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PAYING ATTENTION I try to work it in casually, inconspicuously, but of course it is glaring. Students notice it immediately – the emphasis on a student’s progress instead of grades, the focus on their and my mental wellness as the primary means to be sharpest in learning, the inverting of power dynamics and the undoing of traumatizing power relationships in how the classroom is run. My body notices it, too. Decolonizing the classroom is difficult work and wildly unfamiliar territory. It runs directly in the face of what we instructors and professors know the classroom to be. And it runs directly to our worst fears and insecurities and does an elaborate dance around it – but not in a taunting way. It dances freely in a spirit of welcome and joining. A decolonized classroom, this liberating means of being communal learners together, requires constant movement. And truth-telling, where everyone names their fears. Students locate themselves in the learned cycle of education where their performance is assumed to dictate their worth. And instructors and professors work hard to resist the shameful impulse to agree. For this uneven correlation is all we know: performance is worth. Worth is performance. But is worth the performance? Decolonizing work requires an intense amount of internal resistance, of re-narrating what we have been trained to recognize as true, as opposed to what we may instinctually know to be true. Education can be ruthless at worst, engrossed in its unmoving standards at best. Instructors and professors know this all too well: “How else, besides grading, are we supposed to measure progress?” “How else will students take us seriously?” “How do we ensure students prioritize their coursework?” “How do we make sure our assignments do not take a back seat to another’s class or to a student’s ministry or to the ups and downs of their life?” This is the academic-body’s response to fear: rhetorical questions willing to gently carry our insecurity, for we honestly do not know the answer to these questions. And we may never know until we experiment with inverting power in our course structures. And failure. We need to try failure – again and again. And once we are accustomed to failing, to feeling like we are losing our grip on the notion of rigor we were trained to recognize – by sight, or by the all-too-familiar tightness in our chest - we can ask what lesson(s) failure has been trying to teach us all along. We instructors and teachers must become disciples of our failures, insecurities, and fears. Because it almost feels unbearable to not be liked or to feel misunderstood or to sense disrespect. But a decolonial classroom asks the instructor/professor what the lessons are: What messages of community and communal learning are thrust to the fore when the body struggles with varying messages of acceptance? In actively shifting the purview, the how and who, of learning, what might be able to be seen and understood differently? In a world inundated by systems of dominion and domination, mastery and expertise, often ignorant of the fullness or complexity of a person, what might a holistic form of respect look like? It has to be felt in the body. There is no way around it. We will only get pieces, as a common complaint is that we cannot be everything to every student. This much is true; but even in recognizing this expansive truth, expanding our sense of resisting strictures is still a lesson well-learned.   HOW TO GAIN TRUST IN THE CLASSROOM Dear instructor/professor, How do you feel? It is only from here, the space of feeling, that decolonial possibility in the classroom can be born. It is not method. It is not strategy or project. It is a return to humanity, it is still-unfolding fullness. The process of learning happens to occur in the midst of a collective space where humans are learning how to be appropriately human together. Your decades of study does matter; but what matters most is your decades of living. Does your living have room in your classroom?  This is decoloniality; it is a (means of) living into. To be decolonial means treating people like humans - not objects, or projects, or cogs in a machine - but like their life is beautiful and important and lovely. When instructors/professors begin to get a hold of this – first by addressing our fears, and next by allowing space for our pedagogical dreams to blossom and run a bit freer, then and only then can we broach the conversation and winning students’ trust.

As a student in North American classrooms I learned about punctuality, sometimes the hard way. It became so ingrained in me that I am now always early for everything; I am present fifteen minutes ahead of time before the start of church, class, or any mundane event. I reflect on this and find that I am a Latinx individual who has become acclimated to life in the US. However, I now find myself teaching in classrooms that are increasingly diverse. As I interact with these diverse students, I find myself reconnecting with my roots and learning that my heritage as a Latinx person allows me to make connections to the culture of many of my students. Punctuality is a strong Western value. Time is money. One of the greatest resources people have in their possession is time. Yet this is one of the things that sets Western thought apart from other cultures around the world. An example of an attitude that contrasts sharply with this idea is the Latin American saying: “hay más tiempo que vida” (there is more time than life). This saying can be interpreted in two ways. First, one can say carpe diem, seize the day. Life is short, therefore one must make the most of his or her time on earth. The second way this can be taken is that there is plenty of time. Time will go on, and one must therefore invest in relationships rather than fret over punctuality and time. This second interpretation is the way many Latin Americans behave and think consciously and subconsciously. It obviously conflicts with the expectations of Eurocentric culture.[1] I spent three weeks teaching two courses in Zambia last year. One area that I was able to build bridges from my Latin American background with my students from Zambia was through the principle of Ubuntu and its implications for time. Ubuntu is a term that cannot be translated because of the density and depth of its meaning.[2] It is a term that may be described as meaning “humanity for others,” “I am because you are,” “I can only become a person through other persons,” and “to become a person.”[3] A term from Latin America that is similar is the Oaxacan concept of nakara. It is translated as “a willingness to take responsibility for another by providing what is needed for a healthy life.”[4] It indicates a strong collective bond. Rather than being disjointed individuals pulling away from each other, this invites us to see our connectedness and relatedness to one another. My actions affect another person and their actions also affect me. We do not live in a vacuum. Even in our most individualized Western mindset our actions have consequences, whether to an organization, our society, to the environment, to those of a different nationality or race, etc. As I reconnect with my own Latin American roots and simultaneously interact with my Zambia students, I realize that we may be so concerned over the things we must get done and material that needs to be covered that we forget that as teachers we must model an empathic humanity to others. I knew I had a lot of things to get done for my intensive courses in Zambia. However, the first day there, I realized that the students had only participated in asynchronous class sessions and that their only connection to me was a computer screen. The students vocalized the difficult time they were having with this type of education, learning our LMS, and the culture of online courses. These were very foreign. They were in a state of learning shock, longing to establish a close connection with their professors and the seminary. This was the reason that I decided to improvise and to be flexible with my goals. The first day of class, instead of beginning to lecture, I asked them about themselves and the deepest held innermost values related to their own culture and way of being in the world. The students timidly warmed up and began to share from their own point of view. During my personal time at the hotel, I designed some activities that involved teamwork and group discussion. I have often seen my students in the North American context groan and complain about these types of activities. They seem to be very practical and just want the instructor to disseminate information. They also dislike working in groups because they are oriented to doing well for themselves first. Group work may reduce the importance of their individual work and consequently impair them from getting a good grade. But my students from Zambia thrived in this type of environment. They laughed, shared, and opened up to one another. The second thing that I had to adjust was to slow down and spend time on those concepts that I thought could make a positive influence on the students. I learned that I do not have to cover everything. My students are intelligent and responsible for their readings. It was as if my students had to come to a sense of corporate satisfaction with the material covered. I was surprised that when something deeply impacted them that they demonstrated their concern and appreciation for the course content by keeping silent. It is as if they had to digest the material and take their time doing so. Their silence was a mark of comprehension, a sign that they were processing their thoughts and were satisfied with what they were learning. If I can describe it, it was a silence that in Western contexts might be perceived as uncomfortable, but for them it was meaningful. It was the silence of awe and wonder. As I strive for cultural competence and modeling the right relationship with others, Ubuntu has become an important relational term that helps me build a rapport with my students from Zambia. While I may not be the best model of it, for me it means that the classroom must have a strong relational component. My students not only want to receive the right information, but they also want to exist in the right relationship with the instructor and their classmates and course content. I found myself learning from them. Ubuntu has the potential to cross socioeconomic and cultural borders. I find myself thinking differently of my role as a teacher, the class dynamic, and my relationship with my students.   [1] Disclaimer: this does not mean that the class is unstructured or that there is no time limit for student assignments. [2] John D. Volmink, “Ubuntu: Filosofía de vida y ética social,” in Construir puentes Ubuntu para el liderazgo de servicio, edited by the Consortium of Building Bridges for Peace (Canterbury: ImPress, 2019): 45-66. [3] Ibid. [4] Paula E. Morton, Tortillas: A Cultural History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014), 34-36, 138.

Last semester I spent two weeks in Zambia teaching a Doctor of Ministry course to students from eight different African countries. This was an important experience for me because it magnified many of the similar cross or intercultural exchanges that I have experienced in the classroom here in the US. Of concern to me was the notion of cultural competency in order to have a creative classroom experience that enhanced students’ learning. Cultural competency may be defined simply as “the ability to successfully teach students who come from cultures other than our own.” It has also been defined as “the ability of a person to effectively interact, work, and develop meaningful relationships with people of various cultural backgrounds.” The first definition is a bit too utilitarian for me. It is measured simply by teaching students, and students learn all kinds of things from us—including sometimes what they do not want to be like. The second is a better definition, since the focus is on the interaction between the teacher and students. I think it is important to study our students and learn as much as possible about them, in order to build rapport with them and creatively relate our course content to their lives and contexts. As I prepared for this experience in Zambia, there were many contextual aspects to consider. First, I was clearly an outsider. Even upon arrival at the international airport, individuals looked at me and could tell I was not only different, but also an outsider. Many of the students came from countries that suffered under the yoke of colonialism, and much of my training in the Academy has sensitized me to its effects and the necessary work of conscientization among the oppressed.  Secondly, I had to consider how distance would affect us. In African countries, students are generally used to getting to know the instructor and spending time with them. I had met the students virtually via online discussion boards, but their cultures require a person-to-person engagement. Several students had limited internet services and/or sporadic cellular services. Sometimes their cities experienced brownouts or blackouts that limited their online engagement and even their submission of assignments in a timely manner. Being present with the students made a difference and they made it known to me how much they appreciated me being there in person.  This type of situation can be frustrating. Conflict may arise unnecessarily. My ethnic background is that I am Latinx and specifically of Honduran heritage. I have also been immersed in North American education culture for most of my adult life. The Academy has its own culture and expectations. I constantly asked myself how I was to navigate these cultural differences and build bridges to students with completely different experiences and expectations in the classroom. The heart of the matter was that I first had to get over myself. I am Latinx, but even among my community I have always heard things like “hay que mejorar la raza” (“we must improve the race,” meaning we must act European and live among “whiter” races); or “trabajar como negro para vivir como blanco” (“working like a black person in order to live like a white person,” implying that white people always live better than black people). Work among people from different ethnic identities and cultures requires humility. We must have a posture of asking questions and learning from the other—not passing judgment. We must become students of our students. I went into the Academy to be ever inquisitive, to seek out new experiences, to have new ideas, and to somehow make this a better world. This meant that I also had to move beyond my own stereotypes of Africa. Colonizers referred to it as “the dark continent.” One of the first references I had to Africa was seeing hunger portrayed on television through human disasters in Ethiopia and Somalia. More recently, a president referred to countries outside the US as “s—hole countries.” Our mental sketches and mental images need deconstruction. But deconstruction is the easiest part of the process. Anyone can tear down, criticize, or point out flaws and errors. The hard part is to reconstruct a new just and fair structure or mental scheme once the previous ones have been torn down. As for creativity, on the first day of class I asked my students to create a list of positive African values and ideals that they strove to live for. Among the many things they shared were Ubuntu and music. Ubuntu is a South African term that means “I am because you are,” or “humanity towards others.” It is a philosophy adopted by many people of Africa that emphasizes relationships, listening, and being heard. Ubuntu gives them a sense of satisfaction or fulfillment in their relationships with others. Music stood out to me because music is everywhere in Africa. Through drums, in their ministries, and in their homes, my students in Zambia love music. I asked myself how I could use these values to create a classroom environment that would appeal to my students. Our classrooms in North America tend to be cold, dry, and stale. We tend to see education as disseminating the right information so the students can think the right way and act the right way in this world. It is a manner of doing education that prioritizes intellectual ability to the detriment of students from different cultures. The students in Zambia appeared to be pointing me in a direction through Ubuntu that was warm, relational, and alive. The concern was not only in receiving the right information or learning the right way of doing things, but in being in the world and being in right relationship with one another. Music accentuated the quality of pathos, in the sense of evoking emotions or affections that seemed to satisfy a desire to be in right relationship with one another. After finding out what the students valued, I decided to tweak my lesson plans and include activities that were more dialogical and that included music. In my following blogs, I will continue discussing specific ways in which Ubuntu and music helped establish a positive rapport with my students from African countries.

In the last several years, I have been pondering the purpose of our work as theological educators. This seems especially pertinent because many mainline churches which both send and receive our students are dying, theological education institutions have found it difficult to attract new students, most of these institutions are in budgetary crisis, and more schools are closing every year. I have wondered what is important about theological education, what value it adds, and what about it lasts. In the process, I have considered my own experience in seminary and graduate school. It has been 29 and 26 years, respectively, since I entered those programs and I have been reflecting on what has stuck, and what made the time, money, and effort worth it. I admit that I don’t remember many specifics unless I scan my shelves for the books that I read in those programs; they are old friends and evoke a difficult season when I was undergoing a major gestalt shift—a time when old paradigms were losing their power for me. These books remind me of a time when I began to understand more deeply something I had been struggling to clarify. They are old friends who introduced me to new horizons and opened new possibilities in my thinking and doing and being. I have kept these books not because I ever imagine using them in a classroom myself or because I need them for a writing project (they are too outdated for either of those): I keep them because they represent significant—even lifechanging—moments of my life. I remember my professors, my classmates, our discussions, the papers I wrote, the meetings in faculty offices where I engaged the ideas in these books. I think about the arguments I wrestled with, developed, let go of. I remember wrestling with my own understandings, and with teachers and peers, as I felt myself changing, growing, emerging. I don’t value these books and the memories of my time in seminary and a doctoral program so much because of the career they have afforded me; I value them for who they helped me become. I have been playing with the idea that perhaps the benefit of theological education is less in the information we educators impart or the professional training we provide, and more about the kind of learning and experiential communities we build together. Perhaps our value in the world as theological educators is less about the preparation for a particular ministry, the ordination process, or further schooling, and more about the kinds of opportunities we afford students to be formed, to be changed, to grow as people, no matter where they end up or what they do in their professional lives. Students will be formed by all the new information they are exposed to, of course, but also—and maybe more importantly—students are formed by the relationships with people and ideas they develop while in our programs, by the ethos of curiosity and the room to ask gnarly existential questions, by the freedom to interrogate life and the world and themselves and God. The goal of formation emphasizes who people are becoming: how they think, how they behave, how they treat others, what they value, their level of emotional intelligence, the ways they respond to God in and for the world. What if theological education institutions had as their mission to be sites of exploration toward the formation of people so that they—and those they engage—can flourish? Willie Jennings’ book After Whiteness (Eerdmans, 2020) is one of the most important books on teaching, learning, and organizational leadership I have read in recent years, and I want to be a part of what he is imagining. I want to see what could happen if theological education institutions come to be seen as places to belong, to grow, to change, to be creative, to think hard, to come alive in one’s own faith, hope, and love. What would it take for them to become places that explore formation as good people rather than primarily to impart knowledge or deconstruct embedded theologies? Jennings assumes—and I agree—that all human beings yearn for a place to belong and a place to learn how to flourish, and to have that modeled for them. What if theological education institutions became those places? What if they were places people came to first to explore rather than pursue? In the process of this work, of course, we must name what is going on in the world, what is wrong, what impedes flourishing. As Jennings notes, this requires the difficult and painful work of understanding our current condition(s), exposing and decentering and deconstructing the dominant (white, often male) view. This is something divinity schools like mine excel in. But people yearning for flourishing need to understand something else, too. We need to lean into hope, love, faith, grace; to understand all people as beloved, as having the imprimatur of God, as having voices that need to be heard, that deserve to be heard; to have the tools to enact justice. Theological educators in this model would need to have an explicit vision of flourishing, a sense of what could be, of what surely the Divine Urging is calling all of us toward. Those of us teaching theology and religion have an opportunity and, I think, an invitation to hold out such a vision, a creative imagining of who and what God is, and for what that God longs, for her creation. So many of our students live fragmented, trauma-filled lives. They come to our programs from homes, schools, communities, and jobs that are toxic, stressed, and struggling and, often, oppressive. What if we invited them to join us in seeking something more grounded, more life-giving, more whole, and helped them, for example, resist the neoliberal impulse for mastery, control, organization, ownership, separation, and possession (even of ideas)? What if we not only taught such a way but modeled it ourselves as well? Would that change our focus and our practices in the classroom? Would that shift our criteria of “success”? In this playful imaginary, theological educators and the administrators of our institutions would be normative, prescriptive, and committed to their own formation and growth as well as that of students, and of the communities of which we are a part. We could do this while also being critically analytical of the ideas we promote. We might ask explicitly, for example, what the sacred texts tell us about flourishing. We might examine what various religious/faith/philosophical traditions have to say about the good life. We might wonder aloud what is the story of the Good as witnessed in the sacred texts. We might inquire how to sift through all the broken humanness in the sacred texts to get to a message of hope, love, grace, redemption, care. If a deep understanding of flourishing and formation toward such a life and world became the goal, I wonder how that would change how we teach our students to read sacred texts, and whether it would influence how we teach the histories of Christianity. Would such a goal change how we teach pastoral care in our complex world? Would the flourishing of ourselves and our students as the goal influence how we teach ritual and religious practice? Would it change how we teach theology? Would it change how presidents and deans lead the institutions of which we are a part? Would it change whether and how we create community together? I am not suggesting we become proselytizers: I want to retain and exercise my critical thinking, even in relation to the commitments I hold dear, but I sense that a shift in our mission and focus might change some of the ways we do things, moving the emphasis from production to exploration. I yearn for more conversations among ourselves as theological educators and with our students about what we might do differently that might help heal ourselves, each other, our institutions, and maybe even our particular corners of the world. These kinds of conversations take work and intentionality, to be sure, and it would take effort to alter our emphasis from education as information to education as formation toward flourishing. For starters, we would want to develop some shared understandings of what flourishing looks like, what it requires, and how theological education could contribute to it. And, of course, formation and information are not so distinct; it is more a matter of alterations to emphases and processes and outcomes I am pondering. How/would an emphasis on formation to enable flourishing reconfigure our curricula, our faculty, our teaching practices, and the students who might be interested in joining us in that exploration? We might continue to attract fewer and fewer students seeking ordination credentials, it is true, but it is also true that we may spark the desire to join us in people who don’t know exactly what they will do with their time with us, people with tangled existential questions who are looking for a place to belong and explore and grow. And if they joined us in these efforts, who knows what old friends they might take with them?

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

Death is all around us. The palpable feeling of impending loss, grief, dread, doom, and despair has gripped our families, our nation and the world. With each passing day, there are increased numbers of positive diagnoses, hospitalizations, and loss. It feels as if we have been snatched up into the sci-fi novels of Octavia Butler.  We are on the inside of an apocalyptic narrative. We, the global community, in this pandemic moment, are walking through the valley of the shadow of death.  Mental health professionals are part of the teams of experts who are working tirelessly during this pandemic. Societal shuddering and quarantine have meant an increase in domestic violence, self-harm, and child abuse. There has been an uptick in all the forms of mental illness. Sustained periods of terror, trauma, and isolation shred our imaginations. The pressure of this moment will drive some people mad. The corporate value of rugged individualism is not serving us well in this moment. The myths of the lone ranger, the solitary winner, the underdog triumphing against all odds, are box office favorites. In the past, we have preferred the lone achiever, we have favored the one winner, and have envied the one, most prized, beauty. In this moment of pandemic, the ideologies which promote “I, me, mine” are failing us. Slowly we are awakening to, and becoming desperate for, “we, y’all, us, everybody.” The pandemic will be interrupted by a vaccine and/or by a cocktail of medications which will more rapidly quell symptoms. In the meantime, let us steady our fear, anxiety, hopelessness and despair by revitalizing our notion of community. We know all life affects all other life. Martin L. King, scholar and activist, said it this way, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” The poignancy of this truth was made vivid for me and my students when we traveled to West Africa. Many communities in West Africa welcomed me and my students many times over many years. While learning in the homes and schools of othered persons, my students and I were immersed in the life saving and unfamiliar practices of ubuntu. Ubuntu is a communal value of connectedness, radical care, hospitality and inclusion. Ubuntu means simply – “all-of-we-are-one.”  It means, “I cannot know myself apart from you. And you cannot know yourself apart from me.” I means, “If we are not, I am not.” When Ghanaians greet a friend in the market place the question is not “How are you?” This question, in the practice of ubuntu, has no merit or meaning. The question about the welfare of a single person apart from kith and kin seems absorb in the ubuntu philosophy. The greeting, “How are you?” infers that you could be some way that your people are not. Or that the circumstances of your people are not your circumstances. In the practice of ubuntu, the report and disclosure of your wellbeing is a report of the wellbeing of your people.  So, the greeting in the marketplace is “How is it?” The response is - “We are well.” The response is in the plural. In ubuntu, if your mother is well - you are well.  If you brother or sister are on hard times – then you are on hard times.  If your aunt or uncle had a victory, then you had a victory. How you are is how they are – because “all-of-we-is-one.” Ubuntu is bubbling up all around the USA. People all over the country are finding ways, while honoring physical distancing and quarantine, to build community, find community, be community, support community, live as if we are one community. Neighborhoods are having cocktail parties while each neighbor stays on their own porch. Synchronous on-line experiences like concerts, card games, birthday parties, yoga, cooking lessons, and writing sessions are easing the feelings of loneliness and the strain of being alone. Streamed and recorded worship experiences are connecting disconnected souls.  Experiencing community, being part of something bigger than oneself, knowing that you are connected to neighbor, fictive kin, family and co-workers helps all of us cope and survive in these death dealing times. In ubuntu, individualism is replaced with empathy, forgiveness, mutuality, and a feeling of deep connection with all that is. The Wabash Center, in our nimbleness and responsiveness, has reached out to our participants asking, “How is it?” We have heard from our colleagues the many ways they are sustaining and building community. We have also listened to laments from persons in the academic community who feel neglected, overlooked, and lonely.  We have heard colleagues say, with relief in their voices, – thank you for checking on me, because no one in my school has reached out to me.  Friends, the life of the mind cannot be a life of isolation unto death.  Check on your colleagues – just say, “How is it?”  And – as important - do not be afraid to reach back when you receive a call. Participating in activities of community will beat back the fear, the anguish and the trepidation. The devastation of the pandemic will be felt for years. Together (and not apart) we will survive. In the words of Toni Morrison -- "This is precisely the time when artists go to work.  There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language.  That is how civilizations heal."  Let community building be our artistic message. Let the composers among us write songs celebrating the marvel of community. Open the old cookbooks for cocktail formulas and recipes to reconnect with the ancestors. Make quilts in virtual sewing bees for the babies born at this peculiar time; knit shawls for those who are now widowed. Relieve a parent who is home schooling by writing poetry with their children on Facetime. Map the vegetable garden you will soon plant and ask your neighbor which veggies would they like planted.  Find a way to create something for someone else knowing this gesture of care and thoughtfulness will radiate out to everybody. And when the blues come (as they will) – write the words of lament, despair and hopelessness, express the uncertainty and rage, make vivid your messiness and unbalance and sorrow. Then share it with someone else – a neighbor or friend - to help them release their pain. And so – the question, I suppose, is “how is it with me?” I am both overjoyed and overwhelmed.  I am so grateful to the Wabash Center staff for their maximum flexibility in a time when we could have gone dormant.  We transitioned to working remotely while at the same time scrambled to create needed resources for our participants.  We created a dedicated web-page for online teaching resources, tripled the number of podcasts, hosted digital check-in conversations for more than 20 workshop groups, created a Facebook page and started live webinars. We are creating a page for artistic expression and dedicated blog column for online teaching. I am overjoyed about my staff’s dedication and hard work.  We have gotten feedback that our efforts are helpful in this moment of disenfranchisement. My overwhelmed-ness is that I started the job of directing the Wabash Center just three months ago; I am still disoriented.  Then, last week, I was informed that in my circle, three friends are diagnosed with COVID-19; the wife of a friend died on Wednesday, and the brother of another friend died of cancer on Sunday.  Both families are in grief and in upheaval because the funerals will be livestreamed. In the spirit of ubuntu – we are overjoyed, we are new to our job and overwhelmed, we are grieving the loss of loved ones and incensed because a livestreamed funeral is inadequate to hold our sorrow. Even as I write this, I have a keen sense of my community gather around me - calling daily, checking-in regularly – finding ways to be together through this chaos.

Exposing and disrupting the values which perpetuate white normativity puts a strain on the adult classroom. Individualism is a cornerstone value of whiteness and patriarchy.  As persons committed to the flimsy lie of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, too many students believe that education is best attempted alone. Conforming to the principles and practices of individualism, adult students believe that by leaving the people who formed and shaped them they can better demonstrate excellence. By denouncing accountability to and responsibility for their people, their kin, and their community, they are becoming good U.S. citizens. “To thine own self be true” is exaggerated to narcissism, isolation, and dangerous detachment. The racist values of this U.S. society teach that in order to be real you must be alone. Equally, the U.S. educational system functions to uphold the societal tenants of individualism. Higher education rewards individualism. My teaching colleagues were told that the only way to make a legitimate contribution to their scholarly field of study was to do it alone. Collaboration is cheating! We are discouraged from playing well with one another. Consequently, teachers typically insist upon and praise individualism in adult classrooms.     Even for students who understand themselves to be part of a community and enabled by the sacrifices of others, adult classrooms are places of disorientation. The new perspectives, new expectations, new experiences, and new ideas challenge even the most prepared, supported and grounded student. For the student who presumes that individualism is the best way to approach study, the disorientation can become severe and can make learning terrifying. The hardcore pledge to individualism which is a hallmark of U.S. society and the academy only serves to exacerbate the student’s anxieties. Further confusing to the adult student steeped in the delusion of individualism is the classroom that values partnership, cooperation, and collaboration. Group assignments and shared projects that are designed as counterpoints or correctives to society’s hegemonic imagination dumbfound the student who believes the better way is the autonomous way. I have actually heard loud and painful groans when students, upon reading my syllabus, understand that group work is part of the course experience.  Students who believe their work is best showcased in isolation resist and refuse to work on group projects. On more than one occasion, I have had to disband fighting groups.  On a few occasions, groups were crippled by the logistics of when and how to meet. Repeatedly, groups will do tandem reports with each person giving individual speeches rather than working for a synergized, harmonized product. In several instances, I am certain that groups relinquished power to one student who then did most, if not all, of the work. In all of these situations, my hunch is that those students who saw no pedagogical value in collaboration sabotaged the groups. When self-reliance eclipses a sense of community, belonging, and mutuality or when self-reliance is at the expense of communal care and responsibility, then classroom spaces that affirm values of mutuality and teamwork become experiences of deep pain and confounding for the students – and the teacher.    I want my students to become aware that knowing is communal and that learning is relational. Individual knowledge is a fallacy. How we make meaning depends upon the context(s) in which we find ourselves. Who we are and whose we are has direct bearing upon how we learn as well as the measure and merit of learning. Knowing and knowing better requires awareness of relationships. Individualism limits, constrains, and distorts efforts to know beyond yourself.  I have over the years developed strategies to signal to students that their connection to their people while learning is paramount and that my classroom is a place to develop skills for collaboration, partnership and cooperation. The exercises are not meant to instantly dissuade students of individualism as a core value. They are meant as moments to consider that there are other, maybe more generative, values to hold dear while learning and living.  One of my learning activities is a ritual of invocation. Early in the semester I ask students to consider persons, living or dead, who would be glad they are enrolled in my class. I tell them to think about persons who would support them in school when things get difficult or persons who have their best interest at heart as they move through coursework. When students are ready, I ask that each student in-turn speak aloud the full name of one of the persons. I instruct students, saying one name per turn, to exhaust their list of persons. Once all the names have been spoken, I acknowledge the ancestral and communal love in the room. This conjuring often sustains us. Another exercise is a reflection activity. I give students time to think through their answers, then instruct them to write their answers as succinct lists on the blackboard: Who are your people (describe in race, class, gender and other social location indicators)? To whom are you accountable while in this degree program? Who is praying for you while you are here? Who do you struggle not to disappoint as you study? What highest job of leadership will be afforded you once you have demonstrated reasonable mastery? What is the suffering of your people? What are their vulnerabilities? What is their trouble? Which aspects of their suffering and anguish will you bring to bear upon the conversations in this course? How will you work so that with the taking of this degree you are more informed about the needs of your people? During your studies for which systemic oppression will you become expert for the healing of your people? These kinds of learning exercises help reconnect and remind us we are not alone. At least they help me. Each time I do an exercise of this kind, I name my own ancestors and our troubles. I, too, am reminded that I do not teach alone and that I do not teach in vain.