The measures of scholarly productivity are often premised upon a life without the distractions of children and family. The challenges of tenure and promotion are amplified for young parents, yet schools seldom support new mothers with policies, procedures, and cultural norms of welcoming and belonging. Too many schools punish, shame, or blame women who choose to parent. This conversation with young theologians raises the problem of...

A critical challenge during the first years of teaching is defining, forming, and living into a scholarly identity which is healthy, has integrity and is generative for your own scholarly project. This conversation discloses some of the pitfalls and risks when institutions provide little to no mentoring. What does it take to have a common sense and reasonable perspective for being a scholar and for doing scholarship ... over the lo...

Conversations on Teaching and Spirituality
Series One: Exploring Thurman's The Sound of the Genuine

Series One: Episode 2 of 3: Expressions of the Genuine
What if hearing the genuine inside yourself requires a quest, a leaving home, or an exploration of the unfamiliar? If you leave home, can you find a home again? Does the genuine come from within you or does it come through you from somewhere else? What does it mean to offer the ...

Seasons of a Teaching Career

Series One is entitled Exploring Early Career Issues. The featured speakers of this video series are Leah Payne (Portland Seminary, George Fox University), Roger Nam (Candler School of Theology, Emory University) and Nancy Lynne Westfield (The Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion).

Common sense conversations meant to provide perspective, inspire, and encourage colleagues who ar...

What is at risk for those teachers who teach about the connection between religion, the siege on the Capital Building and racial progress? What kinds of evaluations are levied against the professor whose work is noticed for its impact upon the public? What happens when administrators do not know how to respond to assaults on faculty whose work is contested by those beyond the school? What is the toll of societally transformative te...

All of us are experiencing the pandemics differently; the shifting and changing varies. Yet, gaging the classroom and the learning by our students is integral. The losses, responses, and disruptions of COVID 19 has dulled skills and left many teachers feeling as if we are simply muddling through. What does it mean to learn to recalibrate? How do we respond when there is no one right way? Dr. Nancy Lynne Westfield hosts Dr. Sarah Az...

Teaching as a focus of institutional change might be a lynchpin in creating sustainable schools. What if we free faculty to teach, then redesign institutional shifts around their teaching? What would it mean to collaborate beyond the seminary walls and into the neighborhoods? What would it take to suspend judgement of institutional mistakes long enough to experiment for change? Dr. Nancy Lynne Westfield hosts Dr. Ben Sanders, III (...

Welcome to Conversations on Teaching and Spirituality.    
Series One is entitled Exploring Thurman’s “The Sound of the Genuine”.
The featured speakers of this video series are Dr. Nancy Westfield, Dr. Amy G. Oden and Dr. Shively T.J. Smith.

Using Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman’s baccalaureate address at Spelman College (May 4, 1980), entitled “The Sound of the Genuine,” these colleagues discuss the challenges of teachers attempting to bring...

This podcast episode is taken from a recording of a webinar. 

Body indicators such as nose, hair, and flesh tones are relied upon for the perpetuation of prejudice, bias, and presumed privilege. What would it mean to unlearn, then relearn more liberative ways of reading the body? Can the truncated imagination which only sees value in the white body be rekindled to see worth in all bodies? The featured speakers for this event are Dr....