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Lurking on social media the other day, I listened to colleagues discussing how to respond to a student paper in a philosophy class. The assignment was about our responsibilities towards (nonhuman) animals. The student argued that we can do whatever we want with animals because God has given us dominion over them. Presumably, he had Genesis 1.26 in mind, but none of the course readings mentioned Genesis—or God.People in the social media group had lots of suggestions on how to respond:Tell him that religion has no place in the classroom.Tell him that there should be no theist or atheist premises in academic writing.Just write “Irrelevant” in the margin!That last comment got a lot of likes, hopefully because people found it funny and not because they considered it good advice.The consensus was clear: Tell the student that appeals to scripture are inappropriate in college papers.I don’t think that’s good advice.My colleagues were ignoring something crucial. In this sort of situation, we can do deep damage to our relationship with our student and to the student’s relationship with higher education if we don’t tread carefully. Presumably the student who wrote this paper believes in God and the Bible. His religion will be part of his ethical decision-making going forward, and the Bible will influence his thinking and his actions.Bearing this in mind, let’s not tell this student that his thinking about right and wrong in class must be utterly divorced from his thinking about it outside the classroom.My advice would be: Before writing any comments, identify your larger goals. Here are mine:I want our class discussions to help inform my students’ thinking and actions about ethical issues, and in particular about whether it’s OK to do “whatever you want” with animals.I want students to listen when I try to teach them more things after this and I want other professors to be able to teach them even more things. If I reinforce a student’s likely skepticism about professors and religion, I make that harder.I don’t want my actions to increase the chances that my students go out in the world thinking of higher education as an enemy to religion and God.These goals suggest a different approach. Start by taking the paper seriously:Do you think that’s what the Bible means by ‘dominion’? Some people think so, but I've always thought it meant something more like ‘stewardship.’ I mean, God is the Father, right? So, I think of it like if your parents go out and put you in charge of the family dogs. If they come home and discover that you haven’t fed them or given them water, they’ll be mad at you.What do you think someone who doesn’t believe in God and the Bible would make of your argument? How would you persuade them? For instance, imagine that you’re talking to the author of our second reading or to the other kids in the class.I would count this encounter as a success if the student feels like I’m treating him and his religion with respect and if he realizes two things:“Dominion” could mean “stewardship” instead of “freedom to treat them any way I want,” and I need to think more about which one the Bible meant.I need to talk about this differently or I won’t be able to persuade people who don’t believe in the Bible.That’s a start. Much more has to happen before this student writes at college level. Later, I and his other professors will teach him more.It’s a very small step. Growth and intellectual development takes time. I probably won’t see the result of the learning process that I was part of. But occasionally I do.My greatest success story in this context is a student who came into my Intro to Philosophy class as a freshman, determined to prove that Christ rose from the dead. It was rough going, but by the end of the semester, his sources weren’t cringeworthy anymore, and he was presenting an actual argument. And he still trusted me. He majored in math but took Philosophy of Religion with me as a senior, and he explained that he wanted to continue developing his proof.I braced myself. But during the semester, the class discussed faith and reason extensively, and I was able to ask him (privately): Given that you think about faith as being the important thing, what makes it so important to you to prove that Christ rose? He thought about it for a long time and finally decided that he didn’t need to prove that Christ rose. Instead, he wrote a strong final paper in which he reflected on the meaning of faith, discussing his own experience and the course readings.I rarely get wins that size. But taking my students’ religious views seriously makes them possible.

During our close reading of The Letter from Birmingham Jail, he defiantly asked in front of the whole class, “If you can force people into complacency, then segregation works, right? Society still functions.” I froze for a second, absorbing the gravity of the moment. My mind immediately calculated the multiple layers of that remark made within the complicated sociopolitical climate of the 2016 election season. This young white man was not just challenging Martin Luther King Jr.; his tone was intentionally challenging me as an Indian-American woman. Why? What was informing his challenge? The tension in the room was palpable, particularly as the students of color waited with bated breath for their professor’s response. This spontaneous internal calculation produced an answer that still feels like a moment of grace. After an initial pause, I responded, It’s not a question of whether society can still function, but the principles by which it functions. King is arguing that the only way a society can subjugate an entire population into complacency is by stripping them of their sense of worth; transforming them from a somebody into a nobody. This subjugation cannot be the basis of a just society. How might his claims relate to our earlier discussions of imago dei? What makes this letter prophetic in a manner similar to what we said about Moses? I could sense a collective sigh of relief in the room as the student’s initial defiance melted into greater openness. Another student immediately jumped in to offer her perspective. The discussion continued. Occurring within the first three weeks of my first year of teaching, this moment taught me to recognize that how I handle such tension either builds or destroys my credibility for the rest of the semester. While I intuitively prevented an escalation of violence by avoiding any kind of us versus them binary on the basis of race and turning all the students back to the text and shared content of the course, I sought resources that could aid me in understanding the role of embodiment and visceral responses in the classroom. In his book My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies,[1] Resmaa Menakem argues that racism and white supremacy cannot simply be addressed through intellectual conversation. Rather, the discomfort we feel about these themes reveals how they live and breathe in our bodies. If we are born in the US, our bodies reflect trauma responses surrounding the myth of race. In the classroom in particular, racialized trauma can show up in heightened hypervigilance connected to a fight, flight, or freeze response that interrupts normal cognitive pathways. For example, the students of color in the classroom example above expressed this alarm when they waited with bated breath for my response. They were only able to relax once the questions were answered honestly without further harm being committed either against them or their peer. Menakem also proposes the idea of metabolizing trauma, which is especially helpful in preparing for these visceral moments when they occur in the classroom. First, as educators, we must recognize the intersection of our own social locations with those of the various students who make up our classes. Not only will each student relate to the content of the course from different social locations, but such social locations will involve different visceral entry points when the topic of racism is involved. Second, we must discern if our pedagogy is engaging in dirty pain or clean pain. Dirty pain is the pain of avoidance, blame, and denial. The classic example of dirty pain, Menakem argues, is “white fragility.” When talking about racism and white supremacy, white fragility is often viscerally expressed as a reflexive, protective response by which a white body avoids the pain or experience of racial trauma. Clean pain, on the other hand, is pain that can build a capacity for growth. Such pain helps us to engage our body’s integrity and tap into our embodied resilience by moving through painful realities with honesty, step by step. Accepting clean pain has two different effects. For white bodies, it allows them to confront their collective dissociation and silence. For bodies of color caught between white supremacy and anti-blackness in this country, clean pain allows for honesty regarding how these ideologies shape identities and forms of belonging in false ways. The wisdom of this approach, however, is that while all pain hurts, clean pain promises to heal generations so that we do not pass this visceral trauma on to our students. After being exposed to these fundamental concepts of racial trauma theory, I no longer fear these tense moments or see them as aberrations that distract from the lesson plan of the day. Rather, by skillfully attending to them with an awareness that the classroom asks us to be engaged in mind, body, and spirit, such moments have the capacity to heal by showing how we may better engage the hard conversations.   [1] Las Vegas, NV: Central Recovery Press, 2017.

A while back I read an interesting, if not somewhat problematic, book called Hunt, Gather, Parent. The author, NPR science reporter Michaeleen Doucleff, went all around the world, along with her young daughter, trying to learn how people parent. She noticed that, in many other places, children seem to be calm, motivated, flexible, responsible, helpful, confident, cooperative contributors, unlike the tantrum-prone toddler she had in tow. These families functioned more like teams, with both parents and kids playing important and integrated roles. Doucleff offers the apt acronym TEAM to convey what these parents do differently: Togetherness, Encouragement, Autonomy, and Minimal Interference. Dishes need to be washed? TEAM effort. Tortillas need to be made? TEAM effort. Other kids need corralling? TEAM effort. I got to thinking, as I do, about teams (and even toddler-like behavior) in another context: the college classroom. There is no shortage of information about group learning, cooperative learning, and team-based learning, such as Team-Based Learning: A Transformative Use of Small Groups in College Teaching (2004), available in the teaching literature. Fields like business and engineering have done a particularly good job of helping educators understand how to compose teams, how to create projects that actually require team effort (vs. a divide-and-conquer approach), how to grade group work, and how to teach students the skills needed to collaborate, such as establishing norms or navigating conflict. Journals devoted to the teaching of these disciplines are well worth the read (e.g., Journal of Education for Business and Journal of Engineering Education), even for those of us in the humanities. Such skills are, I believe, important for life, since working successfully as part of a team is something we’ll all have to do at some point, no matter what type of job we end up in. Even religion professors, lone wolves many of us, still have to serve on committees or attend department meetings with… other humans. But this kind of team isn’t what I’m talking about here—and not just because I always did hate group work. When we talk about teams in the classroom, what we usually mean are teams of students. Teach them how to work well together, teach them how to take personal accountability, teach them how to resist “social loafing.” But what about us? Why is there always a distance, a separation, a distinction, between us and them? Could we, instead, think of our classes as opportunities for TEAMwork, similar to what Doucleff found in functional families across the world? Could we, instead, conceive of ourselves as being on the same team as our students? Athletic analogies, like teachers as coaches, abound in educational writings, so this idea isn’t exactly far-fetched, though there are a lot of people who don’t love these metaphors. And, of course, there are some real differences between professors and students, including differences in power (which can go both ways: we can give them bad grades, sure, but students can also give us poor evaluations, for instance), that we must keep in mind when considering a team approach. But let’s give it a try. In a previous blog post, I wrote about how I spend time in class co-creating community norms with my students. I realized, after reading Hunt, Gather, Parent, that part of what I am doing in this activity is positioning all of us on the same team, responsible for one another and working toward common goals. Another example, one focusing on the T-for-togetherness part of Doucleff’s TEAM, is that we might start taking a closer look at our own role when students’ performance goes awry. On a team, everyone is responsible for everyone else as well as the success of the team; nobody is exempt. When mistakes or failures happen, we support one another and we try to do better, next time, together. So students bomb the midterm. Okay, well, maybe they studied poorly or not at all. Maybe they didn’t take proper notes in class. Maybe they stayed up too late, cramming or partying, the night before. This happens. But could it also not be that the test was poorly designed, that it didn’t align with what was taught in class? Could it also not be that we didn’t teach students how to study, so the midterm was actually testing not what they had learned in the course so far, but rather their test-taking skills? So students turn in sub-par final papers. Okay, well, maybe they came to college unprepared. Maybe they procrastinated and started writing too late. Maybe they have an overinflated sense of their own writing skills. Yes, of course. But could it also not be that we didn’t provide them proper instruction about how to write this kind of paper, in this class, in this discipline, in the first place, or didn’t give them a rubric or set of criteria to lay bare our expectations? Could it also not be that we didn’t scaffold the assignment into manageable chunks with ample opportunity for feedback and improvement? So students cheat, lie. Okay, well, maybe they’re just entitled, lazy, looking for any opportunity to cut corners. Sure. But could it also not be that our learning environments and assignments incentivize dishonesty? Could it also not be that there are too few and too high-of-stakes assignments that their entire grade is riding on? Could it also not be that we haven’t conveyed why this subject is important for them to know? Could it also not be that we’ve made ourselves so intimidating and unapproachable that they can’t come to us when they’re struggling and simply tell the truth? I’m not saying that we need to use the idea of a team to start blaming ourselves for every bad behavior on the students’ parts. This would be a mistake. Students are adults and, ultimately, responsible for their own learning. (And this is an important life lesson they need to learn, too.) But thinking of ourselves as on or as part of their team, rather than something separate, opens up new ways of thinking about common and perennially frustrating teaching problems. What are some possibilities that the idea of teaching as teamwork opens up for you?

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

The seminary professor, a man of color, just walked out of the academic dean’s office. He had been teaching at the mainline Protestant theological institution for eleven years. The academic dean, a white woman, called him into her office to talk about a recent article he published in a mainstream magazine. He had written about white supremacy within American Christianity and the manifestations of racism in Protestant churches, including in churches that supported the seminary. The dean noted that she had received several complaints about his article. The professor asked the dean if she disagreed with anything that he wrote. She evaded the question and changed the subject to how the professor might repair relationships with some donors. She also reminded him that his review for promotion was coming up shortly and that she worried how this “controversy” could disrupt the review. The conversation ended with no resolution, but the dean said they could revisit “next steps” in a day or two after some prayer and reflection. The seminary professor was enraged, exhausted, and frustrated. In a word, he felt defeated. The professor began teaching at the seminary immediately after graduate school. He loved teaching his students and especially appreciated the increasing racial and ethnic diversity within the student population. But over the years, the racism that he experienced, and the racial harm that he witnessed his colleagues and students of color encounter, had taken a deleterious toll on his wellbeing and health. Being called into the dean’s office was the latest in a long series of episodes in which he and other colleagues of color were assailed because of what they taught, how they advocated for students of color, and how they challenged their institution to live up to its moral, pedagogical, and spiritual commitments to racial diversity, equity, and inclusion. In recent years, seminaries throughout the United States have grappled with racial discrimination. At some seminaries, there have been a handful of discriminatory incidents whereas at other schools the problems of racial prejudice have been widespread. Immediately after departing the dean’s office, this professor sat down on a bench outdoors and wrestled with whether his meeting with the dean was racially discriminatory. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission states that “it is unlawful to harass a person because of that person’s race or color” and explains that “harassment can include, for example, racial slurs, offensive or derogatory remarks about a person’s race or color, or the display of racially-offensive symbols.” The law does not forbid “simple teasing, offhand comments, or isolated incidents that are not very serious,” but it also outlines how racial discrimination is “illegal when it is so frequent or severe that it creates a hostile or offensive work environment or when it results in an adverse employment decision (such as the victim being fired or demoted).” The professor acknowledged to himself that the meeting may not have fallen into the legal delineation of harassment, but he knew it was racially harmful and he could feel the pain coursing through his body. The professor concluded that he had three options. The first option was to compromise and agree to a plan to talk with some of the offended donors. He would not apologize for his scholarship, but he would discuss his article with them and listen to why they thought he was wrong. The second option was to seek the support of his colleagues of color. The faculty of color had confronted the administration before, and he believed they were prepared to do so again on his behalf. The professor thought that his resistance might also garner media attention and perhaps he could write another article for the magazine explaining what happened. But the professor was weary. He thought about his health and his family. He did not know if he, or his family, had the energy required to enact the second option. Therefore, the professor was strongly considering the third option, which was to simply resign from the seminary. He would miss the classroom dearly, for it was his sanctuary, his refuge, and a holy site where he experienced rejuvenation through the wonder of learning together with his students. But in this moment, the professor did not know how much longer he could bear the pain in his teaching body. Questions What does this case study tell you about the seminary and how it engages matters of racial diversity, equity, and inclusion? What would you do if you were the professor? Are there other options the professor should consider? If you were the academic dean, would you have done anything differently in this situation? If so, what? If not, why not?

We were halfway through the first day of class when a student started viciously criticizing a TED talk I had just shown. It wasn’t hard to determine where the student’s criticism was coming from. He was furious that I would consider a woman worth listening to. He was spewing misogynistic hate in a room that was 70 percent female. On the first day of class. I responded to the student’s misogynistic rant in my usual way. Trying to stay calm, I seized on something he was saying I could spin into a statement I agreed with, interrupted him with a “yes, and,” and proceeded to explain the value of the points made by the woman in her talk, being sure to emphasize how important and insightful they were. I never heard a misogynistic word out of him again. He never mistreated his female peers (I monitored closely) and by the end of the term was thoughtfully engaging with readings by female authors. It probably helped that he was surrounded—in my class alone—by thirty brilliant young women who were living proof of women’s intellectual capacities. It also helped that I was a white male, in a position of authority, who had not let him get away with saying misogynistic things unchallenged, even if I did use a strategy inspired by nonviolent conflict transformation techniques rather than direct confrontation and criticism. This story illustrates the power of embodiment, even in the form of a video. I doubt assigning a book or article by a woman would have elicited the same visceral reaction. Honestly, it usually takes me strategically getting a little angry in class to get students to stop routinely misgendering authors as “he,” despite my best efforts to ward off that habit, including through strategies like making cover pages for PDF readings that include a short biographical statement on the author. We often think of “embodiment” in teaching as referring to the kind of presence the teacher has in the classroom. Perhaps we also need to find ways to apply embodiment strategies to the authors we assign. Do we lose some of the power of a diverse syllabus when the authors remain just names on a page? In my classes, I try to use media to help highlight the diverse array of voices I hold up as worth listening to. Sometimes I assign a video or podcast or invite a guest speaker in person or on Zoom, but since most of the assigned readings are books, individual chapters, and articles, I also find other ways to help my students see our authors as real people. I often weave short videos or clips of lectures by our authors into my lessons. Lacking those, I’ll include a photo of an author alongside a quotation from their work in a slideshow. These aren’t complicated interventions; however, I fear that without them my students miss the diversity in my syllabi. This is perhaps most true of those students who most need to see it, those so steeped in patriarchal culture that even a “Barbara” or “Maria” becomes a “he.” Such interventions might not be the best idea if the message your reading list sends is that your field is dominated by cishet white men or that they are the only ones worth listening to, reading, or studying. Applying embodiment strategies to authors assumes that we’ve already done the work of diversifying our syllabi with the voices of those whose gender identity, sexual identity, racial identity, ethnic identity, nationality, language background, disability, age, religion, socioeconomic status, etc., both reflect the full diversity of humanity and affect their scholarship. As a white male, I don’t often deal with the kinds of challenges to my authority and expertise other educators experience, at least not from my students (as an adjunct, administrators and my tenure-track colleagues routinely devalue my expertise and experience). This means that my embodiment in the classroom is not particularly fraught. If anything, I have to take care not to be too intimidating lest my presence stifle participation. My identity and positionality also give me a platform and a responsibility to challenge worldviews that dehumanize and devalue those whose backgrounds, identities, and experiences are different from mine. Making the authors in my syllabi a little more real for students is one small way I pursue that goal.

Earlier this year, the song, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” from the animated film, Encanto¸ emerged as a viral sensation. The film’s protagonist, Mirabel, is seeking counsel from her reclusive uncle, the aforenamed Bruno, who is difficult to find because their family has ostracized him for his propensity to speak uncomfortable truths. Both of my children, one in middle school and the other in elementary school, reported that nearly everyone was singing this track. My eldest child even offered to show me some of the countless covers of the song on TikTok and YouTube.        In my experience teaching at a freestanding seminary, I have observed that there are also students that theological educators don’t talk about, or talk less about, whether within our own institutions or across guild contexts, such as the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature. Our conversations often focus upon two kinds of students: the ones who inspire us and the ones who terrorize us. Amid what almost always feels like a demanding academic semester, it is easy to talk about the students who are enlivening our classrooms and motivating us to sharpen our pedagogical skills. And we rightly seek collegial support concerning those students who abuse, antagonize, and aggravate us for a myriad of reasons, including discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender identity, ability, nationality, and sexuality.   I can think of two kinds of students that we don’t talk about as much as the terrific and the terrible. The first is the tired student. I teach at a denominational seminary with increasing ecumenical, ethnic, and racial diversity within our student population. The Master of Divinity degree is required for ministerial ordination in the denomination to which my seminary belongs, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Therefore, our Presbyterian students are generally not full-time pastors during their studies with us. More of our students from different ecclesial traditions are already full-time pastors and seeking further education to augment their capacities for ministry. Some are bi-vocational pastors leading congregations and balancing multiple responsibilities. In addition to working at least two jobs, they are also primary caregivers for young children, aging parents, and other family members. The tired student I am describing is also exceedingly thankful. During the nationwide racial reckoning in response to the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd two years ago, my seminary implemented a broad and comprehensive plan for Black reparations, which included new scholarships that cover the full cost of tuition and fees for every admitted African American student. In addition, my seminary offers generous scholarships that support the entire cost of tuition for every other non-Black student in a first-level master’s degree program. For some of the students in my classroom, these scholarships have made it possible for them to pursue a theological education. But because all these scholarships require full-time enrollment, I encounter the tired student who is juggling my syllabus along with other family, ministry, and work commitments. One pastor who I admire shares this wise counsel utilizing the metaphor of juggling: One must discern which balls are made of rubber and which are made of glass when prioritizing one’s schedule. The “glass” tasks must not be dropped because they will shatter whereas the tasks that are made of rubber can fall to the ground. For the tired student, I am aware that my assignments and class sessions are more like rubber than glass, especially in comparison to their other responsibilities. The tired student is sometimes unable to show up or perform well on an assignment. Or the cost of showing up and performing well requires a herculean effort with substantial costs in terms of the tired student’s mental, physical, and psychological health. The second kind of student we don’t talk about is the triumphalist student. It is more precise to describe this student as one who comes from a more theologically conservative ecclesial context in comparison to my seminary. Some of my students are unfamiliar with historical-critical methods of biblical interpretation, postcolonial theology, and progressive Christianity. They have not heard of scholars such as Katie Geneva Cannon, Walter Brueggemann, and Kwok Pui-lan. They are unaccustomed to theological inquiry that identifies and criticizes some Christian doctrines and practices. Their conceptions of church history revolve around a search for examples of Christians enacting courageous witness and exemplifying the triumph of God’s goodness over evil. Yet renowned church historian Justo González observes the story of Christianity, when told fully and honestly, includes beautiful moments of awe-inspiring faith and ugly episodes where it is difficult to discern the divine presence. As an historian of Christianity in the United States, the only way that I can teach a full and honest history is to confront the active participation and complicity of Christians who committed and perpetuated the sins of settler colonialism, slavery, sexism, nativism, and other oppressive injustices. And my lessons do not always have heartwarming endings that uplift the soul. There are certainly moments of reflection and application, but some chapters of Christian history are sinful and irredeemable.      There is diversity with the “triumphalist student” I am describing such that I do not want to present this kind of student as a monolith. Some students experience our seminary classrooms as liberative spaces where they can expand their ways of thinking theologically about themselves, God, and Christian ministry. Other students undergo a complex process of educational formation with stages of disorientation and deconstruction preceding reorientation and reconstruction. And a few students remain resistant to our methods of pedagogy. We talk some about the “triumphalist student” who testifies to a metanoia from our curriculum, but we need to talk more about how these students return to congregations that are unprepared to receive their transformed approaches to ministry and theology.          

One of my favorite genres of fantasy fiction is the “magical door” story – tales where a person finds a mystical, strange doorway into another world. Alice in Wonderland is probably the best-known example, but I’m more fond of the contemporary takes, especially Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway (2016) and the Wayward Children series that follows it. In McGuire’s books, children disappear into doorways that lead them to worlds where they feel profoundly at home – sometimes pretty ones, like a world where everything is made of candy, but just as often menacing worlds where lightning can raise people from the dead or where they fight alongside merpeople against the Eldritch horrors of the deep. Besides being the ultimate escapist fantasy for anybody who felt wildly ill-at-ease and out of place in their adolescent years (everybody, perhaps?), these stories also convey that we aren’t really looking for a docile, perfect place to be – we just want to be where we know we fit. This magical door framework recently snuck up on me during an exercise on teaching – we were asked to artistically represent our teaching selves, or the “bother” that spurs us on as professors. Without realizing the connection to some of my favorite books, I quickly crocheted some drab ribbons into a doorway – and on the other side of that doorway, I painted wild and colorful movement, represented in glitter and pom poms and sticky foam. This is how I see my teaching in theology – trying to coax students through a doorway into a world that is bright and overwhelming, chaotic but lovely. Looking at my hasty picture afterwards, I found myself realizing again why students can be so hesitant to jump into this wild world. The doorposts are pretty, in their own way, and they certainly are familiar. We all cling to groundedness when we’re uncertain, and higher education is constantly uncertain, with students suddenly struggling with topics they once found simple, oscillating between the career plans they expected and the ones that better fit their skills, fretting at each new professor’s style of teaching and grading. While my students as a group aren’t particularly religious, for some, their fundamental beliefs about God or the universe or that everything happens for a reason are one of the few stable parts of their identity. My theology class threatens to shake up even that. So, at least on the tough days, they cling to the doorposts and lintels like a toddler avoiding a bath, grasping onto anything rooted until the danger has passed. Or, maybe just as often, they go quiet and inward, not wanting to step through the portal into a conversation they feel unprepared for. Questions and options seem to help – “Do you want to get into groups now, or should we do a poll first?” “I know we might not know much about vows of silence, but who in here needs complete quiet to do homework?” I get them talking about themselves first, and our content second. That way, they can peek through the windows before deciding whether to come outside, and that first tiny step might be enough to build momentum. It’s a helpful reminder that my students are always doing hard work to engage with me and the readings I assign – almost any class day brings up questions. “Do I believe this?” “Could I live that way?” “What commitments would I die for?” “What commitments will I live for?” Even for the non-religious, theology class always holds the potential for deep introspection alongside factual learning, and introspection is hard. With my doorway image in mind, I can recall the importance of gentleness and compassion in my role – not easy-ness, but a gentleness that reminds me to notice the uncertainty, even fear behind the disengagement, and to be ready to try again and again to connect with each individual. I can see more clearly how chaotic and overwhelming the field seems, especially to those who have never crossed the threshold, and look for ways to reassure them that there is something familiar and good on the other side, and that I’ll accompany them until they find it. I remember well a young Latina student pulling me aside after the last day of class and whispering to me, almost like a secret, “Until this class, I didn’t realize I could be both Catholic and a feminist!” She had found her place to belong in the mess of it all. It helps me remember how badly we all want to find a place where we feel welcome, and to create that with both my affect and my syllabus. Every day is a doorway in theology class, and my role is to stand behind it, beckoning, and reassuring, “It’s wonderful here. All you have to do is take another step.”

I remember the first time I felt a sense of awe and wonder about theology. It was in my required Problem of God class at Georgetown University, where I received my undergraduate degree. I had picked a section of the course based on my interest in a list of readings provided with the registration materials the school sent me before I started my freshman year. The professor of that course turned out to be Fr. Thomas King, SJ, who had a reputation as an excellent teacher—something I had no idea about at the time I signed up for the course. I do know I was very fortunate to have done so as my friends who wanted to take his class in the following semester often had trouble finding a spot in his classes. At this point—over twenty years later—I remember little of the specific content of that class, but in terms of overall structure, Fr. King had basically divided everything into groups of three. We examined a variety of readings—from Augustine to Sartre—and Fr. King’s lectures helped us to understand the way each reading explained the nature of God. In the final class of the semester, Fr. King reviewed all the previous content, illustrating how each author’s approach to God (even Sartre!) could fall into one of three categories of ways of talking about God—ways that ultimately could be thought of as an understanding of God as the Father, an understanding of God as the Son, and an understanding of God as the Spirit. As everyone packed up on that final note, my friend Mike and I sat in our seats, completely dumbfounded. Mike turned to me and said, “He just solved the problem of God.” In that moment, for me, a spark had been lit. I had a sense of awe and wonder about the concepts we had examined, and I wanted more of that sense.  In this piece, I aimed to get at a representation of this spark of awe and wonder. The triangle represents the mystery of the divine—a triangle to represent the Trinitarian God of my tradition of Christianity, with a question mark to show how humans, in this life, can never fully know or understand the divine. The heart is meant to represent the sense of awe and wonder that I feel. I would describe it as a sense of joy burning in my heart—similar to the language Blaise Pascal used in his “memorial,” a description of a mystical experience he had that is often published as part of his Pensées, and echoing, of course, Augustine’s idea of the restless heart. The hands are meant to represent my continued seeking of that awe and wonder in my study and research. After creating this, I realized that my imagery had unintentionally mirrored a drawing that one of my other undergraduate professors, Fr. Otto Hentz, SJ, used to draw on the board. In my senior year, I happened to meet an alum who told me this image was all I needed to know in Fr. Hentz’s class—that the triangle represented the mystery of God and the two lines represented the human response to the mystery of God. I recall a bit more discussion in Fr. Hentz’s class about our reading assignments, but his lectures almost always included a reference to this image. When I first considered graduate studies in theology, these Jesuits were the model of the teacher that I wanted to be—one who narrates the content through lecture to try to amaze my students and thus produce the same spark of awe and wonder in my students that had struck me so many years previously. However, I eventually drew on a different undergraduate experience of awe and wonder as a model for my teaching—the experience of reading Pascal’s Pensées in French while studying abroad in Strasbourg, France. This was in the context of a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French literature course, not a theology course, but as I read and interpreted the text for myself in that context, I found a sense of profoundness and truth in what Pascal wrote. For example, one of my favorite fragments states, “Why do you kill me? What! do you not live on the other side of the water? If you lived on this side, my friend, I should be an assassin, and it would be unjust to slay you in this manner. But since you live on the other side, I am a hero, and it is just” (fr. 293). This fragment really illustrates the absurdity of the ways we divide and separate our human family. I found through this experience while studying abroad that I could find the sense of awe and wonder for myself, that I didn’t need a professor to tell it to me. Rather, reading, interpreting, and making meaning for myself through these texts could produce that same sense of awe and wonder. Thus, when I teach today, I aim to help my students learn to read, interpret, and discuss texts for themselves. I know that not everyone will find that spark of awe and wonder, but I still aim to provide them with an opportunity for it.

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