Blogs

Kate Blanchard Last Wednesday most of us opened our cyber-devices to a feed full of news about three young Muslim students in North Carolina who were murdered at home by a gun-toting white neighbor, apparently acting in defense of some...

Jennifer Harvey Associate Professor Drake University In some ways it’s really simple. If we had genuinely multi-racial classrooms in the U.S. the challenge of race in those same rooms would be much less of one. We so quickly find ourselves embroiled in an oh-so-familiar conversation when the pedagogical question becomes how to best teach race, privilege, U.S. religious history, ethics, and justice in the religion and theology classroom. How do we keep white students from shutting down? How do we get them to understand? How do we enable them to recognize their stake in such learning when so few of them have had to..

Eric D. Barreto I teach texts. I read texts. I write texts. Every once in a great while, I even text texts. But I’ve noticed recently that many more of the texts I receive have fewer and fewer actual words. I’m talking acronyms certainly (LOL and lots more I haven’t...

Roger Nam This morning, I received an email concerning course schedule decisions for Spring 2016. It seemed so far away until I realized that it is already 2015. Unbelievably, seven years have passed since I finished my degree and entered my first full time appointment. For most of us, the...

Theological schools are complex institutional systems with many interlocking "moving parts." In most schools, the curriculum is the engine that drives the institution, influencing all aspects of the seminary, from the makeup of the student body, recruitment, faculty hires and...

Kate Blanchard It's late January in Michigan and I'm in a certain mood. So here for your mid-winter schadenfreude are eight (click-baity) things I hate right now, in no particular order. Perhaps many of you can relate. Teaching requires me to dress like a grown-up. While I have male friends...

S. Brent Rodriguez Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies Hamilton College Plate In the final seconds of their struggle, Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown because of a visual impression. From Wilson's point of view, Brown appeared to him like Hulk Hogan, and like a demon. His only conceivable response, he stated, was to shoot. Six bullets penetrated Brown's body, killing him quickly. Demons do not appear to sane people with any frequency. Some people believe that demons exist, but few will admit they have ever seen one live, face to face. So, how would Wilson know what a demon looked like? What transposed...

Eric D. Barreto Alright, not a strange land. It’s just Berkeley. Let me back up. I am currently about halfway through a teaching gig at Pacific School of Religion thanks to the intrepid work of the Hispanic Summer Program. For two weeks, I am helping a group of students find...

Roger S. Nam In my last post, I advocated for open source final exams, which focused on one’s ability to sort through the mass of information readily available on an iPhone. The response to that post was overwhelming, so I offer a follow-up conversation. Below I have paraphrased some of... Read more →

Kate Blanchard It’s a new year! Perhaps some of you, like me, have just spent a large chunk of time celebrating a holiday (or two) with your families of origin. And perhaps some of you, like me, have recently been pondering the distinct and all-encompassing weirdness that is being middle-aged...