self care

“Using Time.” What a curious phrase. At best, it is aspirational. At worst, it is a wee bit oxymoric. Through ticking clocks and rotating calendars we all bear witness to time’s constant motion.[1] Whether we use time well or not it keeps on moving. So that means the moment ...

Who has the power in this faculty meeting, and what does that mean for me? As a new hire in our graduate school of theology, I didn’t formulate these questions explicitly as I went to my first faculty meeting, but I certainly carried these questions within me.           As a ...

I have always been gifted at getting people’s hackles up. Maybe it comes from being the self-righteous firstborn of two firstborns. Maybe it comes from being socially awkward, always better at pleasing teachers than pleasing peers. Maybe it comes from my tendency to say exactly what I think at ...

To paraphrase Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter, “I have a confession: I don’t much like my students.” It’s not that I don’t like them as people or that I wish them ill. It’s not that I don’t like discussing ideas, engaging texts, ...

Arriving onto the campus of my first fulltime teaching job in higher education was not unlike finding myself in a strange land with a little dog under my arm. “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” I remember saying aloud, wondering what I had done in ...