Few things are more difficult than to see outside the bounds of your own perspective—to be able to identify assumptions that you take as universal truths but which, instead, have been crafted by your own unique identity and experiences in the world. We live much of our lives in our own heads, in a reconfirming […]
Never-ending learning
My first university’s motto was Ubi semper discimus: “Where learning never ends.” I internalized this as “We are always learning,” a paraphrase of the motto that emphasizes constancy over time, not just place. During my first semester of graduate school, my advisor helped us locate ourselves in these phases of tertiary education: Bachelor’s: learn and practice the field’s knowledge Master’s: teach and apply the field’s knowledge […]
Organizing ourselves out of jobs
Faith should open doors, not close them.” –Liz Welch Last fall, I spent a few days in Utah with some of the most engaged social organizers I’ve ever met. As we talked about issues like religious freedom, I couldn’t help but imagine how different the national and international conversation on religious freedom might be if […]
Get Lit: Pro-Literacy Poetry
“The greatest lessons you will ever teach us will not come from your syllabus. The greatest lessons you will ever teach us, you will not even remember… “There are things missing from our history books. But we were taught that it was better to be silent than to make Them uncomfortable.” —The Get Lit Players, […]
Christy—On Education and Entropy
“The most powerful symbol in the universe is the “=” sign: it’s a commerce between worlds, symbolic or real. That commerce is the heart of education— greasing the skids between one side of the equation and the other. Remember that the “-” symbol marks a mere subtraction, the one-way interaction present in much of our […]
Olive Hemmings, Richard Rice on Ordination & Interpretation
Black women have always comprised anywhere between 65 and 90 percent of membership in black [US] churches — institutions where they are largely excluded from the religious polity… Religion that began in slave communities is the only ancestral tie American-born blacks have to something like a family tree. But black churches, like many of their white […]
