Course Stirs Controversy.”[iv] Note Willie James Jennings’ salient critique of “mastery” in After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2020).

My absolute favorite way to teach is sitting around a camp stove on a bed of pine needles with students eating mac and cheese and laughing about the day’s challenges. If I’m lucky, my favorite wool socks are on my feet and the hat my friend Tess knit for me is on my head. If I’m really lucky, the students have moved from “That canoe carry was so hard!” to “I was thinking this afternoon about the point Belden Lane makes in the chapter on struggle as teaching us attention and indifference…”As much as I enjoy taking students outside for my regular semester classes, taking them through immersion courses—usually a week backpacking, sometimes canoeing—is a whole other level. All the good that happens in an outdoor session on campus is enhanced by being outdoors for a whole week or more. Students forget that they’re in class, become curious, and learn rather than ask me repeatedly if they’re doing the paper “right.” Students are less distracted on these trips, more able to focus on readings, reflections, experiences, each other. We all feel like we’re getting away with something, and we play, which makes us even more curious and open to learning. We are all more alive in the world. My teaching and my students’ learning becomes more attentive, more responsive, more active, more unpredictable in the best ways because that’s the reality of life on the trail: wild, unpredictable, active, requiring attention and response.All of these things happen, but for this post I’ll focus on just one aspect of the immersive experience: how present students become and how much that positively affects their learning and, more significantly, their lives.Two aspects of immersive outdoor trips especially facilitate students’ presence in their own lives. First, the places I backpack with students usually have no cell service, and I take their phones anyway, requiring them to go screen-free for the duration of not just the trip but the Jan-term (three weeks). Many of us make rules about devices in our classrooms and enforce presence for three hours a week, but imagine how the extended absence of their devices, the immersion into the non-virtual world, brings students into a more sustained experience of attention and therefore a deeper experience of presence. Students are not distracted by people who are not physically present. They cannot spend time staring at a video, leaving their reality behind. The things that distract them from their learning must be more interesting than those on a screen. Students tend to be much more engaged in their reading and read with more focus and depth on these trips, too! Without the numbing kinds of distraction available, students find themselves paying attention to their world and their community—each other. Their minds might wander, but they wander in ways our minds were meant to wander, making connections and noticing the world and the people around them, discovering the humanity of others and reaching out to meet needs they wouldn’t otherwise notice. They may even perceive internal movements of their own souls.The other aspect of the immersive trips that makes students so present is the pace of the trail. We are only ever doing one thing at a time. We’re hiking or sleeping or cooking or eating or playing or sitting around a campfire with one another, but never two of those at the same time (well, we can eat and do most of the other things at the same time, but these are undergraduates we’re talking about). Those are also the only things we do each day, every day, day after day. The pace and the rhythm slows us all down. We can focus. There is nothing vying for our attention. We just have to walk awhile, attend to our feet, attend to the person beside us.What happens when students are present, then, is an exponential increase in learning. Imagine conversations that last longer than thirty seconds because students have read deeply and brought questions and thoughts about the text. Imagine real conversation with real listening to one another and building ideas together because they are not wondering in the backs of their minds about who is texting them or what other conversation they are missing out on. Imagine a full day to ponder and digest the ideas of the previous night, a whole week for the course material to sink deep into students’ bones as they engage it with different people in different conversations over and over with nothing else to do but go for a walk and chat about it.Perhaps backpacking with students is not an option for you, but I imagine some kind of immersive experience is. Could you require a weekend retreat without phones and with a manageable amount of reading you do while at the retreat? Could you schedule even a single day immersion with students? Could you take them to a museum, take their phones, and give them a single task they have to do for several hours, slowly? Could you assign them a weekly meal where they have to be present to one another? May you find your immersive classroom and come to know your absolute favorite way to teach, with or without the wool socks.

I finally went to my primary care doctor the other day and proceeded to unload about three years’ worth of pent-up ailments upon her. I'm losing my hearing! Do I have early-onset dementia? My right knee hurts! Can you test my thyroid? I think I have diabetes! What is this weird bump? My pinky is numb! Is my heart rate normal? Am I a hypochondriac?! This poor woman.I’m pretty sure she diagnosed me with a very serious condition called… “aging.”I’m turning forty this year and suddenly, it seems, I find myself routinely waking up at four a.m., taking a handful of vitamins with breakfast, and grumbling about “kids these days.” The skin on the back of my hands has turned to crepe paper. The other weekend I didn’t go watch a friend’s band play because the show started WAY too late. Readers, it started at nine p.m. I fear it can no longer be denied: I’m getting older.It’s not that I don’t spend time thinking about bodies, including my own. I’ve read books such as Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning (Hrach, 2021). I teach courses on disability and race—two classes in which the body comes up a lot. I emphasize to students that religion isn’t just about beliefs; it’s enacted and embodied amidst a material world too. I know I need a snack in the middle of my Mon/Wed 9:35-10:50 a.m. class or my stomach will let out a series of plaintive whale songs. I’ve dealt with decades-long injuries. I’ve suffered from long COVID. People I love have died. But, oddly, I haven’t thought all that much about aging, or its relationship to my work, until more recently.Part of this odd oversight may be that aging is pretty embarrassing sometimes. Kids can literally fall out of a tree, get up, and walk away just fine; I can pull my back, and need to take it easy for a week, because I reached too far trying to plug in a lamp. This isn’t exactly the kind of story I want to broadcast at the monthly department meeting. Part of it may be that it’s hard to admit, perhaps even to fathom, just how much our lives are affected by this “meat suit” (as my yoga teacher calls it) that is only ours temporarily. Part of it may be that professors tend to work late into life—and so aging doesn’t seem all that relevant to my professional world. Part of it may also be that, because faculty are constantly encountering a turnstile of younger people in our classes, it may be easy to forget we ourselves aren’t forever young. I still feel only a few years older than my students (especially whenever I can sense the presence of free pizza nearby). Part of it too may be that we fancy ourselves living “the life of the mind”—even if it’s a big lie or hell, for a lot of us—and the mind can seem ageless (though the other day I stood in front of my bathroom sink and couldn’t remember which handle was for hot, so….). Part of it is denial, I’m sure.Aging brings up a bunch of considerations—and not just about the indignities and rebellions of a body I can no longer (could not ever?) control. How do I continue to do this work well when my mind is no longer as sharp as it once was? (And what does “well” even mean? Perhaps such notions change over time….) What do I have to offer to my colleagues and students, now that I am no longer fresh out of school? How do I make my own meaning, when the milestones and achievements of the earlier years (e.g., get a degree, get a job) have passed? How can I stay relevant in a rapidly changing world, around those same youths I mentioned above? How can I remember where I put my glasses?!? What are my new goals, what am I aiming toward, where is the forward momentum coming from now? How do I tap into the wisdom of mentors and others who have been through this time and these transitions before me? How do I learn to live with the losses, both personal and professional, that accumulate? How do I stay excited about doing the same thing, for semesters on end? Are there really ways to beat or stave off mid-career malaise or the midlife blues? How do I do *gestures around* all of this for another several decades? These are tough questions to contemplate and I don’t have the answers yet. I’m not sure I ever will.Some of you are probably chuckling to yourselves. What I wouldn’t give to be 40 again, you might be thinking. Yet difficult wonderings can come for us at any age or stage in our career. I’m remembering a quotation my mom, who has since passed away, sent to me once: “Sometimes when you’re in a dark place, you think you have been buried. But you’ve actually been planted.” Now, maybe, is a time to grow.

Playin’ Mas’ – Intertextual Oz As a person of Caribbean heritage and a scholar of Caribbean and African Diasporic studies, I see elements of Trinidad and Tobago’s carnival in accounts of Geoffrey Holder’s approach to envisioning The Wiz. It was Holder’s costuming, first iterated in sketches, which led to the choreography and storytelling of the The Wiz. As in the tradition of “playin’ mas’” (playing masquerade), movement, music, and costuming are intimately connected. The look and construction of the costuming plays a large part in determining the movement. The cyclone which whisked Dorothy away could be conceptualized as Oya, the Yoruban orisha of the whirlwind and guardian of the cemetery. This reading brings a sensibility to the Oz myth which opens it to other possible readings of text in context. Here, I am thinking about the tragic real-life history of1 expansionist national policies towards “western” landscapes in the late nineteenth century which saw the displacement of Indigenous people. While Baum’s narrative does not overtly touch on this aspect, Oz is peopled by different sorts of beings vying for sustainability given the tyranny of the wicked witches.This musical theatrical production was adapted as a film in 1978 with the same name, The Wiz. Plot elements were adjusted to accommodate an older Dorothy, now a teacher, played by Diana Ross. Set in an urban landscape, Dorothy’s snow cyclone travel to Oz lands her in a dystopian New York City. The Scarecrow, played by Michael Jackson, delivers a powerful lament about injustice in a new song introduced in the film called “You Can’t Win.” The song “Home,” like its parallel “Over the Rainbow,” is the movie’s emotional heart and center followed by Lena Horne’s Glinda the Good’s impassioned anthem for self-awareness, “If You Believe in Yourself.”The Wiz reboot of 2024 features a younger cast in which Dorothy’s companions on the Yellow Brick Road are her peers in age. In media interviews director Schele Williams noted that Dorothy, played by Nichelle Lewis, finding community with similarly-aged companions is relevant for a twenty-first-century social context. Williams sees the finding of one’s group of affirming and encouraging peers as a central task of contemporary life.What does it mean to teach the mythos of Oz twenty-five years after I first contemplated doing so while designing a course which I introduced in 2000? Twenty-five years ago, I focused on how Oz represented changing geographical and cultural landscapes at the turn of another century. The movement from a mostly rural population to more people living in cities was a salient feature of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century in the US. Oz, a prison drama television series of the same name was also popular during its six-season broadcast from 1997 to 2003. Where was “home” for incarcerated persons?As a class, we discussed the hero’s journey with reference to the work of Joseph Campbell and its relevance for science fiction and fantasy narratives including Star Wars (1977) and The Matrix (1999). The course contrasted this search for home with diaspora identities and religious traditions where the search for home complicates Dorothy’s assertion that “there’s no place like home.” Other retellings include Geoffrey Maguire’s 1995 Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which is based on both Baum’s 1900 novel as well as the 1939 MGM musical. A Broadway musical called Wicked based on Maguire’s book premiered in 2003. Here the Oz mythos is retold from the point of view of a character who is usually positioned as Dorothy’s arch nemesis.The Oz mythos remains a rich field for exploration in religious studies classes. It is still eminently teachable today. The text’s multiple and continued readings and reinterpretations, across a variety of genres, make it especially suitable for study. Students are exposed to the concept and practice of intertextual reading, and to the subfields of film and religion and visual cultural studies. These in turn allow for the study of shifting cultural signifiers and the enduring legacy of powerful stories. Teaching Oz in the twenty-first century allows for continued exploration of the meaning of home, community, and individual and collective journeys in an ever changing and shifting geographical and cultural landscape.There are many metaphorical yellow brick roads. I would want students to explore North American S/F (speculative fact and fiction) and fantasy literatures and their intersection with religious studies. Situating Oz as an important (although certainly not the only) origin point for fantasy literature in a North American landscape including its tensions, contradictions, and continued troubling legacies would be a richly rewarding teaching and learning experience. Oz should be put into dialogue with the texts of Octavia Butler, for instance. In my past teaching, I taught Oz alongside the imagined worlds of Star Wars and the emancipatory visions of Rastafari. Teaching Oz opens possibilities for journeying through visual and textual studies and exploring their meanings in comparative contexts.

An audio version of this blog post may be found here.It was the first morning of my vacation. The restaurant at the resort had a waiting list for breakfast patrons. The hostess took my phone number and said I would be called when a table opened. I thanked her and walked to find a comfortable spot in which to wait. Not far from the dining room, guests could choose to linger in any of three adjoining rooms--the bar, lobby, or library.I chose to wait in the library. The room was ringed with mahogany shelves carefully adorned with books and creative objects.  Statues, framed paintings, and board games were on display. The room reminded me of magazine covers from Architectural Digest or Good House Keeping. The many chairs and couches were positioned to invite guests to linger in small groups, or to simply sit and read. I picked a chair facing the wall of windows. The windows provided a view of the sprawling pasture setting. I noticed a scrabble board was set on a table near the windows and a chess game was set at another table near the entry door. I, indeed, felt as if I was visiting a friend or relative’s home.As I waited, not because they were loud or intrusive, I overheard a grandfather teaching his grandson to play chess. The boy was about six or seven years old. With the grandfather seated on one side of the board and the boy, kneeling in the chair on the other side, the granddad invited the boy to make the first move. As they played, the grandfather patiently explained the way the boy might move varying pieces. Several times, he encouraged the boy to consider a strategy. At the end of the game, the grandfather showed the boy how to reset the board for the next people who might want to play. I overheard the grandfather say he had taught his daughter, the grandson’s mother, how to play chess when she was about the same age as the boy.Even when I am on vacation, I am thinking about and identifying teaching moments. This tender teaching moment between grandfather and grandson was poignant, delicate, and beautiful. It was not extraordinary. Its beauty was in the ordinary occasion of a grandfather taking time, one-on-one, to play with his grandson.Some of the best, most tender, teaching occurs one-on-one.Classrooms can be marvelous arenas for superb teaching. Classrooms can be sites where the relationship between instructors and learners transforms. Equally ripe with possibility and beauty are the one-on-one relationships between faculty and students which happen beyond the classroom. Teaching students in one-on-one modes has the potential to assist students in ways that the classroom encounter cannot. The opportunity of a sustained conversation with one student can sometimes lead to a long-lasting, life-changing connection.While I was on a faculty, with intention, as part of my teaching agenda, each year I chose to work with a student teaching assistant (TA) and a student research assistant (RA). I considered these relationships with students as key to my teaching responsibility as the courses I taught in classrooms.My practice was to meet weekly with each of the two students to facilitate our prescribed tasks. Then, once a month, if the students were interested, I would convene them for a meal to discuss larger theological issues, hear how they were managing in the day-to-day reality of graduate school life, and encourage conversation about their occupational aspirations and dreams. My aim for these one-on-one relationships was to aid their health and success.I honed my listening skills by teaching one-on-one. Spending time in one-on-one conversations allowed my primary focus to be on the questions, curiosities, abilities, and perspectives of the student. These one-on-one relationships allowed me to make stronger recommendations for further graduate study, employment options, or give my opinion about life’s unexpected twists and turns.  A regular dimension of this kind of teaching was when I was able to write very considerate, in-depth, letters of recommendation for my students because I knew the student as a person and not just as a student who had done well in my class. Occasionally, if there was trouble, my relationship with the TA or RA allowed for convincing intervention or advocacy.My practice of intentionally constructing ways of working one-on-one with students comes from my own experiences in graduate school. When I was in graduate school, the professors for whom I was their TA and RA became my career-long mentors and friends. The three-faculty people who I worked closest with in graduate school have been influential in guiding my entire academic career.Recently, I referred one of my current mentees to my mentor for guidance on an issue for which he had expertise. I told my mentee that I was putting them in touch with their “grand-mentor.”Through these connections I know I am a better teacher and colleague. Last week, a mentee who serves on a university faculty and just received tenure, called me and asked me to talk with one of their doctoral students. I was delighted to assist. Just like grandfather was so glad to teach grandson, I am overjoyed to reach out and support a student of my student.

I remember dial-up modems and the exhilaration of logging onto AOL.com as a teenager. A few years later, I experienced the novelty of Facebook. Duke Divinity School (DDS) advised all of its masters’ students in the 2008 incoming cohort to create Facebook accounts so we could stay connected and support one another through the first year of our graduate program. DDS recognized that this would be a time where students begin to deconstruct presupposed understandings of religion, Bible, and the theologies that we had received from our families of origin and church contexts. Reflecting back on that time, I feel as if the beginning of my deconstruction was wed to the rising age of social media. Now as a professor of the New Testament in the age of social media, what should some of my best practices entail? While difficult to define, the term “social media” identifies the various internet applications that allow users to construct their profiles while also creating content that connects and networks various groups of people. While social media is supposed to be about “connection,” I imagine that we all have experienced “internet trolls,” folks who try to bait and upset readers with disturbing comments. As professors of religion and theology, I would argue that we are the prime targets for internet trolls just by virtue of the nature of our work at a time where there seems to be rising White Christian nationalism in the United States. So, I often ask myself questions about the role of the professor in the age of social media. For example, in my context, our Director of Outreach and Alumni Relations requests that faculty increase their social media presence as a way to connect with alumni who are out working in the world. Can I carefully curate my social media presence to let those alumni know that I support them from afar? As a professor, what content can I create that allows alumni to be refreshed as they do the difficult work of leading congregations and parachurch ministries? Moreover, can social media serve as a way for faculty to connect with prospective students as we all experience the feelings of scarcity in theological education? Is this another area of “service” that faculty can add to their tenure portfolios (assuming one has a job with tenure!)? While I am not sure of the proper answers to the above questions, I certainly try to be cognizant of what the next generations of theological students may look like. Gen Z, for example, born between 1997 to 2012, is the first generation to have grown up with ALL THE TECHNOLOGY. Further, they will buy products from social media sites more than any other generation. Is there a way for Millennial, Gen X, and Boomer faculty to capitalize on connecting with Gen Z through social media? I think that is a conversation that must be had in our various theological faculties. I started @BoozyBibleScholar on TikTok and Instagram, providing segments called “One Minute Womanism” and “Scripture Through Womanist Eyes” as a way to show my growing community that there are other voices besides the conservative right-leaning interpreters of scripture. Now, I will definitely not be keeping up with the latest TikTok dance trends, but I will add my own particular voice to the ever-growing vacuum of social media to provide a brave space for the folks who may be feeling left behind and kicked out of Christianity. Just as in the opening of this reflection I recognized my own deconstruction during the rise of the social media age, I imagine that Gen Z experiences similar deconstruction(s). As I peruse social media, it seems to me that the loudest voices in Christianity today tend to be destructive voices. If you have pondered a desire to help silence those destructive voices, I implore you to act now. Find ways to make your scholarship available to the public. I wholeheartedly believe that one of the professor’s jobs in the age of social media is to be a transformative voice in contrast to those who will try to tear people down. Instead of letting John Piper, John MacArthur, or Voddie Bauchaum be the loudest voices in public religious discourse, professors of religion and theology owe the American public counter voices in the age of social media. My hope is that my social media presence will at least point some to believe that there are other ways to be “Christian” in a world that has vastly devalued such an identity. TikTok: @BoozyBibleScholar and Instagram: @BoozyBibleScholar

I am not a scholar of Religion or Theology. However, my work as a creative writer and professor of Creative Nonfiction often involves identifying everyday divinities; finding the sacred in small things, the flawed, and the profane. Many of the readers/contributors to this blog might recognize my name as a kind of curator for this space. I serve the Wabash Center as an Educational Design Manager, a job that has brought me great opportunity to learn, share and reflect approaches to teaching and the teaching life. When I became aware that one of our blog publishing dates would fall on Juneteenth, I wanted to take the opportunity to write about it and perhaps encourage others to learn and teach more about the subject…Juneteenth: What is it?June 19, 1865: Gordon Granger of the Union army arrived in Galveston, Texas, to inform enslaved African Americans of their freedom and that the Civil War had ended. General Granger’s announcement put into effect the Emancipation Proclamation, which had been issued nearly two and a half years earlier, on January 1, 1863, by President Abraham Lincoln.Juneteenth is an annual commemoration of this event and the end of slavery in the United States after the Civil War. It has been celebrated by African Americans since the late 1800s. It is the longest running Black holiday. Also known as Freedom Day, Jubilee Day and Cel-Liberation Day.The day was first recognized as a federal holiday in 2021, when President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law after the efforts of Lula Briggs Galloway, Opal Lee, and others.I grew up knowing nothing about Juneteenth. This history was not taught to me in my public schools. I first became aware of the day and its significance in college, thanks to my first African American literature professor, and the book by Ralph Ellison. When I  heard the story, I was angry. Understandably, I think. The idea that slavery in the United States continued quite a while after the Emancipation Proclamation was deeply frustrating. But I was also upset with the fact that this event seemed whitewashed from my education. Why wasn’t this major moment in African American history discussed every Black History Month? Why wasn’t this made a part of the curriculum I was given?Another part of me was unsurprised. As a Black person in America, I am familiar with the ways my homeland can defer its promises of equality, and how inconvenient histories can be overlooked in order to affirm narratives of American exceptionalism. The story of Juneteenth complicates our understanding of the Civil War, Lincoln’s legacy, and the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.I wouldn’t encounter Annette Gordon-Reed’s Juneteenth until I was a teacher myself, assigning it to myself and my graduate students to read together. Together, along with other supplementary texts, we’d learn more details about the factors which led chattel slavery to continue in America years after it was said to have ended…States with little or no Union Soldier presence refused/ignored the order to free enslaved people.Border states, including Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri, and of course Texas, ignored emancipation.Slave owners threatened to kill slaves if they tried to leave. Some slavers moved to Texas to keep people enslaved. Galveston, Texas was the last stronghold.The Emancipation Proclamation didn’t apply to Indian tribes. The five “Civilized Tribes” (Cherokee, Choctaw, Muscogee, Chickasaw, Seminole) owned Black, Mixed and Indigenous slaves. Chattel slavery among these tribes was not officially ended until 1866.These factors demanded considerable time and effort to navigate and prompted questions that were uncomfortable for the learners and for me as well. But I believe more was gained by engaging with Juneteenth in the classroom—a greater understanding of ourselves in relation to our citizenship, our communities of belonging, and one another.I wish I had the opportunity to have learned about the event sooner in my life and more often throughout my matriculation through academia. Even if it would have been awkward at times. I wish to have been able to observe this commemoration of freedom earlier, and the chances I might have had to unpack its significance with teachers and fellow students.There is no real discussion about freedom in America that does not invoke the lived experience of Black people. As the poet Terrence Hayes suggests, Black people share a historical and constant relationship to freedom. To take this further with a question: in lessons about the liberation found through God’s grace—the freedom from fear discovered in faith and divine will—why wouldn’t we center the lived experiences of a systemically subjugated population? Why not ask students to engage with a moment that signifies a turn toward a more moral universe? I would like to make a case for making Juneteenth a point of discussion in classrooms across all fields of study, but especially in theological and religious education with its potential to position scholars who lead communities and shape public thought. There is so much to be gained in the teaching of Juneteenth.Here is a resource, a Juneteenth Reading List cultivated by the Smithsonian’s National African American History Museum: CLICK HERE. As we consider how we might craft lessons around this holiday, making sure to read as much as we can on the subject feels imperative.If there are readers who have had success teaching Juneteenth and would like to share a reflection on their experience, reach out at quistd@wabash.edu.

The WizIt is the malleability of the Oz story to reflect different social, historical, and cultural contexts while utilizing recognizable symbols – special magical shoes, the Yellow Brick Road – which makes it such a powerful myth of America. Early in the twentieth century, within a few years of the publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, stage productions had already begun. The 1939 MGM film in which the title was shortened to The Wizard of Oz proved to be iconic in its portrayal of the story of Dorothy and her friends’ journey through the magical land of Oz and their journey of self-discovery. Oz started out as a literary narrative but is retold as a musical film. The Hollywood film musical was well established as a featured genre in which songs, their lyrics, and dance sequences were part and parcel of the narrative. The film musical, in turn, drew on the tradition of musical theatre. Musical theatre’s earlier predecessors included vaudeville, and prior to that, the minstrel show, the earliest popular stage entertainment in the United States.Minstrel shows emerged in the nineteenth century as performances of imagined blackness based on racial stereotypes. Minstrel shows featured white performers in blackface (makeup, wigs, and costuming). Minstrel shows proved to be so popular that there were minstrel shows featuring black performers who donned costume and makeup on stage to perform caricatures. While minstrelsy was supplanted by the movies as the most popular form of mass entertainment, it still lingered well into the twentieth century in stage shows and in film. Reflecting segregationist policies of the era, not many people of African descent who identified as black were cast in mainstream musical theatrical productions. Coupled with this practice, there were all-black musicals on Broadway. In Dahomey was the first such musical, staged in 1903. Others followed in subsequent decades leading up to the staging of the 1964 all-black cast of Hello Dolly! featuring Pearl Bailey in the title role.The introduction of The Wiz in the mid-1970s featuring an all-black cast should not be separated from its contemporary sociocultural or historical context. This staging drew on Baum’s original storyline, as well as on the 1939 MGM musical, but the story was transplanted from turn-of-the-century Kansas to contemporary urban, black America. The full title was The Wiz: The Super Soul Musical of “The Wizard of Oz.” This title was a statement about the musical’s positioning in relation to the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz which itself was positioned in relation to Baum’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. And so, as an audience, we are presented with a version of a version of a version in the fashioning of an authentic representation. The direction and creative costume design by Geoffrey Holder is in itself worthy of exploration, as I will discuss below.Occurring only a decade after the tumult of the 1960s, The Wiz reflected 1970s black American musical genres incorporating soul and gospel-tinged R n’ B in its lyrical content. Its storyline featuring a young Stephanie Mills as Dorothy provided a powerful message of belonging, self -awareness, and affirmation of black identities through embodied performances. With costumes by Trinidadian-born dancer, choreographer, actor, and artist, Geoffrey Holder, the musical was a triumph, winning seven Tony’s (considered the pinnacle of awards for Broadway musical theatre) in 1975. These included Best Musical and two for Holder as director and choreographer.

The day before we were told to go online, rumors that we would transition were flying think and fast. It was a Tuesday. I was supposed to head to Vanderbilt that evening to give a talk on Wednesday, but the night before, it had been canceled. Given this, I suspected that we (CU Boulder) would be going online soon. Earlier in the day when I met with my seminar (a class that, despite being label a seminar, had over 30 people), I told them that I thought online was coming. The entire room burst into conversation, much of it unease, some of it amusement, most of it because they knew I was barely managing our minimalist Canvas site. We had already experienced some small adaptations together. A week or two before, a student who was experiencing back spasms asked if she could lie on the floor during the class. I said yes, and she participated while lying flat on her back. Prior to our last in-person session, a student had emailed me to say that he thought he had Covid-19 and asked if he could attend via FaceTime, on a classmate’s computer. I said yes, and he participated from his screen. Using that flexibility as our foundation, we spent 30 minutes planning our online transition together. In the end, I am responsible for the decisions that were made, but I am very glad that my students and I worked through the plans together. We discussed the possibility of meeting over Zoom. While people really liked our classroom community, we had concerns about trying to have a 34-person conversation over the computer. (At this time, I had never used Zoom and did not realize that I could break the class into small groups with the push of a button.) In addition to questions about the feasibility of the Zoom platform, students were anxious about internet access, changing work schedules, and responsibility for younger siblings. So, we decided that we would have discussion boards. I asked them if they thought that it would be fair to have everyone post one initial thought and two comments on existing posts per day. We agreed, as a group, that one comment could be part of an ongoing conversation on your own post, but that the other comment had to be on someone else’s. We discussed what they wanted and needed in order to make this plan work. Deadlines. They wanted clear deadlines and they wanted me to promise that I would not move things around on them. As the semester would wear on, one by one, they would repeatedly thank me for never moving anything around. We agreed that the initial post needed to be up by the start of class time, and that they had 25 hours to post responses. I talked about what I wanted in the discussion boards: for them to try not to repeat each other, and to make sure that someone commented on almost everyone’s post. When I brought up that second concern, one student nodded. I knew she would monitor our inclusivity. I was delighted, and feel that I can take very little credit, for what happened on our discussion boards over the following weeks. I posted questions to get them going; one of which was always, “Share a quote that struck you as interesting and tell us why you were intrigued by it.” They answered. They picked quotes they liked, they picked quotes that they did not understand, they picked quotes for which they needed more context. They brought their confusion to each other. Frequently, I would log in to discover that a question posed late at night, and probably aimed at me, had been answered by a student before I woke up. But maybe more impressive than their willingness to share their vulnerability, to share their “I do not knows,” they were willing, firmly and politely, to disagree with each other. They challenged each other repeatedly. They debated interpretations of texts, but they also called each other on more charged issues, like failures to see structural racism. Each time, I was struck by the fact that they did so without pointing fingers or descending into accusation. They remained firmly in intellectual community with each other. To be clear, some of these things had been happening in the classroom all along, but most were not, or at least included only the most talkative of the class. These discussion boards were very surprising to me, and upon reflection, I think this kind of connection occurred because I let them choose a format. I did not let them chose the format because I knew that it would lead to these conversations—I did it because I have never taught online, did not know what to do, and wanted to get buy-in for my plan. Wonderfully, my students responded by taking ownership of the space. They had been asked what they wanted to do, and with that freedom they went ahead and did it.

(An audio recording of this blog may be found here.) Classroom spaces are places of intimacy and influence. Teaching is a human-to-human encounter. Course planning typically focuses on the many ways the academic content shapes, forms, and informs students. In our planning, what we too often underestimate, and under plan for, is the personal encounter in the classroom. Students learn as much from the person who teaches the course as they do from the assigned readings, lectures, and rubrics. Often, they are paying as much attention to the teacher as a person as they are to the theories, concepts and approaches being presented. What if the most formational elements of our courses are the ways we, implicitly and explicitly, perform them? If we take a moment to consider the ways students learn more from the behaviors and attitudes of the professor than they do from the topic, we will realize that our classes are permeated by our beliefs and commitments. Your classroom behavior makes vivid your personal values.  Are you aware that your personal values are baked into and operative in your courses? Are the values which undergird your teaching aligned with the institutional values? Are you aware that your personal values are see-able, viewable, known by your students? If so, which of your behaviors are inconsistent with your personal values, and which personal values do you wish to make most evident in your teaching? A facilitator at a recent staff development session I attended said, “We judge ourselves based on our intentions; others judge us by our behaviors.” This resonated with me. In other words, it is not what you say, but what you do that tells your students your ethics. If you talk the talk without walking the walk, then you have formed students with confusion, misalignment, and uncertainty. Words, platitudes, and good intentions are shallow without observable actions. It is not enough to have the intent of compassion, hope, courage, dignity — if no one has the experience of these values in interactions with you or through the learning assignments you guide and offer. Colleagues will often say they value such attributes as: learner-centered teaching, but then lecture during most sessions, placing themselves as “the expert” in the center of the course and relegating the students to the margins of the conversation. community and partnership but assign only individualized assignments to be graded. collaboration but offer no group activities as approaches to learning. creativity but ask that students simply regurgitate information. reliability but rarely return graded assignments in a timely manner. persistence but provide no mechanism to award the student who begins the semester with low grades ways to improve the final grade. responsibility but provide for no major decisions for students to make concerning their own learning in the course. care and compassion for others but limit the scope of the course conversation without including neighborhood projects, adventures, or pilgrimages. diversity without including voices other than those deemed as typical, commonplace, and regular. Designing learning environments and experiences which are congruent with and exemplify your personal values will enhance the learning of your students. Creating this kind of integrity will foster learning experiences which nurture trust and instill confidence in your students. Sculpting congruence in the classroom can be challenging, even for the most seasoned teacher. Consider these activities to strengthen your teaching: Ask a colleague to audit your syllabus for the personal values it communicates. Have a dialogue with the colleague about what they see, sense, and suspect about your values. Discuss ways to align the values you want to be operative in the course with the design of the course. Make a list of your personal values. Reflect – ask yourself why you choose these specific values to be exemplified in your teaching. Describe behaviors, practices and habits that are consistent with these personal values. Then, design or redesign a course with the list, rational and behaviors in mind. Ask a colleague to observe your teaching for 3 weeks, 6 weeks, or an entire semester. Ask that they watch for your traits, behaviors, habits which demonstrate the values, beliefs, and philosophies you demonstrate in your classroom. At the beginning of the semester, tell your students the values you are pursuing in the course. Decide, with the students, the behaviors which should be promoted for these values. Reflect – with a trusted colleague – those behaviors that are inconsistent with your personal values that you portray in the classroom. Decide which one or two behaviors you will work-on in the coming semester for better alignment. Our behaviors tell a story about who we are, what we value, and what we are about. How we behave toward one another speaks volumes and teaches lessons likely to last a life time.