Search Results

In the old religious imagination, neighbor was commandment—love thy neighbor as thyself—a moral directive carved in sacred text, often recited more than practiced. But womanist knowing stretches that word beyond obedience into embodiment. Neighbor is not assignment; neighbor is encounter. It is the moment you recognize that your life is braided into another’s survival.To be neighbor is to resist the lie of separation.To be neighbor is to lean into the inextricable connection between us.To be neighbor is to know that heart, guts, breath, and soul are even now relationship—we know this is how the universe holds us, whether we consent or not. To be neighbor is to understand that justice is not abstract. It is as close as the nearest wound you are willing to see and bind up. This is not about convenience. Neighbor is not the one who lives next door. That is geography, proximity without promise. Neighbor is interruption of our indifference. It is the holy disruption of your comfort by someone else’s reality and need. Neighbor is memory: remembering that somebody once stood in the gap for you/us. Neighbor is risk: choosing connection when disconnection would be easier, less costly, less troublesome. Neighbor is sacred because it insists that no one is outside the circle of care.It is when you cannot unknow what you now know, and so you must respond—not out of charity, but out of shared humanity, communal obligation, and love. Neighbor is the woman whose name you do not know, but whose struggle you recognize in your bones. Your marrow knows she is tired in a way that feels familiar. She is carrying more than she should have to carry. And something in you refuses to let her carry it alone—even if all you can offer is witness and empathy.Womanist theology reminds us that survival is communal. Thriving is collective. Therefore, neighbor is not optional. Neighbor is the practice of showing up, especially when systems have decided someone is disposable, expendable, or useful only to the greed of others… and that someone is we, us, mine. And perhaps most truthfully—neighbor is action. It is doing. It is what you do when love refuses to remain a theory, an abstraction, or a fragile, contestable idea.I have vivid childhood memories of the ways the women in our church, including my mother, would band together to care for someone recently out of the hospital. When a person or household was in distress, they mobilized a circle of care.The women organized grocery shopping, meal preparation, house cleaning, laundry, medication schedules, transportation to doctor visits, errands, fellowship visits, overnight stays, pet care, plant care, and prayer. As many aspects of home life as were needed were tended to. Each woman took, or was assigned, a task, with one or two coordinating the efforts of the whole group.Sometimes this neighborliness supported family members who were caregivers. Sometimes, when there was no family—or when family was absent or unreliable—the women became the family.Most often, my mother cooked meals. My father and I delivered them. My mother gave us strict instructions—where to leave the food, what dishes to retrieve, how to be attentive without overstaying.As a child, I felt the weight and wonder of doing something important. I would talk with the person receiving care, even in my shyness. I would remind my father of my mother’s instructions. Together, we noticed what needed tending: the throw rugs that should be removed now that Mrs. Thurgood used a walker; the broken commode upstairs that needed a plumber before her grandson’s next weekend visit.We stayed just long enough—twenty to thirty minutes—present but not exhausting. Back home, we reported everything to my mother, who reported to the coordinating woman. Often, what needed fixing was already in motion before the next visit.We were neighbors, acting as neighbors. We were caring for someone in need, trusting that when our time came, we would not be alone either. No one was left to fend for themselves. Our care was how we moved and had our collective being in the world.The ethic of neighborliness is part of my DNA. And yet, for a long time, I believed I had not been part of a community that lived this way anymore—or so I thought. I thought I was alone. I was wrong. A recent health diagnosis placed me in the ICU for eight days. While I was in the hospital, friends and colleagues—local, regional, and national—banded together for my care. I am not alone.After my hospital discharge, my neighbor, Tom Traughber—a friend to me and to the Wabash Center for more than twenty years—stepped fully into the work of care. For two weeks, Tom stayed with me. He grocery shopped, cooked, did laundry, picked up prescriptions, drove me to follow-up appointments, watered my plants, and asked me every day, “How do you feel?” He watched over me. He took care of me. Tom’s radical, steadfast care returned me to my childhood—to that circle of care where being neighbored was simply a way of life.I am grateful beyond measure to be healing. I am on the mend. And I am humbled to have received the sacred and precious gift of being on the receiving end of neighboring. Time spent convalescing has given me space to remember, reflect, and pray. Before this moment, I would have said I had lost touch with this kind of neighborly faithfulness. But memory corrected me. I remembered faculty who showed up for one another. I remembered celebration—my first book marked with a sheet cake bearing its cover, joy made edible. I remembered the ways colleagues supported me during the ten years I was the sole caregiver for my parents. I remembered the affirmations—grants, tenure, promotion, and then promotion again—not as solitary achievements, but as communal investments.I had not named these moments as neighborliness before.I have made that correction.Neighbor is not lost. It is waiting to be practiced again, deliberately, tenderly, and with courage. In a world that profits from our isolation, to choose neighbor is to resist. It is to remember that we belong to one another, not as sentiment, but as survival. The question is no longer whether neighbor exists. The question is whether we will be neighbor—again, and again, and again—until no one is left outside the circle of our care.Thank you, Tom!  Reflection Questions Where, in my academic life, have I mistaken collegial proximity for genuine neighborliness—and what would it take to move from one to the other? When have I been carried by a “circle of care” in my professional journey, and how do I honor that memory through my own actions now? What risks am I unwilling to take for the sake of connection, and what does that reveal about my commitments to communal thriving? How do institutional norms (competition, productivity, scarcity) shape or limit my capacity to practice neighborliness—and how might I resist them? Who, in my immediate academic community, is carrying more than they should—and what is one concrete act of neighboring I can offer this week?

Part 1: “Hate”I came into academia sideways. At a slant, you might say. After seminary, I worked in multicultural student affairs at a small, private liberal arts college by day and attended classes in an educational leadership, research, and policy PhD program for working professionals by night. After earning my degree, I served my church denomination as a researcher and was happy in that role, but the constant travel was taking a toll on my health.I longed to find a vocational path that could ground me within a particular community, a place where I might have a day-to-day impact on others and vice versa. I also knew I didn’t want to pastor a church (I never did) but desired to continue engaging in relevant research for the church and community. This is when I saw a job announcement for an administrative faculty position at my alma mater to direct the school’s internship program and decided to apply.Little did I know what I was getting myself into. I quickly realized that “one of these things is not like the other.” My daily activities of running an internship program, overseeing adjunct faculty teaching seminar courses, and planning trainings for intern supervisors and students was quite different from the daily labors of my faculty colleagues. Sure, I taught half the credits that a tenure-track colleague taught, but this was far eclipsed by the kind of work that I and my staff—yes, I also have the responsibility of hiring and supervising staff—faced regularly. Think student affairs/academic dean type of work, with less responsibility but more external accountabilities.My first year was especially difficult. I was asked to conduct a review of the program’s curriculum and the department as a whole, and there was staff turnover during that time. While much of it was not unlike the administrative and supervisory work I had done for the denomination, it was a very different rhythm and workload from that of my peers.Because I came into academia at a slant—from the church, and with a non-religious doctorate from a non-ranked state school—I felt honored that the faculty had chosen me to join their exclusive club. I still feel honored. As a Latina and first-generation college graduate from a poor, rural background, working at a graduate theological school was beyond my wildest childhood dreams. Many of the faculty had been my seminary professors more than twenty years before. They, along with the administration, saw my gifts as a teacher and researcher and nurtured those gifts through various avenues of support and camaraderie. They are now truly my colleagues.Eight years into the life of a teacher-administrator, however, I am feeling the wear and tear of administrative work on my body and my spirit. Having earned a sabbatical (for which I am very, very grateful), I have tasted the sweet nectar of being only a teacher—someone who maintains a certain amount of autonomy over their own schedules for course planning, research, and travel. They are not beholden to staff or adjunct faculty supervisees, leaders in churches and nonprofits, or even students in the same ways. Even though there are committee and guild responsibilities for full-time teaching and research faculty (I have those too), there is more space to read, to think, to write. I realized early on that if I wanted to pursue a research and writing agenda, I needed to adopt a bivocational mentality as a teacher-administrator. Unfortunately, what this has led to is possessing two full-time jobs. Sabbatical affords me the luxury of holding just one full-time position, committing with gusto to research and writing. Adding the teaching of one or two classes and a few monthly meetings to that schedule seems pretty manageable compared to the pace at which I had been running. (I know boundaries are important, and so on; but I needed to produce scholarship at an accelerated pace in order to even be considered for tenure, which is a story for another time.)I don’t really have a “hate” relationship with the role of teacher-administrator because I do not ascribe to the action itself. But with each passing year, I find myself wanting to live more fully in one world or the other. Having now established myself as a scholar in the field, I want to explore further where my research and academic pursuits might lead. Institutions are demanding more from all of us these days, so many are feeling the tensions of the teacher-administrator conundrum in this era of scarcity and rapid change. These pulls often remain unacknowledged in academia, but if we begin to talk more openly about them, we might be able to imagine more sustainable paths forward (and more equitable compensation models).I came into academia sideways. At a slant, you might say. I still feel honored to be here. Might I dare to want more?

A few weeks ago, I stood in a sea of people at a Devo and B-52’s concert, feeling like I’d been transported back to the 1980s. I could see the waves of color from the stage lights, neon, and pulsing. It struck me that this, too, was a kind of art practice—a reminder that movement, rhythm, and attention are inseparable. Sometimes I meditate, and sometimes I find music has similar effects. The musical energy that others might find chaotic calms me. What some might label “angry” or “loud” music—whatever that means—has always soothed my Aspie brain. No, I’m not suggesting that Devo or the B-52’s fit those categories. 025 Mini #7, 2.5 x 3.5 in., ink on paper That concert reminded me how fully the sensory world animates everything I do. The driving beat, the lights, the crowd—it all felt like a visual composition in motion. When I draw, I’m doing something similar: tracing the rhythm of sound and motion until the lines on the page start to breathe. There’s no boundary between listening, seeing, and creating. Presence isn’t achieved by blocking out the world, but by stepping fully into it.This, for me, is the foundation of Art as Spiritual Practice. It isn’t about ritual, belief, or meditation in the conventional sense. It’s about attention—fierce, sustained attention—to the moment as it unfolds through color, sound, line, and touch. Making art slows perception. It opens a space between thought and movement where something larger than language happens.  2025 Mini #11, 2.5 x 3.5 in., ink on paper I don’t pretend to know what to call that something. Some might call it spiritual, while others might use the language of psychology, neurobiology, philosophy, or anthropology. To me, those vantage points all circle the same experience: the shift from distraction to presence, from noise to stillness. It doesn’t matter whether the source is a rock concert, a blank sheet of paper, or a kitchen sink filled with dishes. Each offers a chance to inhabit awareness more fully.The term “spiritual” itself is hotly contested—too elastic for some, too personal for others. Scholars of religion debate whether its very malleability renders it useless for any serious analysis. I tend to think of it as a working placeholder, a word that gestures toward the transformative quality of human experience when we’re paying close attention. Yes, this is among the varied and problematic definitions of spirituality, and I’m fine with that. I’ve moved toward immersing myself in the experience of art-making and away from debates over how to classify these experiences. Of course, that’s a perk of “retirement,” I suppose. I no longer need to engage in those debates, important though they may be.  2025 Mini #8, 2.5 x 3.5 in., ink on paper That’s the spirit behind my forthcoming course, also called Art as Spiritual Practice. It’s designed primarily for non-artists, hobbyists, and anyone who feels the urge to express themselves creatively but doesn’t know where to start. You don’t need to identify as “spiritual,” and you certainly don’t need to believe in anything otherworldly. You just need curiosity—and a willingness to stay with your own process long enough to notice what shifts.Alongside the course, I’m also beginning to share my own sketchbook practice more publicly. The series of small 2½ × 3½-in. ink drawings I’ve been making—each one a study in rhythm, attention, and constraint—will soon appear in a monthly format for those who want to follow the work as it unfolds. 2025 Mini #12, 2.5 x 3.5 in., ink on paper The course mixes practical exercises with reflection. We’ll explore how a daily sketchbook habit can become a form of grounding, how color and rhythm shape mood, and how repetition itself—the steady return to the page—creates meaning over time. Participants will also wrestle with questions that don’t have easy answers: What does it mean to call something spiritual? Who gets to decide who is or is not an artist? What happens when we replace the pursuit of perfection with the practice of presence?In that sense, the course isn’t just about making art; it’s about re-learning how to be with ourselves. Each drawing, each attempt, becomes a mirror for how we approach uncertainty, judgment, and even joy. There’s a moment—whether I’m drawing, cooking, or listening to Devo—when the line between effort and ease dissolves. That’s where transformation begins.I’ve spent much of my life teaching students to look closely, to question assumptions, to sit with ambiguity. I’m still doing that, but now the classroom is my desk, the lesson plan is a page of ink lines, and the students are anyone willing to pick up a pen and see what happens.Presence, not product, is the point. Art becomes the way we practice paying attention. And when we do, even the loudest music becomes a form of stillness.

a·syn·chron·ous·definition: “not existing or happening at the same time” I recently surprised a professor friend with the “news” that I taught almost exclusively in an asynchronous format and have been doing so for the past dozen years. A colleague on staff at my school recently said about this format: “Don’t you just set up the class and they are left to learn on their own?” Another professor in my field when responding to my comment in a writing workshop that I do a lot of my writing in comments on Canvas posts said: “Isn’t that mostly cut-and-paste?” I have been surprised to realize that many people in my inner circle don’t think of asynchronous online teaching as real teaching work. I beg to differ.Recently, I found myself in the worst of it. I was writing discussion prompts for week six while responding to late posts from students meant for week one while two-thirds of my students were talking with each other somewhere in week three. Others had turned in an assignment not due for two more weeks. All this teaching in multiple weeks in my course in one two-hour block while sitting at my kid’s desk on my laptop. He left for college a few weeks ago. We are all in different times, different places, but somehow still connected.Asynchronous teaching is the stuff of sci-fi and fantasy. I engage in time travel on the daily. If only I was a Time Lord with a Tardis to travel in! Or Hermione Grainger with a magical Time Turner on a necklace so I could stop the other times to focus on the one in which I found myself. Instead, I just have a learning management system, where I click to the next item in Speed Grader and jump ahead or behind a couple of weeks to material that has since slipped from my leaky brain. I try to remember what the student would and wouldn’t have encountered at that point in the class as I respond to their work.This morning, I found myself lying in bed and thinking about the clunkiness of the word asynchronous. What would be the word for being in a different place than your learners? A-syn-loc-ous? Oh, yeah. We just call that “distance learning.” Easy peasy. Everyone does that. But when we are in different times, we have a word that specifically marks the absence of togetherness: asynchronous. Out of time with one another.In fact, this is not a new reality. John Dewey called it the greatest pedagogical fallacy, the assumption that students are learning what we are teaching when we are teaching it. I can remember sitting in the now-demolished stadium-seating lecture hall in seminary and watching some of the great professors of my era lecturing. Sitting near the back, I would amuse myself by watching my classmates reach the point when they gave up taking notes, hopelessly lost in the verbiage of our professors. A few at a time, their pens would go down in defeat, and they would sit back in the wooden theater chairs and stare blankly at the speaker, folding their arms defensively. Nowadays, they would pick up their phones or click over to another tab on their computers to check the news, less obvious means of abandoning the effort to follow along. Where the students were, in time, was some light years away from where the professor was teaching. They remained closer to the energetic start of the universe that the professor was now hurtling along the furthest edges of. Teaching involves many moments like these. Planning a syllabus and having to post it a month before the class starts, or having to propose it to a committee a year in advance. In either case, never having met the learners before devising a plan for their learning. Teaching students who have just been exposed to the material alongside those who have wrestled with it for a term or even for years. Teaching people ruminating on yesterday’s political assassination about something that happened a thousand years ago. Sometimes it feels like a miracle when we end up in the same time with the same focus.All of this jumping to the location of students in time and space takes an enormous amount of imagination, energy, and nimbleness, whether online or working in person. But sure, why wouldn’t you put twenty-five or thirty-five students in my asynchronous class, since all I do is post the information and they learn it on their own in their own time? Turns out, asynchronous teaching makes me into an unwilling time lord without a sonic screwdriver in sight. But it also illuminates what Dewey named so long ago: meeting students where they are is no easy challenge, no matter the teaching modality. Teaching online and asynchronously just places this experience in vivid contrast so we recognize it more quickly and are forced to bear the weight of its reality. 

A student in my intro Religions of the World class recently asked—well, more like desperately pleaded—to be able to use a 3x5 notecard on the final exam. I said “maybe,” but it was the kind of “maybe” that parents say when they want to get kids off their back and hope the kids forget about it later. I was, to put it mildly, pretty resistant to the idea. I worried it would mean that students wouldn’t study as hard, offloading what should be stored in their brains onto a piece of paper that would just be discarded. Isn’t notecard usage basically just a professor-sanctioned form of cheating–or, at least, a professor-sanctioned form of “don’t worry about learning anything”? Are students just trying to find any and all shortcuts to the actual difficult labor of learning? What is this world coming to?? (I’ve officially turned old and “kids-these-days”-y.)But I had promised to consider her request and I didn’t really want to be the person who my daughter always accuses me of being—the person whose “maybe” really just always means “no.”One morning, after waking up at 3:20am and not being able to fall back asleep (WHY), I decided to actually look up research on notecard usage. Why I didn’t think to do this before forming my opinion about the usage of notecards is beyond me. As you might expect, if you’re familiar with research on education and pedagogy, research is mixed.Some studies have shown that students using notecards outperform peers who don’t. But even studies in which performance isn’t obviously better do show that the use of notecards can alleviate student anxiety and may reduce the temptation to cheat. For me, the bit about alleviating stress was actually the most important. I’m trying to instill in students a love, maybe even an appreciation, of the subject matter–not permanently repel them from the study of religion. Anxiety was certainly what was leading my student to make the request in the first place. She was overwhelmed by the amount of material in a 101 survey course and not at all feeling confident about her ability to do well on the final exam. If I could help ease her mind a bit, why not?But also: the articles I reviewed brought up a good point, which is that the creation of the notecards is itself a form of studying or a good study habit. That is, students have to gather, review, and synthesize a bunch of different information to discern what ultimately goes into the notecard. That the actual making of the notecard helps them to learn the material. Okay, sold.So, I went in the next day and told my students they could use notecards for the final exam. We’ll see how it goes. 

How is your medicine utilized in your teaching? I’m no medical doctor, but I figure that any medicine that imposes on the body and does not work with the body will ultimately cause more harm than good. Our bodies are brilliant, and they point toward life. If they wanted to kill us, well, we’d be dead. But our bodies are keeping us alive in ways we can and cannot name. I think this is the same with teaching. Our students come to us with worlds of brilliance. Their ideas are keeping those worlds alive in ways they can and cannot name. My job as an educator is not to impose on them. My job is to help them be aware of that brilliance and share it with others. This may mean reintroducing educational nutrients they may be deficient in. Or removing toxic ideologies that cause harm and hinder learning. It’s weird, though. Sometimes I think I’ve been trained to be radiation, and that my students’ curiosity and self-worth are some kind of cancer that I must kill. Or, I’m trained to be insulin that’s priced out of the market. You need this, but can’t afford it. Or maybe I’ve been trained to be something like Ozempic; meant to teach and treat the heart, but utilized as a way to look good for others. In many ways, we are training our students to be aides in the healing process of others. Whether that is by being a spiritual guide, or working at a nonprofit that helps bring in resources, or creating art that brings healing. And as comforting as that may be, we all (us and students included) are working to be healing in the midst of needing our own. I often think of how this process connects with our teaching. Allow me to share a couple of metaphors that help me. Tell me what ails you: Doctors may know a lot, but they don’t know everything. I have never met a doctor who could look at me and instantly tell me what is wrong (although, as a plus-sized Black woman, I’ve had more than enough doctors try). Doctors hold both a wealth of knowledge and access to more resources that aid that knowledge. Despite this, part of the diagnosis must include what the patient can articulate about what ails them. It is in the conversation between doctor and patient that a diagnosis is determined. I think this is also similar to teaching. As educators, we have a wealth of knowledge and access to resources. But it is when we can cultivate a learning environment where students can articulate their educational needs, histories, and discoveries that together we can create the kinds of learning environments where students can grow. There is no such thing as a magic pill, although I wish there were. Too often, pop culture medicine influencers, businesses, and the like are trying to find the one thing that will cure all that ails us. But no matter how powerful a supplement or pill is, there is no one thing that cures us. Our healing requires (and deserves) an ecosystem of help. Yes, it may include traditional forms of medicine. But it also includes natural remedies like exercise, play, meditation, less stress, eradication of systems of oppression, and laughter. Similarly, teaching requires more than just readings, lectures, papers, and tests. It requires us to understand how our pedagogical tools are part of an educational ecosystem that includes our students’ lives, communities, play, funding, and yes, the eradication of systems of oppression, and laughter. You know, I think I want to be an herb. Found in nature, praised by the weirdos who know what’s up. Hated by the institutions because I’m hard to sell. Treatment with me takes too long, mostly because I’m not poison. Poison is efficient. I want to teach the way herbs heal. Drink this. Yes, it tastes funny. No, you don’t know what it is doing. But it is helping you be more of who you were meant to be. It’s not conventional, but learning isn’t either. What about you? If your teaching were medicine, what would it be?