Notes From The Field

Training students to identify and traverse the identity politics in the United States begins on the first day of my courses. On day one, I introduce myself, then launch into the syllabus review. In describing the required readings, I hold the book or article in my hand, tell students the ...

Theological education centers on attention. Attending to another person’s thoughts, their arguments, their conceptions – studying, parsing, comparing, etc. This is not a novel claim. The Jewish philosopher Simone Weil, however, claims that there is more going on as we work out a geometry problem, tussle over a difficult argument, ...

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe  impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day.  Why,  sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things ...

A major task that our students will have to undertake is to create a sustainable way of life. To do so, they need to be able to understand how to analyze themselves, especially how their behaviors and worldviews are connected with social and environmental effects. To our misfortune, this is ...

“Spiritual Companioning for Ministry” is a course I recently taught for the first time for a colleague when she took a well-deserved sabbatical. She shared her syllabus and course plan with me and told me that she usually taught it to about 12 students which worked well for the topic. A ...