Resources

“… The Dark Fantastic considers the work of mainstream authors, television writers, and other storytelling creatives through the networked communities – such as fandoms -- where such work is discussed, and the attendant implications for the larger culture.”– Ebony Elizabeth Thomas Teaching courses at the intersection of religion and popular culture is an integral component of my teaching practice. However, when I began teaching, first as a graduate student tutorial leader and then as a faculty member in the 1990s, incorporation of popular cultural texts often bore the strain of having to justify their relevance or appropriateness for academic scrutiny. For many of us who were fans and/or critics of movies, novels, comics, and fashion, our forays into critical popular culture studies were often viewed as side interests. There was the “other” curriculum of unassigned popular cultural texts accessed through independent bookstores, literary and film festivals, and frequently through borrowing from each other. Surely, they could not constitute “serious” academic inquiry. In fact, we often began our academic inquiries about the popular as fans of an author or a particular work or genre. We did the work anyway, often while we pursued other projects deemed, at the time, more worthy of scholarly attention. Fortunately, the influential work of scholars in cultural studies such as Stuart Hall, Jamaican-born sociologist and former director of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies in the UK, [helped bring] methods and approaches for examining the impact of cultural representation to the forefront.As digital texts have grown and proliferated in format and significance, I see these early examinations of popular cultural texts as critical interventions emerging from what Ebony Elizabeth Thomas refers to as “the dark fantastic,” in her book of the same name. For Thomas, “the dark fantastic” is not synonymous with “the Black Fantastic” or “Afrofuturism.” Rather, “the dark fantastic” emerges from the reactions and critical commentary of fandoms to narratives produced by mainstream authors, filmmakers, and television writers. It is a perspective which takes seriously audience reactions and the collective discussions which form because of them as a basis of critique. In retrospect, I think that the dark fantastic is what some of us were engaging in through our participation in ad hoc discussion groups about movies, novels, and particular authors as students.The oeuvre of science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler is a particular example. I was introduced to Butler’s work in the early 1990s by another student who recommended the novel Wild Seed. Neither of us had had any of Butler’s writing assigned in our courses, yet we met and discussed her novel. We saw the connections in Butler’s writing with themes about identity, displacement, and community relevant especially for considering African diasporic experiences. Since then, I have taught Butler’s work, such as the novel Parable of the Sower, in religious studies courses for nearly thirty years. Moving the commentary which began in fan discourse into scholarship and creative expressions has enriched my academic and creative path.In teaching contexts, embracing this approach has meant including opportunities for students to use their responses to storyworlds and narratives which are widely accessed, often through multiple platforms and genres, as the basis of scholarly critique. Does this mean that individual students are viewed as “fans” and classrooms as fandoms? In answer to this question, not necessarily, but it does open the space to include such discourse as a source of critique.It does not replace more traditional academic forms of scholarship, such as library-based research, for instance, but it acknowledges and leaves space for critical interventions which emerge from the shared communications of viewing and reading popular cultural texts outside of the digital or in-person religious studies classroom.Here are a couple of examples from my teaching and learning experience in which students are encouraged through assignments and class discussion to reflect on and share their reactions to popular cultural texts as an initial step in their critical analysis:(a) Music Playlist: Students are invited to contribute to a curated music playlist related to the course subject matter. In this short assignment, students select a song which they associate with themes and concepts in the course and write a short (typically 300-word) review outlining the connections which they associate between the song and the course subject matter, including readings, lectures, and documentaries.(b) Film Screening: A film screening is organized as an integral component of the course, to which other members of the department or larger university community are invited. An introduction is provided by the instructor. A facilitated discussion follows. On some occasions, a filmmaker has participated in a facilitated question-and-answer session with the audience.Recommended Reading:Hall, Stuart, Sean Nixon, and Jessica Evans (eds.). Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, 3rd edition. Sage Publications, 2024.Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth. The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games. New York University Press, 2019.

I started writing on a hot summer day in August, and at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School that means classes are about to begin for the start of our 207th year. Our start date, which is earlier in the summer than at most institutions, isn’t the only queer (subversive; norm-transgressing) aspect of our community. You see, most students, and faculty, won’t set foot on our campus until Commencement in May. We are an intimate institution in size but diffuse in location. This isn’t a new reality. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, this institution, which proudly publicizes its commitments to “Peace. Service. Justice,” understands and has acted upon the conviction that online education is about more than convenience; it’s a matter of equity. And we are not alone. There are 174 ATS-accredited institutions currently approved to offer comprehensive distance education (50% or more of a degree), including four other divinity schools associated with the American Baptist Churches USA.[i]Thanks to President Angela D. Sims' leadership, the faculty’s flexibility, and the staff’s dedicated support and innovation, we have provided accredited theological education to students who would otherwise be unable to follow their callings due to various responsibilities and systemic injustices (such as being the primary caregiver for a family member and working multiple jobs), which preclude them from moving to a new city, commuting hours to and from campus, or attending class during work hours. Together, we have provided, and continue to provide, rigorous theological education to persons across the globe, primarily serving students from Black churches. Last spring, I had the opportunity to participate as second reader from Vienna, Austria, where I live with my German husband, in the MA thesis defense of a student located in Jamaica under the leadership of my colleague, Dr. Jin Young Choi, in Rochester, New York. The potential for transgressing the boundaries and confines of national borders in order to teach, learn from, and be deeply enriched by students and faculty around the globe is real and present. This is a queer context: close-knit and dispersed, historic and fully online, contextually-focused and internationally constituted. One identity doesn’t negate the other; their boundaries become porous and take on new meanings through our embodiment of them for such a time as now. But might something be missing in a community of learning such as this? Piloting a Virtual CampusThanks to a small project grant from the Wabash Center, we recently launched a virtual campus on the Gather platform in partnership with Young Prophets Collective, an LGBTQIA+-led nonprofit that designed a virtual church campus, which now houses the Colgate Rochester Crozer Wing (photo below). The virtual campus pilot seeks to continue this institution’s prophetic work, not only to provide access to classes and meetings, but to provide a shared sense of space and the unstructured communal formation that makes theological education different from merely reading texts at home or logging in for class while on the road.The open-ended, pedagogical question we’re asking is this: How might a virtual campus environment—one that enables spatial movement, ambient community (continuously present in the background of a shared environment, rather than requiring constant, direct interaction), and incarnational co-presence—transform the quality of theological formation and pedagogical engagement at Colgate Rochester Crozer? And, what intentional preparation for faculty, staff, and students alike is required to move from using such a platform as a novelty to integrating it as a quotidian habitat? We don’t have the answers, but we’re looking forward to pondering these questions together over the course of this fall semester. What You Can Expect From Us: CollegialityOur partnership with Wabash means a commitment to disseminate what we learn during this process – from the inevitable glitches and technical difficulties to the (hopefully) profound reflections on our own experiences as practitioners teaching, learning, and creating community as dispersed faculty colleagues. I have quickly become known in my institution for emphasizing “collegiality” as a guiding principle. Maybe this is due to our 6 to 9-hour time difference (depending on their location in the U.S.) and thousands of miles of distance can. At times, this can lead me to feel disconnected or out-of-the-loop on certain discussions and decisions. Or perhaps my emphasis on collegiality is a reaction to the heightened sense of alert that many of us feel in higher education at the moment—as democratic institutions once understood to educate and critically support the development of a responsible and learned citizenry are dismantled in real time. Or perhaps my push towards greater collegiality is due to the words of the queer theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid and how they ring uncomfortably true in this moment for so many: “a Queer theologian has many passports because she is a theologian in diaspora...”[ii] Collegiality can be a lifeline amidst the daily battle of simply persisting in our duties as best we can as professors of religion and theology—but it is not immediately or always available, especially in this moment.Over the next five months, you will hear from different members of our faculty, affiliates and full-time. We will spend time during two of our Fall 26 faculty meetings critically reflecting upon our experiences with the virtual campus. Not all of us will teach on the platform, in fact, most of us won’t. This is a pilot project, meaning no one is required to utilize the platform; it is an open, invitational phase. We’ll see if such an agency-oriented, organic approach works… My hope is that these conversations, the dedicated digital space in which all faculty, including affiliates, have personalized offices, and the invitation to write together as part of this blog series will all work together to enrich our experiences both as teachers and as colleagues both within and beyond our institution. Only time will tell. I hope you’ll stick around to find out, colleague. Notes & Bibliography[i] Association of Theological Schools, “Member School Distance Education,” accessed August 22, 2026, https://www.ats.edu/Member-School-Distance-Education.[ii] Marcella Althaus-Reid, The Queer God (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003), 7.

Like many academics of my generation, I was never formally trained to teach. When I first stepped into the classroom as an instructor, I relied largely on memories from my own learning journey—on the teachers who had shaped my education, borrowing what they did well and avoiding, as best I could, what they did poorly. Over time, I learned to trust my own experience, experimenting and reflecting as I became increasingly aware of my strengths and limitations as an educator.It wasn’t until years later that I came to recognize that I had internalised a fundamental mistruth about teaching—one that had quietly and persistently shaped my practice. It was the belief that the instructor must control the learning journey. I had an implicit sense of myself as a content expert, and I had grown accustomed to standing at the front of the room, dispensing information and answering questions. Without realising it, this false assumption influenced everything: the structure of my lessons, the physical layout of the learning spaces, even the tone of my voice.Gradually, the artifice of this belief became impossible to ignore as a deeper truth emerged: learning happens in community. When I spoke from the podium, I was not hearing what the students had to offer. When I focused solely on content, I overlooked the fact that they were anything but empty vessels. When I assigned grades, I failed to value the ways that all of us—myself included—had been changed through the shared experience of learning together. The illusion of control and the mystique of expertise obscured something far more powerful: the experience of belonging to a community of learners, in which I had a role, but not sole authority. Together, we were—and are—smarter.Of course, these are not new ideas. Paulo Freire articulates them powerfully in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed(1970), where he critiques what he calls the “banking model” of education—an approach that positions students as passive recipients of knowledge deposited by an expert teacher. Freire instead advocates for dialogical, problem-posing education grounded in praxis, reflection, and collective action. Yet even these radical commitments can be neutralized in practice. In the traditional academic classroom, it is possible to teach—even celebrate—Freirean ideas while leaving intact the very hierarchies, power relations, and instructional routines that Freire sought to dismantle. In this way, revolutionary pedagogy risks becoming another form of content, rather than a transformative way of being together in learning.It wasn’t until I found myself out of my comfort zone that I first experienced the transformative power of learning alongside my students. Like many a sessional instructor, I was teaching a course well outside my core area of expertise. I prepared carefully—selecting a strong textbook, inviting guest speakers, and doing my best to stay ahead of the class. A few weeks in, the inevitable occurred: a student asked a question to which I simply did not know the answer. Rather than deflecting or improvising, I admitted my uncertainty and promised to return with a response at the next session.At the next class, I was ready to address the question—but I was surprised to discover that several students had researched it as well. We shared our findings, and almost immediately the dynamic of the class shifted. Suddenly I was no longer positioned as the authoritative expert but as a fellow learner. We were investigating together. From that point on, the course became one of shared inquiries and collective exploration.Years later, a former student told me that this class was the first in which a professor had openly admitted not knowing the answer to a question. Although I was caught off guard in that moment, such honesty might not have surfaced had I been comfortably teaching my regular slate of courses. Yet precisely because it was unexpected and from a place of authenticity, it served to invite students more fully into the subject. They felt more connected—to one another, to the material, and to their own learning—and, as a result, more invested in the process itself.I learned something profound in that classroom as well. I learned, through experience, that teaching carries an ethical dimension: integrity and fidelity toward those with whom we are learning. Effective learning is not about preserving the status quo or maintaining a façade of expertise. Rather, as Freire argued all along, it is about honesty, humility, and the willingness to invite others into the shared work of inquiry—to explore, to understand, and to marvel at what becomes possible together.

Early in my academic career, I received a piece of advice that I have never quite forgotten. I had received a few teaching awards and proudly added them to my CV. A senior colleague looked over the document and gently suggested that I remove them.The reasoning was simple: teaching awards might make it look like I wasn’t a serious researcher.The logic behind the advice was not unusual. In many research universities, there is an unspoken hierarchy of academic value. Research sits at the top. Grants, books, and journal articles signal seriousness. Teaching, by contrast, is often treated as something secondary—a duty rather than a scholarly accomplishment. A teaching award, in this logic, signals that you spend too much time in the classroom and not enough time producing research.What struck me even then was the implication behind the advice. It assumed that excellence in teaching and excellence in research exist in tension with one another. If you are recognized as a good teacher, the assumption goes, you must be neglecting the work that truly counts. As the author of three books—two of which are published by Cambridge University Press—with a fourth on the way, I reject this premise. In my own work on early Christianity, teaching has never been separate from research. Explaining Gregory of Nazianzus (my personal favourite) to students forces clarity about arguments that can otherwise remain comfortably obscure. Students ask questions that expose assumptions. They notice ambiguities that scholars sometimes overlook. Again and again, the classroom becomes a place where ideas are re-examined.Teaching is not the absence of scholarship. It is one of the places where scholarship happens.There is also something revealing about the warning itself. Early-career-scholars—especially women—often receive subtle signals about what kinds of work will be taken seriously. Mentoring students and investing in pedagogy can be quietly coded as “soft” labour. The message is not always explicit, but it is clear enough: if you want to be seen as a real scholar, do not look too invested in teaching or in your students.The irony is that universities depend on that very labour. Students do not encounter research outputs directly; they encounter them through teaching. The classroom is where the intellectual traditions of a discipline are actually transmitted. To treat excellence in teaching as a sign of diminished scholarly seriousness misunderstands how academic life works.I did not remove the teaching awards from my CV.The advice was offered with genuine care—but the premise behind it is broken. The problem is not that teaching awards appear on a CV. The problem is the academic culture that once made many scholars think they should not.

I, like so many of my peers, have been wondering endlessly about how to discourage, combat, disincentivize, or otherwise turn back the clock on generative AI usage by students. Every time I see an unnecessary list of three similar adjectives with an Oxford comma (why is it always “insightful, interesting, and deeply engaging”?), I die a little inside.When I tried to dig into the why behind my students turning to ChatGPT, however, I heard the same kinds of insecurity that I’ve always heard from these undergraduates – they fear that their writing is not good enough for college in some vague, undefinable way. This goes double for my first-generation and multilingual students, it seems. They’ve internalized that something is just not quite right about their writing style (or fear that college is just more than they can handle) and second-guess every sentence. It used to be that I could gently force them through enough weeks of low-stakes writing that they could come to realize I wasn’t overly concerned with their formality or how many esoteric words they could cram in – I just want to know what they think! Now, though, they see a possible fix and may try to use it before I can convince them how unnecessary it is.With this in mind, I’m trying a new strategy this semester. I have deliberately asked for messy writing. On quizzes and daily homework, I use broad questions and instruct my students that I’m not looking for a carefully constructed argument or a singular conclusion. Instead, I ask for the wild swirl of their thoughts, the rabbit-holes, and the contradictions. Sometimes, I give them the same question posed in two or three different ways, with examples they can latch onto – or not. If I want messy answers, why make my questions tidy? I assure them that there are many ways to respond, and that they can leave fussy grammar at the door for now. I want their authentic, raw voice, and a snapshot of what their brain is doing in that moment.While I’m a long ways from declaring victory, the results I’ve seen so far have been positive, even joyful. Students have mostly reacted with sighs of relief, and writing that feels much more casual and real. I’m hearing more silliness and humor than I usually do in the semester by this time – many of my learners are happy to use their social media voices (“um, like, no???”) which they speak with native fluency. There has been some anxiety from my self-identified perfectionists, who seem to not quite trust that messiness is allowed, or that they won’t be negatively judged for being informal. I’ve just reassured them that they can write however they please, but I’m grading the contents rather than the wrapping.As with any pedagogical shift, I’m a little conflicted. I do want students to practice formal and professional language and effective, accurate communication, but I also work at a school where our pre-professional programs typically maintain those standards – it’s alright with me if I end up teaching students how to modify their voices or communication styles based on the expectations they’re given. And heck, I teach Theology, a discipline that is notorious for being impossible to pin down or perfectly express, where metaphor and mystery rule – should I expect my students to talk with more confidence than the spiritual leaders they read? I think there is a value in being unsure, unclear, confused, and doubting, and trying to articulate that experience. So at least for now, this is what I’ll choose, and hope that emphasizing the process over the product offers my students something new – and makes them less likely to turn to artificial means.

To me, grades are the biggest problem that we contend with as we help to shape an egalitarian classroom. On one hand, the process of engaging with student work – prompting ideas (the assignment), offering conversations in office hours and class to refine the approach, and offering feedback and (possibly) revision opportunities – is at the core of a conversational, enriching classroom. Drawing on bell hook’s notions of pedagogy rooted in love, I believe that honest and generous engagement with a student’s work is at the core of assessment when done correctly. I am excited by the ideas of ungrading, but given that many of us work in institutional contexts that do not support these practices, I have had to confront the question: how do we grade, and grade with rigor, while not lapsing into authoritarian practices?First I’d say we need to accept that this often creates the somewhat frustrating dynamic that my title alludes to. With the egalitarian practices outlined in my previous blog post, students occasionally have the perspective that I’ll be an “easy” grader. After all, I am flexible with deadlines, offer affirming comments throughout class, and frame my teaching on building skills they already possess rather than corrections or an exposure of deficiency. Yet, staring down at lengthy comments and a B-, students sometimes feel confused or even betrayed. They thought I liked them! At first, this attitude really bothered me – and sometimes it still does. But try as we might to decouple rigor from authoritarian approaches, we have to contend with the fact that these two things are often synonymous in students’ eyes. In other words, being kind but still rigorous remains a bit of an anomaly. Therefore, we need to first practice patience because we’re operating in a system that usually only has room for “nice, easy” teachers or “tough but fair” (or just tough) teachers. Getting through the “nice person, but…” comments can allow us to press on and continue to have a rigor rooted in egalitarian love. Perhaps one day it will be “nice person because she’s a rigorous grader,” but for now, I try to enjoy the experience that may lead to this transformation.What does this look like? Borrowing from ungrading/labor grading, I aim to involve my students as much as possible in crafting the assignments themselves, assessing their own work, and building in responses to my feedback so that it becomes less of a “hand off” (described elegantly by Freire as the “banking model”) and more of a collaboration. In seminar classes, my students and I collaborate to make a participation rubric based on their feedback on quality discussions. They submit their own assessment of their participation frequently, which levels the grading (i.e., they are accountable to themselves rather than seeing me as the arbiter of what “counts”) and creates a dynamic of community in which contributing becomes less about a grade and more about building quality, in-depth discussions together.When assigning papers, I often have students work to create their own questions, meet with them one-on-one (during regular class time for those of you worried about extra labor!), give extensive feedback on what worked, what could be improved, and specifically how to improve it. Following this, students have the opportunity to revise, and in their revisions, they include reflections on my feedback. Perhaps most important, I ask “What was the biggest issue as you see it, and were you worried about it coming in, or was my feedback a surprise to you?” I find this question is particularly effective for leveling authority and maintaining rigor as it reveals any moments in which a student is blindsided by a grade or comment. Such a moment is important to respond to when thinking about anti-authoritarian practices. While I often want to reply, “Well, I’m the expert, so listen!” I now use this as an opportunity to discuss with students the conversational and collaborative nature of learning: some things are only revealed when we are vulnerable enough to trust others to read and think with us. There are some areas of growth and improvement we cannot see and we depend on the generosity of others to work with us. And sometimes, professors get it wrong too – I have had moments where a student objects to my characterization of their work, and upon rereading, I realized that I was tired or unfocused when I read it the first time. Again, egalitarian classrooms allow for an exchange like this without feeling like we’ve compromised our expertise or authority, but rather allows a moment for vulnerability and true transformation.In an ideal world, I think this feedback and conversation could take place in the absence of grading. But in the world and institutional contexts almost all of us operate in, shifting the narrative, allowing students in, and creating opportunities to emphasize process and growth over each individual attempt allow us to maintain standards, rigor, and knowledge, but from a place of care, collaboration, and, yes, love.

It happened again this semester. I had planned a new class for this term called “Religion, Imagination, and Facing the Future.” While the class technically fulfills a first-year seminar curricular function of teaching graduate level reading, research, and writing, I can pick the theme. I chose it in light of the chaos in the United States right now and the fascinating conversations arising amongst scholars and organizers I admire about how to imagine a different future than the late-stage capitalist, wealth inequality laden, earth-destroying, violent social world we currently live in. I collected readings hoping to explore imagination as a key quality for religious leaders facing scary and death-dealing situations in their communities. We started with Ruha Benjamin’s Imagination: A Manifesto and moved into Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, with later readings from so many friends and colleagues I respect… Willie James Jennings, Sarah Farmer, Yara González-Justiniano. I created assignments and built a rhythm for the course with great care and excitement for the students I would encounter. I read and re-read the texts I had chosen, creating discussion prompts for the students to engage. The course was built out in Canvas, the students had been populated into it by the registrar, and it was time to hit the button to “publish” the course. I hesitated. I re-read the course description and its now seemingly impossible claims about what we would be exploring during the term. And then I sat there with the deep feelings of inadequacy that flooded my body. Who was I to be teaching such a course? I was achingly aware of the privilege of my social position, of my work as a professor rather than an organizer, of my lack of experience working in institutions that didn’t allow space for my vocation to emerge and be expressed. In those days I was watching former students and professional colleagues involved in organizing resistance to the ICE occupation in Minneapolis, living into the mutual aid, love for neighbor, solidarity, and bold witness that I have taught about for years. Deep in my bones and my gut, my intuition told me that I was inadequate to the task of teaching this course that I had put together. What did I do? I pushed the button and published the course anyway.Why? Because in my deeper wisdom, I know these are the questions and the struggles that my students need to wrestle with, whether or not I feel up to the task. They need to learn more than I can teach in this moment. That moment of profound humility before the work of teaching is absolutely the place to begin, at least for me. It marks a moment of letting go of the control of the learning environment and leaning in to trust that the students will show up. Together we might begin a journey that won’t be fruitless. They will learn things that I intend to teach them, and they will learn things that I never imagined or don’t yet understand myself. They will teach me what they know from the work they engage where they are, from the mentors who have guided them, from the challenges they have already survived, from the faith they have when I am lacking. Together, we are good enough to engage these questions that they are already responsible to in their lives well beyond my classroom. If I only taught the things I feel expertise and skill in teaching, I would fail to provide the education they need in this moment. It takes courage and vulnerability to recognize my limits and to still take necessary risks for significant learning anyway.

Pope Leo XIV has just released his first encyclical, focused on artificial intelligence and the future of human society. The timing could not be more urgent for theological institutions. Prior to the encyclical, Pope Leo already has stressed that emerging technologies place a particular mandate on Catholic educators: “Catholic education can be a beacon: not a nostalgic refuge, but a laboratory of discernment, pedagogical innovation and prophetic witness. Drawing new maps of hope: this is the urgency of the mandate.”Pope Leo’s call to “draw new maps of hope,” echoes his predecessor, Pope Francis, who urged Catholic universities to “Be present as great laboratories of hope at this crossroads of history.” There is just one glaring problem with this captivating vision: hope is in short supply right now in higher education.Long before ChatGPT answered its first query, changes in demographics, pandemic-era disruptions in student preparation, and a political climate that seeks to undermine the value of critical reasoning had already dramatically decreased the level of hope in these intellectual “laboratories.” Reading student reflections that have been quite obviously written by robots is depressing; even more depressing are the despondent attitudes of students struggling to find value in classroom learning itself.Like most educators and administrators, I have wrestled with how to prepare our community for inevitable technological transformation. Last summer, I co-led a group of faculty at our private Catholic R1 university to discuss how we might prepare for inevitable technological transformation. These conversations renewed our confidence in a liberal arts education as the critical tool we will need to face the future.This era requires thought leaders who are trained to ask better questions, who know the value of human reason and creativity, and who can critically and ethically evaluate rapidly changing technologies and their applications. Liberal arts colleges and universities are designed to prepare precisely this kind of leader, and that should be the reason for our hope.Our curriculum does not teach students to find answers to arbitrary questions; it enlivens their creative capacity to refine their questions in order to build a more just world. At a moment when large language models promise instant answers at unprecedented speed, universities have a different responsibility. We must prepare students who know how to evaluate knowledge critically, recognize the limits of technological systems, and ask difficult moral and intellectual questions about the societies those systems are shaping. ‘Education in the round’Many institutions of higher education are grounded in an educational tradition that is vitally important for this historical moment. The Greco-Roman tradition of encyclios paideia, or “education in the round,” was a technology of the empire that worked by ensuring a common language and training, but also by educating the whole person. This circular, or complete, education was thought to advance society by forming the human soul through a set of shared educational habits, habits that shaped the ways humans would think, behave, and dialogue with each other to produce knowledge.The Catholic intellectual tradition is full to the brim with thinkers who leaned into inquiry in the face of dramatic change. Pope Leo underscores that “dynamic history” tracing it from the Desert Fathers to women educational reformers of the 19th and 20th centuries who led the way in educating the marginalized.Catholic higher education is part of a living tradition, and there are a few key features that I have observed as a historian working at a Catholic university that strike me as particularly valuable for this historical moment. First and foremost is that we continue to prioritize the dignity of the human person in the process of advancing knowledge. This means that the utility and profitability of discovery is not the sole telos of our research — the human metacognitive and dialogic processes by which we arrive at those discoveries in community are just as important. The human researcher is essential for the successful evaluation, interpretation, and integration of knowledge. New discoveries are not possible without human reason and verification in a community of researchers who are held accountable for their work. LLMs do not possess these essential human faculties, and when they are wrong, they bear no accountability.The ethical questions we face in this technological age are more complex than the citation or fabrication of sources; they strike at the foundations of human interdependence and its centrality for the advancement of human knowledge. LLMs promise to provide answers to human questions at an unprecedented rate, but they attempt to do so by indiscriminately pulling from available sources in ways that obscure the contexts and relationships between those sources, limit the perspectives considered, and reinforce inequalities. University education prepares students not just to examine the sources and evidence they can readily see, but to ask critical questions about the evidence itself. This is the intellectual scaffolding that meets the changing needs of our students and our world.Pope Leo reminds us, “education does not measure its value only on the axis of efficiency: it measures it according to dignity, justice, the capacity to serve the common good. This integral anthropological vision must remain the cornerstone of Catholic pedagogy." This does not mean we educate students on every injustice in our current world, but that we teach them discernment so they can “recognize and name both justice and oppression” in an ever-changing world.  In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo places particular emphasis on community and human relationships for achieving this learning: “Schools are not called to follow the pace of the digital world, but to offer that which the digital sphere  by itself cannot provide, namely a shared time for learning and developing trustworthy relationships.” As AI threatens the biodiversity of human knowledge, university education “in the round” will be vitally important for protecting human innovation and its roots in the human community. We know as educators that we cannot possibly provide our students with all of the knowledge they will need ten or twenty years from now. Our hope is grounded in knowing that a student who graduates with the humility to recognize the limits of their knowledge, the curiosity to ask a different question, and the moral courage to ask a difficult question will be prepared for the uncertainty of a changing world. In the era of AI, the ability to stay curious and center human flourishing will distinguish the leaders from the users. 

On a recent visit to the faculty breakroom to heat up my lunch, I ran into a colleague who asked, “Richelle, how is the semester going?” We had not seen each other very much during the semester. We were at the midpoint—administering exams and collecting assignments. Among the faculty, there was an awareness that the consistent use of AI was presenting problems. We felt anxious because we were uneasy about moving forward regarding campus policies and the use of AI. We were skeptical and questioned whether students were even interested in learning anymore.My colleague’s question prompted me to move beyond the default response, “The semester is going well,” but I took a few seconds to answer. “I am experiencing some sharpening this semester.” With a puzzled look, he followed up with, “What do you mean?” “I am being challenged relationally by students, and vocationally I am being stretched.” Our brief conversation ended with him telling me to hang in there, and with me returning to my office to take some time to reflect on my response.Proverbs 27:17—“As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” One Bible commentator offers: “Iron cutting tools are made sharp, bright, and useful by rubbing them against another form of iron. A person without the company and conversation of a friend is alone, dull, and inactive; but with the fellowship and communication of a friend, they are refreshed, revived, and fitted for—and incited to—action.”The experiences of sharpening that I encountered were not directly connected to friendship, but to the teacher-student relationship. I recalled the two intentions I set at the beginning of the semester:As a teacher, I would strive to be the best version of myself. As a teacher, I would help students read, write, and think better. The first intention caused me to remember my teacher, mentor, and dissertation advisor—Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon. She often shared the legacy of Black women educators in the Jim Crow South who taught in overcrowded, one-teacher schools with scarce funding and out-of-date resources. This lack did not prevent them from proclaiming to Black children, “I will give you the best that I’ve got, and I want you to be even better.” This mantra was my guiding star throughout the semester. I created, prepared, rearranged, revised, added, subtracted, engaged, and explored content and teaching strategies for student-centered learning.The second intention called for a complete overhaul of the first because I was confronting the reality that some students do not want to be better readers, writers, or thinkers. There was resistance and, oftentimes, a refusal to engage in those foundational educational tasks. My self-dialogue centered on the following questions:Why do they resist reading and writing? It seems like using ChatGPT is always their first choice—why do they refuse to think on their own? Have they been taught to think critically? Beyond offering objective answers, many students would not respond to questions in class. Students used ChatGPT to complete reflection questions and other learning assignments. Using AI is not a big deal for students—everybody does it. Students often avoid doing hard things. Facing consequences and/or being held accountable for actions, good or bad, has not been consistent.As I became more intentional about engaging in prayer and reading scripture, and paid attention to what I was seeing and experiencing among my students, I resonated with Matthew 9:36: “When he (Jesus) saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were confused and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” This verse helped me to identify the students’ need for character development, critical thinking, accountability, and facing consequences for their actions. They were confused and helplessly attached to cultural norms, social media, and subject to poor decision-making.These revelations helped change my perspective and navigate more effective ways of being my best self, while incorporating character development, accountability, critical thinking, and consequences within the foundational activities of reading, writing, and thinking. God was calling me to be a shepherd for this group of sheep, guiding them beyond confusion and poor decisions. This experience of sharpening is a continuous process. Progressing through the semester with these new changes was not easy, but it introduced all of us to becoming better—if not the best—versions of ourselves. Challenging, refining, and improving one another, the sparks and friction that ensued were difficult but necessary, and will hopefully produce lifelong learners who benefit from the sharpening.

“The best way to learn something is to teach it.” Wary as I tend to be of truisms, this one has proven accurate in my own experience as a teacher and scholar. The passages and concepts that I have taught over the years are on permanent recall in my brain. I remember these stories and ideas because I have talked about them with others repeatedly. But learning—and learning through teaching—is not just about memorization. The practice of preparing to teach prompts a very specific (and, yes, memorable) kind of thinking. When I approach a text to make a teaching plan, it requires attention to particularity and ambiguity. When I prepare to teach, I ask: What can be clearly learned from this passage? What is uncertain enough to warrant discussion? In other words, I read for ways both to distill possible meanings and to make room for new ones. In recent years, I have begun wondering what it might be like to invite my undergraduate students into this practice of teaching preparation. I’ve formulated “The Teaching Portfolio” as a capstone assignment for an upper-level undergraduate course where the enrollment may be too high for students to actually teach all or even part of a session themselves. In this assignment, each student selects a biblical passage (one we haven’t already read together), subjects that passage to close analysis using the terms and queries we’ve developed over the course of our semester, and finally plans several activities or discussion prompts they would use to help their hypothetical students engage with their chosen passage.  The AssignmentThis is how I describe the assignment to students:This final project invites you into a step-by-step process of how you would approach interpreting and then teaching a biblical passage in a classroom setting. These projects will be individual, but we will devote the final two weeks of class to workshopping these projects collaboratively.Here’s what that teaching portfolio will include:A. An Annotated Biblical Passage. In the margins of this passage you will:Pose three major interpretive questions, related to the types of terms and queries we have asked over the course of the class. Pose two translation or vocabulary questions that you can research and answer (please chat with me about this!).Pose two connections with texts we’ve studied over the course of this text. Explain these connections. B. An Interpretive Artifact. A piece of direct (that is self-conscious) interpretation of the passage you’ve chosen (from short ancient Jewish or Christian texts, from the history of art, etc.). If you select a text, make sure that it’s an excerpt of around three hundred words. Put this artifact into brief context (tell us who made it, when, and where).Describe the artifact, making two to four observations about how our specific course concepts and terms are represented in this artifact or are relevant to its analysis.Make at least two observations about how this interpretation differs from the biblical text and/or what this interpretation adds to the biblical account.How might you incorporate this artifact into a classroom activity? What questions would you pose to the classroom to generate discussion about this artifact? C.  Answering Your Questions. Attempt provisional answers to your three major interpretive questions (from part A) with direct, specific references to the text. You may not be able to answer your questions conclusively (that’s okay!), just reflect on how you would begin to answer these questions with as much detail as you can.D. Preparing to Teach. Having wrestled with this text and its interpretation, now is the time to reflect and prepare to teach it. In this final section, please address the following questions: If you taught this story in a classroom setting, what two or three major concepts, questions, or ideas would you want students to remember from this text? Why? What would make teaching this particular text challenging? How might you address those challenges? Describe an activity (in addition to the discussion you imagined above in part B.4) that you might use in class that would engage and convey those ideas to students. Describe it in as much detail as you can.Having completed this project, what new interpretive questions do you now have about this passage, especially in view of our course’s major terms and concepts? E. Presentation. You will have ten to fifteen minutes to present your portfolio work-in-progress in the two weeks leading up to finals week.  The Fine Print Your selected passage must be from a part of the Hebrew Bible or Septuagint (LXX) that we have NOT covered in class. Be sure to spend time understanding the context of this passage, especially if it is part of a larger narrative. That is one thing we will ask you do at the beginning your portfolio presentation.Not sure where to start looking for an interpretive artifact? Check out the following sites:Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization. The Posen online library has some great examples of visual and literary interpretation of biblical passages.  Visual Commentary on Scripture has some good examples of biblical interpretation in the history of art (if using the VCS just make sure the artwork you select is a direct, self-conscious representation of your biblical passage; some of the connections this site makes are more abstract). Sefaria is a great place to start in finding examples of ancient Jewish interpretation. While you are welcome (encouraged!) to confer with colleagues, your final project must show clear evidence of independent thought (different questions and answers, a distinctive interpretive artifact, etc.). If a colleague from our workshop inspires or helps your thinking in any particular way, be sure to cite them like this: “(conversation with A. Colleague, 12/6/24).” ResultsI have used this assignment in several 300-level courses (enrollment twenty to twenty-five). I typically reserve our three final class sessions for students to present their portfolios in progress and receive feedback from their colleagues. This means we typically end the semester on an energetic and collaborative note. One student told me that the project helped inspire his pursuit of a career in education. Students have reflected that this project helped them to synthesize the major ideas of the class and consider how they might communicate them to communities beyond our classroom.