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 frame, at an awkw...
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, “What is the purpose of pilg...
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 not my first time on sesshin, b...
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 important or unable...
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...
On obedience, attention, and freedom
It’s snowing, a lot, everywhere, so this morning I was reading Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century German mystic (obviously). In the first installment of hi...
Applying the compassionate infrastructure (New Year’s reboot)
And we’re back. When I first started this blog in September I had pretty grand designs for what and how I was going to write here. Looking back, I think more of...
On prepping for the first day of school
This week and next, I start at my new job at a progressive school in Manhattan, teaching middle and high school math. This is my fourth school setting, right on...
On religion in the news, the Republican debate, and reading ‘Fun Home’ at Duke
I will write about religion in the news. There are two good reasons to do this: The way some religious people make news misrepresents what it looks like to do s...
Dharma Combat with Augustine
On the meaning of the teaching of St. Augustine of Hippo, addressing God in the first paragraph of his Confessions: You have made us for yourself, and our heart...
On a secular theology
Much of what I write on this blog will be notes toward a secular theology. The fact that I write as a “Theological Engineer” might already suggest that my theol...
On systems
Systems are scientific constructs, but I’ll often be talking about them in terms of social justice and theology. I’ll connect them here. A system is a collectio...
About the Theological Engineer
I’m a math-teacher theologian Zen-Buddhist New-Yorker. I have studied and practiced engineering, education, theology, depth psychology, and all of the above app...