About fifteen years ago, I had one of those winters where I caught every bug that came my way. Our daughter was in a new school and bringing home all the germs. At her elementary school Halloween jamboree, I and half the rest of Dedham, MA contracted the H1N1 flu, notorious for taking out the immune system’s metaphorical goalie for the rest of the season. After that bout, I was in and out of various sinus and lung infections until the following summer.

After the second or third month of this ordeal, I started to feel desperate. I found myself avoiding situations where I’d be in close contact with people who were possibly sick and felt irrational rage toward anyone I heard coughing, even if from all the way across a room. I’d think I was better, and then I’d feel the telltale scratch in my throat, and I’d want to cry. But I was a seminary professor and administrator and a mom, so I soldiered on.

One of my students at the time, Amy, was a friendly and thoughtful person who commuted to our Massachusetts campus from Florida during the week. I was in awe of her energy and commitment. She took a class with me, and I happened to mention to her that I was going through a spate of illnesses on a repeating loop. She suggested a form of alternative therapy called “Body Talk.” Perhaps a less exhausted and desperate version of me would have realized that I was acting needy and changed the subject, but I was all ears, ready to try anything.

Amy described Body Talk as “acupuncture without needles.” I learned through some basic research that it’s a form of energy healing focused on restoring rhythms and balance. I found a practitioner in the same town where our family lived and gave it a try. After some listening to my story and tapping on my wrist, my Body Talk therapist wrote me a prescription: start keeping a scrapbook. I went to the craft store on my way home and spent a couple hundred bucks on supplies. Did I already say I was ready to try anything?

The Body Talk healer said that my immune system was overly stressed because it was out of sync. It didn’t have time to catch up between illnesses and kept getting hit while it was down. She said I’d reset the system by getting into the present moment. Scrap-booking would help me not to arrest time, but to get into alignment with it. My stress about catching yet another virus or contract a new infection was, ironically, making that eventuality more likely. As the youngsters like to say, using a quote attributed to the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), “Be where your feet are.” One way to do that? Evidently, scrapbook.

I remembered my foray into Body Talk when I heard a story on the radio last week about a newly identified form of mental illness: circadian depression. A lot of depressed people have trouble sleeping; that we already know. But it also seems like there’s a chicken-and-egg dimension to insomnia and depression, where a person becomes depressed because they are out of sync with time. They can’t sleep because their bodies, their minds, and the hours on the clock can’t be reconciled.

Circadian depression has a cultural counterpart, and no, I’m not referring to daylight savings’ bitter end. In an increasingly diverse society, where we’re all wired to one another yet also in different time zones and realities, synchronicity is a tall order. How are we to find peace within, and peace with each other, amidst so much misalignment? Individualism, where everyone is on their own clock, might seem the convenient response. But we need to check our watches if we’re to make plans with a friend, pick our kid up from school, or get to the church on time. Asynchronicity undermines community and thus results in loneliness.

I’m sure you’re wondering if scrap-booking did the trick. It wasn’t unhelpful in that it slowed me down. Perhaps the reason that I was able to break the illness-antibiotics-more illness cycle was that I learned from Body Talk that when I’m sick, I have to rest. If I don’t, I might get better, but not for long. No big surprise. And it’s also no big surprise that those who are out of alignment with time feel depressed, because if our schedules are out of whack, we become estranged from one another. We know, right down to the cells that make up our bodies, that we’re meant to be in community together.

Sometimes I receive an email in my personal GMail account and see an AI-generated suggested response. I didn’t ask for these suggestions, vain as I am about my capacities in epistolary communication. I honestly don’t know how the suggested text got there; I certainly never enabled AI to draft responses to my friends and family. What upsets me most is when the drafts are actually pretty good, mimicking what I would have said, the way I would have said it. Creepy!

Here’s what I do when I see those suggested, AI-generated responses: I delete them and then try to write something truly original. For instance, if the email I received was from my sister, and the auto-generated response is generic, I write a real response filled with inside jokes and memories only my sister would share.

I’m not alone in this response to change: the going gets creepy, and the creepy get weird. The musician Beck was interviewed on NPR about his new album, “Ride Lonesome,” which is all live-recorded music. Beck said that he took that creative direction because AI makes him want to write more “personal, weird music.” It makes me want to write weirder responses to emails. In other words the change that AI is imposing on my life makes me craft a version of myself that is more intentionally who I am.

Consider this parable, which emerges from my 20+ years teaching leadership and change. Imagine two puzzle pieces that fit together. We’ll call them Piece One (P1) and Piece Two (P2). For good and not-totally-optional reasons, P1 changes its shape. It did what it needed to do, but it no longer fits with P2. P1 tells P2 “You should change like I did, so we can fit together again.” P2 doesn’t want to change, especially considering that it hadn’t agreed to P1 becoming something different. P2 asks why P1 won’t just revert back to its previous form if fitting together was actually important to P1.

P1 becomes angry because it feels it had no choice but to change, and it wants P2 to understand that and get with the program. P2 resents being expected to accommodate changes initiated by P1. Anger and resentment are two of the reasons why change is hard on relationships, and not just between partners and other kinds of family members. Rather, anger and resentment are part of life when we choose to be connected in the world, a piece of a puzzle rather than an island unto ourselves.

We could apply this “puzzle-piece principle” to AI and the way it affects teaching and learning. AI is rising in prominence as access to its functions becomes easier and easier. P1 is the student who now has a new tool available that could help them cut corners and meet P2’s expectations quickly and easily. P2 might be the educator who creates a curriculum, assigns reading, and reads students’ writing.

P2 (the educator) doesn’t want P1 (the student) to use AI to cut corners. Why? Because the actual work of reading about theology and ministry, and writing essays that integrate old and new ideas, is the whole point of study. Through wrestling ideas into sensible words and then communicating them, students get smarter. Then, they bring those smarts to new situations that require rigorous analysis and clear communication, and the world gets better because of their training.

But did P2 ever articulate that reasoning? Did they ever have to, really, given that P1 never had an AI option before? Well, they have to now. P2 can’t tell P1 to “stop using AI” without at least articulating the point of reading and writing. The world has changed, P1 has changed, and P2 must change by becoming more articulate and more intentional in order to sustain a relationship.

When those around us change, and we want to stay in relationship with them, we need to change too. We might have feelings of anger and resentment as we do so, but the alternative is disconnection and estrangement. Amidst the rise of AI’s presence in education, P2 — educators like me — have to change in order to refit with P1 — the student in the educator’s care. But P2 is allowed to insist on changes, too. For instance, P2 can say they want P1s’ essays to be more personal, their references more specific to insider knowledge and shared history, and their creations… more weird.

On the radio news this morning, I heard a story about Evangelical Christians pulling away from the President and his MAGA movement after a long stretch of lock-step adherence. Here’s what I expected to be the rationale for their change of heart: Christian conservatives got fed up with the President’s amoral approach to leadership. Here was the actual rationale: gas prices. Inflation. In other words, money. I am not a political conservative; am I still allowed to feel disillusioned and betrayed?

As I processed my reaction to the story, an unexpected memory rose to the surface of my mind. About ten years ago, Professor Carolyn Roberts spoke at an event sponsored by the seminary I serve, Andover Newton at Yale Divinity School. Dr. Roberts studies the role of medicine in the enslavement of Africans in the US. Her research has taken her to places she never expected to be, and in the talk she offered in our community, the specific place she described was an unexplored archive.

Dr. Roberts came upon a box of records never before studied in a library in Europe. She had to learn pharmacological German — pharmacological German?! — to make sense of a set of medical records that told the story of African infant deaths in the transatlantic passage. Once she did, she found hundreds of stories of babies and toddlers who didn’t survive their parents’ unwilling migrations.

In her address, Roberts talked about how she pined to read just one story of a medical officer viewing the bodies of these babies and their parents as human, worthy of love, God’s children. But she never did. Dr. Roberts said she found hope nonetheless in her own capacity to view those whose lives were cut so very short as beloved, worthy, and real.

In a similar way, this morning I waited to hear a story of an Evangelical Christian disavowing the President and his political movement because of cruelty: to immigrants, to women, to foreign civilians caught in the crossfire of senseless wars. That story never came.

I realize I could be tried and convicted for drawing false equivalencies between the evils of the slave trade and my political differences with the MAGA right. But in my defense, I would say that I am an idealist, and Evangelical Christians fleeing Trump over prices? That feels pretty cynical to me.

I could similarly face reasonable prosecution for classism. The fact is, my spouse and I both have jobs, and I don’t expend endless worry on the cost of gas and groceries. Do we need to be careful and thoughtful in these tight times? Of course. Is my livelihood at risk? No, not over inflation, so maybe I can’t fully relate to those who vote their pocketbooks or mainly debate policy around the kitchen table with families trying to make ends meet.

I’m not only a Christian, but I’m an evangelical one. An important distinction is required, yet never offered in the press, between evangelicalism and the Religious Right, which seeks to blend Christianity with political policy (aka Christian Nationalism). What makes me an evangelical? I believe that Christianity’s goodness is worth sharing with other because it’s a force for good. What makes me NOT part of the Religious Right? I believe that religions other than Christianity are valid and virtuous, I understand belief to be an evolving process that requires room for discernment and doubt, and I don’t believe that violence in Jesus’ name is justifiable.

Evangelicals pulling away from Trump and MAGA over money scares the living daylights out of me because of its moral vacuousness. The exodus doesn’t thrill me but rather reinforces my fear not that religion is ruining politics, but politics is ruining religion. Specifically my religion. Specifically my Jesus, who said that we are to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but who would never endorse money as a moral true north.

This coming Sunday, days before the midterms, should ministers talk about politics from the pulpit? Heavens no, but many will. What they should talk about is moral reasoning, and how we can use our Christian morality to interpret the world and, therefore, elections. When the Religious Right condones evil when the economy is good, they get the sequence dead wrong and hurt both church and state.

This evening, I attended a lecture delivered by Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and Professor of Law at NYU. My husband Dan wanted to go, as Stevenson’s book Just Mercy is on Dan’s syllabus in a course he teaches on Shakespeare and justice.

I’m blessed to serve in a setting where great speakers come to campus regularly, necessitating some picking and choosing on my part. I was happy to accompany Dan to this talk — I mean, heck, Michael B. Jordan plays Stevenson in the movie about his early career — but I had some quiet reservations.

Usually, when I attend a talk or sermon with Dan, I’m hyper-aware of how he is reacting. His love for the English language sometimes emerges in the form of visible cringing when it’s not used properly. Over 30 years, I’ve trained Dan not to give away whodunnit when he’s figured out the mystery ten minutes into the movie (Dan is much smarter than me), but I’ve never learned to tune out his disapproval when public speaking isn’t done well.

Never have I had less cause for worry about Dan’s reaction than in our hour with Bryan Stevenson. Dan was in tears on and off throughout the lecture. Stevenson has earned his reputation as one of the most powerful orators of our time. First, his life story of advocating for condemned prisoners on death row radiates heartwarming heroism while simultaneously breaking the listener’s heart. Second, his speaking style is astonishingly masterful. It’s fluid, erudite, vulnerable, polished, authentic, organized, and captivating. He didn’t lose me for one second of a sixty-minute address. That. Never. Happens.

Third, in telling the story of his call, he inspired me — us — to think about our own. Stevenson meditated aloud on some soul-searching he’s been doing lately about why he does what he does, advocating for justice against what feels like insurmountable obstacles standing in justice’s way. He thought about why it is that he can’t pull back from fighting for broken people. His answer? “I do what I do because I’m broken, too.”

In traditional Western thought — humanist, modern, enlightened — motivations rely on reason. The formulas used to fix problems are satisfyingly algebraic, calling on us to solve for a single variable to produce a solution. Such linear thinking seems so elegant but is a setup for unbearable disappointment, for we don’t live in a rational society. Stevenson described the ways in which our justice system is better at protecting the guilty wealthy than the innocent poor. A belief in quick fixes could madden a person seeking to change such a system.

We need a different source of motivation (why do I do what I do?) and a more flexible theory of change (if I do x, y will result… or, will it?). Stevenson has found his raison d’être by aligning his brokenness with the brokenness of others. He roots his passion for justice in his empathetic sense of connection with those who have been crushed by unjust systems and now are symptom-bearers of a sick society.

Where else can a person find motivation when they have been forced to accept that they could do everything within their power to bring about positive social change, but it still might not be enough? When we don’t know where to start, we turn to love. In his book about ministering to people whose behavior is difficult, Arthur Boers writes that people follow a call to ministry as a way of giving thanks for God’s love (Never Call Them Jerks, the Alban Institute, 1999, pg. 132).

I appreciate Boers’ definition of what calls a person into Christian ministry, as it doesn’t presuppose an outcome, and outcomes aren’t always something human beings can control. The person called to ministry can thus say, “I’m not doing this because I’m trying to change anyone or anything, but because God loves me, and I can’t not respond.” The capacity to remember why we are doing the work we’re doing is essential to our psychological survival when the people we’re serving are acting like jerks (note, I’m not saying they are jerks… just acting like them).

This Sunday, many ministers — myself included — will preach on Deuteronomy 34:1–12, which tells the story of the death of Moses. I was reminded in hearing Bryan Stevenson’s lecture that one of the most amazing things about Moses’ death was that God lets him see, but not enter, the promised land before he dies. In verse four, we read:

“The Lord said to [Moses], ‘This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, “I will give it to your descendants”; I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there.’”

Even Moses, among the most important figures in the Christian or Hebrew bibles, didn’t get his just deserts. He had to find motivation to serve that wasn’t results-oriented in the here-and-now but rather transcendent: eternal and internal. He aligned his actions with what he believed was right in God’s eyes, which meant accepting that God’s time and human time aren’t synchronized.

The most important challenges of the present collective moment — climate collapse, democracy in peril, the rise of AI — probably won’t get resolved in our lifetimes. When we find plumb lines that guide us toward doing the right thing, despite the unlikelihood of our ever knowing whether we made a difference, we can find satisfaction and a specific form of freedom: the freedom that comes when we give ourselves over to something bigger — and greater, and chronologically longer — than our singular, finite, material, incarnate lives.

On October 2, I wrote an open letter to current student and rising star in the field of Practical Theology Antonio Vargas, Jr. Here, Antonio writes back. My first submission from a guest writer! Thank you, Antonio. -S.

Dear Sarah,

Greetings! What a vital conference it was, bringing to the fore questions an emerging scholar like myself stay up at night wondering. To understand my perspective, let me tell you about my family. My parents were born three weeks apart from one another in Ponce, Puerto Rico, into very different worlds. My father was one of seven in a single-income household until displacement brought him to the Bronx. My mother was one of fourteen, knee-deep in farm work and mango trees until high school, when her itinerant minister parents began moving the family across the eastern United States.

As a child, my parents recounted their experiences in Puerto Rico with great emotion and fondness for their upbringing and lessons learned. They often shared too many refranes, or idioms, that have been repeated and passed down like our own kind of Proverbs. Mami would often repeat no te dejes cojer de mangó bajito — don’t let someone fool you for being a low-hanging mango. She would share the agricultural implications (stories of growing mangoes and consistently sticky fingers) and the social ones (a caution against allowing others to take advantage of your innocence and vulnerability, to be easily consumed like a ripe mango in arms’ reach). It’s a call to assume a position of suspicion and discernment before consent. In other words, it’s a protective measure passed down from those before to resist naïveté and seek understanding.

Unfortunately, Puerto Rican history shows how the powerful have consumed communities in the name of research. In the name of research, Puerto Rican women were reduced to lab subjects as the U.S. began experimenting on birth control pills by masking a routine check-in with experimental drugs on the Island. In the name of research, we were considered an “excess population”, resulting in mass-sterilization policy in the 1950s and 60s. In the name of research, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission conducted radiation and cancer cell-implantations on the island without neighborhood’s consent.

Most recently, consider the plethora of scholarship about Puerto Rico post-Hurricane Maria by researchers and federal agencies studying the climate, the people, and its ecologies. Most of this scholarship does not aid local grassroots movements and neighborhoods on the Island in the ongoing plea for equitable resourcing despite infrastructural and systemic neglect. When these researchers come into the Island, who benefits? And who receives the short end of the stick?

No nos vamos a dejar coger de mangó bajito. (We won’t allow ourselves to be taken as low-hanging mangoes). So when I think about ethnography, I recognize the bite marks of its teeth.

At the same time, I am unsure if the solution includes isolating Puerto Rico from the sharing of herself and her particularities. Puerto Rico has so much to teach and model. From the Island’s resilient hope despite unfavorable conditions, to vibrant cultures that transcend geography, farming techniques and frituras (fried snacks…aka Heaven on earth), rituals and dances that connect us to our past and future, she’s got a beauty that enchants us all. We need not fragment ourselves into silos, especially in a globalizing world where bodies are presented with multiple identities.

As someone who has felt being written about, instead of writing with, what might be some ways forward? I join the many voices over many generations that say: we are not the powerfuls’ lab rats for assimilation (Daniel 1.12–14 has long warned us about that). Nor are Puerto Rican wombs the US’s Hagar, reducing bodies to reproduction.

What we can become is kin, separate-yet-connected to the lessons and life of those within the Puerto Rican story. Ethnography can offer the opportunity for mutuality when we slow down to emphasize relationship instead of a publication or data set. In doing so, we

• allow ideas and scholarship to emerge organically and collaboratively rather than with a rushed timeline.
• move at the pace of trust, recognizing that assumptions need to be untangled from our lived experiences.
• identify where, not if, our power differentials show up — in characterizations, language (is Puerto Rico a colony or territory?), research assumptions and questions (to whom does this scholarship serve?).
• resist romanticizing another Global Majority community, as if we are the all-encompassing vision of communal perfection.

This ideal is not the road often taken, but it might be a road that resists the ways of this ever-fragmenting world. In the case of someone newly holding the microscope while also having sat beneath it, how do we live and handle both? How might we allow the people to speak as much as they can, for themselves?

With a one-day hope,

Antonio

When I give talks about leadership in the congregational way, I often use this graphic to describe the understanding of the universe that serves as the foundation of congregational Christian faith community polity:

I introduce the diagram with two apologies: (1) I’m sorry that the limits of depicting an image in two dimensions require God to be “up” and earth to be “down”, which fails to capture two realms that overlay upon and coexist with one another; and (2) I’m sorry for the Euro-centric, Kit Harrington depiction of the decidedly Middle-Eastern Jesus.

But then I explain the diagram, which I have found does more good than harm in helping people to understand the interactions between the Creator and the created in daily life. The realm of God and of earth are separate, yet a lot of traffic passes between them. God intervenes in history, in-breaking into our lives and times. People offer their prayers of intercession, opening themselves to God’s tangible involvement in earthly affairs.

Jesus — ONLY Jesus — spans both realms. This theological position has serious implications for a life of faith. In the cosmology depicted above, there’s no place for an idea that good people are closer to God and bad people are further away. Important to the congregational way’s theology of ordination, there’s no special zone for clergy in the middle ground. In Matthew and Mark’s gospels, we read that brothers James and John ask Jesus if they can sit at his right hand in heaven. Jesus sighs audibly.

This past Sunday and Monday, I had the kinds of days that make me feel like I eat chocolate mousse for all three meals. Sunday morning, I gave a talk to a group of leaders at a congregation who want to learn more about discernment. When I showed them the diagram above, they asked, “Where’s the Holy Spirit?” I shared that I’ve gotten that question before. I think the Holy Spirit is in the connections between the actors. It’s the air they all breathe. It energizes the whole machine and brings it to life.

Later that same day, I helped to coordinate an installation service for a new faculty chair at the seminary I serve as founding dean. Braxton D. Shelley is now Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School’s George Washington Williams Chair. The new chair and its inaugural holder are both worthy of accolades galore, but I’ll choose and focus on one attribute: Professor Shelley’s work is infused with the Holy Spirit.

Professor Shelley writes and teaches about Black sacred music. The chair he occupies is designed for a faculty member whose research area has been overlooked by the academy while being utterly crucial to the life of the church. Black sacred music transcends simple diagrams. It connects, breathes life into, and energizes faith communities.

The morning after the George Washington Williams/Braxton Shelley celebration, I had a holy hangover, but I pulled myself together to attend the Beecher Lecture from William Barber. The Beecher Lecture is a historic and prestigious one on the theory and practice of preaching. Dr. Barber talked about life in the Spirit as an “enlightened quarrel” between where we are and where God imagines us to be.

Dr. Barber said that Christians must take the Holy Spirit seriously, as a matter of life and death rather than a momentary sensation of goosebumps. He quoted Jurgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope (SCM Press, 1965) where the master theologian wrote that the Holy Spirit isn’t a sign of God’s sentimental encouragement but the manifestation of God’s divine power. He went on to propose a theology of the Holy Spirit’s action in our lives — an “affective pneumatology” — which blends holiness, prophetic social witness, and spiritual empowerment.

Put differently:

1. The Holy Spirit is our supernatural courage.
2. The Holy Spirit is the electricity that makes what was dead come to life.
3. The Holy Spirit is what courses through the veins of the person and the community, making it possible for them to hear the word of the Lord.

In other words, my diagram needs to retire. It fails to capture the player in our divine drama whose activity is enlivening the emergence of a new way of being church that’s taking shape today: the Holy Spirit. Beyond our words, beyond our ken, beyond our two-dimensional depictions, beyond our understanding, the Holy Spirit is as close as our very breath.

Among those who study the theology of emergence, like Phyllis Tickle, we read ideas about eras. The question posed in different ways, again and again, is “Which era are we living in?” Tickle famously writes that, every 500 years, the church undergoes a rummage sale where everything once taken for granted gets the Marie Kondo treatment. If a doctrine doesn’t spark joy, it’s relegated to the ash heap of history. I’ve also heard it said that the first millennium after Christ was the millennium of claiming the one true God, the second millennium the one true Christ, and the third — a.k.a. now — the one true Spirit.

To say that we’re at the dawning of the age of the Spirit is a concept I find immensely comforting, because as I regard the world around me, I just don’t understand what in the world God is up to. But I trust that people can connect with each other. We can breathe. We can tap into the energetic force of God.

Just because we can’t make much sense of the world around us doesn’t mean we’re dead, as reason wasn’t what made us alive. We’re alive in, and because of, the Spirit, which both gives us and resurrects our lives.

Dear Antonio,

I have been thinking over the course of this past week about the superbly thoughtful words you shared as a panelist at the symposium we at Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School co-sponsored on faith and resistance to empire in the Puerto Rican Christian church. Normally, I would write you an email, but this time I thought I’d go one step further with an open letter to which I hope (and trust) you will respond.

It was clear to me that those in attendance at the symposium care about Puerto Rico and have strong emotional ties to its past, present, and future. Although I wasn’t there for every presentation, I can see now that passion was building over the course of the event. You were on the last panel, and maybe you were less surprised than I was when an exchange between one of your fellow panelists and an audience member grew heated for reasons it took me some time and reflection to understand.

Your panelist colleague — let’s call her Allie — had just made a point with which I happened to disagree. She said that ethnography as a research methodology is inherently violent, and auto-ethnography is the only reliably ethical way to study and report on a culture. I don’t think ethnography is necessarily violent or that auto-ethnography is always safe.

Studying the culture of those who are different from us helps us not want to kill them; I am, therefore, in favor of it. If we come to respect or even love people through learning about them, that’s a bonus not to be taken for granted in our fragmented world. Conversely, I think some auto-ethnography is best compared with auto-eroticism: reportage on self-fascination. Without love, any ethnography is — to use the language of Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:1b — “a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”

I was still thinking about the ethnography question when a participant in the symposium, whom I have to imagine was known to Allie, asked her, “What about public religion?” Let’s call this questioner “Oliver”. “Public religion” isn’t an expression we use a lot in the study of theology and ministry, although I imagine it might be common in a social-sciences approach to religion. I believe Oliver was trying to figure out, “What about the expressions of a faith discernible to the naked eye? Can we study those?”

Allie cried foul. She heard Oliver use the word “emerge” to describe how the outcroppings of religious observance enter the public sphere. Allie railed, Do you think that you’re entitled to the religion of the Nuyorican diaspora just because it’s happening behind an unlocked door? Oliver said he didn’t remember using the word, “emerge,” but whether he did or not, whatever verb he chose seemed pretty synonymous with emerging.

Oliver was talking about the difference between infiltrating an oppressed community to study it (which he and Allie seemed to agree is wrong) and studying that which the oppressed community chooses to share with the wider world. But his words reminded me — and I’m guessing Allie too — of the excuses we might hear from a child who swears they didn’t steal the candy but simply found it… on the shelf… in a store… and took it.

The exchange between Allie and Oliver lasted one minute, but I’ve thought about it in the six days since. I feel compassion for both actors in this drama, yet I don’t think either was exactly right. Allie didn’t like the idea of Oliver claiming ownership of her faith story, and she pushed back too hard for dialogue to ensue. Oliver seemed genuinely desirous of learning but came off as a voyeur. I have made both of these mistakes in the past myself.

I kind of love that I didn’t grasp what the problem was at first. The very idea of “studying” the faith of another — particularly another who’s been systematically marginalized — doesn’t interest me, and such a practice doesn’t come close to reflecting what I understand our work at Andover Newton Seminary at YDS to be. I don’t study people. We don’t study communities. I and we seek to connect and form relationships so that we might learn together.

Allie and Oliver’s brief, heated exchange helped me understand why ministers need to become educated about how to connect with people across differences. We don’t need to learn about “world religions,” as interesting as such learning may be, or how successful such knowledge might make us in bar trivia. What we need more, for peace’s sake, is to approach the religious views of others as an opportunity to build community, find common ground, and enrich our appreciation of the bounty of creation.

I’m not Puerto Rican, and I don’t consider myself a practical theologian. You are both, so help me out: Did you hear what I heard, Antonio-Tonito? What did you think about the way the symposium explored ethnography, so-called Public Religion, and building community?

This ‘blog is an experiment; let’s call it “epistolary ethnography”. I wonder if an open letter about discourse in a public forum, where you were a panelist charged with responding to what you heard, qualifies as a non-extractive form of creating new knowledge? If not, know that the impulse behind my questions is one of faith seeking understanding.

Grace and Peace, Respect and Curiosity,

Sarah

The season in the history of thought and culture through which we’re living today is one to which some refer as “emergence.” In class today with students in Mission-Driven Innovation, the leadership course I’m co-teaching with my sister-scholar from the Yale School of Management, I laid out for students what that season is and how we must lead differently amidst it than we have in previous eras. What follows is how I approached the topic, as well as my newer thoughts on emergence since I laid it out earlier today.

I described the past two-hundred-ish years in the history of how people make sense of life in the US and Western Europe.

The Modern Era: From about 1800 until about 1960, humans increasingly believed in their own potential, also known as “humanism”. Advances in science persuaded them that it was only a matter of time before people figured everything out about how life worked. Institutions flourished. Right and wrong were assigned clear labels. Change leadership happened linearly, shaped by those who controlled resources, like capital and might.

Post-modernity: In the 1960s, belief in human potential ran up against limitations. With all the science in the world, we still can’t be sure when “life” begins, or who should be in charge of answering that question. The so-called “Just Wars” of the early 20th Century, framed as battles between good and evil, were superseded by wars, like the US’s in Vietnam, whose objectives were unclear and whose heroes were unsung. New voices entered conversation about how the world should work; that was good. Yet many reacted adversely to the notion that truth is multiple, not monolithic, and that no grownups were coming to the rescue to tell us all what to do. Such a realization led to anxiety, and — as we should expect — anxiety results in backlashes, such as…

New Tribalism: Briefly in the early 21st Century, factions struck back against the free-for-all that was Postmodernism. People assembled in like-minded camps. This era began around the time when airplanes felled the Twin Towers and began to subside when we went into Covid-19 lock-down. We came out of Covid-19 into a season of emergence, although Christian scholars like Phillis Tickle and Brian McLaren were using the term far earlier.

A season of emergence is an in-between time. We hover over a threshold between the known and the unknown. Another term for this in-between-eras era is “liminality,” whose Latin root — limen — means the sash at the bottom of a doorway.

In a season of emergence, we must allow new ways to become formed, make themselves known, and instruct our actions. For control freaks, such surrender feels miserable, even irresponsible. We sense that the old ways we knew are falling apart, and the new ways aren’t yet ready for prime-time. We must do something, mustn’t we? No.

What we must do is to listen, partner, and collaborate, allowing new truths to emerge rather than forcing them out of their pupae. When we rush to closure, we risk coming to the wrong conclusions, skipping to the end of the mystery novel whilst never having understood the story well enough to care who dunnit.

Emergence scholar adrienne maree brown uses nature images to define how new truths emerge. For example, light’s nature as both particle and wave shows us the both-and-ness of emergence. Bees and ants model collaboration. Mushrooms teach us how all can be one (such as underground mycelial networks) while also many (above-ground individual mushrooms).

Nature metaphors are but one new way of making sense of an in-between time. Lately, I’ve thought about the ways in which malapropisms can provide us with insight. A new student at the seminary I serve, Andover Newton at Yale Divinity School, told me about an encounter that happened in our cafeteria. She referred to that space as our “Reflectory,” and I just about died. Yes! We eat and reflect there! Time for a renaming, I think.

Another student introduced me to a friend of his who intends to apply to our seminary. He introduced the friend as a “perspective student” rather than a prospective one. I loved it. The applicant seeks perspective; to call the candidate a prospect — as though they were an object, or prey — is the true misnomer.

In a season of emergence, we use our God-given gift of reason, but we don’t — can’t — over-rely on it. Human rationality is what got us into the trouble we’re in now, where we overestimated what we could come to understand. We need reason. We also need to use that reason to formulate moral frameworks that channel our energies, thus checking the power of those who control resources but are otherwise unqualified to tell the world how it ought to work.

Something old is dying; something new is being born. The only guardrails we have as we drive toward the future take the form of a transcendent sense that there’s an order to this created realm. That order is photo-bombing our tidy assessments of what’s logically correct. It’s flirting with us, winking at us, and asking us to trust that it’s coming, that it’s love, and that it’s good.

When I told my friend Teresa that I’m reading the book, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents, by Lindsay C. Gibson (New Harbinger Press, 2015), she was shocked I’d never heard of it before it came up in my Amazon algorithm.

When I’d told my friend Joyce the same thing the previous day, she, like I, had never heard of the book before. Teresa is a public health leadership scholar, and Joyce is a pastoral theologian. Evidently, the book made a bigger splash in the secular social sciences than in the theological world, yet I can’t help but to find in it lessons about God.

I’m reading Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents because I’m working on a book about leadership in a culture of anger. Many of the resources I’ve consulted in preparing to write the book have pointed out the connection between anger and immaturity. A person who blows their top when angry isn’t mature, so I need to understand immaturity better. After reading the book, I see immaturity everywhere, but to understand it, we have to study its positive partner: maturity.

Mature people regulate their emotions. When they experience disappointment due to unmet expectations, or grief over loss, mature people “use their words.” When they feel anger, they say things like, “That makes me angry,” rather than lashing out.

The emotionally mature don’t expect the world to conform to their wills or expectations. They can observe turns of events without forming an opinion about each and every one of them. They can let other people be Other People rather than objects of judgment for the ways in which they differ from themselves.

The emotionally mature accept that more than one thing can be true at the same time. They can feel both compassion and disapproval, both love and frustration, both determination and hopelessness. Mature people give other people room to be themselves because they recognize that they and other people aren’t Clark Kent and Superman but two different people.

When a person is immature, their identity is fragile. They act out because they fear obliteration of self. When taken by surprise when people don’t do what was expected, they feel betrayed. Gibson writes, “Their self-esteem relies on your compliance.” Out of all the wise words in the book, it was these that stopped me in my tracks.

I comply a lot in order to make other people comfortable. If they want me to be small, just watch how small I can get! To quote the great film “American Beauty” (1999) I’m able to say, “I’ll be whoever you want me to be.” Gibson’s observations caused me to look back on 25 years of studying leadership amidst organizational change through new eyes. Do people and institutions resist change because they’re just too immature to make room for natural and healthy progress? Are they just like the immature parent who loses their minds when their kids become their own people?

Social scientists present some answers to the question, How do we help a person become more mature? For instance, Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Bob Kegan writes that the engine that powers maturation is the subject-object relationship. We are subject to an assumption until we become objective about it. As we examine all our assumptions, therefore, we become increasingly objective and insightful. Insight shows us that assumptions need have no power over us; we can make room for differences and change. No one is leaving us.

Christian theology teaches a different lesson about letting go of assumptions, beginning with this: we have an awesome God. And we’re not God, which means we have to humble ourselves and realize that there’s so much we don’t know.

The story of the Christian faith is replete with fear of abandonment: Jonah on the beach in Nineveh, Jeremiah lamenting that he doesn’t want to prophesy but can’t stop, Jesus in the wilderness, Jesus on the cross. But undergirding all those stories is a trust that God won’t — can’t — abandon us. Satan: You have no power here.

One of God’s attributes lifted up in scripture is that God is slow to anger. If we’re created in God’s image, that can be us. Maybe not automatically or right away, but it’s possible. Maybe we need to grow over the course of our lives into our capacities to own our emotions, accept what’s beyond our understanding, and face multiple and conflicting truths with humility.

When another tries to control us because their self-esteem relies upon our compliance, we can say we don’t need to protect your self-esteem, for God is on our side. We can also say that we don’t fear abandonment, because we believe God loves us. We couldn’t get God to abandon us abandon us if we tried.

On the night of the Easter Vigil at the Memorial Church in Harvard Yard in 1995, a young woman approached the chancel as Peter John Gomes prepared to baptize a baby. I was a first-year seminarian and was standing near Professor Gomes to assist him. I could see surprise flash across his face — and instantly disappear — when the young woman said she too wanted to be baptized. He baptized her, and I didn’t know until nearly a week later that nothing like that had ever happened before.

I wasn’t familiar with the concept of an Easter Vigil when I went to work at Memorial Church, so for me, everything about the service — not just this unexpected baptism — was a surprise. The service began on the steps of the church, where the ministers gathered around a metal barrel with congregants. They set the contents of the barrel, which may have been palms from Palm Sunday, on fire at midnight. Then, everyone processed into the church singing.

After the spontaneous baptism, my supervisor, Associate Minister Preston Hannibal, deputized the staff to track the young woman down. We needed her name for church records and a baptism certificate. All these events happened a long time ago, of course, but what I remember — will always remember — was that fleeting look of surprise on Professor Gomes’ face, and how quickly it gave way to his inimitable pastoral confidence.

For the past five years, my colleague JaQuan Beachem and I have worked together — with his role increasing, and mine gradually decreasing — to lead a fall retreat for our students. New as it is, the event is beginning to take on the contours of tradition.

We gather at a retreat center on Long Island Sound and take advantage of the ocean’s proximity to reenact baptisms. Students gather on the beach, and I stand in the water. We sing a song, and I say a few words about the significance of baptism in the Christian faith. Then, I use a leafy branch to sprinkle everyone with sea water while saying these words: “I baptize you in the name of God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit.” I then offer a baptism blessing: “Peace be upon you child of God, disciple of Christ, member of the church.”

I try to make clear to participants that what we’re doing isn’t a baptism, per se, but an act of remembrance. Many of our students were baptized as infants, and others as young teens; the reenactment is a ritual of confirmation of vows we said or were said on our behalf. As an act of hospitality, however, I offer that anyone who’s never been baptized can come present themselves for baptism, as “reenactment” doesn’t work for first-timers. After four previous invitations, this year, we had our first taker.

It turns out that Grace Powell had just been talking over lunch with friends about how she’d never been baptized. Something about the setting, the people, and the movement of the Holy Spirit told her the time was right. Grace and I walked into the water together up to our waists. I would have taken her in deeper, but the water was shallow, and I didn’t want to depart too far from the shore. I dunked her! Three times: In the name of God! Jesus the Christ! The Holy Spirit! I said a blessing, and we embraced.

Grace, our newest baptisand, sprinkled her friends with water at the reenactment that came next, using a goldenrod stalk I’d found near the beach. I brought that stalk home and am drying it now. Grace got her certificate at our community dinner last night.

I’d only experienced a spontaneous baptism one time before, in an entirely different role and context, over thirty years ago. But I have extensive training in theology and ministry. That training both gives me a foundation and humbles me in the face of sacraments, where human understanding is by-definition limited. Sacraments are a place where human agency and the Holy Spirit kiss one another between one dimension and another. The human-divine collaboration involved in sacramental leadership blends the ordinary and the supernatural-sublime.

The tradition in which I’m ordained to the ministry is the United Church of Christ (UCC) recognizes two sacraments: baptism and communion. Ordinarily, a person receives communion only after they’re baptized, but our forebears and contemporaries in the UCC always strive to widen welcome, and an increasingly open table is one ways in which that happens. Grace wasn’t “baptized UCC,” because that’s not a thing. She was baptized Christian. Although rituals differ across traditions, a person who’s been baptized always will be a baptized, with occasional reenactments on beaches here and there.

As I wrote last week, I am co-teaching a course this semester on innovative leadership. Grace’s baptism reminded me how wonderfully unoriginal innovation can be. Consider these dimensions of my “new” experience baptizing Grace:

• Baptism is an ancient tradition that was already taking place before Jesus began his ministry.
• I learned and keep on learning the theology that underpins the administration of sacraments in Christian ministry.
• I observed an event 32 years ago that stayed with me.
• I’ve experienced a whole lot of surprises between then and now.

And then, Saturday, September 5, 2026, I did something “spontaneous” that was rooted and grounded in love.