Sometimes students just need a change of pace. Sometimes their professor needs a break. It’s nice when those two moments coincide. [For more on the power of surprises in the classroom, see Dr. Lynne Westfield’s February blog post]. The rhythm of class, even when it’s an active ...

On October 7, 1962, Robert H. Walkup preached from the book of Job at First Presbyterian Church in Starkville, Mississippi. Walkup graduated from Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in 1941 and had been the pastor of this congregation for nine years. Before Walkup accepted the ministerial position in Starkville, Walkup made clear to the ...

The day after the Atlanta spa shootings in March last year, my class on Asian and Asian American Theologies met via Zoom. We had scheduled to discuss worship and preaching for that class. But I knew that the murder of eight people, including six women of Asian descent, would weigh ...

Before the pandemic, one of the most pressing subjects for discussion and debate in my context, teaching at a freestanding seminary, was the transition to online education. I recall lively conversations engaging the merits and challenges of “moving online” in formal faculty meetings, and the sometimes more important informal tê...

“The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing something unfamiliar or an abstraction in terms of something familiar and concrete. Thus, our language is an incredibly intricate web of definitions of one thing in terms of another.”[1] Mary Ylvisaker Nilsen’s expansive definition of metaphor applies to teaching—helping students ...