Archives for 2021

Talking about race in the classroom makes me nervous. What if a white student says something awful and I don’t know how to handle it? What if I don’t know the facts? What if something blows up and I end up in big trouble? And isn’t it ...

CREATIVITY IS… Learning in the theological academy needs to be liberated. It has been held hostage by standards of appropriateness authored by voices and ideologies long gone yet holding on. They can be quite static and unmoving. The solution? Creativity. But I’m not sure if theological institutions are truly ...

A college friend of mine took his life by suicide when he was only twenty-two years old. The death occurred just weeks before I began seminary in 1987. Theological study offered me a refuge in which to grieve Bill’s death and to try to make sense of it. I wrote ...

My dissertation advisor and I were discussing my recently written chapter. She believed the chapter needed more work, needed a rewrite. I was passively resisting her advice believing my words were …. good. In a stern tone, my advisor said to me, “You must learn to kill your babies.” Her tone ...

Recently, I was sharing with my children that one of the first purchases I made when moving to a new city or state was a map. In the not-so-distant past (circa 1995), obtaining a map was of utmost importance for daily travel to visit restaurants, stores, and especially the homes of ...