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One of the great paradoxes of my life at the moment is that I am writing a textbook (on religion and disability) while slowly moving away from using textbooks in my own courses, from lower-level intro classes to upper-level electives. Textbooks have been hard to wean myself from. They are so helpful, so convenient, so… soothing. I feel comforted knowing they have been authored and edited by people who I always assume are way more expert than me. (Hello, imposter syndrome!) I feel like I can assume some standard of quality, accuracy, and coherence. It certainly takes me way less time to decide which one textbook to require than it does to search for and sift through dozens of case studies or examples drawn from books, scholarly journals, news outlets, personal blogs, YouTube videos, Netflix movies or shows, social media, university webpages, local religious sites, podcasts, Google images, Spotify playlists, guest speakers, and more. I find it so easy and efficient to lay out my course schedule with different textbook chapters corresponding to different units, weeks, or days. The tests fall, similarly, smoothly into place. (Sometimes the textbooks even provide tests for us, so we don’t have to create them ourselves!) Likewise, the students just have to keep track of one thing. So why am I starting to move away from them? Well, for one, they can be extremely expensive. Search around online and you come across the word “scam” pretty quickly in discussions, articles, and sites devoted to textbooks. My university now even has a place in the students’ registration system where classes that have low-cost or no textbooks are clearly indicated. Of course, some things are worth a high sticker price—for example, the Trek mountain bike I’ve used exactly twice, obviously—but if we’re wanting higher education to be available to everyone, cost must be a consideration. As inclusive as this rationale is, however, I have to admit it isn’t my main motivation. Rather, I fear textbooks give students the erroneous impression that all there is to know about a particular religion (or any other subject) can be found in those thirty or so pages of each written chapter. After all, it’s supposed to be an introduction! As if the material is complete, comprehensive, and closed. Yet some textbooks spend too much time on one religion (Christianity, usually), while neglecting others. I like Religion Matters a lot, for example, but the current version doesn’t contain anything on African religions—an omission I’ve heard its author, Stephen Prothero, is rectifying in the next edition. Or, some textbooks, in an attempt to fulfill their presumed charge of trying to capture an entire religion in the limited space allotted, end up making sweeping generalizations, like “all Muslims must…,” which contradicts exactly what I’m trying to teach students about the diversity of all religious traditions. Of course, I can—and do—point out the problematic nature of such assertions to my students, but still…. Textbooks are also written works, though they may be supplemented with beautiful visuals and online materials. Yet, as Jin Young Kim writes in “Embodying World Religions in the Classroom,” religion is a lived sensory experience. David Morgan’s publishing career has been basically one big reminder of the material nature of religion (through books, of course!). Some religions like Hinduism, textbooks will even claim, are more about practice and experience than any specific set of beliefs, dogmas, or creeds. But, of course, Muslims move when they pray. Meditation involves the body, the breath. Challah is eaten. The Vatican is a place people go. What impression do we leave with students, then, if our predominant material for class is the written word? This bias can be especially distorting when dealing with traditions that are primarily oral. I was able to find a written source for Little Dawn Boy, a Navajo story about disability, but the one-page PDF was not nearly as captivating, or illuminating, as watching and listening to Navajo member Hoskie Benally, Jr., tell the same story. Guess which one I assigned to my students this term? Students also get the unfortunate idea from textbooks that there is only one position—the author’s/authors’—to hold about whatever topic is being addressed. The textbook was written by experts, after all, professors with PhDs. Who could argue with them? Textbook authors sometimes try to stave off this problem by including phrases like “scholars disagree” or “some scholars believe,” but in the absence of multiple sources or examples, I have watched such nuances go right over students’ heads. Sometimes I find myself assigning excerpts from different textbooks, just to show students discrepancy and debate, to clarify that even experts disagree, and to convey how a field can evolve in its understanding of a subject. I also fear that textbook use is out of alignment with my general approach to teaching, which is less lecturey and more interactive. Using a textbook seems like it supports an older “sage on stage” model, where we, the masters of a subject, convey our vast wisdom (in books and from behind lecterns) to the passive recipients in our courses, our naive and novice students. Read Chapter 1, pages 3-19. Take notes on what the professionals think. Study the key terms in the glossary (further condensed into one paragraph for ease!). Listen to the lecture. Download the PPTs. Take the test. You’re all set. Of course, textbooks usually have study questions at the end, and of course, professors can enliven or shift this process to become more dialogic in their classrooms, building off of or troubling what the textbook presents. But, in general, the way most textbooks are written still feels a bit too one-directional to me. This brings me to my final point, which is that a lot of textbooks are booooooring. For as much as they try to be exciting, with their images and interviews and bolded terms and online supplements, they sometimes just aren’t. Students struggle to get through the assigned material, the overviews of millennia’s worth of global history can be overwhelming and convoluted, there are a lot of specifics to sort through, and the relevance and applicability is not always clear. Now, I’m not saying learning always is, or always has to be, exciting. Sometimes you just have to put in the time, grind it out, do it for the extrinsic motivation. And I’m certainly not a proponent of the edutainment/edutainer idea. But I do think learning has the potential to be interesting, provocative, thrilling, even. After all, how many of us got into the field because we found it…dull? Many of these issues are what I’m trying to remedy in my own textbook, filling it with more questions and prompts than with answers and assertions, crafting prose that sounds more like casual conversation with a co-learner than a data dump from a master, including invitations and encouragements to seek out media and experiences elsewhere, presenting disagreements and differences of perspective. Until more textbooks approach their subjects in this way, I’m afraid I am going to have to let them go.

Twelve weeks ago, there was a class, who took on an enormous task, of studying the present and the past, Israel and Palestine. Dr. Breed taught them the history, so that it wouldn’t be a mystery, when they set out on their journey, to explore a land where two people are entwined.    All was going great, as the students began to articulate the past, present and current state, of historical sites and holy places, Then October 7th came, the bombing by Hamas was to blame, all our plans had to change, no longer could we enter these sacred spaces. . . So began a reflection by Columbia Theological Seminary student A’Keti Mayweather, at the end of a January 2024 trip that was originally planned as a travel seminar in Israel and Palestine. My colleague Brennan Breed and I were scheduled to take a group of students to that land for two weeks, and he was teaching a fall class in preparation for the trip. Everything changed on October 7. As A’Keti put it, Drs. Breed and Moore-Keish developed a plan, to help us learn from our fellow man, in two of our nation’s greatest domestic lands, New York and Washington D.C. . . . We were concerned about how to do this well; after all, protests were roiling university campuses, colleagues and administrators were being publicly criticized for what they said and did not say about the conflict, and people were being threatened and losing their jobs. All this while real human beings are fighting and dying in Gaza, Israel, and the West Bank. Quickly, we put together a trip that enabled us to meet with Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities in these two U.S. cities, to seek understanding of Israeli and Palestinian peoples amid the unfolding conflict. With help from colleagues at the American Jewish Committee, the United Nations, the Presbyterian Church (USA) Office of Public Witness, and others, we attended worship services in synagogues and masjids, shared meals with rabbis and pastors, talked with imams, activists, and aid workers, scholars and students, United Nations representatives and staff at the U.S. Holocaust Museum. As our student Jordan put it, As we visited more places, it became clear that many of the stories I had heard were true about Palestinian and Jewish suffering. Talking to [our Jewish and Palestinian partners] it was clear that many people were hurt and afraid. That there was much destruction. As we went on, we heard more and more of these stories and each time it seemed as though it got worse as the casualties grew, more disagreement presented itself, hope seemed to dwindle, and the status quo seemed to prevail. The challenges in this class were real: suddenly planning a new trip on short notice; addressing our shared disappointment at the change; seeking engagement with multiple communities who were themselves in the midst of trauma; trying to cultivate compassion without becoming overwhelmed by the complexity and scale of the suffering. How and what did we learn? How did we seek new understanding amid cognitive dissonance, hearing multiple stories of existential threat to both Jewish and Palestinian peoplehood? How did we keep from losing ourselves in cynicism and despair? Through many encounters, we learned that we could not reduce any side of this conflict to a caricature. Palestinian Christians and Muslims, Israeli Jews, U.S. Muslims, U.S. Jews—all are real, vulnerable human beings with stories we needed to hear. And each person we spoke with was longing for justice and for peace. As another student, Susan, said, Every day on our journey, our heads would be swimming and our hearts broken wide open as we heard more and more perspectives, all powerful, all convincing, all urgent. Every person that we heard from needed us to see their perspective and their story. Every person that took the time to sit with us, share food with us, open their homes to us, open their houses of worship to us, was seeking us out. Every person that we met—Palestinian, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and so much more—felt strongly about their vision of justice. And yet despite the differences, one thing was clearly pulsing through each conversation and that was this palpable sense of urgency and belief in peace across any lines you might imagine. Even with their clashing perspectives on the conflict, we did not meet any demons—only humans longing to be seen and heard. And so we practiced seeing and hearing stories, again and again and again. Worshiping with a variety of religious communities also helped us to learn about Israeli and Palestinian people, through embodied singing and praying, sitting and standing, and through being guests in the sacred space of another community. Our student Tony reported: It was my first time attending Shabbat Services. It was also my first time attending Muslim Jumu’ah Services. Both were enthralling, but for very different reasons. With my Jewish siblings, I was so captivated by experiencing the foundation of my Christian faith. I enjoyed the prayers and songs in the Shabbat services, but what mesmerized me the most was the opening of the “ark” that housed the Torah. . . . Seeing the magnificent image of the ark, and the care and reverence with which they handled the scroll, was absolutely beautiful. Also, seeing the congregants proactively move to touch the Torah with the prayer books, and then kiss the prayer books, was a vivid reminder of how holy and sacred God’s word is. One delightful interfaith twist occurred when we were welcomed as guests to Jumu’ah prayers at Masjid Muhammad in Washington DC. That community currently worships in the basement of Holy Redeemer Catholic church, while their own historic mosque is undergoing renovation. As a result, when we thanked the community leaders for their hospitality in welcoming us, they responded by seeing us as part of the host community, since we were also Christian. We were part of the wider Christian family that was making them welcome while they were temporarily displaced from their own home. As our own self-understanding pivoted from guest to host and back again, we recognized once more that the best kind of learning takes place through building relationships across lines of difference, undoing harmful assumptions, and recognizing our mutual human vulnerabilities. “This wasn’t the trip that any of us planned for and yet I believe that it was exactly the trip we were supposed to take.” So concluded Susan in her reflections. And another student, Andrew, reflecting on the challenges of learning about Israel and Palestine in this time said: “When we experience seemingly impossible tasks, we should take small, but measurable steps, to promote change. Education is our tool for making a real and sustainable difference in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—by transforming one heart at a time, one person at a time.”

The best thing anyone ever told me in graduate school rings as clear and true today as it did then. It was during the first year of my doctoral work after one of my classes that my instructor pulled me aside and said matter-of-factly, “Mark, you’ve got a chip on your shoulder, and you need to do something about it.” We had finished one of her class sessions when I followed her out of the classroom and wanted to ask some follow-up questions from our discussion. I could tell she was frustrated with me from the tone of her voice and the directness of the message. I paused. My lips began to quiver and my eyes started to well with tears, and yet I will be forever grateful for the truthfulness of those words, for their bite, and their ability to catalyze a sorely-needed recalibration in my life. Up to that point, I was a student who had learned to verbalize my thoughts aloud by asking questions and offering many comments. I was curious and it helped me work through my questions. It also made me look and feel smart, or so I believed. Looking back on those days, my academic insecurities resulted in a lot of unnecessary verbal processing and quite frankly, some badgering. The formation of an academic scholar cuts both ways. On the one hand, I learned in different graduate schools to look at reality and theory from multiple angles. Interpretations and understandings are usually more complex than any single reasoning and a thorough search of these multiplicities is not only scholarly, but integrous. It takes careful tending for an academic to hone their craft well in areas of curiosity, observation, research, and reasoning. And this refining results in one of the best parts of academic formation, which is to see and name complexity. On the other hand, untended graduate academic formation has the potential to harm. The very skills that afford us the capacity to rigorously research a matter can ironically produce in us a rigidity that locks us into our arguments and reasoning. We may cease to consider an alternative explanation, or worse, adopt inflexible forms of argumentation and reasoning for the sake of being clearly the only right one. Having clarity and conviction while holding complexity isn’t an issue; neither is the practice of logic and debate. Rather, an underlying and often unnoticed dynamic of needing to be right, or to be the smartest one, or the recognizable one, is what is troubling about this kind of formation in an academic. This is why tending to our formation while in graduate school and beyond is so important for those in the academy. In graduate school we are introduced to, and then eventually hold on our own, many powerful tools and capacities that can help to heal, transform, and harm. What my instructor did for me that day was to awaken me to things I could not see about myself and how I held myself in graduate school and our learning community. My hunch is that she knew she could do this because she was not only my advisor, but also a mentor. My hunch is that in some way, she knew she had to take this step for other community colleagues and for my future. Her truthfulness cut right through any theory or concept and hit home because it came out of a good, and frustrated, place where I could receive this difficult word well and sit with it for days. In some ways, I should not have been surprised by this encounter because my academic trajectory had reached a point where being the one who asked (unnecessary) questions and offered tiresome rebuttals was sadly powerful. I needed this demonstration of love and care though I did not know I needed it until it actually happened. My personality is such that I will always have an edgy, passionate, and direct side to who I am as both a professional and an academic. However, because someone in graduate school took the time to tell me something I really needed to hear, I find that I can hold these parts of who I am more reasonably now. I am working on not always having to respond to statements I do not agree with and finding other ways to contribute to the process than with unnecessary words, and I am (and I think others around me are) the better for it. So, what is the best thing anyone ever told you in graduate school?

This blogpost is a conversation between Kimberly Diaz, University of California Riverside, Michael DeAnda, DePaul University, and Neomi DeAnda, University of Dayton. KIM: Neomi, how did the Loteria session at the AAR come to be? NEOMI: This year marked the twentieth anniversary of the first time I attended the American Academy of Religion (AAR). Having a background in education and strongly believing that humans learn differently, I always questioned the ninety-minute and two-and-a-half-hour session format of presented papers for all sessions. Five days of these sessions bookended with breakfast meetings and receptions has always felt exhausting to me. Over the years, the suggestion of doing something different has arisen. While I have participated in other types of sessions like roundtable discussions and generative sessions, I wondered how I could entertain comments about doing something radically different at multiple sections’ business meetings. Last December, I found the game Millennial Loteria: Gen Z Edition at a big box merchant in Chicago, Illinois and Dayton, Ohio. I initially bought the game to incorporate into my Latina/Latino Religious Experience undergraduate course at the University of Dayton. This game provided an in-class common experience from which to build the semester. The course participants enjoyed, appreciated, and questioned the game. That same day, I posted a picture of the game on social media, igniting a quick discussion about the game itself. I was overjoyed to see such a response about something both so close and so new to my Tejana experience. The topic of immigration often takes center stage when the AAR and Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) meet in San Antonio. I am often frustrated about the lack of thought given to the plurality of possible topics which could thrive while meeting at this particular geographical location. Horacio Vela, session panelist, astutely remarked, “Loteria helps us appreciate the historical and evolving nature of Mexican-American cultures, identities, and religions. It also opens our eyes to the ways that Latina/o/x communities have handed down and scripturalized stereotypes about race, ethnicity, and gender.” The conversation on social media presented one such opportunity. From there, the idea was born to play the game at a session of the AAR. MICHAEL: How did you envision the format of playing Loteria in a conference session and what did you do to prepare? NEOMI: Carmen Nanko-Fernandez connected me with the co-chairs of the Religion, Sport and Play Unit, Kimberly Diaz and Jeffery Scholes. They were very amenable to helping me work through a proposal to submit to their call. The Experiential Session Playing Millennial Gen Z Loteria which was held Sunday, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM in the San Antonio Convention Center-Room 225C (Meeting Room Level) came from that accepted proposal. The proposal recommended the following format for the session: play the game panelists respond group discussion. The day for the session arrived. I had conjured prizes from various tables in the AAR/SBL book exhibit and from a Wabash Center luncheon the day before. Keri Liechty from the Louisville Institute brought swag from their office. MICHAEL: Very cool. That’s a nod to kermeses, a site where Loteria is often played and the prizes are often donated tchotchkes and trinkets fished out of storage. Your approach is totally emulating the found-and-sourced prizes spirit. Tell me how the session went? NEOMI: The tone in the room was different from the beginning as game boards and emoji tokens (instead of frijoles) were handed out to session participants. I set the rules. Structured play. The play during the session would end when the last of the prizes was collected. After two rounds, it seemed the third round could be the last. The participants changed the rules when play was going to end sooner than they wished. During the session, the energy in the room dampened between playing the game and the initial responses. So the session followed a modified format: play the game initial responses from three panelists play the game group discussion. The emoji tokens were later labeled chingaderitas by panelist Gilberto Cavazos-Gonzalez. Session participants remarked about the relaxation they felt from play during an AAR session. I noticed the session attendants, most of whom did not know each other upon entering the space, quickly formed a community to continue play. NEOMI: Any reflections on theory, Michael? MICHAEL: It’s interesting to see how incorporating the game into this session really invited the play spirit for the entirety of the session and appropriated the space. It’s like you went total kermes at the AAR! This is what I love about games: They can be tools to restructure and rethink what’s possible. In your case, Loteria provided enough of a ludic structure to bring energy into the room, invite people to socialize, and allow people to unmask. I want to note that it was smart to pivot at the request of players, granting them agency in this. Furthermore, for critical game play, multiple rounds of playing a game are important. The first playthrough we are often consumed by the game, so this was a great way to familiarize people with the game. The initial responses then primed participants to approach gameplay with the criticality to then contribute to the group discussion. Games are ludic structures with potential to reimagine how we make meaning. It’s the meaning that we create in and through games that make them so potent. Think about a game like Ticket To Ride, for example. The literal actions sound quite lackluster (drawing cards, placing blocks on a board). However, the hermeneutics give meaning to these mundane tasks: laying blocks emulates building railroad tracks. Games of chance are good for providing just enough of a ludic structure while still allowing for socializing, but not too much that it’s all people focus on. So, folks can chat, and if they reach a lull in the conversation, they can lean on playing the game during the shift in their conversation. It’s also worth mentioning that play extended beyond the game Loteria in the session. This included participants playing with the format of the session, players influencing the restructuring of the session, and playing with language deployed at a conference (yes, the swearing). As we play, we perform and we also confront truths about ourselves. Horacio commented, “Playing and talking about loteria in the AAR session brought back memories of growing up in south Texas. It was also a welcome and refreshing alternative to the typical AAR/SBL panel, with just as much, if not more, scholarly discourse and analysis.” Horacio continued, “Newer versions of loteria challenge us to discuss, critique, and reshape our communities and cultures, which have always been characterized by diverse experiences and interpretations.” NEOMI: Kim, please tell us about your experience immediately following the session as well as your thoughts since. KIM: The experiential session of playing Millennial Gen Z Loteria was immediately followed by the business meeting for the Religion, Sport, and Play Unit. In between the sessions, I rushed to my unit co-chair, Jeffrey Scholes, eager to exchange thoughts about having just played Loteria at the AAR. Instantaneously, we agreed that this experiential session encouraged us to take a more practical approach to the third integral aspect of the unit: play. As far as we both knew, the Religion, Sport, and Play Unit had always approached play in terms of discourse, especially in the context of organized athletics, but never with the actual practice of play during a session. At the beginning of the business meeting, our first order of business was to confirm the ongoing use of experiential sessions of play at future AAR annual meetings. The way in which the experiential session of Loteria radically transformed the trajectory of the Religion, Sport, and Play unit demonstrates how actual play within the conference setting can help ground the decolonization of academia. As Neomi observed, Loteria participants quickly transformed from serious individual conference attendees into a group of light-hearted players who cared more about playing together than claiming the prizes and ending the game. Recalling my own experience, I vividly remember being hunched over, placing tokens on my Loteria card as Neomi called out Millennial Gen Z phrases from a stack of shuffled cards. My body positioned itself as it needed to, helping optimize my gameplay rather than unconsciously following Western constructs of professional bodily posture (such as sitting up straight with my legs crossed). Overall, this experiential session of play fostered a communal space where participants transcended the optics of Western professionalism and became immersed in the carefree spirit of play. Playing Loteria at the AAR was not merely a form of escapism, but, like every decolonial praxis, existed in the liminal plane between colonial hegemony and resistance. Throughout history many decolonial efforts have been led by women of color and Neomi leading the experiential session contributes to this history. But decolonial efforts should not be the sole responsibility of those on the margins, such as women of color in a heavily white/male dominated field. NEOMI: Great point connecting back to this year’s AAR theme of “La Labor de Nuestras Manos”! KIM: Yes. Why should we, as women of color, be the ones to bear this responsibility, especially in a way that caters to the comfortability of those beyond ourselves? What about exploring other generative effects, like discomfort and unfamiliarity, initiated by the more privileged rather than the labor of the oppressed? To continuously move toward resistance, particularly in the context of experiential sessions, religious studies scholars must actively challenge the pretense that their scholarly work inherently makes the world a better place, and become intentional about practically contributing to decolonization, especially as it transcends the comfortability of their own individualism. In the words of black lesbian poet Audre Lorde, “Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.” NEOMI: Fascinating! I did not see it as a decolonial praxis but as living in my own Tejana space. I honestly saw the session as something that comes from being Mexican-American, Chicana, Tejana. I loved being able to bring cookies as prizes to share, cookies which our parents had made during Michael and my father’s occupational therapy, as he learns to live life after stroke. The convention center was no wiser that I did not ask permission or order the cookies from their vendor. As Gilberto Cavazos-Gonzalez, session panelist, noted, “I was happy to be a part of this Loteria session. Although I did not recognize the Loteria images (I missed my Chalupa) it was still a trip down memory lane and the importance of play in family life and spirituality. It also helped me make the connection to the importance of cultural connections for Mexican Americans living in a sometimes hostile and racist U.S.A. environment.” There is something about play which allows for simultaneous space (re)creation, mockery, and truth-telling. MICHAEL: Play is like alchemy: it has deep transformative potential. Kim’s reflection on decolonizing underscores this, especially when she draws attention to exploring generative effects, as does Neomi’s approach to developing the session to reflect and live in Tejana space. Games afford ludic structures for play to happen.

Recently I led a workshop at a church. I was asked by the pastor to address the topic, “What is Biblical Literacy?” Of particular note, congregational leaders wanted to know how to get millennials and Gen Z back to church. With the apparent drop, no, plummet in said groups’ attendance, this particular body was seeking any handles, tips, or miracles to reach persons in these age brackets. According to some attending the event if church members could become more biblically literate, they could help twenty- to forty-year-olds see how relevant the Bible is here and now. Of course the aforementioned congregation is not alone. Any number of churches, temples, mosques, and religious institutions are struggling to get persons born circa the 90s in seats. This is not to paint a broad stroke as there are indeed exceptions to the rule. However, documentaries on God, Faith, and Millennials continue to highlight said challenges. It is clear that millennials, many of whom are current seminary or divinity school students or graduates, are pushing the religious envelope. They long for environments where attention to social justice, sexuality and gender, personal story, and spirituality shape conversation and praxis. During my workshop the dialogue around biblical literacy led to exchanges between various religions, honoring their sacred texts. In this Christian context, the question of whether this specific church was “promoting a different path beyond Jesus as savior” arose. Boom! At this point I shared with attendees what I often note in the classroom. It is important to treat what happens in academic settings with intellectual hospitality. This is never to aver that contexts outside of the hallowed halls of academia are not intellectual. They are indeed!   What I was purporting to those astute members during the seminar is that as professors we must be mindful that not everything we teach should be shared in other contexts. Not all readings, ideas, and theories are applicable to the work of faith-forming religious institutions outside of graduate theological institutions. Some matters need to stay in the classroom while others are apropos for the Sunday School or for the training ground for one’s religious beliefs or spiritual development. I dared not answer that one question posed to me because it was not my place. That was the work of the pastor. I am an ordained preacher. Intellectual hospitality calls me to know my scholarly assignment as a professor, adhere to the directives given for any invitation, and sojourn with leaders of religious institutions seeking to ensure the survival of their congregations and communities.