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Being honest with oneself is challenging. One might think that academics, committed to intellectual pursuits, would have an easier time being honest with themselves. I fear this is not the case, at least for me.Frustration and rejection abound in academia. Whether it be the rejection of a piece of writing, an unsuccessful grant proposal, or, more commonly, a teaching difficulty, academics face a smorgasbord of possible sources of strife. Some become defiant phoenixes, rising above disappointment and angst, sometimes becoming hyperconfident egoists. Others ignore the positives and engage in a Sisyphean pursuit of perfection, morphing into self-flagellating pessimists. Others are more even-keeled, particularly those who can separate a sense of self from their job, although I suspect this level of equanimity takes years, if not decades, to develop. Let me tell you what I hope is my first lie of this essay:If a professor is sufficiently skilled, all students will be motivated to learn, will put forth their best effort, will be completely attentive in class, will accept the professor’s judgment of their assessments, and will not violate academic integrity.At every educational level I have attended or worked at, some of the instructors were spoken of reverentially. Their pedagogical acumen was mythical, captivating their students and guiding them to produce work of remarkably high quality. I assumed that their teaching ability was not just better than mine, but categorically superior. To employ a baseball analogy, if they were Major League quality, I belonged in Little League. Although many of my students were graciously engaged, showed up prepared, behaved attentively, and accepted my assessment judgments, the fact that not all my students can be described as such reflected a deficiency on my part. Not only was I letting myself down by not being a better teacher, but I was also doing my students and my institution a disservice. I had to improve somehow. I could always explain course material more clearly. Perhaps I should grade even more generously. No, I should grade more strictly, then students would be more motivated to focus in class and to prepare for their assessments. It was so simple for the great teachers about whom I had been hearing my entire life.Let’s try to be honest.Even though I fall into the self-flagellating pessimist category outlined above, do I really think that every student issue was my fault? Let’s try another question. Do I blame my colleagues when they report struggling with a student who habitually shows up late or violates academic integrity? I would not, just as I would not blame other people who receive subpar treatment.So, why am I unable to excise the lie mentioned above from my psyche? It comes back to the mythically great teachers. They, certainly, have solved the problems I am having. Thus, a perfect, or nearly perfect teacher exists; I ought to work to be as strong an instructor as they are. Do I have empirical evidence that these instructors are, in fact, universally beloved? I suppose I do not, but that has not shaken my belief in their mythology. Here’s a second lie I’m going to tell that underlies the first one:You should want everyone to like you and you have the capacity to get everyone to like you.I’ve never been comfortable with anyone, let alone students, not liking me. I have been told that getting everyone to like you is like trying to fit a rug that is too big for a room—whatever you do, there will be a corner in which the rug won’t fit or lie flat. Even in classes in which most students reported on their evaluations that they would recommend me as a teacher, if it wasn’t 100 percent of them, I felt as if I had failed to live up to standards. This takes me to a final lie: Student satisfaction is a direct reflection of quality teaching.I accept this as a lie, despite institutional pressure to return high student satisfaction scores. If I acknowledge this, then the fact that I am not universally beloved by students does not entail that I am an inadequate teacher. The hard truth is that I would likely be a better teacher if I focused less on my perception of how my teaching is received. There is likely nothing I can do to make everyone like me. Perhaps the mythically great teachers are just that—myths I’ve held on to as a way of magnifying the negative at the expense of the positive.

Words That Refuse to Remain WordsDeportation. ICE. Visa. Travel restrictions. Social-media screening. An “admit-until” date.Lately, these words refuse to remain only words in my life.I hear them as a transnational scholar and in conversations with students who have crossed borders to study, answer a calling, or build lives across more than one place. A policy change can enter the classroom before we do—through a delayed visa appointment, a family member’s status, or the question of whether visiting home is worth another border crossing.As I write in early September 2026, changes under the Trump administration make this uncertainty more immediate. F, M, and J visa applicants remain subject to online presence review, while a Department of Homeland Security rule scheduled for September 15 would replace “duration of status” with fixed admission periods for F and J students and exchange visitors. Students and I are trying to understand what these changes mean for study, travel, work, and future plans.[i]In our classrooms, these words may be topics for theology, ethics, or pastoral care. But for some students, they arrive with bodies, papers, families, borders, prayers, fears, debts, and futures attached.What kind of pedagogy becomes possible when immigration policy is not an abstract topic, but a daily atmosphere?My first response is to protect my students. I want them to take intellectual risks without being forced into personal or legal ones—and to speak and create without calculating whether visibility itself is dangerous.But I do not want protection to become the only way I know how to see them. When Care Becomes Too CarefulEven as I try to imagine a pedagogy attuned to deportability, I hesitate.It can sound like one more instruction: Be careful. Be sensitive. Do no harm. All of this matters. I am not asking faculty to care less. I am asking what happens when care becomes a narrowing way of seeing.Care can become too careful when I lower expectations without asking what support a student wants, avoid difficult material, interpret silence only as fear, or turn a check-in into a request for disclosure. In trying not to harm a student, I may decide who they are before listening.Deportability is not an identity or a label for undocumented people. It names a condition produced through law, surveillance, uncertain status, and the possibility that immigration systems may interrupt a life.[ii] Undocumented students, international students, refugees, permanent residents, and citizens do not face the same legal conditions. Perhaps immigration precarity is broader, while deportability names its sharpest edge: exclusion, detention, or removal.Deportability also travels through families, friendships, congregations, and classrooms.A student may be physically present while part of their attention is elsewhere: a visa appointment, a family member’s status, or a future that feels suspended. This does not mean the student is less committed. It means learning is happening amid fear, responsibility, hope, humor, fatigue, and ordinary life. The Right to Be OrdinaryFaculty need to be careful about what we ask students to share and how easily “immigration policy” can become family, paperwork, debt, fear, prayer, and love.And yet, in our desire to care well, we may see students living under immigration precarity mainly through fear, trauma, risk, and vulnerability.By ordinary, I do not mean untouched by precarity. I mean not required to represent it—or to perform resilience for us.Students may live under real risk. But their lives are larger than risk. They may also be funny, brilliant, impatient, angry, joyful, bored, and intellectually restless.What if such a pedagogy makes room for uncertainty without letting it become a student’s whole story?Pedagogy cannot remove the legal conditions producing precarity, but it can refuse to make students prove, perform, or explain them. It may offer flexibility without forced disclosure, choices when assignments invite personal experience, and teaching that does not turn international or immigrant students into living case studies. It can maintain rigor while asking what support makes learning possible.It may also honor students’ right not to explain or translate their lives or turn private experiences into material for our learning.Perhaps it means creating classrooms where students can simply be students—students who disagree with us, love theory, are tired of theory, and talk about food, music, family, faith, work, beauty, and the future.Students who are shaped by deportability but not defined by it. Careful Enough for LifeI have listened to students wonder whether visiting family is worth another border crossing. Friends and colleagues have shared worries about visa status, work authorization, and the fragile timelines through which governments and institutions shape who may stay, teach, study, and belong. Some of us who teach carry these words too, though not with the same legal risk or institutional power.I do not know whether “deportability-attuned pedagogy” is the right phrase. But I want a pedagogy that does not confuse care with pity, sensitivity with surveillance, or trauma-awareness with a narrowed imagination of our lives.What might become possible in our classrooms when immigration precarity is recognized but not allowed to tell the whole story?What if fear, anger, boredom, humor, ambition, uncertainty, and joy can all become part of the learning we do together?Perhaps care is careful enough when it recognizes danger without allowing danger to tell the whole story—when it makes room for students to name who they are and who they are becoming. Notes & Bibliography[i] Sources current as of September 3, 2026: U.S. Department of State, “Announcement of Expanded Screening and Vetting for Visa Applicants,” March 25, 2026; U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “Establishing a Fixed Time Period of Admission and an Extension of Stay Procedure,” July 17, 2026. [ii] Nicholas P. De Genova, “Migrant ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life,” Annual Review of Anthropology 31 (2002): 419–447, DOI: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.31.040402.085432. 

Most days, I walk into my classroom with ease. My clothes are professional, my hair is done, my slides are ready, and I stand at the front like a conductor ready to direct an orchestra – excited and eager to hear what emerges.One day a week, though, I walk into a different classroom. This time, my hair is up and my water bottle rattles with ice. My clothes are vividly neon. Instead of standing at a podium, I put on some loud reggaeton music and slide to the floor to stretch.Some days I teach Theology. Other days I teach Zumba.As a professor officially in my “mid-career” phase, I sometimes think nostalgically on my first few years of teaching. I had tons of enthusiasm and energy, and I would try all kinds of things to keep my classes moving and engaging. Most of them worked okay, but only a few became tried-and-true staples of my teaching style. I appreciate that I can spend less time inventing new projects and activities and instead tap into my “greatest hits” for more dependable results, and yet sometimes I miss the frisson of coming in and trying something new. So I found a new way to reconnect with that energy.Thanks to a generous Wabash grant, I’ve now been a licensed Zumba instructor for over a year. I teach my classes on my campus, so my students are my students, and they’ve slowly grown used to seeing me both in blazers and crop tops, depending on the context. I’ve learned more than I could have imagined about the body image, stress, and intensity of my students’ lives – and I’ve also learned a few key things about myself as a teacher.First off, it’s okay to teach from a place of joy rather than raw expertise. I am not that impressive as a dancer. I’m plus-sized and pushing 40 with a persistent foot injury, so even with my dance background and enthusiasm, plenty of my youthful undergrads can hit choreography more cleanly and look cuter while doing it. Turns out that that isn’t the point, and honestly, it doesn’t matter once we get going. I’ve learned, or re-learned, that I just love teaching! I thrill to see learners follow my lead and instructions, knowing they’ll have a unique and new experience. Seeing students overtake me feels like a victory, not a failure. Teaching Zumba has been a powerful reminder that teaching is mostly about going first and inviting others along – perfect mastery isn’t necessary, but joy is, and I get that in spades from being with a group of curious people. I feel like I’ve seen my vocation distilled down to the best bits, and reconnecting with that makes me more confident in the traditional classroom.Secondly, I’ve been reminded of how bodily all teaching is. I literally teach a course entitled Bodies in Christian Theology, so this isn’t so much a surprise as a reprise, but I love using my full body-self in teaching – pacing, gesturing, talking (perhaps excessively), writing, and pointing. If my body is engaged in teaching, shouldn’t my students’ bodies be engaged in learning? Teaching Zumba – and seeing that a bit of silliness and controlled chaos actually enhances the classroom more than it detracts – has freed me up to encourage more bodiliness in academic learning. Making students get up to move to new groups, write and draw and doodle, talk and laugh, giving them objects to play with, asking them to take three deep breaths, is good teaching! They’re more than just brains in the classroom. More body-time is stimulating and interesting.So for other mid-career faculty, or anyone else hoping to inject new life into their classroom, consider teaching something entirely new. It might shake things up in a joyful new way.

Usually, I do this activity the first day of my Introduction to Christian Theology class. We arrange all the desks in a circle. I then ask my students to get a piece of paper and write for a few minutes about one concrete experience they’ve had with Christianity that still impacts their view today. I ask them to write legibly, hinting that these will be read by someone else. Then, I ask them to crumple the page into a ball and throw their experience into the middle of the classroom.At this point, I usually get some confused looks on people's faces: You want me to throw stuff the first day of class? What's going to happen to what I just wrote? I count to three quickly, and just like that: we have a pile of crumpled pieces of paper, filled with stories that say a lot about the assumptions people carry as they enter into a THEO 100 classroom.We go around the room, with each student picking up someone else's experience and reading it out loud. These are completely anonymous contributions, but the energy in the room is heightened: people are waiting to hear their own experience read aloud, or they may be nervous to read the story on the spot. Sometimes it is difficult to read someone's handwriting. Sometimes, the experience is very emotional, and the reader feels nervous about representing someone else's life story with the respect it deserves. Other times, the experience describes a boredom so thorough with this religious tradition that they barely thought when they scribbled down a response.This activity is useful because it gives a safe space for people to express concerns about taking this class, either because of their lack of experience with Christianity or religion, or a painful experience of religious abuse or trauma. Sometimes, people share ecstatic moments of communion with the Divine, miracles, moments where they found their faith in a new light. Grandmothers, parents, aunts, uncles, and siblings join us momentarily in the circle as people share stories of those who have inspired, or stunted, their understanding of faith. The room gets filled with whatever experiential knowledge that students already have entering the theological classroom.I do this activity, and I share this exercise here, because it is a concrete classroom experience that actively demonstrates my own assumptions about transformative education and the sacred, expansive possibilities of a theological classroom. At its best, I believe the theological classroom can be a space of self-exploration. It should be a place of recovery from religious education that dismissed or even discouraged questioning. I tell students that this classroom can be a place to ask your biggest questions and think critically. We might not end up with clear-cut answers; I can almost guarantee we will end up with more questions. But this ability to go deep also makes the theological classroom a site of emotional, psychological, intellectual, and spiritual growth.Deeply influenced by popular educators like bell hooks and dian marino, I believe that in a liberatory education, students and professors are both learners and teachers to every single person in the class. This is not to erase the power dynamic: I am still the one in charge of managing group dynamics, giving grades, and choosing the content to discuss. But it is an attempt to highlight how egalitarian classroom learning like this can honor the students and the professor as complex humans with meaningful experiential insights to share.This activity can be adapted for any topic when you want an in-the-moment survey of what assumptions and perspectives students are bringing with them at the start of the semester. You will notice that having a metadiscussion about what students felt, heard, and observed leads nicely into making classroom agreements. These were shared anonymously, but what guidelines would need to be in place for you to share your experiences?I have also adapted the activity for online courses. When sending out pre-course surveys, I have added this question about one experience that shapes your view of Christianity today. Then, I compile the answers without any names attached to them into an Excel spreadsheet, and we can analyze this data as a class, either synchronously by reading it out loud and then discussing, or asynchronously, as described below.This activity reminds each one of us that we are here to learn about ourselves and each other. Each one of us enters the classroom with valuable knowledge that is derived from our different life experiences. Assigned readings will present us with a variety of perspectives, but our task as co-learners is to explore how these topics show up in our lives and our classmates’ lives in different ways. Sharing our perspectives and hearing our classmates’ perspectives gives a more complex and nuanced understanding of religion and the world that we collectively inhabit. My hope is that we leave the classroom with a stronger sense of our responsibility to work to make life more livable, more just for each other—even if we don’t always agree with each other, we can understand why someone might think the way they do given their life experiences.Activity Description:Ask students to write about one concrete experience that still shapes their view of your class topic (Christianity, social justice, religion, death and dying, etc.) to this day. Ask them to try and describe just one instance, with specific details, rather than a broader summary. They may have multiple experiences, or very few experiences. Tell the students that it is okay—however partial or seemingly small it may be, for today, just focus on one.If it is in person, ask the student to crumple their response and throw it in the center of the classroom. If it is digital, make a format where students can anonymously view each other’s responses.Read aloud the anonymous Christian experiences with intention. If it is a classroom setting, make sure each student reads one. If it is digital, let students read them on their own. Encourage them to pause and digest the stories that their classmates are telling. Invite them to notice where their own story falls into this compilation. Celebrate the fact that we have a group of beautiful, complex, intriguing human beings gathered for this course!After hearing these stories/reading through this document, ask students to reflect on these questions and share in class/post their responses on the forum. Invite the students to pay attention to their classmates’ responses—they may be referencing their experiences in their own theological learning process already...Possible Discussion Questions:What did it feel like reading through this list? What was it like to read other people's stories? What was it like to hear/see your own experience in class/within the document?Which stories did you relate to the most? Why? Which stories were different from yours but made you want to learn more? Why?Which patterns, if any, did you notice in the responses? How might this impact the way our discussions happen throughout the semester?What did you learn by doing this activity? Why do you think we did this as our first activity for this class?These experiences were anonymous. What guidelines would need to be in place for you to feel comfortable sharing some of your life experiences in class? 

The class is Religion and 20th Century Fantasy Literature, affectionately known around campus as “The Harry Potter Class.” One of the larger classes the Religion department offers, there are two main classrooms where this course lands every semester. One is the giant lecture hall in HCB (huge classroom building, of course), with room for 335 students. It’s boring, but efficient. The other room was made for this class, and its maximum capacity is a cozier group of 225 students. Renovated to reflect its original look from the 1800s when the university was first built, the room is grand. Carved oak decorates with detail, and the painted ceramic ceiling tiles, gorgeous, were reconstructed from one half-tile that remained from the hundred years prior. The floor-to-ceiling windows welcome into the room the Florida sun. And despite the fact that seagulls are more likely to fly past than owls, the room tricks you to believing that all manner of magic is possible.The professor who teaches in this room must master the domain or do the room injustice. Moreover, in the case of the “Harry Potter Class” a certain electricity is present. The Harry Potter professor wishes to deliver, and so the familiar tune, the recognizable theme song to the films, fills the room. The students come into the room already knowing the material – primary text, film adaptations, fanfiction, memes, and all content in all directions, related to this world of literature. The expectations are high. That these students are in the room, filling 20-30% of their schedule with this class says all. It is not a required course – they spend one of their precious electives to come into this space and simply learn, learn more about a topic that they know well. In fact, for some, they know this material like religious texts, and they know it authoritatively. They surely know the details of Harry Potter more than any of the other material in any of the other courses in their schedule. And so long as the primary text steers the course, the professor cannot go wrong… or can they?In such a course, the professor walks into the room at a disadvantage. They are not the “smartest” or most knowledgeable person in the room. In fact, were a bar to suddenly come up out of the floor, and a bartender begin asking those familiar questions that mark a Harry Potter trivia night, the professor would lose, hands down. The individual and collective knowledge in the room, the way that hiding in one’s bed with a flashlight long after bedtime, night after night for years, imparts knowledge and expertise is only lost on the professor once. The lesson of who knows more is revealed fast. If the professor’s ego rests on the false identity of “Harry Potter Expert” in this crowd, the identity and ego is sure to crumble fast.But a sixteen-week course on Harry Potter would bore even this crowd fast if all it did was go through the plot details, character analysis, and talk about what everyone in the room already knows. What this course on Harry Potter covers are the Christian/religious/irreligious elements of the story. The course explores the Joseph Campbell mythic elements of the story, the Augustinian elements of the story, the clash between the supernatural and the detective (Sherlock-Holmesian). It reaches into 20th century history and considers the impact of World War II on Britain, the Battle of Dunkirk, and how all those things affected the world of HP. And the course compares the three major British Fantasy works that live in community with each other: Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and The Chronicles of Narnia. The course weaves all these elements in and serves up a platter of complexity that offers the expert reader not only enough to keep their attention for sixteen weeks, but the skills to ask the right questions and explore influence into their beloved texts, long after they leave the classroom.So when a student catches the professor off guard, and perhaps even in a mistake that comes from recounting episodes from the source material off the cuff; when the student, enamored until this point realizes that the professor is a “muggle,” and relies not on magic to know all, but their sheer skill in teaching; when the student learns that—in some areas of Harry Potter expertise—they know more than their professor, it is not a cause for despair for the educator.  When the student comes in and knows the minutiae, details of things like what color curse was used with “this spell” in “this episode” in book, the professor can safely and honestly relent without harm and say, “You know these details better than me. No question. But wait until the end of the term, and tell me you didn’t learn something.” You can know all the facts, the data points, and still get authenticity all wrong. And you can miss a date or a detail here and there and still be authentic. Teaching is not about the year Caesar crossed the Rubicon, but what his crossing meant. The professor does not need to know it all. In fact, it can be far more powerful when they concede that they don’t know items and simply move on. The things they do know will rest powerfully on the eager students’ ears by means of honestly and authentic engagement.

Most days, I no longer think of “studio time” as a separate block on the calendar. The work has spread into everything else. I might be rinsing dishes, arranging pens that have finally unclogged, or making notes about the day’s errands when a line or pattern catches my attention. Art no longer begins with a blank page; it begins wherever I happen to be paying attention.2025 Mini #17, 2.5x3.5 in., ink on paper That recognition has altered my perspective on creative practice. Drawing, cooking, walking, and cleaning all rely on the same capacities: observation, repetition, and adjustment. Each activity requires focus within its constraints. A 2½ × 3½-inch drawing forces choices about scale and composition; a dinner deadline forces decisions about timing and sequence. What unites them is method—a disciplined, almost research-like approach to noticing how perception works in real-time.When I was teaching, I used to describe scholarship as the craft of paying sustained attention to ordinary things until they disclose more than we expected. I find myself doing that again, only now the medium is ink instead of text. The page becomes a field site. I observe, record, and revise. The variables are pressure, speed, and rhythm rather than citation, argument, and evidence, but the logic is the same: careful description produces understanding.Constraint is part of that method. Limited tools, limited time, limited space—these boundaries clarify what matters. My favorite pens clogged months ago, so I switched to a set of colored pens I’ve hardly used. The change altered everything about my process: the rhythm of the line, the speed of line-making, even the way I breathe while drawing. Limits become data. They show how attention behaves when conditions shift.2025 Mini #19, 2.5x3.5 in., ink on paperWhat I learn on paper transfers elsewhere. The pause before overworking a drawing becomes the pause before overexplaining or overreacting in conversation. The ability to stop, look, and reset—to acknowledge that I’ve gone too far or not far enough—is the same skill across contexts. Art, in that sense, functions as a training ground for perception.There’s nothing mysterious about this. It’s simply the repetition of noticing. The more I repeat, the more subtle the distinctions become: between one kind of line and another, between habit and genuine seeing. Practice sharpens the instrument that makes both art and life intelligible—the mind paying attention to its own process.2025 Mini #20, 2.5x3.5 in., ink on paperThe daily drawings have become a kind of record of this experiment. Some succeed; others collapse halfway through. Collectively, they form a logbook of perception under constraint. They also remind me that consistency matters more than inspiration. A single drawing rarely tells the story; the accumulation does.I sometimes think this is what I was always teaching, though I didn’t frame it that way at the time. In the classroom, I asked students to slow down with a text or a film, to observe structure before interpretation. The goal wasn’t belief or agreement; it was precision of attention. I’m still pursuing that, only now the syllabus is shorter and the outcomes are measured in lines rather than pages.If there’s a thread connecting these activities—art, writing, caregiving, cooking—it’s the refusal to separate them. Each demands the same thing: presence with material conditions as they are. Ink runs out; recipes fail; conversations drift. The task is to return, adjust, and keep looking. Over time, that practice forms its own kind of stability.2025 Mini #22, 2.5x3.5 in., ink on paperAttention, then, is not a virtue or special personality trait. It’s a method—a way of being attuned to experience. It asks, “What’s actually happening right now?” and waits for the answer. The drawings are simply evidence that the question was asked. These pieces will also soon form the basis of a new Patreon project—a space to share process, sketches, and reflections each month. Like the drawings themselves, it’s less about product and more about tracing attention over time.Maybe that’s the point of this stage of my work: not to produce enduring artifacts, but to refine perception itself. To keep training the eye and hand to register the world with slightly greater accuracy, whether on paper or in the course of an ordinary day.

I teach a religiously diverse crowd at my college. In any given Intro to Christianity course, I can expect one or two atheists, one or two conservative Christians, and twenty students running the rest of the gamut in between – my agnostics with religious trauma, my cultural Catholics, my “we went to church until I started playing sports” folks, and a group of people who are into spirituality but could never imagine themselves being committed to any one religious tradition. This is how I like it! More variety means better conversations, more interesting questions, and a lot of learning from one another. As I tell them, practicing talking about religion with people from another background is a little awkward, but being able to talk awkwardly about important things is a needed and transferable skill. Even if they never talk about religion again after they take their final for my class, they’ve still practiced for the day when they’ll need to ask their boss for a raise, or tell their significant other that the laundry situation is a big deal and needs to be solved now. Awkward conversations are a part of life!But I don’t want my students to just marinate in the awkward – I want them to think about how they can communicate and connect across difference, and to grow in mutual respect for the experiences and beliefs of others. This is a more complex task. How can I simultaneously suggest to the non-religious that there might be something lovely in the way religious people use traditions and rituals to stay rooted, while also teaching my most traditional believers that maybe there’s something exciting in how people without religious commitments forge their own paths and craft their own meaning? Oddly enough, inspiration struck in my own garden. I grow plants with far more enthusiasm than skill, but I do find that some of the fun of gardening is doing it a little “wrong” and seeing what happens. From my literal and metaphorical soil sprouted a metaphor that I now use constantly when trying to explain why some people love religion while others don’t – tomatoes and cucumbers.People, I say, might be more like tomatoes, or more like cucumbers. Tomatoes (or at least the tomatoes I manage to grow), love structure. They do great when surrounded by a framework to grow into, like a tomato cage or trellis. They grow bigger, leaf out better, and fruit more if they have something to help hold them up. So too, some people thrive with religious structure. They like the parameters and clear expectations. They feel safer with something to lean into – beliefs, community, ritual – when life feels less stable. There’s nothing better or worse about thriving with structure. It’s just the way tomatoes work best.Then again, people might also be cucumbers. Cucumbers (at least the ones I cultivate), laugh at every attempt I make to corral them. Trellis? No thank you. Wire cage? Cute, but not happening. Once the cucumbers start, they go where they darn well please. They find the best light, the prime pollinator areas, and the most hidden spots to grow their fruit on their own. Every time I’ve forced a cucumber plant up a structure that I created, it droops and mopes and refuses to blossom or fruit until it makes a break for it when I’m not looking. Cucumbers want to be free! And when I just let them go on their own journey, they thrive. People can be like that too – structure can feel constricting and artificial rather than comforting, and they’d rather strike out on their own to see what they learn, and create something entirely unique. There’s nothing better or worse about thriving with space and options – it’s just how cucumbers work best.While the metaphor may reveal more about my sub-par gardening chops than I’d like, I do appreciate having a relatively neutral way to explore how religiosity just looks and feels different for each person. How do you explain the variety of ways to be religious to your students?

Mouth open, story jump out was a phrase that I grew up hearing in Anglophone Caribbean cultural and linguistic contexts. It described an experience where the avoided topic of conversation somehow, in spite of our best machinations, managed to insert itself into the narrative, often awkwardly. You might say to yourself in advance that you are not going to discuss a particular topic or idea for any of the following reasons: it is controversial, it might seem rude or uncouth, it might be shameful to oneself or others, it could stir up deep emotions for which one may be unprepared. In other words, having the conversation will undoubtedly upset the status quo. However, as the phrase warns, as you begin to speak with the intention of uttering the carefully prescribed words of avoidance and subterfuge, it is as if the story has a life of its own and the suppressed topic comes tumbling out. Typically, the subject matter which was being carefully avoided is one which needed to be addressed. And despite the discomfort, there is a very real possibility of transformation for oneself and others through honest dialogue and careful inquiry.As I mentioned in another blog, “Story Bones,” my older brother and I spent our early childhood with our maternal grandparents in Antigua. They were born about a century and a quarter ago in Caribbean colonies, of the then British West Indies, when the British Empire arguably was at the height of its power. Household items and technologies for preparing food and washing clothes from the nineteenth and earlier centuries would have been in daily use. We, the current generation living adult lives in the early decades of the twenty-first century, were not there as living witnesses. However, those who lived during those earlier times raised us, fed us, taught us how to cook, and told us their stories using what poet and literary scholar Kamau Brathwaite terms “nation language,” a creole expressive language created by Caribbean people. We learned about descriptions of a variety of qualities of speech and oral expression including how bodies moved in motion or held postural positions. These descriptions told us a lot about the speaker and how to listen to whatever they were saying with discernment. For instance, someone who was dicty was fussy and ostentatious in their personal style. From my Trinbagonian (Trinidad and Tobago) friends, I learned the term mauvais lang to describe those who relished gossip. I also grew up hearing the term speaksy-spokesy used to describe deliberate, careful speech which indicated the user’s self-conscious striving for upward social positioning, often through avoidance of common, everyday language use including creole. From my experience, mouth-open-story-jump-out speech challenged controlled speaksy-spokesy utterances and lived into the postural, audacious style of the dicty. Mouth open, story jump out was outspoken speech which offered an invitation to radical truth telling. It held the promise of a path to engagement with the challenging work of personal and social transformation.Mouth open, story jump out is an observation about the power of stories which can transform our own consciousness and that of others in their utterance. Teaching can involve moments like these which surprise and jolt us out of expected conversational routes, especially those designed to avoid what we might consider topics that are too challenging, or for which there just does not seem to be enough time to adequately address. We teachers might pause believing that students may not be adequately prepared, but the topic intrudes on the planned lesson. Popular cultural texts, world events, and changing cultural landscapes can prompt what might seem like impromptu expressions. My suggestion is to embrace them as they come up. They might be the entry point to creative ventures, new research and curriculum ideas, and collaborations and collaborative problem solving. For instance, when I opened my mouth and dared to listen to some of the half-whispered stories, my work as a short story writer jumped out. They were the hidden stories, fragments of which lurked in archival documents. Speculative fiction was the genre which enabled me to blend historical research with imaginings about what the lives and thoughts of people living in the colonial era in the Caribbean may have been like as they grappled with theological and spiritual themes about the nature of liberation. In other words, these stories explored many of the same themes as my scholarship and course development. Speculative fiction enabled me to reimagine the life worlds of Caribbean people using Caribbean folklore to explore themes such as intergenerational trauma, liberation, memory, and invisible branches of family trees. Incorporating opportunities for students to examine challenging topics through written reflections, creative writing, facilitated conversations, and other creative projects holds great potential rewards for transformative learning. What stories will jump out, if we dare to open our mouths authentically in our teaching practice?Suggested ReadingBennett, Louise. Jamaica Labrish. Sangsters, 1966.Brathwaite, Kamau. History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. New Beacon Books, 1984.

Part 2: “Love”I will admit that it’s much easier for me to write about the downsides of being a teacher-administrator than the upsides.And I wouldn’t say that I love being a teacher-administrator any more than I would say that I hate being a teacher-administrator. There are gives and takes on both ends.As much as I loathe to admit this in the midst of an incredibly satisfying sabbatical, there is deep joy in getting to know and work with students in spaces beyond the classroom. Theological field education—which exists in the form of internships or specialized chaplaincy training (called Clinical Pastoral Education or CPE)—serves as a kind of in-between educational space. There might be a class component where students meet regularly with an instructor, but in my role I mostly engage with students through the processes surrounding the classroom and the field site. In this more liminal space, I really get to know them—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Sure, some personalities might arise in the context of the classroom. Faculty generally know the students who collectively engender the most joy and the most challenge throughout their courses and the degree program or school as a whole. Some individuals, however, try to model particular behaviors in a course because they know they are being evaluated. The rest of us who work with students beyond that space often have a little bit more insight into how those individuals show up differently when they aren’t being evaluated formally, and we often have more chances to engage in personal conversations about students’ lives and experiences that may not be surfaced in the context of a graded course. Sometimes, I’d rather not know a few of the more personal details that I have learned over time. Other times, I’ve developed lasting relationships with individuals over our shared experiences or affinities (especially guinea pigs, who are the greatest pets a human could have). In some instances, I’ve held my tongue in faculty meetings where a majority of my colleagues want to award a particular individual with the title of Student of the Year because they displayed exemplary intellectual skill or agreeable behavior in classes, yet I have encountered them as completely different (i.e., less agreeable) persons in the field education process. In other settings, I’ve marveled at the deep wisdom and maturity with which students have navigated very difficult internship or CPE situations, yet my colleagues would consider them to be fairly average students intellectually or otherwise. I suppose we all know different aspects of students, in the same ways that they know different parts of us as educators. I would argue, however, that my knowing individuals both within (as a teacher) and beyond (as an administrator) the classroom space grants a level of joy that I wish more faculty could experience. Not joy in the sense of ephemeral happiness or elation but, rather, as a process of both knowing and being known. This itself cultivates a profound sense of fulfillment, constituting education as relationship rather than content or container. Relationship is certainly messier and more frustrating; it results in more meetings and more emails than I care to count. As an introvert who would rather spend every waking moment either reading or writing books, I am easily depleted by the continual interactions required for relationships. Some students treat our exchanges as merely transactional and, many days, so do I. They want me to fix their problems or change some policy, and the technicalism of it all can be wearing.But if I hold on to the capacity for dynamic knowing, if I dare to open myself up to what might unfold in the in-betweenness of our vocational conversations and at the edges of the paperwork needing to be completed, I might actually love being a teacher-administrator. It’s not for the faint of heart and requires some true grit, as my teacher-administrator (especially field educator) colleagues know. Also, I can say with confidence that it is more work than that of my faculty colleagues with no administrative responsibilities. It is hybrid, holy work. And I feel honored to be doing it.

Since 2022, I have had the distinct privilege of serving as an editor and conversation-partner for Director Lynne Westfield through her ongoing written contributions to the Wabash Center. What began as a professional collaboration quickly became something more generative, more human—an evolving dialogue grounded in trust, care, and a shared commitment to clarity of thought and purpose in teaching.From the very beginning, I found myself drawn to Lynne’s voice. There is a particular kind of vulnerability in her writing, an openness that does not seek performance but instead insists on honesty. Month after month, for more than four years, I have sat with her words, responding not simply as an editor marking a page, but as a reader invited into a living, breathing intellectual and spiritual practice. With each blog post, I became a deeper admirer of her work—not because it sought perfection, but because it refused to hide from complexity.Those monthly exchanges were never transactional. They were conversations. They required attention, patience, and a willingness to listen beyond the surface of the text. As an editor, I believe it is important to understand one’s role is not to refine the author/artist into something more “polished,” but to help them become more fully themselves on the page.Many of the blog posts with Lynne have now found new life in her recent book, Thinking Teaching, out now from Cascade Books. Watching that manuscript take shape has been profoundly rewarding. It marks the second time I’ve had the honor of witnessing Lynne bring a book into the world, following her earlier work, Glimpses of Me and Mine (2023). To see the arc of her ideas develop from individual reflections to a cohesive, enduring text has been a reminder of what sustained writing practice can do.Editing, at its best, is an act of care. A good editor does not impose themselves onto the work. They do not flatten the writer’s voice into something more familiar or marketable. Instead, they listen. They ask questions. They create space for the writer to hear themselves more clearly.Over the years, working with Lynne has sharpened my understanding of what it means to be a compassionate and effective editor. For those engaged in similar work, I offer a few guiding principles:Listen for the writer’s intention, not just the sentence’s structure.Editing is not only about correctness; it is about coherence between what the writer means and what the reader receives.Protect the writer’s voice at all costs.Your job is not to rewrite the work in your own image. The distinctiveness of a writer’s voice is their greatest strength.Respond, don’t dictate.Frame your edits as invitations or inquiries rather than commands. This keeps the process collaborative rather than hierarchical.Cultivate patience and trust.Good writing, and good editing, takes time. Trust that clarity will emerge through conversation, not force.What I have learned through this work is that editing is not a neutral act. It is relational. It requires humility. And when done well, it becomes transformative, not only for the writer, who is given the space to grow and refine their voice, but also for the editor.To work with Lynne Westfield has been to witness an author bloom steadily, courageously, and without compromise. In supporting that process, I, too, have been changed. I have become a more attentive reader, a more patient collaborator, and, I hope, a more generous thinker.This is the quiet gift of editing: when we commit ourselves to the flourishing of another’s voice, we often find our own deepened in the process.Please check out Lynne Westfield’s latest…Thinking Teaching: Stories, Insights, and Strategies to Ignite Reflection, Discussion, and Imagination – Out Now!