Archives for 2015

One of my favorite cartoons depicts a bowling pin on a psychiatrist's coach. There is a diploma on the wall, a plant in the corner, and a therapist with notepad sitting behind the disconcerted bowling pin character. The caption has the cartoon bowling pin asking, simply, "Why me?" If you're ...

Baby Suggs, holy, is an enslaved, woman in the novel Beloved, by Toni Morrison.  In the passage cited below, Baby Suggs, holy is preaching in the woods on a Saturday afternoon.  Baby Suggs, holy stands on a huge flat-sided rock, prays, and then begins to preach proclaiming the essential message ...

When and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me. Anna Julia Cooper Student enters. Looks at me, looks at other students, looks back at me. Is this room 101? ...

By the time you read this, I will have met the students in “Religious Dimensions in Human Experience: Between Animals and Gods.” In this completely redesigned dual-level (grad/undergrad) course, we will explore how people can know a single animal—the snake—as an earthly creature and a supernatural entity. ...

My introduction to Old Testament course has served as an experimental site for decentering racializing master-narratives, especially those that have contributed to the marginalization of the Other in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands. As a Latino biblical scholar, decentering represents an important pedagogical tactic that is shaped and informed by various forms ...