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March, 2020    I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void;      and to the heavens, and they had no light.  I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking,      and all the hills moved to and fro.  I looked, and lo, there was no one at all,      and all the birds of the air had fled.  I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert,      and all its cities were laid in ruins      before the Lord, before his fierce anger (Jer. 4:23-26, NRSV)   Positively Outraged.  Hello, COVID-19:  Yes. I said, “Hello.” I still have my manners. You, on the other hand, are rude.    You burst onto the global scene, rampaging across spaces and time zones, bearing death with you and compelling individuals and entire communities and nations to “shut down,” to become diseased, misaligned, and dis-eased. I am not infected with you. I am affected by your boorish behavior and way of being. I am positively outraged because wherever you reside, physical death or a heightened threat of physical death manifests in the form of social death – “ghost towns” are left in your wake, or in anticipation of your arrival, as visual remains of your invasion.   I am positively outraged because you compel internal alienation. You force me to run away from my multiplicity, to become alienated from it and to see it as a threat to my existence. I must retreat from public spaces into private quarters. I am forced into exile, barred from towns and schools and churches and synagogues and mosques and malls and stadiums; from those places and times where the routineness of life intersects with modes and forms of communal art and ritual, with shared affect and accountability, and with corporate play and carnival. And now – because of you, because of your mode of public presence – the burden to secure and nourish the survival of my kind falls on the shoulders of a few – those who provide “essential” services. They must now do their jobs with the added anxiety of knowing that contact with another of us might strike a death nail. Visits to the grocery store are anxiety ridden – should it potentially cost life to go and purchase a loaf of bread and juice? Six-feet separation is the road I must travel, in order to avoid going six-feet under. This pollution, this outrageous burden, that you have unleashed cannot be inhaled.    You fouler of the air – which belongs to nobody but which everybody must have – will not permit social intimacy in the daylight and, so, I perform forms of Passover in the night as sheltered existence for survival. You restrict my ability to think BIG in the BIG places and BIG waves that have shaped what until now has been my life. Instead, I must think BIG from behind closed doors, sitting in front of small screens – tv, tablet, phone; technological BIGNESS that shrinks space and time, and puts it all at my fingertips. Do you realize the kind of ideological and epistemological heresy and horror that this can produce? The world at my fingertips? I have learned that this kind of consolidated power is ominous, and can be deadly when put solely, singularly, into the wrong hands. The world is a darkened nervous place, not because we have chosen it but because your presence compels it upon us. I am positively outraged. Nations of people flee robust urban centers to remote urban spaces. But you are the monster inside of we. Already inside of we. A part of the world around me. And you insist on becoming incarnational in the forms of job losses and food insecurity and illness and sudden death, while you also bully us into cramped corners and steal our breath. This offends we. While inside, you take away the things we have learned to depend on, the things that have nourished us: experiencing material interconnectedness with others as a resource, not a risk; celebrating the fleshiness of existence and its modes of fleshy social and communal intimacy; social education from the rich traditions – handed down from our forebears – about sitting under the palm tree or out front on the yard, with large amounts of food and palm wine to feed all – immediate and long distant relatives and friends. Because of your assault on these things, I freak out. I panic. What should I do? And then you force me – us – to take my – our – anxieties and anguish home to secluded places. The moral pandemic that your presence generates ends up lodged in secluded physical, spiritual and social places – the places where the poor and marginalized live. This makes my blood boil. I am too closed-in with family and friends to strike out. If this keeps up many of us might end up permanently lodged in the underside of history. I am positively outraged because you have also attacked our social nervous system and, so, it is possible that we’ll mistake survival for virtue. It is when we make proclamations that detach time from place or that attempt to throw this moment and every moment of communal trauma into social amnesia – as if it didn’t happen, or as if the future belongs only to those who survive this moment unscathed – those who are able to afford the costly price of admission advance into that future. But because that future is deadly costly, you have placed the proverbial tree of the knowledge of good and evil next to the tree of life, forcing nurses and doctors in medical centers to make horrendous choices between saving one life and letting go the other. Because of your seemingly insatiable desire for bodies – your propensity to consume the bodies you infect – the tempting fruit of survival is etched to the austerity and deficiency you represent, and, then, placed next to the tree of lives. You COVID have forced us to create from austerity; you have deprived us of multiplicity, and I resent this trespass! I am told that you have a family and that we have met before. Are you the trunk of your nuclei family tree, or are you its crown? We remember your family visit from the 1918 influenza wave, and – much closer to your genealogical birth date – the HIV/AIDS outbreak in the 1980s. Your visits seem to be happening with greater frequency – or our consciousness of your presence seems to be picking up pace. Over the past 20 years, we have encountered your kin many times: Anthrax in 2001, SARS in 2003, Salmonella and E-coli in 2008, H1N1 in 2009, MERS in 2012 (and 2015), Ebola in 2014, Zika in 2016, to name a few. In fact, since ancient times, your family has made spectacular and spectacularly damaging visits to the human species, sometimes because we ourselves violated the ecosystem, and other times because we chose to abuse your role as virus among breathing creatures. Your arrival in 2019 hit an already sore nerve in our communal body, which is still reeling from the afterlives of your predecessor-kin virus outbreaks. And that soreness reminds us that we will encounter you again. Our bodies have kept the score, as Bessel van der Kolk has taught us. With each return from you, we face the mental pressures that come with uncertainty about who has, and who doesn’t have, a part of you – who you have or haven’t invaded to take. Some have survived your invasion, and may form the basis for our herd immunity. Yet, news feeds have live updates of the increasing number of infections and deaths. Many hospitals and funeral homes are overwhelmed because you – COVID – are quickly relocating many bodies from homes to hospitals to funeral homes or ice trucks and to mass graves. The pace is astounding – and likely underreported. In the process, you are reshaping visual and material representations of our collective psychosocial and communal body. Empty streets, parks, schools, restaurants, churches, houses, mosques, and synagogues; overcrowded hospitals and mortuaries; overworked medical officials and farmers and sanitation workers; mentally and emotionally exhausted friends and kin and neighbors, all trying new and old ways of gathering, searching for lost or broken or abandoned places and neighbors. You have caused many to depart from us. Somehow, in their untimely departures, they have taken parts of us. Their departures have produced something of a new coveting in us. From Positive Outrage to Riposte: COVET THIS Affected by COVID-19, I begin to COVET anew, and desire takes me to back to my future in community. I COVET belonging – the kind that has formed me and formed the things you are taking. Hear me. I am an African descended biblical scholar. This means, among other things, that I tend to think in waves, often from the backside, the other side, of communal survival and flourishing. I am the product of a community of colleagues and parents and friends and children and siblings who have taught me how to covet communal health, how to read and interpret written and oral texts by also paying attention to the cracks of history, and to those who live on the other side of history’s “official” tracks. It is learning from a history and a life of grit and pain and grief and tears, of mass graves and genocide and holocaust and Maafa. It is also learning from a history and life of joy and generosity; a history of the creative side of politics and religion; a history of Ubuntu and its epistemological preference for communal life and wellbeing. Understand we. I COVET meaningful listening. Through our griots and seers, our ancestors and our yet unborn children, the harshness of historical colliding is wrestled and transitioned into tangible imagination. It is not a trick of the mind, a fantastic escape mechanism. No. It is a marshalling of communal attention and focus, a calming of the restless and bitter soul, a tuning of our communal radars, a widening of our peripheral vision, and a listening to the rhythms and rhymes of history and herstory – all in order to distinguish between different kinds of tears running down many cheeks. Are they tears of joy or of sorrow? I have learned that to read the flowing tears of a people without attention to the causes and afterlives of those tears is to misread. That is what one of our brightest minds, Toni Morrison, told us about and named rememory.  Rememory me. I COVET interpretation. Great artists, lyrical composers and prophets have taught me how to read your rueful visitation. A Psalmist’s inquiry as to how responses to history’s horrors are etched and coded unto the communal, spatial, epistemological, and spiritual body and, also, unto The Book; Moses and Jeremiah writing the “laws of history” on hard, rocky, and brittle stone tablets, as well as on the rhythmic movements of powerful human heart muscles; Ezekiel speaking and working, like an African medicine-man, trying to transform dry bones into a fleshy-lively-strong community; Miriam in prophetic laboring and ritual chanting to heal a plagued and socially distanced community that is struggling to come to terms with surrounding dead bodies and polluted waters. This interpretive struggle – this coveting of something new – connects liberating genealogy, story and mythology. That is how I understand the ancient biblical Hebrews summoning their warrior and breasted one to address the advent and manifestation of a wave of plagues during their struggle for freedom. I know why the ancient Greeks asked Hephaestus to grapple with similar questions of communal wellbeing. I can follow the narrative of the First Gospel and see Jesus’s healing act of a single uncontrollable man that lived among the tombs, refocused into the quelling of rampaging legions hogged up inside of him. During a period of turmoil, citizens of the medieval kingdom of Old Mali used the epic of Sundiata Keita to ask similar questions about the intersection of deformed bodies, political ambitions, Islamic and traditional African rituals, the powers of griots and the healing powers of a baobab tree. This is what I know; this is how I desire to know. Watch us. Stingy and singular, you – COVID – cannot be my teacher. Survival with you makes space and place and time rare commodities; they are made rarer by political, spiritual, economic and cultural demoniacs who find shelter inside those with compromised immunity or those of different demographic constituencies and, then, jump off the cliff. Decades and centuries of colonialism and racism and xenophobia and ecological abuse taught us how to wash and sanitize and mask against the monstrosity of a singularizing now-moment that manifests as a trauma that doesn’t go away. Vacating our public spaces, we withdraw from a bountiful and crowded world, stilled at last. Then rememory kicks in, and transitions coveting into covenanting. From COVET to COVENANT Are you looking for a ransom? It’s not like we have an option not to pay. Even so, I suspect that you – or one of your kin – will come again. And if we can imagine that future encounter, without succumbing to flights of fancy, we learn how to think and emote with corporeal and communal forms of improvisational solidarity glued together by our treasured rememorances. Those repurposed memories of other places and times are the coin-of-the-realm by which we build multiple forms of presence – sight and sound and prayer and ultimately even touch – that approximate the corporeal forms that have nourished us, and open up vectors for new rituals of gathering. We transition from coveting to covenanting. The great religions of the world have given us many gifts, one of which is to ability to engage the (costly) failure of imagination not with forms of social Darwinism of the survival of the religiously, politically, economically and technologically fittest, but with corporeal and communal forms of improvisational solidarity. Many African philosophers, religious leaders, and epistemologists call this Ubuntu, the notion that the individual is always already the product of the communal, and that that relation is not only bilateral and multilateral; it sustains itself by its ability to be multiple, to be generous and therefore renewable. The ancient Hebrew poets called it Hesed – steadfast love – and described its character as being renewable everyday so that it produces not just a single great all-embracing faithfulness but many daily faithfulnesses (Lam. 3:22-23). The gift is the multiplicity that allows – that compels – us to stand with our differently abled local and global bodies, as they struggle to endure the latest manifestation of erasure, enormous loss and alienation. We have learned some covenanting skills. Some of our communities have given more than others to your high and costly demands. We have already paid heavily for – what?  Species survival. What does it mean to inhabit, to somehow survive, and ultimately to demand release from the spaces and places of disposable life, and more importantly from the ideology and mechanisms of disposability? Does one “rise” in the form of dust, rise from the dusty wreckage, as the caged bird sings? Your pervasiveness, COVID, forces us to ask how we can hold all of life together – including the life you have relocated to Sheol, to the Deep. We are told to wash our hands routinely, to keep ourselves from being infected, and in turn infecting others, and worse, being relocated to Sheol. This ritual act of life is healthy only if the water is clean. We have lived with and struggled against water pollution for long – with Flint Michigan as one of many such realities around the world. We have also lived with, and struggled to deal with other forms of water pollution – water polluted by the transatlantic slave trade and genocide, as well as in modern genocides such as Rwanda, where the water became the coroner and custodian of dead bodies. Like Jonah, I have a nagging suspicion of such waters because there’s something fishy about them; they have been made to swallow up bodies and then spit them out on the shores of imperial cities that seem capable of momentary repentance only when threatened with extinction. And so, we connect the physical waves to another form of wave, the epistemological wave. We may or may not swim again in the oceans, but we can produce artistic and ritual activities that simulate our experiences of erasure and alienation, and transition out into openings for new beginnings. We may yet stand beside John the Baptizer, stand between the wilderness and the water, to ensure that weary pilgrims are refreshed and sinking bodies rise from deep seas. This is the work of trauma-hope; the weaving of the fragments of history into new futures. Are closures what you demand?  So we shut down, shelter in, stay home, stop shaking hands and say we are strong and in this together. You slow but don’t cease. We wash down and mask up. Sure you wane but continue to wonder to and fro like a thief and where you’ll strike nobody knows. Is it a question of prediction or about divining the future?  Prediction juices the sensory organs for an unfolding present-future yet undetermined. But the alerted senses must then do the work of preparation and resilience production. That is how African Americans have developed and used “The Talk” to prepare young men when they go into public spaces. The child who has received that “Talk” from a parent, a mentor, a priest, scholar, counselor, sangoma, or ancestor (living-dead, to quote the late John Mbiti) goes into the public knowing that they are not alone. Their resilience and ultimate survival of the dangerous public space is a function of the fact that they become a multitude, a legion, when they reengage the public space. The ritual character of that “Talk” does more than transfer information from mentor or parent to child; it also shares epistemology and tactic and strategy and even presence. The Talk, the Prayer, the Kiss on the forehead – these become communal shawls that connect the child to their larger family. A model of The Talk is found in sacred scripture: Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates (Deut. 6) And it is this truth claim that underlies the African COVENANTING saying: “If you want to go fast, you go alone; if you want to go far, you go together.” We must go together, for we are Many!

My teaching style has always been a bit on the lighthearted side; I crack jokes, use ridiculous metaphors, draw inelegant pictures on the whiteboard and make my students guess what I’m trying to convey in an odd version of academic Pictionary. Being funny is a great way to keep students engaged! But now that my school, along with everyone else’s, has gone fully online for the duration of the semester, I’ve had to reframe my humor–what I usually think of as a useful teaching tactic, I now see as an indispensable tool for teaching effectively in a global pandemic. It’s already cliché to say that everybody’s stressed out by this health crisis, but the sheer variety of ways to be stressed is staggering, and my students seem to embody every one of them. I teach at a women’s college where traditional undergraduates learn alongside non-traditional working students; about a quarter of whom are parents. We’re heavy on the health sciences, so while lots of our undergrads are suddenly unemployed from their server and retail jobs, those who work in pharmacies, elder care, and hospitals are being begged to pick up extra shifts. My classes are an eclectic combination of the desperately bored and the profoundly overworked. The only thing they all seem to have in common is how badly they need a laugh right now. I can’t cure their anxiety, but I can offer them a momentary opportunity to forget about it while they’re smirking at one of my quips. These little breaks are a big part of how we can cope with our new normal. I usually rely on reading a room for my jokes, so I’ve had to get more creative. I’m terrible at creating dynamic PowerPoints, for example, and I’m now using them for nearly every lecture. To keep things interesting, I insert snarky comments into my slides making fun of my own dismal formatting and don’t call attention to them while I present, leaving them like Easter eggs for the attentive watcher. When I require Zoom meetings, I ask every attendee if they have a nearby pet or small child they can put on screen for the rest of us to coo over before beginning our discussion. I’m still teaching loads of content in the midst of all these less-serious moments, but it’s obvious that the content flows better when I make space to be a little silly. When my students pop up on webcam to talk about their upcoming papers, they’re visibly tense–this disappears almost immediately when I say that I do want to talk about their paper, but I also insisted on this meeting because I’m lonely and want to be reminded that other humans exist. They smile, I smile back, and for a second or two, they feel better–and then are better able to listen and learn. Beyond benefiting my students, prioritizing humor also helps me look forward to teaching and gives me a hint of that refreshing energy I used to get from being in the classroom with so many personalities. Staring at my laptop for hours on end is a little more bearable when I’m also thinking about whether there’s a way I can insert a picture of a chicken into my presentation so it’ll flash on screen at random intervals while I’m talking. Teaching is a haven for me amid my own apprehension, and it feels even more purposeful when I can try to make it haven for my students too. There is no one teaching style that will spell perfect success in this tumultuous time, but for even the most serious professor, I urge you–try for some silliness! Change your Zoom background so you look like you’re lecturing from the middle of the zombie apocalypse, offer pictures of your  pet as a reward for students completing required tasks, come up with a rude nickname for your online learning platform (I like to refer to Canvas[1] as “that jerkwad”) and use it whenever part of your haphazardly constructed course site doesn’t work the way you thought it would. Give yourself the gift of being a little ridiculous, and you’ll find that your students’ attitudes–and their work–will benefit from the break. [1] No offense to Canvas. It is a beautiful, elegant system, even when I can’t for the life of me figure out why it keeps taking assignments off of the student to-do list.

The first edition of Film as Religion was one of the first texts to develop a framework for the analysis of the religious function of films for audiences. Like more formal religious institutions, films can provide us with ways to view the world and the values to confront it. Lyden argues that the cultural influence of films is analogous to that of religions, so that films can be understood as representing a “religious” worldview in their own right. Thoroughly updating his examples, Lyden examines a range of film genres and individual films, from The Godfather to The Hunger Games to Frozen, to show how film can function religiously. (From the Publisher)

From the Women’s March in D.C. to #BlackLivesMatter rallies across the country, there has been a rising wave of protests and social activism. These events have been an important part of the battle to combat racism, authoritarianism, and xenophobia in Trump’s America. However, the struggle for social justice continues long after the posters and megaphones have been packed away. After the protests are heard, how can we continue to work toward lasting change? This book is an invaluable resource for anyone invested in the fight for social justice. Welch highlights examples of social justice work accomplished at the institutional level. From the worlds of social enterprise, impact investing, and sustainable business, After the Protests Are Heard describes the work being done to promote responsible business practices and healthy, cooperative communities. The book also illuminates how colleges and universities educate students to strive toward social justice on campuses across the country, such as the Engaged Scholarship movement, which fosters interactions between faculty and students and local and global communities. In each of these instances, activists work from within institutions to transform practices and structures to foster justice and equality. After the Protests Are Heard confronts the difficult reality that social change is often followed by spikes in violence and authoritarianism. It offers important insights into how the nation might more fully acknowledge the brutal costs of racism and the historical drivers of racial injustice, and how people of all races can contain such violence in the present and prevent its resurgence in the future. For many members of the social justice community, the real work begins when the protests end. After the Protests Are Heard is a must-read for everyone interested in social justice and activism – from the barricades and campuses to the breakrooms and cubicles. (From the Publisher)

Moving abruptly online during the middle of a semester is tough. It requires translating on-ground pedagogies for online environments very quickly. Though, as tough as it is for instructors, we know that this transition is tough for students as well. Students need consistency; they need reassurance and predictability. Students need more than just online course content, they need the full pedagogical weight of the institution behind them. They need the support of institutional mission. Each accredited college or university has one, an institutional mission. This mission, if well implemented, not only structures the institution but also gives meaning to the academic life of the institution. It characterizes the type of community that the institution forms. Mission gives institutional on-ground education a sense, a feel, that is distinctive to that institution. It promotes an ethos and a directionality unique to the institution’s culture. This is particularly the case for confessional academic institutions for whom mission has religious significance. It is now more important than ever for higher education institutions to provide consistency to their students by communicating mission pedagogically in online environments, to keep students engaged with the institutions to whom they entrusted their academic careers. Consider three ways to accomplish this: Draw from institutional symbols. Symbols bring people together to form community, and institutional missions tend to be built on symbols distinctive to the college or university. Your online environment can be enlivened through the process of identifying what these symbols are and evaluating how these symbols can be pedagogically leveraged to invoke your distinctive institutional ethos and culture. Three types of institutional symbols are useful for consideration. 1) academic themes or virtues (such as “social justice,” “service,” “wellbeing,” “hospitality”) that characterize the institution’s expression of academic excellence 2) documentary symbols such as strategic plans, the mission statement itself, student codes of conduct, academic integrity policies, etc. 3) initiative-based symbols such as athletic or wellbeing programs, community engagement programs, institution-based institutes, etc. Institutional symbols are particularly helpful when they are diverse. Diversity gives students multiple entry points into the communal life of the college or university and allows them to express themselves in a way that is most comfortable to their experience. What are some of your institution’s symbols? How can these be incorporated into your online pedagogy to create a more supportive learning environment? How are these symbols diverse? Invite the wider campus community into learning spaces. Modeling mission in online learning environments is one way to communicate the mission to students. This can be done by drawing from those campus-based resources that were able to be moved online. For example, if your college or university librarian is now online, inviting him or her into the online learning space helps students to reconnect with the broader campus community supporting their learning. Similar assistance can be gained from resources such as guest lecturers, diversity and inclusion initiatives, campus ministry, career services, etc. When the larger campus community provides support according to the institution’s mission, the community models its mission for students and expresses a sensibility consistent with their prior on-ground educational experiences. Do you have members of the wider campus community whom you can draw from? How can these persons contribute to your course? How do they model the institutional culture? Engage students in practicing the mission in the online learning environment. The mission is not something that institutional employees “give” to students, but something that the institution as a community enacts together. Once missional symbols and modeling are pedagogically incorporated into their curricula, students are initiated into the mission as active participants. As participants in the mission, it is important for students to develop their own creative take on the mission and what it means in their lives. Formative and summative assessments oriented towards evaluating student appropriation of the mission can help students practice the mission and help them come together as an online community.  What could the institutional mission mean to your students? How do students exemplify the mission in their relationships with one another? How can you help strengthen their relationships through the institutional mission?

The editors of Experiments in Empathy: Critical Reflections on Interreligious Education have assembled a volume that spans multiple religious traditions and offers innovative methods for teaching and designing interreligious learning. This groundbreaking text includes established interreligious educators and emerging scholars who expand the vision of this field to include critical studies, decolonial approaches and exciting pedagogical developments. The book includes voices that are often left out of other comparative theology or interreligious education texts. Scholars from evangelical, Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, religiously hybrid and other background enrich the existing models for interreligious classrooms. The book is particularly relevant at a time when religion is so often harnessed for division and hatred. By examining the roots of racism, xenophobia, sexism and their interaction with religion that contribute to inequity the volume offers real world educational interventions. The content is in high demand as are the authors who contributed to the volume. (From the Publisher)

I teach biblical/theological studies. Each semester, I seek to guide students toward a deeper understanding of my conclusions concerning the major theological points of the Old Testament. I teach them that, as a result of sin, the world in which we live is not the world as God created it to be. The world is “broken.” However, the amazing story of the Old Testament shows us that God, despite the sinfulness of humanity, is making a way for humanity to be reconciled to him. The brokenness of this world is the primary reason we find difficulty present in our lives on such a regular basis. The story of the Old Testament teaches us that God uses these various kinds of difficulties to command humanity’s attention so that they turn their hearts toward him in dependence. My desire as a professor of the Old Testament is to find real connections to my students’ lives so that the Old Testament is not viewed as merely an ancient book, which has no real value to their contemporary world. And every semester, it is a battle because most of them are simply not old enough, nor do they have the life experiences that are sufficient enough, to lead them to more deeply understand the powerful truths of the Old Testament. Outside of the minor irritations of life, the majority of the freshmen or sophomore students in my courses lack that which would lead them to truly understand the theological points I am trying to make and, therefore, they can lack an interest in making the necessary connections. They still feel a little invincible and at the top of their game. Enter our global pandemic. I could not ask for a better “soft ball” to be thrown at me. It is a perfect scenario for the teachings of the Old Testament to come alive. This global pandemic has created the opportunity to openly discuss the issues confronting our world, and even the issues that confront my students, with the goal of connecting all of it to the profound theology of the Old Testament. Every situation this global pandemic brings into their lives becomes a special opportunity for them to understand the deeper realities of living in this world as we know it and all of its subsequent difficulties. Even if it does not touch their own lives in meaningful ways, they are bombarded with constant news updating them on the tragedies that other people in this world are up against. They feel it. And they are moved by it. As numerous emotional stories flow through various information platforms, it has an impact on them, making them more prepared to listen . . . and to think. So, my responsibility as a professor is to take full advantage of a crisis that I could not have planned. For my teaching, it is truly the “perfect storm” for the application of my course content. With the emergence of this global pandemic, my class is more interested in engaging the focus of my teaching. And they will be the better for it. Of course, this causes me to reflect on what might be less obvious in the everyday events of our world, which, if properly utilized, could create the same opportunity for my students to impacted. Perhaps, as a teacher, I have grown somewhat lazy in my attempts to connect the dots for my students. This has led me to think more deeply about the way I approach my course lectures. Consider the many issues that potentially confront my students on a daily basis: • At a private Christian liberal arts university, costing around $40,000 per year, this may not be an issue for my students, but one cannot help but be aware of the persons who have made a bus stop their home or walk down the street pushing their shopping cart full of their life’s possessions or who scrounge around restaurant trash cans in search of food. • Sex or human trafficking. It is difficult to believe that either sex or human trafficking could be happening in our neighbor’s home across the street or in an apartment complex in close proximity to our home, but it is possible. These “invisible” people may be closer than we think. It is a horrible issue in our world, and we can put it out of our minds. • Drug/alcohol abuse. More people will die of drug abuse in the USA than will die of this global pandemic in the year 2020. Drug abuse wrecks families, tears apart marriages, and leads to financial ruin. Students have more than likely seen the impact of this issue in one way or another. My point is that, although these issues may not directly impact my students’ lives, the global pandemic might not either. But, unlike the global pandemic, these other issues exist continuously in the world which my students and I inhabit. Oftentimes, these issues become background noise to our comfortable little worlds, but they are there. My job as a teacher is to work harder to make these connecting points when my students might be having difficulty making connection on their own. Because of this, I am thankful for the global pandemic. I know that my subject matter, the theology of the Old Testament, made it fairly easy for me to make the connections between course content and this global pandemic, but I assume that, with a little bit of thinking, you can do the same. And, if you do, it will make your course content come alive and your students will be better able to draw value from the content of your course. And, if we can do it with a global pandemic, then I bet we can do it better in the situations of everyday life. I encourage you to go for it!

The previous blog in this series focused on “long shot” (“big picture”) editing, specifically, revision tasks related to changing scenes and cutting. This final blog in the series zooms in to “medium-shot” and “close-up” editing. I realize that not all preachers have time to focus on revisions every week. While I cannot offer extra time, I can offer recommendations from filmmakers to preachers who have only 30 or 45 minutes to revise their sermon prior to Sunday morning. Medium-Shot Revisions Choose one major move/section of the sermon and focus on setting the scene with vivid language that sparks a variety of senses. The preacher does this by first visualizing the scene and providing a “thick description.” Filmmakers can be helpful guides since they make hundreds of choices in order to provide scenes that create the desired impact on the viewers. Looking carefully at their craft can hone the preacher’s skills for description. Try this exercise: Choose a scene from a favorite film. Press pause and write your responses to the following questions. Where is the scene? How do you know? What objects appear in the scene? What details give you clues about the characters in the scene? What is the major color scheme in the scene? What mood does it create? What do you think happened just prior to this scene and what is likely to happen after? What in the scene involves your hearing? your sense of smell? Now go back to the major move in the sermon and describe your scene using the same prompts. This process helps you visualize the scene so that you can describe it in a way that helps your hearers visualize it . . . without a screen. Writer Janet Burroway summarizes this well: “The first requisite of effective setting is to know it fully, to experience it mentally; and the second is to create it through significant detail.”[1] One caveat: refrain from getting carried away with details that don’t actually advance the main trajectory of the sermon. In other words, not everything from the exercise will appear in the sermon. Keep only those descriptors that move you to the next section. Close-Up Revisions We now zoom in on individual phrases and words. The art of choosing just the right word is not lost on the preacher. In fact, sometimes we agonize over just the right word. I would like to recommend that preachers spend time on the particular phrases that serve as transitions from one major move (section) to the other. Once again, films can assist. Take a segment of the film you engaged above and watch the film until you’ve identified two to three scene changes. Once you’ve done that, take a closer look at the transitions themselves. How does the filmmaker guide us from one scene to the next? Are there hints in the previous scene that we will be moving to a new scene? Or, is the scene change abrupt? If so, why? What effect does an abrupt scene change have on a viewer? Once you’ve engaged the transitions in the film, return to your sermon draft to analyze its transitions using similar questions. The first step is to make sure that there are transitions. Second, identify the roles the transitions play. In his book, The Witness of Preaching, homiletician Tom Long suggests that connectors (his word for transitions) accomplish four communication tasks: provide closure for previous segment indicate how upcoming section is related to previous anticipate the content of the next section helps listeners adopt a stance Finally, be creative and not clichéd. There are common transitions that belong specifically to the genre of sermons, for example, “In today’s gospel reading . . .” You’ve heard it. You’ve said it.  But why not be more creative, especially since when you begin to talk about Peter, we know you are referring to the section of scripture that was just read. Instead, if you are transitioning from a contemporary story to something that happened with Jesus and disciples, try this: “We weren’t the first to be in awe of Jesus’ capacity to calm the treacherous seas of life. The disciples saw it first-hand . . .”  Again, while I cannot gift preachers extra time, I hope these recommendations, gleaned from the wisdom of filmmakers and their work on the screen, might at least offer some editing possibilities if and when preachers find they have extra moments once they’ve got their “rough cut” on the page. [1] Janet Burroway, Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft (147).