A Classroom has a Soul
When I was in seminary, I had planned my master’s thesis around the title “Psyche and Spirit in the Classroom.” I see now that this was a skew...
Tag: theology
systems of ultimate concern
Confronting Whiteness with White Students
In January of 2020, I co-facilitated a two-day workshop on whiteness, race, and racism with a group of white high school students. I had designed the workshop w...
Living close to my own life
Book of Serenity #20: Dizang’s Nearness Dizang asked Fayan, “Where are you going?” Fayan said, “Around on pilgrimage.” Dizang said...
Math, in search of meaning
What does math mean? And what should it mean for my students? The answer to both these questions is up for grabs and not initially apparent. It requires an inte...
Theological values in secular math education
Before continuing to look at math education in the light of, on one hand, a drastically uncertain future, and on the other, values inherent in that work that we...
Reflections after a silent retreat
I returned from my zendo’s ten-day silent retreat just yesterday, called a “sesshin” (which means “gathering the mind”). This is n...
The Author of Violence and Staying Awake
In the midst of my theological education, I came to an understanding of why the existence of evil in our world was so often attributed to a conscious entity, ca...
More like you than you
I’ve often felt an affinity for the marginalized. It comes from an early place in my life of feeling marginalized myself — powerless or less importa...
Teaching Math at Sing Sing
I spent a year teaching high school math at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison some 20 miles north of New York City. I was a graduate st...
On the “broad and generous spirit…”
In my last post, I ended with Darlene Cohen on the benefits of facing our pain, rather than distracting from it or trying to push it away: …you begin to feel ge...