Creaturely Pedagogy Part Five: Risk and Danger

(Content Warning : mentions of vulnerability, death, and excrement)

One cool, wet, overcast February morning we were leisurely circling a small retention pond, our pace mirroring the unhurried arrival of spring. The students were examining some Green Frog tadpoles (Lithobates clamitans), and an unidentified corixid (an aquatic insect with oar-like back legs) we’d temporarily detained when I found and netted a Six-Spotted Fishing Spider (Dolomedes triton) and brought it over. 

In the excitement and commotion at meeting this new neighbor, one student slipped down the embankment towards the muck. “Oh sh*t!” she exclaimed. Her right foot found solid ground just before water’s edge, her left knee firmly planted in the mud upslope. After confirming she was uninjured and helping her to both feet, we continued our work. 

It was a profound moment of vulnerability. Sh*t happens! 

Excrement is unavoidable in Creaturely Theology.^[i] Suffering and death are too. 

Just a half an hour before that encounter by the pond, we’d discovered the carcass of a White-Tailed Deer (Odocoileus virginianus), a doe, tragically caught on a rusted, derelict barbed-wire fence in a thicket of non-native honeysuckle and privet. Even if she’d made it over, though, she would have still had to risk crossing the road. 

We don’t cross roads or barbed-wire fences. The most dangerous thing we do—at least statistically—is traveling by van for field trips. 

I always take every precaution to ensure the welfare and safety of all my students. No one is permitted to touch any animals or plants or fungi we cannot identify—or any medically-significant ones we can! Weather-and terrain-appropriate footwear and clothing are required in the field. We always move at a calm, careful pace—we’d miss out on so much if we rushed, after all. 

But risk and danger are inevitable. They are unavoidable in human life. Such realities play an important role in all human growth and education. In the Christian theological tradition, the fear of God, and our smallness in relation to God’s other creatures, are both instructive. The kinds of encounters we can have with the divine Other, and creaturely others, teach us our vulnerability and interdependence (see Job 38–41). In facing risks and dangers we can learn resilience, and we grow.  

Spiders, centipedes, and snakes always elicit the most excitement from my students. On our first day outside in spring of 2025 I was privileged to introduce this year’s cohort to an impressive female Southern Black Widow (Latrodectus mactans). I gently excavated her from her tangled web with a long twig and coaxed her onto a small piece of white paper. Her jet-black body and legs gleamed in the sunlight, contrasting sharply with the brilliant red hourglass on her abdomen, a striking sign of her formidable venom. She barely moved as we admired her. I returned her to her rock lair, and we parted ways. 

Later the same day an Eastern Red Centipede (Scolopocryptops sexspinosus) danced excitedly from one end of a longer stick to the other as I steadily alternated hands, taking care to avoid the wiggling antennae on his bitey end. 

While I have never found a venomous snake on campus, we regularly encounter about a dozen harmless species.^[ii] As long as a snake is calm—it is easy to tell whether any individual is overly stressed or not—I allow everyone a chance to touch or handle it.^[iii] Such encounters have a transformative effect. As one of my students put it, “there is something so peaceful about holding a calm wild snake.” Far from increasing our fear, or even terror, such experiences of risk and vulnerability help to further ground us in this place, and in our vulnerable selves. Coming to know “the peace of the[se] wild things,” allows us, in Wendell Berry’s words, “to rest in the grace of the world, and [be] free.”^[iv]

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