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We live in a world fraught with compartmentalization. Work outfits vs. weekend wear. Neighborhood friends vs. work colleagues. Convocation vs. chapel. I get it. We like to orient our world based on neatly stacked boxes where we can stuff the various facets of our lives. The problem is this doesn’t reflect the design principles that surround us or the various environments in which we live and operate. We know from a study of nature that everything is connected to everything else. Callenbach reminds us that there is a mutualism or symbiotic relationship in natural ecologies that prevents compartmentalization. He asserts, “Nothing alive exists in isolation from its ecological context. . . . Symbiotic relationships . . . are a universal way in which life forms survive and coexist.”[1] Each of the various ecological elements mutually interconnect with one another. As Taylor reminds us, “Apparently, there is little rugged individualism in nature.”[2]A few summers ago, I took up gardening. More specifically, I attempted to grow my favorite tomato variety, Celebrity. I found planters under the deck with some soil already in them and plopped my seedlings into those boxes. I found a shady spot by the house where they could thrive. I finished my project and waited to see what would happen! However, the saying “out of sight, out of mind” very much applied to my situation. They were out of sight, so watering wasn’t a priority. I barely even tended to them other than to impatiently check for growth. You can probably guess what happened to my hopes of a plentiful tomato crop. I discovered that tomatoes need a lot of sunlight. They also need regular watering, proper soil nutrition, and ongoing tending. This includes removing suckers, staking the plants, and checking for blossom end rot. Everything in that tomato’s ecosystem impacted everything else. Sadly, we didn’t eat a lot of tomatoes that summer, but I learned some important lessons: nothing thrives in isolation and intentionality is critical to growth.These lessons from the natural world apply to teaching and learning. We may think that teaching is a disconnected enterprise, but just like the tomato garden, it is part of a larger ecosystem or constellation of interconnected elements. Our students are connected to one another in a variety of ways including their families of origin, friends, neighbors, co-workers, faculty, staff, communities of faith, and to the broader world. They bring all these social connections and relationships like checked baggage to our classrooms. Not only that, they also take what they have learned back to their respective relationships, responsibilities, and even life contexts. The reciprocal dynamic at work in all natural, social, spiritual, and learning ecologies nurtures growth because of the impact bi-directional engagements have on the teacher and learner.[3] The learner isn’t an isolated element in the classroom but rather brings a number of connections from their social networks, life experiences, ministry opportunities, and adult responsibilities. Bronfenbrenner used the language of nested ecologies to describe the various levels or environments in which a person engages and develops.[4]These complimentary ecosystems interconnect with each other as a way of facilitating and stimulating mutualistic growth.When learning is connected to the student’s multi-contextualized realities, we see impact not just in test scores or nicely articulated papers but also in a holistic approach to navigating the world around them. In one class I teach, my students learn how to develop and use a modified form of Hartman’s ecomap[5] called an ecoplan. In this plan, they must identify a daily strategy to address an activity or a way of being, centered around all six dimensions of a whole person formation model, (physical, mental, emotional, social, moral, and spiritual) first proposed by Ted Ward.[6] For example, on Mondays, they will commit to some form of physical activity, intellectual exercise, emotional engagement, social practice, moral obligation, and spiritual discipline. Something similar is identified for each day of the week. At first it seems overwhelming to them but once they start implementing their plan, they’re often amazed at how easy it is to incorporate an integrated approach to how they live. They begin to understand that what happens in one of the dimensions impacts and is impacted by all the others. They see that proper attention to physical activity has an impact on emotional health. Similarly, intentionality with respect to spiritual practices has an impact on their relationships to one another, and healthy emotional habits may influence mental health as well.In all that we teach, we should be mindful that there is an inherent and inescapable connection between the content we deliver, the teaching that we facilitate, and the way in which students live out what they are learning. When our teaching accommodates these human ecosystem dynamics, we create a far richer learning experience and one that potentially creates lasting impact. Teaching, from this perspective, shifts from content management to formative integration of content.Once we understand that the educational compartments we construct have to be permeable and connected to others, we have an opportunity to radically reshape teaching and learning paradigms. Here’s to a bumper crop of tomatoes andintegrated learners! Notes & Bibliography[1] E. Callenbach, Ecology: A Pocket Guide (University of California Press, 2008), 134.[2] W. Taylor, “Significance of the Biotic Community in Ecological Studies,” The Quarterly Review of Biology 10, no. 3 (1935): 296.[3] S. Lowe, and Lowe, M., Ecologies of Faith in a Digital Age: Spiritual Growth through Online Education (IVP Academic, 2018).[4] U. Bronfenbrenner, The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design (Harvard University Press, 1979).[5] A. Hartman, Finding Families: An Ecological Approach to Family Assessment in Adoption (Sage Publications, 1979).[6] T. Ward, Values Begin at Home (Victor Books, 1989).

On a Sunday morning in mid-April, my students and I gathered around the firepit in the open-air Council House at the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont. Light drizzle pattered on the roof and danced through the open smoke vent, speckling the dust and ash at our feet. Just out of sight the Middle Prong river thundered, singing to us through a grove of Hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis), Sycamores (Platanus occidentalis), and Tulip Poplars (Liriodendron tulipifera). The deciduous trees were leafing out, sprouting and unfurling fresh, vibrant spring greens. They would’ve been blinding in the sun, but the clouds softened and dispersed the light so it felt as though the whole world had been dyed green. Soon pale yellow and orange tuliptree flowers would explode from buds to beckon hummingbirds and bumblebees into the bustle of spring.“The body of Christ, broken for you,” I addressed each student. “And the blood of Christ, the cup of salvation, given for you.” We ate and drank, tasting and seeing, overwhelmed by the goodness of creation and her Creator. Our shared experiences throughout the semester and during that retreat weekend transfigured the embodied, communal practice of eucharistic thanksgiving. We’d seen many broken bodies together – I remembered the sun-bleached skull of a buck, its flesh long returned to the soil. And there’d been at least some blood shed, mostly my own, given to thorns and briars in our adventures and exploration.While that Sunday service was especially powerful, the “normal” religious rituals of prayer and Scripture reading that began each class session took on new resonances as we learned outside. I probably should not be as surprised at these developments as I sometimes still am. The Bible is “an outdoor book . . . a hypaethral book . . . a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better,” according to Wendell Berry.[i] While Berry denies that he is “an accredited interpreter of Scripture,” I have been learning and practicing the tools of disciplined, responsible, faithful biblical exegesis now for two decades.[ii] The work of considering the words of Scripture outside has had a greater transformative effect on me, I have to admit, than the whole sum of my academic research and theological reflection.[iii] My eyes have been opened anew to the power and beauty of the creaturely imagery of Sacred Scripture. Study and even religious reading inside now often feel sterile, and sterilizing, to me. One student commented that while she’d never before considered reading the Bible from the imagined perspective of a plant or animal, now she could never imagine going back to the way things were before.Last year, on Earth Day, my Creaturely Theology class invited fellow students and colleagues to join us in a new tradition. We chose not the conventional activity of planting trees – though our future work will certainly involve much planting – but instead to uproot. There are times for both (Eccl 3.2), whether in farming, or faith, or academic formation. In the outdoor classroom of Johnson University’s campus, non-indigenous privets (Ligustrum sinense), honeysuckles (Lonicera japonica and L. maackii), pears (Pryus calleryana), and tree-of-heaven (Alianthus altissimua) are abundant, especially on borders between fields and forest. They obscure the vision of the goodness of this place and crowd out the native lives that once thrived more freely here. Ivy (Hedera hylix), kudzu (Pueraria montana), and wintercreeper (Euonymus fortunei) smother large patches of soil, devouring all available nutrients and making it impossible for indigenous plants, fungi, and animals to dwell where they once did.One must first have eyes to see to identify such obstacles, and then one can work to uproot them, making possible renewed thriving and good growth. Practicing seeing and reading, giving and receiving, outside, even especially in the traditional practices and words of our faith, has caused scales to fall from our eyes. It has transformed and is transforming us to see, believe, and be empowered to get to work in trust that the God who has begun such work in us, and in God’s world, will be faithful to bring it to completion. Notes & Bibliography[i] Wendell Berry, “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,” Cross Currents 43, no. 2 (1993), 155.[ii] See Wendell Berry, Our Only World: Ten Essays (Counterpoint, 2015), 168.[iii] This is not to repudiate or downplay any of that work, which I still stand behind. See Joseph K. Gordon, Divine Scripture in Human Understanding: A Systematic Theology of the Christian Bible (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019) and also Joseph K. Gordon, ed., Critical Realism and the Christian Scriptures: Foundations and Readings (Marquette University Press, 2023).

Humans, like all living things, are creatures of habit. The familiarity of my classroom spaces, whether indoor or outdoor, is profoundly comforting to me. The established structures and routines – the layout and furniture of the room (or patio), where everyone sits, the specific times we keep for prayer, discussion, board work, and listening all come together – a spatiotemporal synergy – to create an atmosphere of healthy safety that makes the gentle provocations and challenges needed for learning, growth, and even transformation possible. We can address ideas and issues in the unique space and time we have together because of its set-apart particularity. And stability, predictability, and repetition are integral ingredients for the very possibility of such work.When I take students outside for Creaturely Theology, though, such routines and structures are out the window, literally. The changes and challenges of the seasons demand adaptability. We must be ever ready with open minds, hearts, and even hands to receive whatever is offered, moment by moment.There are certainly rhythms and regularities. Throughout the semester we return to the same places again and again, often via the same trails and routes. Every time we arrive again to where we have been before, things are new. The cold browns and grays of January and February give way to rich, vibrant greens, and then whites, yellows, pinks, oranges, and blues, as herbaceous plants awaken and show off beautiful ephemeral blooms in March and April. In the cool, wet winter, we regularly encounter salamanders, small mammals, and ground-dwelling invertebrates, but as the world warms, the diversity of lives multiplies before our eyes. Flying insects appear seemingly from nowhere, and snakes, lizards, and turtles emerge from the subterranean slumber of brumation into the lengthening brightness and warmth.Chorus frogs and spring peepers announce the inevitable coming warmth before we can feel or believe it. Overwintering birds depart and spring migrants arrive, transforming the diurnal soundscape, filling each holler and hilltop with new harmonies. Even aromas shift dramatically. The moldering, earthy wetness of winter gives way to the spice and sweet sap of buds unfurling and swelling into leaves and verdant new shoots greedily pressing through previous years’ detritus, pushing aside soil and rock, to meet the sun. Later in the semester, petrichor – the scent of warm rains on drying soil – lifts our spirits, even when our hair and clothes are dampened.Every change and happening has its particular power for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, but sometimes the experiences are more personal. Some scents and sights have almost bowled me over, returning me to the sensations of my undergraduate self – now twenty years past – in this same but different place.In my last blog I mused on the importance of recognizing and learning the names of our living non-human neighbors whose ancestors have dwelt here for countless generations. It is, of course, impossible for my students and I to know, and to draw near to, all of them in just one semester. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer stresses the desperate need for indigeneity in our age of globalized placelessness.[i] We must shed our restless destructiveness to become grounded again. The health of our environs, their non-human inhabitants, and our own well-being, both physical and psychological, depends upon such attention and connection. It cannot happen completely while obtaining a Bachelor’s degree, let alone during a semester, but I can help plant its seeds, and tend its early growth, with each new cohort of creaturely theologians.The seasons and lives of this place are constantly reshaping the typical rhythms of academia and my own teaching life. I no longer feel as if I am passing through these woods and fields in unassailable ignorance, taking from them what I can. However slowly, I am becoming naturalized. The more I learn, the more palpably I know my ignorance and limitations; and yet, paradoxically, the more I feel at home. As this place and its inhabitants remake, and renew, me, I am better able to share such intimate care with my students.As one student put it at the end of the semester, “We kept coming back and getting to know the area. . . [I]n a way it became ‘our campus,’ not in the sense of ownership, but in the sense of friendship.” Notes & Bibliography[i] See Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 205–15.

In an address at the 1968 International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), Senegalese forester Baba Dioum famously declared, “In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.”[i] We cannot understand what we do not notice, and we will not notice what we cannot name. To love and learn we must first know, and to know, we must name. In my more conventional courses, I continue to assess students on theological and philosophical terms and names. I do so not to determine students’ comprehension and competency in a master discourse, but instead for the sake of calling them to account, to attention, to care, for the uses of variegated, precise language. Because the world is dynamic and changing, and since I hold that God calls human creatures to growth in self-transcendence, we must take seriously the task of stewarding our thoughts and speech.Concepts, ideas, and words, labels, classifications, and names all have dates. Each has a history. But language use is not merely a matter of historical interest, it is a profoundly serious moral task. Through naming, or taxonomy, we learn to navigate the worlds of meaning we have received.[ii] The work of learning, and even creating, new names can be a profoundly liberative, even salvific, activity. But naming can also be used to instrumentalize, enslave, and degrade places, creatures, and persons.Consider the moral difference between labeling fungi, plants, and animals “natural resources,” on the one hand, and “living organisms” on the other. The former risks instrumentalizing such lives economically; the latter might instead help us to recognize their intrinsic value. A third approach might recognize such lives not as resources, or as living things, but instead as “creatures” called into existence, loved, and sustained by God.Whether one uses the language of “natural resources,” “living organisms,” or “creatures,” all three are morally preferable to operating with a mental bestiary or botanical consciousness that ascribes worth, or wrath, to creatures from a narrowly anthropocentric perspective. “Pests” and “weeds” play major roles in our collective cultural psyche, but our distain for such living things does not make them any less loved by God.[iii]In Creaturely Theology we share in the divine work of knowing and caring for other creatures through noticing and naming the lives, even those we might initially despise, that surround us. Each student is tasked with identifying at least one hundred different species of plants, animals, and fungi during the semester. That work requires leaning on scientific and naturalist wisdom gathered in field guides and the living community of iNaturalist experts to get to know the creatures we happen to meet.[iv]Such work has lasting, powerful effects. As one student put it, “The class as a whole showed me how to wonder again. We would go into the woods not knowing what we would find, and then see a plant and not know what it was, and then not know much about it even after identifying it!”We are learning so much about the biodiversity of this place, but such knowledge only increases our appreciation of the mysterious otherness of each creature! We never encounter a generic flower or beetle or bird or snake; each chance meeting is with a unique, unrepeatable individual, known intimately by its Creator. To share such knowledge is a holy privilege, and each time we do we become just a little more like the One who has made us all. Notes & Bibliography[i] See Barbara K. Rodes and Rice Odell, eds., A Dictionary of Environmental Quotations (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 33.[ii] My approach to the related issues of self-transcendence, growth, meaning, and historicity depends upon the work of Bernard Lonergan. See especially Bernard Lonergan, “Natural Right and Historical Mindedness,” in A Third Collection, edited by Robert M. Doran and John Dadosky (University of Toronto Press, 2017), 161–76.[iii] For an important exploration of the risks and deleterious effects of such consciousness on both non-human creatures and on humans, see Bethany Brookshire, Pests: How Human Create Animal Villains (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2022).[iv] See https://www.inaturalist.org/. We also use the apps Seek (https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app) and Merlin (https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/). Both are useful but Seek often exhibits the significant limitations of AI technology, while Merlin more regularly shows its promise.