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I remember dial-up modems and the exhilaration of logging onto AOL.com as a teenager. A few years later, I experienced the novelty of Facebook. Duke Divinity School (DDS) advised all of its masters’ students in the 2008 incoming cohort to create Facebook accounts so we could stay connected and support one another through the first year of our graduate program. DDS recognized that this would be a time where students begin to deconstruct presupposed understandings of religion, Bible, and the theologies that we had received from our families of origin and church contexts. Reflecting back on that time, I feel as if the beginning of my deconstruction was wed to the rising age of social media. Now as a professor of the New Testament in the age of social media, what should some of my best practices entail? While difficult to define, the term “social media” identifies the various internet applications that allow users to construct their profiles while also creating content that connects and networks various groups of people. While social media is supposed to be about “connection,” I imagine that we all have experienced “internet trolls,” folks who try to bait and upset readers with disturbing comments. As professors of religion and theology, I would argue that we are the prime targets for internet trolls just by virtue of the nature of our work at a time where there seems to be rising White Christian nationalism in the United States. So, I often ask myself questions about the role of the professor in the age of social media. For example, in my context, our Director of Outreach and Alumni Relations requests that faculty increase their social media presence as a way to connect with alumni who are out working in the world. Can I carefully curate my social media presence to let those alumni know that I support them from afar? As a professor, what content can I create that allows alumni to be refreshed as they do the difficult work of leading congregations and parachurch ministries? Moreover, can social media serve as a way for faculty to connect with prospective students as we all experience the feelings of scarcity in theological education? Is this another area of “service” that faculty can add to their tenure portfolios (assuming one has a job with tenure!)? While I am not sure of the proper answers to the above questions, I certainly try to be cognizant of what the next generations of theological students may look like. Gen Z, for example, born between 1997 to 2012, is the first generation to have grown up with ALL THE TECHNOLOGY. Further, they will buy products from social media sites more than any other generation. Is there a way for Millennial, Gen X, and Boomer faculty to capitalize on connecting with Gen Z through social media? I think that is a conversation that must be had in our various theological faculties. I started @BoozyBibleScholar on TikTok and Instagram, providing segments called “One Minute Womanism” and “Scripture Through Womanist Eyes” as a way to show my growing community that there are other voices besides the conservative right-leaning interpreters of scripture. Now, I will definitely not be keeping up with the latest TikTok dance trends, but I will add my own particular voice to the ever-growing vacuum of social media to provide a brave space for the folks who may be feeling left behind and kicked out of Christianity. Just as in the opening of this reflection I recognized my own deconstruction during the rise of the social media age, I imagine that Gen Z experiences similar deconstruction(s). As I peruse social media, it seems to me that the loudest voices in Christianity today tend to be destructive voices. If you have pondered a desire to help silence those destructive voices, I implore you to act now. Find ways to make your scholarship available to the public. I wholeheartedly believe that one of the professor’s jobs in the age of social media is to be a transformative voice in contrast to those who will try to tear people down. Instead of letting John Piper, John MacArthur, or Voddie Bauchaum be the loudest voices in public religious discourse, professors of religion and theology owe the American public counter voices in the age of social media. My hope is that my social media presence will at least point some to believe that there are other ways to be “Christian” in a world that has vastly devalued such an identity. TikTok: @BoozyBibleScholar and Instagram: @BoozyBibleScholar

What is happening in the world is happening to each of us. On May 3, 2023, Dr. Vivek Murthy, United States Surgeon General, released an advisory calling attention to the public health crisis of loneliness, isolation, and lack of connection between people in our country. Disconnection fundamentally affects mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual health. Even before the COVID-19 quarantine, approximately half of the U.S. adults reported experiencing measurable levels of loneliness and isolation. Since the quarantine, we can imagine the sharp increase in isolation and fear. We, students/faculty/administrators, are part of this affected demographic. Newspapers, in small towns and major cities, provided news that fed democracy and linked people overwhelmed by otherness and isolation. In the recent past, print, and digital news provided a “watchdog” service aimed at holding our civic institutions accountable. The newspaper industry has reported a period of immense disruption and financial distress leaving news deserts across the country. Public service journalism that spotlighted the major issues confronting communities has shrunk. This leaves residents without the information they need to discuss and to solve their problems.  Whether delivered over the internet, airwaves or in print, the lack of vitality in local news coverage exacerbates our feelings of isolation.   Our loneliness is further compounded by the dichotomized assumptions promoted through social media. People depend upon memes, soundbites, and social media threads for facts, storylines, and information on complicated issues. Students/faculty/administrators, like the public, are immersed in social media culture. The rhetoric of “us versus them” has saturated our thinking and has become a presumed framework of discourse. The barrage of loss, hatreds, separation, grief, and rhetoric of division is affecting us – all of us. We are living in an extended and deepening national moment of blaming, clinched fists, gritted teeth, and suspicion for people beyond our chosen tribes, beyond our chosen communities, beyond those people with whom we agree and have chosen political affinity. There is growing suspicion of difference. There is a feeling that “the other shoe is about to drop,” without knowing when or what the shoe will be.  Here is the strangeness. While the country becomes more polarized and less informed - our daily lives and routines are relatively unchanged. How can it be – business as usual? Our everydayness continues relatively unscathed. We shop in the same grocery store. Go to the same big box stores. Perform the activities of employment. Participate in the same schools, churches, and mosques. Use the same online streaming services. While we suffer from profound loneliness, our everydayness has not changed much. We are simultaneously uninterrupted and fractured.  Division and social upheaval are smoldering while we operate in the relative customary school year start. School has begun. Teachers/students/administrators are re-convening with the same rituals, rites, and routines as always. Syllabi have been distributed. Lessons have begun. Committee meetings are back in swing. At-a-glance, we look fine. Yet, fear and uncertainty are palpable. We must be aware that loneliness, fear, and isolation tend to manifest, not where it is easily seen in our daily activities, but in our interior spaces.  Our fears are performed in relationships. Our isolation becomes apparent when we are with one another. Our trouble, pain, and turmoil are witnessed when we are working together and with others. The start of school makes us vulnerable to seeing and being seen. We are, when we gather-back, reconstituting our relationships while we are knee deep in our loneliness. Our relationships expose our fears, isolation and mental unwellness. Conflicts will soon arise. My caution is that, given the effects of the wider political climate, the veneer of calm and routine will soon dissipate. Are your classrooms ready for conflict? The most vulnerable people are those who bring diversity and difference into the faculty/student body/administration. For those faculties and student bodies who have, recently or over a very long period, accepted the challenge of diversity – this is potentially a very troubled moment for teaching. Diversity (race, class, political, gender, nationality, creed) is precisely what is not tolerated in the growing USA climate and yet diversity is what is needed to move us away from isolation and toward conversation, toward peace, toward community. The lack of tangible conflict, or the absence of specific dispute, does not mean that institutional fissures are not forming along the lines of diversity. Unaltered routines, unexamined practices, and undiscerning leadership will miss the hushed emerging crisis in community. Do not wait until difference turns into intolerance, vindictiveness, expressions of hatred, and war to invite your school into meaningful conversations. There are no recipes, formulas, or roadmaps for this brittle moment. Your school must engage its own communities as they are unique in the world and as you live together in this uncharted malaise. Gladly, there are some big ideas to which we can attend to help us make sense of the places where you teach and learn. Now, during the beginning of the semester, find ways to collectively reflect upon these kinds of questions in anticipation of conflict: What are the consequences of difference? What are the effects of difference? What meaningful project can we work on together? What sustains us through conflict? What is a good conflict and how are disputes processed with fairness, justice, and for maturity of community? Consider facilitating these kinds of habits and practices in your school or in your classroom: acknowledge the diversity and celebrate it; make the community aware of the diversities which exist; demonstrate how diversity strengthens the mission of community; attend to creating cultures of respect and regard for difference; create conversation groups across diversity to listen to one another; construct institutional processes and protocols before there is conflict; create an ombuds position; message into the community that difference is a strength and not a weakness; design new rituals and rites that support and honor diversity; facilitate conversations on the nature of hatred and the detriment of animosity; create policies of zero tolerance for hate speech; work on practices of solidarity; make a communal project of peace, empathy, compassion and forgiveness; admire courage and bravery; award truth telling; create artwork and expressions which honor difference; complexify dichotomous thinking; find ways for people to work together against divisiveness, objectification, and authoritarian assumptions. When, not if, the ugly expressions of hatred and entitlement bubble up in your community – be ready. You will not have the luxury of feigning surprise. Conflicts, subtle or violent, will arise along identity fault lines and your institution must be ready so that those targeted by the dispute are not severely hurt, ostracized, or killed.

Recently I was working with my IT colleague, Dr. Justin Barber, on a project to use machine learning to gather data about student experience in our hybrid classes from our LMS (Learning Management System). Big data comes to theological education! Our curriculum committee was testing a common perception that our distance students felt better about their experience in the classes after they had been together on campus. To test this assumption, we asked Justin to do something called “sentiment analysis” on the discussion forums to see how the emotional tenor of their interactions changed once they had been together in space and time. Full disclosure: Justin is brilliant, and I often have no idea what AI (Artificial Intelligence) magic he has rendered. So, we always have to sit down for him to explain the results to me. Before performing the sentiment analysis, we summarized the aggregate posts of each discussion with three keywords to get a sense of the content of each discussion (excluding the common words that occur in almost every post like "the", "a", etc.). Then these three words would be analyzed before and after the campus visits to see if they were, on the whole, more positive after the students had been together. The three word combinations were often just the topic for the week and two key related terms. Hilariously, a colleague’s class in “Ancient and Emerging Practices” came up with the trio: church, tickle, sexuality. I had to explain to Justin who Phyllis Tickle was when he became concerned about what on earth was going on in that class. But as we scrolled through data from hundreds of forums over five years of data, week by week, the main word that showed up again and again was “thanks.” Thanks. As we scrolled, I was reminded of so many student posts that began with that word. “Thanks for sharing that story.” “Thanks for bringing up that topic, because I was wondering about it, too.” “Thanks for making that clearer, because when I read it I was totally confused.” While the results of the sentiment analysis were largely insignificant, this moment of realization of the function of gratitude in our online classrooms has stuck with me. It drew together something in my lived experience, but it was still surprising how often that it made the top three. Thanks. Not only in classes where emotional intelligence and personal sharing is expected, such as pastoral care courses, but in history classes, Bible classes, comparative religion classes. Many faculty fear a loss of relationality in online classes. They worry that peer-to-peer learning is diminished, that learning becomes a form of correspondence course between students and faculty. In my doctoral pedagogy class, students worry that conversations in online forums will mimic the trolling vitriol of Twitter comments. But here was dispassionate evidence that an attitude of respectful engagement was the overwhelming norm in all of our classes. In simple list form, we discovered over and over again the simple acknowledgement of indebtedness to another student: Thanks. As Justin and I processed this surprising result, we talked about how some of this polite deference might be a reflection of the somewhat tenuous nature of online community. Perhaps in situations where relationships aren’t reinforced by regular embodied interaction, a level of additional respect becomes a habitual marker of conversation in order to maintain connection and compensate for the way text doesn’t communicate body language, tone, or attentiveness. More cynically, this profusion of thanks might be a signal of perfunctory niceness, something that both our majority white female student population and church-related vocation students are socialized to perform. I like to think of this habit of gratitude as a way that students hold one another’s stories and learnings as gift. The esteemed religious educator Dr. Anne Streaty Wimberly once led a retreat in a church that I later served as youth minister. Even years later, the young people in that community remembered her as the “thank you for sharing lady” because she had taught them to receive every word spoken into the circle as gift, which required verbalized gratitude. Opening up a laptop in a faraway city to re-enter a challenging class alone can be a difficult discipline, particularly for students who already have very busy lives. Finding colleagues there who hold your contributions with respect and gratitude makes that space more gracious and inviting. And so our students, without our prompting, learned together to say thanks.

My most recent tweet (of almost ten thousand) was 40 weeks ago. My most recent Facebook status update (except for a brief "thank you" for birthday wishes in July) was 46 weeks ago. The previous three years, however, I have taught my main introductory course, "Introduction to the Hebrew Bible," as an open, freely-available, online event built almost entirely on social media, especially Twitter, WordPress blogs, and Google Docs. This was the Open Old Testament Learning Event, or "OOTLE." My use of social media in higher education was based on a belief in the power of making for learning, and on a utopian vision for the internet that was based on my own experience. Eventually, the failures of the major centralized social-media platforms to proactively account for systemic abuse of marginalized users led me to abandon our pioneer outpost of open learning, and to retreat with my students back into the familiar confines of "the devil I know," the closed learning management system or "LMS." Many educators will have some familiarity with the learning theory "constructivism" (sometimes "constructionism"). According to this model, learners do not simply "acquire" knowledge, but rather always "construct" knowledge by synthesizing their existing understandings with new information or insights. Less well known, however, is that according to a constructivist model, this knowledge-making is more likely to occur where learning happens socially and where learners collaboratively build artifacts that are publicly shared. As the internet age took hold, and learners began increasingly to build their knowledge in a world of information excess rather than a world of information scarcity, it was often remarked that content on the internet was composed by perhaps 1% of internet users. Perhaps 9% of users interact with this content, and some 90% only passively consume content. This is sometimes called the "1% rule" or the "90/9/1 rule." From computer science to the humanities, educators began to embrace the power of "maker culture" to unleash the potential of constructivist learning in individuals, and to remake the internet in the image of the whole body of its users. It was in this context that the use of social media in higher education began to spread like fire: classroom Twitter "back channels" or weekly synchronous "Twitter chats"; blogging assignments on open web platforms like WordPress; presentation or digital storytelling on YouTube; and Facebook groups and pages. Then in 2014 came "Gamergate," a campaign of organized harassment against female game designers and game enthusiasts, including frequent credible threats of sexual violence and murder. Gamergate provided a playbook for white supremacist organizations and eventually, it seems, even for Russian interference via "troll farms" in 2015-16 U.S. political discourse on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. ("Trolling" describes skillful, media-savvy practices in derailing or redirecting discourse, whether for pleasure, malice, or profit.) Even among social-media users apparently uninvolved in these large events, in became clear that the codes of conduct and anti-harassment policies dictated by the young, white "tech bros" of social media (Jack Dorsey of Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook), could not provide marginalized users anything like the safe environment enjoyed by privileged users less likely to be targeted. This remains the case, skewed as these policies are toward favoring "free speech" in an absolute sense and leaving users to block malicious actors as best they can . . . only possible, of course, after the malicious acts have occurred. Even we relatively privileged users became accustomed to weary acknowledgements that "of course Twitter is a cesspool, but . . . " Eventually, "But. . . “ became for me, and for many educators in my circles, "But what?" and then "But nothing." It had become impossible to offer my learners a reasonable guarantee that they would enjoy equitable social-media experiences, regardless of how they chose to present their race, gender, sexual self-understanding, class, or other differences. As I consider shepherding learners again into the social-media space ("not yet, not yet"), I remain optimistic about decentralized platforms like Mastodon. It is clear that the "one size fits all" approach to codes of conduct and anti-harassment policies (as on Twitter and Facebook) is untenable. On Mastodon, a radical free-speech, no-holds-barred community can have its minimalistic code of conduct, while a more proactive, highly-moderated community can choose to federate with that group, or not. I have not given up on a commitment to learning via collaborative construction of publicly available artifacts, but I am once bitten . . .and will twice be shy of any monetized, centralized platform.