Search Results

Thanks to the collegiality of Dr. Mitzi J. Smith and the generosity of the Wabash Center, I have the opportunity to engage in learning that moves beyond professional development to include personal transformation. This summer I will participate as a learner in an intensive that Mitzi will teach on The Gospel of Luke and African-American Interpretation. Mitzi is J. Davidson Philips Professor of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary and a leading womanist biblical scholar. She and CTS have graciously agreed to include me and 21 students from Bethany Theological Seminary and Earlham School of Religion in the course. Mitzi and I are also co-directing a Wabash Center small grant project titled, “The Challenges and Effective Pedagogy of a Trans-Contextual Online Collaboration for an African-American/Womanist Hermeneutics Course during Covid-19.”  Dr. Marcia Riggs (also of CTS), and Dr. Mary Hess (Luther Theological Seminary) have joined the project as consultants, bringing expertise in the areas of ethics and education. The grant creates space for us to reflect on pedagogy and social justice in ways that go beyond our usual reflective practice. This blog is a way to make our learning public. Both the course and the grant project feel challenging to me--a white, straight, cisgendered male with a history of privilege. Unlike Mitzi and many of my students, I have not experienced biblical texts being used as a basis for marginalizing me, requiring me to be submissive because of my gender, or excluding me from leadership. In most churches I have attended, it is socially acceptable to ignore biblical texts that challenge my middle-class lifestyle, such as Luke 14:33. Students in my courses are welcome to “talk back” about the Bible with or without the “sass” that Mitzi encourages;[1] I, however, have been more inclined to emphasize that New Testament texts are inspiring and worthy of careful study despite their flaws. Mitzi’s hermeneutics of suspicion may challenge me to critique biblical interpretations and texts more assertively in light of core biblical values such as justice, mercy, and love. My approaches to hermeneutics and pedagogy have long emphasized inclusion of a wide diversity of interpreters with the understanding that Jesus often speaks through people who have been marginalized. My revised introductory survey course is now titled “Reading the New Testament Contextually,” and it includes True to Our Native Land as essential reading.[2] I am fluent enough to teach in Spanish and have enjoyed leading bilingual intercultural hermeneutics seminars in Puerto Rico and California. I have also had the privilege of team teaching with several Nigerian scholars through video-linked classrooms in Jos, Plateau State, and Richmond, Indiana. Those efforts, however, have not qualified me to foreground the experiences of African-American communities in all the ways that justice, love, and good teaching require. In order to understand and embody Jesus’ teaching faithfully in this time, I need to recognize the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on communities of color, especially on African-American communities. I need to speak out more forcefully against the discriminatory police violence that has continued unabated even as other activities shut down for the pandemic. I need to engage more deeply with African-American neighbors and biblical interpreters in order to hear what Jesus is saying now through them and through scripture. And I need to step up efforts to recognize and confront racism in myself as well as in society. In a recent consultation, Mitzi, Marcia, Mary, and I exchanged ideas for helping students become aware of their own contexts and identities, including their experiences of race. Marcia reminded us that storytelling rooted in personal and communal experience is an essential practice of womanist theology. Mary and Marcia each suggested prompts that could encourage students to write thoughtfully about the identities and experiences they bring to a course in African-American and womanist biblical interpretation. For example, “What are systemic patterns of racism that you observe in general society today? How do you participate (even inadvertently) in these patterns?”[3] We agreed that it is important for both students and professors to know their contexts, to remember their own stories, and to tell them in ways that create space for honest conversation. I plan to share more of my story and learning as the project continues, and I look forward to interacting with posts by Mitzi and other participants. As a reader of this blog, your constructive comments are also welcome as we journey together toward deeper understanding. Read about Mitzi Smith's Experience with Dan Ulrich   [1] See Mitzi J. Smith, Womanist Sass and Talk Back: Social (In)Justice, Intersectionality, and Biblical Interpretation (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018); also Mitzi J. Smith and Yung Suk Kim. Toward Decentering the New Testament : A Reintroduction (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018). [2] Brian K. Blount, ed. True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007). [3] Rima Vesely-Flad, “‘Saying the Wrong Thing’: Experiences of Teaching Race in the Classroom,” Spotlight on Teaching, Religious Studies News (November 5, 2018), https://rsn.aarweb.org/spotlight-on/teaching/anti-racism/saying-the-wrong-thing, accessed June 18, 2020.

[su_youtube_advanced url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JR_5IQlhxk&feature=youtu.be"] Last year I participated in a Colloquy at Wabash entitled “Teaching the Black Presence.” Not long after, for the first time in my career, a white male New Testament scholar, Dan Ulrich, approached me about teaching an African American biblical interpretation course for students, primarily white, attending Bethany Theological Seminary in Indiana; for some reason I imagined them to be primarily male. Dan had read and assigned students to read the essays I wrote in True Our Native Land (2007). By Dan’s own admission, he might have been “scared away by the strong hermeneutics of suspicion developed” in my recent work, much of which he has now read for this course. That reflects change. In my experience it is not unusual for scholars in biblical studies to be more familiar with the work of black males than with the scholarship of black females, but that is changing. This collaboration between Dan and me is novel for both of us, and taking it online in the pandemic brings its own challenges. We each carry our own ‘baggage,’ and we are committed to working through it to create a pedagogical experience that will enhance learning for the students enrolled and for ourselves. I am the teaching faculty for the course, the expert in African American and womanist biblical interpretation, although my dissertation and the book I published from it are readings of the Acts of the Apostles. I am a biblical scholar--this is often lost on some colleagues across the academy, as well as students, in my experience. So, as we navigate our way through this course—become acquainted with each other as scholars and human beings—our ‘baggage’ will trip us up at times. But hopefully we will also shed some ‘baggage.’  This is not an easy journey for either of us because of experiences, the ways that we have been socialized in the academy and society, both of which are racialized and gendered in favor of white males and the scholarship they do. We both have been shaped in ways we can and cannot immediately identify. In a meeting during the Colloquy with our consultants (Dr. Marcia Riggs and Dr. Mary Hess), Mary provided feedback to Dan on his first draft blog. It was feedback that I withheld because I did not believe Dan could receive it from me. This is my baggage. After Mary spoke, I confessed that I had a similar impression, but did not want to ‘hurt Dan’s feelings.’ But as I reflect now that was not the reason I withheld my critique. I believed that Dan would not receive my critique, and so why offer it. I was guilty of what I and other black scholars and scholars of color believe (and have experienced) too many white scholars to be guilty of, which is of not providing needed critical feedback to black students and other students of color, of being patronizing and assuming they can’t handle it or are not up to doing the work. I never fail to provide critical feedback to students, regardless of race-ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and so on. But I neglected in Dan’s case to offer useful critique, and my failure was not beneficial to him. I didn’t give Dan the chance to receive my feedback with grace and collegiality until after the white woman scholar offered hers. Going forward I must be honest with Dan, tactful, but honest in offering critique, because he has said he is participating in this collaboration as a learner and peer. This change would reflect neighbor-love informed by a self-love that values critical feedback as necessary for success. As a learner-collaborator, I am grateful for the idea from our consultants to ask students to write more than a two-paragraph statement describing the contexts that impact their selection and reading of a pericope. Our consultants have encouraged me to ask students to write an extended hermeneutical autobiography that will assist them in thinking more critically about their contexts and how culture and social identities, for example, shape them. This collaboration is not easy, but it is giving me life and pedagogical strategies and ideas. Read About Dan Ulrich's Experience with Mitzi Smith

This book explores the impact of eLearning on the quality of teaching in higher education, focusing on three main issues: university teachers’ perception of quality teaching, their strategies for achieving quality teaching in practice, and interventions that design and implement online collaborative activities in a large class. The book argues that if eLearning targets the real problems in practice and is appropriately designed and implemented, it can improve the teaching quality at universities. It also demonstrates the complexity of teachers’ perception of quality teaching and contextual factors that affect teaching practice and quality. Further, it explores university teachers’ perception of quality teaching in Italy, the UK and China – an aspect that is rarely addressed in the literature – and reveals why the impact of ICTs on university teaching is not as great as in other fields by explaining the issues that threaten the quality of day-to-day teaching. Lastly, it confirms that traditional lecturing, combined with online collaborative activities, improves the quality of teaching compared to traditional lecturing alone. As such, this book is a necessary and important resource for the research community. (From the Publisher)

An important backdrop to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals involves consideration of the impact of a ‘new demographics’ derived from the interaction of two global developments. First, high levels of internal and cross-border mass migration, stimulated by climate change, violence and disparities in wealth and social stability within and between different countries and the global South and North. Second, the phenomenon of increasing longevity and rapidly ageing populations, especially in the developed world. This book explores the central role that socially engaged higher education might potentially play in helping address these challenges, enhancing lifelong learning opportunities and facilitating more positive outcomes for both individuals and societies. The contributors to this book are scholars of higher education and lifelong learning based in twelve countries from Europe (Germany, Ireland, Slovenia, Sweden and the United Kingdom), the Americas (Brazil, Canada, Mexico and the USA), Japan, Australia and New Zealand. (From the Publisher)

The social justice issue that I have consistently raised in my biblical exegesis courses has been US immigration. As I tell my students—mostly white middle-class Protestants fixed on parish ministry—engaging this topic in a sermon will likely incite some criticism from parishioners or even set in motion a premature resignation.  Despite my school’s borderlands location and the exilic content of the Hebrew Bible, pivoting to the topic of US immigration in a biblical exegesis course cannot be done haphazardly. In terms of texts, I find that Genesis (12–50), Exodus, Psalms 120–134, Second Isaiah (40–55) and Lamentations are especially apt for engaging this complex sociopolitical topic. What is unavoidable in these texts are stories about people on the move because of famine, jealousy, conquest, or faith—to name just a few. Yet still, connecting these biblical stories to the lived experiences of migrants in places like the US-Mexico border is by no means a linear process. No matter how convinced I am that Abram’s journey from the Ur of the Chaldeans to the land of Canaan (Gen 11:31) is a migration story, in order to bring my students along I must confront the assumptions that inform their understanding of migration. A common assumption they often have about migration and by extension immigration is that both phenomena represent a social problem or challenge. At the source of this assumption is indeed not an ancient notion of migration but rather their nation-state formation. By contextualizing the latter, students discover that the problems most associated with migration and immigration in US dominant society—like border crossers as “illegal,” economic strains, cultural threats, and spreaders of disease—stem from Western nationalist forms of inclusion and exclusion. After discovering their own nation-state biases about immigrants, I find it easier to shift to the theme of migration in the biblical text, contrasting along the way the ancient assumptions that likely informed it. As opposed to nationalist thinking, the biblical text often starts with the assumption that humans are free to move and that this movement constitutes an act of faith rather than a crime. Emphasizing the freedom of movement and the faith that accompanies it in the biblical text, I then pivot to US immigration and the sociopolitical injustices produced by the nation-state’s control of human mobility. Though migration studies, forced migration studies, and refugee studies are useful resources, their approach to immigration is often based entirely on the modern concept of the nation-state and hence tend to view borders, citizenship, and state sovereignty not as human constructs but as natural to our earthly existence. This nationalist-centric agenda can also be transferred unwittingly over to the biblical commentary material that relies on the social sciences.  For this reason, I supplement my immigration bibliography with migrant artwork (See https://artedelagrimas.org/), particularly the kind that emphasizes the freedom of movement and faith as in the drawing below: Dayana, “Mi Jornada (My Journey),” colored pencil and marker, 2014, 9 x 12, Arte de Lágrimas Gallery. Dayana is from Guatemala and was 7-years old when she drew this art piece about her asylum-seeking journey to the US. She and her mother travelled by car and then by bus. She remembered that the road was long and gray (left side). Her picture narrative ends with them crossing the Rio Grande on a makeshift raft (lancha). She first drew the rocks (piedras) in the river and then the river banks. Next, she drew the makeshift raft in the middle of the river with her and her mother inside it. I asked, “Did anyone say good bye to you?” She replied, “My aunt.” She placed her aunt on the Mexican side of the river waving goodbye. I then asked, “Was there anyone else?” Not saying anything, she removed the rosary from around her neck and traced the plastic crucifix over the Rio Grande. She then began to sing the hymn “En la Cruz, en la Cruz, yo primero vi la luz, y las manchas de mi alma yo lavé, fue allí por fe yo vi a Jesús, y siempre feliz con El seré (At the Cross).” Her and her mother sang these words while on the raft. In the drawing the cross is the symbol of faith that accompanied Dayana’s migratory movement across the Rio Grande—the symbol of a territorially bounded state. Like Abram’s story, her faith assumes the freedom of movement.

Silence fills the class. No one wants to respond to the question I just raised. From a corner, I hear a student say, “Step it up.” She is looking at a white male student who had been quiet the entire class period. With slight hesitation, he apologizes for his silence. He shares that he has been processing feelings of shame around his whiteness. The room is no longer silent. The learning community delves deeper, peeling back layers of shame other students in the class had also been feeling but fearful to share. Fear is the greatest enemy to justice-seeking conversations in the classroom. It inhibits dialogue and paralyzes transformative learning. Thus, I invite students to name their fears. They fear: saying the wrong thing being misunderstood losing friends crying or exploding with rage in the classroom being seen as the “bad” person discovering that all they grew up believing is a sham. Their fears are justified. Justice-seeking conversations can be like a minefield; risk-free zones do not exist. Promising safe space would be a lie. Justice-seeking conversations need spaces where students can enact courage. Creating these spaces is one of my tasks as a professor. To overcome fear, I invite students on a journey. I tell students that while this course will require intellectual rigor, it will also require emotional rigor. I encourage students to shed false identities and bring their authentic voice into the space. They do not have to perform “wokeness,” nor does ignorance have to invoke shame. Justice-seeking conversations challenge students at the core. Students aren’t just grappling with social justice concepts theoretically; they wrestle with their very identities. I invite that wrestling in the class. I want the class to be a space where they can explore, discover, challenge, reconstruct, and dream of a better world and their participation in that world together. But each of these actions require courage. I imagine my classroom as a stage, one where students are invited to “try on” these new courageous ways of doing and being socially just. Crafting learning covenants together is one pedagogical practice I implement in class to invite accountability and inspire courage. The learning covenant establishes how we engage one another. Emphasizing that my class is a learning community underscores the importance of relationships. The learning community is not just my responsibility, rather, students co-create the space and then help sustain the space through shared governance. It provides a common language of accountability. The covenant invites ownership and enables me to redistribute power to students in the classroom. I too agree to the covenant. My ultimate goal is to create a relational fabric that is thick enough to withstand the discomfort, offense, and pain that might emerge as a result of justice-seeking conversations. When my student says “Step It Up” in the opening, she is simply enforcing the learning covenant. Yet, her speaking up and the student’s response both require courage and mutual accountability. The classroom becomes a site where they can rehearse justice-seeking conversations in a non-hostile way. Lines from past course covenants include: We won’t ask others to take risks that we are not willing to take. We will show mercy rather than condemn. We won’t settle for fear. We will embrace courage, unity, and humility. We give permission for ourselves to be wrong. This space is not solely for the sake of gaining knowledge. This space is designed to equip. We commit to being agents of change when we leave here. It takes time to craft the covenant, but my time investment intends to model the process of consensus-building and affirm the significance of making intentional decisions about how we interact with one another. I remind them that each student will have to agree to these guidelines within the learning community. Once I offer this reminder, I always have a student that wants to revise something in the covenant. After the covenant is complete, I post it. For the first couple of classes, we read it aloud together. We return to it again and again throughout the course. The ultimate goal of the covenant is to foster a courageous, inclusive space where students feel valued, respected, and a sense of belonging. Loving well and building reconciling practices does not begin when students leave the classroom; these practices begin within the classroom. When we conclude our class, I encourage students to practice what they learned in other spaces. It is now their task to create courageous spaces among their friends and family. Amidst the racial pandemic and election, we must prepare for more intense justice-seeking conversations. In what ways might you create space for courage and accountability in your classroom?

Volatile social dissonance in America’s urban landscape is the backdrop as Valerie A. Miles-Tribble examines tensions in ecclesiology and public theology, focusing on theoethical dilemmas that complicate churches’ public justice witness as prophetic change agents. She attributes churches’ reticence to confront unjust disparities to conflicting views, for example, of Black Lives Matter protests as “mere politics,” and disparities in leader and congregant preparation for public justice roles. As a practical theologian with experience in organizational leadership, Miles-Tribble applies adaptive change theory, public justice theory, and a womanist communitarian perspective, engaging Emilie Townes’s construct of cultural evil as she presents a model of social reform activism re-envisioned as public discipleship. She contends that urban churches are urgently needed to embrace active prophetic roles and thus increase public justice witness. “Black Lives Matter times” compel churches to connect faith with public roles as spiritual catalysts of change. (From the Publisher)

“Resisting cultured despair” is a phrase from feminist ethicist Sharon Welch that captured my imagination in graduate school. It is a phrase, or rather a disposition, that named for me my experience with the paralysis (and the privilege) that often prevent us from moving beyond critical description (what is going on) to responsive and responsible action in an unjust and messy world. For the past decade, resisting cultured despair has been an explicit feature of my teaching philosophy. It takes form in undergraduate, values-integrated seminars as well as in graduate servant leadership classes–courses designed to counter what religious education scholar Mary Elizabeth Moore decries as the “bifurcation of information and formation” in our pedagogies. In the end, I want the knowledge we generate together in the classroom to be catalytic rather than paralytic. I want my students to join the resistance, to become arc-benders in the moral universe. In its more common form, the initial despair sets in as the students grow in their awareness of the complex, long-standing, and interlocking nature of contemporary social ills–that is, as the students become “cultured.” So, conventional wisdom suggests we read together from the traditional canon of arc-benders. Yes, the challenges are daunting, the systems entrenched, but look at MLK! Ella Baker! Nelson Mandela! Dorothy Day! Cesar Chavez! to name just a few of the social change “saints” often invited into the curriculum. But herein lies the rub, and the less talked about but no less paralyzing dimension of cultured despair: the more we read of the moral virtuosos whose lives we count on to inspire our students (and, let’s be honest, ourselves), the easier it becomes to outsource our responsibility for changing the world to the luminaries, the set apart among us, the ones–certainly not me!–who by virtue of their extraordinary gifts and sacrifice can actually make a difference. As I continue to wrestle with transposing resistance to cultured despair from the soaring heights of a teaching philosophy to the grounded pedagogy of everyday teaching, I have found it helpful to adapt a strategy that has been effective in designing student writing assignments. One challenge familiar, I suspect, to most teachers is the student paper that tries, unsuccessfully, to emulate the style of and employ with earnest abandon the new vocabulary in the assigned course readings–the “try hards,” as my teenage daughter might say. My kneejerk response reflects this appellation: you are trying too hard, which, of course, is not helpful feedback. Whether crestfallen, contemptuous, or simply confused, student reactions to critiques of their writing include an implicit demand: ok, then show me what good writing that I am capable of looks like. So, we read the eloquent and professionally edited essays, speeches, and letters of the virtuosos for inspiration, and less for imitation. We pair these readings with review and discussion of a good (and sometimes a great) student paper from a past class. For me, forming students to resist cultured despair requires a similar approach. What this looks like in practice may vary, but for the past several semesters I have made an intentional effort to invite into the classroom recent alumni who are working in organizations that attend daily to the intersection of justice and care–organizations that amplify the leading causes of life in word and deed. The first-person stories of peers, like the reading of student writing, is a witness to a way of life as towards social justice, towards a life of “faithful service and ethical leadership,” as our university mission intimates. Their stories serve as tangible reference points throughout the semester, grounding our critical and conceptual analysis of issues threatening human flourishing. Three practical points to note: these conversations are shared, memorable, and easily adapted to flexible learning environments. These conversations with alumni ensure that we have a “shared text”–something that a required reading aspires to but often falls short of in practice. The shared, living texts prove easier to recall and work with in subsequent class sessions. And, as I discovered this year, the conversations can be hosted virtually in a way that, ironically, may enhance the “reality” of their stories. For example, alumni can give virtual tours of organizations we would never be able to visit in person during a class. There is, of course, nothing radical or new about bringing back alumni to tell their story–your alumni office will be thrilled to assist (and publicize). And as with any alumni “career talks,” the impact can be direct: the current student compelled to apply for a year of service with the organizations for whom the alumni work. But the pedagogical move, like so many, is not contingent on generating immediate, observable causal relationships. Rather, it is a recognition that in our classrooms, the invitation to change the world –as the most recent iteration of our (your?) university branding exhorts–cannot be delivered solely by those whose stories have been mythologized and anthologized. This has become increasingly clear in the current moment when the moral authority of past saints is simultaneously invoked and revoked by new voices demanding to be heard. Teaching resistance to cultured despair requires additional signposts and, likely, the identification of new paths. Partnering with recent alumni is a source of hope and accountability for me as I prepare to teach this fall, conscious of both the temptation to cultured despair and the rising culture of despair.