Changing Scholarship

It’s common these days, you may have seen, on academic conference name tags or at the bottom of email signatures, to indicate one’s pronouns--not “preferred” pronouns, since this isn’t some kind of preference, but rather just an identity a person holds, like any other. It’s happening ...

Besides screaming “Don’t do it!” or “Why in the (bleep) would you want to do that?” there are any number of tidbits people just don’t offer when it comes to moving from the classroom to administration. With any number of references to “going to the dark side” (of ...

Scholarship through Performance – Part Two When I started to think about a play, I never imagined how hard it would be. To write/perform a play to bring my clown--a new entity--into existence, is a lot of work. I have a theater director working with me and he tells me ...

PAYING ATTENTION I try to work it in casually, inconspicuously, but of course it is glaring. Students notice it immediately – the emphasis on a student’s progress instead of grades, the focus on their and my mental wellness as the primary means to be sharpest in learning, the inverting of ...

“So, if anyone tells you to go to hell,” I say to my students, “you can say, ‘that’s fine—because Jesus has already been there, so I won’t be alone.’” When I started teaching theology at Columbia Seminary nearly twenty years ago, nobody told me that I needed ...