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As the Jewish Studies Professor for my department, I teach an undergraduate course in the Holocaust (Sho’ah) every other school year. The remote format of the course now consists of weekly assigned readings and the edited version of class lectures gleaned from earlier years of in-class instruction. Students submit short weekly responses to the readings, including personal viewpoints and questions requiring additional information. The enrollees are a good Louisiana gumbo of Black, Brown, and White, male, female, and “other.” Two weeks ago, I received responses to essays on “The Medieval Treatment of the Jews” (book burnings, forced baptism, conversion sermons, blood libel, host desecration). Their responses largely expressed surprise that they had never been taught about these specific modes of mistreatment meted out to Jews in Europe. But there was one component that surprised and touched me personally. Although we had never discussed it, they seemed to sense how emotional Yom ha-Sho’ah (Holocaust Memorial Day, Jan 27) would be for me, and many expressed words of kindness and consolation. Their gesture moved me to respond with the following email of thanks. The national motto of Israel is lo’ ‘od, Hebrew for “Never again.” As Jews, we read and study a version of history that is not the same as the version other school children in America study. We don’t sing, “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” For us, the events of 1492 are singled out as a cause for mourning, a year during which we learned that not even conversion to the dominant Christianity of our world was enough to transform us into persons whose value is equal to that of our fellow citizens. It is understandable that the typical history curriculum in most of our schools does not focus on these matters of life and death to a tiny portion of the population. They are matters of no serious consequence to anyone other than the minority group of Jews. But if we watch in horror the slow and agonizing death of George Floyd or the senseless murder of Alton Sterling in our own beloved Baton Rouge, our responses can be either-or. Either we turn away and try not to think of what happens, or we vow to join the effort to create a world in which such evil can no longer be tolerated. In this struggle, the human capacity to empathize is essential. If the only persons who understand the pain of a class of people are those who themselves are in that category, hatred and pain never cease. Only the victims care, and their cries go unheard. Small, insignificant acts of meanness somehow morph into large and debilitating experiences. Over time, the world becomes darker and more frightening, for we have learned that we must fear each other. What is the answer? I cannot be other than who I am. But if I can only sense and react to treatment that is harmful to Jews, or old professors, then bad stuff done to “Others” floats by me right in front of my face—and I do nothing to combat it. This must not happen! Even at this later stage of my own life, I must daily renew my determination to expand my vision ever wider, to open my heart to the conditions of life that all people face, not just folks like me—old, white, male, Jews – all people. “To see” must also become “to perceive.” “To hear” must be “to understand.” I must be responsible not just for myself alone, but for everyone who is part of my human family.  Here is a major part of my reason for entering into dialogue with people like you who are young, probably majority Christian, and cool. In other words, nothing at all like me. Yes, I need you to be “woke” about Judaism and our unfathomable experience during a truly awful period of history. But I also believe that it is incumbent on me to learn about all of you, to care about you as if you were my own family, because that is exactly what you are. Indeed, if Judaism teaches only one lesson, it is that we are all from the same father and mother and thus  a single family destined either to live and care for each other or, God forbid, to hate and destroy each other. I choose life and caring, and I ask all of you to join me. Ken yehi ratzon. “May it be God’s will.”

During the past year, two of my favorite Brazilian writers and educators, Luiz Antonio Simas and Luiz Rufino collaborated on yet another book: Encantamento: Sobre a Política da Vida (Incantation: On the Politics of Life).  One of the central affirmations of their work (which follows their previous co-authored publications: A Pedagogy of the Crossroads, An Arrow Through Time, and The Enchanted Science of Macumbas) is that the opposite of life isn’t death—it is desencantamento, or an inability to surrender to a process of incantation. As a verb, incantare evokes our capacity to fuse song and word in an effort to raise our spirits, to spark magic in our imaginations, to invite divine presence. Our capacity to incantate spaces of learning does precisely what theologian Rubem Alves invites us to do:  name and invoke the not-yet worlds, so as to break the spells of right-here worlds that continue to abandon, oppress, exclude, and sever from ourselves and our communities of belonging. Incantation as a poetic of resistance allows us to escape, disobey, and ambush the traps set through the colonial matrix of power so that bodies can dare to see, create, invent, and integrate new possibilities freedom, belonging, and liberation through creativity and imagination. Incantation, Simas and Rufino affirm, nests our capacity to move through time, to experience a passage between forms and worlds, to change our points of reference through a politic of life that is rooted in an imprinting of the everyday as rites of reading and writing different poetic routes capable of setting traps to our collective loss of hope and vivacity.[i]  In this sense, incantation is an exercise in emergence and survivance that lives and breathes beyond the terrorizing effects of coloniality. It’s the commitment to movement, occupation, visibility, insertion, and participation. It’s the creative force that travels through crossroads of knowledge-making, confronting hierarchizations produced by ontological, epistemological, and semiotic violences. Art, as I understand it, has a tremendous power to forge incantatory pathways of resistance because of its capacity to dis-educate us from disciplinary molding. It reverberates and discloses to us that which is hidden in our interior recesses in embodied, striking, and visceral ways. It can help us re-educate our affections, as Paulo Freire puts it, or work a kind of magic in our souls, as bell hooks states.  It also inspires us to name the world as we see it, and to find a poetic tongue when the language we know fails us. It helps us resist, heal, connect, conjure, and tend to all our relations. As generative clearings, the arts are sites for world-making, for dreaming, rehearsing, and choreographing new possibilities of being and intervening in the world. When we immerse ourselves in acts of artmaking, we have the opportunity to access the visceral, the somatic life of the body, its reflexes, limits, intuition, responses, desires, needs, and its alchemies.  When we encourage and invite students to in-corporate artmaking processes as they engage readings, discussions, and bodies of knowledge, we participate in this politic of incantation. A student’s performance and ritual entitled “Disposable Beauty” still stands as one of the most profound and generative projects to which I have been witness.   As a final integrative assignment, the performance consisted of placing delicate flower arrangements throughout locations in her neighborhood that were marked by abuse, violence, and abandonment. Such poetic gestures in vulnerable spaces in the city sought to raise awareness of our transience, interdependence, and negligence in the face of injustice. The flower assemblages were made out of blossoms and foliage that flower shops would throw away at the end of the day. This poetic gesture both incantated and resisted the (i)logic of degradation, disposability, oppression, and inequity by orienting herself and participants in acts of creative wonder. Through her invocation of not-yet worlds, she extended a gesture of care, of regard, of re-worlding, refusing to be desencantada with the world around her. At the end of these performances, she invited folks to partake in tea ceremonies that were rooted in offering the gift of reciprocity, spiritual care, regard, and a warm cup of tea. As a poetic of incantation, her artistic gestures imbued spaces of desolation, disposability, and abandonment with love, presence, and beauty through a practice that integrated the semester’s resources, readings, discussions and questions with her own wisdom, creativity, and spiritual sensibilities. I return to this experience often to remind myself to continuously ask how many of the assignments outlined in my syllabi impede or foster poetic and incantatory experimentations. Notes [i] See Luiz Antonio Simas and Luiz Rufino, Encantamento: Sobre Política de Vida (Rio de Janeiro, RJ: Morula Editorial, 2020). Photo Credit: Miguel Garcia Saaved - stock.Adobe.com

I am familiar with what liminality means, but I have never put the Israelite’s journey in the wilderness and liminality together until recently. Liminality was first used in the discipline of anthropology and then applied to ritual and other areas of research. It is a term to describe being in between, being in the threshold, where a person is in transitional stage, not belonging to the past or future. I have used the term to describe the biblical Job during his suffering. Liminality is a time of confusion, vulnerability, uncertainty, and even danger. But then it also reflects a time of possibility, potential, and becoming. For example, when a person passes from singlehood to a married status, that person can no longer return to the old single self, but has been transformed into a new sense of self with someone else to live and care for. Similarly, when one is between jobs, that person is also in the liminal stage. In a way, all schools are going through this liminality during the COVID-19 crisis. Being in a pandemic is being in liminality, with all the confusion, vulnerability, and uncertainty that go along with it, not to mention danger. Being in transition is not comfortable. Belonging nowhere is painful. Having a confused status is never fun. Yet, being in COVID-19 is also a time of profound possibility, potential, and becoming. The world will not be the same after COVID-19. Many professions and fields will forever be changed in the post-COVID-19 world, and education is among them. In the future, online education and programs will be a necessity rather than an option or a suggestion. Remote learning will be the norm. The idea of expecting people to come to one’s campus physically for education will soon be in the distant past, if  that is not a reality already. During the podcast conversation I had with Dr. Lynne Westfield in early February 2021, she asked me about the future of my school: “Is it bright?”  I responded: “The future is online but everything else is uncertain.” Indeed, with COVID-19, all schools are not just in the same boat, but in the same storm, as Westfield rightly remarked. Living in liminality can be frustrating, but we can choose to see the transforming potential it has for all of us if we discern attentively what God is doing at this moment of history as administrators, faculty, and students in our particular contexts of formation. If we try to see beyond the chaotic present into the future, perhaps we can see ourselves living in a prophetic time, a critical time for reflection on things that matter. After leaving Sinai for the Promised Land, the Israelites were stranded in the wilderness for forty years. It was during that crucial time through trials, suffering, rebelliousness, and dependence, that the Israelites became the people of God. It was also during that difficult time, that the presence of God was with them (Ex 40:38). Being in liminality can be meaningful and hopeful.

Delvyn Case · Ruach (Revised Version)   The Hebrew word Ruach means both “breath” and “spirit.” Fundamental to this word (and to the Greek analogue, pneuma, which also is used in both ways) is a paradox. The notion of “spirit” denotes something ineffable and invisible - yet something that is always ready to break through and make itself known in a transformative way. Catholic mystics, African griots, and Christian Pentecostals are well-known examples of religious people who - when filled with the “spirit” – sing, dance, pray, feel, or see things that are amazing, powerful, and even out of their control. In the same way, “breath” is something simultaneously ineffable and invisible – yet also so fundamentally physical that our bodies do it without our conscious thought. We usually only become aware of our breathing when we experience something surprising or particularly important: when something beautiful makes us catch our breath, our something frightening makes us cry out in terror. In the same way, we are not usually aware of our “spirit” except in special circumstances: in a religious or spiritual state, for example, or when we have to call upon something deep within us in order to create – or to endure. This piece, Ruach, confronts this paradox by bringing to our awareness many different ways “breath” and “spirit” can become sonically and dramatic present. Throughout the piece the performers are asked to make various kinds of breath sounds with their instruments and their own voices, blurring the line between music and sound. Overall, the piece emphasizes idea of the spirit as a powerful force that is surprising, shocking, and fundamentally resistant to control.

Sex, money, politics: all the things we are told not to talk about. However, as the ethics professor at an Episcopal/Anglican seminary which draws diverse students from across the theological spectrum, teaching on these controversial issues is an important and challenging part of my job. As a professor, it’s easy for me to believe that my responsibility in teaching on controversial issues extends only to giving a compelling lecture or leading an animated discussion. However, unless controversial issues are presented in a context in which the students and I are open to learning and changing, there is always a risk that the class simply confirms the students who already agreed with me in their convictions and alienates the students who disagree, making their future openness to change even less likely. Rather, true transformational pedagogy requires not just teaching concepts, but incorporation into a community which creates the conditions for transformation. In February of 1940, Dorothy Day considered the transformation required in order for the members of the Catholic Worker to confront the difficulties of working for “a new heaven and a new earth, wherein justice dwelleth.” Day described how this work depends on God’s grace, but also demands radical change on the part of the human participants. In fact, it requires “indoctrination”—bringing people into the doctrine of the “mystical body of Christ.” Indoctrination is not simply the reception of information, but actual incorporation—becoming one body—with the community. Incorporation requires formation, which is achieved in part through shared practices such as worship (daily attendance at Mass and communal rosaries), community (carried out in kitchens and at the table), and external engagement (political activism and care of the poor). In the rest of this post, I will consider how these same practices are key for developing a community in which transformative pedagogy regarding controversial issues is possible. First, Day examines how the practice of worship highlights the “correlation” between the spiritual and the material while also emphasizing the primacy of the spiritual. Looking beyond the physical to the spiritual expands the imagination by “quicken[ing] the perceptions” to appreciate other material and spiritual experiences than one’s own. Creating fertile ground for engagement with controversial issues in the classroom requires exactly this type of transformation of the imagination. In addition, worship teaches patience and charity. Confronting our own limitations in contrast to God’s goodness should ensure that “we will not lose faith in those around us, no matter how stumbling their progress is.” In Christian seminaries in a liturgical tradition such as my own, communal practices of worship provide the perfect opportunity to encourage students to look beyond their material circumstances to seek “the presence of God” in their analysis of controversial issues. However, any pedagogical practices which move students beyond the classroom into a mode of reflective engagement—with the beauty of art or nature especially—can also prove valuable resources in a nonreligious or interfaith setting for transformation of imagination and expansion of perspective. Day’s description of the communal practices of kitchen and table point to the context which prepares people to engage with controversial questions. In the time of COVID, we have come to realize how important eating together is to create the bond and trust required for vulnerability. In addition, the cooperation of cooking together or other shared creative activities strengthen and reinforce a communal bond. Creating space for students to engage in these types of activities, whether as a whole class or in small groups, creates the conditions for true openness regarding challenging issues. Through these communal practices, students and professors begin to experience the reality of their identity as a communal body. Like a body, students incorporated in the community will start to feel the hurts and joys of one another as their own—preparing them to approach controversial questions which impact the lives of others with new empathy and urgency. Finally, Day describes the practices of service and activism which are the outgrowth of communal and spiritual practices. These actions, especially those which engage the community in service with the poor, build on the first two categories, as well as providing the end which guides them. Of course, these practices are more easily obtained in service-learning programs. However, even taking advantage of opportunities to genuinely serve others in the community can enhance solidarity within the community while also expanding the participants’ awareness of the sorrows and challenges of the world. Through shared engagement in these practices, students and professor gain a deeper understanding of the impact of controversial questions on people’s lives, confront the limited nature of solutions currently available, and come to appreciate the need not only for knowledge, but action. Will all these practices make teaching controversial issues easier? Not necessarily. In fact, they may complicate emotional engagement and can add to the administrative burden. In addition, they require the professor to surrender pedagogical illusions of grandeur or omniscience. However, as Day reminds us, “little works” matter, and through these small practices both we and our students may change and ultimately grow.

For the last fifteen years or so, I’ve done freelance editing work as a side gig. This winter break, while moping around with a mysterious months-long lung infection (not COVID... probably?), I edited a colleague’s book manuscript, which focused, in part, on neoliberalism (a slippery and contested term) and the deployment of certain reductive conceptions of religion in various development contexts around the world. It was a super interesting read, but that’s not what I want to focus on here. Instead, I want to take inspiration from her critique of various neoliberal terms/concepts and consider one particularly prevalent in higher education—that of “best practices.” This is a phrase we use all the time, especially related to online teaching and learning. I think we have good reason to be suspicious of this idea. Examples of “best practices” abound, even at Wabash. Take the list below, from a Stanford’s Tomorrow’s Professor post, which summarizes a chapter from the older version of The Online Teaching Survival Guide: Simple and Practical Pedagogical Tips (2010): Best practice 1: Be present at the course site. Best practice 2: Create a supportive online course community. Best practice 3: Develop a set of explicit expectations for your learners and yourself as to how you will communicate and how much time students should be working on the course each week. Best practice 4: Use a variety of large group, small group, and individual work experiences. Best practice 5: Use synchronous and asynchronous activities. Best practice 6: Ask for informal feedback early in the term. Best practice 7: Prepare discussion posts that invite responses, questions, discussions, and reflections. Best practice 8: Search out and use content resources that are available in digital format if possible. Best practice 9: Combine core concept learning with customized and personalized learning. Best practice 10: Plan a good closing and wrap activity for the course. Upon first read, who could argue with these? Create a supportive course community? That’s my jam! Develop a set of explicit expectations? I love transparency! It’s not that the practices on these “best” lists are bad ideas, per se. It’s not that I’m opposed to asking for informal feedback or planning a good wrap activity or [fill in the blank]. It’s that such “best practices” are often presented as generic, broadly applicable, value neutral, consensus based, and informed by research, when they aren’t always or necessarily. (See Wendy Brown's Undoing the Demons [2017] for an in-depth critical consideration of this concept.) It may not be clear how to operationalize them in any given context; it may not be possible to do so. Some could even be detrimental if operationalized in certain ways by certain instructors for certain students. Best practices are ostensibly good for everyone, when, in fact, they may be good for no one. (This reminds me of the point of The End of Average (2016), when Todd Rose shows that an “average” person doesn’t exist, so when we design for an average person, we are actually designing for nobody.) Worse, in my mind, is that there can feel like no good way to dispute or critique “best practices.” Especially when written in the imperative, like those above, they don’t exactly invite reflection, conversation, inquiry, experimentation, or collaboration. When we start throwing around the phrase “best practices,” particularly those of us in positions to influence other instructors and what goes on in the college classroom, I worry we start to become “part of a machinery suppressing” faculty. After all, these are the “best” teaching practices. Everyone agrees. Who agrees? Well, the teaching “experts”: instructional designers, staff at centers for teaching excellence, faculty who have won teaching awards, those who publish on this topic. And who has time to question them, especially when everyone is just trying to stay on top of teaching and research and service (amid an ongoing pandemic, nonetheless!)? Trying to also stay on top of literature related to teaching may simply feel like too much. Our teaching contexts are incredibly distinct and diverse. There are so many “situational factors” for us to consider as we design and implement our courses, especially right now. I can’t be sure that what works (some days, ha!) for my Religions of the World course will work for a colleague in my department teaching another section of this very same class during the very same semester. Okay, so creating community seems like a good idea, particularly online, but how I go about doing that this semester over Zoom in my upper-level Religion and Film class will (and should, I think) be very different than how a friend does it in his upper-level U.S. Judiciary Zoom class, even though we are in the same college and have rather similar teaching philosophies. Best practices are somehow specifically evidence-based, but also somehow broad enough to make room for every possible instructional context. That just can’t be. I am fully in support of learning from one another. I am fully in support of sharing and spreading what is known (and some things are known) about teaching and learning. I am fully in support of experimentation and growth, especially in one’s own classroom. I am fully in support of professional development initiatives that encourage faculty to consider what they’re doing in their instruction and—this is the most important—why. I am not convinced that notions of “best practice” necessarily promote any of this. It makes me nervous when anyone starts implying or advising that there is a set, static list (like a top ten) of teaching strategies that will work for everyone, regardless of context, and that if we would all just follow these practices, we would be set. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but teaching just doesn’t work that way.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuHStsvmaG8[/embedyt]

Listen to Dr. Westfield read this blog in an audio format. My mother was deeply loved. She and my father came to live with me in 2008. Mom and Dad became known in the school community as they regularly attended chapel services, lectures and community dinners. Students who were my research assistants and teaching assistants were invited to dinner by my mom who still cooked dinner for our family. When invited by the Dean, Mom and Dad attended one faculty meeting (!!! Sweet Jesus!!! – a story for another time!). My mother, Nancy Bullock Westfield died on December 7, 2010. We funeralized her in the chapel of Seminary Hall. Many students and colleagues attended the service. I felt an outpouring of love for my family.  Mom’s homegoing service was a celebration of her life well lived. The celebration highlighted mom’s 81 years of service, artistry, nurture and audacious acts of justice on behalf of poor children and Black children in Philadelphia. And, the homegoing, like so many funerals, was the beginning of my family’s long-walk-through grieving our beloved. In the spring semester of 2011, I was teaching my introductory course. Amy, a brilliant doctoral student, was my teaching assistant. One day while class was convened, Amy, with reticence, asked if she could talk with me in the hallway. I had divided the students into small groups with reflection questions, so the class was, in this moment, on task. I said yes, let’s talk now. Amy looked untypically pensive as we walked into the hallway and away from the possibility of our conversation being overheard by our students.  Amy said, “Dr. Westfield…” (full pause; and holding her breath). “Umm…” (empty pause; and still holding her breath) Concerned, I asked, “Amy, what is it?” Amy said, “Dr. Westfield…” (taking a breath to gain courage) “Dr. Westfield, you’ve given that assignment before.” (looking me in the eye for the first time) I did not understand what Amy meant; I frowned to express my puzzlement. My thoughts raced in preparation to disagree. In nano-seconds, I recalled the week before, but I could not recall the learning  activities. I turned a half-pivot from her and looked away as I tried to remember, tried to think. Amy, in a gentle, low tone, said, “Last week you divided the students into conversation groups and gave the same reflection questions.” My immediate reaction was to be defensive and tell her that she was mistaken, but before speaking I looked at her eyes filled with such empathy that I knew she was trying to be helpful. My pause created space for her to speak again, “Remember. …. last week you gave the same assignment … and then the students reported in.” “Actually….”  Amy went on, “…. this is the third time you have asked them to reflect upon these questions.” As she said these words, I began to remember. I began to orient myself. I began to realize that, indeed, this was the third time I had given the same assignment for class discussion. Without allowing my body to flinch, I jolted from the realization. In exasperation and embarrassment, I whispered in a quiet and defeated tone, “Amy.” With a warm smile, Amy said, “It’s ok – the class understands you’re grieving.” Amy and I returned to the classroom and I called the class out of their small groups. When we gathered, I apologized without giving a reason for the thrice redundant learning activity. I quickly reminded them of the assignment that was due the next week, asked for any questions, then dismissed the class about thirty minutes earlier than our scheduled dismissal. Walking with my mother through her illness and then to her death had been one of the most difficult journeys I have ever taken. Even so, I underestimated the power of sorrow and the ways it can (and does) effect all aspects of life – even the teaching life. My mother’s death had taken a toll on me. Thankfully, Amy had my back. The vaccine for the COVID 19 virus promises an ease to the suffering in our country and around the world. Many of us, faculty, administrators, and students, have personally lost loved ones during this scourge. We grieve. Others will not have had family and friends who died, but will be part of the overall experience of malaise, communal loss, and shock that continues to grip the nation. We grieve. The Black Lives Matter movement’s demands go unanswered. We ring our hands, pray and grieve. The insurrection at the Capital Building on January 6 sent a renewed wave of fear, frustration, and the anxiety yet ripples through our nation. The feelings of loss, terror, and anxiety continue to pierce our awake and our dreams. In our uncertainty, we grieve. We have to acknowledge that we are, all, teaching while grieving. Who is the self who teaches? In this moment of loss, our corporate answer is that we are the people who are seized by sorrow, hurt, and anguish. We are people who are grieving. Teaching as usual is not possible! In recollecting this classroom experience I am not trying to be confessional - as if I had done something wrong. Rather, I tell the story to convey that  grieving necessitates additional support and care. Even the most seasoned and conscientious teacher, while grieving, needs help. I am appreciative to Amy for pointing out  that I was stuck. Had she not told me, my realization would have been much more painful and embarrassing. Or worse yet, I would not have ever realized. In teaching while grieving, who has your back? Who is your brave Amy? For individuals who are in touch with their grief, what grief counselor, spiritual director or therapist will you meet with regularly as you process the effects of 2020-21 upon your teaching? For learning communities who possess a depth of communal awareness and a sense of togetherness, what rituals, rites, and conversations will you design for this sad moment? What blues songs will you compose? What lamentation will you paint, sculpt, write, create? What new habits will you acquire to honor the dead and the dieing? In what ways will you take your grieving and be inspired, be made brave, be summoned to a deeper, more meaningful call of teaching? What new insights on teaching will you incorporate? Perhaps there will be new ceremonies for graduations, commencements and baccalaureates? Maybe new liturgies or rites of passage will be included in the senior send-offs, the spring dances, and the year books? Perhaps you will begin or end each class with a moment of silence, or of music, or ask students to plan a community-wide protest as a course assignment? Sometimes grief prevents reflection, prevents action – only affords paralyasis. Sometimes while we are grieving all we can do is the little bit we can do; one day at a time. Perhaps, simply keep a journal on your teaching until the grief subsides enough to reflect and plan for change. The courses I taught in the Spring of 2011 were not my best, but they were the best I had to offer at the time. I hope that the little bits I had to offer my students were enough. Thank you, Amy, for your care and support.

Democracy, in its essence, and genius, is imaginative love for and identification with a community with which, much of the time and in many ways, one may be in profound disagreement. ~ Marilynne Robinson[1] These words hung like a silent invocation on the threshold of my Truth, Beauty, and Goodness class this fall. They appeared overnight as the election neared, scripted elegantly on a scrap of paper and tucked with intentional inconspicuousness into the door plate of our fifth-floor classroom. Robinson’s words were a sentiment I had shared with students often throughout the past years as we tried to make sense of, well, everything, I guess. I was grateful for the daily reminder—and the “guerilla gardening” of the student who planted these seeds of wisdom in hallways and stairwells around campus. For weeks, this class of mostly first-year undergraduates checking off their philosophy credits had been carefully cultivating our capacity for dialogue across difference, employing a weekly community of inquiry model to probe issues like kneeling for the national anthem, the removal of statues and monuments, and the place of religion in the public sphere. The weekly community of inquiry was set up with a short, accessible article that provided an example of the theoretical perspectives we were exploring that week. For example, during a week focused on public memory and art, we read a local news article on the removal of a large artistic rendering of a Native American chief that had, for over half a century, looked out over the Mississippi River, just a mile from our campus. I have attempted versions of communities of inquiry before but not as the primary pedagogical ground for a course. This, however, was a new class in a newly designed major, Ethics, Culture, and Society. And, well, it was 2020. It would be too much to claim that this consistent, student-driven, structured conversation resulted in the airing of all perspectives on an issue, though based on student evaluations, I do think we often approached that Aristotelean “mark of an educated mind”: the ability “to entertain a thought without accepting it.” In so doing, perhaps we bent a little bit further towards Robinson’s generous vision of democracy—if not love for, at least identification with those whom we disagree. If any class was primed, then, for a post-election conversation on November 4, it was this one. But an hour before class, I balked. Walking into class, I pulled the Robinson scrap (secular mezuzah?) from its perch, read it aloud to the class, paused, read aloud passages from books I had hastily pulled from my shelves—books that had always grounded me and helped me to understand, in the words of Ellen Ott Marshall, “moral agency under constraint.” I told the students we were not going to talk about the election. Instead, I tasked them with finding poems and passages, songs and speeches. We were going to animate our classroom space with the voices of those who help us imagine and bring into being the world we want to live in—in my mind’s eye an attempt, however naïve, at some kind of performative utterance. After ten minutes, students read aloud from their excavations of hope; no commentary, just the words given audible breath. There would be time and space later for inquiry and dialogue—for example, a letter to the next president expressing their individual hopes for binding up the morally wounded nation, a group project focused on the possibilities of truth and reconciliation processes as response to specific events in the U.S. But for the moment, we needed to be a community of invocation, not inquiry, (re)making our classroom as sacred space insofar as it was set apart from the distorted vocabulary and disordered pathos of our contemporary political discourse—distortion and disorder that make identification with, much less love for, those with whom we disagree an improbability. Walking out of class that day, like many other days, I wasn’t sure if I had made the right choice. There were no obvious, immediate signs from students. They had participated dutifully, the mood of the class largely subdued—in part, I suspect, because many of these first-time voters had stayed up most of the night watching, waiting for a certainty that has, until recently, remained frustratingly elusive. Later that day, though, I received an email from a student: “I was nervous to come to this class after all the election stuff going on because others are very out there with their opinions and it sometimes freaks me out to talk in the class. So, wanted to say thank you!” As seems true of most classes, this student had other kindred spirits in the classroom, peers hesitant to make publicly known their perspectives during the semester on a politically fraught topic. But this day in class, many of these same students found their voice for the first time by invoking the words of others, a tentative first step, perhaps, in the movement towards exercising a kind of moral agency under constraint. And this has given me pause to consider the conditions necessary for creating and sustaining a community of inquiry in our classrooms during this tumultuous time. Going forward, one of those conditions in my classroom will be consistently holding open space for students to perform public speech acts that give voice to their perspectives, not merely as imitation, but as invocation. Notes [1] Marilynn Robinson, “Imagination and Community,” in When I Was a Child I Read Books (New York: Picador, 2013), 27-28. Also excerpted and reprinted at https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/imagination-community

I am often asked some version of the following question: “How has it been teaching online now?” For those of us who teach at schools with in-person learning, I imagine this is a common query from friends, family members, and colleagues. Initially, I gave answers that highlighted the sensations of newness, uncertainty, and adventure. Over time, I either expanded my answer to share what I was specifically learning or shortened my answer to a succinct summation like “it is going okay,” or “it is what it is,” based on the context of the conversation. For example, I opted for the latter replies, despite their triteness, at the beginning or the end of virtual meetings. What else is there to say when awkwardly waiting for other participants to join a Zoom call? Now, after approximately ten months, my answer is that my transition has not been from in-person to online education. Rather, I am continuing to adapt to pandemic education, which is occurring in an online environment to ensure safe conditions for productive learning. Pandemic education and online education are not synonymous. As someone who is new to fully online instruction, I have certainly benefited from consultations with educational design experts at my seminary and engaging resources in the forms of best practice summaries, advice guides, podcasts, and more. Fortunately, wise counsel and practical guidance are a few clicks away on my web browser. At the same time, I cannot escape the multiple pandemics we are experiencing across public health, systemic racism, white Christian nationalism, and political polarization. When so many people are suffering and dying, and so much hate and falsehood infects our civic life, it feels small and strange to invest my energy in making a weekly online forum more accessible and interactive. Therefore, I find it more generative to center the notion of pandemic education in my planning. As a theological educator, my students and I are constantly engaged in a collaborative learning process that seeks both comprehensive knowledge of the subject matter and concrete inquiry of why the subject matters in everyday congregations and ministry contexts. Teaching amid multiple pandemics has sharpened my focus on cultivating a pedagogical environment that thoroughly and precisely interrogates how the content in the syllabus intersects with what is actually happening in our churches and neighborhoods. One example in my teaching as an historian of American Christianity is to trace with students the legacies of racism, sexism, nativism, and heterosexism within some of our denominations and traditions. If my students and I only study the best of the past, exclusively reading the theologies and testimonies of those striving for justice and equality, we would be ill prepared to face the hard realities and complex challenges of Christian witness and leadership today. It is not enough to express perpetual shock at what actions, whether political insurrections or public health dismissals, bear the name of Jesus Christ. We must be able to identify origins and construct counternarratives. Some counternarratives will be rooted in the past, others will be adapted from the past to meet present conditions, and yet others will emerge as new creations. I have found transitioning to pandemic education also requires a heightened awareness of the emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual health of my students. One of my teaching principles, which I share freely and often with my students, is to exhibit compassion without compromising academic integrity. I do not hesitate to grant extensions, seek creative solutions to problems with assignments, and offer as much pastoral care as I can. Yet, I also strive to fully honor the contributions of students who meet deadlines with meticulous attention to requirements and expectations. The context of theological education, with its wide diversity of adult learners, some carrying significant congregational, familial, or other personal responsibilities alongside their academic coursework, makes this principle necessary but sometimes complicated to practice. Pandemic education has certainly stretched this principle of practicing compassion without compromise. I have witnessed students produce remarkably brilliant work and experienced invigorating synchronous discussions abounding with insights over the past ten months. Yet, I have also encountered deep pain, loss, doubt, exhaustion, and hopelessness in my classroom. Not only in my interaction with students, but also in myself. In these dark moments, I am especially reminded that pandemic education is not the same as online education.