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For the past several years, I’ve gotten obsessed with Orpah: Naomi’s other Moabite daughter-in-law in the biblical story of Ruth.[1] Often overshadowed by the story’s eponymous hero, Orpah can be read as Ruth’s opposite. When Ruth leaves everything to follow Naomi, Orpah returns to her people and her land. Ruth becomes an Israelite, Orpah remains a Moabite. I’ve been interested in Orpah ever since reading Laura Donaldson’s piece, “The Sign of Orpah: Reading Ruth through Native Eyes.”[2] Donaldson urges us to rethink this character’s often-maligned decision to remain a Moabite in light of contemporary assimilation pressures and erased cultures. What does it mean, she asks, to read Orpah’s choice as brave instead of bad? My course, The Bible and Ethics, encourages students to get curious about Orpah’s story, to relate to her point of view, and to understand her choice to return home as intelligible, even heroic. This encouragement is part of a larger effort to humanize biblical characters that are often ignored or disparaged either within a given biblical story or in the history of its interpretation. If we can get curious about people less visible in a powerful text, the theory goes, it might prime us to see humanity more acutely elsewhere. The idea is to notice beauty, complexity, and pain in individuals and communities we have learned to ignore. But this kind of reading and seeing is difficult. Getting curious about Orpah is particularly challenging both because we have learned to overlook her and because her biblical mentions are scant. Sometimes my students don’t see the point. Why consider the story of Orpah when we have the compelling duo of Ruth and Naomi? Why follow Michal when we can think about her captivating husband, David? Why imagine the perspective of Lot’s wife or of the children who die in the smoking ruins of Sodom and Jericho when Abraham, Lot himself, and Joshua are demanding our attention? The pull of the biblical authors’ own attention is strong. Following the stories of Orpah, Michal, Lot’s wife, or a child in Sodom is like sitting in a darkened theater and trying to keep track of a character who has left the stage. Maybe they never walked on stage to begin with. Either way, it would be easier to just keep watching the show. Fortunately, we have examples of scholars and poets who have taken up the challenge of reading for characters whose stories have been lost, erased, or never written. Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation”[3] and Wilda Gafney’s “Womanist Midrash”[4] offer cues and strategies to grapple with absence and to shine a light on individuals – fictional and actual, ancient and modern – whose presence we ignore. I want to be clear that this way of reading rarely makes converts. And that’s not really the point. Students, by and large, remain committed to our biblical protagonists and find accessing curiosity and empathy for marginal characters quite difficult. Poetry helps. Poetic re-imaginings of biblical stories are some of the most potent teaching tools I have both because they are pithy enough to be experienced collectively during a class meeting and because they invite us to explore the emotional quality of this kind of reading. Natalie Diaz’s “Of Course She Looked Back”[5] is a great example. Diaz’s poem – affectingly unpacked by Pádraig Ó Tuama in his Poetry Unbound podcast episode[6] – witnesses the destruction of Sodom from the perspective of Lot’s wife. What I love about this poem is where it begins. Of course Lot’s wife looked back at the ruination of her adopted home, the poet declares. In fact, “you would have, too.” As she fades from the biblical story, together with the silenced screams of Sodom’s children, Lot’s wife asks us to imagine ourselves as among the forgotten.  Notes & Bibliography[1] https://www.sefaria.org/Ruth.1?lang=en[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470775080.ch10[3] https://muse.jhu.edu/article/241115[4] https://www.wjkbooks.com/Products/066423903X/womanist-midrash-volume-1.aspx[5] https://onbeing.org/poetry/of-course-she-looked-back/[6] https://onbeing.org/programs/natalie-diaz-of-course-she-looked-back/

Lurking on social media the other day, I listened to colleagues discussing how to respond to a student paper in a philosophy class. The assignment was about our responsibilities towards (nonhuman) animals. The student argued that we can do whatever we want with animals because God has given us dominion over them. Presumably, he had Genesis 1.26 in mind, but none of the course readings mentioned Genesis—or God.People in the social media group had lots of suggestions on how to respond:Tell him that religion has no place in the classroom.Tell him that there should be no theist or atheist premises in academic writing.Just write “Irrelevant” in the margin!That last comment got a lot of likes, hopefully because people found it funny and not because they considered it good advice.The consensus was clear: Tell the student that appeals to scripture are inappropriate in college papers.I don’t think that’s good advice.My colleagues were ignoring something crucial. In this sort of situation, we can do deep damage to our relationship with our student and to the student’s relationship with higher education if we don’t tread carefully. Presumably the student who wrote this paper believes in God and the Bible. His religion will be part of his ethical decision-making going forward, and the Bible will influence his thinking and his actions.Bearing this in mind, let’s not tell this student that his thinking about right and wrong in class must be utterly divorced from his thinking about it outside the classroom.My advice would be: Before writing any comments, identify your larger goals. Here are mine:I want our class discussions to help inform my students’ thinking and actions about ethical issues, and in particular about whether it’s OK to do “whatever you want” with animals.I want students to listen when I try to teach them more things after this and I want other professors to be able to teach them even more things. If I reinforce a student’s likely skepticism about professors and religion, I make that harder.I don’t want my actions to increase the chances that my students go out in the world thinking of higher education as an enemy to religion and God.These goals suggest a different approach. Start by taking the paper seriously:Do you think that’s what the Bible means by ‘dominion’? Some people think so, but I've always thought it meant something more like ‘stewardship.’ I mean, God is the Father, right? So, I think of it like if your parents go out and put you in charge of the family dogs. If they come home and discover that you haven’t fed them or given them water, they’ll be mad at you.What do you think someone who doesn’t believe in God and the Bible would make of your argument? How would you persuade them? For instance, imagine that you’re talking to the author of our second reading or to the other kids in the class.I would count this encounter as a success if the student feels like I’m treating him and his religion with respect and if he realizes two things:“Dominion” could mean “stewardship” instead of “freedom to treat them any way I want,” and I need to think more about which one the Bible meant.I need to talk about this differently or I won’t be able to persuade people who don’t believe in the Bible.That’s a start. Much more has to happen before this student writes at college level. Later, I and his other professors will teach him more.It’s a very small step. Growth and intellectual development takes time. I probably won’t see the result of the learning process that I was part of. But occasionally I do.My greatest success story in this context is a student who came into my Intro to Philosophy class as a freshman, determined to prove that Christ rose from the dead. It was rough going, but by the end of the semester, his sources weren’t cringeworthy anymore, and he was presenting an actual argument. And he still trusted me. He majored in math but took Philosophy of Religion with me as a senior, and he explained that he wanted to continue developing his proof.I braced myself. But during the semester, the class discussed faith and reason extensively, and I was able to ask him (privately): Given that you think about faith as being the important thing, what makes it so important to you to prove that Christ rose? He thought about it for a long time and finally decided that he didn’t need to prove that Christ rose. Instead, he wrote a strong final paper in which he reflected on the meaning of faith, discussing his own experience and the course readings.I rarely get wins that size. But taking my students’ religious views seriously makes them possible.

Teaching Introduction to the Hebrew Bible is one of the most challenging—and enjoyable—parts of my job. It shares some of its challenges with any other large humanities class: how to keep students engaged, reading closely, and asking sophisticated questions while they sit in a sea of their peers.Other challenges are particular to this course. I jokingly tell colleagues that I teach one of the only Gen Ed topics—the Bible—that students know everything about before entering the classroom. Which is another way of saying that it can be difficult to tap into students’ curiosity about a text they may know about intimately from other places. To be curious about a text is to be vulnerable to new ways of thinking about it and not everyone who walks into my classroom feels ready to be open in that way. Thus, while I assume that every student actually does have questions about the Bible, some are primed to offer only answers instead of queries about this text. This resistance may be due to the ideological heterogeneity of their peers, to the fact that my authority to teach derives from academic, not religious, credentials, or some other reason entirely. In any case, the large, nondevotional site that is the public university lecture hall can be a difficult context not only for students to stay engaged but also to unleash their curiosity about the Bible in the first place. The practice of Designated Respondents (DR), which I now use every semester I teach this 120-student course, does not resolve all of these difficulties. It does, however, generate conditions in which to address them by creating a framework for consistent engagement, inquiry, and connection. Practice Designated Respondents works in some ways like a sustained and structured “fishbowl.” Here is how I introduce students to it in the syllabus:Three times during this class you will be asked to serve as the “Designated Respondent” for a class meeting. This means that you will come to class more prepared than usual. I will look to you first to actively participate, respond to and pose your own questions during the course of the class. Try to speak at least once in each of your assigned sessions. If you are unable to attend one of your scheduled days, please contact me and I will assign you to another group. I divide students into six or seven groups (fifteen to twenty students per group) and begin the DR practice at the end of the second week of class, once enrollment has stabilized. For the first round many students are quite nervous to speak up. To help relieve anxiety, I open these sessions by asking students to pose their prepared questions about the reading, so they can get used to hearing their own voices. They can ask questions about anything. I only require that their questions: (1) invoke the assigned biblical reading directly; and (2) are put in terms intelligible to a broad, religiously-diverse audience. The goal here is to get students to slow down enough to let the Bible surprise them and then to make those surprises intelligible to students who may not share their guiding interpretive assumptions. I have found that after students speak up once or twice they gain confidence in this aspect of the assignment. Inviting students to sit towards the front of the room, if they are able, helps to mitigate the intimidation they may feel from speaking in a larger space.This practice means that I structure every class session around large questions and leave ample space for discussion. I put one or more of these questions on the opening slide for students to consider as they settle into the room. That way, more reticent students can contemplate and even prepare their responses in advance. EvaluationStudents assign themselves a grade for this aspect of class, though they can only assign themselves full points if they: (a) attend their assigned class session, (b) complete all the assigned reading for the day, and (c) complete the entire rubric.The self-evaluation rubric consists of the following questions:What percentage of the reading did you read in advance of this class?Describe two passages from the assigned reading that you were prepared to discuss.What two questions were you prepared to ask in this class session? Be as specific as you can, invoking the biblical text directly.Describe what engagement looked like for you during class.Out of 10 points, explain what grade you would assign yourself based on your answers to the above questions.It is worth noting that for some students, speaking in class is not just a strong disinclination but not possible or healthy. I work with students to create specific strategies for their voices to be heard during their assigned sessions. However, the evaluation rubric permits students who are not able to speak up to still articulate their questions, explain their engagement (which may consist entirely of attentive listening and active notetaking), and achieve full points.  Results Some students truly hate this assignment. It requires them to read and to attend, and it strongly encourages them to speak in a large class. Each one of these components can be profoundly challenging. But many more students, while anxious at first, find their voices through this practice. Some have shared with me that it has empowered them to speak more in other courses as well. Here is how one student recently described it: “I really liked the designated respondents! At first I thought it was terrible, but after I did it and participated in the course, I found them really beneficial. I have thoughts and answers to questions every day in the class but I am always too scared to raise my hand (simply social anxiety!) but being told that I have to respond has helped me participate more in class.” This practice has helped me forge connections with a larger percentage of students and to better understand their interpretive questions and concerns. I have also seen it generate connections among students within the class. Speaking up in class is a vulnerable act and it encourages students to be curious about the Bible and about one another. I have witnessed students, who were otherwise strangers, linger after class to talk in response to what they raised in our discussion. Finally, DR prevents any one student (or handful of students) from dominating discussion. Hearing from a diverse range of voices (by semester’s end, nearly every student has spoken) makes our class more socially-connected than is typical for a hundred-plus person course.Designated Respondents is not a panacea for the problems of student anonymity, alienation, and disengagement that hamper many large courses. However, by creating clear structures for close-reading and active participation from a wide range of voices, it creates conditions for some of these issues to be assuaged.