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Teaching. Is there a greater thing to fear? For those of us in religious education, the “straw epistle” tells us that the teacher will be judged more strictly (James 3:1). These words on strict judgment are a source of meta praxis reflection for me. Irene Orr defines meta praxis as: “the potential for human flourishing through an awareness of practice and the value of making craft as an explicit knowledge pathway. Within and beyond the practice, this pathway has the potential to put us in touch with the essential vitality of life and its human value.”[i]Below, I focus on my meta praxis with the idea that the craft of teaching requires courage. This courage reflects on the essential vitality of life and its human value. Furthermore, it requires us to make a serious connection between what we study and how we live it out. In Spanish we say, “Del dicho al hecho hay mucho trecho” which means something like “From saying it to doing it there’s a big stretch.” It is similar to saying, “It is easier said than done.”Teaching is a task that is undervalued in our cultural milieu – and especially in fundamentalist circles it is seen with suspicion. I live and work in fundamentalist circles in the Southeastern US. Fundamentalism loves the end-time prophets, the soothsayers, and the showmen. In the classroom, it prefers indoctrination and rote recall. For example, it took a solar eclipse in 2024 to generate speculation about eschatological events and a lot of misinformation pouring into the livelihoods of people of faith. True education involves so much more than fear mongering. It engages people where they live. Otherwise, there can be no authentic reflection or flourishing.In my experience, writing about teaching requires us to have the courage to be human. For example, in my classes I have experienced that it is important to build and establish a rapport with students. In building a rapport, the teacher must engage the students right where they are at, wherever they come from, and with the baggage (for better or for worse) of their religious background. It is here that being human involves a level of relatability. Griffiths states that being relatable can help to create an appetite for learning.[ii] As a person with a PhD, I am an expert on the content. I have studied it and know that the material I teach is potentially life-changing. The difficulty arises because as a teacher I engage the learner at the mundane level of everyday reality. The journey towards the deeper layers of cognition and the underlying base epistemology is quite daunting, particularly when my students are not asking the questions I want to answer. Furthermore, the age of disinformation complicates my work.[iii] I have had several students who have no formal theological training in my classroom. They are usually content to compartmentalize the grammars of theology from their lived reality. Quite simply, some students just want to know how to make their church grow numerically, how to increase donations, and about the latest eschatological theological fads. It is taxing to engage them in the everyday visceral reality with the deeper theological grammars that powerfully shape and mold human beings.I have found that an effective way of demonstrating humanity is by incarnating my deepest values in the classroom. Much of what I teach about is modeled in the classroom. The values that I hold dear are more often “caught” than they are taught.[iv] For me, it has become imperative to establish some sort of relational connection with my students. As a teacher, I find myself carefully observing the world around my students. I become a student of my students. It is similar work to that of ethnographers when they enter a group and establish a rapport for their task of observation. I have heard many of my peers criticize this by saying that our students don’t need their hands held, but when looking at different academic studies about the classroom, the most common denominator in retention success is a human connection.[v]And when one considers that the number of students specializing in religion is actually decreasing, this becomes even more important. Ultimately, it is a battle for the affections of our students, whether they are undergraduate or graduate students. I recognize that this affective work cannot be readily quantified as the affections are an elusive but very real element of our humanity.Having courage means that I must create a hospitable environment – even with the fundamentalists. I have found that teaching works best when I create a hospitable environment, even when we vehemently disagree. However, students desire a “relationship-rich” experience in their journey through higher education.[vi] It requires courage because quite honestly, my time is filled with faculty meetings, committee meetings, personal research, writing, and the search for creativity – the temptation is to let contact with my students slide and limit my communication with them to terse sentences via email (if I respond at all). This press for time means that my contact with students must be intentional and meaningful. The teacher must have the courage, even in asynchronous online interactions, to establish quality contact with students.I am convinced that being courageous yields positive results. It ultimately means that my voice, a Honduran-American mestizo voice, is at the very least respected because I have shown hospitality when many students merely think of me as just “the Hispanic professor.” This hospitality transforms me from a stranger (read: a “Bad Hombre”) into being able to engage my students, even with the insertion of a dissonance of perspective. It is this relationship with them that allows me to introduce them to a new thought or a different pattern of living (meta praxis) that can alter someone’s life journey. My mere presence has a new sense of authority that can possibly create enough ripples at the edges of life experiences so that I might alter the web or system of beliefs.[vii] I engage the teaching discipline to discover ways to alter webs and engage my students as I further embody concepts and the dense stuff in the clouds and give it traction in their daily lived experiences. We agree, disagree, and yet ultimately strive for synthesized solutions on our journey together. Notes & Bibliography[i] Irene Orr, “Meta Praxis: Craft Praxis: A Way of Being,” (Doctoral Thesis, University of Dundee, 2020).[ii] Paul J. Griffiths, Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar (Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 2, https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=b3a0cf3c-9a8b-3131-b54f-14e766e41a5e.[iii] W. Lance Bennett, The Disinformation Age (Cambridge University Press, 2020),https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914628.[iv] For an example see Ronald Allen, “Is Preaching Taught or Caught: How Practitioners Learn,” Theological Education 41, no. 1 (2005): 137-152, https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=5e35cd3a-845e-389c-bddd-d72efdd95eb0.[v] Rebecca A. Glazier, Connecting in the Online Classroom : Building Rapport Between Teachers and Students, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021), https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=b7ecbdd5-70bf-3ed1-9f85-342d7e4829bd.[vi] Glazier, Connecting.[vii] Brett Topey, “Quinean Holism, Analyticity, and Diachronic Rational Norms,” Synthese 195, no. 7 (July 2018): 3143-3171; 3144, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26750351.

The day after the Atlanta spa shootings in March last year, my class on Asian and Asian American Theologies met via Zoom. We had scheduled to discuss worship and preaching for that class. But I knew that the murder of eight people, including six women of Asian descent, would weigh heavily on the students’ hearts. I sensed that this communal crisis would be an undercurrent in whatever we were going to discuss, and that students needed a space to process their thoughts and feelings. It turned out that several students lived close to one of the spas. One student passed by it almost every day. These students were particularly hard hit by the murders. [caption id="attachment_250943" align="alignright" width="476"] Students at Candler School of Theology held signs outside Gold Spa[/caption] The next day, two Asian and Asian American students in the class went to one of the spas to protest the shootings. One of them held a sign saying, “Stand with the Asian Community.” A New York Times journalist took a photo of them and wrote about their protest in the newspaper. Later that weekend, other students also visited the site to remember the victims and speak out against anti-Asian violence. Prompted by the students’ activism, I gathered the Asian and Asian American faculty of my school to find ways to respond to rising anti-Asian hatred in the country. We decided to organize a webinar and invited scholars and a local activist to address “Anti-Asian Racism and Christian Responses.” The response was beyond our expectations. More than 600 people of different racial backgrounds from across the US registered for the webinar and more than 430 people attended! During the webinar, some clergy and leaders of white churches asked for resources on the Asian American community and churches. I felt the need to educate the public about the long history of discrimination against the Asian American community and the people’s resilience. Living in the South, the discussion of racism usually follows a black and white binary, such that the oppression of Asian Americans, Latinx Americans, and Native Americans becomes invisible. Orientalized stereotypes portray Asian women as obedient, compliant, and hypersexualized. Popular media casts them as the long-suffering Madame Butterfly or the seductive Suzie Wong. During the Vietnam War, sex tourism flourished around American military bases in the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries. Asian women’s bodies were exploited by American GIs for their “rest and recreation” during the brutal Vietnam war. Sex tourism created the myth that Asian women’s flesh is available and there for the taking. Robert Aaron Long, the white killer of the spa shootings, said that he has a “sex addiction” and that he thought the spas owned by Asians were “safer” than paying for sex elsewhere. A member of a Christian church, he has struggled with his addiction and lashed out at the spa businesses, which he viewed as sexual temptation. To provide opportunities to learn about Asian and Asian American women, I facilitated an online course on Asian and Asian American Feminist Theologies in the summer of 2021. I invited guest speakers from both Asia and the US to speak about feminist theology, interpretation of the Bible, Christian ethics and sexuality, interreligious learning, and leadership and ministry. The online short course attracted hundreds of participants from Asia and North America. It provided a forum for dialogue across geographical, racial, cultural, and religious differences. The pandemic forced us to shift our teaching online in the past years. While we lament the disruption and long for in-person contact, online teaching enables us to reach a wider audience. Millions are accustomed to using Zoom as a learning platform. My short course was truly transnational and the discussion was rich and riveting. The recordings of the course were uploaded to YouTube so that people can use them as resources. As scholars we have to begin thinking about the “community” we teach in a much broader sense. It is important to remember that Asian feminist theology emerged during the height of the Vietnam war. Some of the pioneering theologians, such as Mary John Mananzan from the Philippines, addressed the sexual exploitation of women, sex tourism, and militarism. Today, Asian and Asian American female scholars and activists continue to protest sexual abuses and harassment of Asian women by militarism, the police, and other powerful men. [caption id="attachment_250944" align="alignleft" width="425"] The altar created at the vigil service in the Cannon Chapel at Candler School of Theology[/caption] Close to the anniversary of the March spa shootings, I organized a vigil for the victims at my school’s chapel. During the vigil, we prayed for other victims of war and violence, especially those who died in the Russian invasion of Ukraine and their families. When the Korean hymn “O-So-So” was sung by a student, I invited the community gathered to place Japanese peace cranes on the altar to symbolize their prayers and solidarity. On the altar were two paintings by a local Korean American artist, Connie LaGoy, who painted them in response to the shootings. She has sold prints of the paintings to generate funds to donate to the victims’ families. When a community tragedy disrupts our classes and teaching agenda, it opens a window for rethinking our teaching and vocation as a scholar.

Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary (LTSS) of Lenoir-Rhyne University in Columbia, SC sits in an African American neighborhood impacted by policies of food apartheid. For several years the faculty has listened for our vocation, hoping to create a seedbed for fresh food and racial repair in our community. As a part of this discernment, my colleague, Rev. Dr. Ginger Barfield, Onnie Jackson, a board member of the asset-based development nonprofit Koinonia of Columbia, and I attended a training by the nonprofit, Life Around the Table, on their curricular framework called Eating Together Faithfully (ETF). While at the training and on a hike, the words “grow my garden” came to me. As I shared this experience with my LTSS team, we wondered what it might mean, and if the Holy Spirit might be up to something among us. Those enigmatic words stayed with me as we (Ginger, Onnie, and I) started a pilot group using the ETF framework in March 2020. Twelve community members gathered around the table—seminary professors, students, leaders of Koinonia of Columbia, the principal of the Title 1 elementary school across the street, and leaders in Axiom Farms, an organization dedicated to teaching and practicing sustainable agriculture. Keith Alexander, the founder and leader of Axiom and a third-generation farmer in South Carolina, shared his profound knowledge of the injustices of the food economy and his proactive work to farm differently. A tall man with a soft-spoken manner, Keith Alexander described his sharecropper grandfather and his decades-long vision to “grow food that tastes like justice” by cultivating a food hub in our neighborhood. My eyes opened and my head jerked up from the table. “This is the garden God wants to grow,” I thought. “Food that tastes like justice—on the ten-acre campus of an historically white institution that is currently only growing a monoculture of grass.” During the pandemic 2020-2021 school year the campus’s land lay fallow, but we cultivated relationships in our local food economy. I taught ETF to our students online, and Axiom Farms, Koinonia of Columbia, the Columbia Food Policy Committee chairperson, and other community members involved in food justice work came into our Zoom squares. The students, by engaging in conversation with farmers and food activists and by preparing a meal from local produce each week, learned how to eat justly. Meanwhile, the seminary, through the leadership of our dean, Mary Hinkle Shore, applied for and was approved for grants from the In Trust Center for Theological Schools and the North Carolina Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to grow a garden on our campus. Dean Shore and I, through conversations with the leadership of the Methodist Theological School in Ohio, learned about their exemplary work on their campus farm and their curricular integration of theologies of ecotheology, sustainability, and justice. By fall 2021, Keith Alexander and his Axiom Farms team began plans for a sustainable garden and became the food service vendor of our campus—with the vision to become a farm-to-table restaurant for the community. Alexander said, “We’ve entered a partnership with Lenoir-Rhyne to bring a food hub and farm to campus. We already have a relationship with the community. People in the community are excited for us to open and have access to fresh food.” Alexander and his team plan to offer agriculture classes to the community and to eventually offer produce boxes from the campus garden. In September 2021, as a part of learning about creation care, my Christian Ethics class met at the new garden site with Keith Alexander. As we stood in a circle, he described his quarter of an acre plot design with the use of grow bags, which offer maximum yield and minimal labor using high-quality soil and without the need for weeding. Students shoveled rich, loamy black soil into the grow bags. Other students placed cardboard on the ground as a weed preventative. Later in the semester, Alexander came into the classroom to converse with students on the differences between organic and industrial farming, racism in farming, and to reflect on practices of sustainable agriculture. A student who had taken the ETF class and Christian Ethics said, “It’s amazing to see this garden dream taking place, and to have gotten my hands dirty in the soil of it.” Students are learning anti-racist discipleship and community partnership by getting their hands in soil and by listening to wise teachers like Alexander.  In a service, we dedicated the garden and by winter 2022 our campus and community will begin to eat collards and kale from the grow bags. Those three words “grow my garden” have taken root on our campus grounds, in our seminary, and among community members. The Holy Spirit is indeed up to something, and it’s going to taste like justice. 

Recently, I was sharing with my children that one of the first purchases I made when moving to a new city or state was a map. In the not-so-distant past (circa 1995), obtaining a map was of utmost importance for daily travel to visit restaurants, stores, and especially the homes of new friends and colleagues. This need for a map diminished when directions became accessible online, but I still relied upon step-by-step printouts from MapQuest in the days before smartphones. For the entire duration of my children’s lifetimes, which is roughly a decade, the notion of traveling with maps or printouts has been obsolete. Directions to and from anywhere are available at our fingertips. When we are driving to an unfamiliar location, my children are accustomed to instructions emanating from an automated voice on a mobile phone, not the crinkling sounds of a human peering at a paper map. When my children begin driving in a few years, I do not anticipate teaching them to read maps in the same way my parents taught me a generation ago. Rather, I will likely provide reminders about devices being sufficiently charged and issue warnings about the perils of multitasking on the road. Technological developments over the past twenty years have transformed our access to information in a myriad of areas, ranging from shopping for household items to researching academic subjects. This information explosion has altered nearly every facet of our lives, but I wonder if theological education is one arena, at least in some classrooms, where the teaching and learning operates as if we were still in the twentieth century. Although much of my journey as a masters-level seminary student coincided with the advent of the information explosion, my experience entailed a lot of rote memorization with a heavy emphasis on comprehension of content, such as the ability to regurgitate information, often in dreaded blue books, about significant persons, dates, ideas, and movements, without notes. I was also required to analyze this content, but only after I demonstrated an adequate grasp of the foundational data. For example, it was important that I knew from memory the chronological order and specific dates of Martin Luther’s theological writings before I offered commentary on the import, impact, and differences between Luther’s three treatises in 1520. My teaching as an historian of Christianity in the United States has eschewed any requirement of rote memorization. I believe it remains valuable to possess a clear trajectory of religious developments and some historical facts from memory, but I also recognize how the information explosion has made it possible to shift my pedagogical priorities toward method, praxis, and application. Access to historical facts is no longer confined to visiting physical libraries or purchasing books because this information is readily available online. But because history is a contested endeavor pursued from multiple perspectives and sometimes with malicious agendas, my aims are to meticulously cover historiography and trace with my students how history gets made. This includes comparisons of written histories utilizing different sources, such as the different presentations of world missions from the viewpoints of white missionaries from the United States and local Christian leaders across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. I don’t want my teaching to be “two-thousand and late,” which is a colloquialism derived from a song by the Black Eyes Peas criticizing modes of thinking or doing that are hopelessly outdated. I cannot teach with some of the same approaches as my predecessors and former professors. I am grateful for the ways they sparked my curiosity and stirred my mind, but my students and I are learning today amid an explosion of information, misinformation, and disinformation. A pedagogy centered on lecturing about historical content for three hours every week and then mandating that my students reproduce this content from memory feels as archaic as printing out directions from MapQuest. It is more exciting and effective to interpret, analyze, and apply the historical content together with my students. In studying the history and legacy of U.S. participation in world missions, we are grappling with the pernicious results of colonization and evangelization alongside the courageous and anti-imperial witness of some individual missionaries. After my students graduate, they may not remember when or where exactly these missionaries served overseas, but they can immediately recall this information on their phones and computers. What I want them to remember, as they plan short-term mission trips in their congregations, is our deep engagement with the moral questions and immoral failings of world missions, including Jomo Kenyatta’s observation: “When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.” Because I don’t want my students to repeat the mistakes of the past in their ministries, I must continuously adapt and revise my teaching to create more opportunities to connect historical content with contextual praxis.

How does my teaching connect the learning in my seminary classroom with congregations? As an historian of Christianity in the United States, I am aware that theological education has primarily adopted a trickle-down approach to answering this question—a trickle that flows from professors to students to congregations such that the students are the conduits connecting faculty like me to the many persons and messy challenges in their churches. The traditional method entails professors equipping students to take what they learn and apply it as religious leaders in their churches or church-related agencies. This model relies almost entirely upon students. The professor has one task whereas the student has at least two. Professors are responsible for teaching their subject matter with lectures, discussions, assignments, and exams. Yet, students must first demonstrate comprehension of the subject matter in the given coursework and then discern how to utilize what they have learned in their present and future ministries. The way that professors help to produce congregational transformation and social change in this paradigm is through their students. Professors teach their students well and these students then lead their congregations with the analytical tools in biblical interpretation, pastoral care, and theological ethics they acquired in the classroom. In other words, the instruction of the professors reaches a multitude of congregations through their students. When the semester is complete, it feels like the professor says to the student, “I can’t go with you to your congregation, but you have my lecture notes, required textbooks, and commentary on your research paper. All this, along with the grace of God, will be sufficient for you. And I guess we can stay in touch by email.” When I was a seminary student, the process of synthesizing and applying my theological education to my congregational ministry was entrusted to me to figure out by myself. The faculty at my predominantly white seminary conveyed little interest in my personhood as an Asian American and my ministry in a multigenerational, bilingual, and immigrant congregation. In some courses, I felt as though I left my personhood at the door before walking into the classroom to learn about the supposed superiority of theological frameworks and doctrinal formulations shaped by an assembly of white men in seventeenth-century England. Even in the courses in which my personhood was welcome into the classroom, there were not opportunities to integrate what I was learning there with the congregations I had come from and was headed to after graduation. Like my faculty colleagues in theological education today, I am committed to avoiding the mistakes of my past teachers and forging a better pathway for my students. None of us declare that we are going to do things exactly like they have always been done. And yet, how does our teaching directly and effectively connect the learning in our classrooms with the congregational contexts of our students? In the first few years of my teaching, I devoted time in every class session to prompting students to share about both their congregations and how the subject matter at hand would be received in their congregations. These discussions were insightful, raw, vulnerable, and generative. In recent years, I have made this kind of congregational synthesis and application more explicit in my pedagogy. In addition to discussions, I require students to reflect deeply about their congregational contexts and offer precise analysis connecting our lessons and assigned readings to their contexts, along with the opportunity to express moments of either detachment or potential division. For example, one prompt calls upon students to present a thick description of their past, present, or future congregation. The subsequent prompts ask students to first construct specific ways they would apply what they have learned from the assigned readings and lessons within such a congregation and then identify the promise and peril of their applications to uncover what is at stake for both their leadership and their congregation. My teaching confronts the long histories and ongoing legacies of racial prejudice, gender discrimination, economic exploitation, and LGBTQIA+ exclusion in American Christianity because I believe it is necessary for seminary classrooms to grapple with, rather than gloss over, past sins and present consequences. I am also convinced that my teaching must employ collaborative pedagogical processes in which my students and I work together to develop strategies and refine skills to help foster incremental change in congregations. Some of our congregations are committed to intersectional justice and social change whereas others are fiercely resistant to Christian approaches that disrupt familiar systems and theologies of race, class, gender identity, sexuality, and American exceptionalism. Bringing our congregations into the seminary classroom is therefore a sobering enterprise that is sometimes more dispiriting than inspiring. But too much is at stake to leave our congregations at the door.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuHStsvmaG8[/embedyt]

The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it has overturned the order of the soul. -Leonard Cohen[1] I still remember vividly the fear and frenzy swirling around my graduate school the days and weeks after September 11, 2001. As the blizzard of physical and spiritual violence and their inevitable outcome of war blew around campus, classes went on. Sitting in a classroom for two hours at a time and listening to lectures on systematic theology seemed--to me, at least--pointless. I can remember only two of my professors mentioning in class the terrorist attacks and their aftermath. One professor stormed into the classroom the morning of September 12, in a fury, declaring: “We need to bomb ‘em!” He then uttered something about holy wrath. When the US eventually did bomb Afghanistan on October 7, another one of my professors openly wept in class. She was concerned, as was I, about the number of innocent lives that would be lost in the ensuing war. In a move deemed controversial around the Theology Department, she hung a poster on her office door entitled “Death Toll,” which she updated daily to reflect the current count. It was to her office hours I went when I was trying to find my way through the storm of confusing thoughts and emotions. So many people around me were indifferent to the suffering of others. So many seemed to be separated from their souls. “What’s the point of going to class anymore?” I remember asking her. I had been thinking that my time would be better spent dropping out of school and becoming an activist. Actually, I had a similar crisis of conscience during my undergraduate studies, I told her when I almost quit school for what seemed like a nobler cause. Now a professor myself, when I reflect back on these difficult moments during my student years, I can identify what annoyed me so much about so many of my theology classes: they were irrelevant and disengaged from the serious events surrounding us; their aim was to transfer content. No one seemed to care, except for the one professor from whom I sought guidance, about teaching us to apply the knowledge we learned to the context around us. That education entails not just knowledge, but also attitudes, skills, and practices may seem to be a universal pedagogical value. But, if it is, it is not universally carried out. For example, in the Catholic neck of the woods in which I teach, formation is understood to entail four pillars: intellectual, spiritual, pastoral, and human. Seminarians, permanent diaconate candidates, and lay students preparing for ministry are to be formed across these pillars in order to emerge from graduate theological programs as integrated, healthy ministers in their churches and communities. So often though, these pillars operate as mutually exclusive silos. In many programs, I have seen, for instance, theology professors are responsible for intellectual formation, while field educators and priests are in charge of the other three pillars. Sometimes little to no conversation happens across those responsible for each pillar. The student moving through such a program is the sole agent of integration between the four pillars. As I know from my student days, this doesn’t work very well. The soul feels separated from the intellect and the conscience, and the feeling of disintegration is heightened, and becomes too much to bear, when living in times of war, amidst racial and economic injustice, ecological ruin, political deceit, and greed, etc. The importance of integration and integrity have been made clear enough in the current US presidency. To take just one example: consider the foolishness of the POTUS (President of the United States) delivering a speech on the responsibility of Twitter to millennials during his visit to Saudi Arabia. When our world leaders act in such a way, demonstrating a separation between intellect and soul, or a wholescale overturning of “the order of the soul,” to use Cohen’s words again, we need to help the students in our classrooms make their way through “the blizzard of the world,” lest they be lost, too, in the madness. Course syllabi and outlines need to be revised. Term assignments need to be rethought. Discussions in class need to be redirected. All of this needs to happen so that we give students the time and space in our classes to learn how to apply knowledge to context and practice. In a brainstorming session of my “Classics of Christian Spirituality” course I taught last semester, I was edified deeply when one of my students had the idea to apply the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola that we had read for class that day to a community night of reflection for peace and discernment during politically turbulent times. I have also learned that students need the chance to receive feedback on their efforts because it is far more difficult to apply the information they learn in class than it is to memorize it and regurgitate it back to a teacher on a test or in paper. Giving them opportunities to act across the four pillars, or simply place their knowledge in the service of praxis, is critical for their formation as engaged citizens in church and society. If we are concerned about the declining registration rates in theological and religious education programs in North America, we might need to step up our game in terms of formation. If it weren’t for the teacher I had in the Fall of 2001 who kept things real and relevant for me, I doubt I would have registered for any more classes either. [1] Leonard Cohen, “The Future” © 1992 by Sony Music Entertainment, Inc.