Legacies of Christian Languaging and Literacies in American Education: Perspectives on English Language Arts Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning 9780367136345, 9780429027604

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Legacies of Christian Languaging and Literacies in American Education

Because spiritual life and religious participation are widespread human and cultural phenomena, these experiences unsurprisingly find their way into English language arts curriculum, learning, teaching, and teacher education work. Yet many public school literacy teachers and secondary teacher educators feel unsure how to engage religious and spiritual topics and responses in their classrooms. This volume responds to this challenge with an in-depth exploration of diverse experiences and perspectives on Christianity within American education. The authors not only examine how Christianity—the historically dominant religion in American society—shapes languaging and literacies in schools and other educational spaces, but they also imagine how these relations might be reconfigured. From curricula to classroom practice, from narratives of teacher education to youth coming-to-faith, chapters vivify how spiritual lives, beliefs, practices, communities, and religious traditions interact with linguistic and literate practices and pedagogies. In relating legacies of Christian languaging and literacies to urgent issues including White supremacy, sexism, homophobia, and the politics of exclusion, the volume enacts and invites inclusive relational configurations within and across the myriad American Christian subcultures coming to bear on English language arts curriculum, teaching, and learning. This courageous collection contributes to an emerging scholarly literature at the intersection of language and literacy teaching and learning, religious literacy, curriculum studies, teacher education, and youth studies. It will speak to teacher educators, scholars, secondary school teachers, and graduate and postgraduate students, among others. Mary M. Juzwik is Professor in the departments of Teacher Education and English at Michigan State University, USA. Jennifer C. Stone is Professor of English at the University of Alaska Anchorage, USA. Kevin J. Burke is Associate Professor of English Education in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia, USA. Denise Dávila is Assistant Professor of Literacy and Children’s Literature in the Language and Literacy Studies program at the University of Texas at Austin, USA.

Routledge Research in Education

This series aims to present the latest research from right across the field of education. It is not confined to any particular area or school of thought and seeks to provide coverage of a broad range of topics, theories and issues from around the world. Recent titles in the series include: The Complex Web of Inequality in North American Schools Investigating Educational Policies for Social Justice Edited by Gilberto Q. Conchas, Briana M. Hinga, Miguel N. Abad, and Kris D. Gutiérrez Fear and Schooling Understanding the Troubled History of Progressive Education Ronald W. Evans Applying Cultural Historical Activity Theory in Educational Settings May Britt Postholm and Kirsten Foshaug Vennebo Sonic Studies in Educational Foundations Echoes, Reverberations, Silences, Noise Edited by Walter S. Gershon and Peter Appelbaum Designing for Situated Knowledge Transformation Edited by Nina Bonderup Dohn, Stig Børsen Hansen and Jens Jørgen Hansen Challenging Perceptions of Africa in Schools Critical Approaches to Global Justice Education Edited by Barbara O’Toole, David Nyaluke and Ebun Joseph Legacies of Christian Languaging and Literacies in American Education Perspectives on English Language Arts Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning Edited by Mary M. Juzwik, Jennifer C. Stone, Kevin J. Burke, and Denise Dávila For a complete list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Research-in-Education/book-series/SE0393

Legacies of Christian Languaging and Literacies in American Education Perspectives on English Language Arts Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning Edited by Mary M. Juzwik, Jennifer C. Stone, Kevin J. Burke, and Denise Dávila

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Mary M. Juzwik, Jennifer C. Stone, Kevin J. Burke, and Denise Dávila to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-13634-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-02760-4 (ebk) Typeset in Baskerville by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgments Foreword

viii ix

DAV I D E . K I R KLAND

Introduction: Legacies of Christian Languaging and Literacies in American Education

1

M A RY M . J UZW IK, KEVIN J. BU RKE, JENNIFER C. STONE, AN D D E N I S E D ÁVILA

SECTION I

Babel: Conversation, Conflict, and Contested Terrains of Schooling

17

JE N N I F E R C . S TO NE

1 “Real Religion”: The Roles of Knowledge, Dialogue, and Sense-Making in Coming to a Faith

21

AL L I S O N S K E RRET T

2 Recognizing Religion with Preservice Teachers

37

HE I D I L . H AD LEY AND W ILLIAM J. FASSBENDER

3 Institutional Rituals as Interpersonal Verbal Rituals as Interactional Resources in Classroom Talk

51

RO BE RT L E BLANC

SECTION II

Purity: Making Present the Stranger

67

K E V I N J. BUR K E

4 Myth and Christian Reading Practice in English Teaching S C OT T JA RV IE

71

vi

Contents

5 “Racism Is a God-Damned Thing”: The Implications of Historical and Contemporary Catholic Racism for ELA Classrooms

82

M A RY L . N E V ILLE

6 Regulating Language: Language Policies of Early American Christian Missions in Alaska

96

JENNIFER C. STONE, SAMANTHA MACK, JACOB D. HOLLEY-KLINE, AN D M I TC HELL HO BAC K

7 A Dream Come True: Young Evangelical Women’s Negotiations of Dreams, Reality, and Ideologies on Pinterest

111

BR E E S T R AAY ER-G ANNO N

SECTION III

Wisdom: Loving God, Loving Our Neighbors, and Engaging Religious Pluralism Through Literary Response

125

M A RY M . J UZ W I K

8 Entering Into Literary Communion: Nourishing the Soul and Reclaiming Mystery Through Reading

131

K AT I M AC ALU SO

9 “Love Your Neighbor”: LGBTQ Social Justice and the Youth Canon of WWII Literature

145

D E N I S E D ÁV ILA AND ELO U ISE E. EPST EIN

10 Disrupting Protestant Dominion: Middle School Affirmations of Diverse Religious Images in Community Spaces

160

D E N I S E D ÁV ILA AND ALLISO N VO LZ

SECTION IV

Resurrection: Contemplative Essays on Navigating Christian Literacies, Teaching, and Pedagogies in the English Language Arts Classroom

175

D E N I S E D ÁV I L A

11 Ambivalence in Two Parts: Legacies of Catholic Languaging ADAM J. GR ET EMAN

179

Contents 12 Exploring the Multilingual, Multimodal, and Cosmopolitan Dimensions of Two Young Cuban American Women’s Religious Literacies

vii

192

NATA S HA P E R EZ

13 I Had to Die to Live Again: A Racial Storytelling of a Black Male English Educator’s Spiritual Literacies and Practices

205

L AM A R L . J OHNSO N

14 (Re)Mystifying Literary Pedagogy

222

M A RY M . J UZW IK

Afterword: The Gift of Babel

234

S AN D RO R . BARRO S

List of Contributors Index

241 251

Acknowledgments

St. Thomas Aquinas writes—of the inherent human inability to account for the vast mystery of God—that we suffer, always, from a poverty of language. We echo this sentiment in thinking about the ways that we will, inevitably, fail at properly rendering the scope of our gratitude to those who have made this project possible. Of course, language is all we have here, and so with a sense of the scale of our shortcomings, we wish to thank a number of colleagues, friends, and mentors for this work. First, thank you to our editors at Routledge, first Matthew Friberg and then Elsbeth Wright, for the technical guidance necessary to produce a text as disparate as this one. We’d like to extend our gratitude to the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and to the invitation from Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, then-chair of the NCTE Standing Committee for Research, for scheduling the original forum out of which this project grew as a Featured Research Session at the 2017 annual NCTE convention. We’re grateful to conversational partners along the way who have helped shape our thinking on the problems of this project, the work, and the intersecting fields of Language and Literacy Studies, English Education, and educational research, most especially Deborah Brandt, Ellen Cushman, Anne Haas Dyson, Avner Segall, and Anne Whitney. Special thanks are due to David Kirkland, who signed onto the project sight unseen on a street in St. Louis some years back, and to Sandro Barros, who was kind enough to overlook our belated acknowledgment of his shared interests and jumped in readily and with great depth at later stages of the project. Mary would like to thank Dusty for his loving support, especially during the final intense weeks of bringing this project to completion. Jennifer thanks Scott and Katrina for their love, patience, and good humor. Kevin extends his gratitude to Lauren for her generosity along the way and to those Marists, Jesuits, Vincentians, Sisters of the Most Precious Blood, and lay ministers who taught him that the institution of the Church is always secondary to the work of its people toward a more just world. Finally, and most importantly, thank you to the contributors in this volume for taking risks in your scholarship and for pushing the conversation in, we think, profound and useful ways.

Foreword David E. Kirkland

I have studied the intersections of race, gender, and literacy for nearly two decades. My early studies were ethnographic, detailing literacy in the lives of Black young men and boys. After countless hours spent with them, I found that the relationship between Black young men and boys and their words was deeply spiritual, something ancestral like the roots of an ageless tree, more vast than the possibilities of words, like nebula or dreams—something akin to God. This should not have been surprising to me. Black young men and boys, like many other human groups, exist in cultures that blur the sacred and the secular, creating a kind of haze that makes it impossible to distinguish between where language begins and faith ends. The language of faith and the language of a faith-driven people are remarkably kindred. This kindred space, both for the young people I learned from and other literate people like them, gives breath to literate being, holding in place recollection and reconciliation and, thus, the sweetest blues of, say, Coltrane borne of “the sorrow songs” of DuBois all in the space of the living word. In this space, literacy whispers and raps, but transcendently in the tradition of griots where the language of faith soils the soul until it becomes etched into memory. This is how literacy works. The connection between the spiritual power of words is understood in West African cosmology as Nommo—the spiritual power of the word. The spiritual power of the word, or language, operates through such faith traditions as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, among others. Thus, literacy is what faith accomplishes in a people striving to communicate that which is impossible—the act of bringing others inside themselves to experience a deep hunger, an aching hurt, an incomplete history, all of which live in the body. And for the young people I have spent my life learning from and about, literacy was also the story of what lives inside the body, of wounds set against swollen smiles, of practices of survivance that act as a prayer whose words sit adjacent to the echoes of holy books and the cries of “a holier-than-thou” people. This is why I find this book fascinating, for it gets it. It explains to me the remarkable connection between faith and literacy, which I have witnessed over and again in the field researching race, gender, and literacy. It has taken me to a new place in the study of literacy—outside the classroom and into the ideological embellishments of nations and borders, into the stew of our social and

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cultural identities and their more cosmetic antecedents. Moreover, if this book had been written at the time I was writing about Black masculine literacies, I might have been more capable of making sense of “legacies of Christian languaging” core to the spiritual literacy practices of Black young men and boys. My analysis might have gotten closer to them, beyond their bodies, to explaining, for example, how Black young men and boys lead lives of faith in the midst of incredible uncertainty, ceremony, triumph, and struggle. More than this, the beautiful contributions of this volume might have helped me to connect Black young men and boys seemingly disconnected from everything else in the world back to a source—to grandmothers who bury their heads in prayer, to captives who seized upon stars in search of “the Promised Land,” and to what the editors of this volume call “diverse theologies, lived experiences, institutional arrangements, spiritual practices, cultural ways of being, political orientations . . . and so on”. As each chapter makes clear, faith is a subtle heuristic for social life. Then it follows that literacy as a social and a cultural practice that both builds upon and builds within faith is intimately connected to our systems of belief. It is human to believe, to be motivated by those beliefs, and to also be obscured in them. But faith, like literacy, is evolving, perhaps ever-evolving—more of a malleable concept than a concrete thing. The mistake we make is attempting to hold such monumental entities as faith and literacy in place and defining them based on an ill-conceived certainty so that they might fit into small hands like a book or a pen. But even a book perched against palms, or a pen clinched by fingers, is immense, far more resplendent than the limbs struggling to hold it. This book is about the grandiose, and the grandiose is always figment, just as faith is figment. Just as literacy is figment. Figment is peculiar because its power rests in imagination. However, imagination is not neutral. It dreams up things like God to give power to some over others, or existence to provide space for this dark game of winners and losers. It stitches together the stories of the conqueror and the conquered, inventing a devil out of the particles of our own lives and giving her, him, or them horns. Imagination fables a paradise lost somewhere between the historical present and the ontological past, writing a history and ordering things visible and less visible to us. Is it ever possible to understand literacy without confronting faith, for both are born of imagination? This question might be the most important that this series of chapters seeks to address. In its attempt to address it, the book reminds us that Christianity is a particular kind of imagination, a particular influence upon languaging and literacies in the contexts of American education. Through Christianity, literacies have evolved along with the evolution (and at times the devolution) of the social world, from the mass spread of vernacular readings and scripts that have acted and interacted as revolutionary praxes wielded by the masses—from before the Dark Ages to the present day—to the re-rending of education as a public good necessary for civility and salvation. The Christian Bible, its languaging somehow always pointing forward while always looking back, its liturgy conditioned with the most base and also the

Foreword xi most admirable of human qualities and ideas, has carved out figments of both bondage and liberation in the suffocating struggle to advance figments of order and justice. We see this delicate dance of a faith that becomes oppression in the sanctioned ways that Christian thought all but invented our modern androcentric worldview, dripping in xenophobia, homophobia, racism, sexism, ableism, and many other convictions of the abnormal that derive from the rendering of certain men as God. This delicate dance also plays out in movements for human rights, from the abolition of humans lodged into chattel bondage to the breaking down of borders imagined to stall our pilgrimage closer to one another. The relationship between faith and literacy can never be said to be simply positive or negative. In truth, it is complex. In taking on these incredibly delicate ideas—ideas of faith, literacy, figment, imagination—in its desire to comment on the place of Christianity more specifically in advancing our understanding of literacy, this volume is courageous. It takes incredible risks that deal with embracing forces that have been both deadly and life-giving, destructive and constructive, marred by white supremacy, racism, sexism, the logics of economic oppression, xenophobia, settler colonialism, imperialism, and so on. It must balance these against the hopes of those who suffer and the frameworks for justice that Christian faith has portended. Perhaps the biggest accomplishment of this book is its ability to balance all of these elements while also connecting the threads back to languaging and literacies and the roles that faith has played in (re)making them. We would, thus, be remiss not to acknowledge how Christian traditions have transformed our literate world, from the invention of typesetting and the mass production of texts to the ceremony of communities and nations carved out of eschatological doctrine and the written word. This is why it gives me hope that we finally have a book bold enough to take on faith and its relationship to literacy. Absent this encounter, our ability to understand language and literacy, our ability to truly understand ourselves and our institutions charged with facilitating language and literacy learning, would be limited. Read this book as I have, and let us be limited no more.

Introduction Legacies of Christian Languaging and Literacies in American Education Mary M. Juzwik, Kevin J. Burke, Jennifer C. Stone, and Denise Dávila Introduction Because spiritual life and religious participation are widespread human and cultural phenomena, these experiences unsurprisingly find their way into English language arts curriculum, learning, teaching, and teacher education work. Yet many public school teachers, at least in the United States, feel unsure how to engage religious and spiritual topics and responses in their classrooms. This book emerged from a set of conversations around these broader issues of religion and spirituality in the context of English language arts teaching and teacher education specifically and coalesced in a featured research session conducted at the 2017 annual meeting of a professional society for English Language Arts teachers, teacher educators, and researchers in the United States, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). Quite honestly, we organizers were unsure whether anyone in the professional organization, beyond our personal friends, would want to engage in a session titled “Religion, Spirituality, and the Work of Literacy Education”. A surprisingly large turnout for the session, accompanied by a marked enthusiasm to participate in such conversations, led us to come together as an editorial team to propose and collaborate on this book project. As we waded deeper into the waters of our project, we quickly realized the broader topic of the NCTE session was too vast to responsibly and inclusively treat within a single volume. We also noticed that most, though certainly not all, of the contributors to the session seemed to be thinking about some form of Christianity in their work on religion or spirituality. On further reflection, this reality makes sense given the dominance of Christianity within American society—both historically and in contemporary life, culture, and politics. With some trepidation, therefore, we decided to focus this present volume on the diversities of Christianity (or perhaps more accurately Christanities) that come to bear on languaging and literacies in American education. We are keenly aware of how much we leave out in focusing on Christianity rather than religion more broadly. We are also keenly aware of how much is left out by focusing on “American” Christianities. Yet this strategic choice became conceptually important in delimiting the scope of the volume.

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The following discussion defines key terms of this project; overviews relevant historical, conceptual, and empirical background; and introduces contemporary questions, issues, and methodologies taken up by the authors. Finally, four Christian themes—Babel, purity, wisdom, and resurrection—emerged as a schematic organization through which we, as editors, came to read the papers in this volume.

Christianity, Religion, Spirituality: Exploring Definitions Oftentimes in the U.S., when folks write about religion, languaging, and literacies and/in education, they are actually writing about some form of Christianity, although there are important exceptions to this characterization (e.g., Blumenfeld-Jones, 2016; Moore, 2016; Muhammad, 2015; Sarroub, 2004). This tendency creates a profound problem, ultimately an equity problem: When writers use the term “religion” to refer exclusively to some variety of “Christianity,” then Christianity continues to be privileged as the default or dominant form of religion, indeed as the paradigmatic example or nexus around which “religion” as a category or idea comes to be defined, circulated, and imagined (Asad, 2003). In an effort to address this conflation problem, this volume focuses on Christianity. We take as given that Christianity in American life encompasses diverse theologies, lived experiences, institutional arrangements, spiritual practices, cultural ways of being, political orientations, orientations toward languaging and literacies, and so on. There is, extant, a line of research thinking about how this problem of equity affects schooled lives, particularly in North American contexts. The point of much of this work is to decenter Christian privilege, somewhat paradoxically as in much of critical scholarship, by placing it firmly within the lens of analysis—making strange, as it were, the trees that were blending into the forest. Callaghan (2018), for example, examines ongoing homophobia in Canadian Catholic schools that are publicly funded and that operate often at odds with national mandates related to the treatment of LGBTQ students and teachers. The political gray area in which these schools operate, onto which light has recently been thrown, extends official Church doctrine in ways that clearly run against both public sentiment and political will, privileging a particular (and theologically troubled we should say) Christian interpretation of moral conduct. Blumenfeld, Joshi, and Fairchild (2008) illuminate the power of Christian privilege, as existing “through the cultural power of the norm” (p. vii). Focusing on tangible manifestations of public Christian pedagogies, they cite various categorical examples related to school calendars, popular images of “god”, architectural practices, and curricular materials. Burke and Segall (2017) work in a similar vein, though their focus turns to structural and discursive presences, long-standing vestigial relations that bear the traces of Christian historical assumptions particularly as related to discipline, teacher practices, and broader narratives related to love and educational

Introduction 3 possibility. Examples include attending closely to the Christian linguistic structures outlining the original—and ongoing—standards movement in education as well as a focus on the apple as a religious symbol linked with the teaching profession. The worry, of course, in a volume like this one, that takes as selfevident that Christian privilege exists and persists in American schooling, is that even with critical attention, one more book that conflates religion and/ in education with Christianity reinscribes exactly the narratives we’d hope to trouble. We don’t necessarily have a satisfactory answer to this concern, which we consider both necessary and insufficient to the task. As it stands, there is too little work in the field of English language arts that thinks with and about religion; given our relative levels of expertise in the area and our unique though blended histories with religion, we see Christianity as a focal point to start the discussion even while understanding that this runs the risk of recentering it as the religion to attend to. In that sense, we’ve run into something of a Derridean (1992) aporia, an impossibility that must be attended to and worked through even as that work remains impossible; we ask, then, forbearance on the part of the reader and seek further engagement with other, better work across the broader religious spectrum. Defining Religion and Spirituality In some ways we are continuing, with all due humility, the work of Martin Marty and the Public Religion Project of the late 1990s which fostered the work of Warren Nord, among others. Nord argued (2002) fiercely—and in ways we don’t always agree with—that “the idea of liberal education does commit us to take religion seriously in both schools and universities” (p. 10). The sticky wicket in that work, as it gets pulled forward into the second decade of the new millennium, lies in a long-standing, though perhaps newly relevant, definitional problem: what is religion? And at the fuzzy edges of religion, what might spirituality be that is different and overlapping specifically, in this case, in Christian contexts. We’re tempted to rely on the Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964) pornography dodge, one uniquely suited to the St. Thomases in the audience, and let it be that we know these things when we see them. Research from Overstreet (2013) suggests “however” that in many cases though subjects assert that they are spiritual and not religious, the distinction, when drilled down into, doesn’t have much difference except that in many contexts “spiritual” feels less threatening and hidebound than “religious”. Still, there are histories to these terms that might tease out difference and we’re inclined in this space to draw from Skerrett’s (this volume) use of King, Clardy, and Ramos (2013) who see religiousness as tied to institutionalized doctrine and spirituality as an expression of religiosity that is perhaps dependent, though not necessarily so, on religious tradition. Macaluso (this volume) plumbs a similar line suggesting a possible way to disentangle spirituality from religion by a distinction related to the inchoate desire in religion to advance its own—institutional—cause while individual variance and agency is allowed for in the spiritual. These aren’t, we’d say, hard and fast and they are

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of necessity imbricated but for our purposes here we find ourselves living in the, perhaps constructed, space that suggests differences between institutional religion and individual experiences of belief in transcendence however mediated the latter might be by the former. Defining Christianity Christianity is, by turns, both easier and more difficult to define. As evidenced in the recent American Legion v. American Humanist Association (2019) Supreme Court ruling, at least for a plurality of the justices, sometimes a cross just isn’t a cross (or, rather, merely is one). The case centered on a memorial erected on public land to honor soldiers killed in World War I. In a 7–2 verdict, the majority decided that the 40 foot cross on the site could not, in its current context, be viewed as particularly nor only a religious symbol and thus was not an establishment of religion as prohibited in the Constitution. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in dissent noted that the cross is a clear representation of the “central theological claim of Christianity: that the son of God died on the cross, that he rose from the dead, and that his death and resurrection offer the possibility of eternal life”. That, somehow, the cross in this case has been transmogrified into a secular public symbol would, it seems, be a new kind of miracle; still, Ginsburg’s definition is helpful in our work in thinking about Christianity in definitional terms. There are represented in this volume a number of faith traditions within Christianity; it is, rightly, then a volume of Christianities though it is not allinclusive in its work for reasons having to do with our own relationships with the authors, the structural limitations of an edited volume such as this one, and of course the power of privilege within Christianities themselves—is it any wonder that there are multiple Catholic perspectives represented and none from Unitarian Universalists or from Pentecostal traditions? Still the central theological claim holds: Christ crucified and raised from the dead for the redemption of the world. How expansive that world is might vary significantly across denominations. What we would suggest, however, in the differences present in the various theologies drawn upon here, is a nod to the tangled history of religious freedom in the United States. Finbarr Curtis (2016) writes that “conflict is not what happens when already formed religions bump into each other in public life; conflict makes religions” (p. 2). What we’re witness to in this book is the conflict that is producing Christianities through different forms of literacies and languaging. And of course, by virtue of exclusion, other religious traditions and spiritualities, beyond the ken of Christianity, are produced in various ways as well.

Historical Legacies of Christianity, Language, Literacy, and Education in American Contexts This term “American” in our title indexes a variety of geographical, imperial, cultural, and national constructs. Geographically, it encapsulates South, Central, and North American locations and imaginaries. It also includes the

Introduction 5 impact of nation-states, cultures, and languages on American contexts, such as the influence of imperial powers on particular regions (e.g., Anglo-American areas of the United States and Canada; Latin-American areas of the United States, Mexico, and much of South and Central America), the history of forced migration (e.g., the enslavement of African peoples and the forced relocation of Indigenous peoples throughout South, Central, and North America), and trajectories of voluntary migration (e.g., Vietnamese American). We also can’t ignore the common conflation between “America” and the nation, “United States of America”. Each of these ways of defining “America” is problematic, to be sure, as the amount and kind of overlap among such categories will often tend to wash out the differences across them. Even so, we situate this volume as focusing on American education because of the geographic foci of each of the chapters, the engagement throughout the book with American colonial legacies, and our own positionalities as scholars in the United States. From a historical standpoint, the globalization of Christianity created extensive language contact between colonial languages, Indigenous languages, and immigrant languages. As Pennycook and Makoni (2005) discuss, in some cases, the spread of Christianity hastened the spread of colonial languages while still supporting documentation of local languages for religious and educational purposes, as well as creating opportunities for bilingualism and biliteracy. In other cases, local languages were suppressed in favor of the colonial languages of European settlers, especially in cases like the United States where the federal government called on missionaries to Christianize and civilize Indigenous people while also supporting the development of nationalism (e.g., Berkhofer, 2014; Bowden, 1985). In many contexts, Christianity formed the ideological basis for education broadly and languaging and literacies specifically. The spread of Christianity in Anglo America raised key questions about humanity, language, literacy, and education. For example, Cornelius’s (1991) analysis of reading among slaves highlights the tension that emerged in the Antebellum south between the Protestant idea that all humans should be able to read God’s word and questions about the humanity of African Americans. It also highlights the unintended consequences of spreading language and literacy. Despite attempts to confine the purposes for print literacy to religious purposes, Cornelius (1991) traces how the ability to read enabled that literacy to be used for liberatory purposes. In contrast, in many Native American and Alaska Native contexts, Christian missionaries and educators played key roles in language suppression, which has resulted in widespread language shift and even language death (e.g., Krauss, 1980; Reyhner & Eder, 2004). We also can trace many current cultural assumptions about the supremacy of English as a language, certain varieties of English, and certain literacies to colonial (Christian) legacies established earlier in English education, both globally and in American contexts (e.g., Pennycook, 1998; Phillipson, 1992). In parts of North, Central, and South America, under the rule of the Spanish monarchy following the voyages of Christopher Columbus, the Catholic Church and the mission system played a significant role in the conquest and

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devastation of the Indigenous peoples and cultures. The clergy and missionaries, who were dependent upon the Spanish crown, were responsible for indoctrinating the population in Catholicism, so the Indigenous people would be easier to control. In turn, the Church was an essential part of the early government in the Americas in serving as the official registrar and overseeing all schools, hospitals, cemeteries, and community services. Although clergy and missionaries introduced the Spanish language to the Americas, they also recognized the benefits of learning localized Indigenous languages, customs, and traditions as a means of influencing the kinds of social discourses and literacies that were complicit with colonization. The work of Brazilian philosopher and educator, Paolo Freire (1921–1997), responded to the legacy of colonialism in the Americas. He called on teachers to “read the world” (1985), and to employ critical pedagogies as a means of identifying and dismantling oppressive social structures, including those institutionalized by the early church-state.

Legacies of Christian Languaging in Framing and Studying Secularization, Literacy, and Education The scholarship in the present volume became imaginable as two widespread modernist theses of the mid-19th century waned. The first is the classical sociological secularization thesis that took root in the 1960s: As nation-states modernize and become more economically developed, “secularity” takes root and religion and religious identification fade away, Europe being the paradigmatic example (e.g., Weber, 1958). The second is the literacy or “great divide” thesis, articulated by Goody and Watt (1963), Olson (1977), and others: As societies and individuals develop literacy, conceptualized as distinct from “orality” or “oral culture,” they develop “more advanced” cognitive skills (e.g., syllogistic reasoning), they organize into democracies and begin to keep historical records, and they become capable of more autonomous, decontextualized, and critical ways of reading. Situated and comparative studies of languages, literacies, religions, and education and their intersections have, however, shown both sets of claims to be false on both empirical and conceptual grounds. One key problem both theses shared in common was a centering of European Christian frameworks, examples, and histories that made it difficult to see, on a global level, the diversity of ways that “religion is . . . a profoundly normal part of the lives of the huge majority of people in the late modern world” (Davies, p. 162). Conceptual Critiques of Secularization and “Great Divide” Theses The conceptual critique offers a starting point. As Asad (2003) noted, much of the conceptual and linguistic apparatus for studying religion within anthropology itself was from its inception deeply imbricated in Christian ways of knowing. He offered that the sacred/secular distinction is itself a Christian construct, suggesting how the term “secular” was developed to be the other of a certain kind

Introduction 7 of Christian religious life. The idea of secularity centers a northern European Protestant religious sensibility in which observance happens in private, rather than in the public sphere. People, in turn, require “liberty” to be left alone to observe their Christianity or secularity privately, in their homes or places of worship or religious schools (e.g., the “Christian school” studied by Peshkin, 1986). This very framework of sacred/secular is inherently Christian, helping to explain why Muslim women wearing headscarves in public places, including public schools, has been so vexing in locales such as France (Asad, 2006; Judge, 2004) and why the sacred/secular distinction has not provided satisfactory explanatory power to address the nature of religious conflicts beyond Christianity, in places such as Palestine (e.g., Butler, 2011). Although it wasn’t his primary point, Olson (1977) showed something similar for literacy in his linking of autonomous notions of text to Martin Luther’s theology where meaning—that is, God’s truth—resides in the text of the Bible itself (the Word with a capital “W,” the Ultimate), apart from interpretive tradition, historical context, receptive context, how interactions in the “here and now” shape Biblical scripture interpretation, etc. Olson showed how the conceptual and terministic grounds for defining and studying literacy learning (by which he meant essayist alphabetic literacy in western schools) were themselves deeply entangled in European Protestant Christian frameworks, ideologies, and languages. This latter relationship was further explored, from a more critical standpoint, in Collins and Blot’s (2003) historical study of situated literacies in the Americas. A portion of their analysis addressed the colonizing legacies of Christian literacies in the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, touched upon previously. They argued that, in the great divide thesis, orality became the blank slate, the “other” on which “literacy” could be inscribed and therefore come into conceptual existence. Driving their analysis was the conception of “scriptural economies of literacy,” drawn from the French Jesuit priest Michel de Certeau (1984) and emerging from within Western European Christian ways of knowing, doing, and being. This line of reasoning highlights the Christian underpinnings of certain sociocultural approaches to language and literacy research. Take, for example, how cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973, 1983) pulled out symbol as a central religious construct that was applied to the nation as well as to the study of cultural life more broadly. Geertz’s ideas on language as symbolic action and the interpretive methodology of “thick description” came to influence a generation of culturally-oriented research on language and literacy within education. One example of this influence is Anne Haas Dyson’s corpus of ethnographic classroom studies of child language and writing development. Cued by Geertz, her earlier work in particular focused on children’s literate activity to examine “why certain symbolic materials and rituals matter” in classroom settings of pluralistic classroom contact (Dyson, 1997, p. 20), where not all child literate trajectories were assumed to be centered to a White European Protestant literate prototype (contra Olson, 1977). The challenge even of this important conceptual scholarly contribution, as we see it, is that framing children’s writing as symbolic action itself continued to center Christian ideology and epistemology.

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Asad (2003) pointed out that Islam, for example, does not share the symbolic imaginary of Christianity where the cross becomes a symbol of the ultimate and is therefore (in different forms, with or without the crucified Christ) prominent in many, if not most, places of Christian worship. The cross is also used in other symbolic ways to express or enact Christian devotion (e.g., making the sign of the cross in a worship service). Asad’s line of reasoning suggests, for example, that a Christian woman choosing to wear a cross necklace to symbolically express her faith is not equivalent to the meaning of wearing a hijab for a Muslim woman, because the latter is not symbolic in how it is conceptualized, imagined, and enacted. To circle back to the study of language and literacy, conceptually emphasizing symbols and symbolic action may suggest, a priori, a certain kind of Christian framing of the phenomenon. The study of language as symbolic action offers but one example of a more general insight: Christianity has historically furnished the conceptual lenses through which literacy was imagined, defined, studied, critiqued, and taught. Empirical Critiques of “Great Divide” and Secularization Theses As scholars in the 1970s began to study language, literacy, and religion in communities beyond historically dominant western European traditions, they found that neither the literacy thesis nor the secularization thesis held up to empirical scrutiny. Regarding literacy, Heath’s (1983) study of language socialization in three southeastern US communities showed how oral and literate language intertwined for two working class communities, Black Protestants in Trackton and White fundamentalists in Roadville (the religious practices of middle-class Townspeople were not much discussed in her study). That study also reported the potential impact of engaging teachers as ethnographers in studying and appreciating the diverse language and literacy socialization backgrounds of children in their classrooms, including different kinds of literacy socialization in different Christian communities. Other early situated studies of literacy focused on languages and literacies in Muslim communities beyond the Americas: Scribner and Cole (1981) studied Arabic literacies among the Vai people of western Africa and Street (1984) examined how Maktab literacies, learned in religious schools, shaped the commercial literacy practices of Muslim merchants in rural Iran. More salient to the present volume, Smitherman (1977) traced how Black American verbal arts had tapped a deep vein of Black spirituality rooted in Black Protestant as well as west African linguistic traditions. All these researchers showed, through attention to religious languages and literacies in communities, that “orality” could not be empirically distinguished from “literacy” in cultural life. From an ethical standpoint, this scholarship overturned the European Christianity-centric value claim that literacy was intellectually, morally, or socially superior to orality. Regarding religion, anthropologists and sociologists raised serious questions about the predictive value and empirical accuracy of the secularization thesis.

Introduction 9 Anthropologist Amy Stambach (2010), summarizing sociological and anthropological work critical of the secularization thesis, especially highlighted postcolonial and subaltern scholarship (e.g., Mudimbe, 1988; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 1981) to explain: The secularization thesis—that religion declines as secular-modernity expands—did not even characterize much of the West. Rather it subsumed different histories into a single narrative of Christianity, and often took thin measures of church attendance as evidence of religious belief. . . . [It] described even less well concepts of religion and education in non-Christian contexts, where religion was, and largely remains, integrated differently into aspects of social life, and where formal schooling historically was associated with colonialism and imperialism, not with liberty and freedom. (p. 15) As a counterpoint to the term and concept of secularization, the notion of “resacralization” has been offered within sociology to foreground religion as an explanatory variable in studying diverse forms of social and cultural life (Gracie, 2010). The project of resacralization invites inquiries making visible how, for better or for worse, Christianities of various kinds helped shape literacy teaching, learning, and curriculum within American public education. It also leads to the question of how, from a conceptual and methodological standpoint, various traditions of Christianity have influenced educational research on language, literacy, and education. Although beyond the scope of the present volume, resacralization also opens up a vast field of inquiry into religious legacies of language, literacy, and education beyond Christianity.

Contemporary Issues, Questions, and Methodologies These empirical and conceptual insights notwithstanding, many educational settings and curricula, as well as a good deal of literacy scholarship and teacher education work, continues to operate as if these Euro-centric, Christian-oriented theses are true (e.g., Collins & Blot, 2003). That is to say, despite decades of situated literacies research and conceptual argumentation to the contrary, written language is often still regarded as distinct from—and morally and functionally superior to—other forms of languaging and semiosis. Likewise, in an era when global religion is growing rather than declining, many secondary English teachers and literacy teacher educators remain unaware of or choose to ignore the significance of religious language and literacies in the lives of students, families, and communities (e.g., Dávila, 2015; Marks, Binkley, & Daly, 2014; Spector, 2007). The project of resacralization helps describe a new generation of scholarly work emerging at the intersections of language, literacy, religion, spirituality, and education. We hope that this body of work may become more robust as a result of our work here. Thinking about the nature of literacy sponsorship

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in response to the work of Brandt (1998, 2001), a body of scholarship is providing fruitful insight into the roles of Christianity in individual, family, and community literacy development (e.g., Lathan, 2014; Mattingly, 2014; Moulder, 2011; Young, 2014). Other recent work is focusing on youth religious literacies—predominantly, although not exclusively Christian—developing from the rich seedbeds of diverse cultural communities (e.g., Juzwik, 2014; Kirkland, 2013; Lytra, Volk, & Gregory, 2016; Rackley, 2014). Related work centers the experiences of youth religious languages and literacies in the contact zones of public school literacy curriculum, teaching, and learning (e.g., Ek, 2008; Juzwik & McKenzie, 2015; Reyes, 2009; Sarroub, 2004; Schweber, 2006; Skerrett, 2013). Still other work traces particularized literate, linguistic, liturgical, and ideological legacies of Christianity in diverse parochial schools and religious educational settings (e.g., Baquedano-Lopez, 2008; Campano, Ghiso, & Welch, 2016; Eakle, 2007; Leblanc, 2017; Schweber & Irwin, 2003). Finally, a long-standing body of scholarship, tracing to the work of Nord and Haynes (1998) and others, continues to develop around religious literacy as a kind of competency measured in encounters with, and uptake of, the major beliefs of various faith systems with the aim of increasing tolerance through exposure (e.g., Dávila & Volz, 2017; Moore, 2007). Joining these voices, this collection of papers foregrounds complex relations among various traditions and trajectories of Christianity in relation to languaging, literacies and American education, both formal and informal. The Authors examine how Christianity, in some cases alongside other religious traditions, animates the lives of youth and emerging adults; how it interacts with present and future possibilities for English language arts curriculum, teaching, and learning; how it enters into secondary literacy and English teacher education; and how it shapes ongoing scholarship in language and literacy studies. Four sets of themes crisscross the volume: (1) How do diverse forms and practices of Christianity inform and challenge inter-religious literacies and meaning-making practices of groups and individuals? (2) How do Christianity, racialization, languaging, and literacies interrelate, both historically and in contemporary educational settings? (3) How does Christian languaging produce and delimit possibility at intersections of gender/sexuality, curriculum, and teacher education? (4) How do the epistemological and ontological relations between Christianities and English as a school subject shape secondary literacy curriculum and teacher education? The methodological and scholarly approaches taken to these questions vary across this volume. Some of the papers engage historical inquiry, for example into the language ideologies of Alaskan mission schools, into the Christian justifications for heteronormativity advanced in Nazi Germany and in contemporary North America, and into the racist legacies within Catholic education

Introduction 11 in the United States. Other papers take more discourse-oriented approaches to examining intersections of language, literacy, and interaction in and out of school contexts—from playful youth appropriations of liturgical ritual in literacy classroom interaction, to young women’s uptake of evangelical purity discourses on Pinterest, to children’s inclusive talk about diverse religious images in community places and spaces, to a youth raised in multiple religious communities journeying to discover the one true faith for her. Yet others take more explicitly humanistic angles on linguistic, literary, and educational processes, calling upon mythology, neo-Hegelian recognition theory, sacramental Catholic theology, and the queering of Catholic theology. Taking a more testimonial tack, some of the authors suggest possibilities for language and literacy teaching and learning in dialogue with narratives of lived experiences involving Black Christian spirituality, Cuban American Catholicism, and contemplative Christianity. Continuing on this latter course, the biographical statements at the end of the volume make an effort to address the troubles that can be created by the invisibility of Christianity in language and literacy scholarship. Taking a cue from the spiritual identification statements offered in Wong and Canagarajah (2009, pp. xi–xvi), contributor biographical statements for this volume begin to make visible how Christianity alongside other religious and spiritual legacies interact with other identifications to shape contributors’ intellectual trajectories. Threading across these statements and across the papers in this volume is a profound and unresolved tension. On the one hand, Christianity can be felt as generative resource, support, and sustenance for languaging and literacy practice, for learning and teaching and learning to teach. On the other hand, Christianity can be felt as a mechanism for linguistically marginalizing those deemed “outside the fold” and, more extremely, for perpetrating and justifying physical, psychological, and symbolic violence under the guise of righteous action. The papers offer diverse—indeed incommensurate—perspectives on this tension, suggesting more broadly that the possible interactions among language, literacy, Christianity, and education are multitudinous and deserving of continuing scholarly scrutiny.

Volume Organization The volume is organized, roughly, thematically. After collecting the chapters from contributors, the editorial team—through numerous readings—considered a number of organizational schemes that were, by turns, methodological, denominational, and related to the subjectivities of both researchers and chapter topics. What we landed on, however, was putting into conversation those pieces that could be read through specific religious themes. That is to say the thread connecting each section emerges from distinctly Christian ideas as well as notions that travel across many other religious and spiritual traditions. We’re partial to this scheme because it offers a new language, a new structure for considering the organization of work in the field of English language arts research and practice. Certainly, the method by which the scholarship was conducted

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matters. And the subjectivities of the writers producing the scholarship matters a great deal as well. So does the denominational tradition on which the work focuses. But this organization highlights how the theological undertones that play baseline for the work being done may come to matter as well. Of course, there are arguments to be made for different juxtapositions and there are undoubtedly other religious scaffolds on which to hang the various chapters. This arrangement emerges as one of the many interpretive possibilities inherent in a diverse readership, one that might not, at first blush, seem intuitive. Our reading, then, organizes the volume into four prominent Christian concepts—Babel, Purity, Wisdom, and Resurrection—introduced in short essays by the volume editors. The chapters in the Babel section examine Christian languaging and literacies in contexts where languages, cultures, and religions come into contact and conflict. The chapters in the Purity section grapple with notions of religious purity related to language, race, and gender and sexuality. The chapters in the section on Wisdom explore literary reading and engagement as an embodied wisdom practice of loving God and loving one’s neighbor. And the chapters in the section on Resurrection engage in testimonial narrative explorations of how languaging and literacies can be informed by transformative spiritual and religious identities. Together, the concepts of Babel, Purity, Wisdom, and Resurrection offer one possible emic vocabulary for considering legacies of Christian languaging and literacies in American education.

References The American Legion v. American Humanist Association, 588 U.S. (2019). Asad, T. (2003). Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, modernity. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Asad, T. (2006). Trying to understand French secularism. In H. de Vries & L. E. Sullivan (Eds.), Political theologies: Public religions in a post-secular world (pp. 494–526). New York: Fordham University Press. Baquedano-Lopez, P. (2008). The pragmatics of reading prayers: Learning the Act of Contrition in Spanish-based religious education classes (doctrina). Text & Talk—An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse Communication Studies, 28(5), 581–602. Berkhofer, R. F. (2014). Salvation and the savage: An analysis of Protestant missions and American Indian response, 1787–1862. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Blumenfeld, W. J., Joshi, K. Y., & Fairchild, E. E. (Eds.). (2008). Investigating Christian privilege and religious oppression in the United States. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Blumenfeld-Jones, D. (2016). The violence of words, words of violence: Keeping the uncomfortable at bay, a Jewish perspective. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 31(1), 4–23. Bowden, H. W. (1985). American Indians and Christian missions: Studies in cultural conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brandt, D. (1998). Sponsors of literacy. College Composition and Communication, 49(2), 165–185. Brandt, D. (2001). Literacy in American lives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Burke, K. J., & Segall, A. (2017). Christian privilege in US education: Legacies and current issues. New York: Routledge.

Introduction 13 Butler, J. P. (2011). Is Judaism Zionism? In J. P. Butler, J. Habermas, C. Taylor, & C. West (Eds.), The power of religion in the public sphere (pp. 70–91). New York: Columbia University Press. Callaghan, T. (2018). Homophobia in the hallways: Heterosexism and transphobia in Canadian Catholic schools. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Campano, G., Ghiso, M. P., & Welch, B. (2016). Partnering with immigrant communities: Action through literacy. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Collins, J., & Blot, R. K. (2003). Literacy and literacies: Texts, power, and identity. New York: Cambridge University Press. Cornelius, J. D. (1991). When I can read my title clear: Literacy, slavery, and religion in the Antebellum South. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Curtis, F. (2016). The production of American religious freedom. New York: New York University Press. Dávila, D. (2015). #WhoNeedsDiverseBooks?: Preservice teachers and religious neutrality with children’s literature. Research in the Teaching of English, 50(1), 60–83. Dávila, D., & Volz, A. (2017). “That sh*t is rude” religion, picture books, and social narratives in middle school. Middle Grades Review, 3(3), 1–15. De Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Derrida, J. (1992). Force of law: The “mystical foundation of authority”. In D. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld, & G. Carlson (Eds.), Deconstruction and the possibility of justice. New York, NY: Routledge. Dyson, A. H. (1997). Writing superheroes: Contemporary childhood, popular culture, and classroom literacy. New York: Teachers College Press. Eakle, J. (2007). Literacy spaces of a Christian faith-based school. Reading Research Quarterly, 42(4), 472–510. Ek, L. D. (2008). Language and literacy in the Pentacostal church and the public high school: A case study of a Mexican ESL student. High School Journal, 92(2), 1–13. Freire, P. (1985). Reading the world and reading the word: An interview with Paulo Freire. Language Arts, 62(1), 15–21. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. New York: Basic Books. Geertz, C. (1983). Local knowledge. New York: Basic Books. Goody, J., & Watt, I. (1963). The consequences of literacy. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 5(3), 304–345. Gracie, G. (2010). Resacralization. In B. S. Turner (Ed.), The new Blackwell companion to the sociology of religion (pp. 160–177). Oxford: Blackwell. Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964). Judge, H. (2004). The Muslim headscarf and French schools. American Journal of Education, 111(1), 1–24. Juzwik, M. M. (2014). American evangelical Biblicism as literate practice: A critical review. Reading Research Quarterly, 49(3), 335–349. Juzwik, M. M., & McKenzie, C. (2015). Writing, religious faith, and rooted cosmopolitan dialogue: Portraits of two American evangelical men in a public school English classroom. Written Communication, 32(2), 121–149. King, P. E., Clardy, C. E., & Ramos, J. S. (2013). Adolescent spiritual exemplars: Exploring spirituality in the lives of diverse youth. Journal of Adolescent Research, 29(2), 186–212.

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Kirkland, D. E. (2013). A search past silence: The literacy of young Black men. New York: Teachers College Press. Krauss, M. E. (1980). Alaska Native languages: Past, present, and future. Fairbanks, AK: Alaska Native Language Center. Lathan, R. E. (2014). Testimony as a sponsor of literacy: Bernice Robinson and the South Carolina Sea Island Citizenship Program’s literacy activism. In J. Duffy, J. N. Christoph, E. Goldblatt, N. Graff, R. S. Nowacek, & B. Trabold (Eds.), Literacy, economy, and power: Writing and research after literacy in American lives (pp. 30–44). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. LeBlanc, R. J. (2017). The interactional production of race and religious identity in an urban Catholic school. Journal of Catholic Education, 21(1), 84–110. Lytra, V., Volk, D., & Gregory, E. (Eds.). (2016). Navigating languages, literacies and identities: Religion in young lives. New York: Routledge. Marks, M. J., Binkley, R., & Daly, J. K. (2014). Preservice teachers and religion: Serious gaps in religious knowledge and the First Amendment. The Social Studies, 105(5), 245–256. Mattingly, C. (2014). Beyond the Protestant literacy myth. In J. Duffy, J. N. Christoph, E. Goldblatt, N. Graff, R. S. Nowacek, & B. Trabold (Eds.), Literacy, economy, and power: Writing and research after literacy in American lives (pp. 45–60). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Moore, D. L. (2007). Overcoming religious illiteracy: A multicultural approach to teaching about religion in secondary schools. New York: Palgrave. Moore, D. L. (2016). Methodological assumptions and analytical frameworks regarding religion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Divinity School. Moulder, M. A. (2011). Cherokee practice, missionary intentions: Literacy learning among early nineteenth-century Cherokee women. College Composition and Communication, 63(1), 75–97. Mudimbe, V. Y. (1988). The invention of Africa: Gnosis, philosophy, and the order of knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Muhammad, G. E. (2015). Iqra: African American Muslim girls reading and writing for social change. Written Communication, 32(3), 1–31. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. (1981). Decolonizing the mind. London: James Currey. Nord, W. (2002). Liberal education and religious studies. In E. L. Blumhofer (Ed.), Religion, education, and the American experience (pp. 9–40). Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. Nord, W., & Haynes, C. C. (1998). Taking religion seriously across the curriculum. Alexandria, VA: ASCD. Olson, D. (1977). From utterance to text: The bias of language in speech and writing. Harvard Educational Review, 47(3), 257–281. Overstreet, D. (2013). Spiritual vs. religious: Perspectives from today’s undergraduate Catholics. Journal of Catholic Education, 14(2), 238–263. Pennycook, A. (1998). English and the discourses of colonialism. London: Routledge. Pennycook, A., & Makoni, S. (2005). The modern mission: The language effects of Christianity. Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 4(2), 137–155. Peshkin, A. (1986). God’s choice: The total world of a fundamentalist Christian school. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rackley, E. D. (2014). Scripture-based discourses of latter-day saints and Methodist youths. Reading Research Quarterly, 49(4), 417–435.

Introduction 15 Reyes, C. (2009). El Libro de Recuerdos (Book of memories): A Latina student’s exploration of self and religion in public school. Research in the Teaching of English, 43(3), 263–285. Reyhner, J., & Eder, J. (2004). American Indian education: A history. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Sarroub, L. (2004). All-American Yemeni girls: Being Muslim in a public school. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Schweber, S. (2006). Fundamentally 9/11: The mechanics of collective memory in a fundamentalist Christian school. American Journal of Education, 112(3), 392–417. Schweber, S., & Irwin, R. (2003). “Especially special”: Learning about Jews in a fundamentalist Christian school. Teachers College Record, 105(9), 1693–1719. Scribner, S., & Cole, M. (1981). The psychology of literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Skerrett, A. (2013). Religious literacies in a secular literacy classroom. Reading Research Quarterly, 49(2), 233–250. Smitherman, G. (1977). Talkin and testifyin: The language of Black America. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Spector, K. (2007). God on the gallows: Reading the Holocaust through narratives of redemption. Research in the Teaching of English, 42(1), 7–55. Stambach, A. (2010). Faith in schools: Religion, education, and American evangelicals in East Africa. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Street, B. (1984). Literacy in theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, M. (1958). The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. New York: Scribner. Wong, M., & Canagarajah, S. (2009). Christian and critical English language educators in dialogue. New York: Routledge. Young, M. (2014). Writing the life of Henry Obookiah: The sponsorship of literacy and identity. In J. Duffy, J. N. Christoph, E. Goldblatt, N. Graff, R. S. Nowacek, & B. Trabold (Eds.), Literacy, economy, and power: Writing and research after literacy in American lives (pp. 61–77). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Section I

Babel Conversation, Conflict, and Contested Terrains of Schooling Jennifer C. Stone And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. (Genesis 11:1–9, King James Version)

Perhaps one of the most iconic passages from the Old Testament, the story of Babel sheds light on the plurality of the world. From a secular perspective, Babel provides an origin story for the diversity of languages, peoples, and locations in the world. From a religious perspectives, Babel might be interpreted as a historical account (e.g., Parry, 1998). It might also serve as a reminder of humanity’s tendencies toward sin, in this case pride that humans could access Heaven without God, pride in worldly accomplishments, or a disregard for God’s direction to “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth” (Genesis 9:1) (e.g., Heibert, 2007; Strawn, 2009). It can also be seen as a lesson about God’s power, as well as God’s ability to punish and redirect humanity toward his will (Strawn, 2009). Literary interpretations have attempted to move beyond a “pride-and-punishment” understanding of the story of Babel to examine it as an origin story about cultural difference (e.g. Heibert, 2007), a postcolonial critique of empire (Croatto, 1998), or an exploration of the tension between unity and diversity (Anderson, 2005).

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No matter which perspective we use to interpret the story of Babel, the outcome of the story—along with the reality of the world we live in—is one of multilingualism as well as cultural and religious diversity. As Barros (2017, 2018) suggests, multilingualism is a fact of American life; it is like the world confounded by God after scattering the people across the earth. Yet, much like the people who built the tower in Shinar, the plurality of Babel is in constant struggle with the monolingual, nationalistic forces of American colonial legacies. These tensions—between monolingualism and multilingualism, between unity and plurality, between nationalism and transnational movement—create sites of intersection, overlap, synergy, tension, and struggle. The essays in this section grapple with aspects of our Babelian reality from various perspectives and across various contexts. They examine Christian languaging and literacies at sites of intersection between religious traditions, between secular and religious belief systems, and between cultural groups. They illustrate the realities of our current-day Babel as they play out in conversations, conflicts, and contested terrains of schooling. And they do so in far-flung places and faith traditions. Allison Skerrett’s chapter, “‘Real Religion’: The Roles of Knowledge, Dialogue, and Sense-Making in Coming to a Faith,” explores a case study of the processes of religious identity development in transnational contexts. It traces the experiences of Annemarie, a Guyanese-born young woman of Indian descent whose family immigrated to Sint Maarten when she was one year old. Annemarie had access to multicultural and multireligious language and literacy resources in her home and school. Her mother identified as Muslim and her faith was Islam, her father identified as Hindu and associated with Hinduism, and her school emphasized a Protestant form of Christianity. The chapter traces Annemarie’s journey of choosing a religious faith. It identifies the significance of religious leaders and other agents in supporting youths who are exploring multiple religions and emphasizes the nature of discursive interactions among religious identity agents and youths that promote understandings about religion and faith. Heidi L. Hadley and Will J. Fassbender extend struggles over religious identity into the context of teacher education in their chapter “Recognizing Religion with Preservice Teachers”. They provide a case study of a group of teacher candidates who are devout Evangelical Christians. As students in a social justice-oriented English Education program in the southeastern United States, the teacher candidates struggled with conflicts between their deeply held religious beliefs and the diversities emphasized in the program, including identity issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. The study addresses how the candidates’ deeply held Christian beliefs influenced their perceptions of their coursework, instructors, peers, and future classrooms. In so doing, Hadley and Fassbender identify an important gap in English teacher education, which assumes a separation of religious beliefs from public schooling. Robert LeBlanc’s chapter, “Institutional Rituals as Interpersonal Verbal Rituals as Interactional Resources in Classroom Talk” looks at the diversity

Babel 19 of linguistic resources afforded by multicultural and multilingual spaces. He provides a close analysis of a contentious and racially charged conversation among a diverse group of students in an urban Catholic school in Philadelphia. He examines how a small group of Mexican and Vietnamese American students repurposed small-scale institutional rituals of the Catholic Church along with other linguistic resources in the flow of classroom talk. Through his analysis, LeBlanc illustrates how young people from a range of backgrounds draw on available linguistic resources in ways that creatively subvert traditional boundaries. As a whole, these chapters raise important questions about how we might engage as educators and teacher educators in multilingual and multicultural contexts. They shed light on the individual and social implications—both for us and for our students—of the Babel we live in.

References Anderson, B. W. (2005). The Tower of Babel: Unity and diversity in God’s creation. In From creation to new creation: Old testament perspectives (Reprint ed., pp. 165–178). Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers. Barros, S. R. (2017). Rejecting Babel: Examining multilingualism without citizenship in the U.S. postnational scenario. Current Issues in Language Planning, 18(2), 117–135. doi: 10.1080/14664208.2016.1220279 Barros, S. R. (2018). English in the key of Babel: Feeling, affecting, and performing language. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 15(2), 1–22. doi:10.1080/15505170.2018. 1462744 Croatto, J. S. (1998). A reading of the story of the Tower of Babel from a perspective of non-identity. In F. F. Segovia & M. A. Tolbert (Eds.), Teaching the Bible: The discourses and politics of biblical pedagogy (pp. 203–223). Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Heibert, T. (2007). The Tower of Babel and the origin of the world’s cultures. Journal of Biblical Literature, 126(1), 29–58. Parry, D. W. (1998). The flood and the Tower of Babel. Ensign, 28(1). Retrieved from www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1998/01/the-flood-and-the-towerof-babel?lang=eng Strawn, B. A. (2009). Focus on Tower of Babel. Oxford Biblical Studies Online. Retrieved from http://global.oup.com/obso/focus/focus_on_towerbabel/

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“Real Religion” The Roles of Knowledge, Dialogue, and Sense-Making in Coming to a Faith Allison Skerrett

This chapter explores the processes that helped shape the religious identity of a youth whose lived experiences and identities represent multiple cultures and religious affiliations. Specifically, it examines a young woman’s engagements in multicultural and multi-faith spaces and related religious literacy practices across time. Landmark literacy research has explored how a family’s or home-culture’s self-selected religious associations strongly influence the development of youths’ religious identities (Heath, 1983; Kapitzke, 1995; Sarroub, 2002). However, little work has explored the phenomenon of how youths who are situated in multicultural and multi-faith homes negotiate their way to religious identities (Skerrett, 2017). Given the rise in the numbers of homes where multiple cultures, languages, and religious faiths coexist (Pew Research Center, 2019; United States Census Bureau, 2018), it is important to explore whether and in what ways the processes of religious identity development are different for youths who come from multiethnic and multi-faith homes. Such understandings stand to strengthen the knowledge base pertaining to literacy and identity development as well as provide insights into the social and educational implications of these youths’ religious engagements and their outcomes. Studying the religious lives of young people helps to uncover the language and literacy practices they bring to and generate from their religious lives that have import for their ways of being and becoming literate across multiple social contexts, including school. Religious life is a key context for developing sophisticated language and literacy competencies that are beneficial to literacy engagements in school and other social contexts. These include interpretative capacities within and across texts containing complex and nuanced ideas as well as the ability to identify, articulate, and analyze points of convergence and debate (Eakle, 2007; Skerrett, 2014a). Literacy capabilities developed through religious life can also include the ability to combine intellectual and moral reasoning on a range of issues on one’s own and in conversation with others who may hold differing positions (Juzwik, 2014; Kapitzke, 1995; Sarroub, 2002). Youths who transact with multiple religious faiths on their journeys to developing their own religious identities may develop these capacities in more elaborate forms. Given the centrality of language and literacy practices in religious

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life, literacy scholarship should make greater investments in understanding the processes and outcomes of religious identity development. Doing so can promote literacy theory building and instructional practices that better reflect and leverage the complex manifestations of diversity and its associated resources for student learning.

Theoretical Frameworks Recent and foundational theoretical works, including in literacy, have identified processes through which adolescents develop religious identities. Religiosity is both distinct from, and connected to, spirituality. King, Clardy, and Ramos (2013) write: Religiousness refers to the extent to which an individual has a relationship with a particular institutionalized doctrine about ultimate reality. . . . Spirituality is not necessarily dependent on a religious tradition, but is often expressed within a religious context. (p. 188) Exploring spiritual development among 30 adolescents who represented eight religions and six countries, King et al. (2013) found three primary constructs through which spirituality developed either within or outside the adolescents’ belonging to an institutionalized religion: transcendence (pursuing connection with the sacred); fidelity, entailing commitment to beliefs, worldviews and moral values including as expressed in sacred texts; and embodied practices of intentionally living out practices aligned with their spiritual beliefs and moral values. Narrative and contemplative practices also contribute to adolescents’ religious identity development (Baker & Edwards, 2012; Visser-Vogel et al., 2012). Narratives allow people to tell stories of how they come into religious identity (Visser-Vogel et al., 2012). Additionally, contemplation on issues of spirituality and religiosity in communities with identity agents such as religious teachers and parents can promote consolidation of youths’ religious identities (Baker & Edwards, 2012; Heath, 1983; Kapitzke, 1995). Heath’s (1983) landmark study in four religious communities in the southern U.S. found that across these communities various levels of authority were afforded to different religious actors such as pastors, adults, and youth church members in interpreting Biblical meanings that contributed to the nature and strength of individuals’ and communities’ religious identities. The concepts and processes involved in the formation of youths’ religious identities described previously—such as telling narratives, engaging in dialogue and embodied practices, study of sacred texts, and the role of religious identity agents—facilitate the present analysis of how a young woman who explored multiple religions came to solidify her religious identity.

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Literature Review Research studies illuminate the processes involved in adolescents’ religious identity development identified in the previous theories. In relation to the centrality of a sacred text and beliefs to guide their daily practices (Heath, 1983; King et al., 2013), I have presented how a Christian Latina adolescent negotiated conflicts between the practices and beliefs espoused in the Bible and her other social practices and identities that she herself named as a flirt and Hip Hop dancer (Skerrett, 2014b). Francis and Robbins’ (2014) large-scale quantitative analysis of 547 adolescent males in England and Wales that self-identified as Christian or Muslim found that the youths held high regard for their religions’ sacred texts and viewed them as guiding wisdom for life. Research also supports the theoretical tenet of dialogue in communal spaces with others who both share and differ in religious beliefs for youths’ consolidation of religious identity (Visser-Vogel et al., 2012). In one study, I have shown (Skerrett, 2014a) how a group of students and their literacy teacher developed strategies for maintaining healthy classroom community when conflicting perspectives on the Christian faith erupted, animated by literature study. In a similar situation of conflicting moral beliefs being debated in another classroom, I found that a young man’s participation in this dialogue was the most significant way he expressed his own religious beliefs (Skerrett, 2017). Ding (2009) and Daguo (2012), in their studies of Chinese graduate students in the U.K., called for intercultural dialogue and understanding about the cultural and religious values and beliefs of Chinese students, rather than imposition of dominant Western religious beliefs onto them. In relation to narrative and contemplative practices as religious identitymaking processes (Baker & Edwards, 2012; Visser-Vogel et al., 2012), Reyes (2009) examined a scrapbook her participant, Zulmy, created, discovering notes and letters from her friends that sometimes invoked Zulmy’s God and religion, pictures of friends and teacher-mentors, inspirational poems, religious sayings, and symbols and images of popular culture Zulmy enjoyed. Reyes (2009) conceptualized the scrapbook as a personal space in which Zulmy reflected on her spirituality and the materialism of the world in which she lived. The concept of embodied practices of religion and spirituality as an identitymaking process (Heath, 1983; King et al., 2013) is also supported by research. Scholars have identified how praying, worship practices, and aligning behaviors to fit with religious doctrine are all significant performances of, and contributors to, youths’ religious identities (Daguo, 2012; Eakle, 2007). Daguo (2012) described the responses of Chinese students who were brought into Christian religious practices such as communion (consuming bread and wine to acknowledge Jesus Christ’s death to save humans from sin) through a religious-based university support group. The Chinese students’ responses ranged from conversion to Christianity, contemplation, and active resistance to what some of them understood as forcible proselytizing.

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All of the aforementioned studies provide informative portraits that illuminate the processes through which young adults develop or strengthen a single religious identity. Yet little is understood from existing research about how youths transact with multiple religions within and across home and other social contexts in composing their religious identities. In a world where increasing numbers of families represent multiple cultural and religious experiences and identities to their children, such understandings are essential. In a line of analysis dedicated to this inquiry, I explored the case of a young man who identified as St. Maarten-Chinese and who lived in a multilingual, multicultural, and multi-faith home (Skerrett, 2017). Peter (self-selected pseudonym) was the child of a man who identified as Jamaican (Black) and Chinese and a Chinese-born mother. Peter’s father identified as a Protestant Christian and Peter’s mother practiced Buddhism. Peter had been formally taught Cantonese as a child at home, and he also spoke English at home (primarily to his father as his mother, according to Peter, did not understand much English). Peter described how as a young child his mother introduced him into Buddhist practices with language he could not understand, causing him to criticize and resist that religion’s embodied worship practices. These refusals of Peter created religious distance between himself and his mother. In contrast, all of the schools Peter attended were English-speaking schools, and two of the three were faith-based Christian schools. Through formal study of English language Christian religious texts with teachers across multiple academic content areas, and engagement in other Protestant-based practices such as prayer, worship, and dialogue, also carried out in English, with teachers, classmates, friends, and church-based communities, Peter came to self-identify as a Christian. The present analysis seeks to deepen understandings of the factors and processes that seem salient for youth embedded in culturally and religiously diverse homes and other social communities in development of their religious identities. It does so by exploring the case of another youth who also came from a multicultural and multi-faith home, and who engaged in active negotiations with multiple religious faiths in her quest to find which religion was right for her.

Methods This chapter derives from an ongoing qualitative inquiry (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2013) begun in 2013 into the literate lives of transnational youths. Transnationalism refers to the phenomenon wherein people, through a mix of necessity and choice, live their lives across two or more nations to maximize their social, economic, educational, and other life experiences and outcomes (Vertovec, 2009). Several of the transnational youths in this study live their lives across Dutch Sint Maarten and French Saint Martin in the Caribbean and major US urban centers in states such as Florida and New York (e.g., Skerrett, 2015, 2016, 2018). The broad goal of the research is to understand the influences of transnationalism on the literacy practices and development of young people. Data collection methods include primarily interviews, observations, and

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collection and analysis of artifacts and documents. A key site of the research on Dutch Sint Maarten is a school that I call Triumph Multiage School (TMS) where I have conducted research for four years. TMS is a Christian-based school that accepts students and families from any (or no) religious faiths. Thirteen of the study’s 21 youth participants, including this analysis’ focal participant, have attended TMS. Setting Sint Maarten is an ideal site for conducting research on literacy and diversity, including religious diversity. It is the number one receiving country for intra-Caribbean migration and hosts residents from over 120 nations with their attendant cultures, religions, and languages (Cepal, 2002; Government of Sint Maarten, 2014). The island remains under the governance of its colonizer, Holland, and its official languages are Dutch and English. For this analysis, it is important to understand that the Dutch Netherlands, including Sint Maarten, have a long tradition of subsidizing religiously-affiliated and private secular schools as long as these schools integrate the national curriculum. Furthermore, Caribbean families have a history of selecting religiously affiliated schools for their children based on social and academic criteria even though these schools may not reflect the families’ religious beliefs (Center on International Benchmarking, 2009; Skerrett, 2015, 2016). Focal Participant Annemarie (self-selected pseudonym) is a Guyanese-born young woman of Indian descent whose family immigrated to Sint Maarten when she was one year old. It is important to acknowledge that Annemarie leads a transnational lifestyle although her transnational identity is not explored in this chapter because of its focus on the complexities of her religious identity development. Annemarie’s primary home is St. Maarten; however, she has extended family in Guyana, Canada, and the US, and travels several times a year to spend extended time with family in these global locales. Annemarie was 15 years old when she entered the study in 2015. She claimed English as her only language and her family’s home language although the family had a multilingual heritage that appeared to not be cultivated in their home. Annemarie’s family was middle class. Annemarie was purposively selected for this analysis (Miles et al., 2013) of how youths from multicultural and multireligious backgrounds develop their religious identities. Apart from another student, Peter, from whose case I presented previously (Skerrett, 2017), Annemarie’s case represented another potentially fruitful analysis to deepen understanding of how such youths negotiate multiple religious faiths. Annemarie’s parents claimed two different cultural backgrounds and associated religious faiths. Her mother identified as Muslim and her faith was Islam, and her father identified as Hindu and associated with Hinduism. Annemarie engaged with a third religion, a Protestant form

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of Christianity at her school, TMS. Annemarie was also especially well-suited for this analysis because of her love for and openness to multiple religions even as she believed that there existed a “real religion” that one needed to identify and commit to. Studying Annemarie’s journey of choosing a religious faith suggested important understandings could be uncovered about the processes and factors involved in how youths living and engaging in multicultural and multireligious homes and communities develop their religious identities. Researcher I am a faculty member at a US university and identify as a Black, Caribbean-born US immigrant. English is my first and only language. I also identify as a Protestant Christian. My own affiliation with one of the religious faiths that Annemarie considered to be a potential “real religion” required that I maintain a judicious stance throughout the research process. I intentionally probed into all leadings of Annemarie’s talk about different religions and employed theoretical frameworks developed from multiple religions for conducting data analysis. Doing so built in strategies for reducing bias toward Christianity in the research and analysis process. Data and Analysis I draw on three of four semi-structured in-depth interviews with Annemarie spanning March 2015–June 2017: our first interview on March 3, 2015 [Int.1.3.3.2015]; our second on February 25, 2016 [Int.2.2.25.2016]; and our fourth on June 9, 2017 [Int.4.6.9.2017]. I also draw from one of five interviews with the principal of TMS and artifacts of the school’s curriculum. The emphasis on interview data for this analysis aligns with theory related to the processes of religious identity development in youths and the methodological insistence on narratives (Baker & Edwards, 2012; Visser-Vogel et al., 2012). Analysis I conducted a thematic analysis, reducing the data using the research questions as a guide through a process of iterative reading and progressive focusing (Glaser & Strauss, 2006). As relevant data were identified, I began memo-ing (Charmaz, 2006), taking extensive notes on initial impressions, thoughts, and questions about the data, and making rudimentary theoretical and researchrelated connections. Open coding across the reduced data set identified words and phrases related to Annemarie’s development of religious identity such as “doing research” and “attending everything” (meaning religious events of different faiths). Focused coding led to the development of broad categories such as “Embodiment” that included codes related to participation in different religions’ events, and “Dialogue” that brought together codes pertaining to the elements of dialogue that promoted or interfered with Annemarie’s process of developing her religious identity.

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Analysis then shifted to creating a storyline (Corbin & Strauss, 2008) across categories that explained the elements and processes involved in Annemarie’s self-selection of a particular religious faith. This last stage of analysis included additional memo-ing that grounded the storyline within related theory and research (Corbin & Strauss, 2008), and facilitated implications of this inquiry for literacy theory and research. Here, I considered how the processes of religious identity formation offered by the extant theory and research had not adequately accounted for youths who came from multicultural, multi-faith homes and who also engaged with multi-faith communities in the societies in which they lived.

Findings I begin the findings section by narrating from Annemarie’s journey from a young child to the age of 16 in which she engaged with multiple religions, including their texts and embodied practices, based in her desire to find what would be her one religion. Within this section and in the section that follows, I focus on two findings that analysis presented as most significant in relation to Annemarie’s case of developing religious identity. The first finding is that Annemarie’s process of coming to a religious faith involved a robust sense-making process that integrated both spiritual leading or resonance (a sense that this felt good, possible, or right) and intellectual or rational thinking applied to diverse religious knowledge bases and the hard-to-reconcile, complex ideas within and across different doctrines. For literacy studies this finding provides an instantiation of the rich literacy repertoires that youths immersed in multi-faith communities practice and strengthen. This finding also reveals the clear connections between religious literacy practices and those that schools are concerned with developing in students. The second finding relates to the importance of religious leaders’ and other religious identity socialization agents’ depth of knowledge about their faith and other faiths within their communities, and these agents’ abilities to engage others in spiritually and rationally credible dialogue about foundational and complex aspects of their own faiths. This finding is essential in today’s multireligious societies for it indicates that religious leaders’ religious knowledge and discursive repertoires would benefit from expansion beyond their own religious faiths and communities; that is, it would be advantageous if religious leaders are able to put their faiths into relationship with other religions that are present within their societies. Doing so could foster productive dialogue and relations across peoples of different religious faiths. Coming to One “Real Religion” Notwithstanding her love for and engagements with diverse religions, Annemarie felt an urgency to select one religion as the “real religion” because she believed that the religion one practiced on earth had consequences for what she believed was the continuation of life after death. I do believe in a hereafter. . . . I know there is consequences for how I am living right now, and me personally, if I die right now it is not going to be

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Allison Skerrett good for me in the hereafter because I don’t really have a strong God basis, a strong God foundation. So, it is like, “What is exactly going to happen to me right now, if I die?” It is time for me to actually choose a religion now . . . be committed [Int2–2.25.2016]

Annemarie criticized Christians (and perhaps by extension people of other faiths) who had selected religions without careful research and explorations of different religious faiths in order to be sure they chose the “real religion”. Referring to how in Islam, Jesus is considered a prophet of God, and how in Christianity Jesus is positioned as both the son of God and God himself revealed to humankind, Annemarie reasoned: For the Christians to actually believe that Jesus is God but then one day he is going to come and [say] I’m not God, I am just a prophet of God. Do you really want to lead a Christian life and just [find out] . . . that wasn’t a perfect choice or the real religion to fall yourself into? Like I am still doing a lot of research and stuff like that. [Int.2–2.25.2016] Annemarie acknowledged that she had the most knowledge of and exposure to the beliefs and practices of Islam because it was prevalent at home. Although her father identified with the Hindu culture and the religion of Hinduism, Annemarie’s mother, who identified as Muslim and with Islam, embodied her religion in a more active way and socialized her daughter into that religious doctrine and its practices (Heath, 1983; King et al., 2013). As such, Annemarie talked about growing up Muslim. “I know a lot more about the Muslim religion because I was in it when I was small, that was what I was grown into” [Int.1–3.3.2015]. Annemarie loved Islam. “I really love that religion. You know, it’s full of peace. It teaches you so much things, it brings you so close to God” [Int.1.3.3.2015]. Here, Annemarie signified the role of religious knowledge considered sacred and a guide for spiritual and secular life, another established characteristic of youths identifying as religious (Francis & Robbins, 2014). Schools (both secular and religious-based) are fertile sites for religious identity development (Eakle, 2007; Heath, 1983; Kapitzke, 1995; Skerrett, 2014a, 2014b). Annemarie had begun exploring Christianity in earnest through embodied practices and textual engagements (Baker & Edwards, 2012) with that religious faith at 12 years old when she began attending her Christianbased school, TMS. Embodied practices of Christianity were requirements at her school, such as morning prayer and recitation of Bible verses. Further, the entire curriculum at TMS was infused with Christianity. TMS’ curriculum was imported from a US-based educational foundation that aligns with TMS’ parent foundation’s religious beliefs. This organization, on its website [name withheld to protect participants’ privacy], as of July 30, 2015, describes its curriculum as “diagnostically individualized to meet a student’s specific learning needs and capabilities; incorporating Scripture, Godly character building, and

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wisdom principles; [and] using advanced computer technology to help ensure the finest education possible in today’s high-tech climate”. Furthermore, as the principal of TMS emphasized: We are the only school providing a Christian curriculum in entirety. The principles of Christendom are worked directly into math, English, science, and social studies. . . . That [her emphasis] you will not find on another campus outside of the devotions in the morning or religious studies as a curriculum. [Interview, 2/24/2016] Thus both in her own individual textual studies and in textual engagements and dialogue with others at school (Visser-Vogel et al., 2012), Annemarie came to learn about Christian doctrine. When I asked Annemarie whether she found many religious references in the curriculum, she answered decisively, “Yes, there’s a lot. Even in the pace [content area workbooks], like we have to learn a Scripture verse, and that Scripture verse on the test holds four points, so you’d better know that Scripture verse.” Annemarie reported that she was not bothered by the Christian religious knowledge infused into the curriculum. “It’s fine. It’s nothing” [Int.1.3.3.2015]. In fact her comments moments later indicated that Annemarie found that the curriculum both taught her Biblical knowledge while expanding her frameworks for understanding academic concepts. Using the case of biology, Annemarie explained So that’s what makes it so interesting, you know. With biology, like learning about science, it’s so interesting. Like there’s things I’ve never known, and in the biology book too, they put in when Adam and Eve were here and how God created the world. So it teaches me a lot. [Int.1.3.3.2015] Annemarie was accepting of the Bible-based explanation of Creationism as one possibility among scientific others of how the world was formed, displaying, as finding one states, her dual employment of spiritual and rational frameworks for understanding issues of religion and life. As part of coming to a faith, Annemarie voluntarily participated in different religions’ activities in addition to those that were expected of her by her Muslim mother and offered to her by her Hindu father. Like I attend everything. When I go back home in Guyana I go to a Hindu church. I attend a Muslim church here in [the local community]. I come to this church [Sunday services held at TMS] sometimes. . . . Recently they made a Hindu temple [in a community a little further from her home]. . . . But I depend on my dad to take me, so whenever he goes, he goes. Like, they’re having a celebration, Holi, soon, so I’ll take part. I take part in everything when it comes to religion, like, I don’t mind. [Int.1.3.3.2015]

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By age 16, Annemarie found enough intellectual and spiritual substance and credibility, including similarities, across Islam and Christianity, that made them seem reasonable contenders as the potential “real religion” to which she should ascribe. After years of engagement with different religions Annemarie was at the point in her journey of coming to a faith where elemental as well as nuanced aspects of religious doctrine became increasingly important for her to understand. These questions, particularly those that went unanswered or were unsatisfactory to her, related primarily to Christianity. However, Annemarie continued to pursue knowledge and understanding of Islam as well. It appeared that the Hindu faith was no longer a strong consideration of Annemarie’s in terms of a faith she would claim as her own although she continued to appreciate and participate in some of its religious practices. Muslim and Christianity would really be my top two, but I enjoy the activities from the Hindu religion. It is all fun and everything. But for me to actually commit myself I would say that I am still debating between Christianity and Muslim. [Int.2–2.25.2016] In keeping with finding one, Annemarie’s process of coming to a religious faith involved a robust sense-making process that integrated both spiritual resonance and rational thinking applied to diverse religious knowledge bases. Annemarie appeared to find spiritual as well as rational substance in the religious tenets and practices of the Christian and Muslim faiths. However, there were elements of Hinduism that she felt were “nonsense” and thus, for her, Hinduism could not be a religion that she would claim for herself. “The Hindu religion is just really different. I mean they worship cows. I mean, like really? How can you make sense out of nonsense?” [Int.2–2.25.2016]. Yet in determining that this religion was not the “real religion”, Annemarie continued to show respect and appreciation for aspects of Hinduism such as the pleasurable communal events. It was important to her, given her attraction to the concept and practice of religion in human life to not “discriminate” against any human religions. “I still really respect the religion because I don’t like discriminate between the others, but for me to actually get committed? No.” [Int.2–2.25.2016]. The Role of Religious Leaders’ Knowledge and Discourse in Choosing the “Real” Religion Annemarie, at our second interview, continued to have “lots of questions” about Christianity and could not commit to that religion without clarifying key elements of Christian doctrine, frameworks for interpreting that doctrine, and the ways in which Christians should respond to unclear aspects of their faith. “But, where Christianity is concerned, I still have a lot of questions. . . . I still want some more answers before I really get committed to something.” [Int2–2.25.2016]. In these continued explorations, as finding two articulates,

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religious leaders’ deep knowledge of complex and fundamental aspects of their faith, abilities to relate aspects of their faiths to pertinent doctrinal elements of other faiths, and engage in spiritually and intellectually credible discourse were central in leading Annemarie to her self-selected faith. One tension Annemarie experienced was that the Christian religious leaders to whom she would bring her questions did not appear to have sufficient understandings of Christianity to provide satisfactory insights into her questions. Consequently, these religious leaders took a position that Annemarie (and likely others with similar questions) should ascribe to a simple acceptance of points of religious doctrine they did not understand or had difficulty accepting. Annemarie talked of how, in contrast, when she brought her questions about the Muslim faith to those religious leaders, she was provided with clear answers that allowed her to further her thinking and eventual decisions about belief or non-belief. And when I do ask those questions [of Christian leaders] I mostly get “God wants it that way.” Or “That’s how it’s got to be.” Rather than when I ask a question in the Muslim religion they actually break every single thing down for me, so it is like, “Hmmmm, which one should I really stick to?” [Int2–2.25.2016] Annemarie felt frustration that she had surrounded herself with Christians and engaged in much research and learning about Christianity through school and her own research, but that apart from identity socialization agents at school, had found no Christian religious leader who could engage her in spiritual but also rational analyses that led to understanding the elements of Christian doctrine that perplexed her. I can’t say that I don’t surround myself with Christians because half of my classmates at school are Christians. If I have any questions, I can always ask and everything like that. But for me, . . . like out of school, if I go to ask any other Christian person like anything else they won’t really give me a good answer. Rather . . . when [TMS’] Principal gives me an answer she is really good at it. She breaks it down and everything. How good are the other Christians? Do they know the religion like that? [Int2–2.25.2016] Annemarie’s statements about breaking things down suggested her need for a visible process of rational sense-making, and her question of “do they really know the religion like that” indicated that one needed to possess deep knowledge of the tenets of one’s faith in order to participate in a process of sensemaking with oneself and others who may not be as knowledgeable about one’s faith. Annemarie described the important role of the deep intellectual understanding of Islam that the Sheik, or Muslim religious leader, held in making Islam a credible one for her. This Sheik had a long-standing relationship with

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Annemarie and her family, considering Annemarie had been raised in the religious community he led. I would ask him and [I] know him because I was really like small going to church with my mom and stuff, so they like know us personally, you know? I would talk to him and his daughter, and they would really answer my questions be able to help me with certain things that I don’t understand. [Int2–2.25.2016] These comments suggest an open invitation to Annemarie to continuously ask questions in a personalized relational space that developed in Annemarie an expectancy that over time she would find increasingly satisfying spiritual and intellectual answers and deepened understandings. Annemarie’s comments further point to the need for religious socialization agents, particularly those in leadership roles, to have deep knowledge of their faiths through which they can engage in satisfactory dialogue with questioning or believing others who have been exposed to some form of knowledge or embodied experience of their faith. Annemarie contrasted the deeper understandings she took away from religious dialogue with the Sheik with an example of an interaction with a Christian pastor about an aspect of Christian doctrine that can be difficult to understand rationally, and, sometimes spiritually, to those exploring that faith or even those who identify as Christians. This concept pertained to the identities and relations among Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit that the Christian faith teaches are all at once distinct but one—the Trinity. [I attended a] Seventh Day Adventist [church]. A friend took me. I was like, “OK I have a question” because he [the pastor] was like “any questions from the visitors?” I was like, “Can you really explain how God is like Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and God?” And he was like, “Look at you. Aren’t you a daughter, a sister, an aunt? Look at it that way.” And I was like, “If you can compare me to God, then who exactly is God?” Because for me God is a supreme being. We are like nothing. You can’t even compare us to him. That kind of ticked me off. How he tried to explain that wasn’t really good, especially for somebody who wants to learn and know about the religion. You really have to come better than that. [Int2–2.25.2016] Annemarie was offended that she had not been positioned as an intellectual, rational and spiritual sense-maker in this dialogic exchange. She was deeply confused about the construct of God in Christianity in comparison to Islam. As she commented, “For the Muslim religion . . . God is . . . Allah. Basically, there is only one God. So I find Christianity just a bit more confusing” [Int2–2.25.2016]. Yet her solid understanding of the sacredness of God, both in Christianity and Islam, led to her rejection and even condemnation of this pastor for attempting to offer an explanation of the Trinity through everyday human relations.

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This approach to making meaning seemed too simple, desecrating, and antiintellectual to her. For Annemarie, an intellectual, rational sense-making process needed to be engaged when trying to understand matters of religious doctrine. But that process needed to be coupled with evidence of deep intellectual religious knowledge and spiritual sense-making, a meaning-making process that stirred resonance or a sense of possibility or rightness in the hearer; discourse that would not transgress what Annemarie viewed as sacred knowledge. Further, it was unclear in Annemarie’s recounting whether she and this Christian pastor engaged in any discussion of the conceptualization of God in Islam. Theory and research confirm that formal knowledge of sacred texts; embodied practices; sustained engagement, including dialogue, in religious communities of practice; and identity agents, such as parents and religious teachers, are key to youths’ generation of religious identity (Francis & Robbins, 2014; Juzwik, 2014; Visser-Vogel et al., 2012). Annemarie found limited opportunities to engage with these processes of religious identity formation at home or in other social worlds in the Hindu religion. She found plentiful opportunities to engage with Christianity in school and church worlds, including through textual study and dialogue with Christian peers and adult socialization agents such as her principal. However, her interactions with Christian religious leaders around fundamental aspects of Christian doctrine left her dissatisfied and disturbed about the nature of knowledge and discourse one could expect from leaders in that faith, and what she understood as the expectation on Christians to believe despite a lack of understanding. In contrast, Annemarie experienced a lifetime of engaging with her Sheik and other religious agents in her Muslim community who consistently invited her to question, and had the knowledge and ability to engage her in dialogue that brought intellectual and spiritual insights to her religious puzzlements. The knowledge and understandings Annemarie constructed from her engagements with her Muslim religious leaders, as well as the understandings she crafted from her own sense-making processes were cultivated through a blend of rational, intellectual sense-making and spiritual leading applied to deep knowledge of religious doctrines. These dimensions of dialogue and sense-making on her own and with religious socialization agents were pivotal in Annemarie’s eventual selection of Islam as her “real religion”. By our fourth interview, Annemarie informed me: I’m done researching because I know which faith is best for me. I’ve chosen Islam. Because it’s what I love and that’s the true faith in my opinion . . . no other religion brings as much as peace as Islam in my opinion. [Int.4.6.9.2017]

Implications This analysis has explored an under-examined phenomenon of how an adolescent who came from a multicultural and multi-faith home experienced the process of religious identity development. The study thus expands the existing

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knowledge base in literacy research related to youths’ religious identity development that has been primarily developed from youths’ transactions with their families’ singular faith (Eakle, 2007; Reyes, 2009; Skerrett, 2014a, 2014b). Furthermore, this study expands upon the already established theoretical significance of the role of religious identity agents in youths’ negotiating their way to religious faith. My analysis contributes deeper knowledge about why and how religious leaders and other identity agents are important in youths coming to religious faith. This analysis has identified the significance of religious leaders and other identity socialization agents holding deep and sufficiently diverse religious knowledge bases in supporting youths who are exploring multiple religions, including for the purpose of selecting one as their own. Further, my analysis has identified the nature of discursive interactions among religious identity agents and youths that promote understandings about religion and faith. Literacy scholarship pertaining to youths who claim a single faith has been illuminating the complex literacy capacities that youths develop through religious life and suggesting how literacy teachers can connect those strengths to building academic, civic, and social literacies (Eakle, 2007; Skerrett, 2014a, 2014b). Youths who transact with multiple faiths in developing religious identities seem uniquely positioned to build even more robust literacy repertoires from their engagements with multiple religions. These youths must read, analyze, and attempt to synthesize diverse texts from different religious and intellectual traditions and standpoints. They must embody openness and willingness to engage in forms of dialogue about religion that truly seek to understand, integrate when possible, and appreciate multiple religious perspectives. The nature and purposes of such dialogues are in stark contrast to those that are guided by desires of just being heard, being proved right, proving others wrong. These ways of learning, knowing, and being are essential in increasingly multicultural and multi-faith schools and societies around the world. Literacy teachers may follow the lead of youths like Annemarie oriented toward religious diversity—their ways of trying to learn and understand through research and textual study on their own and with others, and through productive dialogue with religiously similar and diverse others about the diversity of religions that surround them. Through doing so, teachers can come to deeper knowledge and understanding of their students and the literacies they engage in religious life. Such knowledge can be used to consider how the literacy curriculum, including the nature of dialogue for learning, can leverage literacies developed from religious engagements for more powerful learning in literacy classrooms.

References Baker, D., & Edwards, N. (2012). What would Catherine of Sienna do? Spiritual formation and the brains of adolescent girls. Religious Education, 107(4), 371–387. Center on International Education Benchmarking. (2009). Netherlands. Retrieved March 25, 2016, from www.ncee.org/programs-affiliates/center-on-international-educationbenchmarking/top-performing-countries/netherlands-overview/

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Cepal.org. (2002). The impact of immigration on Caribbean microstates: Bahamas, British Virgin Islands, Saint Maarten, United States Virgin Islands. Retrieved May 1, 2015, from www. cepal.org/publicaciones/xml/0/10340/carg0540.pdf Charmaz, K. (2006). Constructing grounded theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Corbin, J., & Strauss, A. L. (2008). Basics of qualitative research (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Daguo, L. (2012). Out of the Ivory tower: The impact of wider social contact on the values, religious beliefs and identities of Chinese postgraduate students in the UK. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 15(2), 241–258. Ding, H. (2009). East meets west: Chinese students making sense of their cultural identity in London. Changing English, 16(3), 313–321. Eakle, J. A. (2007). Literacy spaces of a Christian faith-based school. Reading Research Quarterly, 42(4), 472–510. Francis, L. J., & Robbins, M. (2014). The religious and social significance of self-assigned religious affiliation in England and Wales: Comparing Christian, Muslim, and religiously-unaffiliated adolescent males. Research in Education, 92, 32–48. Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (2006). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co. Government of Sint Maarten. (2014). SintMaartenGov.org: The official website of the government of Sint Maarten. Retrieved March 15, 2014, from www.sintmaartengov.org/Pages/ default.aspx Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Juzwik, M. M. (2014). American evangelical Biblicism as literate practice: A critical review. Reading Research Quarterly, 49(3), 335–349. Kapitzke, C. (1995). Literacy and religion: The textual politics and practice of Seventh-day Adventism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. King, P. E., Clardy, C. E., & Ramos, J. S. (2013). Adolescent spiritual exemplars: Exploring spirituality in the lives of diverse youth. Journal of Adolescent Research, 29(2), 186–212. Miles, M. B., Huberman, M., & Saldana, J. (2013). Qualitative data analysis: A methods sourcebook. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Pew Research Center. (2019). 8 facts about love and marriage in America. Retrieved September 2, 2019, from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/13/8-factsabout-love-and-marriage/ Reyes, C. C. (2009). El libro de recuerdos [book of memories]: A Latina student’s exploration of self and religion in public school. Research in the Teaching of English, 43(3), 263–285. Sarroub, L. K. (2002). In-betweenness: Religion and conflicting visions of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 37(2), 130–148. Skerrett, A. (2014a). Religious literacies in a secular literacy classroom. Reading Research Quarterly, 49(2), 233–250. Skerrett, A. (2014b). “Closer to God”: Following religion across the lifeworlds of an urban youth. Urban Education, 51(8), 964–990. doi:10.1177/0042085914549365 Skerrett, A. (2015). Teaching transnational youth: Literacy and education in a changing world. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Skerrett, A. (2016). Attending to pleasure and purpose in multiliteracies instructional practices: Insights from transnational youths. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 60(2), 115–120.

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Skerrett, A. (2017). The role of language in religious identity-making: A case of a ChineseCaribbean Youth. Literacy Research: Theory, Method and Practice, 66(1), 325–340. Skerrett, A. (2018). Learning music literacies across transnational school settings. Journal of Literacy Research, 50(1), 31–51. United States Census Bureau. (2018). Race, ethnicity, and marriage in the United States. Growth in interracial and interethnic married-couple households. Retrieved September 2, 2019, from https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/07/interracial-marriages.html Vertovec, S. (2009). Transnationalism. New York: Routledge. Visser-Vogel, E., Westerink, J., de Kock, J., Barnard, M., & Bakker, C. (2012). Developing a framework for research on religious identity development of highly committed adolescents. Religious Education, 107(2), 108–121.

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Recognizing Religion with Preservice Teachers Heidi L. Hadley and William J. Fassbender

Teacher preparation programs have, in some measure and to varying degrees of success, considered how to prepare preservice teachers to address issues of diversity, particularly around identity issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality in their own classrooms. Still, we argue that teacher preparation programs have not yet adequately grappled with religious identity, both as a part of the teacher identity preservice teachers bring with them into teacher preparation programs, but also in the way that these programs prepare preservice teachers to deal with religious identity in their own classrooms. This case study focuses on the experiences of one group of teacher candidates enrolled in an English Education BSED program, paying close attention to the ways in which deeply held religious beliefs influenced their perceptions of their coursework, their instructors, their peers, and their conceptions about their future classrooms. We argue here that teacher educators must think more deeply about the ways in which religion can and must be approached, particularly as part of a cosmopolitan (e.g. Pinar, 2009), multicultural curriculum (Ladson-Billings, 1994; Nieto, 1999). Teacher educators cannot, in other words, assume that separation of religion from public schooling means that teacher candidates’ religious beliefs will not affect their experiences in teacher education classrooms and in turn the classrooms of their students. The following vignette from the teacher education program in which we teach serves as the guiding frame for our inquiry. “Have you seen the post that Meilin1 wrote on the class website?” That question seemed to be on everyone’s lips, from students to instructors. Meilin had, perhaps unwittingly, stirred up controversy in the cohort of twenty-one pre-service English teachers. The group was tightly bound both by the amount of time they spent together (twenty hours a week), and by the camaraderie that can only be achieved by sharing the highly stressful experience of learning to teach. However, the general sense of community thinly veiled an underlying tension. Meilin and other evangelical Christian students often found themselves at odds with the curriculum of the program, particularly when sexuality and gender were discussed. In this instance, Meilin, a devout evangelical Christian, posted the following on a class website: I have a question that matters to me personally, but I don’t think we’d really answer it: most LGBT beliefs are against my personal, religious beliefs, and

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Heidi L. Hadley and William J. Fassbender I have no intention of going against my soul, so how do I teach on LGBT issues when I honestly believe with all of my heart that normalizing LGBT is normalizing a type of sin? Don’t worry about the theological accuracy of what I just said for now. Just think of my conscience for a moment. If I seriously believe that being LGBT is a sin, how can I normalize it? How can I do that and still live with myself ? I’m comfortable (eager, even) with raising the issue in order to address prejudice, discrimination, and hate, but there ain’t no way am I ever going to look a student in the eye and say, “There’s nothing wrong with being gay,” without feeling like a complete LIAR. I think raising any dialogue that involves LGBT will inevitably come across its morality or gloss over it as if its morality shouldn’t even be questioned. In either case, I’m choking on guilt. I know this can offend and hurt a lot of people in the cohort, and I hope that you come to me if you are one of those people. I want to ask you how/if I can show people that I care about them without supporting their decision to be who they feel they are. If we want our students to enter into this kind of discourse with each other, we need to be prepared to do it first.

Several other members of the class approached us to talk about this incident. Most were disturbed by what they viewed as an ignorant and bigoted post in a public forum. However, upon reading the post for ourselves, we were struck by how vulnerable and honest it was, particularly considering the program’s outward commitment to educational equity and the openly liberal political stance of many of the cohort members and cohort instructors (including ourselves). Meilin’s questioning seemed to be motivated by a genuine desire to be a good teacher (by the definition of the program and her cohort) while still being a good Christian (by the definition of her family and her church community). For Meilin, the social justice-oriented teacher education she was receiving seemed to be in direct conflict with her personal religious beliefs. We chose to read Meilin’s post as a sincere question: How can I be an effective equity-minded educator without sacrificing my own beliefs and ethics? While we had no easy answers for Meilin, her post did cause us to question the experience of religious preservice teachers like Meilin in preservice education programs like ours. Inspired by Meilin’s post and the response to it, this case study considers what this small conflict might reveal about the experience of evangelical Christian teachers in a teacher preparation program, the ways in which they make sense of their own identity, their teachers and peers, and the program’s curriculum.

Literature Review The often “explosive, controversial, emotional, and threatening” (Purpel, 1989, p. 68) debate around the appropriate role of religion in public education is, we think, an important one, considering how many students and teachers enter the classroom with a strong sense of religious identity. Particularly in the Deep South where we teach, we find that not only the communities we live in, but

Recognizing Religion with Preservice Teachers 39 also the pre-service teachers we teach and the mentor teachers with whom we work within public schools are shaped by both the historical religiosity of the region and by the current religious identities that a majority of the population embraces. Similarly, in a study of public school teachers’ beliefs in Wisconsin, Hartwick (2014) found that nearly 88% of the teachers in his study believed in God, and almost 60% believed that they had been “called by God to teach” (p. 14). When teachers believe that God has called them to teach, this conviction surely influences the choices that they make about what and how to teach. Although it is tempting to believe that the “silence around teachers and religion assumes that teachers are neutral agents in the choice and delivery of curriculum” (White, 2009, p. 859), our own experiences with current and prospective teachers as well as our understanding of multiculturalism (Ladson-Billings, 1994; Nieto, 1999) and multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996) makes this assumption highly suspect. It has been argued ( James, 2015; Kunzman, 2006; Nord & Haynes, 1998) that teachers practice “pedagogical evasion” when encountering issues related to religion in schools (Kunzman, 2006, p. 5) out of fear of inadvertently crossing over the line that has been drawn by the Supreme Court about what is permissible. Teachers may feel ill-equipped to deal with a seemingly-unresolvable debate over differing values and beliefs (James, 2015). However, Nord and Haynes (1998) are quick to point out that “it is not unconstitutional to teach students about religion—if it is done properly” (p. 6). They argue that teacher education should include a consideration of both secular and religious viewpoints in order to prepare teachers to be respectful of and build upon the varied religious understandings that students bring into the classroom. Although there are educational researchers who center students’ religious beliefs and practices as part of an intersectional identity that is deeply rooted in family and community ( Dávila, 2015; Skerrett, 2013), it is important to note that these researchers are particularly discussing the religion of K-12 students. When research focuses on the religion of preservice teachers in teacher preparation programs, these studies tend to fall into two categories. First, preservice teachers’ religious literacy—conceptualized in these studies as their factual knowledge about different world religions—is measured in some way and found to be woefully inadequate (Anderson, Mathys, & Cook, 2015; Bruce & Bailey, 2014; Marks, Binkley, & Daly, 2014; Subedi, 2006). The second type of existing study positions preservice teachers’ beliefs as a dispositional problem that limits teachers’ ability to engage in social justice pedagogies (Blumenfeld & Jaekel, 2012; Journell, 2011). In this article, we purposefully position preservice teachers’ beliefs as a product of their intersectional identity, while considering the complex experience of evangelical Christian teachers as they move through their teacher training and field experiences. Further, through our examination of the controversy around Meilin’s post, we question what discursive figurations in the English Education program—in curriculum, peer interactions, and instruction—made her vilification possible. We argue here for a complication, then, of the positioning of religious students in teacher education programs.

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Theoretical Framework Recognition For this study, we have grounded our work in Axel Honneth’s recognition theory. Honneth draws significantly from Hegel’s concept of recognition, understanding it as central to the struggle for autonomy and emancipation. Recognition is typically associated with a sense of familiarity and, from a moral philosophical standpoint, a response to another person who demands us to “see” them as an autonomous equal. According to Rancière (2016) “It is not the confirmation of something already existing but the construction of the common world in which existences appear and are validated” (p. 85). In other words, recognition is about the critical creation and delineation of social spaces that determine the people and ideas that are accepted and rejected in any given culture. For Honneth (2012) autonomy and moral subjectivity are constructed through three axes of identity formation: love, respect, and esteem. Precisely because “we do not acquire autonomy on our own, but only in relation to other people” (p. 41), recognition rooted in Honneth’s triad is required in order to foster the ethical dialog around religion necessary to fruitfully engage religion in classrooms. Though we are more or less steeped in a language of love in teacher education (“I teach because I love kids”), less is said about just what respect and esteem might look like in the classroom. Respect, as conceptualized through recognition theory, is associated with the juridical equal treatment of citizens through the granting of full rights through non-discrimination. Although there are implications for this in school settings, particularly in looking at who gets to be a teacher and the separation of church and state, self-respect as theorized here will be less useful in studying the relationships of those who engage or reject ethical dialogue. As such, we will be focusing primarily on Honneth’s third tenet: esteem. For Honneth, esteem “indicates that an individual’s personal character traits and abilities have worth and value in the community” (Carlson, 2015, p. 23). Thus, self-esteem is a double process of individualization and equalization (van den Brink & Owen, 2007, p. 13). A subject must understand that their unique beliefs and characteristics are accepted, providing them with self-esteem. This sense of belonging within a community leads to “a felt confidence that one’s achievements or abilities will be recognized as ‘valuable’ by other members of society” (van den Brink & Owen, 2007, p. 14). Whether it is a classroom or society writ large, the search for esteem is a form of recognition that is central to access to and a sense of belonging within a community. It is symmetrical esteem for others that allows communities to build relationships because there is a recognition of others’ values that “inspire[s] not just passive tolerance but felt concern for what is individual and particular about the other person” (van den Brink & Owen, 2007, p. 15). Recognition requires reciprocity in all three axes mentioned previously. Honneth (2012) defines recognition as “the reciprocal limitation of one’s own,

Recognizing Religion with Preservice Teachers 41 egocentric desires for the benefit of the other” (p. 17). Drawing on Kant, Honneth (2007), understands this act as one that requires us to “impose a restriction on our actions that injures our self-love” (p. 336). It becomes evident that Honneth believes that recognition of the other is a moral act of selflessness. It begs an autonomous subject to tamp down their own ego. This requires a decentering of the self in order to recognize a subject. Borrowing again from Hegel, Honneth and Margalit understand this as a negation of the self (an ihm), an exchange that must occur within any subjects engaging in a discourse of recognition. This is an act that honors the worth of another and implicitly signals a “confirmation” or “affirmation” of another’s claims by allowing them to infringe on your self-love (Honneth & Margalit, 2001). Misrecognition Negation and decentering should not be assumed amongst interlocutors. The search for recognition is one steeped in power and agency. In fact, the intersubjectivity and reliance on the other can be fraught for anyone seeking legitimation and recognition. Honneth (2012) states, “We do not acquire autonomy on our own, but only in relation to other people who are willing to appreciate us, just as we must be able to appreciate them” (p. 41). In this regard, our esteem/ self-worth is wrapped up in what is valued in us by others. Our “evaluative qualities,” then, are often measured through a form of “value realism”—the values we assume are recognized or rejected within certain communities with which we associate (Honneth, 2007). Subsequently, a struggle for recognition often comes as a result of one’s own evaluative qualities not being honored and recognized by those from which we seek acceptance. Often, this denial is situated within a group of people that possesses the power to determine what is valued within the community. According to Honneth (2003), “the extent to which something counts as ‘achievement,’ as a cooperative contribution, is defined against value standards whose normative reference point is the economic activity of the independent, middle-class, male bourgeois” (as seen in van den Brink & Owen, 2007, p. 20). Thus, the standards for recognition are historically situated in societal norms. Misrecognition comes as a result of refusing to decenter and negate one’s own self-love in order to recognize another. Those who hold positions that are more widely accepted hold power by determining who will be readily recognized and who will be denied. This type of denial often renders those on the margins powerless, robbing them of any sense of autonomy. Honneth believed it was important to differentiate misrecognition from invisibility. He makes clear that “cognizing” (Erkennen), or being cognizant of, another must occur before “recognizing” (Anerkenne) is possible (Honneth & Margalit, 2001)—before we can begin engaging with someone, we must first cognitively see them by affirming their presence. Honneth and Margalit describe a time in which nobility were permitted to undress in front of servants as if they did not exist. Actions like these demonstrate a deliberate act of seeing through someone not worthy of attention. The act of rendering another invisible by seeing through

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them is a demoralizing gesture that causes the affected person to “actually feel themselves not to be perceived” (Honneth & Margalit, 2001, p. 113). As a result, an invisible person may take great strides in order to be seen. Someone who continually fails at being “cognized” by others may resort to “striking out” to provoke countermeasures from the person from whom they are seeking cognizing. James (2015) argues “the invisibility of religion, its taken-for-grantedness, ought not be mistaken for absence” (p. 36). We agree, but push further: because we have assumed invisibility, the irruption of religion in the teacher education classroom feels uniquely threatening though it need not be. Recognition of the always absent presence of religion is a beginning. Moreover, students with strongly held religious beliefs are likely entering teacher preparation programs without feeling as if their backgrounds are being seen by instructors and their classmates. It is worth clarifying that cognizing does not necessarily lead to recognition. In fact, the simple act of “striking out” in order to gain attention may decrease any willingness for the other to willingly decenter and negate, having possibly felt personally attacked or offended. Once someone rendered invisible is cognized, they may open themselves to the possibility of misrecognition. Carlson (2015) claims, “The struggle for recognition is . . . incomplete without the practical effects of disrespect, or misrecognition. The struggle for recognition is predicated on the continual and various guises of misrecognition in various social spaces” (p. 24). Perhaps in the best-case scenario, misrecognition leads to a dialogue of disagreement. Rancière (2016) states, “Dis-agreement” renders the untranslatable term mésentente, which plays on the relation between entendre, to “hear,” and entendre, to “understand” (emphasis in original text) (p. 84). So any form of misrecognition that leads to disagreement requires a counterpoint to both hear and understand what is being shared. Thus, disagreement may serve as an intermediary between misrecognition and recognition. Throughout this study, we attempt to pinpoint moments of recognition and misrecognition as well as our evangelical participants’ ability to leverage striking out and dis-agreement to be heard and understood when discussing the difficulties of working with students from the LGBTQ community.

Method We present a qualitative case study (Stake, 2000) around the experience of evangelical Christian preservice teachers as they participated in an English education teacher preparation program. This case study approach allowed us to consider multiple perspectives of the same incident and understand larger patterns of experience. Participants For this chapter we focus on interviews with two participants (Meilin and James). Both of the participants report having a Christian background or upbringing of some kind. Meilin and James were devout in their faith, closely aligning themselves with Christian identities. For both Meilin (a Chinese female who grew

Recognizing Religion with Preservice Teachers 43 up in the United States) and James (a White male), college was described as a time of faith building: filled with Christian clubs, fellowship, and evangelism. Because Meilin was the central figure of the conflict we are studying, we focus primarily on Meilin’s interview, although we use interviews with James to extend and complement her experiences. All of the participants in this study were enrolled in a teacher preparation program at a large research university in the southeastern United States. During the period of the interviews, all of the participants were engaged in both fieldwork (two days a week) in local classrooms and university coursework (two days a week). Data Collection Data collection took place over a month-long period during the participants’ cohort experience, so that we could gather their reflections while they were still engaged in the discussions that we hoped to understand more fully. We conducted semi-structured interviews with all of the interview participants. The majority of our questions focused on how students felt their personal beliefs were either supported, ignored, or challenged by their graduate instructors, their peers, and the curriculum of the courses that they were taking as part of the cohort. We asked all of the interviewees (including Meilin) about the reaction to Meilin’s post on the class discussion board. We also collected relevant posts from class discussion boards. Data Analysis Data analysis began when all interviews were completed. We used thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Guest, 2012) to consider the context, beliefs, stances, and experiences of the participants around this specific conflict. We began our data analysis process by individually reading the interview transcripts, noting the participants’ responses that were particularly salient to the context of the conflict and the beliefs and stances of the participants. Further, we noted places where the participants connected this conflict to their future teaching and future teacher identity, or where the participants connected this conflict to their current experience as a student in a teacher education program. We then met as a research team to discuss our initial impressions, complicate our thinking about what we were seeing, come to consensus about our initial understandings of the data, and to co-construct categories of codes that most fully captured our interpretations of the data.

Findings We identified three categories of codes—invisibility, recognition, and misrecognition—that account for the experience of the participants in their teacher education program, particularly as these experiences relate to beliefs, religion, and this particular classroom conflict.

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Invisibility Invisibility was evident throughout our analysis of the interviews, particularly with our pre-service teachers who identify as evangelical Christian. There were instances where it became evident that they felt that they were forced to censor themselves, particularly during classes that centered around the need to be an ally for LGBTQ students. As Meilin’s post on the class wiki demonstrates, she expressed strong opinions and anxiety about her ability to support students whose very existence is dissonant with her Christian values. However, her post also appeared to be an eruption of pent up frustration from feelings of not being heard or seen by her instructors, and more importantly, her peers. During her interview, Meilin referred to imagined conversations/debates she would have with people who were strong allies of or identified as LGBTQ. She felt a strong conviction to share her reasoning for not being comfortable in affirming that an LGBTQ identity was morally acceptable. Meilin expressed a desire to talk about these issues with her classmates saying, I would just hope that someone would hear me and understand that I have an opinion on this, and I want to talk about it and be open about it, and I’m hoping that someone will be courageous enough to be like, “Sorry, hey, I overheard you guys talking about this.” Even though I want to be the one to initiate that conversation, I’m scared to, so I’m hoping that like, if, I just leave the door there, someone will come knocking. At a different point, Meilin mentioned that she does not feel antagonism from her peers “except for when I imagine it”. It became evident to us that this was an issue that had been weighing on her for quite some time, as she clearly played out in her mind what a friendly debate about the struggle to support LGBTQ students might look like. Interestingly, she chose to imagine the conversation turning antagonistic. This is a complicated instance of invisibility because Meilin assumed that her classmates have identified her as a Christian who struggles with the ability to serve as an ally to LGBTQ students. Instead of broaching this subject in class, she imagined a situation in which she might discuss her conflicting feelings with other Christians in her peer group and other classmates might overhear her and feel compelled to join in a civil dialogue about her beliefs. Meilin also discussed a time when she and James were talking about the issue of supporting LGBTQ students one day in class just loud enough for a classmate, who she identifies as an LGBTQ ally and outspoken leader of the cohort, to hear. Although her classmate did not take the bait, the classmate asked a question to the whole group about what to do when confronted by teachers who seem “ignorant” when it comes to serving as an ally to LGBTQ students—a question that Meilin interpreted as a veiled barb at her own beliefs. Although Meilin often felt invisible in social settings in the context of her cohort, she also felt self-conscious, as if she had indeed been cognized without being directly acknowledged. Meilin’s objective in speaking her honest feelings was to

Recognizing Religion with Preservice Teachers 45 engage in a conversation where she could respond to some of the concerns that her classmates had. Instead, Meilin felt as if she had been cognized and swiftly misrecognized as ignorant by a peer whom she respected. James, on the other hand, actively avoided making his beliefs known to his classmates, believing that any conversation he could engage in with an LGBTQ ally would not be productive. He claimed that there is a “higher love” than having to explain and justify your perspective to someone who holds an opposing view on a sensitive topic. In his opinion, starting a conversation might stir up hurt feelings for those who felt passionately about serving as an ally for LGBTQ students. For James, stating his “personal convictions was not a hill to die on”. Although he chose to be invisible in the classroom space, he was admittedly impressed with Meilin’s willingness to be so open with her concerns in her post to the class. He admitted that he did not have the “guts” to be so open about the issues he was questioning. So, while James was content with being invisible, it was evident that Meilin truly wanted to engage with others to let them know that it was not so easy for her to push her religion aside to be a support for her LGBTQ students. We consider her post an example of an invisible person “striking out” by taking an extreme measure in order to get the attention of those seeing through her. In this example, it becomes clear that Meilin got the response she needed, as it led to a form of disagreement spurred on by misrecognition. She was heard, but not understood. The result was active outcry from her peers, especially those who identify as LGBTQ or LGBTQ allies. Although it was not the productive conversation she and James could have hoped for, she was finally cognized by her instructors and peers. In addition to being admired by James, the instructor of the course pulled Meilin aside after class and told her that she appreciated her honesty in the post and that she did not find it offensive. In addition, Meilin recounts that the instructor told her that there have been times when her faith conflicted with the content in her own teaching. Reflecting on this encounter, Meilin felt she was “awed that a teacher would approach [her] and talk to [her] about like, a post that [she] made, and share what her thoughts were”. No longer invisible, Meilin felt as if she was recognized, her conflicted feelings affirmed. Her gambit was an example of “striking out” that allowed for her to receive the visibility that she had desired. Recognition Throughout the interviews, participants mentioned how important it had been for them within the cohort to find peers and instructors who shared their beliefs and stances, and this held true no matter what those beliefs and stances were. Even when instructors attempted to remain neutral, Meilin found other ways to identify them as like her or unlike her with regards to faith. One program instructor she (correctly) identified as not religious because she had an undergraduate degree in philosophy—a branch of study that Meilin felt was deeply atheistic. Another program instructor was identified as not religious because she led the class in a mindfulness exercise (the instructor considers herself spiritual but not religious).

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For Meilin, these weren’t just idle curiosities. Her identifications of instructors as Christians or non-Christians had real consequences for the way that she attended to their lessons or accepted their approach to social justice issues. For example, when another student in the cohort told her that a shared teacher was Christian, she said “that made me rethink my perception of her and the material that she was teaching . . . the materials didn’t change, but somehow I accepted it more”. In this instance, Meilin is talking about a teacher who taught LGBTQ-affirming pedagogies, an issue about which she expressed a great deal of anxiety. She continued: Like if she’s [the instructor] a non-Christian, I’m going to assume that she doesn’t even care what God says, and is just like, ‘Oh, yeah, LGBT all the way.’ But if she’s a Christian, I’m assuming that she cares about what God says, believes it, and . . . found a way that she could do both without betraying God. . . . Therefore, these same strategies that she’s found, I’m going to assume that God’s okay with them, and I’m more likely to use them. Meilin consistently expressed more trust and confidence in the teachings of teachers who identified as Christian, even while she acknowledged that many of her non-Christian teachers were engaging and interesting. With these teachers, Meilin stated that she consciously filtered what they said and what they modeled through her Christian perspective before she accepted it as appropriate for her own classroom practice. James, too, reported feeling an affinity for teachers who talked openly about their faith (even if it was in regards to their personal struggle reconciling faith and issues of equity). James also discussed how important it was for him within the cohort space to find other devout evangelical Christians with whom he could talk about lessons and ideas that, to his mind, challenged Biblical teachings. In one class, a guest speaker shared how teachers might create LGBTQ-affirming classrooms. While James felt like his conceptions of what it meant to “love all his students” were challenged by this presentation, he found a great deal of value in talking over the presentation with his fellow Christian students, considering together what strategies they could, in good conscience as Christians, adopt in their future classrooms and which strategies were “just a step outside” of what is acceptable to God. This kind of peer discussion resulted in what appeared to be a collaborative agreement between the Christian students about what they would and wouldn’t feel comfortable doing to support LGBTQ students. James expressed that he still had many unresolved questions that he hadn’t yet been able to answer to his own satisfaction. However, in the interviews the languaging that both Meilin and James used to describe their future stances toward LGBTQ students seemed similar enough to indicate a mutual understanding within the group about what would be appropriate. For example, Meilin stated, “I would definitely advocate for protecting LGBT communities and not letting them be hated on and discriminated against . . . but I can’t have a [LGBTQ] student coming to me telling

Recognizing Religion with Preservice Teachers 47 me that they need my support and . . . actually give them support. I can’t—I don’t know how I would—I can’t do that.”2 James shares the same sentiment, “I want to be a comfort and a shield in a sense of kids who are confused about their gender, who are catching flak for being gay or lesbian . . . If you are gay, I want to be your friend . . . but I cannot speak the words that I’m happy that you’re confident in your relationship . . . I can’t tell the student in that moment that I’m their ally.” Misrecognition Throughout the interviews, evangelical preservice teachers shared a sense of being misrecognized, and the anxiety of misrecognition by peers was far greater than the sense of being misrecognized by instructors. All three of the participants stated that their instructors cared for them and said that they knew they could go and talk to their instructors in one-on-one spaces about things that were bothering them. The fact that none of them did approach instructors on their own, and instead expressed gratitude when instructors approached them to talk about controversial issues is a circumstance that we think challenges their stated view of instructors as trusted advisors (it matters, we think, that we, their instructors, were conducting interviews and wonder if more anxiety about instructors would have surfaced if the power dynamics within the interviews had been different). Both Meilin and James expressed considerable anxiety around the perceptions of their peers in the teacher program about Christians in general, and more specifically about the way they, as individuals, were being perceived. For Meilin, the fear of being misrecognized kept her from engaging in the kinds of conversations that she felt could lead to genuine connection—conversations that, in her mind, could help her to learn “to just be loving without being accepting”. Meilin stated that when her classmates started talking passionately about LGBTQ rights or affirming LGBTQ students in their future classrooms, she had decided that the best approach was: “just don’t say anything at all . . . even though I feel like if I were to give my perspective, they would be able to give their perspective, and there could be like a beautiful exchange that could happen, but you know, I just don’t even want to risk antagonizing someone even though the payoff could be great”. Meilin followed up by stating that the payoff would be that her classmates might realize that she isn’t as bigoted on issues of sexuality and gender as they think she is, and they aren’t as bigoted against Christianity as she thinks they are. Misrecognition for Meilin and James occurs primarily around their identification as Christians (and around political and social beliefs that are often closely associated with evangelical Christianity). Also worth considering are the ways in which evangelical Christian preservice teachers might be misrecognizing students in the secondary classroom where they teach. If misrecognition, according to Honneth, results from a refusal to decenter and negate one’s own self-love, experiences like Meilin’s hypothetical situation of not being able to

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tell a LGBTQ student that she supported them is certainly based in a form of misrecognition. For Meilin, no small amount of her anguish around this issue seems to be centered around her belief that she is sinning if she does affirm LGBTQ students’ identities. In response to a question about her original blog post and her motivation for writing it, she shared, “I can’t separate my personal identity from my professional identity without somehow sinning against God”. In her original post, she mentions feeling that no matter how she acts in the situation she’s “choking on guilt” or feels like “a complete LIAR”. Meilin’s post, then, reveals less of a preoccupation with the perceived sin of the hypothetical student, and more of a preoccupation with her own perceived sin. In Meilin’s hypothetical situation then, we see the possibilities of misrecognition between Meilin and students in her future classroom.

Discussion Honneth served as a valuable framework for understanding the struggle for recognition students manifesting varying deeply-held beliefs may be feeling in teacher education courses. As this study demonstrates, honoring perspectives and worldviews that reject certain identities is problematic within the field of education. However, when teacher educators choose to exclude (whether consciously or unconsciously) religious identity in open classroom discussions, students who identify as religious feel that they are silenced or made invisible. As a result, students—like Meilin—may feel as if they are not being heard, seen, or understood. We’re not saying here that we’ve figured out some algorithmic way to have meaningful and productive discussions with religious students like Meilin and James, but we are arguing that as a field, teacher education needs to grapple more substantially with the identities and perspectives of religious teachers. We hope that this work places a spotlight on the need for productive conversations that allow for misrecognition and an opportunity for classroom spaces to be one in which recognition becomes possible. Beyond exploring this particular conflict in this course, we see broader value in the questions that were raised through our examination of the experiences of our evangelical preservice teachers. If the goal of teacher educators is to model for preservice teachers how they might affirm the identities of all the students in their own classrooms, what does it mean that preservice teachers report feeling misrecognized and ideologically marginalized in teacher education classrooms? We wish to acknowledge, however, the reality of this study: while Christian preservice teachers report feeling silenced and ideologically marginalized in their teacher preparation program (Patterson, 2016; Thomson-Bunn, 2017)—a feeling with which we empathize in some measure—we also find their views (particularly around LGBTQ-affirming pedagogies) to be problematic in relation to the overall goal of teacher education and public education as an equity project—a project to which we remain committed. Further, we wish to acknowledge that the perceived silencing of Christian preservice teachers—in

Recognizing Religion with Preservice Teachers 49 one space, while still holding vast privilege in society at large—is wildly disproportionate to the experiences and relative positionality of LGBTQ-identifying preservice teachers and students: where their very existence is consistently questioned, critiqued, and belittled. What we do argue for, as a result of this study, are more open conversations about religious identity with preservice teachers so that they can explore, understand, and critique their own cultural backgrounds and/or privilege as they prepare to enter increasingly pluralistic and diverse classrooms. Additionally, we suggest that there is value in having frank, open, and theoretically informed conversations about ethics and responsibility with preservice teachers as they work to understand their personal responsibility to the students in their future classrooms.

Notes 1. All names have been changed for anonymity. 2. We recognize the logical fallacy here: that it is possible to not discriminate against LGBTQ students while simultaneously refusing to support them and their identities. Still, we report it here because it was a common logical fallacy that was presented as logic among our conservative Christian participants.

References Anderson, D., Mathys, H., & Cook, T. (2015). Religious beliefs, knowledge, and teaching actions: Elementary teacher candidates and world religions. Religion & Education, 42(3), 268–288. Blumenfeld, W. J., & Jaekel, K. (2012). Exploring levels of Christian privilege awareness among preservice teachers. Journal of Social Issues, 68(1), 128–144. Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77–101. Bruce, R. T., & Bailey, B. (2014). Religious issues in English education: An examination of the field. Religion & Education, 41, 310–328. Carlson, D. L. (2015). Queer recognition and interdependence: LGBTQ young adult literature and the contemporary moment. In D. Linville & D. L. Carlson (Eds.), Beyond borders: Queer eros and ethos (ethics) in LGBTQ young adult literature (pp. 21–34). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Davila, D. (2015). #WhoNeedsDiverseBooks?: Preservice teachers and religious neutrality with children’s literature. Research in the Teaching of English, 50(1), 60–83. Guest, G. (2012). Applied thematic analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Hartwick, J. M. (2015). Public school teachers’ beliefs in and conceptions of God: What teachers believe, and why it matters. Religion and Education, 42, 122–146. Honneth, A. (2003). Redistribution as recognition: A response to Nancy Fraser. In N. Fraser & A. Honneth (Eds.), (J. Golb, J. Ingram, & C. Wilke, Trans.), Redistribution or recognition?:A political-philosophical exchange (pp. 110–197). New York, NY: Verso. Honneth, A. (2007). Recognition as ideology. In B. van den Brink & D. Owen (Eds.), Recognition and power: Axel Honneth and the tradition of critical social theory (pp. 323–347). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Honneth, A. (2012). The I in we: Studies in the theory of recognition (J. Ganahl, Trans.). Malden, MA: Polity Press.

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Honneth, A. & Margalit, A. (2001). Invisibility: On the epistemology of ‘recognition.’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplemental, 75, 111–139. https://doi.org/10.1111/ 1467-8349.00081 James, J. H. (2015). Religion in the classroom: Dilemmas for democratic education. New York, NY: Routledge. Journell, W. (2011). Teachers’ controversial issue decisions related to race, gender, and religion during the 2008 presidential election. Theory and Research in Social Education, 39(3), 348–392. Kunzman, R. (2006). Grappling with the good: Talking about religion and morality in public schools. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). The dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African American children. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Marks, M. J., Binkley, R., & Daly, J. K. (2014). Preservice teachers and religion: Serious gaps in religious knowledge and the first amendment. The Social Studies, 105, 245–256. New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social features. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60–92. Nieto, S. (1999). The light in their eyes: Creating multicultural learning communities. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Nord, W., & Haynes, C. (1998). Taking religion seriously across the curriculum. Alexandria, VA: ASCD. Patterson, G. (2016). The unbearable weight of pedagogical neutrality: Religion and LGBTQ issues in the English studies classroom. In J. Alexander & J. Rhodes (Eds.), Sexual rhetorics: Methods, identities, publics (pp. 134–146). New York, NY: Routledge. Pinar, W. F. (2009). The worldliness of a cosmopolitan education: Passionate lives in public service. New York, NY: Routledge. Purpel, D. E. (1989). The moral and spiritual crisis in education: A curriculum for justice and compassion in education. South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey. Rancière, J. (2016). Critical questions on the theory of recognition. In K. Genel & J.-P. Deranty (Eds.), Recognition or disagreement: A critical encounter on the politics of freedom, equality, and identity (pp. 83–95). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Skerrett, A. (2013). Religious literacies in a secular literacy classroom. Reading Research Quarterly, 49(2), 233–250. Stake, R. E. (2000). Case studies. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 435–454). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Subedi, B. (2006). Preservice teachers’ beliefs and practices: Religion and religious diversity. Equity & Excellence in Education, 39, 227–238. Thomson-Bunn, H. (2017). Mediating discursive worlds: When academic norms and religious benefit conflict. College English, 79(3), 276–296. van den Brink, B., & Owen, D. (2007). Editor’s introduction. In B. van den Brink & D. Owen (Eds.), Recognition and power: Axel Honneth and the tradition of critical social theory (pp. 1–32). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. White, K. R. (2009). Connecting religion and teacher identity: The unexplored relationship between teachers and religion in public schools. Teaching and Teacher Education, 25(6), 857–866.

3

Institutional Rituals as Interpersonal Verbal Rituals as Interactional Resources in Classroom Talk Robert LeBlanc

Stylized speech appears in a range of interactional frames, and much attention has been given in recent years to the forms, moments, and tensions of these reflexive communicative practices (cf., Agha, 2005; Rampton, 2006). Because stylization is highly flexible, it is present in all kinds of interactional structures and institutional genres: from intensely ordered rituals and routines to comparatively open-ended extemporaneous peer talk. For students in schools, stylized communication—utterances in which speakers produce “specially marked and often exaggerated representations of languages, styles, and dialects” (Rampton, 2009, p. 149)—can be resources for classroom-level interaction and in service of a variety of literacy practices. This chapter looks closely at some of the ways in which stylized, small-scale institutional rituals of the Catholic Church were repurposed in a Catholic school classroom in Philadelphia amongst Vietnamese American and Mexican students. Noting what Irvine (1979) calls a code inconsistency (what’s a nice Catholic ritual doing in a classroom argument like this?) and drawing from a multi-year interactional ethnography (LeBlanc, 2017), this chapter analyzes a classroomlevel interaction between a small group of students, where academic roles and tasks were hotly contested and negotiated, as apercus of how the fleeting but artful deployment of Catholic ritual may function as an interactional resource. This has particular relevance for ELA classrooms where discussion can be “livewire” and topics may be controversial—in such circumstances, what strategies and resources do students deploy to smooth and repair conversations? In this chapter, I outline how students creatively used the ritual text of the Catholic act of contrition to pivot footing and reconstrue a tense peer exchange in their classroom. For the Vietnamese American students, for whom the priesthood and its accompanying institutional respectability had been debated over successive speech events, the use of institutional rituals of the Catholic church in classroom talk proves to be simultaneously subversive and the creative appropriation of authoritative linguistic resources. Inspired by Rampton’s (2009) uptake of Goffman’s (1971, 1981) “interpersonal verbal ritual” amongst students, I outline the use of these linguistic resources of the Catholic act of contrition as an interpersonal face-saving ritual within contested classroom interactions: less

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stylization or performance (though that too) and more a creative reworking of the everyday rituals of interaction. If, as Goffman outlines, people use interpersonal verbal rituals in moments of social jeopardy, what are the particular social contours of what those rituals might look like in practice? What gets to be an interpersonal verbal ritual?

Diverse Catholic Students in American Catholic Schools In recent years, American Catholic schools have followed the broader US trend of educating a much more diverse group of students (Louie & Holdaway, 2009). St. Dominic Savio,1 a diverse urban Catholic parish and school, stands as a representative of these changes: the parish and the surrounding community are robustly multiethnic and multilingual. Mass is held each week in Spanish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, and English, and many locals also speak Tagalog, Haitian Creole, French Creole, French, Cambodian, Mandarin, Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya, and Tigre. The school is also incredibly diverse, with a majority of its students from Vietnamese, Mexican, Indonesian, and African American families. I first met the students in this study while volunteering as the local boys’ CYO basketball coach, a role that was part of a larger, ongoing community-university research relationship (Campano, Ghiso, & Welch, 2016). After securing permission from the students, their teacher, and their parents, I began a full academic year of participant observation in their 8th Grade classroom and at a range of community and literacy events affiliated with the school and parish: Sunday Mass, community festivals, Bible Studies, after school book clubs, summer camp, and school assemblies. The bulk of my research, however, was in the 8th Grade classroom, with intensive audio-recording from October to June, three times a week for three hours a day. From my own research at St. Dominic Savio (LeBlanc, 2017, 2018), it was clear that the boys with whom I worked largely avoided the “safetalk” of “race neutral” discussion that has framed others’ research on race talk in schools (Pollock, 2004), and rather skirted various boundaries of racial categorization for a variety of purposes. These students are not untouched by what anthropologist John Jackson calls the “racial paranoia” (2010) governing the sanitized, politically correct speech of the 21st century, but engage it as a live-wire topic for the purposes of comedy, classroom positioning, and the like (cf., Reyes, 2009). This became particularly relevant in my recordings of their interactions with me as a White researcher—race talk amongst the boys and their classmates, including the jovial jostling around racial categories, was often met with a cautious aside to the group with something akin to “You shouldn’t say that in front of Mr. Robert” The boys were aware of the politics of politically correct speech (notably amongst a White listening audience) and occasionally policed themselves in light of this circulating trope (cf., Arman, 2018). Prevalent amongst their everyday peer talk, almost exclusively “backstage” and out of teacher earshot, were both racial categorizations and what Rampton

Institutional Rituals 53 (1999) and others call “crossing”: “speaking the other” (Arman, 2018) through the stylized performance of non-habitual speech (or speech perceived as nonhabitual) in a manner that ran the risk of transgressing racial or ethnic boundaries.2 This concern with transgression provokes concerns about legitimacy (who are you to stylize this speech form indexical of this ethnic group?) but equally can function to disrupt hegemonic conceptions of one-to-one language-ethnicity ideologies (Rampton, 1999). These moments of race talk were also frequently comingled with religious categorization (LeBlanc, 2017), highlighting religious and racial differences in the school along Catholic/non-Catholic, immigrant/ African American lines. Most common in my audio data corpus was “Mock Chinese” (the boys’ framing) (Reyes, 2009) amongst the Vietnamese adolescents, often characterologically associated with the figure of a bumbling older man or “Fresh Off the Boat”/”FOB”; Talmy, 2009—a form which was particularly distant from their own everyday speech. However, a number of other stylized forms arose that were part of the students’ general repertoires. For example, JP, a Vietnamese American Catholic student, suggested that his own contemporary urban vernacular (Rampton, 2013) was influenced by his peer affiliations with African American youth, offering an iconic example of his stylized performances. Robert: Do:o you speak in a particular way because you’re from Philadelphia? Or (1.1) because of the particular community you’re from? JP: Yes Robert: Sa::ay more about that JP: Some would say I’m ghetto I don’t think I’m ghetto becausThey say that because I hang around with (.) like (.) black people So I think they think I was influenced by them if I’m talking ghetto Robert: So what kinds of things do you say that make people think you talk ghetto? JP: Yo da:awg==Whatch you doin? Stuff like that Stylization and crossing were common amongst these boys and these linguistic resources and distinct ways of speaking were put to use to perform “locally recognizable identities” (Shankar, 2011, p. 12). In the previous example, JP is able to trace his linguistic stylizations to distinct trajectories amongst his peer affiliations and categorize that stylization via a range of stereotypical forms and lexical items (“Yo da:awg=”). But equally he points to (and contributes to) negative associations indexed locally by those forms (“talking ghetto”, which JP eschews at least as a hardened personal identity, claiming “I don’t think I’m ghetto”). Crossing and stylization are frequently policed, stereotyped, and regimented by a shifting cadre of interlocutors (“Some would say”), meaning each stylization takes place in a series of overlapping chronotopes that organize the indexicality of various orders of discourse, including fleeting performances of stereotypical resources, by blending space

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(“Philadelphia”, “ghetto”) and time (“I hang around with (.) like (.) black people”). As Rampton (2009) notes, crossing and the stylization of non-habitual speech across boundaries of race and ethnicity can be risky for the speaker (and the listener); performative stylizations have the potential to provoke questions of authority (by what right?). In face-to-face communication, there is always a chance that this social exchange could go wrong, that one could cross the wrong boundary or misread the norms of the emerging context. Consequently, speakers take on a range of strategies to mitigate, hedge, and distance themselves in these kinds of interactions.

Central Concepts Footing, Keying, Voicing When we voice another speaker—for example, “Johnny told his boss, ‘Take this job and shove it’”—we do so within the ongoing stream of an utterance. Goffman (1981) calls this complex organization “footing,” indicating the participants’ “alignment, or set, or stance, or posture, or projected self ” (p. 128) with regards to the voice, style, or register animated in the moment. These shifts in footing are indicated by all kinds of markers, including tone, register, posture, volume, deixis, and pitch reset. We can equally indicate to listeners that they should take this shift in footing “differently” through what Goffman (1974) calls “keys”—wherein one activity is “transformed into something patterned on this activity by the participants to be something quite else” (p. 44). In doing so, we can indicate our alignment as to the text/utterance/register/style that we animate. For example, I can indicate my footing regarding an utterance, a voice, or a practice by framing it ironically, humorously, ceremonially, demonstrably, and so on (as the punchline to a joke—“He turns to his boss and says, ‘Take this job and shove it’” *uproarious laughter from listeners). I can key an utterance or practice as something “special,” as make believe, as drama, or as play. In doing so, I indicate that this is now a special non-normative frame, which allows some of the usual conversational rules to be put in brackets, if only momentarily. Goffman’s conceptual apparatus helps link linguistic registers with changes in footing (Agha, 2005). Registers are bundles of recognizable semiotic signs that are bound together with stereotypical images, characters, and voices, such that they are indicators of figures of personhood at various levels of specificity: one can offer voices of contrastive individualism (a different speaker), biography (a specific individual), and social characterization (broadly circulating social types like lawyers or priests). Voices, then, “are not attributes of persons but entextualized figures of personhood” (Agha, 2005, p. 43). When we hear a voice in action, we hear it as a social and recognizable voice based on a range of complicated processes, including our own social trajectories. This makes characterological representation possible: “When the social life of such figures is mediated through speech stereotypes”, Agha continues, “any animator can

Institutional Rituals 55 inhabit that figure by uttering the form” (p. 177). Speakers can stylistically perform familiar characters (enregistered voices) through stereotypical linguistic forms, including well-trodden characters such as “out-of-touch Ivory tower academic” or “ditsy California Valley Girl” (Bucholtz, 2010). These become resources that can be deployed interactively. Interpersonal Ritual Central to this chapter is Goffman’s (1971) notion of “interpersonal verbal ritual”, the small-scale, everyday, habituated practices with which we engage one another in face-to-face encounters. Commonly, we can think of the quotidian, and often perfunctory, verbal rituals of greetings and leaving, which Goffman characterizes broadly as being contained within “a special class of quite conventionalised utterances, lexicalisations whose controlling purpose is to give praise, blame, thanks, support, affection or show gratitude, disapproval, dislike, sympathy”, etc. (1981, pp. 20–21). Importantly, Goffman notes that these tend to arise because we treat each other as being in “possession of a small patrimony of sacredness” (1971, p. 89) in face-to-face interaction, “sacredness” that is continually at risk through our ongoing, real-time social relations: “When individuals come into one another’s immediate presence”, Goffman (1971) cautions, “territories of the self bring to the scene a vast filigree of wires which individuals are uniquely equipped to trip over” (1971, pp. 135–136). We may at any moment offend, blunder into a faux pas, or create embarrassment, and interpersonal ritual comes to the fore to provide conventionalized interaction, notably in situations of potential uncertainty or fraught interpersonal relations. “[M]oments of jeopardy”, Goffman suggests, “intensify the need for participants to display regard for the relations on hand and social order more generally” (p. 126) by turning to formalized ritualistic properties of interaction. Because the intention of these interactional rituals is fundamentally restorative, the reestablishment of predictable social relations, “[p]art of the force of these speech acts comes from the feelings they directly index; little of the force derives from the semantic content of the words” (Goffman, 1981, p. 20). The focus is on the ritual action itself, not the parsing of the particular words, conventional as they are from other spheres of social life. Rampton’s (2006) work in the “Ashmead” neighborhood of London examining inter-cultural communication amongst multilingual adolescents has brought Goffman’s work to the present with regards to tenuous and fraught conversation, notably in moments of stylistic crossing. Most saliently for my own purposes, Rampton highlights how interpersonal ritual has a corrective capacity amongst youth, and emerges in his own data most commonly when (seeming) ethnic and racial boundaries have been crossed amongst speakers. Interpersonal ritual becomes defensive, then, moving to restore what was tentatively disrupted: “Interaction ritual actions are evasive or redressive, aimed at preserving or restoring normal relations, re-stabilising rather than de-stabilising the ordinary world” (Rampton, 2009, p. 9, original emphasis). In these kinds of fraught moments,

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Rampton continues, “people generally amplify the symbolic dimensions of their conduct, shifting briefly away from the appropriately modulated/hedged production of propositional utterances geared to truth and falsity” (p. 9). When our vast filigree of wires is tripped, notably in and amongst race talk, speakers turn to interpersonal rituals of a variety of kinds in order to restore face, pivoting the focus toward the form of talk that indicates deference, respect, and the harmonization of norms. For adolescents, often speaking to each other in the key of biting humor, riposte, and irony, these kinds of interpersonal rituals can be a valuable resource.

Negotiating Classrooms, Identities, Voices The deployment of linguistic resources, including stylizations that cross ethnic, racial, and institutional boundaries, comes with questions of appropriateness and rights—who are you to stylize this speech form that is indexical of this ethnic/religious/racial/institutional group? Such an approach recognizes that these resources exist within a contested field, over which different groups jockey for the right to status; in doing so, we demonstrate how categories relevant for the community (and beyond) become interactionally relevant. In light of Goffman’s framework on interpersonal ritual, what are the local linguistic resources the boys might have to spring themselves from relative social jeopardy? Animating Institutional Ritual as Interpersonal Ritual This leads us into understanding the creative appropriation of Catholic ritual by these boys in the everyday back-and-forth of the classroom: Catholic ritual as a habitually familiar linguistic resource that was nonetheless contested by age, office, and a series of circulating linguistic ideologies. The invocation of Catholic ritual idioms came to the fore in a lengthy classroom interaction amongst a group of six of the 8th Grade boys—four of whom were first- or second-generation Catholic immigrants from Mexican and Vietnamese families (Francisco was originally from Mexico, whereas Benny, JP, and Greg’s parents had all come to America in the fallout of the Vietnam War), one of whom identified as mixed-race African American/White (Gabriel), and one of whom identified as African American (Charles). The students were tasked by their teacher with a fairly standard classroom multimodal practice, taking words and turning them into a poster: reading the definitions of the Corporeal and Spiritual Works of Mercy (“feed the hungry; shelter the homeless, clothe the naked; visit the sick”, etc.) from their Religion textbook and to use an old Maryknoll magazine to make a collage of words and images that visually represent one of the Works. The task was loosely set (parameters from the teacher were minimal) and once the students were organized into groups the teacher exited, leaving only me as the adult (and researcher) in the room. In addition to needing to negotiate which Work of Mercy the group would focus on for their representation, the group also needed to decide what would be the various group roles

Institutional Rituals 57 (that is, who was leading this group and how would they determine roles once the Work is selected). This quickly turned into a jostling, relatively disorderly, but (originally) good-natured back-and-forth amongst the boys, each forwarding his own position: JP: Benny: Francisco: Greg: JP: Benny: Benny: JP: Greg: Benny: JP: Greg: JP: Greg: JP:

Cure the sick! Feed the hungry I got one [I got one I got one [ Just feed the hungry Feed the hungry (.) man Visit the sick! No::::o ((mock Chinese accent)3 Feed [da hungwe:::e [Feed the hungry! Visit (.) the (.) sick! ((to Francisco)) Francisco (.) agree with me Raise your hand for feed the hungry ((no hands raise)) Because you always think you’re the leader ((to JP)) And you’re not I’m not the leader! You a::::are ((coughing)) Cure the sick ((laughs)) Visit the sick (.) see? Raise your hand Raise (.) your (.) hand Visit the sick (.) nitwits!

Notice the number of interactional strategies at work—Greg asking for a democratic hand count before insisting that JP become the group leader, Francisco initiating a suggestion then remaining quiet when it falls on deaf ears, Benny contesting JP’s leadership, and JP forcefully repeating “Visit the sick” and going as far as to dramatically animate the downtrodden. And while this may “read” as hostile, it was clear in the moment that this entire interaction was being keyed as a game or verbal contest. The intense laughter, Benny fleetingly taking on the figure of a Chinese man through stylistic crossing, and JP literally inhabiting a character from the textbook all indicate shifts in footing toward this interaction as verbal sport, as theatrical, and as such orient the listeners to not take the exchange “seriously” and thus as unlikely to trip the “vast filigree of wires” (Goffman, 1971, p. 136). This is keeping with Rampton’s (2009) findings that crossing (styling the other) appeared most harmoniously within contexts of contests/games and “jocular abuse,” both of which invoked an “engrossing, nonroutine frame” wherein “a little bit of judiciously provocative crossing served to spice up the contest” (p. 157).

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This special interpretive frame for crossing continued as the interaction carried on for another ten minutes in this same manner, leading to increased frustration on the part of Greg and increased incidents of crossing and racial categorization: Raise your hand for alms giving What? Alms giving What is that? Give alms to the poor! You just said that’s donating money to the poor Robert: Alright Did you guys make a decision yet? Greg: I don’t know These guys are talking JP: Nacho::o (.) Libɹe::::eh! ((to Francisco in Mock Spanish accent))4 Come on! ((laughs)) Greg: Raise your hand for alms ((to group)) Giving alms to the poor Francisco: Jah-ka Cha::::ahn! ((“Jackie Chan”, to JP in Mock Asian accent)) Let’s [go] JP: [I’m working!] Okay (.) George (.) Loh-pez ((in Mock Spanish accent)) ((all laugh uproariously)) (3.4) Greg: Francisco: Greg: Francisco: Greg:

Francisco: Bruce Lee (.) come one Jet Li JP: ʁicaɹdo:::::o Loh-pe::::::ez Junior! Benny: Jah-ka Cha::ahn! ((Mock Asian accent)) JP: [Jet Li!] Francisco: [Jet Li] Benny: Jet Li with hair Greg: Jet Li’s dead! Francisco: No Greg: Yes he is Charles: He’s still alive Robert: Jet Li’s not dead JP: He’s in my body Greg: I thought he died from poison or something JP: He’s right here ((points to self)) Greg: Well Bruce Lee is dead That’s a fact

Institutional Rituals 59 JP: Greg:

Bruce Lee is [me] [Bruce] Lee dead (2.3)

We need to stop talking because the recorder is on We can see the continued mounting of the playful, crossing frame in this interaction, as the boys stylistically perform both the voices of the imagined “Others” (in this case, conflating the boys’ multigenerational Mexican and Vietnamese heritage with generic and broad linguistic performances) and associate them with the names of prominent Asian and Hispanic celebrities and imagined characters (Nacho Libre, Jet Li, Jacki Chan, George Lopez, “Ricardo Lopez”).5 The boys are not doing de facto impressions of these well-known characters, but rather invoking them in order to introduce further crossing, all seemingly to break the monotony of the class and the relative stalemate in the assignment. Regardless, and most notably here, we can see Greg’s invocation of the researcher and the researcher’s ubiquitous recorder toward the end of this excerpt—while the boys are clearly not beholden to the “racial paranoia” that Jackson (2010) suggests marks much contemporary talk, they are not unaware of the micro-politics of political correctness, notably in the presence of the researcher as the White listening subject. Greg appears aware that there is relative social “jeopardy” in racial categorization and crossing, and alerts the group to the potential tripwire they’re traversing. Using data from this chapter to characterize this kind of small group peer-talk in a classroom (amongst a White listener), we see it emerging as jostling and contestational verbal sport, drawing on local and widely circulating characterizations and language ideologies, which runs the risk at any moment of fraying broadly-circulating politically correct boundaries. Breaking the frame of “game” or “sport”—live-wire act as it is—contains the potential of threatening the “face” of the group or an individual (Goffman, 1967). This racial categorization and parodic riffing continues, this time invoking their African American classmate, Charles. Greg: Okay (.) visit the sick! Charles: Why can’t we feed them too? JP: Charles (.) Charles Shut up Greg: ((to JP)) You’re so mean to your brother JP: He’s African American I’m Asian Greg: So? Charles: I’m mixed I’m Asian and Black ((everyone bursts out laughing)) Greg: I have a Black cousin There’s Micah We both got messed up legs ((both Micah and Greg walk with a pronounced limp))

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Francisco: That doesn’t mean you’re cousins . . . ((3 turns elapse)) Greg: The recorder is on JP: Greg (.) he not gonna record you You don’t have anything interesting to say It is at this point that the interaction appears to take a turn, with all the interactional framing of “game” or verbal sparring turning down in their clarity: inthe-moment, we could see eye gazes suddenly averted, uncomfortable shifting in chairs, and other indicators of awkwardness. Charles had been relatively quiet for this entire interaction, and his only major contribution was immediately shut down. Goffman notes that a successful insult is one that manipulates the ritual order of the ongoing interaction so that at one level the stream of talk continues uninterrupted (Collins, 2005). But with Greg’s renewed and serious concern that the recorder is on sparking apologetic work through claims to racial solidarity, it is clear that this frame is fraying with JP’s insult. Along with ethnographically-generated observations—JP and Charles notoriously did not get along, while JP, Greg, Benny, and Francisco were all part of the same close friendship group—we can see both oppositional framing on the part of JP (defying “brotherhood” with “He’s African American/I’m Asian”) and Greg’s attempt at attenuating this oppositional framing by claiming his own (imagined) familial relations with an African American classmate outside the interaction. As the interaction continues, Greg again notes cautiously that the recorder is on, a warning to his classmates—not only were they traversing known racial boundaries, at least in the contemporary political milieu, but this may provoke a “moment of jeopardy” (Goffman, 1971, p. 126) that could both threaten the “face” of the group and the individual members. Further, Greg’s multiple insistences that they monitor their speech in the presence of my audio-recorder further reframes this interaction (or pulls on reframing it) away from “game”. At this point in the small group discussion, Greg attempts to turn the conversation back to choosing a Work of Mercy for the poster (the group is now 17 minutes into the activity without having yet come to a consensus on the topic), when JP and Greg separately invoke in body and word Catholic ritual, first as a blessing and then the act of contrition: ((JP reaches over to make the sign of the cross on his forehead)) Benny: JP (.) you have a girlfriend ((to JP)) You can’t be Father He has a girlfriend ((to Robert)) He can’t be Father Cause he just did something to Greg JP: I blessed him Benny: He was like ((makes small cross on forehead)) ((laughs)) Robert: He blessed him? ((to JP))

Institutional Rituals 61 Why did you bless him? JP: He’s annoying Greg: I’m not annoying Robert: So why did you bless him? ((to JP)) JP: I asked the Lord for patience not to choke him ((laughs)) The argument unresolved, the discussion over poster topic continues for another minute and a half, with continued exasperation on the part of the boys: ((Benny and JP arguing about poster topic—JP has chosen several photos he’d like to use if his topic is chosen)) JP: Oh::h my Go:::::od MotherfuBenny: Dude you got everything You have all of these guys ((points to magazine photos)) ((Greg laughs)) Greg: In the name of the Father (.) Son and Spirit (.) Amen ((crosses self and leans over to JP)) Bless me Father for I have sinned Benny: He’s filled with the devil Greg: Confess! Confess your sins ((laughing)) Confess your problems (.) JP Confess your problems (.) JP What is your problem? ((giggling)) How to explain the sudden incorporation of Catholic blessing and confessional ritual text, embodied and performative, in the (parodic) ecclesiastical voice of a Catholic priest (“Father”) in the midst of this classroom interaction? Both the blessing and the opening words of the act of contrition fit together as some of the formalized text of the Catholic ritual confession. Ritual confession is, in Goffman’s (1971) parlance, a “tie-sign,” in the same manner as rituals of birth, marriage, and death, which indicate a change or establishment of a relationship (married, forgiven, etc.). Tie-signs have resonance with Austin’s speech acts, and in both the previous examples the uttering/action is the action itself (“I absolve you of your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”). Within the (presupposed) actual act of ritual contrition, a second co-present individual is needed (a priest or a confessee), making this a dialogic ritual practice. Baquedano-Lopez (2008) has described this particular ritual as a “second-order indexical,” as the animator (priest) speaking longcodified words takes on responsibility for the words as principal in real time, in part through embodied co-present practice (physically touching foreheads with blessing, crossing self with hands, etc.) in real time; that is, these words indexically linked to the register of abstract priest and confessor providing inhabitable

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roles for the immediate priest and confessor. But in our situation, the specific moment of the act of contrition is pulled into another indexical grounding of the classroom, still offering inhabitable roles but this time in parody (which only works because these words have been enregistered previously as ritualistic and indexical of the Catholic church). But in what key are these being uttered? While these are indeed artful performances (Rampton, 2009) of non-habitual stylistic resources, dragged from the realm of solemnity into the light of the classroom and all the parodic overlay available, they are equally performed as a response to an exigency of “face”. But whose face? These words are not being animated to and for Charles, who drops out of the field of reference despite seemingly being the wronged party in the previous interaction—rather, the boys perform them to one another in reference to general group frustration with the immediate task, the precarious nature of crossing, and the mounting instability of the group’s “vast filigree of wires” made only the more tentative by my presence. Keys are the systematic transformation of familiar (Goffman, 1974), already meaningful semiotic materials into something different via conventionally available cues. Both JP and Greg make it clear that they are keying this nonnormatively, putting the normal rules of the ritual into brackets: JP “asked the Lord for patience not to choke him,” Greg laughs uproariously throughout the interaction, and these are all set far from the hallowed confines of a confessional booth. But these still function as interaction ritual, an institutional ritual of the Catholic church, in this case parodically re-keyed: while the “systematic transformation that a particular keying introduces may alter only slightly the activity thus transformed,” Goffman (1974) offers and which we see at work in the relative fidelity to the previous institutional ritual words by the boys, “it utterly changes what it is a participant would say is going on” (p. 45). And where Goffman imagines as an example a marriage ritual keyed as it appears on the stage of a theater, we can see here Catholic ritual keyed as something non-normative, the expected status momentarily bracketed, for the sake of interpersonal ritual. Ritual expression makes “crossing and stylization acceptable by constructing them as urgent responses” (Rampton, 2009, p. 150); formally, Rampton continues, “The symbols invoked have to be conventional enough for the recipients to recognize their communality, but their raison d’etre lies in the immediacy for their exophoric ties to whatever’s just transpired” (p. 163). So where we might see JP and Greg’s performance of ritual confession as exonerating the other from the frustration, cursing, racial categorization, and inter-ethnic crossing (all heightened by the presence of a White listener with a recorder on—Rosa & Flores, 2017), the keying through laughter and play makes this less serious exculpation and rather orients us to the ritual-qua-ritual: “It is by invoking relatively well established material associated with (local or quite general) tradition,” Rampton (2009) suggests, that students might “display an orientation to perduring social bonds and collectives capable of overriding the temporary disturbance immediately on hand” (p. 160). Performing Catholic ritual, well-established

Institutional Rituals 63 material in this community if anything was, following face-threatening interactions functions to re-set the exchange, and re-keys the Catholic confessional ritual as something attending to the momentary (potential) social rupture by reestablishing long-standing social bonds between the boys, notably social bonds forged by years in the Catholic church.

Conclusions In these interactions, we see Catholic ritual as a potential bundle of interactional resources, and in these cases, mobilized as redressive strategies for classroom talk—institutional ritual as interpersonal verbal ritual in a moment of (relative) social jeopardy. In pivoting our footing, we imply “a change in the alignment we take up to ourselves and the others present” (Goffman, 1981, p. 128), marking the boys’ pivot in footing from high-wire jocular racial stylization and crossing to potentially contentious (and politically incorrect in light of the recording audience) speech to the performance of the institutional ritual of the Catholic church as a series of alignment changes to each other. Theorizing Goffman’s interaction ritual as able to contain long-standing institutional rituals means we might envision other institutional rituals as equally available resources for redressing small-scale social jeopardies that arise during interaction—no longer “generic” interpersonal ritual, but specific resources circulating at multiple spatiotemporal scales and within different communities. When standard protocols of “face” and larger-scaled political ideologies about conversation violate the ritual order of the encounter, it is “apologies, which are part of the flow of deference rituals in conversation”, which can restore “ritual equilibrium” to the interaction” (Collins, 2005, p. 25). As ELA teachers and researchers of ELA education, we know that the contemporary classroom is marked by live-wire speech and discussion—overlapping, jostling, filled with talk which can and regularly does trip the vast filigree of wires we all possess (LeBlanc, 2017; Reyes, 2009; Talmy, 2009). And where standard apologies have their own ritualistic quality to them (form-focused rather than meaningfocused), we can see in these interactions the boys laminating Catholic ritual apologies into their day-to-day classroom interactions in a bid to restore the ritual equilibrium of the “game” frame of the talk. Thinking about our own classrooms or contexts of research—Catholic, secular, or otherwise—we may look to moments of social jeopardy and investigate what redressive strategies students have at their disposal. What all this points to, at least via the micro- and macro-sociological literature of the contemporary age (cf., Collins, 2005; Giddens, 1998), is the relative fraying of traditional boundaries and the opening up of linguistic resources— not the neat mapping of register to institutional practice, of language to ethnicity, of standard politeness norms to classroom talk, but the pluralization of linguistic resources for a range of purposes (Rampton, 2006). Students can take advantage of this instability, using a range of stylizations and registers reflexively and creatively for classroom-level work. In doing so, they help transform

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the religious institution and all of its associated rituals into a set of interactional assets for the classroom.

Notes 1. All names are pseudonyms. 2. Crossing, in Rampton’s (1999) framing, is the “ways in which people use language and dialect in discursive practice to appropriate, explore, reproduce or challenge influential images and stereotypes of groups that they themselves don’t (straightforwardly) belong to” (p. 421). 3. For the phonological, lexical, and syntactic feature of Mock Asian, see Chun (2009). In the current case of Benny and (later) Francisco, features of their stylization of Mock Asian include final syllable lengthening (“Cha::::ahn”), neutralizations of the phonemic distinction between /r/ and /w/ (“hungwe:::e” rather than “hungry”), indental alveolorization (“da” rather than “the”), and explosive stressed syllables. 4. JP’s multiple attempts at Mock Spanish alveolar rhotic consonants are indicated by the /ɹ/ 5. It is not clear if JP is referring to Ricardo Lopez, the Mexican boxer and WBO champion, or simply riffing on his previous reference to well-known American comedian George Lopez by combining it with Francisco’s occasional nickname at the school, “Ricardo” (the origins of which were never explained to me).

References Agha, A. (2005). Voice, footing, and enregisterment. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15(1), 38–59. Arman, H. (2018). Speaking “the other”?: Youth’s regimentation and policing of contemporary urban vernacular. Language & Communication, 58(1), 47–61. Baquedano-Lopez, P. (2008). The pragmatics of reading prayer: Learning the Act of Contrition in Spanish-based religious education classes (doctrina). Text & Talk, 28(5), 581–602. Bucholtz, M. (2010). White kids: Language, race, and styles of youth identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Campano, G., Ghiso, M. P., & Welch, B. (2016). Partnering with immigrant communities. New York: Teachers College Press. Chun, E. (2009). Ideologies of legitimate mockery. In A. Reyes & A. Lo (Eds.), Beyond yellow English: Toward a linguistic anthropology of Asian Pacific America (pp. 261–287). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Collins, R. (2005). Interaction ritual chains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Giddens, A. (1998). Post-traditional civil society and the radical center. New Perspective Quarterly, 15(2), 14–20. Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual. New York: Doubleday. Goffman, E. (1971). Relations in public: Microstudies of the public order. Reading/Fakenham, UK: Penguin Books. Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. New York: Harper. Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Irvine, J. T. (1979). Formality and informality in communicative events. American Anthropologist, 81(4), 773–790. Jackson, J. (2010). Racial paranoia. New York: Civitas.

Institutional Rituals 65 LeBlanc, R. J. (2017). Interactional order, moral order: Classroom interactions and the institutional production of identities. Linguistics and Education, 40(1), 27–37. LeBlanc, R. J. (2018). Those who know and are known: Students using ethnography to interrogate language and literacy ideologies. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 61(5), 489–499. Louie, V., & Holdaway, J. (2009). Catholic schools and immigrant students: A new generation. Teachers College Record, 111(3), 783–816. Pollock, M. (2004). Colormute: Race talk dilemmas in an American school. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rampton, B. (1999). Styling the other. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 3(4), 421–427. Rampton, B. (2006). Language in late modernity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rampton, B. (2009). Interaction ritual and not just artful performance in crossing and stylization. Language in Society, 38(2), 146–176. Rampton, B. (2013). Language, social categories, and interaction. Tilburg Papers in Cultural Studies, Paper, 47, 1–9. Reyes, A. (2005). Appropriation of African American slang by Asian American youth. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 9(4), 509–532. Reyes, A. (2009). Asian American stereotypes as circulating resource. In A. Reyes & A. Lo (Eds.), Beyond yellow English: Toward a linguistic anthropology of Asian Pacific America (pp. 43–62). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Reyes, A. (2011). “Racist!”: Metapragmatic regimentation of racist discourse by Asian American youth. Discourse & Society, 22(4), 458–473. Rosa, J., & Flores, N. (2017). Do you hear what I hear? Raciolinguistic ideologies and culturally sustaining pedagogies. In D. Paris & H. S. Alim (Eds.), Culturally sustaining pedagogies (pp. 175–190). New York: TC Press. Shankar, S. (2011). Asian American youth language use: Perspectives across schools and communities. Review of Research in Education, 35(1), 1–28. Talmy, S. (2009). Forever FOB? Resisting and reproducing the other in high school ESL. In A. Reyes & A. Lo (Eds.), Beyond yellow English: Toward a linguistic anthropology of Asian Pacific America (pp. 347–365). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Section II

Purity Making Present the Stranger Kevin J. Burke Western, Christian religious formulations of purity flow, initially, from Jewish purity laws “developed and systematized in ancient Judaism during exile” as a way to “re-establish . . . identity over against the foreign cultures and cults among which Israel was forced to dwell” (Cahill, 1996, p. 133). Because purity “societies” “are organized around polarized categories of pure and impure, clean and unclean” (p. 129) they are inherently concerned with the policing of intimate contact: the points at which boundaries between self and world come under threat of transgression. They are also, of course, fundamentally concerned with creating in-group solidarity—and out-group exclusion. The juridical in this case, then, forms around “caste, behavior, social position, and physical condition” (p. 129). Modern Christian conceptualizations of purity emerged, out of this long Judaic tradition, through later documents known as the Penitentials “which flourished in ecclesiastical use from about the sixth to the twelfth century C.E.” These documents were “designed to help confessors in their pastoral dealings with penitents in confession, providing lists of sins and corresponding penances” (Salzman & Lawler, 2008, p. 33). More than lists, however, the Penitentials were moral pedagogical documents—the first character education curriculum(!)—that codified much of the subsequent Western understanding of sexual impurity and sin. The point in tracing this too-brief history is to suggest, in concert with Jarvie’s treatment of myth in this section, that vital possibility for rethinking conceptions of purity in English language arts are missed when we pass over (ahem) their religious progenitors. Arguments, then, against standardization, might be strengthened through a consideration of the long and deep links between sinfulness and incomplete attention to proper rule following. Jarvie argues “that a renewed interest in the myths of English as a school subject may help us ‘not to inquire into the operations of nature’ but instead to ‘draw a circumference around a human community and look inward toward that community.’” Which is to say that advocacy for a student’s right to their own language, as has come in many different ways (e.g. NCTE, 1974; Smitherman, 2006; Paris & Alim, 2018), would be well enriched by looking back at the initial roots, the founding religious mythos, for why such arguments continue to need to be made.

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Notions of purity have shaped English as a school subject since its inception. Given the ways in which the other is created in purity cultures through policing of difference, critical work rethinking orientations to a curriculum of the pure and impure must revisit fundamental questions of relationship. “The key question in curriculum theorizing” the late James Macdonald suggested, is rather simply, “How shall we live together?” (in Pinar, 1995, p. 8). In answering that question, Macdonald came to view (1995) curriculum theorizing as a prayerful act embedded in “an expression of the humanistic vision of life” (p. 181) where theorizing in general, in education, “is an act of faith, a religious act” (p. 181). In order to live together, of course, we must have faith in the best intentions of others who, in essence, make us precarious (Butler, 2010) by their very existence; this situation is, of course, reciprocal. And when that faith is broken—when ill intent and structural forces conspire toward a maldistribution of precarity—the work of theory is to make conditions livable again through a direct challenge to entrenched power. I have written elsewhere, and with colleagues, about the ways in which any educational action in the United States, because of its deep ongoing embeddedness in Christian histories and discourses, is in ways we might consider similar to, but different from Macdonald’s construction, a religious act (e.g. Burke & Segall, 2017). What’s suggested, anew, in the chapters in this section, is the possibility of engaging, of theorizing, amidst notions of religiously inflected purity in the study and teaching of the English language arts. Take the works here, then, as small prayers for a different politics of living together in the world; as challenges to the terrible power of the unjust status quo. The argument for this jumble of chapters about seemingly disparate topics, written in beautifully discordant styles, runs through a drive toward certain underconsidered—at least until now—notions of religious purity undergirding ongoing realities in English language arts classrooms and policy in the United States. And so, the linguistic chauvinism that Stone, Mack, Holley-Kline, and Hoback chronicle during White missionary colonization of Alaska; the deepseated racism of Catholic religious orders in the United States to which Neville attends; Jarvie’s work around the persistent mythologizing of standard language ideology and the rationality of static grammar instruction; and Straayer-Gannon’s analysis of the digital literacy practices of young Evangelical women creating and erasing possibility for themselves, are all linked through a religious conceptualization of the value of purity. What, each chapter asks, might we do differently to change the calculus that might make our living together more humane and differently possible? Because “myths are always present in every act of faith, because the language of faith is the symbol” (Tillich, 1957, p. 56) we engage here in the challenge of rebutting myths of purity which rely on a faith in codification of human conduct—for the sake of constructing a chastened, well-controlled people— long ignored in English language arts scholarship. Stone et. al attend to missionary work in Alaska in the 19th and early 20th centuries chronicling official and unofficial English-only educational policy, its manifestations and local resistance

Purity 69 to its uptake. This story, long told through Carlyle-school style eradication of Native language and custom, speaks of a need to produce purity through linguistic imperialism: impose the right version of the right language and whitewash a rich past, a vital future. Resistance to the purification—the whitening of Native people—however “allowed Alaska Native languages to persist in spite of suppressive policies and practices”. Missionary zeal dissipated against the breakwall of refusal, pedagogical sabotage, and the will of the people. Neville’s work is different but of a piece and requires a mote of self-disclosure here. She writes of racist outbursts in US Catholic schools—those made most public in any event—and particularly notes an event that occurred recently where White Marist High School students from Chicago spread bigoted vitriol via text. I am a graduate of Marist. I’m a product of the culture that produced and produces such a discourse; indeed, the modern American skinhead movement began in a neighborhood adjacent to the one I grew up in. The maintenance of pure, white spaces in modern Catholic schools is something that remains woefully underreported. Neville covers vital ground here, then, attending to Black women religious and their exclusion from Catholic orders under an historical—but clearly ongoing as manifest in the incidents she foregrounds at the start of the chapter—discourse rooted in blood quantums and the myth of biological race. She sees a way out through pedagogy and outlines a different way we might be together, spurred on by activist English language arts classrooms that are Catholic and, ideally, catholic as well. Straayer-Gannon takes up an examination of Evangelical sexual mythmaking centered on control of women’s sexuality, seen through the lens of young women composing (themselves, their lives) on Pinterest. She notes that the literacy technology of Pinterest allowed a space for young girls, subject to a curriculum that made their sexuality into a literal commodity—five gems to be guarded until marriage—to dream in constrained ways about a future explicitly tied to wedding and family plans. Along the way the girls walk a tightrope of an idealized future whose goal is always, ultimately, about finding a husband who can stand in for Jesus, as a way to save them from falling into concupiscence. The girls, however, focus on a middle distance and dream of weddings in Pinterest spaces, for the event itself is easier to fathom than a lifetime subject to the harsh realities of constraint that color women’s lives in the culture. Girls must remain pure looking toward an idealized future until their mothers and leaders of youth groups who monitor their Pinterest sites come to reign in their dreams with the muddled pragmatism of financial constraints and future-modest-kitchen concepts. Life, it seems, really isn’t about gems and marrying Jesus, but for women in this culture, it’s about settling for a life of Formica. Lohfink (2012) in a reframing of the Jesus narrative—and in careful rebuttal to long-standing supersessionist anti-Semitic interpretations in Christian circles (Carroll, 2001)—suggests that Jesus’ response to contemporary Jewish purity laws was to “appeal to God’s creative will” such that “if the world and everything in it is made good” then “uncleanness . . . comes about always and only through the evil that emerges from human hearts” (p. 211). Social constructions

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of purity of language, of race, of gender and sexuality, these emerge unclean solely through the ill-intent of human hearts. They rend the world in ways that make living together explicitly, and purposely, impossible. The chapters in this section imagine a world otherwise, remaking a new mythology through which to understand English language arts.

References Burke, K. J., & Segall, A. (2017). Christian privilege in US education: Legacies and current issues. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (2010). Frames of war: When is life grievable? New York: Verso. Cahill, L. S. (1996). Sex, gender & Christian ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carroll, J. (2001). Constantine’s sword: The church and the Jews. New York: Mariner Books. Lohfink, G. (2012). Jesus of Nazareth: What he wanted, who he was (L. M. Maloney, Trans.). Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press. Macdonald, J. B. (1995). Theory as a prayerful act: The collected essays of James B. Macdonald (B. J. Macdonald, Ed.). New York: Peter Lang. National Council of Teachers of English. (1974). NCTE Resolution #74.2. Urbana, IL: NCTE. Tillich, P. (1957). Dynamics of faith. New York: HarperCollins. Pinar, W. F. (1995). Introduction. In B. J. Macdonald (Ed.), Theory as a prayerful act: The collected essays of James B. Macdonald (pp. 1–14). New York: Peter Lang. Salzman, T. A., & Lawler, M. G. (2008). The sexual person: Toward a renewed catholic anthropology. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Smitherman, G. (2006). Word from the mother: Language and African Americans. New York: Routledge.

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Myth and Christian Reading Practice in English Teaching Scott Jarvie

In a memorable passage from the novel Gilead (2006), author Marilynne Robinson ponders how a particular experience might be read as a moment from a myth, and in doing so she understands it as worth attending to: There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn’t. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. . . . I wish I had paid more attention to it. My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it. (27–28) That is, she ascribes mythic qualities to experiences of special—and for the avowedly Calvinist Robinson, sacred—significance in the daily goings-on of our worlds. The poet Alison Rollins (2017), meanwhile, describes her own work as that of “a finch weaving myth into a nested crown of logic”, taking up myth in order to destabilize the certainties by which we operate on a day-to-day basis. In this chapter I identify myths which hold special significance in English classrooms, and, in doing so, weave them into the otherwise conventional, wellnested, even imperial logics of English as a school subject. As such, I’m interested in the questions: What are the myths—understood as narratives that have specific functions in our communities—that shape curricula and practices in English classrooms? Where might these myths come from, and more importantly, where do they take us? What do they do? What do they make possible (and not) in the daily work of teaching and learning English? I argue that a renewed interest in the myths of English as a school subject may help us “not to inquire into the operations of nature” but instead to “draw a circumference around a human community and look inward toward that community” (Frye, 1990, p. 55). In particular, I identify two myths which I feel have come to shape

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the community of English teaching: one associated with language and its functions, and another with the teaching of grammar. Viewing these concepts as myths might be used as a rebuttal, I think, to a kind of textual fundamentalism or literalism championed by the Common Core standards and other current education reform efforts in the U.S., modes of reading that have their roots in particular Christian reading practices that need more attention. Thinking through and with myth may help educators respond to and resist the narrowing of English pedagogy and curriculum pushed by much current education reform.

Framing Myth In taking up notions of myth, I draw on the work of literary critic Northrup Frye (1990), who summarizes his view of myth as: Primarily a mythos, a story, a narrative, a plot, or in general the sequential ordering of words . . . with a specific social function . . . myths grow out of a specific society and transmit a cultural heritage of shared allusion. We may call the myth a verbal temenos, a circle drawn around a sacred or numinous area. (p. 238) Importantly, I (and Frye) do not invoke myth and ascribe it to certain contexts (i.e., English teaching) in order to falsify or delegitimize the work being done there (as in the colloquial usage, “Oh, that’s just a myth”). Rather, I understand all contexts discursively, as made up of highly trafficked myths of varying social import. Although these myths emerge from and overlap with many traditions, both religious and secular, Frye’s theorizing is especially concerned with Biblical notions of myth. For him myths “are the stories that tell a society what is important for it to know. They thus become sacred . . . and form part of what the Biblical tradition calls revelation” (p. 50–51). The myths I’m interested in with respect to English teaching, particularly in the U.S., reflect approaches to reading of a particular literalist Christian nature; I argue that they need to be understood as such (as a part of that particular tradition) so that they can be best addressed. Seeking out, identifying, and critiquing English teaching as myth offers a conceptual intervention in the status quo: myths are narratives with histories that persist and continue into the present, and it’s this continuation that makes them generative. Barthes (2013) explains as much, arguing that myths have a social history, and are in that sense unnatural, though they operate by naturalizing. Identifying and considering myth offers a form of critique that exposes the implicit, the assumed, the essential, the normal, or the natural in the ways we’ve come to think of teaching English—myths I’ll argue are part of the historic and ongoing Christian privilege (Burke & Segall, 2017) in U.S. schooling—as rather unnatural, socially conditioned, and historically produced.

Myth and Christian Reading Practice 73 What the term “myth” importantly offers that is not accomplished by using words like “assumption” or “discourse”, is that it frames English teaching in terms of larger narratives which hold special importance to a community, as part of a broader cosmology that spans past, present, and future. Frye (2006) identifies two characteristics of myths which distinguish them from other narratives: (1) myths relate to one another and take place as part of a larger mythology; (2) they delineate and refer to a specific segment of culture, distinguishing it from others. (p. 52). In what follows, I’ll make a case that the relation between the two myths I identify are reflective of a particular set of Christian reading practices; and further, that these myths outline major areas of the field of English teaching. My work in this chapter, then, emerges from and contributes to a body of “resacralizing scholarship” (Davie, 2010; Wexler, 2013) that “grapples with the existence (reemergence if you like) of the religious in supposedly secular spaces” (Burke & Segall, 2015, p. 87). Such work points to the founding Protestant myth of English as a subject in U.S. schools: that literacy, and its teaching, is necessary for children’s salvation, as they need to be able to personally encounter Jesus in the Bible through reading (Brass, 2011). This myth serves as a starting point for a larger consideration of the ways Christianity broadly and Protestantism in particular has historically shaped and continues to shape American public schooling. I’ll argue, then, that, following Burke and Segall (2017), the myths of English teaching are of a piece with reading practices of a particularly Christian nature—they treat language and grammar in fundamentally Christian ways.1 I argue that these myths engender what Burke and Segall have identified as Christian reading practices that might be thought otherwise. Yet English teaching and the research which undergirds it has historically sought to demystify (and demythify) the field, positioning its relation to myth antagonistically. The work of Goody and Watt (1963) provides an example here. Their anthropological study looking at the history of the development of literacy sought to assert what’s “intrinsic in human communication” (p. 306). That purpose extends an older project, dating as early as Hinsdale’s seminal study (Hinsdale & Tarney-Campbell, 1897), whose purpose was to ground the teaching of reading and writing in the fundamental facts of human nature. Goody and Watt (1963) describe their own work as “the replacement of myth with history; . . . historia in the Greek sense, meaning ‘inquiry,’ can be viewed much more broadly as an attempt to determine reality in every area of human concern” (p. 326). The scope and nature of their framing of what reading, writing, and the teaching of both can do, then, problematizes the uncertainty of myth as a way of thinking about literacy.2 In this vein, I embrace theoretical considerations of myth in English teaching research. Additionally, I draw from Burke and Segall’s (2017) notions of Christian reading practices as undergirding standardized approaches to English curriculum in order to situate these myths within the present moment in U.S. schools.

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It’s probably useful then to quickly delineate what I’m interested in when I think about myths in the context of the field of English teaching today, bearing in mind that any such cordoning off is undoubtedly fraught with problematic limitations and conspicuous exclusions. My analysis focuses on myths of linguistic and grammatical instruction, which cut across the traditional domains of English teaching (reading, writing, speaking) as well as recent curricular expansions towards media literacy, and new and multi-literacies (New London Group, 1996). Although there are doubtless other myths we might consider, I believe these particular areas have done much to occupy conversation in English teaching and scholarship, and thus are worth working through, through the lens of myth, for how they might help us understand where the field has been and where it may yet go.

Identifying and Weaving Myths Into English Teaching In the sections that follow I turn to two specific myths I identify in prominent understandings of English teaching; in doing so I weave them into these understandings of English teaching as myths, reading them mythically as narratives that serve social functions in the communities of English teaching and scholarship. Such narratives, understood as myths, are rendered uncertain, and thus might yet be thought or interpreted differently. I do this work so that I might eventually consider in the section that follows how both myths are reflective of particular fundamentalist Christian reading practices, which operate to narrow engagement with reading and which, again, might be thought helpful otherwise. The Language Myth The first myth I’ll consider is a language myth: that language functions as a conduit for meaning, transmitting a message from A to B intact. Understanding this notion through a lensing of myth provides a conceptual frame which may help scholars in English Education engage and reckon with what is by now a very old problem in English. The problem of the instability of language, which prompted the linguistic turn in philosophy, literary criticism and theory, engages the notion that “there is nothing outside text” (Derrida, 2016, p. 158) and thus that we must work with/in language despite its fundamental shortcomings. Post-structural scholars took seriously the idea that language may never be depended upon as a fixed, stable, and certain medium for transmitting meaning. For them, rather, “it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say” (Foucault, 1994, p. 9); there is no “pure signified” (Derrida, 1997, p. 159) that lies “behind” or “beyond” words. Language after this turn is understood as inherently suspect and uncertain. Yet we don’t necessarily need myth here in order to talk about the problem of language. What I understand myth offering to this conversation, that is different from, say, “discourse”, is a way of thinking about how the narrative that language works has been naturalized, has become a narrative of peculiar (I’ll argue,

Myth and Christian Reading Practice 75 religious) significance to the community of English teaching writ large. That is, language acquires a sacred quality which can make it difficult to doubt—words being, well, the Word. This offers an explanation for why this language myth persists despite the linguistic turn which undermines it: (1) it itself undergirds the foundation of English teaching which makes the work as we understand it possible; (2) it is also part of a larger mythology that constitutes the subject. Thus, we might extrapolate from that language myth other myths: for example, the myth that a literary text has a single meaning that students should get out of it, one implicit in much of the framing of, and emphasis on, particular kinds of close reading in the Common Core standards. Pointing out that language operates as a myth in this way is hardly novel, I know; what may be novel are the implications of seeing the language myth as myth: namely, that the myth persists in order to serve the interests of a certain community (English teachers, scholars, and teacher educators, i.e., all of us) who necessarily depend on language to do our work. Understood as mythical narrative, this language myth might yet be thought otherwise. The alternative is to decouple language from this myth, understanding it as something other than working to transmit meaning intact and with certainty. For Toni Morrison (1993), the impulse that language can be mastered is the heart of the problem: Sexist language, racist language, theistic [emphasis added] language—all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas . . . Language can never “pin down” slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable. In other words, for Morrison a critical approach to language embraces its radical uncertainty, this less an intellectual move than an ethical one. Bingham (2011) helps here, suggesting a move towards the poetic as a way of responding to the problem of language. He notes in envisioning two educational ideas for the future (new myths, perhaps) that it is generally assumed in schools that language works on the “sender-receiver model”, conveying meaning from one student to another. Following from this, the educator’s job is to deliver curriculum to the student through language. This reflects a “deep belief in the organization and delivery of knowledge—in the form of curriculum, through the medium of language”. (p. 515). It is to that organization and delivery of knowledge through language that I turn next, considering how this language myth inheres within approaches to grammar as part of a larger mythology of English teaching. The Grammar Myth I found it surprisingly hard to identify one particular myth with respect to grammar, which has been so thoroughly worked over in its controversy over the years at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) in the U.S. and

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elsewhere. As Doniger (2003) describes, controversy over the harm of grammar has raged for more than five decades now; he notes the persistent influence of the 1985 NCTE resolution against the teaching of grammar in particular as emblematic of the grammar stance “in control” (p. 101). Much has been said, for example, about racist myths surrounding the treatment of African American language in ELA curricula and instruction (e.g., Smitherman, 1973; Baker-Bell, 2013). For my purposes here, I’ll use Dunn and Lindblom’s (2003) framework to elucidate a larger myth about grammar, which consists of a series of statements that I understand as comprising that larger myth.3 Their list of grammar myths in English teaching is as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Students who make grammar errors are lazy. (p. 44) Students need to know grammar rules before they can break them. (p. 44) Teachers tell student writers what they’re doing wrong so that the students will write better in the future. (p. 45) If students are taught to write according to the rules, their writing will be clearer. (p. 45) If students are taught to write according to the rules, their writing may come across as more educated. (p. 45) Effective writers follow the rules. (p. 46) Students need grammar rules to learn standard English. (p. 46)

I understand these statements as part of a larger myth about grammar: that it is essential to English teaching, foundational, and, in-and-of itself, harmless. Yet many have argued in the vein of Crowley and Hawhee (1999) that grammatical “usage rules are the conventions of written English that allow Americans to discriminate against one another” (p. 283). Although an important distinction needs to be made between descriptive and prescriptive grammar, the fact remains that there is power and consequence in the descriptions we choose to give (and not), and of course in who gives them, and to whom. It’s easy to see, then, following Crowley and Hawhee and those critics how, if the previous statements are considered part of such a myth, grammar and its instruction might function to circumscribe a community, excluding those who don’t conform and justifying discrimination against them, all the while naturalizing the rules in such a way as to make them seem apolitical, natural, etc.—sacred, even.4 Seeing grammar as myth allows us to understand it as invested in guiding, producing, and maintaining a particular community, and as yielding an uncertain narrative that might be critiqued and (re)written differently. In other words,

Myth and Christian Reading Practice 77 we might take up myth in responding to Smitherman’s (1997) question of the continued prejudices of grammar instruction: “At this late stage in history, how is it that people are still missing the beat on Black Language?” (p. 28). Frye’s (2006) lensing of myth helps us to understand how grammatical myth, “because of its sacrosanct nature, is likely to persist in a society in inorganic ways, and so come to make assertions or assumptions about the order of nature that conflict with what the actual observation of that order suggests” (Frye, 2006, p. 56). That is, looking at grammar-as-myth in the particular way I’m doing here offers one way of explaining the persistence of problematic grammatical instruction despite decades of scholarship undermining its value. It helps to see how, in spite of so much conflicting actual observation in the daily work of teaching, teachers might cling to and perpetuate the notion that students must first, for example, “learn the rules of grammar before they can break them.”5

English Myths as Christian Reading Practice Following from Frye’s (1964) assertion that the Bible is “the most complete form of the myth that underlies Western culture” (p. 110), Burke and Segall (2017) argue that “the very essence of standardized testing requires a curriculum based on [Biblical] testament (and vice versa), and both necessitate a form of reading that accepts rather than challenges and that requires students to memorize rather than think, interpret, and question” (p. 59). This particular notion of Christian, Biblical reading, and its attendant requirement of literalism—which opposes the multiplicity and ambiguity of interpretation—is very much made possible by the two myths I’ve outlined. That is, to read the Bible literally in this vein requires a belief that language transmits meaning intact through stable grammatical structures that can (and should) be taught, so that such meaning can be received. Thus, these myths position readers as particular types of readers; they encourage uncritical reading practices. They do not encourage critical readings of texts, sacred or otherwise. When we approach sacred texts as critical readers, Gopnik (2019) argues: Rather than as worshippers, we gain much, but we lose much, too. We gain the freedom to read and roam for pleasure. But we forget at our peril that, through most of their history, these have been not books to be appreciated, but truths, to be obeyed. That is, assuming language and grammar as mythical in the ways previously noted is in keeping with a Christian literalist orientation toward reading, with obedience to the words—and their Truth—being very much the point. Such an orientation towards reading, in turn, perpetuates and gives way to these language and grammar myths. It depends on an unwavering faith that language can hold up, that we know what its meaning is and can express it in and through words and the capital W-Word. Through this lens, reading in these ways may require, disciplinarily, an enculturation into the structures (grammars) that are

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the forms that W/word has taken and will take, accepting that “these are the rules, and they must be learned, before anything else can be done” rather than challenging them. Understanding these myths as myths, then, can allow for other ways of reading and being in English classrooms, but only if we’re willing to: Face the presence of religion [and myth]—wanted or not—in our educational thinking and practice and critically explore its roots, its ensuing curricular and pedagogical ramifications . . . finding ways to use that knowledge to engender an education that fosters autonomy and criticality among students rather than docility, acceptance, and compliance. (Segall & Burke, 2013, p. 319) Ironically, Segall and Burke note that the Bible’s postmodern structure—as a collection of fragmented texts and voices across space and time, often in conflict, requiring hermeneutical intervention—actually resists the particular Christian notion of reading I’ve identified and mapped onto and with these myths. In that, it might, “([they] emphasize ‘might’) have a better chance at changing our reading habits in educational contexts more broadly, positioning students to engender more unruly, deconstructive, and imaginable readings that challenge the word and the world” (p. 327). And importantly, there are other reading traditions that might be drawn upon (e.g., the Midrashic tradition) or even Biblical forms (e.g. psalms, parables) which center interpretation, multiplicities of meanings, and the uncertainty of texts in ways lending themselves to more critical, less certain readings. Might it be, then, that considering these myths and the ways they map onto, for example, the Common Core State Standards (among other forms of standardization), could open up new and useful ways of reading and teaching English? Going forward, more useful work could illuminate in greater nuance the embedded narratives and historical/ social development of curricula so that we might better make mythical sense of the narratives embedded in secondary English teaching as we know it today.

Conclusions: Reading Myth Affirmatively What I’ve offered throughout this chapter is a reading of myth as critique—as Christian narratives which in their power delimit possibility for reading and teaching English differently. In that sense the work is part of a tradition of critical pedagogy which exposes the problematic nature of myths at work, perhaps best exemplified in Freire’s assertion that a “pedagogy of domination mythologizes reality; the pedagogy of liberation demythologizes it” (p. 64). But it’s also worth noting how myths are not inherently problematic, but rather powerful—dangerous (Foucault, 1983)—and how power also operates affirmatively, to make possible what otherwise might not be. Although critical treatments of myth have proven popular (and valuable), some scholars have taken up myth in an affirmative sense (e.g., Doll, 2011; Grumet, 1988). For them, a myth

Myth and Christian Reading Practice 79 is understood as “a disclosure of possible worlds” (Ricoeur, 1974, p. 410) and serves the imagination, while simultaneously resisting certainty, as any mythic form of teaching deconstructs through the very language one uses to express the myth. Further work, then, might theorize the role that myth, and particularly Christian myth, plays in affirmatively shaping English teaching practice, in particular in the U.S. given the historical and continued privilege of Christianity (Burke & Segall, 2017). As previously noted, teacher-scholars like Lysicott draw upon Christian myths not to oppress or delude but rather to liberate. Such myths, no doubt, do much to delineate possibilities for contemporary critical English teaching towards justice, of the type Morrell (2015) understands as the work of developing powerful readers, critical writers, oral historians, and savvy consumers and producers of media. What would it mean, then, to expand our sense of myth, and Christian myth in particular, in considering reading practices in English classrooms? How might it help if we were to understand the Bible, drawing on the historical work of Beal (2011), as a “library of questions” instead of a “book of answers” (p. 178)? How might we avoid taking an “undesirable tone of moral certainty in critiquing the moral certainties” of particular Biblical literacy practices? (Juzwik, 2014, p. 346). Or, how could religious/Christian notions of justice disclose new possibilities for envisioning more just English teaching? The trajectory of these questions makes clear that myth opens up new possibilities for teaching and writing—and living—in and through and with English. In the passage that opens this chapter, Robinson’s myth provides language with which to see beauty in the ordinary work of life, that we better might attend to it. A consideration of the myths that shape English as a school subject, both critically and affirmatively, helps us to better see and render the beauty in our daily work. As I hope this chapter makes plain, such myths will “still be there whether there is . . . any ‘truth’ in [them] or not” (Frye, p. 50). They deserve all the attention we can give them.

Notes 1. I do this bearing in mind that this will inevitably require a conflation of the plurality of Christian traditions, and in that sense opens my argument to critique along those lines. Point taken. Following Appiah (2018), it may be that my target here should be less Christianity writ large and more specifically fundamentalism. He argues that fundamentalism—or alternatively, attending to the particular reading practices of sacred texts, literalism—constitutes the outlier rather than the center of the Christian tradition. By centering critique on fundamentalism particularly, it becomes possible to untether the argument from Christianity singularly, as fundamentalism cuts across traditions (e.g., fundamentalist Islam, Judaism, Hinduism etc.) I do not want to do this. To my mind, it makes more sense here to center Christianity and Christian reading practice in my discussion of myth, given the historical and contemporary privilege (Burke & Segall, 2017) of Christianity in U.S. schools; in that sense this might be read in part as a critique of the dominant myths trafficked there. But more specifically, I hew close to the Christian following my understanding of the Christian history of subject area English in the U.S., where Protestant notions

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3. 4.

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Scott Jarvie of reading shaped the purposes of the content from the start. I do attempt, at this chapter’s conclusion, to nuance my understanding of myth and particularly Christian myths in these contexts in ways that move beyond critique; doubtless other chapters in this volume also present alternative visions for ways we might complicate our understandings of Christianities in schooling. One way of looking at Goody & Watt’s work, ironically, is that in undermining some kind of mythic understanding of literacy, they’re also perpetuating their own kind of myth (one rooted in Christianity): the Great Divide myth (though in this case they’re dressing up the myth in new clothes, using “literate/illiterate” instead of “civilized/ uncivilized). See the work of Graff (1991) for a further consideration of this. Dunn & Lindblom nicely rebut each of these statements in their piece. Intriguingly, Lysicott (2014), in a popular TED talk, offers a rebuke of racism in grammar instruction and particularly how it comes to problematically shape discourses around the notion of “being articulate”. In speaking back to language prejudice, Lysicott appeals to Biblical myths as the one true arbiter of linguistic correctness: “‘Cause the only God of language is the one recorded in the Genesis of this world saying ‘It is good’”. This insight points to the ways myth, even Christian myths of the type I critique here, might operate affirmatively to humanize English instruction towards equity and justice. More on the affirmative promise of myth at the conclusion of this chapter. A line I heard over and over again in my own experience as a student in English classrooms, and later from my colleagues as a teacher in secondary English departments.

References Appiah, K. W. (2018). The lies that bind: Rethinking identity, creed, country, color, class culture. New York, NY: Liveright. Baker-Bell, A. (2013). “I never really knew the history behind African American Language”: Critical language pedagogy in an Advanced Placement English Language Arts class. Equity & Excellence in Education, 46(3), 355–370. Barthes, R. (2013). Mythologies. New York, NY: Hill & Wang. Beal, T. (2011). The rise and fall of the Bible: The unexpected history of an accidental book. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Bingham, C. (2011). Two educational ideas for 2011 and beyond. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 30(5), 513–519. Brass, J. (2011). Sunday schools and English teaching: Re-reading Ian Hunter and the emergence of “English” in the United States. Changing English, 18(4), 337–349. Burke, K. J., & Segall, A. (2015). The religion of American public schooling: Standards, fidelity, and cardinal principles. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 12(1), 73–91. Burke, K. J., & Segall, A. (2017). Christian privilege in U.S. education: Legacies and current issues. New York: Routledge. Crowley, S., & Hawhee, D. (1999). Ancient rhetorics for contemporary students (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Davie, G. (2010). Resacralization. In B. S. Turner (Ed.), The new Blackwell companion to the sociology of religion. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Derrida, J. (1997). Marx c’est quelqu’un. In J. Derrida, M. Guillaume, & J.-P. Vincent (Eds.), Marx en jeu. Paris: Descartes & Cie. Derrida, J. (2016). Of grammatology (G. Spivak, Trans.). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press. Doll, M. A. (2011). The more of myth: A pedagogy of diversion. Rotterdam, ND: Sense Publishers.

Myth and Christian Reading Practice 81 Doniger, P. E. (2003). Language matters: Grammar as a tool in the teaching of literature. English Journal, 92(3), 101–104. Dunn, P. A., & Lindblom, K. (2003). Why revitalize grammar? English Journal, 92(3), 43–50. Foucault, M. (1983). Afterword. In H. L. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow (Eds.), Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. (1994). The order of things. New York: Vintage. Frye, N. (1964). The educated imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Frye, N. (1990). Myth and metaphor: Selected essays, 1974–1988. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. Frye, N. (2006). The great code: The Bible and literature. Toronto, CA: University of Toronto Press. Goody, J., & Watt, I. (1963). The consequences of literacy. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 5(3), 304–345. Gopnik, A. (2019). How to read the good books. The New Yorker. Retrieved from www. newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/28/how-to-read-the-good-books Graff, H. J. (1991). The literacy myth: Cultural integration and social structure in the nineteenth century. New York: Routledge. Grumet, M. (1988). Bitter milk: Women and teaching. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Hinsdale, B. A., & Tarney-Campbell, M. S. E. (1897). Teaching the language-arts: Speech, reading, composition (Vol. 34). New York: D. Appleton. Juzwik, M. M. (2014). American evangelical Biblicism as literate practice: A critical review. Reading Research Quarterly, 49(3), 335–349. Lysicott, J. (2014). 3 ways to speak English. Ted.com. Retrieved from www.ted.com/talks/ jamila_lyiscott_3_ways_to_speak_english/discussion?nolanguage=he1 Macaluso, M. (2016). Examining canonicity as an implicit and discursive frame in secondary English classrooms (Doctoral dissertation)¸ Michigan State University. Retrieved from Proquest Dissertations Publishing. (10143666). Morrell, E. (2015). The 2014 NCTE presidential address: Powerful English at NCTE yesterday, today, and tomorrow: Toward the next movement. Research in the Teaching of English, 49(3), 307–327. Morrison, T. (1993). Nobel Lecture. The Nobel Prize. Retrieved from www.nobelprize. org/prizes/literature/1993/morrison/lecture/ New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60–92. Ricoeur, P. (1974). The conflict of interpretations: Essays in hermeneutics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Robinson, M. (2006). Gilead. New York: Picador. Rollins, A. (2017). What the lyric be. Poetry Foundation. Retrieved November 2, 2017, from www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/92677/what-the-lyric-be Segall, A., & Burke, K. J. (2013). Reading the Bible as a pedagogical text: Testing, testament, and some postmodern considerations about religion/the Bible in contemporary education. Curriculum Inquiry, 43(3), 305–331. Smitherman, G. (1973). Grammar and goodness. The English Journal, 62(5), 774–778. Smitherman, G. (1997). Black language and the education of black children: One mo once. The Black Scholar, 27(1), 28–35. Wexler, P. (2013). Mystical sociology: Toward a cosmic social theory. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

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“Racism Is a God-Damned Thing” The Implications of Historical and Contemporary Catholic Racism for ELA Classrooms Mary L. Neville

W.E.B. DuBois, in a 1925 edition of the magazine Crisis, wrote, “The Catholic Church in America stands for color separation and discrimination to a degree equaled by no other church in America” (quoted in Marable, 2016, p. 125). Despite DuBois having made this statement nearly 100 years ago, his sentiment resonates across some contemporary U.S. Catholic schools. For example, a student from Chicago’s Marist High School received disciplinary action for sending a text message that included a strong racist, anti-Black slur, to which a fellow Marist student replied, “same” (Swanson, 2016). Earlier in 2016, a Kentucky mother of a Black student at Lexington Catholic High School found messages on her son’s computer from some of the school’s football players; these messages included anti-Black and violent insults toward her son (Muhammad, 2016). In Modesto, California, a 12-second Snapchat video depicted a student from Central Catholic High School condoning anti-Black violence through lynching (Kandra, 2016). And in Virginia, school administrators at Paul VI Catholic High School investigated a “racially charged video” sent by a student of that school (Larimer, 2018). These violent and anti-Black words and actions from White youth who attend Catholic schools are both jarring and unsurprising, given that ideologies of anti-Blackness are pervasive among all societal structures in the U.S., including schools and religious bodies (Bonilla-Silva, 2009; Matias, 2017). While racial slurs certainly happen in majority White public schools, these students’ actions are particularly important to consider in light of the racist nature of White U.S. Christian spaces. As Cone (2000) writes, all forms of Christianity in the United States have necessarily been constructed within a system of racism: “No theology, Black or White, Protestant or Catholic, can become Christian theology in North America or the world that does not engage White supremacy in society and the Church” (p. 731). He argues that White Catholic and Protestant theologians have been “virtually silent” about racism, or “America’s most radical and persistent sin”, particularly in the ways that racism is pervasive throughout their religious institutions. Cone further argues that when White Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, remain mute on issues of racism, they are “following a White tradition of nearly four centuries of silence” (p. 731).

“Racism Is a God-Damned Thing” 83 The construction of Christianity within racist social structures is evident in the ways that Christian denominations in the U.S. are divided across racial lines (Burke & Gilbert, 2015). Dr. King’s (1960) assertion, “Not surprisingly, 11 a.m. on Sunday morning remains the most segregated hour in Christian America,” continues to resonate. In this chapter, I consider how English language arts (ELA) curricula in Catholic schools might respond to this reality of historical and contemporary racism in Christian spaces, and I conceptualize a framework for an anti-racist and Catholic—and also catholic, in the sense of universal—ELA classroom. I first highlight scholarship on race, Catholic schools, and ELA classrooms, and I then offer one example of Black Catholic resistance to racism in the U.S. through the historical experiences of Black women religious. This example may serve as a starting point for ELA teachers and students to analyze the history of White Catholic racism and Black Catholic resistance. I then discuss how ELA teachers and students in Catholic schools might analyze Catholicism, race, and antiBlackness through the analysis of texts. It is my hope that such a lensing may help students and teachers in Catholic schools, but not only Catholic schools, more fully attend to the principles of Catholic social teaching in constructing anti-racist worldviews.

Literature Review To begin, I briefly note my positionality within this work before reviewing the literature on anti-Blackness, Catholic schools, and ELA classrooms. I am a White, middle-class, straight, cisgender Catholic woman. The majority of the spaces in which I was raised were both predominantly Catholic and White. I taught in Catholic schools for five years as a middle and high school English teacher. Keeping this positionality in mind, I seek to further understand how Catholic ELA classrooms may be more actively anti-racist. In order to ultimately understand how such spaces might disrupt these beliefs, I first turn to the scholarship on race and Catholic schools, anti-Blackness in U.S. Catholic history, and antiracist ELA classrooms. Anti-Blackness, Catholic Schools, and ELA Classrooms Despite the racial segregation of U.S. Christian and Catholic spaces, the principles of Catholic social teaching instruct Catholics to condemn and interrupt racism and anti-Blackness in all forms (Pasquier, 2016). Fr. John Markoe, Catholic priest and civil rights activist, succinctly stated one Catholic orientation toward racial prejudice: “Racism is a God-damned thing” (McNamara, 2011). Some may argue that this condemnation of racism has been addressed in many ways by Catholic schools, a system of education that has historically and contemporaneously served Black students (Irvine & Foster, 1996). Indeed, scholars have argued that Catholic schools have uniquely met the needs of Black students, resulting in academic success for many alumni (Green, 2011; York, 1996)

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and making space for both Catholic and non-Catholic Black students to learn from Black teachers and classmates (Garibaldi, 1996; Irvine, 1996; Polite, 1996). The Catholic school system in the U.S.—the largest private school system in the world—has also been responsible for many all-Black Catholic K-12 schools and universities, thus offering the opportunity for Black students to attend school in the midst of slavery and segregation (Green, 2011). Moreover, whereas Black students have historically remained a small percentage of the Catholic school population as a whole, U.S. Catholic school systems are all experiencing a significant increase in the enrollment of racially diverse students (Sanchez, 2018). Still, the history of Catholic schools and other Catholic spaces is replete with examples of racism and anti-Blackness. Although Catholic social teaching may argue for anti-racist theological frameworks in theory, in practice much of the history of U.S. Catholicism reveals the ways in which White Catholics have ignored, maintained, and even advocated for the continuing presence of racism and anti-Blackness. Davis (2016) names U.S. Catholicism as particularly committed to anti-Blackness. He notes, “Whenever African Americans were historically met with Catholicism, they were also met with violence.” White Catholics have restricted Black religious style of worship within Catholic spaces, have mandated racially segregated Catholic churches and schools, and have failed to respond to instances of anti-Black violence against people of Color (Cone, 2000; Polite, 1996). Moreover, many White Catholics name the election of John F. Kennedy to the presidency as the moment when Catholics became “truly American”. Cressler (2017) argues that this orientation toward Catholicism and citizenship “elides and erases” Black identities within Catholicism and names U.S. Catholicism as strictly White. Anti-Blackness, then, does not so much contradict Catholicism in the U.S., but in many ways constitutes it. Although White Catholics have largely been “mute” on issues of racism, Black Catholics have a “long history of vocal resistance against racism” (Cone, 2000, p. 731). Given this history of White Catholic anti-Blackness and Black Catholic resistance, what might students and teachers in English language arts (ELA) classrooms in Catholic schools do to resist and interrupt racism? How might Catholic ELA classrooms more fully attend to the principles of Catholic social teaching, which center the rights and dignity of each human person? I argue that teachers and students in English language arts classrooms in Catholic schools have a unique opportunity to read and deconstruct the history of race and U.S. Catholicism as a text in itself. Moreover, the space of an ELA classroom is uniquely positioned to help students interrogate, deconstruct, and interrupt racism. Scholars have argued that ELA classrooms can help students and teachers disrupt racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression through the analysis of media, language, and literature (Baker-Bell, Butler, & Johnson, 2017; Johnson, 2017; 2018). BakerBell, Stanbrough, and Everett (2017) further argue that ELA educators “have a responsibility to use our discipline to transform our world and raise awareness of the crisis of racial injustice” (p. 130). ELA classrooms can help students and teachers analyze racialized and gendered violence across texts, schools, and

“Racism Is a God-Damned Thing” 85 society (Love, 2017). Coupling principles of Catholic social teaching with an anti-racist ELA framework, then, may help students and teachers deconstruct and interrupt racism in U.S. Catholic spaces. In constructing an anti-racist and Catholic ELA framework, it may be helpful to consider a historical example of racism towards and resistance from Black Catholics. In the sections that follow, I offer the examples of Black Catholic women religious in sisterhoods and schools. While I may have demonstrated the historical intertwining of Catholicism and racism through countless examples, I chose the experiences of Black Catholic women religious based on the foundational nature of women religious in Catholic schools (Hunt, Joseph, & Nuzzi, 2004). This historical insight may help to inform the curriculum and pedagogy of anti-racist ELA classrooms in Catholic schools.

Racism and Resistance: Black Catholic Women Religious in Sisterhoods and Schools In this portion of my analysis of race and racism within American Catholic spaces, I draw on Williams’ (2013, 2016) historicizing of the experiences of Black women religious to portray the “unholy discrimination” experienced by Black women religious. I then explicitly address the ways Black women religious resisted this oppression through the example of Mother Mary (Elizabeth) Lange of the Oblate Sisters of Providence. “Four months ago, I left the convent. I left for a variety of reasons, but basically I left because I am black, they are white, and ‘ne’er the twain shall meet’” (Willingham, 1968, p. 64). Saundra Willingham, formerly Sr. Melanie Willingham, described her experiences leaving the Sisters of Notre Dame based on racial prejudices and “subtle ridicule” from her White sisters in a December 1968 issue of Ebony Magazine. Her story testifies to but one example of many of the experiences of Black women religious in majority White congregations (Williams, 2013, 2016). In the issue, Willingham chronicles her admiration for and spiritual connection with Catholicism, beginning as a young child in Catholic schools. She cites Du Bois in stating that this education was “a kind of double consciousness, triple even: I was black, I was American, I was Catholic, and reconciling those polarities has become a lifelong personal struggle” (p. 64). Her eight years with the Sisters of Notre Dame revealed to her that, although she loved the Church, she would be forced to prioritize and ultimately choose one aspect of her identity: either “the white authoritybound institution into which I had put myself [or] the black race in which I was born” (p. 70). As is evident in the article, this choice was riddled with emotional turmoil for the now former sister. Willingham stated that she was “fired up” by civil rights activism in response to the public and White supremacist atrocities of the time period, including the 1963 Birmingham church bombing which killed four young African American girls as well as the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965. According to Willingham, her commitment to racial justice in response

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to these events “seemed to capture [no more] than the casual attention of my [congregational] community” (p. 70). Her congregation’s disciplinary practices, “subtle ridicule”, and passive reaction to public and violent displays of White supremacy in the nation eventually were enough to convince Willingham to leave the congregation. She cried, she states—at first “for myself. Now I grieve over the blindness of that group of Sisters who in failing me, failed themselves” (p. 68). Willingham’s story is one among many of the experiences of Black women religious in U.S. majority-White congregations (Williams, 2013). Here, I categorize these examples of what Williams has called “unholy discrimination” (Williams & White, 2016) experienced by the sisters under two camps: the exclusionary policies of majority-White congregations (Williams, 2013) and the erasure of the histories of Black women religious in White congregations (Supan, 1997). I then focus on the resistance of one Black Catholic sister: Mother Mary Lange. Exclusionary Race-Based Admission Policies In uncovering stories of multiple Black women religious, Williams (2013) found that many were either discouraged or firmly barred from the White congregations in which they sought to make their vows and commitment to the sisterhood. Black Catholic women interested in the religious life were often left with the options of either entering an historically Black congregation, such as Savannah’s Franciscan Handmaids of the Most Holy Heart of Mary, Baltimore’s Good Shepherd Sisters, the Sisters of the Holy Family in New Orleans, or abandoning the prospect of entering a religious community altogether. Elaine Marie Clyburn told Williams of her time searching for entry into a congregation of her choosing during the 1960s: “I was explicitly told that I could not enter the Sisters of Saint Joseph because of my color and only because of my color”. Clyburn further acknowledges that Church officials encouraged her to instead seek entry into a Black congregation (Williams, 2013). Clyburn’s story is by no means unique. Williams (2016) argues that a majority of White sisterhoods continued to promulgate race-based exclusionary practices well into the 1950s and ‘60s, decades that are notable for U.S. attention to civil rights legislation. Williams cites the work of Fr. Raymond Bernard, a White Jesuit priest who, beginning in 1949, chronicled the race-based exclusionary admissions policies of White Catholic sisterhoods. Between the years of 1951 and 1957, Bernard found that, despite the desegregation of schools via the 1954 Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education, as well as Vatican pressure to eliminate racial biases in admissions policies for all Catholic institutions, White sisterhoods “clearly [demonstrated] the persistence of racial discriminatory admissions policies [of] qualified Negro girls”. Bernard brought the irony of these policies into stark relief, saying: “Many [Catholic] institutions which complain about the scarcity of vocations have drawn a color-line on would-be

“Racism Is a God-Damned Thing” 87 applicants, yet continue to pray for more vocations to arrive at their door” (Williams, 2013). Despite Vatican pressures to desegregate communities, then, Williams and Bernard’s research demonstrates that, throughout most of the 20th century, White sisterhoods continued to discriminate against Black women religious via exclusionary admissions policies. Erasure In addition to outright exclusion of Black women religious, White sisterhoods also participated in pointed historical erasure of prominent Black women religious in White congregations. One example is that of Mother Theresa Maxis, founder of the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM) in Monroe, Michigan. Supan (1997) writes that, despite her acknowledgement of discrimination by the Church toward women of Color like herself, Maxis moved from Baltimore to Michigan at the age of 19. She hoped that her “light skin and intellectual and administrative gifts would gain her entry to a world otherwise closed to persons of color” (p. 39). The sisterhood, under Maxis’ direction, began as a congregation in which two-thirds of the original community were women of Color (p. 43). Despite Maxis’ popularity with sisters across racial divides and her profound capacity for administration, Maxis experienced vicious racism from the diocesan officials who knew of her identity as a woman of Color. One example of this is evident in a letter from Bishop Peter Paul Lefevere of Detroit, who stated that Mother Maxis “displayed all the softness, slyness, and low cunning of the mulatto” (p. 41). Most notable among the examples of racism experienced by Maxis are the ways that her impact on the founding of IHM was largely erased from the sisterhood’s history. After Maxis’ death, a group of White sisters in IHM made purposeful decisions to “purge evidence of Maxis’ prominence” (Supan, 1997, p. 62). Her obituary, for example, erroneously claimed that other women religious called her “Mother” not because she was Mother Superior, but because she was the oldest sister in the congregation. Documents of the original founding of the sisterhood included “strategic deletions and insertions, as well as blatant revision” of facts surrounding Maxis’ influence (p. 63). These revisions and deletions of her prominence were justified by IHM officials as an attempt to protect the majority-White congregation. For example, in 1932, Mother Loyola Gallagher, IHM, criticized a then-forthcoming publication detailing the history of the Diocese of Detroit, as the author had claimed that Mother Theresa Maxis was IHM’s founding sister. Mother Gallagher wrote, “This book . . . would be very detrimental to our community, referring, as it does, to our foundress as mulatto” and further argued that “this publication would do untold harm to almost 3,000 of our Sisters” (p. 61). In light of documentation recently uncovered, it is clear that White sisters during and after Maxis’ role as foundress of the congregation attempted to strategically erase her influence from the sisterhood’s historical record (Supan,

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1997). White Catholic sisterhoods, then, routinely barred, discriminated against, and erased the legacies of Black women religious in the 20th century. Despite these examples of blatant racism in Catholic spaces, Black women religious also resisted through their commitment to the education of children within their communities. Resistance Mother Mary (Elizabeth) Lange was born Elizabeth Clarisse Lange in Cuba around 1784. Around 1814, she and her parents sought refuge in Baltimore (Cause of Canonization, 2018). Because the city of Baltimore was located within a “border state” between the slave-holding South and the North, children of Color consequently were excluded from public education. Thus, Lange decided to use her own home to educate the children of Caribbean immigrants coming to the United States. In 1828 Lange began a school for girls of Color that still exists today, and in 1829 she was a founder of the first all-Black women religious community called the Oblate Sisters of Providence (Cause of Canonization, 2018). Lange is also known to have directed literacy classes for people of Color as well as orphanages for children of Color, during, but particularly after the Civil War. Lange’s story offers one example of how Black Catholic women showed resistance through their commitment to the education of youth in their communities. Kathy Knecht, archivist for the Oblate Sisters of Providence, stated of Lange: I think she was a very brave woman who came to this country with four strikes against her. She was an immigrant in a nativist country; she was a Black woman in a slave state; she was a woman in male-dominated society; and she was Catholic in a Protestant country. (Jurich, 2018) As Knecht notes here, Black Catholic women religious frequently resisted the racism present in White Catholic spaces, often by creating Black Catholic spaces of their own. Black women religious resisted racial oppression for themselves and their communities, particularly through the education of youth of Color. Stories of resistance to racism like those of Mother Mary Lange may be fruitful in offering anti-racist English language arts frameworks.

Implications for Anti-Racist Catholic ELA “I cried, at first, for myself. Now I grieve over the blindness of that group of Sisters who, in failing me, failed themselves.” —Saundra Willingham, Ebony Magazine, 1968

The examination of the historical erasure and resistance of Black Catholics may inform the curriculum and pedagogy of anti-racist and Catholic secondary

“Racism Is a God-Damned Thing” 89 ELA classrooms. In both racially diverse and racially homogeneous Catholic ELA classrooms, students and teachers can benefit from an anti-racist, historical approach to literature and writing instruction. In doing this, Catholic teachers may consider how “Black lives matter in ELA classrooms” (Johnson, 2018, p. 102) and how the ELA curriculum and pedagogy might help students reject and interrupt White supremacy and anti-Blackness through the analysis of texts, Catholicism, and society. In the sections that follow, I offer an anti-racist Catholic ELA framework that builds upon and extends the previous historical examination of Black Catholic women religious. Although the history I cite previously focuses specifically on Black Catholic spaces, an anti-racist Catholic ELA framework may approach the deconstruction of race and racism in both Catholic and non-Catholic spaces. Moreover, although the approaches here center the Catholic ELA classroom, with modifications they may also inform other Catholic or nonCatholic pedagogical spaces committed to anti-racism. The framework may also help teachers and students in both predominantly White ELA classrooms and classrooms with students of Color interrupt and interrogate anti-Black racism. As Willingham (1968) notes, such an interrogation allows the reader to consider how racism and anti-Blackness fail humans of all races in constructing a socially just world. Approaches to an Anti-Racist, Catholic Secondary ELA Classroom In this section, I offer four “approaches” for Catholic ELA secondary curriculum and pedagogy to examine race and racism in U.S. and/or Catholic contexts. For the purposes of this chapter, I consider these four approaches of histories, literature, visual art, and theology as ways to examine historical and contemporary race and resistance within and beyond Catholic contexts. Here, these four approaches are listed separately, much like course plans that follow chronological units of instruction. Throughout this framework, however, I suggest that teachers see these entry points as interwoven with one another. For example, the historical lensing of the barring of Black women religious might be analyzed alongside artistic texts of resistance as well as plans for action in interrupting racism and anti-Blackness. Moreover, the options offered here represent both Catholic and non-Catholic forms of art and texts as resistance. In offering both Catholic and non-Catholic contexts in this framework, I hope to attend to Cone’s (2000) critique of Catholicism, an institution that so often remains historically and contemporarily silent regarding issues of racialized violence against people of Color. I also hope to construct a truly “universal” Catholic ELA classroom, one that responds to racism and resistance across both Catholic and non-Catholic spaces.

Approach 1: Histories Objective

Students will be able to examine the connections between historical and contemporary race and racism across schooling, housing, and religion.

Potential texts

Non-Catholic spaces: • Wilkerson (2011): The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration • Rothstein (2017): The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. • “Why I Sit”: East Lansing High School student Alex Hosey editorial in the Lansing State Journal • Hamer, F. L., Brooks, M. P., & Houck, D. W. (2013). The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is.

Assessment

Catholic spaces: • The 2018 United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ “Open Wide Our Hearts: The Enduring Call to Love: A Pastoral Letter Against Racism.” • Massingale, B. (2010). Racial Justice and the Catholic Church. • Williams, S. D. (forthcoming). Subversive Habits: The Untold Story of Black Catholic Nuns in the United States. • Gehring, J. & Isler, J. L. L. (Sept., 2018). Systemic racism is pro-life issue, and Catholics must step up. National Catholic Reporter Online. • McNamara, P. (2017). The blueblood Catholic priest who cried heresy: “Racism is a God-damned thing.” Aleteia. • The Georgetown Slavery Archive. Part of Georgetown University’s slavery, memory, and reconciliation initiative. • Williams, S. D. (2016). A historian explains the racist history of Catholicism that the Church still refuses to acknowledge. Raw Story. • Black Catholic educators: • Sister Thea Bowman, Sister Thea Bowman Foundation, • Williams, S. D. (2013). Segregated sisterhoods and the mercurial politics of racial truth-telling. The Feminist Wire. Students will construct a map, broadly defined, of historical and contemporary connections of race and racism across schooling, housing, and religion. The map may be broad or narrow in concept. In either an essay or verbal defense (video recorded or in class), students will compare the events on their map with the 2018 United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ “Open Wide Our Hearts: The Enduring Call to Love: A Pastoral Letter Against Racism.” Students will note the ways that their map does or does not attend to the anti-racist calls in this letter, and will discuss how the letter does or not does not achieve an anti-racist framework.

Approach 2: Literature Objectives

Potential texts

• Students will be able to analyze how artists have represented and resisted historical and contemporary racism through the written word. • Students will be able to connect literary representations of race and racism across historical and contemporary contexts. • Shire, W. (2015). Home. Poem. • Cullen, C. (1925). Incident. Poem. • Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. Novel. • Gyasi, Y. (2016). Homegoing. • Thomas, A. (2017). The Hate U Give. Young adult novel. • Watson, R. (2017). This Side of Home. Young adult novel. • Hurston, Z. N. (1937). Their Eyes Were Watching God. Novel.

Assessment

Students will curate a text set focused on one piece of literature read during the course. Students will connect their learning across historical and contemporary Catholic and non-Catholic spaces in the curation of this text set. Students will first choose a text read in class and one issue of racial justice incorporated within this text (i.e., schooling, religion, housing, segregation, racialized mass incarceration, police brutality, or others). Students will then curate at least five texts that build upon and extend their learning about this topic. Students will write an essay explaining their choices and why this text set exemplifies their learning.

Approach 3: Visual Art Objectives

• Students will be able to analyze how artists depict and represent race, racism, and resistance across Catholic and non-Catholic spaces. • Students will be able to connect visually artistic representations of race and racism across historical and contemporary contexts.

Potential texts

Non-Catholic spaces: • The work of Kehinde Wiley: In Search of the Miraculous (2017); Femme Piquée par un Serpent (2008); Lamentation (2016). • Murals of Detroit: Fernandez, D. Mural honoring Yemeni Americans, Hamtramck, MI; Fernandez, D. Mural, Mano de Obra Campesina (Hand of the Peasant Labor); James, S. G., The definitive list of everything that will keep you safe as a Black being in America; Perez, B. Southwest Detroit Mural. • Duvernay, A. (2016). 13th [Motion Picture]. United States: Kandoo Films. • Rockwell, N. (1964). The problem we all live with. Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, MA.

Assessment

Catholic spaces: • Becker, C. (2019). Magnificat High School saints mural. Depicts St. Augustine, St. Monica, St. Benedict, Sr. Thea Bowman, and Fr. Augustus Tolton as people in contemporary times and as wearing “ordinary clothing to emphasize the call we all have to sainthood”. (Magnificat High School, 2019). See Figure 5.1. Students will construct an aesthetic response project connecting their historical and contemporary understanding of race and racism with their learning about visual art. Students will also explain their aesthetic response project in either written or verbal presentation. Potential aesthetic responses include: documentary videos; original poetry anthologies; collages; paintings; murals; original songs; performance art; photography; map anthology; intertextual response; student choice.

Approach 4: Theology and Catholic Social Teaching Objective Potential texts

Students will be able to use the principles of Catholic Social Teaching to construct an anti-racist product that informs, modifies, or transforms a Catholic space. • Kammer, F. (2009). Catholic Social Teaching and Racism. • Sister Thea Bowman’s 1989 address to Catholic Bishops • 2018 USCCB letter against racism • Cone, J. (2013). The cross and the Lynching Tree. • The stations of the cross from St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Detroit, MI. These center on: “modern-day issues such as education inequality; nuclear weapons; food insecurity; environmental degradation; police brutality; and Islamophobia” (Hicks, 2017).

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Assessment Students will use the principles of Catholic Social Teaching to construct a product that may inform, modify, or transform a Catholic space toward anti-racism (school building, a Catholic home, a Catholic classroom, a youth group, a retreat, etc.) Examples of a “product”: a letter in response to the 2018 USCCB letter against racism; a plan for a mural on a Catholic school building or classroom wall; a syllabus for a Catholic class in another subject area; a documentary; a book club with your family in which you read a book about race and racism and record (video, field notes, otherwise) the conversation; an original children’s book about racial justice which you read to elementary students; social justice stations of the cross for your city; other project of your choice.

Figure 5.1 Becker, C. (2019). Magnificat High School saints mural Source: photo credit: Daniela DiSanto

Discussion and Conclusion The examples of virulent racism from Catholic high school students noted at the beginning of this chapter, as well as the racism experienced by Black women religious in the 19th and 20th centuries, stand in stark contrast to the expressed condemnation of racism in the principles of Catholic social teaching. This contrast is not itself a contradiction, however, as Christian and Catholic institutions in the United States are necessarily founded in, and therefore must confront, White supremacy and anti-Blackness (Cone, 2000, 2013). How, then, might teachers and students in both Catholic and non-Catholic classrooms confront the historical and contemporary legacies of race and racism? In this chapter, I have outlined the ways in which Catholic spaces are necessarily bound up in White supremacy. I have also demonstrated how English language arts teachers possess a unique opportunity and responsibility to help

“Racism Is a God-Damned Thing” 93 students resist and interrupt the enduring legacies of racism in today’s society through the analysis of texts (Baker-Bell et al., 2017). To illustrate the historical intertwining of U.S. Catholicism and racism, I provided examples of White Catholic exclusion and discrimination of Black Catholic women religious in the 20th century, as well as the ways in which Black Catholic women religious resisted racism. I concluded the chapter by offering four approaches English language arts teachers and students may take to construct an anti-racist ELA classroom. It is my hope that these approaches may be possible ways for students and teachers to not only deconstruct but also ameliorate the enduring presence of racism in Catholic spaces. Adichie (2009) expresses how viewing a phenomenon through only one perspective, whether that be in children’s literature or in the stories people who are not from her home country of Nigeria hear about the continent of Africa, can prove to be extremely dangerous. In a similar vein, I offer that there is danger in seeing the story of U.S. Catholicism and race as only one of the following images: Fr. Theodore Hesburgh linking arms with Dr. King; the five-year old version of myself reading the story of Genesis in my Catholic children’s Bible; the racist erasure of Mother Maria Theresa Maxis’s prominence in a majorityWhite sisterhood; a sixth grade English language arts student analyzing the ways Renee Watson’s This Side of Home is anti-racist; a White 17-year-old Catholic student snapchatting racial slurs to a Black classmate; a Black Catholic man’s continued love for Catholicism despite his ancestors’ enslavement by Catholic priests; and Fr. John Markoe’s condemnation of racism. All of these stories are representative of U.S. Catholicism, and all are accurate, full, complex, valid, and incomplete. Furthermore, they are only a few among many narratives regarding the history of U.S. Catholicism, race, and racism. In order to more expeditiously dismantle the White supremacist ideologies implicit in the actions and environments of many Catholic schools, it is imperative for teachers and students to come to terms with the blatantly racist actions of U.S. Catholicism throughout history, and how these historical episodes have far-reaching implications today. The historical and pedagogical approaches I offer in this chapter serve as an attempt to deconstruct anti-Blackness in Catholic schools through the analysis of space, place, and texts. With this, students and teachers may further uncover the ways that racism is, historically has been, and, without intervention, will continue to be “a God-damned thing”.

References Adichie, C. N. (2009). The danger of a single story. Oxford, UK: TED Talk. Baker-Bell, A., Butler, T., & Johnson, L. (2017). The pain and the wounds: A call for critical race English education in the wake of racial violence. English Education, 49(2), 116. Baker-Bell, A., Stanbrough, R. J., & Everett, S. (2017). The stories they tell: Mainstream media, pedagogies of healing, and critical media literacy. English Education, 49(2), 130. Bonilla-Silva, E. (2009). The style of colorblindness. In Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Burke, K. J., & Gilbert, B. R. (2015). Racing tradition: Catholic schooling and the maintenance of boundaries. Race Ethnicity and Education, 1–22. Cause of Canonization. (2018). Elizabeth Clarisse Lange. Retrieved from www.motherlange. org/biography Cone, J. H. (2000). Black liberation theology and black Catholics: A critical conversation. Theological Studies, 61(4), 731–747. Cone, J. H. (2013). The cross and the lynching tree. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Cressler, M. (2017). Authentically Black and truly Catholic: The rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration. New York, NY: New York University Press. Davis, D. (2016, November). Race and Catholicism (Notre Dame Lecture Series). East Lansing, MI: St. John Catholic Church. Garibaldi, A. M. (1996). Growing up Black and Catholic in Louisiana: Personal reflections on Catholic education. In J. J. Irvine & M. Foster (Eds.), Growing up African American in Catholic schools (pp. 126–140). New York: Teachers College Press. Green, P. (2011). African Americans in urban Catholic schools: Leadership and persistence in pursuit of educational opportunity. Urban Review, 43, 436–464. Hunt, T. C., Joseph, E. A., & Nuzzi, R. J. (2004). Catholic schools in the United States: An encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Irvine, J. J. (1996). Segregation and academic excellence: African American Catholic schools in the South. In J. J. Irvine & M. Foster (Eds.), Growing up African American in Catholic schools (pp. 87–94). New York: Teachers College Press. Irvine, J. J., & Foster, M. (Eds.). (1996). Growing up African American in Catholic schools. New York: Teachers College Press. Johnson, L. L. (2018). Where do we go from here? Toward a critical race English education. Research in the Teaching of English, 53(2), 102–124. Johnson, L. P. (2017). Writing the self: Black queer youth challenge heteronormative ways of Being in an after-school writing club. Research in the Teaching of English, 52(1), 13–33. Jurich, M. (2018). Oakland group hopes film will aid sainthood effort of Mother Mary Lange. The Catholic Voice Online Edition, 56(4). Kandra, G. (2016). Racism at Catholic schools? New York, NY: Aleteia. King, M. L. (1960, April). The most segregated hour in America. Meet the Press. Larimer, S. (2018, January). A student used a racial slur in a video: Now, his Catholic high school is investigating. The Washington Post. Love, B. L. (2017). Difficult knowledge: When a Black feminist educator was too afraid to #SayHerName. English Education, 49(2), 197–208. Marable, M. (2016). W.E.B Du Bois: Black radical democrat. 1986. Reprint. New York: Routledge. Matias, C. (2017). Feeling white: Whiteness, emotionality, and education. Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers. McNamara, P. (2011). Racism is a God-damned thing: Fr. John Markoe, SJ. Englewood, CO: Patheos. Muhammad, P. C. (2016, April 6). Black student threatened with lynching by Lexington Catholic High School teammate. The Key Newsjournal. Lexington, KY. Pasquier, M. (2016, August). Still separate, still unequal: White Catholics and the perduring sin of racism. America: The National Catholic Review. New York, NY. Polite, V. C. (1996). Making a way out of no way: The Oblate Sisters of Providence and St. Frances Academy in Baltimore, Maryland, 1828 to the present. In J. J. Irvine & M. Foster (Eds.), Growing up African American in Catholic schools (pp. 62–75). New York: Teachers College Press.

“Racism Is a God-Damned Thing” 95 Sanchez, B. (2018, September). Catholic schools challenged by changing demographics. America: The Jesuit Review. Supan, M. (1997). Dangerous memory: Mother M. Theresa Maxis Duchemin and the Michigan congregation of the sisters, IHM. In M. S. Thompson (Ed.), Building sisterhood: A feminist history of the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (pp. 30–67). Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Swanson, L. (2016). Marist will take disciplinary action over student’s racially charged tweet. Chicago, IL: Patch. Williams, S. D. (2013, October). Segregated sisterhoods and the mercurial politics of racial truth-telling. The Feminist Wire. Williams, S. D. (2016, September). A historian explains the racist history of Catholicism that the Church still refuses to acknowledge. Raw Story. Williams, S. D., & White, C. V. (2016, March). A conversation with Dr. Shannen Dee Williams and Dr. C. Vanessa White: Subversive Habits: Experiences of Black women religious in the U.S. Catholic Theological Union. Willingham, S. (1968, December). Why I quit the convent. Ebony, 24(2), 64–74. York, D. E. (1996). The academic achievement of African Americans in Catholic schools: A review of the literature. In J. J. Irvine & M. Foster (Eds.), Growing up African American in Catholic schools (pp. 11–45). New York: Teachers College Press.

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Regulating Language Language Policies of Early American Christian Missions in Alaska Jennifer C. Stone, Samantha Mack, Jacob D. Holley-Kline, and Mitchell Hoback

This chapter traces the strategies for English-language assimilation used by early American missions in Alaska, along with their subsequent influence on public schools. The analysis is based on documents that show language policy in action from 1877, when the first American mission school opened in Alaska, to 1931, when educational policy and oversight shifted significantly. The documents include federal and territorial reports; archival letters, diaries, and photographs; and retrospective accounts. It includes perspectives of government officials, teachers, students, and outside visitors. We use the documents to address several questions, including: What motivated English-only educational policies? How were those policies disseminated and enforced? How were they resisted? Our analysis provides insight into how the early practices of Christian missionaries framed relationships between English and Alaska Native languages, and how they engaged young people in projects of civility, Christianization, and colonization. The texts analyzed here illustrate the strategies of formation and implementation of English-only language policies that framed English education in Alaska for much of the 20th century, shaping educational legacies of language ideology that continue to affect Alaska Native people today. In the late 1800s, the new Alaska territory drew attention from religious denominations around the globe. Although Russian, English, and Canadian missions had brought Christianity and colonial languages to Alaska earlier, the Alaska Purchase spurred a widespread push by American missions to “capture the land in the name of Christ and to bring civilization to Native people” (Urvina, 2016, p. 13). The Comity Plan of the 1880s divided Alaska among Protestant denominations for missionization (Williams, 2009, pp. 152–153). Starting in 1877, five main groups, including Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Baptists, Methodists, and Moravians, were joined by Catholics, Quakers, Lutherans, and Seventh Day Adventists in bringing Western Christianity to Alaska (see Williams, 2009, pp. 157–159 for a detailed timeline). Although federal contracts for mission schools ended in 1895, the impact of mission language policies extended well into the 20th century and shaped the beginnings of public education in Alaska. Indeed, as Alton (1998) observed,

Regulating Language 97 many of the earliest public school teachers in Alaska had served as missionaries previously and continued to both teach and evangelize students. Also, “The work of the village teacher in the 1920s was no less a missionary calling than it was in Sheldon Jackson’s time [Jackson was Alaska’s first General Agent of Education]. The bureau often hired husband-and-wife teams and expected them not only to educate the Natives but also to inspire and guide them toward a civilized life” (Alton, 1998, p. 293). Although educational and language practices varied among missions (Williams, 2009) and subsequent public schools, the majority of American educators and missionaries saw the Alaska Natives as a people whose “only hope of survival . . . was their rapid adoption of Christianity and Anglo American culture” (White, 1991, p. 102). Such efforts promoted English language and literacy and suppressed Alaska Native languages.

Rationales for Promoting English and Suppressing Alaska Native Languages Mission educators and officials provided religious and secular rationales for the importance of English education in Alaska. A number of the earliest missionary educators saw Christianizing and civilizing Alaska Natives as their primary goals. These goals aligned with the federal government’s interests in Americanizing the new Alaska Native citizens of the United States and preparing them to participate in the American economy. As the American economy developed in Alaska, educators also argued that English played a key role in protecting Alaska Natives from the influence of unsavory and immoral white people. These arguments laid the groundwork for an explicitly English-only educational policy in Alaska that overtly excluded and suppressed Alaska Native languages. Although English language and literacy were implicit in earlier mission policies (Hoback, 2017), the first explicit argument for English-only language policies was in S. Hall Young’s autobiographical account of a letter he wrote to the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions in 1881. As Young (1927) stated: One strong stand, which so far as I know I was the first to take, was the determination to do no translating into the Thlingit language or any other of the native dialects of that region. When I learned the inadequacy of these languages to express Christian thought, and when I realized that the whites were coming; that schools would come; that the task of making an English-speaking race of these natives was much easier than the task of making a civilized and Christian language out of the Thlingit, Hyda and Tsimpshean; I wrote to the mission Board that the duty to which they had assigned me of translating the Bible into Thlingit and of making a dictionary and grammar of that tongue was a useless and even harmful task; that we should let the old tongues with their superstition and sin die—the sooner the better—and replace these languages with that of Christian civilization, and compel the natives in all our schools to talk English and English only.

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From Young’s perspective, English was foundational to both Christianity and civility as was the eradication of Alaska Native languages. Although prior Presbyterians had initiated English education processes through translation and documentation of Indigenous languages, Young saw these practices as detrimental. Instead he advocated for an English-only approach that was later taken up in official policy. Young’s words also exemplify a rationale for suppressing Alaska Native languages, in this case the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian languages of southeast Alaska. He argued that Alaska Native languages were not adequate for the project of missionization. As he described, in the process of translating the Bible and creating resources for understanding Tlingit, he decided that Indigenous languages were incapable of expressing Christian thought, and that it would be easier to teach people English than to try to translate texts into Alaska Native languages. He also argued that such translations were harmful to communities and that the Indigenous languages were vehicles for “superstition and sin”. Similar arguments for language suppression are made throughout the corpus. Alaska Native languages were portrayed variously as “stunted and dwarfed”, (L.F. Jones, 1914, p. 41), “detrimental to their speedy education and civilization” (“The Board of Home Missions,” 1888, p. 12), and “retarding” to their education (Department of the Interior, 1894a, p. 931, 1898, p. 1618; Jones, D.K., 1980, p. 81). The missionaries’ projects of Christianization and civilization aligned with the federal government’s goal of Americanization. The terms of the Alaska Purchase stipulated that people would become full citizens of the United States, so the project of education in Alaska emphasized the role of language in citizenship. As Nathaniel H.R. Dawson, Commissioner of Education, wrote in 1887: If it be true that the intelligence of the American citizen is so necessary to the security and enjoyment of his liberties, how much more important is it that the native races, who are now being endowed with all the rights of citizenship, shall be prepared by education to appreciate and enjoy their new privileges, and to understand their new obligations and political relations. Especially is this true of the people of Alaska, whom the Government has undertaken by its treaty stipulations to place upon an equal footing with its own citizens. . . . They [Alaska Natives] are to be taught to speak, read, and write English, the purpose of the Government being to educate them in our customs, methods, and language. (Department of the Interior, 1888, p. 43) From the perspective of Dawson and others, English language and literacy were foundational to American culture and citizenship. Likewise, he framed education

Regulating Language 99 broadly, and literacy education specifically, as key mechanisms for the project of civilizing Alaska Native people to be able to participate as American citizens. The role of English was not only tied to the transformation of Alaska Native people into civilized Christian citizens; it also addressed the influx of white people from outside, who brought with them economic opportunities and sinful behaviors. English education was seen as a means of preparation for imminent social changes. As N.H.R. Dawson argued, “If it be true that ‘Westward the course of empire takes its way,’ then the Anglo-American flood-tide will eventually extend to Alaska” (Department of the Interior, 1888, p. 31). As illustrated in the corpus, the “Anglo-American flood-tide” brought two competing forces into the realm of English education. On the one hand, English was framed as increasingly necessary for economic participation. As the 1896– 1897 report on the Sitka Industrial School described, “Manual occupations are in reach of the pupils as fast as they acquire sufficient knowledge of the English language to enable them to prosecute the learning of a trade with success” (Department of the Interior, 1898, p. 1619), foregrounding English as necessary for manual occupations. In 1897–1898, Unalaska reported that, “Now that the fur trade is diminishing, most of the native men of Unalaska are employed in loading and unloading vessels for the various commercial companies, and a knowledge of English is very essential”, highlighting the importance of English for shifting from the fur trade to the commercial shipping industry (Department of the Interior, 1899, p. 1754). The 1900–1901 report from the Sitka Training School described a number of industries that their students’ knowledge of English helped them enter, “Many of the pupils have earned and are still earning good wages simply by their knowledge of the English language by acting as guides, interpreters, and packers for the large number of white men who have come into the territory within recent years” (Department of the Interior, 1902, p. 1479). Indeed, economic developments including the discovery of gold, the shift from fur to shipping, and the growing need for manual labor, guides, and interpreters created extensive language contact in Alaska. English education for Alaska Natives was framed as necessary for supporting the rising presence of white American industries. At the same time that schools were supporting economic interests through English education, the influx of white people created a moral quandary for mission teachers. Education was framed by many educators as a means of protection from sinful activities and unsavory influences, such as alcohol, prostitution, lawlessness, and nonstandard varieties of English. However, as Replogle observed in his account of the Douglas Friends mission in the 1890s, access to English also enabled access to sinful behaviors and industries. He stated that: They put their children in the Mission Home until they could learn to speak English for financial reasons, being relieved of the burden of their support they could make better bargains for their girls. It made girls more marketable and their boys more expert in cunning and craftiness. (1904, p. 22)

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In other words, an unintended consequence of English education enabled Alaska Native people to engage in the sinful behaviors that the missionaries hoped to save them from—it made girls more desirable as prostitutes and boys savvier about industries such as the alcohol trade and gambling. Contact with white economies also placed children into contact with nonstandard varieties of English. As P.H.J. Lerrigo, teacher at the Presbyterian Mission on St. Lawrence Island, described in 1901, “Having picked up a large part of their English from the whalers, it was formerly a heterogeneous compound of pigeon [sic] English intermingled with Hawaiian words, such as ‘pau,’ ‘wahinny,’ etc., and of French ‘savez,’ and other foreign words” (Department of the Interior, 1902, p. 1483). Another teacher, Frederick E. Willard from the Eaton Reindeer Station wrote, “Their use of English savors of the vernacular, they having acquired a good deal of it from passing prospectors. For example, upon asking a boy if he liked to come to school, I received the reply, ‘You bet!’ This has to a certain extent been overcome and purer English taught in its place” (Department of the Interior, 1902, p. 1465). As the presence of English and English speakers developed in Alaska, so too did the enforcement of why English ought to be learned and which varieties of English were acceptable for Christianized, civilized, and Americanized Alaska Natives.

Establishing and Disseminating Official Policies A decade after the first American mission school was established, Secretary of the Interior L.Q.C. Lamar published the first overt English-only language policy for the territory. The 1887 “Rules and Regulations for the Conduct of Public Schools and Education in the Territory of Alaska” included two official policies related to English. First, Part I Section 4c gave power to the Territorial Board of Education with approval from the Commissioner of Education “To prescribe the series of text-books to be used in the public schools and to require all teaching to be done in the English language” (Department of the Interior, 1888, p. 98). Also, Part III Section 6 stated: The children shall be taught in the English language, and the use of school books printed in any foreign language will not be allowed. The purpose of the Government is to make citizens of these people by educating them in our customs, methods, and language. The children are primarily to be taught to speak, read, and write the English language. (Department of the Interior, 1888, p. 100) This is the first example of “overt language policy” that provides an “explicit, formalized, and/or codified” (Huebner, 1999, p. 4) direction for language education in the territory. It is important to note that the policy is not unique to Alaska; rather, it reflects both federal and mission organization interests that were common at the time (Alton, 1998; Haycox, 1982). The policies regulated the language of instruction and literacy, along with the language of textbooks.

Regulating Language 101 The policy also excludes “foreign” languages from textbooks. In early American Alaska, the target of “foreign” languages was twofold. First, the policy intentionally excluded Alaska Native languages, some of which had well-developed writing systems and widespread literacy. Second, the policy was intended to exclude Russian, which was well established as a language of schooling and religion in some communities. Shortly after Lamar’s policy was published, it was taken up in communications with educators. For example, a letter that Sheldon Jackson sent to prospective teachers stated that, “It is the purpose of the government in establishing schools in Alaska to train up English speaking American citizens. You will therefore teach in English and give special prominence to instruction in the English language” (1887). Officials disseminated similar communications through The North Star, a missionary newspaper developed by William Kelly and Sheldon Jackson to share information across missions in Alaska. An article in 1888 stated that: The Board of Home Missions has informed us that government contracts for educating Indian pupils, provide for the ordinary branches of an English education to be taught, and that no books in any Indian language shall be used, or instruction given in that language to Indian pupils. The letter states that this rule will be strictly enforced in all government Indian schools. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs argues, and very forcibly too, that instruction in their vernacular is not only of no use to them but is detrimental to their speedy education and civilization. It is now two years and more since the use of the Indian dialects were first prohibited in the training school here. All instruction is given in English. Pupils are required to speak and write English exclusively, and the results are ten-fold more satisfactory than when they were permitted to converse in unknown tongues. (“The Board of Home Missions,” p. 12) These documents illustrate two instances of the dissemination of overt language policy to mission educators. Jackson’s letter framed English as central to the process of Americanization and the primary language for instruction. Whereas the letter did not discuss the prohibition of Alaska Native languages, the article did. Not only did the article center English as the language of instruction, it also excluded instruction in Alaska Native languages, framing them as potentially “detrimental” to civilization. The article also recounted the local implementation of an English-only policy in the Sitka Training School in 1886—prior to the federal mandate—using it to show the effectiveness of that approach for assimilating Alaska Native students. Policy in Action As illustrated in the article from The North Star, policies requiring English and suppressing Alaska Native languages were also widespread in local classrooms and schools. Throughout the corpus, we found many examples of English-only

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regulations within localized school contexts. For example, a photograph taken in 1914 at St. Mary’s Mission in Akulurak documented the requirement of English and the suppression of Alaska Native languages (see Figure 6.1). In the photograph, a group of students ate lunch in the school. Behind them, a poster read, “Please, do not speak Eskimo”. Although brief, this sign speaks volumes about how English-only ideologies were incorporated into schools. The sign shows both a problem (students speaking “Eskimo”) and an attempt to regulate that problem (a request to not speak “Eskimo”). The use of “Eskimo” rather than Yup’ik, the language spoken in the Akulurak area, illustrates the external classification of languages used at the time. The term lumps together a number of related languages including Central Yup’ik, Siberian Yupik, Alutiiq, Iñupiaq in Alaska, along with languages in parts of Russia, Canada, and Greenland. Language policy, however, is more complex than the production and dissemination of overt rules. As Spolsky points out, “even where there is a formal, written language policy, its effect on language practices is neither guaranteed nor consistent” (2004, p. 8). While many early American mission educators adopted English-only and language suppression requirements, others engaged in practices that supported multilingualism. Often such practices were seen as transitions to teaching English, but even so they resulted in the perpetuation and documentation of Alaska Native languages. A number of accounts in the corpus described multilingualism and translation as effective instructional approaches to teaching English and as a means for

Figure 6.1 Children in Dining Hall with Sign, “Please, do not speak Eskimo” Source: Marquette University Archives, Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions Records, ID 00001 (Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions, 1914)

Regulating Language 103 evangelizing additional communities. Several missionaries described learning Alaska Native languages as essential for their initial teaching of English. The Moravian missionaries in Bethel, for instance, “form[ed] themselves into a class for the study of the native language” (Department of the Interior, 1896b, pp. 1429–1430). Several educators described the benefits of translation for teaching English. For example, in Cape Prince of Wales, Congregational mission teachers W.T. Lopp and H.R. Thornton: began their school work by learning the Eskimo names of the most important objects in daily use and training their pupils in the English equivalents. From words they proceeded to phrases and from phrases to sentences, teaching them to translate from Eskimo to English and vice versa. . . . At the end of the close of the first school year they had a good working vocabulary . . . [could] write and read simple English words, and carry on a conversation in English on everyday practical matters. (Department of the Interior, 1894a, p. 927) Similar approaches were described by Moravian missionary Mrs. J.H. Kilbuck (Department of the Interior, 1896a, p. 1460), Episcopal missionaries from Point Hope (Department of the Interior, 1894b, p. 874) and Anvik (Department of the Interior, 1896b, p. 1429), teacher D.W. Cram from Barrow (U.S. Bureau of Education, 1914, p. 32), and teacher W.B. Van Valin from Wainwright (U.S. Bureau of Education, 1915, p. 24). It is clear, though, that in many cases multilingualism was merely a transitional phase on the way to developing an Englishspeaking people. Indeed, as described in a report from Afognak, “Some of the boys have made such progress that they can carry out any ordinary conversation in English. This obviates the further use of the Russian and Aleut languages by the teacher” (Department of the Interior, 1891, p. 755). Even at the federal level, there were inconsistencies in language policy. For example, two reports from the Commissioner of Education included dictionaries and grammars for Alaska Native languages, contradicting the federal Englishonly stance. In 1896–1897, the commissioner’s report included a “Dictionary of Anglo-Eskimo Vocabulary and Eskimo-English Vocabulary” (Department of the Interior, 1898, pp. 1243–1271) and the 1903–1904 report included a “Grammar and Vocabulary of the Hlingit Language of Southeastern Alaska” (Department of the Interior, 1906, pp. 715–766). Such documents also reflect the “new science of man,” where Americans were both deeply invested in the project of civilizing Indigenous people while at the same time desperate to observe and document the “primitive” cultures that were being destroyed by those practices (Cummings, 2011, p. 52; Pennycook, 1998, p. 47). Some missionaries saw the potential of multilingualism for furthering the project of evangelization. Moravian missionaries in Bethel reported that: A special Bible class of the oldest boys was organized, who read the English fluently and translate readily into the native language. They are to be

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In this case, the students’ knowledge of their native language and English enabled missionaries to spread the word of God more widely than they could have otherwise. Simply put, even though federal, territorial, and many local language policies required English-language instruction and the suppression of Alaska Native languages, they were not implemented uniformly across Alaska. The range of language practices across mission schools is reflected today in varying degrees of language retention. In communities where English-only and language suppression policies were strictly administered, such as those missionized by Presbyterians, Quakers, Baptists, and (most) Catholics, the level of language shift has been the greatest. In communities that used multilingual approaches, there are higher rates of language retention today (Williams, 2009). The Problem of Immersion Educators who more strictly adhered to English-only and language suppression policies identified lack of immersion as a central roadblock to their work. For example in Bethel, the problem was framed as, “Owing to the fact that English is not heard in the community outside of the school and mission, it is very difficult to secure its speaking by pupils” (Department of the Interior, 1894a, p. 928). In communities where missionaries perceived lack of exposure as hindering English learning, educators initiated two different responses: removing children from their homes or infiltrating communities with English. Starting in 1888, the corpus demonstrates a growing sentiment that more progress was made when children were removed from their communities. As Sheldon Jackson reported, “The annual reports of the teachers more and more emphasize the fact that among the native population the best results can be had only where the children are separated from their home surroundings” (Department of the Interior, 1889, p. 193). The Holy Cross Mission reported in 1892 that the language learning of their boarding school students differed greatly from their day school students: This progress was largely due to the effect of the pupils being separated from their parents and being under the influence of their teachers. . . . As in all such schools, English was the only language allowed to be spoken in or out of the schoolroom. At the same place and time, and by the same sisters, there was conducted a day school with an enrollment of 40 scholars. These, however, did not progress as much in their studies as did their friends in the boarding school. (Department of the Interior, 1894b, p. 875)

Regulating Language 105 In short, many missionaries saw removing children from their homes as an ideal solution for accelerating English language learning and suppressing Alaska Native languages. Other missionaries instead extended the reach of English-only policies into communities and homes. For instance, Charles Replogle, in describing the Friends mission of the 1890s in Douglas, stated, “In order, that the children might the more readily acquire the English language, they were expected to speak nothing but English in the home” (Department of the Interior, 1902, p. 95). In his 1914–1915 report, teacher Charles W. Hawkesworth of Hydaburg asserted that: The English language is noticeably lacking in towns where all the people understand a tribal tongue. Since all of our people are anxious for citizenship, and since the English language is supposed to be the language used by citizens in their homes and in their conversations with each other, we endeavored to overcome the Hydah tongue by adopting the slogan “Hydaburg an English-speaking town in five years.” Several of the young men took it up, and we talked it up in every sort of a gathering, from the school chapel exercises to town-council meetings and church services. (Department of the Interior, 1917, p. 70) By imposing English on homes and communities, educators simultaneously promoted English as the language of all facets of life and suppressed Alaska Native languages. Even with strategies like removing students from their homes and extending the influence of English beyond schools and churches, educators described the problem of students continuing to speak their native languages in school. They sought ways to guarantee English-language immersion throughout schools. To address this problem, teachers resorted to various forms of punishment and reward. The corpus includes descriptions of a range of punishments used to encourage students to speak English and discourage the use of Alaska Native languages. Although John Kilbuck was exceptional in his learning of and documenting Yup’ik, he and co-teacher S.R. Spriggs described their use of standing as a punishment for speaking Iñupiaq in Barrow: The main object kept in view was to get the children in the way of using the English they already had learned. As this is an Eskimo country, and the few white people in it speak the vernacular language, the children have had very little use for English. The plan of the compulsory use of the English language in the schoolroom was introduced and proved to be quite a stimulus to the acquirement and proper use of English words. A failure to conform to the rule was punished by standing. When the rule was first put into force nearly the entire school was upon its feet at once. (Department of the Interior, 1907, p. 271) Other educators relied on corporal punishment. A retrospective account by Peter Kalifornsky described how a teacher would hit him with a stick if he

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spoke Dena’ina. As he said, “My English wasn’t too good . . . and [the teacher] hit me several times so hard it broke the skin and caused a boil” (Kalifornsky, Kari, & Boraas, 1991, p. 474). Several accounts described putting chemicals or medicines in children’s mouths if they spoke their native languages. Replogle, a teacher at the Friends mission in Douglas, described using the spicy and bitter mix of myrrh and capsicum to “take away the taint of the Indian language” (1904, p. 95). In a retrospective account of an experience in the 1920s, an Unangan woman from St. George described how: The teachers used to put medicine, I can still taste the vile stuff, in our mouth if we spoke Aleut. They said not to do any Aleut crafts. They told our parents not to talk Aleut. We kids were afraid to speak Aleut even in our homes; we were afraid the teacher would find out and put that terrible tasting medicine in our mouths. (D.K. Jones, 1980, p. 80) Overall, punishments like forcing students to stand, beating students, and putting chemicals in students’ mouths not only enforced English-only policies but extended language suppression into households. These accounts show overt practices of language suppression and the effectiveness of such practices for discouraging students from using their native languages even at home. Likewise, they illustrate the long-lasting effects of this trauma. Not all educators resorted to punishment. Some used rewards to encourage students to use English in school and discourage students from using other languages. Walter C. Culver, a teacher in Port Moller, described the impact of a contest he developed in his classroom: The English language only was used in and around the schoolhouse except for explanation purposes. The children all became very efficient; in fact, during the last two months of school I did not know of one word of Eskimo being used except at my request. This result was largely due to a contest I started among the children. In this contest, the pupil using the least Eskimo was to receive 50 cents; the second least, 25 cents, and the third least 15 cents. These rewards were given at the end of the term. Each time a child used Eskimo one point was marked against him. . . . It was no[t] uncommon to hear the children using English in their playing after school and on Saturdays and Sundays. Although the contest is closed and the rewards given, the spirit of the contest still lives and they are trying to pick up new words which they hear as well as using the ones they have learned. (Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, 1919, p. 54) Culver’s account shows the effectiveness of rewards for enforcing English-only and language suppression language policies. Indeed, the impact of his approach extended beyond the classroom, school day, and the end of the contest.

Regulating Language 107 Resistance Despite overwhelming efforts to implement English-only language policies in early American mission schools, the corpus includes examples of children, parents, communities, and teachers resisting such policies, refusing to speak English, and continuing to promote Alaska Native languages and multilingualism. A widespread form of resistance throughout the territory and across cultural groups was simply not sending children to school. From the earliest accounts, educators and officials described lack of attendance as a major barrier to learning English. Many of the reports from the Commissioner of Education cite attendance as a major roadblock to language learning and request federal or territorial mandates for attendance. For example, Sheldon Jackson’s report on Kodiak from 1887 observed that “Strenuous efforts were made upon the part of some to discourage the attendance of the children, and a strong prejudice manifested itself against the children being taught English” (Department of the Interior, 1888, p. 105). In some cases, these accounts identified conflicts between traditional subsistence activities and school attendance. Ivan Petroff, a census agent who submitted his observation that “the mode of life of these sea-otter hunters is such that no regular school attendance could be secured in any one village or settlement” (Department of the Interior, 1884, p. 282). Petroff recommended industrial boarding schools as a solution to the attendance problem. Another tactic for resisting language suppression was refusing to speak English. In spite of efforts to enforce English and suppress Alaska Native languages outside of school, many communities continued to use their native languages. As Kadiak teacher C.C. Solter reported, “It is very difficult getting the pupils to use out of the school the instructions given them in English, as all the conversation at home is in their native tongue” (Department of the Interior, 1897, p. 1437). Some educators reported a willingness to learn English but not speak it. According to Point Barrow teacher L.M. Stevenson, “They seem to pride themselves on knowing English, but manifest little desire to speak it.” (Department of the Interior, 1894a, p. 925). The refusal to speak English in school, along with the intentional limitation of English to schools, allowed Alaska Native languages to persist in spite of suppressive policies and practices. A final tactic used stories to discourage young people from learning English. A shaman from Point Barrow used this strategy. As Stevenson explained the reason behind his students’ unwillingness to speak English, “that would be breaking off from their traditions, and their Im-ut-koots (doctors) would let the evil one take full possession of them for thus abandoning the style of former days” (Department of the Interior, 1894a, p. 925). A similar strategy was used by Russian Orthodox missionaries, who told families that the American presence was only temporary and that if their children learned English that they would be taken away. For example, Moravian teacher Mary Huber from the Carmel Mission in Nushagak reported, “Attempts were also made to frighten the children, telling them that if they learned English the Government would carry them off to San Francisco and make soldiers of them” (Department of

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the Interior, 1889, p. 186). Such stories of negative results from learning English helped to maintain fluency in Alaska Native languages as well as Russian in some parts of Alaska.

Legacies of Language Ideology in Alaska The language ideologies demonstrated by the documents in the corpus show both the strategies used by early American missionaries in Alaska and the beliefs about language that inspired them. Most of the documents in the corpus promoted English as the language of schooling to support processes of Christianization, civilization, and Americanization among Alaska Native people. The documents also anticipated the arrival of white Americans and proposed using English education to prepare young people to participate in new economies and to protect them from sinful influences. In supporting the necessity of English, many of the documents also explicitly sought to suppress Alaska Native languages. It is important to recognize that there was some variation in how missionary groups and individuals approached language. Indeed, as Williams (2009) points out, there were instances of individuals who learned the local languages and supported multilingualism. In most of these communities, the language shift has been less severe than those missionized by Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, and Catholics, who sought to, “eradicate Native languages and incorporated very strict and punitive measures to do so” (Williams, 2009, 154). It is also important to recognize that Alaska Natives, along with Russian Orthodox missionaries, actively resisted the hegemony of English. By not sending children to school, refusing to speak English, and sharing stories of the dangers of learning English, families and communities were able to protect their languages and cultures to some extent. Such practices set the stage for “linguistic survivance” (Wyman, 2012). Despite resistance, however, the language policies implemented by early American missions in Alaska created an English-only ideological legacy that persists even today. The language practices started by early American missionaries and perpetuated in subsequent public schools created large-scale language shift in all 20 of our officially recognized Alaska Native languages (Krauss, 1980). As Stone (2016) argued, the English-only and native-language-suppression policies continued through much of the 20th century, and assumptions about the utility and superiority of English continue today, especially in educational contexts.

References Alton, T. L. (1998). Federal policy and Alaska Native languages since 1867 (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK. “The Board of Home Missions.” (1888, February). The North Star, p. 12. Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions. (1914). Children in dining hall with sign, “please, do not speak Eskimo,” 1914 (Identifier: 00001) [photograph]. Marquette University Special Collections and University Archives.

Regulating Language 109 Cummings, L. (2011). Historical linguistics and language policy: A comparative look at Christian missions in Alaska. In A. Medina-Rivera & L. Wilberschied (Eds.), In, out and beyond: Studies in border confrontation, resolutions, and encounters. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Department of the Interior. (1884). Report of the Commissioner of Education for the year 1882–83. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Retrieved from https://babel. hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=msu.31293001095227 Department of the Interior. (1888). Report of the Commissioner of Education for the year 1886–87. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Retrieved from https://babel. hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.l0053372116 Department of the Interior. (1889). Report of the Commissioner of Education for the year 1887–88. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Retrieved from https://babel. hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015027264590 Department of the Interior. (1891). Report of the Commissioner of Education for the year 1888–89 (Vol. 2). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Retrieved from https:// babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015027264616 Department of the Interior. (1894a). Report of the Commissioner of Education for the year 1890–91 (Vol. 2). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Retrieved from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015015375242 Department of the Interior. (1894b). Report of the Commissioner of Education for the year 1891–92 (Vol. 2). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Retrieved from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3970392 Department of the Interior. (1896a). Report of the Commissioner of Education for the year 1893–94 (Vol. 2). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Retrieved from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3970396 Department of the Interior. (1896b). Report of the Commissioner of Education for the year 1894–95 (Vol. 2). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Retrieved from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951000865070b Department of the Interior. (1897). Report of the Commissioner of Education for the year 1895–96 (Vol. 2). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Retrieved from https:// babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3970400 Department of the Interior. (1898). Report of the Commissioner of Education for the year 1896–97 (Vol. 2). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. https://babel.hathitrust.org/ cgi/pt?id=umn.319510008650751 Department of the Interior. (1899). Report of the Commissioner of Education for the year 1897–98 (Vol. 2). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Retrieved from https:// babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951d000234888 Department of the Interior. (1902). Report of the Commissioner of Education for the year 1900–01 (Vol. 2). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Retrieved from https:// babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951000865120m Department of the Interior. (1906). Report of the Commissioner of Education for the year 1903–04 (Vol. 2). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Retrieved from https:// babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924097879518 Department of the Interior. (1907). Report of the Commissioner of Education for the year 1904–05 (Vol. 1). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Retrieved from https:// babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.l0053372421 Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education. (1917). Report on the work of the Bureau of Education for the Natives of Alaska, 1914–15 (Bulletin No. 47). Retrieved from https:// files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED542680.pdf

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Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education. (1919). Work of the Bureau of Education for the Natives of Alaska, 1917–18 (Bulletin No. 40). Retrieved from https://files.eric. ed.gov/fulltext/ED541235.pdf Haycox, S. (1982). Sheldon Jackson in historical perspective: Alaska Native schools and mission contracts, 1885–1894. The Pacific Historian, 28(1), 18–28. Hoback, M. (2017). Discursive regulators and ideological constructors: Educative public policy documents in 19th century Protestant missions in Southeast Alaska (Unpublished thesis). University of Alaska Anchorage, Anchorage, AK. Huebner, T. (1999). Sociopolitical perspectives on language policy and planning in the USA. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Jackson, S. (1887, February 9). Copy of letter to teachers sent to Nathan H.R. Dawson (Sir Henry S. Wellcome Collection, Box 1, Folder 3, Record Group 200). National Archives. Jones, D. K. (1980). A century of servitude: Pribilof Aleuts under U.S. rule. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Jones, L. F. (1914). A study of the Thlingets of Alaska. New York, NY: H. Revell. Kalifornsky, P., Kari, J. M., & Boraas, A. (1991). A Dena’ina legacy: The collected writings of Peter Kalifornsky = K’tl’egh’i sukdu. Fairbanks, AK: Alaska Native Language Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks. Krauss, M. E. (1980). Alaska Native languages: Past, present, and future. Fairbanks, AK: Alaska Native Language Center. Pennycook, A. (1998). English and the discourses of colonialism. New York, NY: Routledge. Replogle, C. (1904). Among the Indians of Alaska. London: Headly Brothers. Spolsky, B. (2004). Language policy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Stone, J. C. (2016). Legacies of language ideology in Alaska. In J. Álvarez Valencia, C. Amanti, S. Keyl, & E. Mackinney (Eds.), Critical views on teaching and learning English around the globe: Qualitative research approaches (pp. 123–138). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Urvina, A. (2016). More than God demands: Politics & influence of Christian missions in Northwest Alaska 1897–1918. Fairbanks, AK: University of Alaska Press. U.S. Bureau of Education. (1914). Report on the work of the Bureau of Education for the Natives of Alaska, 1912–13 (Bulletin No. 31). Retrieved from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ ED541684.pdf U.S. Bureau of Education. (1915). Report on the work of the Bureau of Education for the Natives of Alaska, 1913–14 (Report No. 48). Retrieved from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ ED541906.pdf White, R. (1991). “It’s your misfortune and none of my own”: A new history of the American West. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Williams, M. S. T. (2009). The comity agreement: Missionization of Alaska Native people. In M. S. T. Williams (Ed.), The Alaska Native reader: History, culture, politics (pp. 151–162). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wyman, L. (2012). Youth culture, language endangerment and linguistic survivance. Buffalo, NY: Multilingual Matters. Young, S. H. (1927). Hall Young of Alaska, “the mushing parson”. New York, NY: Fleming H. Revell Co.

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A Dream Come True Young Evangelical Women’s Negotiations of Dreams, Reality, and Ideologies on Pinterest Bree Straayer-Gannon

The following study shows the ways Evangelicalism constructs the ideal future for young women and how this future construct uses desire as a vehicle toward this end goal. Looking at the activity of six adolescent, Evangelical women on the website, Pinterest, we can see the ways they negotiate the Evangelical constructs of the ideal life with their own dreams and the imperative that they should not desire “too much”. The findings of this study will offer some understanding of the impact of imagining future selves as meaningful literacy tools particularly in conjunction with the affordances of recursive storytelling and identity formation in digital spaces. It will also offer understanding as regards the challenges and tensions young Evangelical women face in balancing their dreams with their real lives while simultaneously figuring out where they fit with the Evangelical version of the ideal life, particularly in relation to the materialistic aspects of the site and “coveting”. Before the following study began, I had a research interest in how the website, Pinterest, impacted young women, but the study coalesced when my 15-year-old daughter came home from a young women’s Baptist small group and showed me a plastic bag with five diamond-like gems inside. She detailed that these gems represented her purity, and in each physical or heart encounter she had with a man (a woman was not mentioned) prior to marriage, she would be giving these jewels away. When she married, she would give her husband whatever, if any, jewels she might have left. In order to have a fulfilling marriage, prior to her wedding she needed to give away as few gems as possible. Along with the five gems, my daughter brought home a book her small group was reading entitled Authentic Beauty, by a prominent Evangelical author, Leslie Ludy (2003). Two of my eventual six participants in this study were reading this book along with my daughter. Ludy’s book is just one example of many books defining women’s roles and sexuality both in their church communities and in their day-to-day lives. The gems, of course, convert sexuality into tangible, finite material. The teachings in Ludy’s book reinforce the idea that sexuality and the body are gatekeeping mechanisms to a happy, fulfilling future, a future with an emphasis on marriage and the domestic. Once those gems are given away—and Ludy’s work supports this notion in other ways—a young woman compromises her chance at an ideal future.

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When my daughter shared the gems and book with me, I had flashbacks to my own experiences with purity teachings during my teen and young adult years. These teachings profoundly impacted my life and I was shocked that the discourse was still prevalent so many years later. This confluence of memory and shock pushed me toward a passion to research purity discourses in Evangelical communities. Several of the young women in my daughter’s small group and in her friend-circle spent significant time on Pinterest, and my daughter even told me that wedding pinning had been discussed in her small group as part of the purity and marriage teachings they were discussing. Intrigued, I sought a snapshot of how these young women were telling their stories on Pinterest and the ways those stories interacted with the Evangelical sexual and gender ideologies in which they were being enculturated. I share my own personal story as an acknowledgment that I conduct this study as one who has been directly impacted by Evangelical teachings. Patti Lather (2001) characterizes this tension of researching and writing about a community of which you are a part. She writes of ‘“both getting out of the way and in the way’ of the stories that belong to others’’ (p. 207). In my work, I hoped to create the space for the young women to tell their own stories, but I also recognize that my own history gets mixed up in the telling. Because of this mix, I somewhat intentionally get “in the way” by including a bit of my own story here, without apology, but with due caution. I will begin by looking at how digital spaces are used for recursive storytelling and identity formation as well as how the practice of picturing future selves is a valuable literacy tool. As part of identifying some of the tensions my participants face, I will then look at the Evangelical version of the ideal life for young women using the book some of my participants were reading, Authentic Beauty. From there, I will share the results of the study with the conversation around how two of my participants saw—and perhaps still see—their futures and the ways they negotiate their “dream” lives with real life. I begin with a quick note on Pinterest by way of setting context for the reader.

Pinterest For the majority of my participants, Pinterest was the only social media site they were allowed to join on the internet. The lack of self-generated content as well as its emphasis on the domestic, with crafts and cooking, made Pinterest “safe” in comparison to other internet spaces. Pinterest resembles a self-constructed magazine with its prevalence of images related to fashion, food, and fitness. The site is not necessarily designed to capture past events or moments in users’ lives as Facebook or Instagram might; instead, the pins often reflect future hoped for events, activities, and purchases. Pinterest allows users to “pin” photos or content from other users on Pinterest or outside sites onto self-created, titled, and categorized boards. Each pin is represented by a tiny square picture, which when clicked on, leads to its originating website. Pinterest has an open access

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format with profiles and boards set to public by default (though users can create “hidden” boards, but not hidden profiles).

Literature Review Literacy studies have long acknowledged the role social, political, and economic contexts play in student literacies (Branch, 2009; Brandt, 1998; Cintron, 1997; Heath, 1982; Paris, 2011). Literacy has moved from being seen as primarily textual reading and writing to “composing”. The composition process encompasses how young people story their lives and identities in alternative ways beyond text with digital, visual, and aural methods, both in and outside of academic spaces. Social media in particular allows for recursive composition as users gain the ability to shape and alter past, present, and future selves online (Saul, 2014; Tekobbe, 2013; Turner, 2015). Wargo and De Costa (2017) note that with the advent of digital spaces, as communication profoundly changes, “academic literacies are not an ‘and’ but an ‘elsewhere’, thereby emphasizing the importance of space in academic literacy development” (p. 102). They highlight that we need to not only look at how literacy is developed in one space, but look at the layering and movements between spaces, including the digital and the physical worlds. They note four intangible vectors that play a role in literacy: mobilities, ideologies, identities, and technologies. Even though we might be looking at one specific digital space, scholars recognize layers of influences in any individual student’s experience of that space, including identities and ideologies. With the rise of social media and globalization, these movements—along with the layerings of spaces and places—make more complex the ways young people see themselves and compose their online lives for various audiences: as both public and curated. Future forecasting or picturing future selves as literacy tools has made its way from classrooms to digital spaces (Oyserman, Bybee, & Terry, 2006; Turner, 2015). Turner (2015) conducted a study on the effect of students using multimodal media productions to conceptualize their future selves. Their multimodal creations cultivated hope about their future lives and created critiques of their expected futures based on their race and socioeconomic status. Turner notes, “The affordances provided by digital technologies make for a particularly rich form of imagining and providing space for exploration . . . that allow youth to actualize future selves” (pp. 26–27). Social media and online spaces allow young people to try on new identities through imagining who they might become. Turner notes that these spaces “serve as virtual constructions of the type of person the youth participants would like to become (or avoid becoming) and work as an engine for driving eventual action” (p. 27). These future selves multimodally constructed using images, media, and digital spaces become totemic: youths seek to actualize into the physical world the imagined future self. Saul (2014) notes that the self that is constructed in digital spaces has both affordances and “thorny issues” with a public display of a fixed identity. Using Haraway’s (1994) concept of the cyborg, he suggests that these digital depictions

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are “an assembled projection of our social and bodily selves onto various inorganic canvases—the multiple texts of our exterior lives—that we construct and are constructed by” (Saul, 2014, p. 68). We not only construct our future lives, but what we create likewise begins to construct us. Saul writes about a young woman who posts videos with the hope of becoming famous. As she matures, these videos no longer “reflected her desired self ” as she realizes that her hope of being famous will most likely not come to fruition, and she starts rewriting that former self by removing videos that do not reflect who she currently is (p. 67). Digital spaces allow for recursive storytelling and identity formation, but crucially, and often, for a public audience. One has the ability to see a former self living in the dream of becoming famous with the perspective of one who realizes that dream is not coming true. At the same time, digital spaces allow you to go back and rewrite that former self from the perspective, albeit always limited, of the current instantiation of the “me”. Pinterest has been criticized as a site that reinforces traditional gender roles for young women, but others argue that the site is used for intentional meaning making and identity formation. I would suggest that both arguments have merit. Certainly, the algorithms that filter images made available to users create an echo chamber of materialistic desire linked to socioeconomic, racial, and sexualized narratives of an ideal body-person. Still, Cindy Tekobbe (2013) writes that women are not passive users on the site. She notes, “Pinterest’s member community demonstrates rich digital literacy practices by creating elaborate information-sharing networks and by collectively and individually organizing information as pastiche, montage, art, and, ultimately, as a statement of digital/ virtual identity” (p. 386). She goes on to say that users also use the site in ways that intentionally subvert the overarching narrative that Pinterest is strictly a place for consumption and instead use it for creation and composing. With its emphasis on traditional gender roles alongside its opportunities to compose identity, Pinterest allows a window to see the ways people use the site to tell the story of who they are now, but also to forecast their future roles, desires, and needs. Pinterest offers depictions and selections for composing an ideal life as well as the chance to assert subjectivity in the construction of individual boards. This tension also impacts the ways young religious women use the site to negotiate their roles, dreams, and desires with the additional complexity of their religious ideologies which prescribe different but perhaps similar versions of the “ideal” life. Evangelicalism and the “Ideal” Future The gender expectations prescribed in the Evangelical “ideal” life play an instrumental role in how young women view their futures in relationship to domestic, long-term education and vocational goals. These prescriptions are conveyed through various “literacy events,” such as youth groups, Bible studies, large conference gatherings, and church camps (DeRogatis, 2015; Ingersoll, 2003). In particular, one tool used in many of these settings are books, similar

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to the book my participants were reading in their small group. These books, often focused on sexual purity, detail very specific ideal, and idealized, futures for young Christians. Ludy (2003) describes an idealized future as one where a young woman finds her “Prince,” but in order for that to take place girls need to remain sexually pure on both a physical and mental level, which often requires isolation from society. The twelve chapters listed in the table of contents include titles such as “The Reviving of the Feminine Heart”, “Lily Whiteness and Romance”, and “Preparing for Intimacy”. Three chapters bear the subtitle “Future Husband Application”. Amy DeRogatis (2015) in Saving Sex, notes that these books walk a fine line between cultivating future hopes of marriage in order to repress sexual desires while also not wanting young women to focus on marriage too much. Instead, “Young women should fall eagerly in love with Jesus by spending time alone in prayer with Him and reading his love letters (the Bible)” (p. 23). With these books targeted at young women, the message conveyed is that the ideal future is one where they are married and happy. The only way to get there is to shape your adolescence around that end goal, which often can entail isolation and a balancing act between cultivating the idea of marriage but not wanting it “too much”. Pinterest is used as a tool for many young women, Evangelical or not, to plan and prepare for future weddings. The important distinction for Evangelical young woman is the fine line they walk with the need to balance their desires, which can create a tension between hoping for a dream and the reality of what will happen. One of the primary concerns with Evangelical cultivation of an ideal life for women is the encouragement to isolate and sacrifice what might be described as “society’s goals” to reach their religious goals, even if that means removing oneself from school. Ludy (2003) describes a crossroads in her high school education where she felt she had to choose between attending school and “the tender patient whisper of my Prince [Jesus] continu[ing] to tug at my heart” (p. 87). She felt pressure in high school where she admittedly became “goal oriented and ambitious” (p. 87) and burdened by the cultural assumption that “To have a successful future, a young woman must carefully follow society’s pattern for success” (p. 85). Ludy ultimately chose not to follow what she calls, society’s pattern of success (presumably the pursuit of a career outside of a family context), and she describes that moment, “The most important focus of my life now was to build my daily existence around intimacy with Him in my inner sanctuary. I realized it was nearly impossible to do this with my . . . schedule, so (with plenty of fear and trembling!) I made the decision to continue my education at home” (p. 87). Ludy decides to leave school to facilitate spending a substantial portion of her day “alone with her Prince”, and the book demonstrates that the end goal of this alone time was to someday attain a real, flesh-and-blood, husband-as-surrogate-prince (p. 88). The cultivation of this singular dream-future wrapped up in finding a “prince” and having a happy marriage is important and vital enough to walk away from society and even school, effectively exchanging one version of education for another. The power

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of this dream cannot be overstated, and many young Evangelical women are caught in the negotiations between the dream life they hope for and the reality that such a life might be impossible to attain.

Study Description For the study, I followed for a period of three months, six different young women ranging in age from 14 to 17 years on the website Pinterest. For each participant, I recorded the number of pins on each board, their likes, and any other changes, such as board deletions, board title changes, or board additions. Because every participant had a “quote” board, I selected the most recent 20 quotes from each participant’s board and performed a discourse analysis on the texts looking for patterns individually and between participants based on words used in the quotes. I used screenshots to capture the texts as well as to capture any pins that were unique to the user. Then, I conducted a recorded interview based on 19 questions along with follow-up questions. I did not initially seek out Evangelical women for the study as the participants were simply a convenience sampling drawn from young women from my daughter’s friend group. However, the religious aspect emerged during the study’s data gathering process. Two of the participants considered themselves Baptist, three identified as Evangelical nondenominational, and one participant practiced Catholicism. Owing to space constraints, I will only write here about two of my participants. Participants Both participants are from the same small midwestern town, and although they only know each other loosely, they attend the same local public high school. Hannah is 15 years old and identifies as a Christian and attends a non-denominational church and youth group. She uses Pinterest almost daily and checks it before getting out of bed in the morning as a guide for outfits, hair, and makeup for the day. Many of her pins reflect these emphases. Laura, at 17 years old, was the oldest of my participants. She attends a local conservative Baptist church, one of the largest in her town. She also attends weekly Bible studies and youth group events. Laura wears a promise ring, which is a precursor to an engagement ring. She actively pins for weddings and tips for being an adult.

Analysis Demonstrating Faith Hannah and Laura have different involvements in the faith community. Hannah attended weekly church and youth group meetings, and although her family certainly identified as Christian, they carried a more casual approach to their faith involvement. In contrast, Laura and her family were deeply embedded in their Baptist faith community, attending frequent Bible studies and actively

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adhering to faith beliefs in their home and daily lives. Laura was a part of my daughter’s Bible study group where they were reading Ludy’s book and regularly discussed principles of living a Godly sexual life as women preparing for marriage. Both Hannah and Laura not only had pins related to their faith, but identified as Christians in the interview process. When I asked Hannah what people would be able to tell about her when they looked at her Pinterest boards, one of the three aspects she mentioned was that they would be able to tell she was a Christian from her board entitled “Faith”. Laura’s board was likewise entitled “Faith”, but many of the pins overlapped with topics of marriage and her role as a Christian woman. Two pins were titled “The Ten attributes of a Proverbs 31 wife” and “The wife who bases her life on the Bible rather than emotions”. Laura pinned to her “Faith” board as a committed practice. She pinned three to four times weekly with a total of 94 pins over my time watching her. By contrast, although Hannah identified her Christian identity as one of the most dominant characteristics shown in her Pinterest boards, she only had 16 pins in all. Also, after the study officially wrapped up, I revisited her site and noticed her entire “Faith” board had been deleted. It’s clear that her faith plays a role in the recursive storytelling taking place on the website in ways different from Laura. The Future Discussion around the future permeated the observations and interviews with my participants, but I also wanted to explore how they see their lives in the future in relation to their activity on the site. I asked the question, “Five years from now, how do you think your pins would change? What would be different or the same?” Laura Laura uses Pinterest almost exclusively to plan her future, a future she expressed a significant amount of anxiety over during the interview. Initially, she shared that the primary reason for her anxiety is the realization that at 17 she will quickly be on her own. This was most clearly expressed in her board entitled “Being an Adult” where she had a series of “How-to” pins about budgeting, marriage, and being a good wife. When I asked Laura what story her pins or Pinterest boards might tell, she said: That is hard. It would probably tell about some of my anxiety that I have about just like the future. Um especially I have a board about being an adult because it like really freaks me out cause like I don’t know how to do so many things. It’s like I have been catered to by my mom and dad, and they do everything for me. Then when I am eighteen, and then they are like ok, bye, I just have to know what to do.

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As the interview unfolded, the emphasis on marriage and being a good wife throughout her “Being an Adult” board came into focus when she showed me the promise ring that her boyfriend had given her. The knowledge that marriage is in her close purview gave context to her boards, her anxiety about surviving as an adult, and the tension seeded into how she will make her plans and dreams actualities. In considering the future orientation of Laura’s boards, it is important to note that much of this future was framed in the planning of her wedding and her future role as a wife. Her “Future Wedding” board had the highest pin count with 569. Her next highest board, “Create”, has 154; “Being an Adult” came in a close third at 149. She also indicated in the interview that she had an additional hidden wedding board because she did not want people to think she was “crazy”. This theme of people perceiving her as crazy came up frequently throughout the interview, especially in reference to her wedding pins. Laura feared her audience might consider her pins “weird” for someone her age. When I asked her what someone might learn about her from looking at her site, she indicated that “They would probably think I was like crazy with like how much I post about weddings and stuff and how young I am.” In response to her frequent allusions to how people might view her, I asked if she often thought about others when she was pinning. She said: Not often, but with stuff like that [wedding], I don’t want them to think I am like too far ahead of myself. But I am like such a planner that planning things and thinking about things is most of the enjoyment for me, and so like I do things so far in advance. People think that is weird and so I don’t want them to think I am weird. The anticipation of things is a huge part of my experience with them. Even though Laura is worried that people might think she is strange for pinning for the future, my other participants use the site in similar ways. One of the main differences is that Laura’s planning seems to entirely focus on marriage and weddings, and she appears to notice this difference herself as evidenced with her hidden wedding board. Thoughts of her wedding and being a good, “submissive”, and “Godly” wife (terms quoted from her pins) spill over into many of her other boards that are not directly related to marriage. Hannah Hannah’s pinning practices were broader and often focused on identity. She talks about a selfie board she created and deleted later because “she was not on the selfie bandwagon anymore”. When I asked her what people might know about her when they looked at her boards, she responded, “That I am a normal teenage type person”. Even though she perceived herself as normal, her answer regarding her future pinning in five years was unexpected. She responded with the following: I will be twenty, so I probably would have stuff about maybe kids, like kid room ideas, wedding. I already have my dream wedding board, but like for

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[a] real wedding. I will probably use it more for life instead of pleasure if that makes sense because my mom doesn’t like have a humor board or a quotes board. It is all like cooking, cleaning, crockpot, and stuff like that. At the age of twenty, Hannah conflates her life with the life of her mother, who is a stay-at-home mom in her forties. Instead of forecasting a young adult life building a vocation or traveling, she sees a life at 20, not as a pursuit of pleasure, but as one providing means, cleaning a home, and taking care of kids. As both Laura and Hannah forecast their future lives in relationship to the domestic, it makes sense to ask how these future trajectories impact their current thinking in relationship to education and job planning. Although Laura pinned about budgeting, there were no pins talking about careers or a particular means for making money. Instead, she likewise feels pressure to quickly build the kind of life and home her parents currently provide for her, which brings her immense anxiety. Even though she is still in high school, Laura’s domestic future is much more imminent with a chosen partner and a wedding on the near horizon. Hannah imagines at 20 that her life will move away from “pleasure” to the “real” work of life, which is wrapped up in domestic concerns. She predicts that her current pins related to identity and understanding her place in the world, particularly as seen in her “Quotes” board will need to be abandoned. This movement away from her identity quotes perhaps implies a projection that her identity will be realized as a wife and mother and/or be wholly subsumed within the identity of her husband. Dream vs. Real The interviews revealed that my participants often made a distinction in using the site to plan for their future “dream” life and their future “real” life. In many ways, the dream life seemed to cause the most contestation between their desires and their Christian ideologies, whereas the real life reflected their future trajectories more directly. “Real” life also interplayed with their ideologies, but instead of encompassing desires, “real” life was the distilled version of the dream life and had the potential of being actualized. This movement between dream and real life is perhaps an exercise that most young people participate in, but the uniqueness in this study’s participants lies in the negotiation of their religious ideologies as regards what they should be dreaming of and planning for. Along with negotiating is the realization, both prior and during the study, that their pinning practices are being monitored by people in their communities. Hannah: Future and Cult Hannah uses the word dream three times on her boards—“Dream wardrobe”, “Dream house”, and “My dream wedding”. My personal relationship with Hannah was stronger than with the other participants, so I felt a freedom to

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probe more deeply. I asked Hannah directly: What do you mean by “dream”? She replied: It is kind of a far-off thing, but I guess it is not really like dream but more like planning. Like future. It is stuff that I would like to have at my wedding. It is not stuff that is like a dream that I won’t have. But I guess it is like far off . . . in the future. For Hannah, the distance between now and her future allows for dreaming that still contains the hope of realization. Although, in her earlier quote, she recognized that she currently uses the site for “pleasure” and that her future will shift to using it for “life”. Somewhere along the way, these dreams will start shifting to the real, and unlike Laura, this shift is far enough off that it does not produce the anxiety that Laura was facing as that shift was taking place. It is, of course, striking that Hannah sees life as in some way in contradistinction to notions of pleasure. This can be fairly easily tied to regressive notions of female fulfillment pulled from Ludy’s books and other larger discourses in these particular religious circles which case pleasure as childish, lewd, or dangerous, sinful. The topic of pain related to dreaming was also brought up in the interview with Hannah and comments from her mother nearby. When I asked Hannah what she might tell someone who is just joining Pinterest, she mentioned that her mother thought it was a “cult”. Her mother overheard nearby and said: You look at it and you see all these things that you could have and wish you had. You see all these other people pinning these dream kitchens and then look at your kitchen. I got tired of seeing all of that. Her mother equated the power of dreaming with the power of a cult. The dream, for Hannah’s mother, performs a sort of indoctrination, and being caught up with others in the “dream” life was likened to the pull of a dangerous religion. The danger lies in the subsequent pain or difficulty of leaving those dreams behind in a similar way that leaving a cult brings pain. Hannah’s mom had to altogether remove herself from the dreaming. She got “tired of seeing” that which she could not have and, in some ways, that which she ought not to have desired. I asked Hannah if she saw Pinterest like her mother. She responded: No, I don’t. I use it more for enjoyment. I don’t use it for comparing myself with others. It is more like what I wish. With my dream wedding, it is not like I am comparing my wedding to other people’s. Hannah’s mother is already living in her future, real life, and dreaming for her brings pain as she realizes her future will most likely not contain the actualization of those dreams; as well it likely elicits memories of a life before the dream was fulfilled, when life was, in many ways, still aspirational; when difference

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was possible. Hannah is young enough that the dreaming brings pleasure in her future planning; at the same time, she has to negotiate her mother’s cautions that her dreams might be unrealistic. That her dreaming is likened to a dangerous religion which might cause future pain as she moves into her domestic “life” draws on the prohibition of a shared Christian faith: it’s ok to dream about your prince—and the trappings that come with him—but perhaps not so specifically that one begins to covet the material too deeply. Laura: Future and coveting In the same way that Hannah mentions planning for the future as part of dreaming in her pinning activity, Laura also talks about planning. The difference is that she explicitly calls her activity in regards to the future, “planning”, rather than dreaming. I would argue that this planning is closely aligned to my other participant’s ideas of dreaming with the pleasure she derives from it, but she calls it planning because the end goal is not far off in the same way as it might feel for Hannah. At 17, Laura’s adult life will begin in less than a year, and with her promise ring, her dream wedding has transitioned to planning for her real wedding. When I asked her what she would be pinning in five years at 22 years old, she noted that hopefully she would not need a wedding board anymore (because she would be married). She thought for a minute about what she might pin, and then said, “maybe I would not be on Pinterest at all then”. This realization reveals that perhaps her planning, and even her planning for planning, has not extended beyond the dominant ideas (as seen in her pinning practices) of wedding and marriage. In many ways, this would echo her Evangelical upbringing as shown through an examination of Ludy’s book. With a woman’s future and purpose framed around becoming (and then, importantly, being) a wife and having a family, most dreaming and planning centers on actualizing the event(s). For Laura, this actualization is already nearby at 17 with her promise ring, and she imagines its fulfillment before she turns 22. With her future (feeling) so close, perhaps the anxiety around being on her own and her future wedding is partially generated from the reality that the pleasurable anticipation in her planning might not lead to a pleasurable result. One could hear this in her advice to other users, “Have it more for ideas rather than a picture of what you actually want because it is probably not going to happen”. Laura’s caution resides in the tension of what she “actually wants” and having to trim her dreams (plans) down into attainable packages. With her frequent references to people viewing her as “crazy”, she recognizes that some of her pins still hold a dream-like quality. She notes that she pins to alleviate anxiety around planning, but many of the pins are still images of an idealized wedding and marriage, and those are the ones that cause embarrassment as evidenced in her additional hidden wedding board. Perhaps her anxiety speaks to an attempt to make dreams of marriage and finding a “Prince” as cultivated in a church community come true, but realizing that it “probably won’t happen”. The “it”

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is ambiguous, but suggests a kind of melancholic realization that the dream is the thing and any reality that comes beyond the dream (whatever prince chooses you) will never really be Pinterest-worthy and certainly he will never be Jesus. Laura also expressed some tension between being on the site and her religious beliefs. When I asked her what she would tell someone who was just joining Pinterest, she cautioned: Don’t get obsessed with it or like be covetous of it or with it because there is lots of home stuff too and like wedding things and my small group leader Amber, she would actually talk to me about that when she found out that I was on so much. Ironically, there are cautions from others around the dreams Pinterest may cultivate while ignoring the source and similarity of these dreams as cultivated in purity teachings. Amber is, in essence, sanctioning Laura for being too good at reproducing the purity narrative. This surfaces concerning discourses around gender and control: the dream is nice but it’s really not ours in the end. Women are to reserve themselves for men and though they might dream of weddings they ought best to remember that final decisions are never their own, even/ particularly in relation to this well-cultivated dream. Even though these cautions about Pinterest are attached to religious terms—cults and covetousness—they ignore the larger impetus for the dreaming. Perhaps, any user of Pinterest may struggle in these tensions between dreaming and reality, but these two participants are encouraged to regulate these dreams when they are put on display on a secular social media site while simultaneously having dreams of marriage and home cultivated in their religious communities.

Conclusion Pinterest is a site designed for creating neat categories and sorting images and ideas into tidy boards; still my participants use the site to, in some ways, push against easy categorization. The participants negotiate their own desires and dreams in relationship to what they are supposed to desire and what they subsequently characterize as real. Evangelical purity texts offer a glimpse into some of the teachings in which these young women are enculturated and how they, as a result, cultivate the act of dreaming with a specific focus on marriage and the domestic. The participants saw themselves as married and even having children by their early 20s and moving into a time of life where dreaming ceases and the real work of life begins. Taking these dreams of a future fairytale “Prince” and finding images of material items that match up to these dreams might allow them to see more clearly the temporality and hyperbolic notions of the dreams they are told to long for of the domestic ideal. Seeing this ideal in its most concentrated and actualized form allows young women to conceptualize how this dream is made up of perhaps unrealistic parts. Laura has begun to see this dichotomy as she

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begins to actively plan a wedding beyond her Pinterest board and this causes worry over budgeting and finances alongside her focus on images of dream weddings. Seeing desire blown up and materialized calls into question its plausibility. Perhaps, as adults warned both participants, Pinterest will speed up disillusionment. This work asks, in the end, whether such disillusionment is actually such a problem. Evangelicalism encourages the act of dreaming itself and filling those dreams with a “Prince” and fairytale romance, and these dreams are implausible for many in the same way many of the depictions on Pinterest are. In some sense, the realization that Laura faces could be interpellated into a religious crisis; this seems like a ready explanation for her group leader’s caution in relation to the site. The futures that these young women construct are not linear but recursive, and they already reside in Laura and Hannah. The two can continually remake this future though under various religious constraints, as seen in the erasure of Hannah’s selfie board. The challenge is that my participants are already living their “real” future selves and this self focuses its views on the domestic during a time of key educational development. At the same time, as they do move into their futures, they will be able to look back and see their past desires on Pinterest, and this reflection might “destabilize the social narratives that helped to inform it” (Saul, 2014, p. 71). The dichotomy between past desires and the “real” might bring predicted pain as the adults around them suggest, but it might also point towards the domestic dreams that a larger ideological system encouraged them to participate in. These depictions of the future, particularly in relation to Evangelical teachings that emphasize (early) marriage, would well give pause for educators. What might it mean to teach young Evangelicals, particularly in secular settings, about digital representation and production in relation to simulated reality? What might we do as English Educators in particular to think about Pinterest and other sites as imaginary spaces where religious youths try on faith stories in reflection upon the discourses that surround them, but also as places where young women might be challenging the futures into which they are often cast? We’d do well to further study these composing practices first as ways to engage worldbuilding using bricolage, but also as acquiescence and resistance to religious, gendered constructions. There’s much to find in these imagined futures, plans; the disjunctures such dreaming produces could tell us a great deal about the inner life of religious (and secular) teens engaging a troubled and troubling world.

References Branch, K. (2009/2010). What no literacy means: Literacy events in the absence of literacy. Reflections, 9(3), 52–73. Brandt, D. (1998). Sponsors of literacy. College Composition and Communication, 49(2), 165–185. Cintron, R. (1997). Angels’ town: Chero ways, gang life, and rhetorics of the everyday. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

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Haraway, D. J. (1994). A game of cat’s cradle: Science studies, feminist theory, cultural studies. Configurations 2(1), 59–71. Retrieved September 1, 2019, from Project MUSE database. DeRogatis, A. (2015). Saving sex: Sexuality and salvation in American Evangelicalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Heath, S. B. (1982). What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school. Language in Society, 11(1), 49–76. Ingersoll, J. (2003). Evangelical Christian women: War stories in the gender battles. New York: NYU Press. Lather, P. (2001). Postbook: Working the ruins of feminist ethnography. Signs, 27(1), 199–227. Ludy, L. (2003). Authentic beauty. Sisters, OR: Multnomah Press. Oyserman, D., Bybee, D., & Terry, K. (2006). Possible selves and academic outcomes: How and when possible selves impel action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(1), 188–204. Paris, D. (2011). Language across difference: Ethnicity, communication, and youth identities in changing urban schools. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, Print. Saul, R. (2014). Adolescence and the narrative complexities of online life: On the making and unmaking of YouTube’s anonygirl1. Digital Culture & Education, 6(2), 66–86. Tekobbe, C. K. (2013). A site for fresh eyes. Information, Communication & Society, 16(3), 381–396. Turner, K. C. N. (2015). Multimodal media production: New landscapes for crafting future selves. International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 6(2), 25–41. Wargo, J. M., & De Costa, P. I. (2017). Tracing academic literacies across contemporary literacy sponsorscapes: Mobilities, ideologies, identities, and technologies. London Review of Education, 15(1), 101–114.

Section III

Wisdom Loving God, Loving Our Neighbors, and Engaging Religious Pluralism Through Literary Response Mary M. Juzwik And one of [the Pharisees], a lawyer, asked [Jesus] a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:35–40, NRSV)

In this story from Christian gospel scriptures, Jesus responds to an individual who is a Pharisee, a member of a religious faction within the Judaism of his day. The contemplative Christian scholar Cynthia Bourgeault, describes the Pharisees as “the best, not the worst, of the various Jewish religious factions; they were the ‘liberals’ of their own times, valuing moderation and relevance. . . . While open to surface novelty, they took their bearings squarely from received tradition” (115). In response to this test, then, it only made sense for Jesus to invoke the Hebrew law (e.g., Deuteronomy 6:5; Leviticus 19:18) to offer wholeheartedly loving God and loving one’s neighbor as oneself as the central spiritual teachings for religious life and practice. This story offers a touchstone for pondering the value of mystery, wonder, and indeed wisdom in responding to literature engaging religious and spiritual themes. Offering a wisdom perspective on the life of Jesus and the Christian tradition, Bourgeault (2008) interprets these two central ideas within the framework of kenosis: the daily embodied practice of self-emptying love. Her account understands the teachings of Christ as oriented around practice—namely, the practice of putting on “the mind of Christ” (Philippians 2:5–8). This orientation recognizes how, like other world religions, Christianity is not simply defined by right belief, but also—and many would say, more importantly—by practice and by community (e.g., Appiah, 2018). Putting on the mind of Christ, on this account,

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therefore involves practicing self-emptying through such spiritual practices as meditation, Eucharist, prayer, scriptural reading, and so on. It involves following a path of humility, rather than glory or power, to continually attune one’s being and one’s consciousness to encounter the Divine in ways that recast one’s transactions in the here and now. By contrast, a savior-oriented approach orients around “right belief ”, that is, assent to a creed of correct belief and to an ossified code of conduct deemed righteous by those holding power within a religious community and sometimes within a Nation State in the name of God (e.g., as discussed in Dávila and Epstein’s chapter). Taking such an approach leads many Christians to claim occupancy of a moral high ground. This orientation to Christianity has been on full display in U.S. politics for decades, and it almost seems to be an expression of the North American Protestant Christian DNA inherited from the Puritans (e.g., McKenzie, 2013). The preoccupation with right belief orients followers to Jesus Christ more in terms of salvation than wisdom: saying “yes” rather than “no” to Jesus. In Bourgault’s reckoning, “the Christianity of the West has always been savior-oriented. Jesus is seen as the one who died for our sins, who rescued us both individually and corporately from the exile and alienation brought about through the disobedience of Adam and Eve (19).” In this way, the righteous can delineate themselves from the unrighteous, the damned, the “other”. The answer to the question, “Do you believe Christ died for your sins?” becomes the core question dividing “believer” from “nonbeliever”. In western Christianity, some horrific consequences have followed for those who find themselves on the unrighteous (i.e., wrong belief) side of this divide. European and American history yields numerous examples, from the Inquisition and the Crusades in Europe to the enslavement of African peoples and the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. This dark legacy of the salvation orientation to Christianity is explored in Dávila and Epstein’s chapter, which outlines the restrictions, policies, and indeed violence supported by this approach to Christianity as it frames (and supports policies framing) LGBTQ persons as unrepentant sinners in Nazi Germany and in contemporary American life. Dávila and Volz, for their part, touch upon how dominant savior orientations to Christianity can serve to ridicule, marginalize, and ultimately dismiss the experiences of those who observe orientations to Christianity historically marginalized in the U.S., such as Mexican Catholics engaging in the sacramental practice of venerating images of the Virgin Mary found in humble everyday objects. I contrast these orientations to suggest how literacy scholars might conceptualize practices of literary reading as they interact with the wisdom orientation to Christianity presented previously, specifically the spiritual ideas of “loving God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind” and “loving your neighbor as yourself ”. Kati Macaluso, Denise Dávila, Elouise Epstein, and Allison Volz explore these relations with respect to diverse contexts, literary texts, and reading practices. They take up these relations in dialogue with issues and questions facing contemporary English language arts teachers: How can study

Wisdom 127 of literature engaging religious and spiritual themes articulate to standardization movements and imperatives? How, if at all, can responding to the religious and spiritual dimensions of literature help disrupt societal inequities? Kati Macaluso takes up Christ’s teaching to “love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind” by offering the central Catholic sacrament of Communion as metaphor for expanding the literary pedagogical imagination. Specifically, she offers a sacramental vocabulary for reimagining literary reading. “What is essential . . . about the sacraments”, Macaluso suggests, “is the recognition that God, in spite of his ultimate divinity, literally resigns (or resigns) himself to the incarnational world in the form of physical matter” (p. #). Responding to poet Rowan Williams and other scholars working at the intersection of theological and literary studies on sacramentality, Macaluso offers a portrait of reading “reconceived as a fully-embodied spiritual act of entering into communion” (p. #), for Christians practicing sacramental connection with God, perhaps the defining act of “loving God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind”. To show this possibility, in the flesh, she draws on interviews with Margie, a recently retired midwestern English language arts teacher. Macaluso chronicles Margie’s intense and sustained enchantment with Peter Shaffer’s 1973 play, Equus, which narrates the brutal actions of a youth whose fascination with mighty horses points to his longing for unity with the Divine. Margie’s transaction with this play is traced over a lifetime—as a young literature student then as a teacher introducing her students to this work over the course of many years, and as a wife finding the play a source of wisdom in response to a troubled marriage. A mediating priest-figure in Margie’s story is her university literature instructor, Arthur, with whom she develops a close friendship right up to the time of his death. Margie testifies, in a poem to her students, how Equus alongside a few other works have “lived under my skin/ Intimately flowing between muscle and bone,/A lover within my own flesh.” Arguing against dominant standardized instrumentalist approaches to literary reading “designed primarily for the procurement of ideas and the rehearsal of rational analysis” (pp.), Macaluso’s reading of Margie’s story reframes literary reading as an embodied act of self-emptying unity with the divine. Macaluso suggests that “To reframe reading, metaphorically, as an act of communion highlights the potential of literate engagement to be more than an autonomous act aimed at rational knowledge production, and it embraces that which risks becoming lost in an educational climate of exactitudes and certainty: mystery” (pp.). Ultimately, Macaluso believes, to invoke connection with the Divine as a reader is to invite acknowledgement of mystery into the process of literary response in schools. Denise Dávila and Elouise Epstein take a historical turn as they engage with the wisdom of Christ’s teaching and practice to “love your neighbor as yourself ”. This chapter contextualizes contemporary literature about the Nazi regime and the second World War through a discussion about the role of Christianity in Nazi ideology and rule. In the rhetoric of Hitler, Epstein shows, the saviororiented Protestant Christian theology of Luther became a weapon for white

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Nationalism and for the marginalization, persecution, and state-sponsored murder of those deemed “queer”, “other”, “non-White”, and “non-Christian” (i.e., not the right sort of Protestant Christian). Religious heterogeneity was a defining feature of the Nazi reign of terror, Dávila and Epstein highlight, particularly showing its consequences for LGBTQ persons who found themselves caught in Hitler’s web. Dávila and Epstein trace an implicit, and disturbing, parallel to the rhetoric and role of Christianity in contemporary United States discourses and educational policies that marginalize and do violence to LGBTQ persons in contemporary U.S. life, especially life in schools. The chapter explores three different literary texts that, in different ways, disrupt the heteronormativity of Nazi ideology and of much contemporary Christian savior-oriented theology. First, Dávila and Epstein introduce the book Hitler Youth: Growing up in Hitler’s Shadow, to show how in Hitler’s Germany, “loving thy neighbor was narrowly limited to those who met rigid racial, religious, gender, physical, and sexuality norms of Nazi ideology” (p. #). A second book, Branded by the Pink Triangle, zooms in on the consequences of perverting Christ’s command to “love thy neighbor” in relations with LGBTQ persons in Germany. The title evokes how the uniforms of LGBTQ persons in Nazi death camps were “branded” with pink triangles that signaled state-sponsored contempt for them as “un-Christian Others”. Finally, the biography, The Faithful Spy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Plot to Kill Hitler, most explicitly and extensively discusses Christianity and faith in relation to the Nazi regime ideologies and policies. Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran Pastor and theologian who lived Christ’s teaching to “love your neighbor as yourself ”. In his writings, he resisted Nazi ideologies and Nazi policies against “the other”, arguing as Professors Dávila and Epstein put it, that “If [the German church] did not rise up and act in the moment of critical need, then [it] ‘had no right to be called the church at all’ (qtg Hendrix, 2018, p. 78).” For Bonhoeffer, loving one’s neighbor as oneself means loving and defending the most vulnerable among us—an argument that can also be heard among Christians today who follow the wisdom teachings of Jesus and who, like Dávila and Epstein, lament the similarities between contemporary U.S. and Nazi Germany policies toward “the Other”. Finally, some implications of these ideas for religious pluralism and classroom pedagogy are explored by Denise Dávila and Allison Volz. The authors vivify the story of Allison’s urban sixth grade classroom in the midwestern U.S. where literate engagement with religious pluralism became a curricular goal and a pedagogical design. This account joins a very small number of similar accounts in the scholarly literature on language and literacy that explore how youth religious literacies and school curriculum come to interact in religiously heterogeneous public school classrooms (e.g., Damico & Hall, 2015; Ek, 2008; Skerrett, 2014). It stands apart from this and related previous scholarly work in the field (excepting other related writing on this same study [ Dávila & Volz, 2017]), however, because it introduces a literacy classroom scenario where engaging and cultivating religious pluralism in response to literature was an explicit learning goal. Among the materials engaged in the life of this classroom unit were the award-winning bilingual picture book by Carmen Lomas Garza, En Mi Familia/

Wisdom 129 In My Family and the bilingual picture book by Pat Mora, The Beautiful Lady: Our Lady of Guadalupe/La hermos senora: Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe. Through art and narrative, these stories evoke the significance of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the life of Mexican American Catholic families and communities. The curriculum also included a slideshow of public artistic murals from communities around the United States evoking such images as the Virgin of Guadalupe and Buddha. Allison showed her students video segments of mainstream television news reports about the modern-day sacramental practices of venerating Mary, including the Virgin of Guadalupe, in everyday objects. What emerges from the close look at classroom interactional data presented in the chapter is evidence that students developed a kind of wisdom orientation: a capacity to respect others’ different religious vantage points, observances, and experiences. This is the ability to tolerantly cohabitate on this planet with those who are religiously different from ourselves (e.g., Butler, 2011), perhaps even those whose religious sensibilities we find reprehensible. This wisdom practice may be especially challenging for those who smugly and comfortably occupy a religiously grounded moral high ground—the phenomenon described earlier with reference to many who espouse salvation orientations to the life of Jesus. Yet the children in this classroom, in response to their interactions around these literary curricular materials, rebuked news media commentators for mocking and disrespecting what they saw as respect-worthy (if different from their own) religious experiences and observances. And this is where the student Jon came in to observe to his table mates, “I think that shit’s rude”. In essence, Jon and his classmates seem to be wishing for the newscaster to take more of a stance of “Love your neighbor as yourself ”. For that is precisely the stance Allison worked with them to practice and articulate, across the points of the unit described in the chapter. It also creates possibilities for the kinds of literary responses suggested by Margie’s efforts to make space for connection-with-thatwhich-is-greater-than-myself in response to literature. Throughout this section, the chapters focus on literary reading and literary engagement as an embodied wisdom practice of loving God and/or loving one’s neighbor in relation to diverse trajectories, traditions, and histories of Christianity and, in the final chapter, other religious traditions as well. It is inspiring to note, too, that such orientations can be nurtured in classrooms such as Allison’s, even within our current regime of standardization that seems to discourage imaginative spiritual engagement with literature.

References Appiah, K. A. (2018). The lies that bind: Rethinking identity. New York: Norton. Bourgeault, C. (2008). The wisdom Jesus: Transforming heart and mind: A new perspective on Christ and his message. Boston: Shambhala. Butler, J. P. (2011). Is Judaism Zionism? In J. P. Butler, J. Habermas, C. Taylor, & C. West (Eds.), The power of religion in the public sphere (pp. 70–91). New York: Columbia University Press.

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Damico, J., & Hall, T. (2015). The cross and the lynching tree. Language Arts, 92(3), 187–198. Dávila, D., & Volz, A. (2017). “That sh*t is rude”: Religion, picture books, and social narratives in middle school. Middle Grades Review, 3(3), 1–15. Ek, L. D. (2008). Language and literacy in the Pentacostal church and the public high school: A case study of a Mexican ESL student. High School Journal, 92(2), 1–13. Hendrix, J. (2018). The faithful spy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the plot to kill Hitler. New York: Amulet. McKenzie, T. (2013). The first Thanksgiving: What the real story tells us about loving God and learning from history. Grand Rapids: InterVarsity. Skerrett, A. (2014). Religious literacies in a secular literacy classroom. Reading Research Quarterly, 49(2), 233–250.

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Entering into Literary Communion Nourishing the Soul and Reclaiming Mystery Through Reading Kati Macaluso

“A great deal depends [. . .] on our sensing and acknowledging that quality in our kind we call the soul”, wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Marilynne Robinson (2015, p. 235). I found myself compelled to open this essay with Robinson’s assertion because she invokes a term somewhat foreign to the primary discourses of education and literate engagement: the soul. There is something non-utilitarian about the soul, that ethereal substance that somehow transcends the utilitarian values of empiricism and measurement that have taken hold of education of late. Education arises from codified standards and aspires toward measurable and often-commodified outcomes, most namely college and career readiness. But the soul eludes commodification and measurement. “Looked at”, Virginia Woolf once wrote, “it vanishes” (Woolf, 1954, p. 84). My intention is not to engage in any analyses of the soul. I do, however, wish to dwell with Robinson’s words for a moment to inspire a kind of exercise in imagination I hope this chapter can enact for teachers and scholars of literate engagement. What might literate engagement look like when readers, writers, and teachers of reading and writing operate from the conviction that a great deal depends on sensing and acknowledging, not just the rational mind, but also the soul? How can readers, writers, and teachers recover a non-utilitarian sense of literate engagement that conceives of literate practices as fully embodied spiritual acts? One possibility, I believe, is to reframe literate engagement—in particular, the reading of literature—in Christian sacramental terms. I am especially interested in thinking through the relationality, purposes, and possibilities of and for literary reading that arise when one attempts to articulate a not-necessarilyreligious practice (reading) with a religious practice: communion. I do so not to impose religion on a readership of varied beliefs and religious experiences, but rather because the notion of “communion”, as it is used in religious contexts, allows one to access the spiritual potential of reading. In a way, it pluralizes otherwise standardized notions of reading in the secular, rational context of U.S. education. In this chapter I wish to suggest communion as a metaphor for reading, giving shape to what I call “literary communion”. Metaphors, writes poet Albergotti

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(2012), invite an overwhelming display of imagination by searching for “similarity in dissimilars” (p. 59). By bringing into relation a religious concept (communion) with a not-necessarily-religious activity (reading), I invite an exercise in imagination. To conceive of communion as a metaphor for literary reading imagines reading as an act of spiritual nourishment that bears a mystical sense of continuity between living and dead, earthly and divine. To reframe reading, metaphorically, as an act of communion highlights the potential of literate engagement to be more than an autonomous act aimed at rational knowledge production, and it embraces that which risks becoming lost in an educational climate of exactitudes and certainty: mystery. In what follows, I elaborate the case for why this re-framing might be more needed than ever, citing a few instances of the increasingly technocratic agenda of literate engagement within K-12 education. After giving definition to key concepts that transport reading outside a technocratic frame and animate the metaphorical relationship between communion and reading, I offer a portrait of one reader, Margie, and her experience of reading Peter Shaffer’s (1973) Equus. Ultimately, I argue that Margie’s reading experience is one of “literary communion” that posits new relationships, purposes, and possibilities in and for literary reading both in and beyond school contexts.

The Instrumentalization of Literary Reading in K-12 Schooling We are living, at the moment, in what might best be described as a “knowledge economy”. The knowledge economy, as Brandt (2015) defines it, refers to the economy first identified by Fritz Machlup (1972) as that rooted more in the manufacturing of ideas, data, information, and news than in the manufacturing of material things. This rise of a knowledge economy has been accompanied by shifts in the ways people make sense of the worth of various kinds of literacies. Literacies that respond to the economic imperative and that can be leveraged as tools—or instruments—for the manufacturing of knowledge, ideas, and information assume a greater value and a more privileged place in the U.S. school curriculum. Alsup (2015) has argued that the rise of a knowledge economy, along with an increasing obsession with scientific measurement, has resulted in the marginalization of literature. With the advent of the Common Core State Standards in 2011, for example, came a new ratio of recommended “text types”, calling for a 30 percent emphasis on literary fiction and nonfiction and a 70 percent emphasis on informational text that Common Core author David Coleman (2011) claims lends itself more efficiently to students’ mastery of ideas. And although some have argued that such ratios refer to a distribution of reading students undertake across the curriculum, with English Language Arts holding these two types of reading in much greater balance, the increasing linkages between literacy and a knowledge economy do not bode well for literature’s place in the secondary English Language Arts curriculum.

Entering into Literary Communion 133 Even when and where literature does hold a valued place in the ELA curriculum, one might argue that its prioritized place in the curriculum is predicated on a predetermined use value. Beach, Thein, and Webb (2012) delineate a variety of curricular frameworks that have governed the teaching of literature throughout English language arts’ history as a school subject. Whether a shared cultural knowledge framework that stresses the tooling of literature in the name of civic readiness or participation, or a skills-based framework that champions literature as a site for close reading and textual analysis, literature has—in the context of schooling—assumed an instrumental tenor. The degree to which close reading has come to dominate the discourse in and around literary reading in schools may speak, in part, to the instrumentalization of reading in the ELA curriculum. Though definitions and interpretations of close reading vary (Hinchman & Moore, 2013), the version of close reading put front and center in recent U.S. curricular documents is intended to be rigorous, objective, and oriented toward rational knowledge. As presented in this description by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), close reading: stresses engaging with a text of sufficient complexity directly and examining its meaning thoroughly and methodically, encouraging students to read and reread deliberately. Directing student attention to the text itself empowers students to understand the central ideas and key supporting details. It also enables students to reflect on the meanings of individual words and sentences; the order in which sentences unfold; and the development of ideas over the course of the text, which ultimately leads students to arrive at an understanding of the text as a whole. (2011, p. 6) Readers, it seems, are to attend to the formal qualities of text—the order of sentences, the choice of words, the overall order or organizational schema of the text as a whole—to “gather observations” (p. 6) that, taken together, allow them to understand “key details and central ideas”. Applied to both informational and literary texts, this definition of close reading positions literature as a tool designed primarily for the procurement of ideas and the rehearsal of rational analysis.

From the Instrumental to the Spiritual The instrumental uptake of literary reading is perhaps an outgrowth of education’s Cartesian mindset—one that has privileged mind as the primary, if not the only, area for growth and development in the human person. When, in 2016, I was in the midst of a study that involved a series of phenomenological interviews investigating people’s lived experiences of reading, I couldn’t help but detect in those experiences—and in one interview, in particular— something entirely beyond the rational, technocratic tenor of reading. Margie,

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the one interviewee whose story of reading I intend to flesh out in the pages that follow, surfaced a narrative of reading as that which can resonate, often in unpredictable and ineffable ways, with some higher power that gives life meaning and purpose. I call this the “spiritual” potential of reading, and given its relative absence from modern-day discourse, though not the history, of education, I believe it worthwhile to reflect for a moment on what I mean by the spiritual. Like rhetoric and composition scholar Beth Daniell (2003), who studied the spiritual implications of reading in the lives of women enrolled in the healing and recovery program Al-Anon, I distinguish spirituality from religion. Reading certainly carries with it a historical rootedness in organized religion, given the degree to which both reading and writing have been used to assimilate students into the value system of Protestant Christianity (Fraser, 1999). Brass’s (2010) historiographical research, for example, points to the ways educators and curriculum designers have conceived of literature, in particular, as offering a set of non-coercive conditions through which to develop the “right” sorts of aims, values, and visions in readers. Literature’s “musical and imaginative products”, wrote 19th century English educator Percival Chubb, “would lodge more memorably and fatally in the hearts and minds of children more than anything else” (qtd. in Brass, 2010, p. 708). In addition to the ways literary reading has been taken up in schools as a means of religious assimilation, or colonization even, ties between reading and religion also manifest themselves in particular practices and textual ideologies within the ELA curriculum. For example, certain religious traditions like evangelical Biblicism are mediated by a complex set of literacy practices that tie together reading and religion in a manner that has implications for textual authority and interpretation (Juzwik, 2014). I untether spirituality from religion as a way of clarifying that I am not, as some might suspect wherever organized religion is invoked, attempting to advance religious cause or to enforce religious dogma by engaging with religious concepts that help to illuminate the spiritual dimensions of reading. Daniell’s thinking about the spiritual implications of literate engagement speak simultaneously to both the potential relatedness, but also the distinctiveness, of spirituality and religion. For Daniell, an entire line of her own scholarly work on the intersections of literacy and spirituality was born of a realization inspired by a conference panel focused on the work of Paolo Freire. Struck by the fact that each of the conference papers stopped short of addressing Freire’s religiosity and, most relevant to my own argument, the spiritual striving born of it, Daniell noted: Economic and political analyses had never seemed adequately to account for the success of Freire’s method; a fuller, more convincing explanation includes the fact that Freire taps into that striving in his students, in his teachers, and in his readers for something beyond ourselves. Seeking a connection with God, the universe, the life-force, humankind, one’s own higher

Entering into Literary Communion 135 “self ”; attempting to give life coherence and purpose beyond professional, economic, or personal goals. (2003, p. 239) It is this definition of spirituality—a spirituality not necessarily tied to religion or organized faith, a striving to connect with some higher power—that guides my own work on students’ experiences of reading in the English Language Arts curriculum. Although there is value in distinguishing between religion and spirituality, I borrow from a religious tradition—the Christian sacrament of communion—to access spiritual dimensions of reading. Others, before me, have sought to articulate relationships between religion and the non-religious act of reading literary fiction. For writer Flannery O’Connor, for example, Christianity offered a lens through which to engage with literary fiction, not as a means of evangelization, but as a way of seeing beyond the words on the page and into the mystery of the divine. Christianity allowed for what O’Connor called the anagogical vision. Deriving from medieval biblical exegesis, anagogy implied seeing a particular text as relating to one’s spiritual destiny in the same way that a biblical text might refer to the divine life and one’s participation in it (Wolfe, 1986). The theological idea that I draw from in this chapter, as a way of both accessing reading’s spiritual potential and discussing its implications, is sacramentality. I join an ongoing conversation of philosophers, literary critics and theologians (e.g., Weigel (2004), Schwartz (2008), and Williams (2000)), who have worked at the intersection of sacramental theology and literature. For the purposes of this chapter, I home in on the relationship between the material and the divine implied in the Christian notion of “sacrament”. Physical, material signs matter in Christian sacraments—not just because they are symbols of the divine or “places where we get glimpses and hints of the extraordinary that lies just on the far side of the ordinary” (Weigel, 2004, p. 83)—but because of the mere fact that they are physical, material signs. Allow me to explain what I mean by this by reflecting for a moment on the Christian sacrament of communion, particularly as it is understood by poet Rowan Williams. According to Williams, what is essential in thinking about the sacraments is the recognition that God, in spite of his ultimate divinity, literally resigns (or re-signs) himself to the incarnational world in the form of physical matter. At the Last Supper, commemorated in the Christian sacrament of communion, Jesus, through word and gesture, signals his passing over into the physical form of bread and wine. As Williams writes, “He announces his death by ‘signing’ himself as a thing, to be handled and consumed” (2000, p. 216). The essential meaning structure of communion hinges, then, on the similarity of dissimilars (Potts & Smith, 2017)—on the seemingly detached divine resonating, in physical form, with humanity. There are connotations of communion, as it is understood in sacramental terms, that arise from this important point that Williams makes—most notably the simultaneously earthly and divine nature of communion, as well as its potential to nourish, to transform, and to unify.

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I find Williams’s notions of sacramentality and the connotations that arise from it a helpful frame by which to re-see both the processes and outcomes of literary engagement. Theorizing the story of one reader, Margie’s, reading experience in sacramental terms, I show how the act of reading might be reconceived as a fully-embodied spiritual act of entering into communion. This re-imagined notion of reading is one that re-introduces an aesthetic to reading otherwise marginalized in education, while also invoking a concept altogether foreign to more utilitarian models of education: mystery.

Introducing Margie and Her Experience of Reading There are many descriptors I could assign Margie, among them reader, teacher, poet, musician, and mother. When I met Margie for the first time, she was standing on the brink of retirement. It was June, and it had only been four days since she had packed up Room 610, her English language arts classroom at the local public high school, for the last time. From her colleagues’ perspective, Margie was a life-long learner, a musician, a poet “willing to bring her whole life—all her vulnerabilities, her dreams, her creativity and life experience, her triumphs and her defeats, her unbridled passion into the classroom”. Her classroom, they argued, was “frenetically and deliciously alive”. In one of her poems she shared with me—a poem she had gifted her AP Literature students on their final day of class, she wrote: And this year I discovered That words come hardest to me When I try to talk of works that have moved me The most poignantly, the most profoundly. I reentered the worlds of Williams and Kingsolver And Albee and Shaffer With you And began to realize and remember How these works have lived under my skin Intimately flowing between muscle and bone, A lover within my own flesh. When I asked Margie if she could talk about a specific work of literature that was in her own muscle and bone, she shared with me her experiences with Equus, the 1973 play by British playwright Peter Shaffer. Inspired by a British newspaper clipping about a s17-year-old boy arraigned for blinding six horses, Shaffer’s play unfurls primarily through the dialogue between the young boy, Alan, and a child psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Dysart, who has been tasked with understanding the roots of Alan’s actions. In his quest to make sense of Alan’s actions, Dysart begins to ponder his own decisions in life—a life that he perceives as being quite small. Alan’s story, then, becomes just as much the story of Dysart’s tragic realization of how he might have lived a more daring life.

Entering into Literary Communion 137 Margie was a freshman in college, enrolled in a modern drama course the semester she read Equus. Her professor, Arthur, had included it on his syllabus that term. Having already taken another course with Arthur the semester prior, Margie was well-versed in his pedagogical expectations, perhaps best summarized in the statement atop each of his syllabi: “Voyeurs need not apply”. Margie had shed, she said, all voyeuristic tendencies at the threshold of Arthur’s classroom, where she learned to read “with every ounce of [her] being”. It was Act I, scene 10 of Equus that Margie, in our second interview, recalled most vividly—a scene where Dysart, the psychiatrist, asks Alan to talk about his first experience with a horse, hoping that Alan’s answer might begin to make sense of the crime that has resulted in his arraignment. Alan eventually succumbs to the invitation, taking the psychiatrist back in time to the beach, where, a few years prior, Alan had been digging in the sand, unnoticed by his distracted parents. A stranger rides by on horseback and asks Alan if he would like to ride, and—as Shaffer’s stage directions indicate, “Alan nods, eyes wide” (p. 38). He then slips into a trance of memory, prompted by the psychiatrist Dr. Dysart’s question: DYSART: How was it? Was it wonderful? Alan rides in silence. Can’t you remember? HORSEMAN: Do you want to go faster? ALAN: Yes! HORSEMAN: OK. All you have to do is say ‘Come on, Trojan—bear me away!’ . . . Say it then! ALAN: Bear me away! (Shaffer, 1973, p. 38) Like Alan, who succumbs to the memory of being swept away on the back of a horse, Margie, in our interview, let the memory of her first reading of that scene completely overtake her. She recalled how Arthur, mimicking the actions of Alan mounting the stranger’s horse, mounted the table at the center of the classroom. “It was beautiful, just beautiful. Arthur was up there literally doing the scene—literally riding that horse. He said to us, “Ok, I’m Alan on that horse. What am I feeling? What am I seeing?” (Interview, July 14, 2015). As she remembered this first reading of Equus, Margie’s own hands moved as if she too were riding the horse, as if Shaffer’s play, and her experience reading it, still intimately flowed between muscle and bone.

Reading as Entrance Into Communion The relationship between Margie, as reader, and Equus, as text, is one fundamentally different from the relationship implied in the more technocratic, instrumental approaches to literary reading that have gained priority of late. Yagelski (2011), in his theorizing of the relationships between the literate student

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and text in the average U.S. classroom, has described the average relationship as one that promotes a “dualistic way of being in the world”, one that teaches “separateness rather than interconnectedness” (p. 17) and one that treats words as “products of the mind” (p. 45). Close reading, in order to maintain a scientific, rational tenor, requires a degree of distance between reader and text. Even Louise Rosenblatt’s theory on aesthetic transactional reading, which has given shape to a more experiential reader response-centered curriculum in the English language arts classroom, preserves that split between reader and text, although not to the degree of autonomy implied in most models of close reading. For Rosenblatt (1978/1994), reading was always an activity of transaction between reader and text, one always informing the other. “Transactional” seems an inadequate descriptor for Margie’s narrative about her reading of Equus. And although Margie seemed in her interviews to be describing a kind of close reading of Shaffer’s play, it was certainly not a distanced close reading. Her reading experience, after all, is one that has “lived under [her] skin/Intimately flowing between muscle and bone,/A lover within [her] own flesh.” In my analysis of Margie’s lived experience of reading, and others like hers, the best descriptor for her reading experience is one that I would describe as “communion”. The term literary communion is one that emerges from my own spiritual sense of communion derived from my experiences as a practicing Catholic. As mentioned in my earlier elaboration of poet Rowan Williams’s reflections on sacramentality, the term communion has become synonymous with participation in the sacrament of the Eucharist, a sacrament through which individuals, in a quest for spiritual nourishment and through the physical matter of bread and wine, unite themselves (com- is a prefix meaning “with, together”) with one another and the divine (unus means “oneness, union”). The Greek word for communion—koinonia—appears in St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, where he asks, in reference to some of the earliest practices of the Christian Mass, “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation [a koinonia] in the blood of Christ?” (1 Cor. 10:15–17). In other words, borrowing from a Christian sacramental framework, the term communion connotes a kind of mutual participation and nourishment, through physical, material signs, in the transcendent—something higher than ourselves. This notion of communion—as a kind of spiritually transcendent, fully embodied experience of reading that nourishes not only the mind, but also, and perhaps most importantly, the soul—is one that I wish to illustrate through a further elaboration of Margie’s account. Margie’s experiences with Peter Shaffer’s play suggest that literary reading, if approached as a spiritually nourishing entrance into communion, might move from transactional to utterly transformational. To quote Bishop Robert Barron (2011), “Those who participate in communion never leave unchanged; they never go back the same way they came” (p. 194). To speak of literary communion, then, is to speak of a “transformation into a communion, in which [readers] do not remain what [they] once were” (Gadamer, 1975, p. 34).

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Margie, the Literary Communicant The relational dynamic alone, between Margie (reader) and Shaffer’s play (text), is one that connotes communion in that Margie describes texts like Equus as “flowing between muscle and bone”. In a way, Margie fulfills the prophecy of novelist Pat Conroy (2010) who proclaimed in his nonfiction book My Reading Life, “I take it as an article of faith that the novels I’ve loved will live inside me forever”. But the depth at which Equus flowed between Margie’s muscle and bone was never so apparent to me as it was when Marie shared the reverberations of Shaffer’s play throughout her marriage. “That play”, Margie told me as our conversation about Equus continued, “was actually the reason I got divorced”. Margie had been married to a Vietnam veteran, who suffered, she said, from PTSD. “I kid you not—”, she said, “there were nights he went to bed with a gun next to his head”. After pleading with him to stop, after hiding the gun in the closet, after years of therapy—all to no avail—Margie made the life-altering decision to divorce him. I kept telling myself, “Only you can shrink or grow your life, Margie. Only you.” The phrase, “Only you can shrink or grow your life”, had become for Margie a kind of mantra to live by, but it had originated in her reading of Equus, where she had become haunted, she said, by Dysart’s gradual and tragic realizations about how small he had made his own life. By reading Shaffer’s play, Margie was able to participate in a vision for her life larger than the one she had previously been living. Through her reading experience, she came into contact with, in the words of Daniell’s literacy and spirituality framework, “a higher version of [her]self ”. There are many reasons readers seek out literature. As previously noted, in my elaboration of the more technocratic, instrumental uptake of literary texts in U.S. schools, those reasons often assume the form of language acquisition, skill refinement, and rational comprehension. But novelist Marilynne Robinson has suggested that people’s reasons for engaging with literature cut more deeply. And in an interview elaborating this sentiment, Robinson noted the following: Once I went to woman’s [sic] prison in Pocatello, Idaho. I read some, and we talked some, and when I was leaving one of the women said, “Tell your students to write good books. They’re all we live for.” You know? It’s so easy to forget how important books are [. . .] But then you realize that they’re really bread to people who absolutely need them. (Fassler, 2012) Margie’s accounts of her reading of Equus were, in my interpretation, accounts of a reader who had found in reading a kind of figurative bread, a means of nourishment for the soul. Like a communicant come in search of something at once both physically tangible and spiritually nourishing, Margie had discovered that reading, and the engagement with the physicality of text and language, could fulfill a kind of spiritual craving for participation in something capable of giving life coherence and purpose.

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Even more strikingly in line with the philosophies of communion is that Margie’s reading experience was one that brought her into full participation with others. Really, I find it impossible to convey this account of Margie’s reading of Equus without also talking about Arthur. He was, of course, the person and teacher who introduced her to Equus. But his presence throughout her lived accounts seemed so much more deeply and intricately woven than that. From the semester of that fateful modern drama seminar, until quite literally the hour of his death, Arthur was what Margie described as a “key player” in her life. Not surprisingly, then, his name surfaced in each of our three interviews together, sometimes with accompanying tears. To Margie, he was “the dearest of friends”—a statement to which even some of her poetry lends credence. In her poem, “Your Last Class”, it is Arthur that Margie addresses, writing to him from the space of his own living room where she had come to keep him company in his final days of life: And I am the daughter of your classroom, The student who refused to be a voyeur, The one who rejects learning as passive tourism. I am the closest you will come to a legacy, And I have come to hold your hand as you die. Throughout our interview, where she re-enacted for me the scene from Act I that Arthur had animated so many years prior, and that she had continued to animate throughout her life, Margie fulfilled the lines of her poetry: She was indeed Arthur’s legacy. Equus still flowed between her muscle and bone. It still pulsed through her “Bold and daring hands” “willing to let go the reins”. I was not surprised at all to learn that Margie, like Arthur, had integrated Shaffer’s play into the AP literature course she had taught at the local public high school for the past 17 years. Each year, too, until the year he died, Arthur visited Margie’s class, performing for her students the scene he performed for his own class that spring semester of Margie’s freshman year. On the final day of her AP literature class each year, Margie would gift her students with a poem she had written, a litany of hopes for her students, inspired in part by shared experience reading Shaffer’s play: I wish you the Alan-atop-the-horse-at-the-beach kind of love, Free and unrestrained by a bit in the mouth, That bareback kind of love that feels everything. Mostly, I hope that you give yourself permission to, Give yourself the freedom to Gallop in the heat of the wind With your hair flying behind you, At sunrise when the light is almost blinding

Entering into Literary Communion 141 Or at midnight when the fog of the night Permeates your pores. And it is then, At that very moment, That I wish for you Bold and daring hands That are willing to let go the reins. Joined by a collective experience of reading Peter Shaffer’s play—not unlike a spirit that Gioia (2013) describes as “communal” in that it connotes a mystical sense of continuity between the living and the dead—Margie, Arthur, and 17 years’ worth of Michigan-area high school students had entered into communion with one another.

Implications of Literary Communion in and for U.S. Schooling Having discussed the possibility of framing reading in terms of communion, I now consider what this re-framing of literary reading might create space for in conversations and practices in and around literate engagement. In particular, I wish to acknowledge a kind of aesthetic that is introduced when educators begin to imagine reading as a fully embodied spiritual act. I also wish to point out an important shift—from certainty to mystery—that is perhaps more permissible when reading reclaims its spiritual potential. A New Aesthetic Earlier in this chapter, I noted the prevalence of more technocratic, utilitarian approaches to and rationale for reading in U.S. education. A more technocratic agenda for reading that concerns itself with college and career readiness is likely to emphasize formalism. Students learn to analyze an author’s craft, asking such questions as, “How does this literary element contribute to the larger meaning of the text?” or “How might the character’s conflict have been different had the setting shifted?” or “How will the protagonist’s future look, and how do you know?” When readers enter into literary communion, though, and terms like “soul” and “spirituality” begin to enter into conversations about what it means to read, concepts like beauty and mystery become relevant. Brian Doyle, an essayist and poet, posits that there is something to be gained in asking questions outside the frame of textual analysis. The “deeper education” might unfold, Doyle (2015) contends, in response to the question, “What music does the text get going in ourselves?” Reflecting on his own experience in a college seminar focused on Mark Twain’s writings, Doyle praises his professor for having figured out that “It was easy enough to pick apart the craft of the [text], to identify the tools that had been wielded by a brilliant man from Missouri in service to laughter and fury and rage and reverence”. Having made that discovery, his professor

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had built a course around what he perceived as the source of the most powerful reading experiences: “writing that is about the reader, that takes up residence in the country of her heart, that speaks to his innermost self, . . . that shivers, and rattles, and rivets”. In most English language arts classrooms, out of faithfulness to the craft of the text and the skills of analysis, teachers listen for the keenness of a reader’s interpretation. However, accounts like Margie’s reading of Equus, and acknowledgment of the role that reading may play in people’s spiritual strivings, suggest questions of an entirely different aesthetic: “What music does this text get going in the reader’s soul?” “How does this text move the reader?” or “How does it feel to read this passage?” These kinds of questions invite teachers to listen not only for the keenness of a reader’s analysis, but for the music—perhaps the rhythmic architecture of a reader’s voice sharing a particularly moving, shivering, riveting, or rattling passage. And, while words are the dominant currency of the literature curriculum, reimagining literary reading as a soul-filled and soul-filling act of communion may also invite a sometimes wordless language in response to literature. Margie writes, in one of her poems I shared previously, that the literary works a reader finds most moving are sometimes those for which there are no words. Her poem reframes, as generative, those moments in response to reading where a reader struggles to find the right words—where the soul, moved, must rely on a fully embodied language of silence, or tears, or laughter. From Certainty to Mystery The struggle to find the right words, or the sheer inadequacy of words, points to another reality made possible by a disposition toward reading as entrance into communion: the shift from certainty to mystery—that which supersedes our understanding. Mystery is a concept altogether lost in the more utilitarian landscape of education, particularly in an era of measurement and accountability that values scientific certitude and precision. Revisiting the definition of close reading put forth by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), reading is “methodical”; it aspires toward “understanding”. Close reading is a means of asserting control, of gaining certainty. But literature, writes Flannery O’Connor (1969), “concerns itself with mystery that is lived” (p. 128, emphasis added). By reimagining reading as entrance into communion, those responsible for fostering students’ literate engagement, and educators especially, might put readers and reading back in touch with the mystery that writers like O’Connor claim characterizes our lives. “We are mysterious creatures moving in a world of mysterious creatures on our way somewhere”, states Marilynne Robinson (2018). Writing about the sacramentality of Robinson’s writing and its resonance with Williams’s notions of communion as a “play of signs”, Potts and Smith (2017) assert, “It is precisely the human urge to stabilize, to fix and objectify reality that the sacraments work against” (p. 491). Adopting the metaphor of literary reading as literary communion, then, works in opposition to the norms of close reading implied in the majority

Entering into Literary Communion 143 of modern ELA curricular documents. Framing literary reading in sacramental terms invites a resistance to a finalization of meaning, to clean-cut definitions of character. It forestalls closure in the act of reading, and it may even suggest that criteria for text complexity in ELA curricula, currently based on lexile levels, should take into consideration the degree to which texts invite an eye and awe toward mystery. So, a great deal does depend on “acknowledging that quality in our kind we call the soul”. The relative dearth of attention that has been paid to the spiritual dimensions of literacy in the scholarship of literate engagement has only strengthened the utilitarian agenda of and for reading in U.S. school curricula. Engaging with Christian concepts of communion introduces a non-utilitarian vision for literary reading as that which nourishes and moves the soul, draws people in relationship to one another, and ultimately reclaims an appreciation and respect for mystery embodied in the sensory world of the text.

References Albergotti, D. (2012). The truth of imagination: Metaphor’s universe of possibilities. Poets & Writers Magazine, 40(1), 59–60. Alsup, J. (2015). A case for teaching literature in the secondary school: Why reading fiction matters in an age of scientific objectivity and standardization. New York: Routledge. Barron, R. (2011). Catholicism: A journey to the heart of the faith. New York: Image. Beach, R., Thein, A. H., & Webb, A. (2012). Teaching to exceed the English language arts common core state standards: A literacy practices approach for 6–12 classrooms. New York: Routledge. Brandt, D. (2015). The rise of writing: Redefining mass literacy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Brass, J. (2010). The sweet tyranny of creating one’s own life: Rethinking power and freedom in English teaching. Educational Theory, 60(6), 703–717. Coleman, D. (2011, April 28). Bringing the common core to life. Presentation to New York State Department of Education, Albany, NY. Retrieved from http://usny.nysed.gov/ rtt/docs/bringingthecommoncoretolife/fulltranscript.pdf Conroy, P. (2010). My reading life. New York: Doubleday. Daniell, B. (2003). A communion of friendship: Literacy, spiritual practice, and women in recovery. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Doyle, B. (2015, Summer). The dogwood bloomed, too. Notre Dame Magazine. Retrieved from https://magazine.nd.edu/news/echoes-the-dogwood-bloomed-too/ Fassler, J. (2012). Marilynne Robinson on democracy, reading, and religion in America. The Atlantic. Online interview Retrieved from www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/ archive/2012/05/marilynne-robinson-on-democracy-reading-and-religion-in-america/ 257211/ Fraser, J. (1999). Between church and state: Religion and public education in a Multicultural America. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Gadamer, H. G. (1975). Truth and method. New York: The Seabury Press. Gioia, D. (2013). The Catholic Writer Today. First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion & Public Life, (238), 33–43. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.library. nd.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=92007126&site=ehost-live.

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Hinchman, K. A., & Moore, D. W. (2013). Close reading: A cautionary interpretation. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 56(6), 441–450. Juzwik, M. M. (2014). American evangelical Biblicism as literate practice: A critical review. Reading Research Quarterly, 49(3), 335–349. Machlup, F. (1972). The production and distribution of knowledge in the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. O’Connor, F. (1969). Mystery and manners: Occasional prose. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. (2011). Model content frameworks: English language arts/literacy, grades 3–11. Retrieved November 16, 2012, from www.parcconline.org/parcc-content-frameworks Potts, M., & Smith, M. (2017). “The world will be made whole”: Love, loss, and the sacramental imagination in Marilynne Robinson’s housekeeping. Christianity & Literature, 66(3), 482–499. Robinson, M. (2015). The givenness of things: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Robinson, M. (2018, September 19). Writing faith: A conversation with Marilynne Robinson (S. Monta, Interviewer) [Audio clip]. Retrieved from https://news.nd.edu/news/ notre-dame-forum-speaker-robinson-discusses-writing-faith-and-healthy-individualism/ Rosenblatt, L. M. (1978/1994). The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Schwartz, R. (2008). Sacramental poetics at the dawn of secularism: When God left the world (Cultural Memory in the Present). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Shaffer, P. (1973). Equus. New York: Scribner. Weigel, G. (2004). Letters to a young Catholic. New York: Basic Books. Williams, R. (2000). On Christian theology. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Wolfe, G. (1986). Flannery O’Connor: Mystery and metaphor. The Intercollegiate Review, 22(1), 43. Woolf, V. (1954). A writer’s diary: Being extracts from the diary of Virginia Woolf (1st American ed.). New York: Harcourt, Brace. Yagelski, R. (2011). Writing as a way of being: Writing instruction, nonduality, and the crisis of sustainability. New York: Hampton Press.

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“Love Your Neighbor” LGBTQ Social Justice and the Youth Canon of WWII Literature Denise Dávila and Elouise E. Epstein

In this chapter, we argue that young adult literature could and should serve as a catalyst to examining the ways two different Christian social narratives have influenced the treatment and social positioning of LGBTQ students. To describe these narratives, we turn to a Washington Post newspaper commentary by Christian Evangelical minister David Gushee. In the piece, Gushee (2014) explains that one of the social narratives, which some Christians recognize as a code of gender and “sexual ethics”, has “centered on six or seven biblical passages that appear to mention homosexuality negatively or appear to establish a heterosexual norm: the sin of Sodom, the laws of Leviticus and the list of ‘the unrighteous’ in 1 Corinthians 6:9–10” (n.p.). This biblical code of gender/ sexual ethics, has among some members of the Christian community, “metastasized into a hardened attitude against sexual- and gender-identity minorities, bristling with bullying and violence. This contempt is in the name of God, the most powerful kind there is in the world” (Gushee, 2014, n.p.). In short, the social narrative that members of the LGBTQ community are in contempt of God is so hardened among some Christians that these Christians employ violence. Indeed, in the United States the Christian “religious right”—which coalesced in the late 1970s as a political group that helped elect Republican president Ronald Reagan and continues to enjoy considerable influence in the Trump–Pence administration (Balmer, 2017)—has helped to establish U.S. federal and state government policies sanctioning psychological violence against members of the LGBTQ community. Fueled by the Christian narrative that “unholy LGBTQ others” are outside the Biblical code of gender/sexual ethics, seven states have “No Promo Homo” laws that stigmatize LGBTQ persons in K-12 public school classrooms (i.e., Alabama, Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas; GLSEN, 2019, n.p.). Actions that stigmatize youth are recognized as forms of psychological violence or abuse as described by the Public Health Agency of Canada (2008). In Canada, the following behaviors contribute to abuse: (1) implying something is wrong with the targeted persons; (2) refusing to acknowledge the persons’ presence, value, or worth; (3) communicating to the persons that they are useless or inferior; (4) failing to provide

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care in a sensitive and responsive manner to the persons; and (5) denying that any abuse toward the persons has ever occurred. As described by the GLSEN (2019), Promo Homo laws in the U.S.: are local or state education laws that expressly forbid teachers of health/ sexuality education from discussing lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB) people or topics in a positive light—if at all. Some laws even require that teachers actively portray LGB people in a negative or inaccurate way. Not only do these laws prevent LGBTQ young people from learning critical information about their health, but they also serve to further stigmatize LGBTQ students by providing K-12 students false, misleading, or incomplete information about LGBTQ people. (n.p.) In other words, Promo Homo laws call on publicly funded K–12 educators, administrators, and staff to engage in behaviors that forcefully assert something is wrong or deviant with LGBTQ persons; that refuse to value, let alone acknowledge, the presence of LGBTQ children in public schools; and that fail to provide an education that is sensitive and responsive to the needs of LGBTQ children and their families. At the federal level, psychological violence has occurred under the direction of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, on behalf of the Trump–Pence administration. For example, the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) rescinded landmark bathroom protection policies that allowed transgender students to use the bathrooms corresponding to their gender identities (Peters, Becker, & Davis, 2017). Now, K-12 students must use primarily unsupervised bathrooms that correspond with their genitalia and nothing else. Furthermore, the DOE announced that it will no longer investigate complaints filed by transgender youth who are prohibited from using restrooms that match their gender identities. The Trump–Pence administration’s behaviors correspond with the tenets of psychological violence. They reflect the refusal to recognize the presence of transgender/queer children in K-12 public schools; the national messaging that transgender/queer children are not valued in public schools; the failure to ensure a safe and healthy learning environment that is sensitive and responsive to the needs of transgender/queer children; and the denial that any abuses have occurred to transgender/queer children. The administration’s actions were applauded by socially conservative Christians as reported by the New York Times (Peters et al., 2017). Mentioned earlier, many hardline conservative Christians of the religious right subscribe to the first social narrative that LGBTQ people are in contempt of God. In stark contrast to the first, the second Christian social narrative that we present in this chapter is associated with Matthew 22:36–40. As described by Gushee (2014), the most important Christian stance is “the primary moral obligation taught by Jesus—to love our neighbors as ourselves, especially our

“Love Your Neighbor” 147 most vulnerable neighbors” (n.p.). Gushee embraced the latter moral obligation narrative when he personally decided to treat LGBTQ people with humanity. As a minister, he felt obliged to “side with those who were being treated with contempt, just as I hope I would have sided with Jews in the Nazi era.” (n.p.). More specifically, Gushee’s hopes that if he had lived in Nazi Germany, he would not have been complicit with “the silence of most ‘good’ Christians amid the slaughter of the innocents” (n.p.). His desire to transcend the status quo and embrace social justice strikes at the core of this chapter. In the following paragraphs, we take a cue from Gushee by presenting texts about human beings who were treated with contempt simply for being themselves. We describe how socially conscious English teachers and teacher educators could employ children’s and young adult literature and informational texts to critically examine the two different Christian narratives relative to the historical and contemporary treatment and positioning of LGBTQ youth. Standard 10 of the English Language Arts Common Core State Standards (ELA-CCSS; National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010) requires that public school students in grades 6–12 engage with “texts selected from a broad range of cultures and periods” (n.p.), which supports the inclusion of both contemporary works about LGBTQ youth and historical and informational works about Nazi Germany and its occupied territories. Specifically, the ELA-CCSS require that students read a range of literature genres and formats including plays and graphic novels and a variety of informational genres such as expository texts, speeches, biographies, and historical accounts. Here, we discuss acclaimed works from these genres and formats that could give way to critical conversations about social justice relative to the two aforementioned Christian narratives. We begin with an analysis of the texts recommended by the CCSS. Then, we describe three works of award-winning children’s and young adult informational literature that are part of the literary canon about the actors and events of the European theater of World War II. At least three WWII texts are highlighted in Appendix B of the CCSS for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects. The first is Goodrich, Frank, and Hackett’s (1956) The Diary of Anne Frank: A Play. It offers a dramatic interpretation of Anne Frank’s personal diary. The second is Winston Churchill’s “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: Address to Parliament on May 13, 1940”. Churchill delivered this address on the first day he became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the WWII Battle of France. The third is Elie Wiesel’s (1986) Nobel Peace Prize address “Hope, Despair and Memory”. Wiesel’s speech describes the emotional aftermath for survivors of the Nazi concentration camps and of the war. These texts offer first-hand accounts of WWII. The first invites readers into the lives of the Frank family, a Jewish family who lived in hiding for two years in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands before being discovered and sent to a concentration camp where all but one family member, Otto Frank, died. The second tells of the U.K.’s stance toward the Nazi regime in 1940, which was, in the words

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of Churchill, “to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime” (n.p.). The third calls on the international community to never forget that war “leaves no victors, only victims” (n.p.). In his Nobel speech, Wiesel explained that after WWII ended, victims voiced personal experiences about the “tidal wave of hatred which broke over the Jewish people” (n.p.). They hoped their testimonies about the Nazi death camps would persuade people to, “put aside hatred to anyone who is different—whether black or white, Jew or Arab, Christian or Muslim—anyone whose orientation differs politically, philosophically, sexually” (n.p.). Certainly, these ELA-CCSS recommended texts include diverse perspectives on the monstrous facets of WWII Nazi crimes against humanity while providing fodder to engage public school students in the ELA-CCSS standards for text analysis. Nevertheless, simply inviting students to read and rhetorically analyze these selections does not ensure that students will actually understand the broader contexts and nuances of the texts, especially relative to the Christian narratives we described at the beginning of this chapter. Congruently, Wiesel observed that although many people believed WWII victims were persecuted, they “could not comprehend” victims’ experiences because the level of psychological and physical violence the victims endured at the hands of Nazis and Nazi adherents “defies comprehension” (n.p.). We propose that expanding the canon of informational literature about WWII that public school students typically encounter would help to establish a historical context about (a) Nazis’ religious motivations for tyranny and (b) war survivors’ call to dispense with hatred toward people whose sexual orientations (and/or gender identities) differ from the norm (Wiesel, 1986). In the next section, we introduce three acclaimed works of informational literature to expand the canon for youth in grades 6–12. However, before delving into these books, we provide some historical information that serves as a backdrop to both these texts and those recommended by the CCSS.

Christianity and Nazism When Adolf Hitler became Germany’s chancellor in 1933, he made a public promise that his leadership would, “take Christianity, as the basis of our collective morality, and the family as the nucleus of our Volk and state”, and exclaimed, “May God Almighty take our work into his grace, give true form to our will, bless our insight.” (Steigmann-Gall, 2003). Indeed, according to one historical account: Christianity . . . did not constitute a barrier to Nazism. Quite the opposite: For many of the subjects of this [Steigmann-Gall’s] study, the battles waged against Germany’s enemies constituted a war in the name of Christianity. . . . Nearly all the Nazis surveyed here [in The Holy Reich] believed they were defending good by waging war against evil, fighting for God against the

“Love Your Neighbor” 149 Devil, for German against Jew. They were convinced that their movement did not mean the death of God, but the preservation of God. Nazism was infused with key elements of Christian belief. Many Nazi leaders, paganist and Christian alike, revered Jesus as someone whose personal “struggle” against the Jews served as an inspiration for their own struggle. Among paganist and Christians both, [Martin] Luther was cast as a great national hero and religious reformer: as the first German, the first Protestant, and implicitly the first Nazi. Many party leaders demonstrated their belief that Christianity was deeply relevant to Nazi ideology. They did so in their private conversations, their writings, and their actions, both before 1933 and after. . . . The discovery that so many Nazis considered themselves or their movement to be Christian makes us similarly uncomfortable. But the very unpleasantness of this fact makes it all the more important to look at is squarely in the face. (Steigmann-Gall, 2003, pp. 261–267) Steigmann-Gall’s (2003) careful research on Nazis’ religious beliefs disrupts the notion that Nazism was inconsistent with Christianity. To the contrary, Nazism reflected a range of religious beliefs that refute the commonly-held presumption that Nazism was anti-Christian. In reality, during the early years of the Nazi regime described by Steigmann-Gall, many Protestant women’s groups were “in the forefront of advocating social policies that the Nazis would later adopt as their own” (p. 203) and “actively supported Nazi legislation that increased penalties for abortion, pornography, prostitution, and homosexuality” (p. 204). Such legislation punished activities that did not support family development and reinforced pronatalism during a time of falling birthrates in Germany. Moreover, it aligned with the Christian narrative that homosexuals (i.e., members of the LGBTQ community) are in contempt of God and, thereby, deserving of punishment. Not surprising, the members of Protestant women’s groups were “among Hitler’s most avid supporters at the [election] polls”, which aided Hitler’s and the Nazi party’s rise to power (Steigmann-Gall, 2003, p. 205). When he became Chancellor, Hitler moved quickly to establish a new Christian morality. Upon withdrawing Germany from the League of Nations he stated, “Along with the fight for a purer morality we have taken upon ourselves the struggle against the decomposition of our religion” (Beachy, 2014, p. 117). Hitler shrewdly understood that in order to have absolute power he would need to have unquestioned control of all aspects of German life, referred to as Gleichschaltung. Historians Robert Michael and Karin Doerr (2002) define Gleichschaltung as: “Consolidation. All of the German Volk’s social, political, and cultural organizations to be controlled and run according to Nazi ideology and policy. All opposition to be eliminated” (p. 192). Reflecting the need for religious consolidation, Hermann Göring, Reichsmarschall (commander of Germany’s forces) and Hitler’s designated successor and a Protestant delivered a speech in November, 1933, in which he stated, “In our ten year struggle

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[toward Nazi leadership of Germany] we have changed the people, that they would no longer be republicans or monarchists, Catholics or Protestants, but Germans . . . He who would violate this unity of the Volk [German people’s collective identity] betrays the entire nation!” (Steigmann-Gall, 2003, p. 119). The success of Nazism required control of the military, the police, politicians, media, and most importantly, the definition of Christianity as a German virtue. As later described by Göring in a 1935 speech, the Nazis “have told churches that we stand for positive Christianity. Through the zeal of our faith, the strength of our faith, we have once again taken the Volk, which believed in nothing, back to faith” (Steigmann-Gall, 2003, p. 119). Alongside the paganism of some Nazi leaders, the Nazi’s strain of positive Christianity was anti-clerical and coexisted with a Nazi Christian mantle of socialism, anti-Semitism, and family development, which rejected homosexuality (Steigmann-Gall, 2007).

Nazism: An Anti-LGBTQ Movement Gay Berlin Under the initial guise of divine Christian provenance, Chancellor Hitler and the new Nazi government of 1933 moved with dizzying speed to legalize the discrimination and subsequent genocide of LGBTQ persons. However, the Weimar Republic, the governing party of Germany between World War I (1919) and the start of Hitler’s rule in 1933, was not preoccupied with punishing members of the LGBTQ community. Instead, Berlin was known as the homosexual capital of the world. In fact, in 1897 Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a physician, sexologist, and social reformer, established Berlin’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the first global organization for the rights of LGBT people (Setterington, 2013). In Berlin, the thriving gay section of town was filled with dance halls, clubs, bars, and restaurants that catered to the LGBTQ community. Moreover, activists were working in collaboration with Dr. Hirschfeld to abolish a rarely enforced antiquated law of 1871 known as Paragraph 175, which indicated that male indecency could be punishable by prison (Marhoefer, 2015). Of note, the Tony Award winning Broadway musical Cabaret (Kander & Masteroff, 1968) is set in 1929/1930 in a storied nightclub of Gay Berlin called the Kit Kat Club, just as Hitler was ascending to power. Members of the Nazi political party were already starting to harass the LGBTQ community in Gay Berlin in advance of Hitler’s election as chancellor (Plant, 1986). The Institute for Sexual Science The LGBTQ diaspora of Gay Berlin was at the epicenter of a new queer awakening of the 20th century that foregrounded science over religion with regard to gender and sexuality. The lighthouse of this queer exploration and enlightenment was Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science (ISS) created by Dr. Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld championed scientific inquiry over religious morality when it came

“Love Your Neighbor” 151 to legislating and enforcing gender and sexuality. Hirschfeld pioneered the distinction of gender identity as separate from sexuality in his book, Transvestites: The Erotic Urge to Cross-Dress, published in 1910. Experts at the time disagreed whether “transvestite” referred to those who only desired to dress in clothing of the opposite gender or those that experienced gender dysphoria. (Marhoefer, 2015, p. 59) This philosophical designation paved the way for gender identityrelated materials to be published and reach people who were desperate for this type of information. These publications included pamphlets produced by the ISS, but also “transvestite” specific content, included in lesbian-themed magazines (Marhoefer, 2015, p. 59). Further, the Institute experimented with early gender reassignment surgeries. Lili Elbe, the subject of the book The Danish Girl (Ebershoff, 2000) and the 2015 film of the same name, received her innovative surgeries at the ISS. Most notably, by 1932 the German government had formally recognized Hirschfeld’s theories on gender identity and paid for at least one reassignment surgery (Meyerowitz, 2002, p. 20). The Clean Reich: Nazi Erasure of Science and Culture Despite the Weimar Republic’s incubation of an emerging homosexual and gender diaspora, on May 6, 1933, the queer renaissance crashed and burned, literally. Merely six weeks after Hitler became the dictator of Germany, the forces of fascism descended upon the country’s public and private libraries and “un-German” institutions. (Marhoefer, 2015, pp. 174–175) Books by Upton Sinclair, Oscar Wilde, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Helen Keller, to name a few, were among the 25,000 collected for destruction (Wilhelm, 1933; Nazi Book Burnings, n.d.) Five teams of Nazi students, supported by a detachment of Nazi government officials, ransacked the ISS. They took a priceless collection of medical books, patient records, research documents, 35,000 photographs, and brochures while a marching band played outside the Institute (Beachy, 2014, pp. 241–242; Associated Press, 1933). Nazi agents then transported the confiscated material to the Berlin Opera House and on May 10, 1933, lit it all on fire in what became a stunning display of willful scientific ignorance and queer erasure. As reported on May 12, 1933, by the official Nazi daily newspaper Völkischer Beobachter/Populist Observer, one of the refrains the Nazi students chanted as they threw the books and materials into the fire was: “Against decadence and moral degeneracy, for decency and custom in family and government!” (Cunningham, 1999). This refrain corresponded with the interests of the aforementioned Protestant groups described by Steigmann-Gall (2003). It also foreshadowed the Nazi establishment of the Reich Central Office for Combating Abortion and Homosexuality, which linked abortion and homosexuality as threats to family development and Germany’s birthrate (U.S. Holocaust Museum, 2019, n.p.). Following the book burning, the Nazi regime undertook a “Clean Reich” campaign in which gay, lesbian, and “transvestite” bars, clubs, and presses were shut down. Paragraph 175 was revised to be draconian and punitive, which

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enabled the German Secret Police (The Gestapo) to systematically capture and send thousands of homosexuals to prisons and eventually concentration camps for execution (Meyerowitz, 2002, p. 244; Beachy, 2014, p. 245). These victims’ crime was simply being “other”.

Challenging Dominant Narratives About the Nazi Government and the Second World War Focus on Anti-Semitism One of the dominant social narratives about WWII regards anti-Semitism and the genocide of Jews. The Nazi government engaged in a “systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews” as described by the U.S. Holocaust Museum (2019, n.p.). Rightfully, the stories of the Jewish Holocaust are highlighted in the U.S. literary canon of award-winning historical fiction for children and young adult readers (e.g., Number the Stars (Lowry, 1989), The Book Thief (Zusak, 2007), etc.). In addition to the genocide of Jews, the Nazi government also tortured and slaughtered at least five million others, “encompassing gay people, priests, gypsies, people with mental or physical disabilities, communists, trade unionists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, anarchists, Poles and other Slavic peoples, and resistance fighters” (Ridley, 2017). However, there are few stories about these Nazi targets in the U.S. youth canon and even less about the murder victims who were members of the LGBTQ community. A Heteronormative and Cisgender Narrative According to Holocaust historians like Hájková (2019, n.p.), the history of Germany’s government-sponsored persecution and murder of queer people reflects a “heteronormative Holocaust master narrative” that erases the existence of LGBTQ people in Europe. Hájková also explains that (a) with the social positioning of LGBTQ people as the other, the “Holocaust produced a prisoner society that was deeply gendered, homophobic, hierarchical, and violent” and (b) it is important to “recognize that even a collective of those who themselves had been excluded and victimized [by the Nazi German government] still excluded those they defined as ‘other’”(n.p.). Deemed the “other”, members of the LGBTQ community were cast as deviants and suffered on multiple levels. Even today, stories that humanize the queer victims of the Holocaust remain scare. The Holocaust master narrative described by Hájková (2019) centers on anti-Semitism, but is nonetheless heteronormative and cisgender. Corresponding with Hájková’s observation, in the contemporary U.S. literary canon for youth, most of the literature about the Holocaust, albeit excellent, is likewise heteronormative and cisgender. One of the only books about LGBTQ victims of the Nazi government that we were able to find in the youth canon is Branded by the Pink Triangle (Setterington, 2013), hereafter Pink Triangle.

“Love Your Neighbor” 153 This nonfiction title was actually published in Canada with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. However, in the U.S., the Stonewall Award committee of the American Library Association recognized Pink Triangle as an honor book in 2014. We will discuss this title in the next section as one of the tools for addressing with ELA students the societal implications of the two varying Christian narratives identified at the beginning of this chapter. We recognize that no single text is capable of conveying the complete story of any event, topic, or issue. Nevertheless, although the outstanding corpus of historical fiction and non-fiction texts about the Jewish Holocaust certainly helps students to understand the suffering of Jews and the callousness of anti-Semitism, the majority of the titles do little to humanize the members of the LGBTQ community, who were the early targets of persecution and murder by the Nazi party and government.

Expanding the Canon of WWII Literature This next section introduces three award-winning works of informational youth literature that help to provide a broader view of the approximately 11 million people the Nazis murdered. In addition to Pink Triangle, we also discuss the historical documentary Hitler Youth: Growing up in Hitler’s Shadow (Bartoletti, 2005), hereafter Hitler Youth, and the recent biographical graphic novel The Faithful Spy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Plot to Kill Hitler (Hendrix, 2018), hereafter Faithful Spy. This last title engages young readers in Bonhoeffer’s existential crisis about the core tenet of Christianity (to love one’s neighbor) with regard to assassinating Hitler. Taken together, we argue that the three books can help to challenge readers to critically examine how the two Christian social narratives influenced the ways individuals in early 20th Century Europe responded to and engaged with persons cast as the “other” by the Nazi government. Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow Winner of the prestigious Robert F. Sibert and Newbery book awards, Hitler Youth describes the Nazi indoctrination of a generation of Germany’s children from 1933–1945. These children were collectively known as Hitlerjugend (HJ; Hitler’s Youth) and played a significant role in the formation and sustainment of the Nazi government. Hitler shrewdly recognized that via training and indoctrination, Germany’s children would be unquestioningly loyal to him and the Nazi government. Bartoletti’s Hitler Youth describes how the children who participated in youth group activities sponsored by the HJ were encouraged to apply the tenet of “love thy neighbor” as a form of Christian socialism among people whose family heritage met the criteria for belonging to the master race. For example, as part of the Nazi brand of socialism, HJ youth participated in labor service to the state, often in the country helping farmers and their families to increase food production. Youth were required to demonstrate their love of neighbor through such activities, provided that their neighbors was not

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an “other” who the Nazi government judged as an enemy of the state and the master race. Conformity was the lynchpin to the HJ culture. As described in Hitler Youth, the Nazi government forced all German parents of racially pure families to allow their children to join the HJ program. Those who resisted risked having their children taken away from them. Moreover, Hitler eliminated all other youth groups, thus preventing the older generation’s influence and biases. The HJ children swore their bodies, souls, and obedience to the State and by extension to each other as part of the Volk’s collective German identity. Their generation would live, survive, thrive, and even die together in pursuit of this love of Volk. Bartoletti explains how many (not all) of the HJ were complicit with the punishment and extermination of “others” in compliance with government policies. The few HJ children who resisted conformity were severely punished. In addition, Hitler Youth includes first-hand accounts of HJ children who reported their parents to local authorities for showing inadequate enthusiasm for Nazism and/or conformity with the rhetoric and policies of the Nazi government. Nazism was reinforced both in-and out-of-school. Bartoletti explains how the government-approved German curriculum was fundamentally rewritten to promote Nazi ideologies in school. Hilter Youth tells of the ways the Nazi flag and Hitler’s portrait were hung in every classroom, and each day started with the standard greeting of, “Heil Hitler”. The curriculum was further adapted to increase children’s physical training from one hour per day in 1934 to five hours per day by 1938 in an effort to prepare children for combat. Outside of school, HJ boys spent an additional three weeks in military camps where they learned, for example, to shoot guns, throw grenades, and dig foxholes in anticipation of future armed conflicts. So indoctrinated, when the allied forces closed-in around Berlin to end WWII in 1945, the HJ child-soldiers made a last stand because they believed the Germans would still be victorious. For them, serving their proverbial neighbor required total allegiance to Hitler and the Volk in combat. Nevertheless, not all of Germany’s children succumbed to indoctrination. Hitler Youth also describes the brave young people who resisted the despotism of conformity in the service of their neighbors who were victims of Nazis’ cruel exclusivism. Several youth resistance groups like the White Rose undertook efforts to inform the German people about the malicious realities of Nazi actions. All told, Hitler Youth extends the Holocaust canon to illustrate how societal conformity was reinforced by the Nazi government and supported by youth. The actions of the HJ revealed the stark contrast between being part of the dominant group and being “other”. For the children who complied with the HJ, “loving thy neighbor” was narrowly limited to those who met rigid racial, religious, gender, physical, and sexuality norms of Nazi ideology. For the youth who resisted Nazi ideology, “loving thy neighbor” meant informing other Germans about the government’s treatment of “the other” at the risk of their own lives. Hitler Youth offers a vehicle for today’s young readers to consider who are neighbors and who are others in contemporary society.

“Love Your Neighbor” 155 The Faithful Spy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Plot to Kill Hitler In contrast to the Nazi call for conformity in ostracizing “the other”, the biography The Faithful Spy focuses on the deeds of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Protestant pastor and theologian who believed he had the moral Christian obligation to reject government dictums and to stand with his most vulnerable neighbors. As evidenced in the preceding sections of this chapter, the Nazi government followed a deliberate plan to erase the “other” and diminish resisters. To justify their actions, Nazi government leaders anchored their behaviors within the context of German Protestant Christianity, which they used as divine justification for physical and psychological violence toward groups who were deemed non-neighbors, including the queer community. The government’s attack on the queer community served as a trial-run on the near annihilation of the Jewish people. As demonstrated in Faithful Spy, not all German Protestant pastors blindly followed Hitler. Many left the country to fight the government from abroad. Others like Dietrich Bonhoeffer stayed and did everything they could to disrupt the Nazi ideology. Bonhoeffer’s nearly literal interpretation of “love thy neighbor”, is the primary theme of Faithful Spy, which follows Bonhoeffer’s growth toward embracing his faith as a manifestation of protection of the “other”. This book places key moments of Bonhoeffer’s life in relation to the inhumane events surrounding the 1930s and early 1940s in Germany and Europe. Bonhoeffer held an absolute and steadfast commitment to “the other”. For example, as described in Faithful Spy, after the Nazi government passed the Law for Restoration of the Civil Service, he wrote a paper, “The Church and the Jewish Question” in which he offered three ways the church can respond to a hostile state: “question the state and its methods”, “aid the victims of state action”, and “strike back”. (Hendrix, 2018, p. 52) He shrewdly pointed out that the Aryan paragraph would have prevented Saint Peter, Saint Paul, and Jesus himself from entering a German Christian church. (Hendrix, 2018, p. 53) Through vivid illustrations and robust storytelling, Hendrix shows readers Bonhoeffer’s “holy anger” that “Christians must see the Jews as their brothers, as ‘Children of the Covenant’”. More importantly, Bonhoeffer believed that the church existed to protect “the other” and if it did not rise up and act in the moment of critical need, then the church, “had no right to be called the church at all”. (Hendrix, 2018, p. 78) Sadly, Bonhoeffer paid the ultimate price for his faith and was executed just two weeks before his concentration camp was liberated. In his wake, he left behind a legacy of sacrifice in service to “the other”. This pastor had no need to be in the fight at a time when most of German’s clergy chose to sell out and look the other way in order to protect themselves and their churches. In his author’s note, Hendrix compels the reader to, “think about where you encounter ‘the other’ in your life, and consider how you treat them”. Further, he argues, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us that if we hope to be a light in the world around us, we must be willing to live as unified souls. Faith, without action, is no faith

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at all. Love, without sacrifice, is no love at all” (Hendrix, 2018, p. 169). In other words, adopting the narrative of Jesus’ commandment to love one’s neighbor means nothing without embodying the narrative of love in action and sacrifice in service of the vulnerable. Branded by the Pink Triangle A third important book for youth, which focuses on the experiences of homosexuals during the Nazi regime and provides a chronology of the LGBTQ community in Germany and other countries from the late 19th Century to the early 21st Century, begins and ends with a historical account grounded in the concept of “love thy neighbor”. The preface of Pink Triangle features the biographical story of Kitty Fisher who was 16 years old when she and her younger sister were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. Seeing that Kitty and her sister were vulnerable at the camp, a homosexual prisoner whose uniform was labeled with a pink triangle committed to aiding the girls’ survival at the personal risk of torture and execution for his acts of kindness. Although she never learned his name nor what happened to him, Kitty vowed never to forget the humanity of the man’s actions. How Kitty kept her promise is described in the conclusion of Pink Triangle, which after a cogent series of chapters about the psychological and physical violence members of the LGBTQ community endured as the earliest targets of the Nazi regime, focuses on the status of LGBTQ people in the early 21st Century. Making her home in Sydney, Australia in 2001, Kitty was committed to establishing the Gay and Lesbian Holocaust Memorial Park opposite Sydney’s Jewish Museum. The inscription on the pink triangle memorial reads: We remember you who had suffered or died at the hands of others. Women who have loved women; Men who have loved men; And all those who have refused the roles other have expected us to play. Nothing shall purge your deaths from our memories. The inscription memorializes the human beings who were persecuted and murdered by a government that embraced a narrative of contempt for members of the LGBTQ community. In addition to highlighting Kitty’s commitment to showing dignity and respect for the gay man who saved her and her sister’s lives in the Nazi camp, the conclusion of Pink Triangle also features the United Nations’ (U.N.’s) 2011 report on human rights of LGBT people. The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights urged countries to not only repeal laws that punish members of the LGBTQ community, but also to “harmonize the age of consent for heterosexual and homosexual conduct, and enact comprehensive anti-discrimination laws” (Setterington, 2013, p. 115). By demonstrating the chronological connections between the historical and contemporary social positioning and treatment of LGBTQ people by governments, some of which either have been or are currently influenced by Christian religious groups, Pink Triangle offers ELA teachers

“Love Your Neighbor” 157 and teacher educators a springboard for engaging youth in classroom conversations about present-day issues of social justice for LGBTQ youth and adults. Moreover, Pink Triangle complements the ELA-CCSS recommended Nobel speech by Wiesel (1986), who as mentioned earlier, called on the international community to bear witness to the testimonies of WWII victims and to critically reflect on the Holocaust as a means to put aside contempt and hatred for anyone who is different, including LGBTQ people. Introducing youth to the stories of the concentration and death camp prisoners whom the Nazis labeled with pink triangles (a) corresponds with Wiesel’s call to remember the atrocities of the Holocaust and to treat others with dignity and respect and (b) aligns with the social justice narrative of loving one’s neighbor.

Conclusion As ELA teachers and teacher educators tackle matters of contemporary social justice, it is vital to contextualize today’s issues in the LBGTQ community in the recent 20th century history associated with the rise of political parties that weaponize religion to deem some human beings as “the other” and thereby unworthy of neighborly treatment, dignity, and/or respect. One route is to engage students with nonfiction texts about the emotional and physical violence and horrors that democratic governments can perpetrate on their own citizens let alone people from other countries. Specifically, alongside of reading and discussing the texts endorsed by the ELA-CCSS, we encourage teachers and teacher educators to (a) select additional works that expand the current cannon of WWII literature for youth, which primarily centers on heteronormative cisgender stories about the Jewish Holocaust, and (b) create space to discuss how religious narratives can significantly influence the way people are positioned and treated, even in civilized, democratic societies. Hitler Youth, Faithful Spy, and Pink Triangle present first-hand accounts of events and experiences that help to illustrate how the leaders of one democratic government selectively employed religious concepts and social narratives as tools for fostering a citizenry that was complicit with the stigmatization and subsequent ostracization of innocent people whose gender identity, sexual orientation, race, religion, philosophical stance, and/or political affiliation were viewed as a potential threat to the power of the government leaders (Wiesel, 1986). Taken together these nonfiction books help to queer the current cannon by exploring the different interpretations and implications of what it means to “love thy neighbor.” The books illuminate how love can thrive against hate by treating others with dignity and respect. Pink Triangle, in particular, humanizes the stories of LGBTQ people who were the victims of the kind of hate that is imprecisely tied to the translations of words in the New and Old Testaments of the Bible, a set of religious texts from another time, place, language, and set of sociocultural discourses (Gushee, 2014). Despite the New Testament’s teaching to “love thy neighbor”, the persecution of innocent people has been historically justified by governments, like Hitler’s,

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under the guise of Christianity (Steigmann-Gall, 2003). Applauded by the Christian religious right in the U.S., current state and federal school administrators have enacted policies that stigmatize LGBTQ youth and/or families as “the other”. As we write this chapter, the Trump–Pence administration’s refusal to recognize the presence of transgender/queer children in K-12 public schools creates a clear and present danger to LGBTQ people. The failure to ensure a safe and healthy learning environment that is sensitive and responsive to the needs of LGBTQ children and families is contrary to the Christian moral imperative to “love thy neighbor”. Sharing and discussing real stories by and about the “other” and/or those who have risked their lives in the service of others help bring comfort and hope to those in need. These stories work to de-stigmatize and humanize the queer experience. In the end, working for social justice in the ELA classroom is not for the faint of heart. It requires that ELA teachers and teacher educators decide how to define “neighbor”. Is the definition inclusive or exclusive of those who are different? When it comes to those who are suffering in the current U.S. society, we must all ask ourselves, “What would Dietrich Bonhoeffer do?”

References Associated Press. (1933, May 6). “Un-German” books demanded. The St. Louis PostDispatch, p. 5. Balmer, R. (2017, December 11). The evangelical slippery slope, from Ronald Reagan to Roy Moore. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/ la-oe-balmer-slippery-slope-evangelicals-roy-moore-20171211-story.html Bartoletti, S. (2005). Hitler youth: Growing up in Hitler’s shadow. New York, NY: Scholastic. Beachy, R. (2014). Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a modern identity (p. 117). New York: Penguin Random House. Cunningham, H. (1999, July 28). “Volkischer Beobachter” on Nazi book-burning. Retrieved from www.cyberussr.com/hcunn/volkisch.html Ebershoff, D. (2000). The Danish girl. New York, NY: Viking. GLSEN. (2019). No promo homo laws. Retrieved from www.glsen.org/learn/policy/issues/ nopromohomo Goodrich, F., Frank, A., & Hackett, A. (1956). The diary of Anne Frank. New York: Random House. Gushee, D. (2014, November 4). I’m an evangelical minister: I now support the LGBT community-and the church should, too. The Washington Post. Retrieved from www. washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/11/04/im-an-evangelical-ministeri-now-support-the-lgbt-community-and-the-church-should-too/?utm_term=. 4ecc2ef9cd6d Hájková, A. (2019, May 2). How we’ve suppressed the queer history of the Holocaust. Haaretz. Retrieved from https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium-why-we-vesuppressed-the-queer-history-of-the-holocaust-1.5823923 Hendrix, J. (2018). The faithful Spy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the plot to kill Hitler (Introduction). New York, NY: Amulet Books. Kander, J., & Masteroff, J. (1968). Cabaret, the new musical: Book by Joe Masteroff. Based on the play by John van Druten and stories by Christopher Isherwood. Lyrics by Fred Ebb. Piano reduction by Robert H. Noeltner. New York: Sunbeam Music Corp.

“Love Your Neighbor” 159 Lowry, L. (1989). Number the stars. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Marhoefer, L. (2015). Sex and the Weimar republic: German homosexual emancipation and the rise of the Nazis (p. 4). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Meyerowitz, J. (2002). How sex changed: A history of transsexuality in the United States (p. 20). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Michael, R., & Doerr, K. (2002). Nazi-Deutsch/Nazi-German. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers. (2010). Common core state standards. Washington, DC: Author. Nazi Book Burnings-10 May 1033. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://blog.britishnewspaper archive.co.uk/2013/05/09/nazi-book-burnings-10-may-1933 Peters, J. W., Becker, J., & Davis, J. H. (2017, February 22). Trump rescinds rules on bathrooms for transgender students. The New York Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes. com/2017/02/22/us/politics/devos-sessions-transgender-students-rights.html Plant, R. (1986). The Pink Triangle: The Nazi war against homosexuals. New York, NY: Holt. Public Health Agency of Canada. (2008). Psychological abuse: A discussion paper. Ottawa, ON: National Clearinghouse on Family Violence. Ridley, L. (2017, December 6). The Holocaust’s forgotten victims: The 5 million nonJewish people killed by the Nazis. Huffington Post, UK. Retrieved from https://www. huffpost.com/entry/holocaust-non-jewish-victims_n_6555604 Setterington, K. (2013). Branded by the Pink Triangle. Toronto, ON: Second Story Press. Steigmann-Gall, R. (2003). The Holy Reich: Nazi conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Steigmann-Gall, R. (2007). The Nazis’ “positive Christianity”: A variety of “clerical fascism”? Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 8(2), 315–327. U.S. Holocaust Museum (2019). Introduction to the Holocaust. Retrieved from https://www. ushmm.org/learn/introduction-to-the-holocaust. Wiesel, E. (1986, December 11). Hope, despair and memory: Nobel lecture. Retrieved from www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1986/wiesel/lecture/ Wilhelm, T. (1933, May 10). Huge Bonfires planned in various sections of country tonight. The North Adams Transcript, p. 1. Zusak, M. (2007). The book thief. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.

10 Disrupting Protestant Dominion Middle School Affirmations of Diverse Religious Images in Community Spaces Denise Dávila and Allison Volz Our story is set in a midwestern U.S. state where the privileging of Protestant Christianity in mainstream social discourses is seen as unremarkable, natural, and business-as-usual. Fifty-three percent (53%) of the adult population in the state affiliates with Protestantism while 18% affiliates with Catholicism and only 5% affiliates with religions other than Christianity. The other 22% claims no affiliations whatsoever (Pew Research Center, 2014), a growing group sometimes called the “religious nones”. In this state, creationism has been taught in schools that receive public funding (Kirk, 2014); state taxpayer money, in the form of school vouchers, is authorized to fund private Christian K-12 schools (Perry, 2019); and anti-abortion legislation penned by conservative Christians has been signed into law (Furneaux, 2019). Our claim of the dominance of Protestantism within the state holds true as this book goes to press in 2019, yet it is a historical legacy as well (e.g., Fraser, 2016). Indeed, in our estimation, this state context amounts to a tacit, historically enduring social caste system privileging Protestants as the dominant sociocultural group. As educators, we see this caste system shaping what happens in schools, including those in the vicinity of our research project at Mullens Middle School, an urban public school in a racially, culturally, and economically diverse region of the state. For example, Denise previously conducted a study of 79 predominantly White, female preservice teachers who were preparing to become teachers in the same region of the state as Mullens (Dávila, 2015). Denise’s study revealed that some of the preservice teachers who had little background knowledge about world religions would endorse to their future students (a) erroneous descriptions of the perspectives and traditions of unfamiliar (e.g., non-Protestant) religious groups and/or (b) harmful stereotypes about the members of unfamiliar cultural/religious groups. Corresponding with the tacit social caste system privileging the religion of the dominant sociocultural group in the state, already introduced, these preservice teachers’ stances positioned non-Protestant groups as being deviant to mainstream religious norms (Dávila, 2015). Certainly, this picture may seem grim, but our project in this chapter is to share a hopeful—and ideally generative—story of how we worked alongside young people

Disrupting Protestant Dominion 161 to question and actively dismantle the taken-for-granted domination of Protestant discourses in their state as well as in the broader society of which they are part. In the upcoming paragraphs, we describe our religious literacy project with the 19 sixth-grade students in Allison’s English Language Arts (ELA) class at Mullens. Bringing us together as colleagues in literacy teacher education, this project also brought together the complementary resources of Allison’s ongoing work as classroom literacy teacher as well as those of Denise’s ongoing work as educational researcher. The group of middle school children who figure prominently in our story resisted dominant Protestant hegemony. Instead, they embraced the possibilities for religious pluralism and hybridity as part of their ELA classroom discussions. The student discussions narrated in this chapter were part of an interdisciplinary unit called “Religious Images in Many Places & Spaces” about the presence of religious images in the visual landscapes of neighborhood communities, in children’s picture books, and in mainstream media. We have described the complete unit elsewhere (Dávila & Volz, 2017, 2018). As co-researchers, however, we were curious to investigate the children’s responses to the same materials that were presented to the preservice teachers in Denise’s previous research study (Dávila, 2015). Specifically, we focus here on (a) the presence of diverse religious images in public spaces and (b) mainstream media’s treatment of persons who see divine religious images in ordinary objects or venues.

Situating the Study Our study is situated in the corpus of scholarly literature about the importance of navigating the controversial topic of religion in a public school (e.g., Moore, 2010; Nord, 2010). Providing space for religion in literacy instruction offers a holistic approach to education that affirms the diverse backgrounds of children, including those from traditionally marginalized communities (Magaldi-Dopman & ParkTaylor, 2014). Literacy education scholars have only recently begun to examine the intersection of students’ religious literacies and ELA instruction in elementary and middle school classrooms (e.g., Damico & Hall, 2015; McMillon & Edwards, 2008). Research has suggested that when teachers allow opportunities for students to explore diverse perspectives on topics such as religion, students are better prepared to interpret and engage with controversial issues in the region and within the broader society (e.g., Noddings & Brooks, 2017; Zimmerman & Robertson, 2017). Picture books served as critical curricular materials in the design of the Religious Images in Many Places & Spaces unit. This choice, described in more detail later, was influenced by literacy education research supporting the inclusion of picture books in the middle school ELA curriculum. Not only can picture books provide children windows into other people’s lived experiences (Bishop, 1997), they can also facilitate students’ comprehension and language development by providing opportunities for students to discuss their own multidimensional interpretations and responses to the texts (e.g., Harville & Franks, 2015; Pantaleo, 2012; Roser, Martinez, & Fowler-Amato, 2011).

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Allison performed the role of a “critical [discussion] facilitator or guide” (Damico & Apol, 2008, p. 155) to lead the classroom conversations about students’ response to the picture books and other media. Critical facilitators evaluate the tenor and nuances of classroom discussions and determine how and when to explore the responses students generate. In other words, critical facilitators calculate when in the classroom discussion to “push and deepen students’ thinking” (Noordhoff & Kleinfeld, 1993, p. 33) and/or to enact “spontaneous scaffolding” (Applebee, Langer, Nystrand, & Gamoran, 2003, p. 722) in helping students to articulate their ideas and/or divergent views. Conceptually, our project drew from art educational scholarship on the subject of visual culture. This work encompasses an array of visual materials, images, objects, devices, sites, and spaces that are part of communities’ everyday social worlds (Tavin, 2003). Art educators have long suggested that visual culture is linked with people’s multiple communicative modes and literacies (e.g., Duncum, 2004). Literacy education scholars like Serafini (2014) have correspondingly argued that visually literate readers are able to “work across a variety of modes, including photography, painting, sculpture, diagrams, and film . . . [and] to make sense of the images and multimodal ensembles encountered in various settings using a variety of lenses to interpret and analyze their meaning potentials” (pp. 23–24). In other words, making sense of visual culture entails flexibly drawing from multiple literacy practices that serve to interpret the sociocultural context and meaning of the visual material. The intent of our study was to engage students’ multiple visual literacy practices in responding to the presence of religious images in varying contexts. Our goals for the Religious Images in Many Places & Spaces unit aligned with the expectations of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the College and Career Readiness (CCR) anchor standards (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010) to help “students gain literary and cultural knowledge” through the “extensive reading of stories, dramas, poems, and myths from diverse cultures” (n.p). Our unit was likewise guided by the social studies standards established by the State’s Department of Education (2010), which require sixth graders to learn about “the impact of major world religions (Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism)” (n.p.). Finally, our work with Allison’s ELA students was also shaped by the visual arts standards set by State’s Department of Education’s (2012), which expect public school students to “discuss how aspects of culture influence . . . social artwork” (n.p.).

Conducting the Study Participants and Study Setting At the time of our project, Allison, who was raised in the Catholic tradition as a child, was a teacher at Mullens Middle School and a literacy teacher educator at the local university. Denise, whose family practiced both Catholicism and

Disrupting Protestant Dominion 163 Central American Espiritismo, had spent the previous four years working with preservice teachers in the same district as Mullens. She was engaged in the project as part of her work as an educational researcher and children’s literature scholar with a university in another state. Mullens is a neighborhood middle school of >500 students within the state’s largest school district. At the time of our study, at least 90% of the children were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. In Allison’s class of 10 boys and 9 girls, 32% were African American, 5% Asian/Pacific Islander, 11% Latinx, 21% multiracial, and 31% White. The students were also religiously diverse, based on anecdotal and observational data. Many students were Christian and followed Protestant, Methodist, Baptist, or Catholic traditions. A few of the children whose families had immigrated from Somalia, Kenya, and Eritrea practiced Islam. Moreover, within the local Cambodian community, some children in the class practiced Buddhism. Curricular Context Because faculty at Mullens committed themselves to cultivating children’s multiple literacies and interests in reading, every class period included a five-minute read-aloud, including from picture books, to expose the children to a variety of genres, text formats, and reading styles. Moreover, the students in Allison’s class engaged with several Shakespearean plays (e.g., Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, and Julius Caesar). In their discussions of the plays, Allison performed the previously discussed role of a critical facilitator. She did not shy away from the students’ inquiries about the religious and asexual lives of friars and nuns. Instead, she invited the school principal, a practicing Catholic, to respond to the children’s questions about the characters in the plays from his perspective. In reading works of children’s literature, such as the middle grade historical fiction novel Night Fires (Stanley, 2009), Allison provided scaffolding to address students’ disillusionment about the elected/government officials in the story and to contextualize the influence of the Ku Klux Klan in U.S. history. With the multivoiced chapter book Seedfolks (Fleischman, 1997), Allison probed the students’ comments about the realities of negotiating diverse cultural perspectives in the same neighborhood and same building. By serving as a critical guide to each of their literature discussions, Allison established a culture in her classroom in which the children’s comments and questions were valued and circumambulated. The cultural aspiration of classroom dialogue was that nobody’s ideas were ignored or devalued. Materials As mentioned earlier, we designed our project to feature a selection of the same materials (i.e., picture books) that the preservice teachers in Denise’s prior study had evaluated. In the chapter, we focus on one of the picture books used in both studies, the award-winning memoir, In My Family/En mi familia (Garza,

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1996), which we will reference hereafter as Familia. This picture book depicts the childhood memories of Garza’s Tejano American family in Kingsville, Texas, during the 1950s and 1960s. According to Garza (2012), books like Familia “elicit recognition and appreciation among Mexican Americans, both adults and children, while at the same time [they] serve as a source of education for others not familiar with our culture” (n.p.). Such recognition and appreciation are important because o>63% of the 57.5 million Hispanics in the United States are of Mexican heritage (U.S. Census Bureau, 2017). Two paintings from Familia were particularly relevant for the class and the ensuing discussion. The first was a painting of “The Virgin of Guadalupe/La Virgen de Guadalupe”, which is accompanied in Garza’s book by an overview of the legend (10th double-page spread). The second was “The Miracle/El Milagro” (11th double-page spread). In the narrative text accompanying “The Miracle”, Garza recounted the time her family had traveled to a small ranch in south Texas because, like other Texans in the region, they wanted to see the image of Guadalupe that had recently appeared on the ranch’s water tank. On Garza’s webpage that contains images of her paintings (http://carmenlomasgarza.com/artwork/paintings), select image #16 to view “The Miracle” and image #35 to view “The Virgin of Guadalupe.” For the project, we also selected photographs of social artwork from across the United States depicting large-scale outdoor and public murals of legendary religious figures such as the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Buddha. Finally, our study included a video segment of mainstream television news reports about the modern-day appearances of religious figures in non-religious venues: www. youtube.com/watch?v=63wC7On3WFg. Procedures We collected data over the course of four days. The full set of our procedures is reported elsewhere (Dávila & Volz, 2017, 2018). Here, we attend to the class sessions on Days 2 and 3. Brief Overview of Day 1 On the first day, Allison engaged the students in making connections with the concept of legends. A legend is an unconfirmed story referencing historical figures, places, events, or artifacts. Allison started by inviting the class to establish a working definition of “legends.” Then, she encouraged the students to share legends that they knew. Several were familiar with the stories of Robin Hood, Johnny Appleseed, or George Washington and the cherry tree. In response, Allison reinforced that the students already had a great deal of prior knowledge about legends. Next, we jointly introduced the history and legend of the Virgin of Guadalupe via the contemporary picture book, The Beautiful Lady: Our Lady of Guadalupe/La hermosa señora: Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (Mora, 2012; hereafter, we will refer to this book as Señora). Finally, we shared a 2009 photograph

Disrupting Protestant Dominion 165 of Hillary Clinton at the Nacional Basílica de Santa María de Guadalupe in Mexico City, where Clinton is pictured with the legendary image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. (See http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/03/ hillary-clinton.html.) Brief Overview of Day 2 At the start of the session on Day 2, after a few moments of show-and-tell for the students who brought items related to the Virgin of Guadalupe (hereafter, Guadalupe), we asked the children if they had ever seen images of Guadalupe in their neighborhood. Several students identified murals of Guadalupe on the sides of a local Mexican market and a community center. Some had also seen her image on candles in the Hispanic/Latinx aisle of the local grocery store. Inspired by the conversation, many students were excited to describe the varying religious figures and altars in their homes, churches, or temples. Some mentioned statues of the Buddha. One child pointed to a medallion of the Buddha that he wore around his neck. As an extension to the children’s connections to religious imagery in public spaces, we presented a slideshow of murals from communities across the United States. The slideshow included public art of the Buddha as well as multiple representations of Guadalupe. Throughout our slideshow, Allison paused to invite the children to share their connections to the public art and to ask questions such as “Why do you think the muralist selected the particular image for public consumption?” and “What does the image say about the community?” Since at least one mural (Guadalupe) was painted on a government building, Allison also prompted the students with this question: “Why do you think the local government welcomed the image on a public building?” The final image of the slideshow featured a 75-by-43-foot mural of Guadalupe created by Texas A&M University students in 2013 on the ground of a downtown lot in Kingsville, Texas. The children’s curiosity about the community that commissioned the ground mural served as an apropos transition to reading the picture book Familia, Garza’s (1996) memoir about her childhood growing up in Kingsville. An excerpt from the conversation is analyzed later in this chapter. During her read-aloud of Familia, Allison invited the students to look for images of Guadalupe in some of Garza’s paintings. When she arrived at the painting “Guadalupe”, described earlier, Allison welcomed the students to retell the legend as they understood it. We found it interesting that some of the students were keen to emphasize that Guadalupe was the brown Virgin Mary who shared the same skin tone as many of the children in the room. In response to Garza’s painting, “The Miracle”, the children recognized that like the actual legend of Guadalupe, Garza’s narrative also tells an apparition story. Then, they examined the quality of the image on the water tower. Unlike muralists’ public paintings, the image appeared to be part of the actual wood grain. Next, the children debated whether the image was a miracle or

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something that had always been part of the wood. As part of the discussion, one boy shared a national news story in which a woman claimed to see an image of the late Michael Jackson in a cloud formation. Others talked about the power of faith. By the end of Day 2, we found it noteworthy that in contrast to the preservice teachers in Denise’s study, who overwhelmingly opposed discussing “The Miracle” with local students for a variety of reasons (Dávila, 2015), the children in Allison’s class were highly eager to engage in multidimensional conversation about Garza’s childhood experience. Brief Overview of Day 3 We started the Day 3 session by inviting the children to briefly reflect on Garza’s memoir, Familia. We provided the following prompts to help the children express their opinions: (A) Why do you think Carmen Lomas Garza (Carmen) and her mother and brother made the journey to the ranch? (B) Why do you think Carmen tells readers, “Not everybody could see the image [of Guadalupe], but most people could?” (C) Could a story like “The Miracle” take place in the Midwest? Why or Why not? The students responded with varying perspectives. Some focused on the possibility that the image had always been present in the grain of the wood but the people had only just noticed it. Others observed that one’s faith can be very powerful and influence what one sees and believes. (See Dávila & Volz, 2017 for a full analysis of the students’ responses to these prompts.) After the “quick-write” activity, the students viewed an actual news clip about the appearance of Guadalupe on the trunk of a tree in a New Jersey community. (See: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FBn4WKZbMc). The children discussed the clip and the comments of the on-the-scene reporter and the views of the persons he interviewed who were visiting and praying alongside of the tree. Children noticed that although the people and tree were all physically located in the United States, the reporter stated that, “Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Virgin Mary, is worshipped in Mexico”. The children thought it was strange that the reporter emphasized the practices of some Mexican Catholics but did not recognize that people from different backgrounds in the U.S. recognize Guadalupe. They also keenly noticed that the reporter was the only white person in the news clip. Everyone he interviewed, however, had brown skin, just like Guadalupe. In short, the children’s observations revealed their awareness that the reporter positioned the news story as being outside of dominant U.S. views of a Virgin Mary who is less likely to have brown skin. Next, as a point of comparison with Garza’s story about the water tower and the video clip about the appearance of Guadalupe on the tree in New Jersey, we invited the children to respond to a 2011 CBS news broadcast about the religious sightings of the previous 12 months. (See: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=63wC7On3WFg.) An excerpt from the conversation is analyzed later in this chapter.

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Data Collection, Reduction, and Analysis In the interest of space, here we present the data we collected from the audiorecordings of our whole-class and small-group conversations on Days 2 and 3. From the audio-recordings, we first created verbatim transcripts and then documented the turn-taking patterns in verbal exchanges. We reduced our data set by eliminating segments that were unrelated to our focus on how the students regarded religious imagery across different media/venues. Then, we analyzed the transcripts for instances in which the students applied their visual and critical literacies to make sense of how the images were contextualized in varying media/venues (Serafini, 2014).

Circumambulating Diverse Religious Images in Community Spaces To illustrate how children enacted an inclusive social perspective by which it is normal for different religions to thrive in the same community, we begin this discussion with an excerpt from the Day 2 conversation about the presence of religious images in public spaces across the United States. The children had already viewed images of Guadalupe in public spaces of varying cities. What follows is an excerpt from the whole-class discussion after viewing the final images of the Buddha in the slideshow. All student names in the transcripts are pseudonyms. Excerpt from Day 2 Conversation 1. Allison: So, here we have another picture of Buddha. 2. Students (group): Whoa! 3. Allison: It’s also in Los Angeles. Did we see pictures of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Los Angeles? 4. Students (group): Yes. 5. Allison: So, this is in the same city, different religious mural. 6. Student (unidentified): Hey! There’s a guy standing! 7. Allison: This one happens to have a random [person] in it. 8. Allen: It would be kind of cool if they were on the same block or in the same area. 9. Allison: Why would that be kind of cool if the Buddha and the Our Lady of Guadalupe were in the same area? 10. Allen: ‘Cause people would say, “Oh, there’s that lady. And, oh wait! There’s that guy over there too.” 11. Allison: Trevor? 12. Trevor: ‘Cause like you have two big religious figures on the same area. 13. Allison: So, for two separate religious figures to share the same area would be kind of . . . 14. Trevor: BIG religious figures!

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15. Allison: Big physically, like the paintings are physically big? Or, like, important big? 16. Trevor: Important big. 17. Allison: OK. So two big, important religious figures in the same area from two different religions would kind of be a cool thing to see. Mike? 18. Mike: What happens if like the Guadalupe was actually on the other side of that building? 19. Allison: OK, Mike is saying . . . “what if they are on the same building?” What does that mean to us, or for the people that live in this place? . . . If the Buddha and Our Lady of Guadalupe were on different sides of the same building, what would that say about the community? Raymond? 20. Raymond: They’re all, they’re all [inaudible]. 21. Allison: So, somewhere there is common ground in these religious beliefs? 22. Raymond: But it shows that everyone has a religion. 23. Allison: OK, so it would show that there are similarities even though it’s a different religion, but everyone has some sort of belief system, or most everybody maybe does. Nick. 24. Nick: Maybe they’re the two most important religious figures for the people who live in this community. 25. Allison: Places. Raise your hand. 26. Drew: Oh! Me, me! Drew. 27. Allison: Drew? 28. Drew: To let people know who’s their god. 29. Allison: OK, so to celebrate the god that people might believe in particular community? 30. Drew: Uh-huh. 31. Allison: Monica? 32. Monica: So maybe people who believe in them can show off their artistic talents. 33. Allison: So people who believe in that particular god might be showing off their own artistic abilities. Allen? 34. Allen: To, to show who they worship. 35. Allison: OK, so it’s also to praise the person who they worship or the religious figure they look up to. In the class conversation, Allison highlighted that, like some of the murals of Guadalupe in the slideshow, some of the images of Buddha were also located in Los Angeles, California. She performed the role of a critical facilitator not only to mediate the children’s comments but also to investigate their responses. At the beginning of this transcript, Allen, an African American boy, suggested “it would be kind of cool” if Buddha and Guadalupe were in close proximity so people could see both images from the same vantage point (turn 8). In response to Allison’s probing as to why such a scenario would be cool (turn 9), a White child named Trevor explained, “Cause like you have two big religious figures on

Disrupting Protestant Dominion 169 the same area” (turn 12). For emphasis, he restated that they are “BIG religious figures!” (turn 14), clarifying that “big” means important (turn 16). Together, Allen and Trevor offered an inclusive social narrative that Guadalupe is as important to some people as Buddha is to others. Next, a White child named Mike expanded the conversation to wonder what would happen if “Guadalupe was actually on the other side of that building [where there is a mural of Buddha]” (turn 18). His idea of a shared location for the images of Buddha and Guadalupe established the figures as equal. Mike’s, Allen’s, and Trevor’s comments suggested that both images could occupy the same space in a community. As members of the diverse Mullens neighborhood, the boys’ musing about how “cool” it would be to see both murals on the same building reflects an implicit pluralistic perspective that questions the privileging of one religious perspective over another. When Allison proposed to the class that there might be some “common ground” between the two religious systems (turn 21), Raymond, a biracial White/Chinese American boy, responded that having public images of the religious figures on the same building would show “that everyone has a religion” (turn 22). Raymond’s comment aligns with a popular stance that even though universal qualities (like having a religion) might not be explicit, everyone is really “the same on the inside”. (As a sidebar, however, this stance does not recognize the “religious nones” who represent more than a fifth of the state’s population.) The focus of the class conversation then shifted as Drew, an African American child, suggested that expressions of religion in public spaces let “people know who’s their god” (turn 28), while later Allen added that such public displays of social art “show who they worship” (turn 34). The critical conversation Allison guided highlights that the children recognized the existence of many religions. They also accepted the discussion of religion as part of their classroom dialogue, something that the majority of the preservice teachers in Denise’s previous study resisted for an array of reasons, including fear of student disapproval (Dávila, 2015). Moreover, the Day 2 conversation illustrates that the children did not think it was unusual to see diverse religious figures in public spaces. Their responses reflect an inclusive social perspective by which it is normal for different religions to thrive in the same community. The next except from the classroom conversation on Day 3 further illustrates the children’s resistance to social discourses that cast non-dominant religious perspectives as being socially unconventional and/or deviant. The transcript describes the children’s responses to the CBS News (2011) segment titled “Virgin Mary, Jesus Sightings Galore” in which the commentator offers his review of the year’s religious sightings to humor a national, mainstream adult audience. See: www.youtube.com/watch?v=63wC7On3WFg. Because we placed small audio recorders on different tables in the room, this transcript includes a student’s unfiltered response to his tablemates, which is not heard by other students in the class. Again, all student names are pseudonyms.

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Excerpt from Day 3 Classroom Conversation 1. Allison: [To class] What do you think about those [stories about religious sightings]? 2. Students: Cheesus! Cheetos! 3. Jon: [To tablemates] That’s rude. I think that shit’s rude. 4. Allison: [To class] Ok. [Pause] Do you think the guy or the newscaster, did he believe in the images in the ice, in the Cheetos were real? 5. Students: NO! 6. Chelsea: He didn’t. 7. Allison: Chelsea, why didn’t it sound like it in your opinion? 8. Chelsea: He was like, “Apparently, a woman came out and saw ice like the Virgin Mary.” He said it sarcastically. 9. Allison: So, he sounded a bit sarcastic in how he was talking. 10. Amina: Inaudible 11. Allison: He like what, Amina? 12. Amina: He was like laughing in between stories. 13. Allison: And, he laughed between stories. Jon? 14. Jon: Like the Cheetos and stuff. He’s like if God comes back or whatever, and the apocalypse comes it’s going to be delicious. And, he said that’s the news live from the spot! He was like making a joke. 15. Allison: So, he was not making very serious comments. 16. Students: Yeah. Within a second of the video’s conclusion, the children voiced their feedback to each other. An African American boy named Jon blurted out to his tablemates, “That’s rude. That shit is rude” (turn 3). Jon was outraged by the commentator’s disrespect toward the people’s sincere stories of religious sightings in the video clips. Later, Jon suggested to the whole class that the commentator was “making a joke” (turn 14) by pretending he was a serious, on-the-scene reporter who was giving information “live from the spot” (turn 14). Instead, the commentator sat behind a desk and demeaned the people in the news clips by “laughing in between stories”, which a Somali American girl named Amina observed (turn 12). The commentator spoke “sarcastically”, Chelsea noticed (turn 8), and mused that when “the apocalypse comes it’s going to be delicious”, which Jon mimicked for others in the class (turn 14). The sixth graders’ collective disapproval of the news commentator’s supposedly humorous end-of-year review illustrates that the dominant othering narratives of mainstream adult Americans do not resonate with the children in the diverse Mullens community. By contrast, in Denise’s study (Dávila, 2015) the preservice teachers’ responses to Garza’s story about “The Miracle”, described earlier, aligned with—rather than resisted—the same stance the news commentator assumed in his report. For example, one of the preservice teachers would: pair Garza’s account of “The Miracle” with the popular anecdote about a person [who] claimed to have an image of God on their grilled cheese

Disrupting Protestant Dominion 171 sandwich. This trope happened to serve as the subplot of “Grilled Cheesus”, an episode of the television show Glee that aired on October 5, 2010, to an audience of 11.2 million U.S. viewers (Grilled Cheesus, 2014). The trope also inspired the titles of the recent New York Times newspaper article “Is That Jesus in Your Toast?” (Gantman & Van Bavel, 2014) and the Time Magazine article “It’s ‘Perfectly Normal’ to See Jesus in Toast, Study Says” (Waxman, 2014). The titles of these articles, in combination with droll television news stories about “religious sightings”, clearly reinforce the idea that seeing Jesus in a piece of toast is not socially accepted conduct. [Thus,] it is not surprising that a study participant would equate “The Miracle” with the trope about “Grilled Cheesus”. (Dávila, p. 76) As described previously, some of the preservice teachers in Denise’s study would deem Garza’s family, and likely the people who visited the tree in New Jersey, as social deviants. Unlike some of the preservice teachers, however, the children in Allison’s class were empathetic toward the people featured in the broadcast and critically analyzed the commentator’s statement. Many of the sixth graders recognized the personal significance that seeing a religious figure holds for some people. They were also attuned to the dismissive qualities of tacit social narratives that align with an implicit religious caste system by which the historical legacy of Protestantism in the U.S. Midwest is privileged over other Christian and non-Christian traditions.

Conclusion and Implications In this chapter, we have attempted to provide a window into the ways the children of a diverse, low-income region of a primarily Protestant state resisted social discourses that privilege mainstream perspectives over those of underrepresented religious groups. When the children were invited to respond to the religious images (visual culture) in picture books and community spaces, they aligned with the pluralistic qualities of their neighborhood. The data illustrate that the children in Allison’s ELA class favored religious inclusivity, which is a core element of a pluralistic community. Although the results of our study cannot be generalized, they correspond with the research findings described by Lester (2011), who found that students living in an ethnically and culturally diverse community benefitted from learning about their neighbors’ faiths and traditions. In other words, albeit a source of controversy (Noddings & Brooks, 2017; Zimmerman & Robertson, 2017), providing opportunities for students to exercise their visual literacies (Serafini, 2014) and to discuss divergent religious perspectives as part of an interdisciplinary ELA curriculum can be a worthwhile educational endeavor. In the end, the children at Mullens offer hope that in states or regions where one set of religious views are privileged over other religious and non-religious perspectives, children can question implicit religious caste systems. They can

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prioritize inclusivity to support the well-being of their own diverse communities. In short, children are capable of dismantling the taken-for-granted domination of Protestant discourses in their Midwest state as well as in the broader society of which they are part.

References Applebee, A., Langer, J., Nystrand, M., & Gamoran, A. (2003). Discussion-based approaches to developing understanding: Classroom instruction and student performance in middle and high school English. American Education Research Journal, 40(3), 685–730. Bishop, R. S. (1997). Selecting literature for a multicultural curriculum. In V. Harris (Ed.), Using multiethnic literature in the K-8 classroom (pp. 1–19). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Damico, J., & Apol, L. (2008). Using testimonial response to frame the challenges and possibilities of risky historical texts. Children’s Literature in Education, 39, 141–158. Damico, J., & Hall, T. (2015). The cross and the lynching tree. Language Arts, 92(3), 187–198. Dávila, D. (2015). #WhoNeedsDiverseBooks: Preservice teachers and religious neutrality with children’s literature. Research in the Teaching of English, 50(1), 60–83. Dávila, D., & Volz, A. (2017). “That sh*t’s rude!”: Religion, picture books, and social narratives in middle school. Middle Grades Review, 3(3), 1–15. Dávila, D., & Volz, A. (2018). #MakeFriends: Promoting pluralism via picturebooks and pre-reading strategies. Journal of Children’s Literature, 44(1), 40–50. Duncum, P. (2004). Visual culture isn’t just visual: Multiliteracy, multimodality, and meaning. Studies in Art Education, 45(3), 252–264. Fraser, J. (2016). Between Church and State: Religion and public education in a multicultural America (2nd ed.). Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Fleischman, P. (2004). Seedfolks. New York: HarperTrophy. Furneaux, R. (2019, April 11). The Ohio governor just signed a bill banning abortion before many women know they are pregnant. Mother Jones. Retrieved from www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/04/ohio-governor-fetal-heartbeat-abortion-ban-sign/ Gantman, A., & Van Bavel, J. (2014, April 4). Is that Jesus in your toast? The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.ny times.com/2014/04/06/opinion/sunday/ isthat-jesus-in-your-toast.html?_r=0 Garza, C. L. (1996). In my family / En mi familia. San Francisco, CA: Children’s Book Press. Harville, M., & Franks, M. (2015). Postmodern picture books: “The best thing I’ve ever done in English class”. Voices from the Middle, 23(2), 62–68. Kirk, C. (2014, January 26). Map: Publicly funded schools that are allowed to teach creationism. Slate. Retrieved from www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/ science/2014/01/creationism_in_public_schools_mapped_where_tax_money_supports_ alternatives.html Lester, E. (2011). Teaching about religions: A democratic approach for public schools. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Magaldi-Dopman, D., & Park-Taylor, J. (2014). Integration amidst separation: Religion, urban education, and the First Amendment. Urban Review, 46, 47–62.

Disrupting Protestant Dominion 173 McMillon, G. M. T., & Edwards, P. A. (2008). Examining shared domains of literacy in the church & school of African American children. In: J. Flood, S. B. Heath, & D. Lapp (Eds.), Handbook of research on teaching literacy through the communicative and visual arts (Vol. 2, pp. 319–328). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Mora, P. (2012). The beautiful lady: Our Lady of Guadalupe / La hermosa señora: Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. (S. Johnson & L. Fancher, Illus.). New York, NY: Knopf. Moore, D. L. (2010). Guidelines for teaching about religion. Atlanta, GA: American Academy of Religion. National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers. (2010). Common Core state standards. Washington, DC: Author. Noddings, N., & Brooks, L. (2017). Teaching controversial issues: The case for critical thinking and moral commitment in the classroom. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Nord, W. (2010). Does God make a difference? New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Noordhoff, K., & Kleinfeld, J. (1993). Preparing teachers for multicultural classrooms. Teaching & Teacher Education, 9(1), 27–39. Pantaleo, S. (2012). Exploring Grade 7 students’ responses to Shaun Tan’s The Red Tree. Children’s Literature in Education, 43(1), 51–71. Perry, P. (2019, February 17). Springfield students eligible for private school vouchers double. Springfield News-Sun. Retrieved from www.springfieldnewssun.com/news/ local-education/springfield-students-eligible-for-private-school-vouchers-double/ bzHsXgPUsCs9e4HvjdcK7I/ Pew Research Center. (2014). Religious landscape survey. Retrieved from www.pewforum. org/religious-landscape-study/state/ohio/ Roser, N., Martinez, M., & Fowler-Amato, M. (2011). The power of picture books: Resources that support language and learning in middle grade classrooms. Voices from the Middle, 19(1), 24–31. Serafini, F. (2014). Reading the visual: An introduction to teaching multimodal literacy. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Stanley, G. E. (2009). Night Fires. New York: Aladdin. State’s Department of Education. (2010). Social studies standards. Retrieved from https:// education.ohio.gov/getattachment /Topics/Ohio-s-New-Learning-Standards/ Social-Studies/SS -Standards.pdf.aspx State’s Department of Education. (2012). Visual arts standards for Grades 6, 7, 8. Retrieved from https://education.ohio.gov/getattachment/Topics/Ohio-s-New-LearningStandards/Fine -Arts/Ohio-Visual-Art-Standards-Final-2.pdf.aspx Tavin, K. (2003). Wrestling with angels, searching for ghosts: Toward a critical pedagogy of visual culture. Studies in Art Education, 44(3), 197–213. U.S. Census Bureau (2017). 2017 American Community Survey. Retrieved from: https:// factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk Waxman, O. (2014, May 7). It’s “perfectly normal” to see Jesus in toast, study says. Time Magazine. Retrieved from http://time .com/90810/its-perfectly-normal-to-see- jesusin-toast-study-says/ Zimmerman, J., & Robertson, E. (2017). The case for contention: Teaching controversial issues in American schools. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Section IV

Resurrection Contemplative Essays on Navigating Christian Literacies, Teaching, and Pedagogies in the English Language Arts Classroom Denise Dávila This section focuses on the concept of resurrection. Jesus’ resurrection and ascension into Heaven offers many Christians hope for being resurrected from sin with the promise of eternal life in Heaven after death. As an extension of the divine, the Holy Spirit dwells with Christians to help them lead righteous lives on earth. The essays in this section offer autobiographical insights to the lived, real-world experiences and perceptions of a group of four different literacy scholars and teacher educators relative to the concept of resurrection, Christianity, and to the Church as an institution. We frame the next four chapters in the work of Paolo Freire (1921–1997). Freire was not only a Brazilian philosopher, educator, and social activist, he was a Christian. As described by McLaren (2018), Freire’s work was both informed by Marx as well as his Christian faith. Alluding to Christ’s resurrection, Freire (1985) called on teachers and educators to “make Easter” every day with students by dying “as the dominator and be[ing] born again as the dominated, fighting to overcome oppression” (p. 18). He used a Christian metaphor to convey the significance of recognizing the ways one’s words and actions could support a dominant social ideology that typically “serves the interests of the socially powerful” and deciding to “accept a critical position to engage in the action to transform reality” as teachers who work on behalf of students (p. 18). Moreover, Freire challenged literacy educators to baptize themselves “in the waters of children’s culture first” because only then “they will see how to teach reading and writing” (p. 18). He appreciated the dominance of Christianity in the Americas and the cultural essence of embracing the Easter miracle and being born again through baptism. By highlighting the precepts of Christian belief, Freire evoked a kind of tacit God language to speak directly to his audience on a moral, personal, and emotional level as a means to convey the urgency of his message. Freire understood the influence of religion on the ways in which people make sense of the world both politically and personally. He recognized

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that “critically conscious Christians do not only come to recognize their political formation as subjects—their standpoint epistemology—in relation to others, but also gain ontological and ethnical clarity on their role as Christians” (McLaren, 2018, p. 7). The set of essays in this section acknowledges Freire’s observation and widens the corpus of research illustrating that religion influences the literacy and meaning-making practices of youths and adults alike (e.g., Juzwik, 2014; Magaldi-Dopman & Park-Taylor, 2014; Rackley, 2014; Skerrett, 2013). Specifically, these chapters invite us into testimonial narrative explorations of how our literacies and literacy development can be informed by our spiritual and/ or religious identities. This section begins with two essays that examine the languaging, social discourses, and literacies of the global Catholic church and regional Catholic church communities that undergird the authors’ work and relationships with the Church as well as their and professional and personal literacies. The section concludes with two introspective essays that describe the intimate ways in which the authors’ religious identities have shaped their own meaning-making practices and accommodations of spiritual literacies in the English Language Arts classroom. What follows are brief introductions to each of the chapters. The first essay of this section, “Ambivalence in Two Parts: Legacies of Catholic Languaging” by Adam J. Greteman is especially timely as it responds to the contradictory social discourses of the Catholic Church. As we prepared this book for publication in the spring of 2019, the Vatican released a set of guidelines set forth by the Congregation for Catholic Education that rejects contemporary theories of gender identity existing along a spectrum and instead encourages Catholic educators to assume that gender fluidity is “nothing more than a confused concept of freedom in the realm of feelings and wants” (McElwee, 2019, n.p.) In this essay, Greteman provides an ambivalent reading of legacies of Catholic languaging that have foregrounded the Vatican’s recent message. In the first part, Greteman looks to the emerging theological legacies of Catholic languaging as theologians grapple with issues addressing sexuality and gender to make a place in the pew for lesbian and gay people. Optimistic about these emerging liberatory languages, the author argues for their potential in pastoring to people. However, in the second part, Greteman turns to the political legacies of Catholic languaging and the ways Catholic doctrine has been used against gay, lesbian, and transgender people. Pessimistic about Catholic doctrine, Greteman returns to the legacies of Catholic languaging amidst the AIDS epidemic and gender theory. The legacies of Catholic languaging that Greteman explores are conditioned by a context where approval of “gay and lesbian” rights has improved, but where such approval comes with conditions steeped in normative ideas that are still scandalized by transness. In the second essay, “Exploring the Multilingual, Multimodal, and Cosmopolitan Dimensions of Two Young Cuban American Women’s Religious Literacies”, author Natasha Perez examines the development of her own religious identity shaped by her local Catholic Church community, and the religious

Resurrection 177 identities of another Cuban American woman named Rosaura. She examines the dynamic, multimodal, translingual literacy practices that inform her and Rosaura’s faith. She reveals how discussing and engaging with the Bible and other religious texts requires a complex set of literacy skills and a familiarity with discourses derived from historical translations of ancient writings. This chapter explores the intersection between religious literacy practices and emergent multilingualism. Here, Perez employs data from a narrative inquiry study of her own experience together with that of Rosaura’s experience. She argues that the ways in which multilingual youth develop and engage with religious literacies in and out of school contexts reveal hidden funds of knowledge that could support academic literacy development in the classroom. In the third chapter “I Had to Die to Live Again: A Racial Storytelling of a Black Male English Educator’s Spiritual Literacies and Practices”, Lamar L. Johnson shines light on the spiritual component undergirding his engagement in transformative work as a Black language and literacy scholar and English teacher educator. Using racial storytelling as a vehicle in this chapter, Johnson examines childhood moments within the Black Church that illuminate the spiritual literacies he now embodies as a Black male language and literacy scholar and English Educator. Drawing upon the metaphor of the Christian celebration of Easter experience to illuminate how one has to die to be born again when teaching for liberation, Johnson demonstrates how his spiritual literacies are grounded in Black/African American religious traditions and within familial and communal knowledge. This narrative shows how articulating the centrality of spirituality to Black researcher identity enriches the field of language and literacy scholarship: It enacts and contributes to a more holistic narrative of Black language and literacy scholars’ spiritual wisdom, connectedness, resistance, and liberation within and beyond institutions. Moreover, Johnson’s weaving together of Black spirituality, knowledge-making, and teaching invites language and literacy teachers and teacher educators to explore their own spiritual traditions, connections, and journeys to inspire and sustain liberatory scholarly and pedagogical work. This section concludes with Mary Juzwik’s chapter “(Re)Mystifying Literary Pedagogy”, which offers an examination of the moral imperatives for literature instruction, which have frequently been taken up in ways that are didactic, moralizing, and interpretively narrowing. Juzwik’s intimate essay explores the humanizing and liberating literature pedagogical possibilities that account for the richness of inner (spiritual) being-ness by turning to the wisdom of women in the Christian mystical tradition. Here, Juzwik asks: How might literature pedagogy and literate engagements in secondary English classrooms open space for the kinds of joy-filled ecstatic accounts of textual engagements found in the practices of women Christian mystics? Drawing inspiration from notions of “remystification” offered by sociologist Philip Wexler, Juzwik proposes that feminine mystical reading practice could be untethered from elite scholasticism or specific Christian mystical tradition and articulated in relation to pluralistic classroom spaces. She advances her proposal through accounts of literary

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reading by the Christian mystical scholars Simone Weil and Evelyn Underhill. Juzwik elevates the themes of Detachment and Attention, examining what each can offer to the project of re-mystifying literature pedagogy in contemporary classrooms. Collectively, these chapters give voice to the testimonies of resurrection and the concept of making Easter among literacy researchers and teacher educators.

References Freire, P. (1985). Reading the world and reading the word: An interview with Paulo Freire. Language Arts, 62(1), 15–21. Juzwik, M. (2014). American evangelical biblicism as literate practice: A critical review. Reading Research Quarterly, 49(3), 335–349. Magaldi-Dopman, D., & Park-Taylor, J. (2014). Integration amidst separation: Religion, urban education, and the first amendment. Urban Review, 46, 47–62. McElwee, J. (2019, June 10). Vatican office blasts gender theory, questions intentions of transgender people. National Catholic Reporter. Retrieved from www.ncronline.org/ news/vatican/vatican-office-blasts-gender-theory-questions-intentionstransgenderpeople. McLaren, P., & Jandrić, P. (2018). Paulo Freire and liberation theology: The Christian consciousness of critical pedagogy. Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Pädagogik, 94(2), 246–264. doi:10.30965/25890581–09402006. Rackley, E. (2014). Scripture-based discourses of Latter-day Saint and Methodist youths. Reading Research Quarterly, 49(4), 1–19. Skerrett, A. (2013). Religious literacies in a secular literacy classroom. Reading Research Quarterly, 49(2), 233–250.

11 Ambivalence in Two Parts Legacies of Catholic Languaging Adam J. Greteman

Imagining and interpreting something positively is actually a creative act which tends to make it more likely that things develop that way James Alison (2005, p. 12)

This chapter has two parts. The first part engages emerging theological legacies of Catholic languaging around gay and lesbian issues. In this part, I offer an optimistic engagement with contemporary theological arguments that have opened up space and time for imagining possibilities for gays and lesbians. The second part engages the political legacies of Catholic languaging around gay and lesbian issues. Here, I critique the reclamation project of religious literacies embedded in this book for the ways it reinforces a system of goodness that merely expands to include gay and lesbian subjects. To do this, I turn to the passionate politics of queer activisms that challenged the Church’s response to the AIDS epidemic and its contemporary teachings on homosexuality and gender identity. The two parts, when combined, provide an ambivalent perspective on the legacies of Catholic languaging. The legacies of languaging I explore here are conditioned by a context where approval of “gay and lesbian” rights has improved, but such approval comes with conditions steeped in normative ideas that are still scandalized by transness. As educational researchers take up and explore religious languaging, particularly around LGBTQ issues, it will be necessary to grapple with both the emerging legacies attending to cultural changes that makes a place in the pew for some, now tolerated, gay and lesbian subjects while recognizing the limitations of languaging bound to its histories of violence and exclusion towards trans subjects in the 21st century.

Part One: Undoing the Curse Through Education Education, in the form of schooling, forms subjects in complex, contested, and contradictory ways (Arendt, 1954/2007; Biesta, 2006, Woodson, 1933/2010). The languages we encounter in schools and beyond provide us entry into the conversations of our time while helping us make sense of our bodies in the world. Languages help form us and at times deform us, in attempts to reform

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us in(to) a certain likeness when and if we meet the limits of becoming. For much of the 20th and well into the 21st century, the languages in and around sexualities and genders have pushed and pulled the work of schools in various ways (Blount, 2005; Graves, 2009; Greteman, 2018; Gilbert, 2014; Mayo, 2014). Social scientific research on the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer students—as their identities intersect with class, race, ability and religion—has shown both progress in inclusion and the persistence of violence (epistemological, physical, psychological) against LGBTQ students (Mayo, 2014; Kosciw et al., 2018; Wimberly, 2015). Languages around LGBTQ students have shifted from those of pathology, towards those of inclusion and care, in many but not all contexts. My own schooling was imbedded in the late 20th and early 21st century Catholic school context. While schooled by rural diocesan Catholic elementary and high schools, followed by a Jesuit university, I was also educated in a social and political context where LGBTQ issues had become more commonplace. Fights for LGBTQ rights were part of the backdrop of my own schooling, which struggled, as educational institutions so steeped in Catholic doctrine, with these cultural and political changes. Here, I turn to the legacies of Catholic languaging I encountered in my schooling to tell one part of my ambivalent story that drew insight from contemporary theological interventions in biblical interpretation. These insights would, in many ways, inform my own experience becoming a teacher educator who encountered students steeped in various Christian traditions that were uncomfortable and at times unwilling to engage lesbian and gay issues. My schooling within particular “schools” of interpretation allowed me, in those moments, to engage these students as they themselves grappled with quite similar challenges of becoming subjects amidst changing languages. The benefits of 16 years of Catholic schooling proved pedagogically useful and allowed me to contemplate, with emerging teachers, the tensions and possibilities when religions, sexualities, and genders meet. These pedagogical moments of my own emerging scholarly and teaching practices were formed through my earlier education. In my own undergraduate education, I encountered the use of social scientific methods to read the Bible, particularly the New Testament, through my professor Bruce J. Malina. It was through Malina’s (2001) work and teaching that the languages of cultural analysis were brought to my attention as important to reading (and understanding) text (biblical and otherwise). To read and interpret the Bible was not straightforward. For Malina, reading and making sense of the Bible—and the cultural contexts in which it was written—required attending to culture as it became refracted through historical and social changes. “To interpret any piece of language adequately”, Malina (1986) held, “is to interpret the social system that it expresses” (p. 2). And the texts of the Bible express social systems removed by millennia from contemporary U.S. realities. It is through Malina’s work that I gained language that helped me think, in a scholarly way, about the Bible and its lessons. His simple starting point centered the challenge of understanding the foreigner from the foreigner’s vantage. To

Ambivalence in Two Parts 181 interpret otherwise, from one’s own perspective and cultural vantage, would not only be ethnocentric but also anachronistic (Malina, 2001, p. 10). The languages that Malina offered me (and others) provided inroads into contemplating the past and its people as foreign, not to be reduced to contemporary viewpoints, but engaged culturally and anthropologically. The arguments and readings Malina’s scholarship offered were always rooted in interpreting rules, lessons, and stories in their cultural context. His were lessons in humility and patient reading as I had to learn to look through millennia of cultural changes. Malina’s lessons, however, never directly addressed “homosexuality”, because homosexuality as a concept was not present within the context of the first century Mediterranean culture. Same sex practices, yes, but such practices were to be understood through other cultural rules and conditions. Homosexuality, as Michel Foucault (1990) highlighted, emerged in the late 19th century when homosexuals became persons with a case history. Therefore, the biblical rules, lessons, and stories so often used to argue against homosexuality would become, through cultural anthropology, rules, lessons, and stories about honor and shame, purity and other concepts contextualized within the culture(s) when it was written. Such passages—so often trotted out and read from within the contemporary social system—became moot, at least for me, as they were, using biblical hermeneutics, mis-readings and mis-interpretations that held up a system of goodness in the modern world clearly attributed to human rather than divine creation. This system of goodness would be made more visible to me in 2005 during a lecture at Creighton University, when theologian James Alison argued that we were in the midst of a collapsing of the closet in the house of God. Turning to St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, he unpacked the concept of the curse as it illustrated an anthropological system. “Cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey all the things written in the book of the law”, said the passage from Deuteronomy that St. Paul returned to read in his epistle. The passage seemed to offer a rather straightforward lesson. Yet, as Alison argued, the lesson is used by Paul not to prove a point, but as “internal evidence of an anthropological structure” (p. 2). The statement “cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey all the things written in the book of the law” reveals the system that it is part of, a system of goodness that sets up good and bad. As Alison argued If the law curses somebody, then it creates a world of good and bad, and this means that the “good” in that system is fatally dependent on the ‘bad.’ If I rely, for my goodness, on holding onto, and obeying, everything in the system, then that means my goodness is “over against” someone else’s badness, and thus, being dependent on it, is part of it. (p. 2) To be held to the law is to be held in its logic whereby one’s goodness is always defined against someone else’s. And this matters in the lived experience. “The lived anthropological effect of the system of goodness is”, for Alison, “in

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practice, that of nullifying the goodness towards which the commandment points” (p. 3). Put differently, by obeying the law we contradict its very messaging. We create a system of goodness that operates over and against the “other” to make the “self ” appear good. And within Alison’s theological reading of Paul “no system of goodness, precisely because it sets up a world of good and bad, blessing and curse, can be from God, since God is only blessing, only promise” (p. 3). The danger to moral life in Alison’s estimation is not “bad” people. Rather the danger lies in the system of goodness that is dependent on the creation of a wicked other. It is the system that sets up “good and bad” and such a system—created by humans—denies both the “good” and the “bad” their humanity. The “good” people’s goodness is always defined over against the “bad” people, thwarting the ability to be with the other. The curse—and I sense many gay and lesbian Catholics have felt at times like their sexuality was a curse—was not of God’s doing. Rather, as Alison argued, “the sphere of the curse is what it looks like to live in a world in which good and evil are defined over against each other—in other words, it is a strictly anthropological— human—reality” (p. 4). What Alison’s argument provided me was the language by which one might choose to occupy the place of shame, to stay with the trouble of being “class fairy”. In his reading via Paul, Jesus, in going to his death on the cross, occupied the place of shame. Jesus did not run from the curse, nor defend himself against it. As Alison argued: It is as if by his living in the midst of the curse and refusing to regard it as a curse, or be run by it as a curse, or react to it as a cursed-one does, the trap door of the trap goes permanently stuck. . . . And with that, the curse lost its power, and the system of goodness became powerless or moot. (p. 5) Jesus, in occupying the place of the curse “then”, exposed the precarity of systems of goodness that when translated into the 21st century context becomes, for Alison, helpful in understanding the issues impacting lesbian and gay matters figured as subjects occupying the place of the class fairy. The class fairy as Alison (2005) illustrated is always present in a system of goodness. And, “hardly anyone can get through the education system of our world without coming into contact with groups where someone gets to occupy the space of the class fairy” (Alison, 2005, p. 4). Someone inevitably is labeled the class fairy, bullied and made fun of in some way, so that others in the class can feel “good” (or breathe a sigh of relief for not being the chosen class fairy). Although the class fairy is not necessarily always about sexual orientation (or gender identity), the perception of those components of one’s identity are often implicated through the use of words like “fag” or “dyke” or phrases like “that’s gay”. These realities are shifting in our present-day context as anti-bullying and non-discrimination policies become more commonplace in American public education, but the fact remains that LGBTQ youth experience disproportionate

Ambivalence in Two Parts 183 amounts of violence and exclusion in schools (Kosciw et al., 2018). They continue to occupy the cursed place, the place of the class fairy. Despite being positioned as “bad” in our current system of goodness, lesbians and gays are increasingly embracing the “curse”, showing that it is indeed inhabitable. And around gays and lesbians, the story goes, the closet is collapsing. “What has enabled it to collapse has been”, as Allison noted, “people living and dying, often enough with enormous bravery and through great loss, in the place of shame” (p. 9). It is, in his estimation, “a genuine anthropological discovery about what it is to be human” (p. 9). Homosexuals in becoming gays and lesbians—throwing off the yoke of medicalization—have discovered new ways of being and becoming human. With the reason and rationale of Catholic languaging presented in and by the lessons of Malina and Alison it became easier for me to contemplate not only the tensions between religion and sexuality, but my own existence as a gay man. The burden I felt as a young gay man educated in and through Catholic education became lighter as I could understand “faith” through the work of theological study. I was, strangely, lighter in my loafers.

Part Two: On Being Cursed in Political Language The previous is all well and good. Alison’s generosity in “opening the door on gay and lesbian issues” alongside Malina’s cultural anthropology provided important shifts in building new legacies of language and interpretation. These lessons and languages offer new legacies for students to build from and on. They ask us, in different albeit related tones, to imagine the other—the foreign, the gay and lesbian—to do the work of Catholicism. Such building creates a different structure by which subjects become not only religious, but also sexual and gendered, within our 21st century conditions. Many within the religious life of the Catholic Church, despite its complexity, have pastorally embraced their gay and lesbian parishioners. However, such embraces remain conditioned and conditional, seen for instance when a first-grade teacher in Miami’s Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic School was fired after she married her same-sex partner in February 2018. This instance joins numerous other similar cases. Gay and lesbian teachers that marry their same-sex partners still scandalize Church Law that has maintained particular views on “homosexuality”, views that offer an embrace, but often one that proves suffocating. Change takes time, of course, and generous and scholarly advancements still have work to do as they make their way into the structures and minds of emerging persons taking on various forms of responsibility (e.g., as educators, as administrators). Yet I am skeptical of the previous project that lays out “progressive” theological arguments to build a foundation for new Catholic languaging. I am unconvinced that such knowledges are necessary, useful, and helpful to teachers and teacher educators and not merely reproductive of institutional initiatives to keep hold on “the people” and bring them into a still fraught flock. I have, as noted earlier, benefitted from these new methods and models for

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reading biblical, and by consequence other, texts. I am also a white cisgender male and the lessons that Alison, in particular, offered made sense for me and my context. I “fit in” in many ways. These lessons were practical for me as they fit my worldly experience and assisted me in my own becoming. My skepticism of such a practical, albeit progressive, project is informed by curriculum theorist Thomas Popkewitz (2015), who showed: The contemporary work of education constantly casts its problems and formulas of reform in the language of finding useful and practical knowledge: useful for helping the policy-maker be wiser in solving educational problems; helpful to the teacher in becoming more effective and efficient for all children and identifying the practical knowledge for children to find the paths to a righteous and future happiness. (p. 1) Yet Popkewitz (2015) continued Evoking practical and useful knowledge as the educational panacea of change is filled with irony. That irony is that the very principles that organized the hopes of practical knowledge are impractical. They are impractical in that the desire to find practical knowledge assumes a consensus and harmony to organize change that conserves the contemporaneous frameworks that are the object of change. (p. 1) It is, on face value, reasonable to interrogate the work of religion’s languages and literacies in the 21st century as religious discourses and their practitioners assert themselves in new ways—for better and for worse depending on one’s position. Such an interrogation promises to contribute to an understanding of religion’s complex legacies and multifaceted realities. Yet I worry that in embarking on such an epistemological project—of coming to make sense of or “understand” legacies of religious languages—we may forget the ways in which such languages and legacies have distorted or made quite impossible understanding, in the sympathetic sense, those populations for whom religion’s legacy is one of exclusion and violence. It reads in the moment of this writing, as an odd turn of events to re-centralize religion when religion persists in its historic exclusions rooted in dogma and faith more often—in the long view anyway—than “reason” and “social science”. The reasonableness of centralizing legacies of Christianity more broadly and its potential for new relational configurations, I worry, feed into feelings of importance and perpetuates Christian ideas and ideals that, put bluntly, infect minds and reproduce views that for many queers—figured in various ways—is viscerally frightening. Discourses asserting Christian persecution and religious rights comes at a time, as well, of immense backlash against various marginalized queer and trans populations. Christianity—its legacies and

Ambivalence in Two Parts 185 literacies—has sought to put youth on righteous paths to their future; righteous paths that “reparative therapy camps” have made quite clear. Paths to redeem and repair Christianity—Catholicism more specifically—are littered with the queer excesses that, even within benevolent and pastoral renderings of religion, cannot adequately do so without fundamentally altering the very workings and beliefs of religion. To centralize queers—queer signifying those not looking to be tolerated by structures and doctrines that deem them “objectively disordered”—refuses the offer and promise of such religiously inflected paths. Queers, in this sense, do not wish to travel to become one of Christ’s lambs now tolerated once the political winds have shifted in their favor. “Any commingling of religion and liberalism has” after all, Cris Mayo (2006) noted, “only been to the detriment of queer people and attempts to make the disagreements between the two seem less weighty only make current efforts to improve actual queer lives harder” (p. 478). When I scratch the surface of moments—moments that attempt to bridge the divide—I quickly come upon the ways these new languages come much too late. They come much too late as they land amidst the graves of queers for whom the Catholic Church—in situated contexts and its hierarchy—refused to care for and attend to those not only dying of HIV/AIDS then but still dying now due to homo and transphobia. The generosity I learned from Alison comes to meet the rage I learned from queer activists for whom benevolence towards institutions like the Church would have cost more lives. The legacies of Catholic languaging redound with deathly consequences. However, it is, as such, within and through queerness that the second part emerges, arguing against a place in the pew to imagine a world beyond and otherwise. “Shut down our clinics and we will shut down your ‘church,’” David Wojnarowicz (1991) raged in his memoir of disintegration. He continued: I believe in the death penalty for people in positions of power who commit crimes against humanity—i.e., fascism. This creep in black skirts has kept safer sex information off the local television stations and mass transit spaces for the last eight years of the AIDS epidemic thereby helping thousands and thousands to their unnecessary deaths. (p. 114) The Church, as Wojnarowicz illustrated, was a central culprit in the annihilation of queer populations. It was, along with the governmental and medical institutions, the target of protests. And it is the legacies of these protests and their erotically filled rage that might offer alternatives to Christian (and Catholic) languaging. Less interested in the languaging of Catholicism on a scholarly front, Wojnarowicz instead exposed the political languaging of the Catholic Church and its consequences for real, lived, queer lives. The Church may now, like the broader society, have come around to some of its senses. Yet the cost of such coming around is still borne by queers—both those lost to the epidemic and those who lost the possibilities of meeting those queers who would now be our elders.

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Legacies of queer languaging that centralize the queer experience emerge in response to the legacies of homophobia that are, in part, a key legacy of Catholic languaging. Catholicism may have come around more so than other religions—like fundamentalists and evangelicals—but all Christian religions— and yes, I am totalizing here—are rooted in legacies of homophobia that have had and continue to have deadly consequences. The lessons from queer activists that I have learned—the languages of pleasure and resistance—come through the battle fatigued and the dead themselves whose ideas are only slowly being recovered through the work of a new queer archive. It is here that all the languages I learned through Malina and Alison provide me very little solace in that such languages are always already centralized within Catholicism. Religion, even read benevolently, still consumes those around it, demanding some form of grounding in its rationales. It is still always, already, an institution of and by humans. The system of goodness is changing for the better for some gays and lesbians. But the Church—run by men—maintains systems of goodness, seen perhaps pathetically with the continued scapegoating of “homosexuals” in response to the priest sex abuse scandals. The legacies of these languages weigh me down, despite the legacies of “progressive” Catholic languaging in my educational past that lifted me up. The Church hierarchy becomes too much to bear, even with a Jesuit pope. Yes, as Alison noted in the epigraph to this chapter, benevolent reading is important “because imagining and interpreting something positively is actually a creative act which tends to make it more likely that things develop that way” (p. 12). However, I’d rather interpret something positively from a queer position to develop legacies not bound by the machinations and baggage of Catholicism and its “holy” texts, but from the “anthropological discovery” that is queerness and those who have lived queer lives. And it is this queerness that, despite neglect and attempts to annihilate, helped undo the power of the Catholic Church in New York and elsewhere during the AIDS epidemic. It was the queer legacies of surviving an annihilating threat that allowed for such imaginations and protests in the literal aisles of churches, exposing the Church’s legacy of homophobia. The Church has, of course, come around in some ways since the height of the AIDS epidemic to pastorally embrace gays and lesbians. Yet this coming around has its limitations both for gays and lesbians and for transgender individuals. The limitations of the first are illustrated through Pope Francis, who when asked about gay priests early in his papacy responded “who am I to judge”. Francis was praised for asking the question and named “Person of the Year” in 2013 by Time and The Advocate for these reasonable remarks on gays and lesbians. Yet the Pope is trapped between pastoral care and the legacy of teaching that define the Church. This was made visible in a 2013 interview with America Magazine, where the Pope noted: We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible. I have not spoken much

Ambivalence in Two Parts 187 about these things, and I was reprimanded for that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time. (Spadaro, 2013, para. 19) Pope Francis illustrated in these remarks that the Church cannot only focus on cultural issues, like contraception and gay marriage, as it has other issues to address. But Pope Francis also noted that the teachings of the Church are clear on these matters. Francis wants to raise questions about if he is to judge gays and lesbians, but such a move in light of the previous interview reads as avoidance. It is easy to avoid responsibility by asking a question, while maintaining a clear stance on what the Church teaches; lessons that still threaten queer lives. Francis’s pastoral messages become muddied as it is refracted through Catholic teaching’s clarity. This became further visible in 2014 at an interfaith conference where Pope Francis noted to attendees that marriage and the family were in crisis, saying “we cannot qualify [the family] with concepts of an ideological nature that only have strength in a moment of history and then fall” and that children “have the right to grow up in a family, with a father and a mother”. Aligning with Church teachings and within the context of a conference (instead of a plane with reporters), Francis maintains the Church’s stance on the role of “complementarity”, but with an emphasis on the rights of “children” to grow up with opposite sex parents.1 Yet in a December 2014 interview after the Synod on the Family, Francis affirmed his pastoral approach to gay and lesbian children: Nobody spoke about homosexual marriage in the synod, it didn’t occur to us. What we spoke about was how a family that has a homosexual son or daughter, how can they educate him or her, how can they raise him or her, how can this family be helped to move forward in this situation which is a little unprecedented. So in the synod they spoke about the family and homosexual persons in relation to their families, because it is a reality that we encounter many times in the confessional. (O’Connell, 2014, para. 6) Within the context of the confessional, priests encounter homosexual persons in relation to their families—families that I imagine have often kicked them out or taught them, using the language of the catechism, that they have a condition and that condition is “objectively disordered”. In the Pope’s regard there is a need, a pastoral need, to help educate families on how to “move forward in this situation”. The gay and lesbian child, so it goes, needs the Church’s assistance in educating their parents, but what that education entails is never made clear, although the more I read Pope Francis’s remarks within the history of Catholicism I am skeptical that such an education is one that allows for the flourishing of gay and lesbian life beyond the confines of the Church’s system of goodness.

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The legacies of Catholic teachings, rooted in the catechism, instead continue to promote histories of violence, silence, and suicide for queer persons. To pastor to gays and lesbians while maintaining the structure that confines them maintains the double bind of queer consciousness. This was made clear again in the Pope’s 2016 apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love) where he both denounces anti-gay violence because “every person, regardless of sexual orientation, ought to be respected in his or her dignity and treated with consideration” (p. 190), yet affirms that “there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family” (p. 190). Such exhortations highlight the legacies of homophobia whereby enough cultural changes have occurred to make it possible to advocate for pastoral care, yet the doctrine maintains the structure of goodness where homosexuals remain “objectively disordered”. Such shifts are generative for gays and lesbians who have gained a foothold within the Church and are able to live, within dogmatic confines, as persons with dignity. Homophobia rears its head, but does so pastorally in the 21st century Church. Vilified, however, are different queer populations—notably trans individuals—who within Amoris Laetitia—emerge from “forms of an ideology of gender that ‘denies the difference and reciprocity in nature of a man and a woman and envisages a society without sexual differences’” (p. 44). With emerging educational programs and legislative enactments that are seeking to protect the dignity and rights of trans people, the Church re-affirms its commitment to a particular reading of biology pushing against new gendered possibilities because such ideologies assert “human identity becomes the choice of the individual, which can also change over time” (p. 45). It is ironic that earlier in the paragraph concerns about the anthropological family are expressed, as if that anthropological family is ahistorical and without shifts in understandings of sex and gender. My concern, however, is less with that irony and the “concern” also expressed “that some ideologies of this sort, which seek to respond to what are at times understandable aspirations, manage to assert themselves as absolute and unquestionable, even dictating how children should be raised” (p. 45). Given the history of the Catholic Church’s views on absolute power and its existence as the “universal Church”, concerns about other views that claim unquestionable status is quite comical. The joy of love, it would seem within Amoris Laetitia, is always already conditional. The dial moves slightly ahead for gays and lesbians as deserving of dignity while the “understandable aspirations” expanding the dignity accorded to trans people becomes a new iteration of fear. The emerging legacy of Catholicism that joins its historic legacy of homophobia is transphobia. There is no room in the pew within this system of goodness for those for whom the binary is not enough.

Conclusion The closet may very well have collapsed or may still be collapsing, but it collapses on and covers up the bodies of those for whom the closet was and is too

Ambivalence in Two Parts 189 much. The metaphorical closet of 20th century gay life becomes a corporeal closet that traps trans people in ideologies of complementarity.2 Perhaps this is too hyperbolic. But it seems necessary to include passion, to embrace the passionate politics that point out the reality that the “curse” has not been undone; it has only changed guises and targets. The curse still inflicts damage as new persons come to occupy the place of the class fairy. While gay and lesbian Catholics may now have a place in the pew, there are many queers that still stand on the outside, exposing the system of goodness that has ushered the reputable gay and lesbian flock closer to the side of the good. Those who survived—the battle worn—have taken up and on different projects to sustain queerness. This includes those who maintain a critique of the Church and those who see progressive possibilities. My ambivalence, I hope, is apparent as I recognize the real need that some gay and lesbian Catholics have for languages that bring them into the flock. Yet it remains, for me, a reality that the Church has done too little, too late—or, in other ways, too much, too often. The Church has done something and for my contexts I can recognize the benefits that “something” has done for my own possibilities and the legacies such shifts open. Those things, however, come at the expense of generations of gay and lesbian Catholics who didn’t survive, couldn’t survive, the slow movement of the Church. As Judith Butler (1997) argued: The power imposed upon one is the power that animates one’s emergence, and there appears to be no escaping this ambivalence. Indeed, there appears to be no ‘one’ without ambivalence, which is to say that the fictive redoubling necessary to become a self rules out the possibility of strict identity. Finally, then, there is no ambivalence without loss as the verdict of sociality, one that leaves the trace of its turn at the scene of one’s emergence. (p. 198) In being and becoming amidst the 21st century modes of sociality—informed by competing discourses—my body and mind are torn by the losses that inform my conditions. My body and mind are weary of the legacies of Catholic languaging while also, in moments, invigorated by how these progressive languages give me ways to engage the “other”, particularly the student in the midst of their own education. Yet such invigoration quickly subsides as I feel trapped at the threshold, trapped in languaging that despite attempts at reinterpretation, at benevolent re-reading, maintains structures of goodness that pit the “queer” as the outside, the cursed other, the class fairy, the anthropological anomaly. Perhaps I have a place in the pew, but can I sit knowing others stand outside the pastoral dignity I’ve been accorded? Knowledge of the legacies of such languaging has benefits as I encounter students working to understand the work of religion in their lives, but is such an epistemological project always already outdated, unable to account for the changing ways of being and becoming in the world that require immediate attention outside the dogmatic?

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Notes 1. While I cannot attend to the debates about complementarity, Todd Salzman and Michael Lawler’s The Sexual Person: Toward a Renewed Catholic Anthropology (2008) offered compelling lessons illustrating the church’s inconsistency in its teaching around sexuality and gender. 2. Special thanks to Ariel Gentalan for coming up with the term corporeal closet as they assisted me thinking through this issue.

References Alison, J. (2005). Collapsing the closet in the house of God: Opening the door on gay/ straight issues. Retrieved from http://jamesalison.co.uk/texts/collapsing-the-closet-inthe-house-of-god/ Arendt, H. (1954/2007). The crisis in education. In R. Curren (Ed.), Philosophy of education: An anthology (pp. 188–192). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Biesta, G. (2006). Beyond learning: Democratic education for a human future. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press. Blount, J. (2005). Fit to teach: Same-sex desire, gender, and school work in the twentieth century. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Butler, J. (1997). The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Foucault, M. (1990). The history of sexuality: Volume one an introduction. New York, NY: Vintage. Gilbert, J. (2014). Sexuality in School: The limits of education. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Graves, K. (2009). And they were wonderful teachers: Florida’s purge of gay and lesbian teachers. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois. Greteman, A. J. (2018). Sexualities and genders in education: Towards queer thriving. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Kosciw, J. G., Greytak, E. A., Zongrone, A. D., Clark, C. M., & Trong, N. L. (2018). The 2017 National School Climate Survey: The experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth in our nation’s schools. New York: GLSEN. Malina, B. J. (1986). Christian origins and cultural anthropology: Practical models for biblical interpretation. Louisville, KY: John Knox Press. Malina, B. J. (2001). The new testament world: Insights from cultural anthropology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Mayo, C. (2006). Pushing the limits of liberalism: Queerness, children, and the future. Educational Theory, 56(4), 469–487. Mayo, C. (2014). LGBTQ youth and education: Policies and practices. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. O’Connell, G. (2014, December 6). In new interview, Pope Francis says resistance that comes into the open is “a good sign”. America Magazine. Retrieved from www.americamagazine.org/content/dispatches/new-interview-pope-francis-says-resistance-comesopen-good-sign Popkewitz, T. (2015). Curriculum studies, the reason of “reason,” and schooling. In T. Popkewitz (Ed.), The “reason” of schooling: Historicizing curriculum studies, pedagogy, and teacher education (pp. 1–18). New York, NY: Routledge. Salzman, T., & Lawler, M. (2008). The sexual person: Toward a renewed catholic anthropology. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

Ambivalence in Two Parts 191 Spadaro, A. (2013, September 20). A big heart open to God: An interview with Pope Francis. America Magazine. Retrieve from www.americamagazine.org/faith/2013/ 09/30/big-heart-open-god-interview-pope-francis Wimberly, G. L. (Ed.). (2015). LGBTQ issues in education: Advancing a research agenda. Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. Wojnarowicz, D. (1991). Closer to the knives: A memoir of disintegration. New York, NY: Vintage. Woodson, G. C. (1933/2010). This miseducation of the negro. Las Vegas, NV: IAP.

12 Exploring the Multilingual, Multimodal, and Cosmopolitan Dimensions of Two Young Cuban American Women’s Religious Literacies Natasha Perez Religious faith is practiced and transmitted through the language and literacy practices of individuals, families, and communities. In immigrant families, such as mine, the heritage language of the home can powerfully intertwine with the religious practices of the home. Recalling my earliest memories, I remember watching my grandmother murmur her prayers in Spanish every morning, standing next to a well-lit window as she turned the pages of her threadbare Catholic prayer book. I can still hear the jingle of the Virgen Mary medallion that dangled on her bosom, as I can visualize the statuettes of St. Francis and St. Anthony, among others, that populated the chifforobe in her room. These artifacts signaled her faith, and by extension, my own. The Catholic faith had arrived on Cuban shores with the Spanish colonizers centuries earlier and became the dominant form of worship (FernandezSoneira, 1997). In Cuba, my mother had attended Catholic school until the family was pushed out after the country’s communist turn in the early 1960s, and in fact had set sail to Spain with the last of the Catholic clergy expelled from the island. Apprenticed into the faith by my mother and grandmother, my early religious practices were in Spanish, as well as inherently embodied and multimodal. I remember my small fingers touching the onion thin pages of the prayer book; the pictures of baby Jesus and angels depicted in prayer cards stuffed throughout its pages; the sound of whispered prayers chanted during the recitation of the rosary, bead by bead. I grew up surrounded by these artifacts of Catholicism, such as saints, medallions, and prayer books, all of which have associated discourses and vocabularies that I learned in Spanish. I first learned basic childhood prayers by rote in Spanish, such as: Angel de me Guarda, dulce compania, no me desampares ni de noche ni de dia Guardian Angel dear, sweet companion, please protect me by night and by day

Two Young Cuban American Women 193 These artifacts, as well as the sound, the feel, and the embodied expressions of Catholicism were the early bedrock of faith, language, and literacy in my life. I was not aware of this interplay of religion, literacy, and language until I set out to write an autobiographical narrative inquiry (Clandinin, 2016) in order to unpack my own experience as a second-generation bilingual speaker and learner. This was a starting point that led to a broader interest in listening to other people’s stories about their lived experiences with language and literacy, with an eye towards the social, spatial, and temporal elements of these narratives that make up the three-dimensional space of narrative inquiry. Narrative inquiry is about the “living, telling, reliving, and retelling” (Clandinin, 2016, p. 34) of storied phenomenon. In this chapter, I will share narrative snapshots of religious practice from my own life, growing up Cuban and Catholic, and from a more contemporary Cuban-American teen, Rosaura, engaging in Christian literacies through bilingual readings of the Bible. Our stories reveal the dynamic, multi-modal, and cosmopolitan dimensions of Christian literacies in our lives.

Multiliteracies, Religion, and Identity Sociocultural approaches to literacy through a new literacies perspective can highlight the ways that youth use text, language, and media in meaningful ways as part of the social practice of their everyday lives outside of school (Street, 2003; Smagorinsky, 2000). One important outcome of new literacies theory is the concept of multiliteracies, a lens from which I draw on to explore the narratives in this study. A multiliteracies perspective anticipates cultural diversity, linguistic diversity, and multimodality as key features in the landscape of communication (Jewitt, 2008). One benefit of such a wide view of language is that it may help to tease out sociocultural and historical connections and relationships in different spaces or domains of literacy practice (Lytra, 2012; Pahl & Rowsell, 2012), of which church and other spaces of faith practice emerge as generative sites to explore. Pahl and Rowsell (2006) describe multimodality as “communication in the widest sense, including gesture, oral performance, artistic, linguistic, digital, electronic, graphic, and artifact-related” (p. 6). Attending to multimodality is helpful in unpacking how artifacts, stories, culture, and faith practices in a variety of modes work together within the linguistic and literacy landscape, across domains of faith practice. Exploring the language dimension of multimodal practices can also reveal the connection between the local and the global. Languages are associated with cultures that come from some place; in the narratives shared here, the Spanish language practiced by my family and Rosaura’s is the Cuban variety, and in both our experiences, connected us to Cuba. Transnationalism accounts for the mobility of people, language, and sets of practices, including religious literacy practices, across borders (Lam & Warriner, 2012). Although some border crossings are concrete, others are more abstract. For example, my connection to Cuba was not to the island, but to an imagined community wholly consisting of narratives and memories shared by my family and reiterated by the Cuban

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exiles in South Florida of a country that once existed, but was not accessible to us any longer. Most Cuban migrants from the first wave of Cuban immigration in the 1960s were not able to return to Cuba for decades owing to constraints and restrictions between both the Cuban and the U.S. governments; when it became possible to go, many found the idea of return too painful in the face of the hardship and trauma that leaving had caused. Furthermore, because my extended family had reunited in the United States, there was no one left on the island to return to. In contrast, for Rosaura, Cuba was a tangible place that she remembered, whose memories were supplemented through the stories of her childhood and other artifacts, such as pictures and videos that documented her presence on the island. She was born in the late 1990s and her family immigrated under different circumstances, in a time period when return among recent migrants was common and possible. Her family’s departure was less wrought in terms of politics, and they were drawn to return to reunite with family whenever possible. Whereas Rosaura’s reality was transnational in a concrete sense, mine was transnational in an abstract sense; yet we both self-described as second-generation Cuban American. Thus, exploring the spaces of embodied transnationalism can reveal the multiple identities that individuals enact as they engage in multiliteracies (Pahl and Rowsell, 2012). Finally, by zooming in on the multimodal and transnational dimensions of their faith-related language and literacy practices, I will discuss how the interplay of language and religious literacies fostered deeper cosmopolitan understandings of the world (Harper, Bean & Dunkerly, 2010). In Rosaura’s experience specifically, her commitment to reading the Bible in two languages positioned her as a cosmopolitan intellectual (Campano & Ghiso, 2011), aware of the “tensions and possibilities of living and learning in the interface of the local and the global” (Bean & Dunkerley-Bean, 2015, p. 48).

Literature Review In looking at the relationship between religious practice, identity, and literacy, scholars have noted the ways that religious identity can influence the literacy practices of youth (Pastor, 2005; Baquedano-López, 2001; Sarroub, 2002), and how religious practice in turn can influence identity (McMillon & Edwards, 2009; Ek, 2009; Sarroub, 2002; Pastor, 2005). These studies emphasize the centrality of language and culture to religious expression. In fact, one’s religious identity can be closely intertwined with ethnic and national identity, rendering it an integral aspect of one’s home culture (Hirschman, 2004; Nabhan-Warren, 2016). My own experience growing up Catholic in a Cuban household led me to grow up thinking that all Cubans were Catholic; such was my understanding of Cuban identity because of the connection in my mind between Spanish and religion. In a similar vein, Baquedano-López (2001) explored how narratives of La Virgen de Guadalupe, a key figure in Mexican Catholicism, were important to Mexican youth constructing social identities while attending religious education

Two Young Cuban American Women 195 classes in Spanish. Their co-constructed narratives revealed transnational connections between Mexico and the U.S. as they trace their connections with La Virgen to a Mexican past and to their present circumstances living in the U.S. In their research on the shared domains of practice across the African American church and school, McMillon and Edwards (2015) describe the rich history of the church as a site of identity affirmation for African Americans, while simultaneously a place where “literacy and cultural practices are learned and reinforced” (p. 320). Through their involvement in church, individuals affirm both their ethnic identity and their religious identity while in relationship with others. In addition to identity development, religious practice can be a vehicle for literacy development. Scholars have noticed complimentary literacy practices across the domains of church and school. For example, McMillon and Edwards (2015) describes a wealth of literacy practices present in two key literacy events, the African American sermon and Bible class. They found that the African American church shared domains of literacy with school in several areas, such as oral language development, phonemic awareness, concepts of print, and storybook reading and responding. Likewise, in a qualitative study with young children socialized into literacy practices around the Bible, Volk and De Acosta (2001) found that “reading and writing with others, often in rituals with predictable patterns and melodies, provides a scaffold that enables children to participate as competent people in collaborative literacy events” (p. 218). Lastly, in exploring the practices of four Methodist youths and their practices around reading scripture, Rackley (2016) found that the participants in his study employed strategies while reading, such as inferencing, questioning, and applying prior knowledge, indicative of skillful readers. The strategies employed by these youths, often lauded as things that expert readers do, suggest that participating in religious literacies with sacred texts at church can result in sophisticated and complex engagement with literacy that parallel those valued in school. These studies demonstrate a relationship between identity development and religious literacies, suggesting that religious practice can influence the identity and literacy practices of youth.

My Narrative: Literacies of Faith and Home Because I was raised in a small American town, my use of Spanish, and my experience of Cuban-ness was mostly relegated to the home. Perhaps this is why I learned to associate Cuban-ness with Catholicism, since this was also a practice of the home that took place in Spanish. The Catholic faith had traveled with my mother from Cuba to the U.S., and stories of my mother’s lived experiences attending Catholic school helped to connect me not only to my religion but to Cuban culture as well. She had left Cuba at 16 years old, and most of her life until then had revolved around her experiences in Catholic school. We did not have access to many pictures from their time in Cuba; however, the few we

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did have often shared a religious motif: a First Communion portrait, a wedding picture, an aunt dressed as an angel during a Christmas play. In the absence of any memories of my own about Cuba, I imagined Cuba through the stories she told. These narratives and transcultural connections helped me develop a connection to being Cuban and being Catholic simultaneously. While outside of the home the world was in English, I had a reason to use my Spanish with the family, and during faith events, such as baptisms, mass, or simply praying with my grandmother. When I turned five, I began attending Catholic school in English, where I developed my academic literacy and learned the practices of the faith in English. During these years of schooling in New Jersey, we mostly attended weekly mass in English. When we did attend a Spanish mass, I was able to follow along with the words and rituals of the service. I did not know I could read the missalette, which is the book of readings for the mass, in Spanish, until my mother encouraged me to do so. I discovered that I could sound out words in Spanish just as I could in English. However, because it was more laborious, I tended to simply listen and follow along until I eventually memorized the service. Although I was not as fluent and proficient in Spanish as I was in English, I was scaffolded by the choral and communal nature of the Catholicism, which is also inherently multimodal, involving song, repetition, chants, memorized prayers, and gestures that are consistent across languages of worship. Current sociolinguistic scholarship on bilingualism suggests that multilinguals have one language system, or linguistic repertoire, from which they deploy different features to communicate (Garcia, 2009; Vogel & Garcia, 2017). Within this repertoire, language knowledge is interdependent and transferable (Cummins, 1981). This explains why I was able to use my phonemic awareness to sound out words in the Spanish missalette during mass Additionally, these language experiences were social and multimodal. Volk and De Acosta (2001) also accentuate social dimensions of religious literacy practices found at church, finding that “reading and writing with others, often in rituals with predictable patterns and melodies, provides a scaffold that enables children to participate as competent people in collaborative literacy events” (p. 218). In the next phase of my life, my language and literacy development continued to develop reciprocally in two languages across domains of practice between home (in Spanish), school (in English), and church.

Developing Multiliteracies in New Contexts The linguistic landscape of my life took a turn in the 1980s when I moved from the Northeast to South Florida. After 20 years of Cuban immigration to the area, the Cuban presence had transformed many parts of the city into an extended ethnic enclave that supported the language, customs, business, and values of Cubans living in diaspora (Lynch, 2015). Spanish featured prominently in both public and private spaces of South Florida (Portes & Stepick, 1993). Geo-political events in Central and South American in the 1980s further

Two Young Cuban American Women 197 diversified the spaces of the city as scores of new immigrants, from Nicaraguans fleeing the Sandinistas, Colombians fleeing violence, to Venezuelans, Argentinians, Salvadorians, and others fleeing economic hardship, or simply seeking better opportunities for their families arrived (Portes & Stepick, 1993). My family’s move to South Florida overlapped with this demographic growth at a time when I was beginning middle school and starting to participate in a Catholic youth group, and in a few years time I would count many recently arrived immigrant teens amongst my closest friends. This youth group became a key site for identity building both as Cuban American and Catholic. When I initially joined, my Spanish fluency was not enough to support reading the Bible in Spanish, or to have sustained conversations about the meaning of scripture, a practice that was common in this space. Instead, while my peers used their Spanish Bibles, I followed along in my English Bible to sustain my understanding of the concepts being discussed. As I am prone to do even to this day, I would make contributions to the faithsharing discussions by moving across languages, or translanguaging (Garcia, 2009), using my English and Spanish to communicate. We managed to make meaning together effectively through our interactions with Bibles in two languages and through music sung mostly in Spanish. This back-and-forth interaction between English and Spanish, interactions with Biblical text, the musical literacy, and the aural components (listening, speaking, and musicality) of these Catholic faith literacies provided a web of multimodal support for the sophisticated literacies taking place. As a result, I became increasingly biliterate in the years I attended youth group, moving from my English Bible to a Spanish one over time. Papen (2018) describes a similar transfer of literacy across domains of practice through multimodal engagement in the lives of young students in the U.K. In an ethnographic study of the literacy practices of primary students in a Catholic school, Papen notes the role of multimodal religious literacies, including worship, singing, storytelling, and exposure to challenging religious texts, in supporting reading and writing for primary grade participants in her study. After this shift in context to the bilingual city of Miami, expressions of Catholicism and the embodied literacies of Catholic faith practice helped to sustain Cuban identity and Spanish language use. Despite lacking formal literacy education in Spanish, I benefitted from the Catholic Church’s response to the surge of Spanish speaking immigrants in South Florida in the 1980s and the subsequent flexibility of language practice in youth groups. These practices included multimodal forms of literacy such as Bible reading, faith sharing, Sunday masses, and choir, all of which provided a space and a purpose to engage with Spanish literacy in ways that were not required at home or school. The site of youth group was also a transnational and cosmopolitan and identitybuilding experience, as I evolved in my knowledge of Cuban expressions of Catholicism to recognize other Spanish-speakers as Catholic, with Catholicism as a common language and culture that could superimpose itself as a uniting force. While Hispanics may share certain cultural similarities owing to a common legacy of Spanish colonization, their culture and histories are distinct.

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Additionally, although the families that I interacted with were all Hispanic, they represented an array of countries and varieties of Spanish that, while mutually intelligible, are not without their differences in prosody, colloquialisms, accents, and slang, especially to the ears of someone like me who had grown up in the U.S. In this contact zone for different Spanish-speaking immigrant groups, we learned about each other’s expressions of faith and some of the history behind the practice, as well as the language and discourse associated with these practices. For example, although it is typical of Catholics anywhere to sing universally known Catholic songs together, the site of youth group introduced me to songs introduced by individuals in the group who shared music traditionally sung in mass in Nicaragua and Venezuela. Through this music, I learned different repertoires of musical worship and ideas about spirituality. Another example involves the celebration of an important feast day for the church, the celebration of the immaculate conception of the Virgen Mary, a belief central to the Catholic faith. Through my Nicaraguan friends in youth group, I learned about a tradition particular to their culture, La Griteria, in which the faithful culminate eight days of devotions with a boisterous street festival to celebrate the feast day with food and drink, songs, fireworks, and shouts of devotions. This type of celebration was foreign to me, as in the U.S. I was used to celebrating the feast with a solemn mass.1 Drawing upon Anderson’s conceptualization (2011), Dunkerly-Bean suggests that cosmopolitanism “is also a sociology involving the ongoing redefinition of self against the differences and similarities of a new and expanding set of global others” (p. 48). This was the case for me as I developed a better sense of who I was and where I had come from in relation to the experiences of others. For example, before my experience in youth group, I had a limited understanding of pan-ethnic affiliations, immigration, and ethnicity. However, through interactions with so many youth of different backgrounds, I came to a deeper understanding of my own identity and history in relation to others. For example, while the world might categorize us as Hispanic, we were all prone to identify by our nationality and ethnicity, not be a pan-ethnic label. Although I ethnically identified as Cuban, I strongly identified as American in nationality. Because my life included elements of both cultures, I described myself as Cuban-American. Three key similarities that bound us were Spanish as the family language, a thread of immigration in our family, and Catholic faith. Yet we differed in race, ranging in shades across a spectrum of white, brown, and black; in ethnicity and nationality, representing American-born Cuban, Cuban-born Cuban, and recent migrants from Central and South America; in age and gender, given the age range of the youth group was somewhere between 15 and 21 years; and in socioeconomic status, representing a mixed bag of social classes in the U.S., further complicated by a recent history of different social class and life experience left behind in the country of origin by those who had recently migrated. As a result, once-wealthy families in Nicaragua could now find themselves cleaning offices or working in factories. In the church I attended,

Two Young Cuban American Women 199 current and former wealthy, middle or working class, and poor could be sitting next to each other in the pews. Interestingly, before we met in youth group, our paths had not crossed in the high school that many of us attended. In school, some of my youth group peers were tracked into ESL classes for English, while I was in advanced English. In fact, it was through them that I learned about the existence of ESL classes, and witnessed the hard work that immigrant students did to learn the language and content simultaneously. However, in some cases these same students were in advanced Math or Science, because the curriculum in their country of origin was more advanced than that in the U.S. Socially, we did not seek each other out in the lunch room until we became friends in youth group, as it was in this space that our shared faith bound us together. After this, my religious and academic worlds would converge for 30 minutes during lunch as I sat with youth group friends, where conversations would flow in Spanish, English, or both. Following this development in school, our friendships began to spill over into other areas of life outside of church and school, leading to opportunities for social interactions with families as well and a window into the family dynamics of daily life. Campano and Ghiso (2011) critique the grouping of diverse individuals “into prefabricated social and ethnic categories” (p. 165) that is prone to trickling down to the level of classrooms, where curriculum is also essentialized to a one-size-fits-all definition of a particular culture. In contrast, they describe the cosmopolitanism often inherent in students from immigrant backgrounds as “not just an imagined possibility, but often a perceptual and lived reality as well” (p. 166), as my own experience implies. As I deepened my faith and religious knowledge, my experiences in youth group taught me the plurality of stories and lived experiences of people from Spanishspeaking countries, helping me forge a cosmopolitan understanding of the world. One of many things that I learned is the variability of immigrant experiences, even amongst immigrants from the same country. Sometimes during prayer circles, individuals would share their fears about an upcoming immigration appointment, something that was foreign to me as a person born in the U.S. whose family entered the country with a guaranteed path to citizenship. Many times, I witnessed the anguish of my teenaged peers as they suffered the illness or death of a loved one back in their country, as they were unable to be with them in their time of need, and instead asked for prayers so that God would intercede on their behalf. All of these experiences helped me to recognize the differences in our family histories of immigration, even amongst fellow Cubans.

Rosaura’s Narrative When I met Rosaura, she was a 15-year-old millennial Cuban American girl growing up in the Midwest. She had arrived from Cuba at age four with her parents, leaving extended family behind on the island, a fact that was a source

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of great pain and hardship for the family. Because she had started school in the U.S., Rosaura was fluent in English and attending mainstream classes in public school when she became a participant in my study. Rosaura spoke Spanish and English fluently. At 15, she was much more fluent in Spanish than I had been at that age; she engaged in reading and writing in Spanish through letter writing to family in Cuba, interpreting documents for her parents, and reading for leisure, as well as for religious purposes. Her mother struggled with her English but was able to understand, whereas her father struggled quite a bit. As a result, Rosaura communicated with her parents solely in Spanish. In contrast, school communications were largely in English, as she had little opportunity to interact with other Spanish speakers since she left behind ESL support classes in the fourth grade. Maintaining the Spanish language, however, was very important to Rosaura, on many levels. Spanish was the language of her home and of her culture. The Spanish language was a thread that kept her connected to the loved ones left behind in Cuba, with whom the family communicated through letters and return visits whenever possible. Thus, Spanish enabled a transnational identity. Spanish was such an integral component of her identity that Rosaura often worried about losing her home language: Rosaura: I feel like if I get out of touch, I’ll start forgetting the [Spanish] language more easily, because I’ve grown . . . so comfortable in this language [English], um, in this way of life She actively worried about language loss, and worried that the English language and American culture would swallow up her Spanish. As a result, she was deliberate about using her Spanish language whenever possible. One way that she practiced was by reading a bilingual Bible that her mother had found in a garage sale. The Bible was set up in two languages, the page on the left in English, and on the right in Spanish. In one of our conversations, she shared her thought process about reading the Bible: When you read the Bible do you read the Spanish side or the English side? Rosaura: Well, I try to read them both. If I don’t understand something very clearly I go to the English side, but I try, I start reading it in Spanish. Me: Yeah? Rosaura: Yeah, my mom has always encouraged me to do that. I can look up scriptures really fast—I underline the English section. Me: Are you faster in English? Rosaura: Um, I think I am, yeah. Me:

Although she is faster at reading the scriptures on the English side of the Bible, where she “can look up scriptures really fast”, it is notable that Rosaura makes it a point to read in Spanish first, signaling a significant investment

Two Young Cuban American Women 201 on her part. When asked about her comprehension of scripture in Spanish, she responded: Like, some of the words I encounter I tell my mom, what does this mean? But she doesn’t know some of them either. Some of the words are tricky. And there are some in English that I don’t know either. She positions herself as a learner of two languages, when she says: Some words are tricky. And there are some in English that I don’t know either. In positioning herself as a learner, she does not privilege her academic English over her Spanish, instead valuing both. Although it is not surprising that an adolescent would grapple with the archaic vocabulary and ancient syntax of some scriptural translations, her wisdom in seeking to comprehend the meaning of scripture in two languages seemed noteworthy, as was her understanding of the fact that comprehension of complex text often involves negotiation of meaning. For example, while making sense of the Bible verse from Job 5: 2–4, she cuts across both the Spanish and English text to make meaning: Rosaura: This was in Job 5: “Resentment kills the fool, and envy slays the simple.” [Reading in Spanish]“El resentimiento mata a los necios, la envidia mata a los insensatos.” So now when I hear ‘insensatos’, I go okay, now I understand that part. So I kind of go back and forth if I don’t understand what it means. Me: so ‘insensate’ helps you understand ‘fool’? Rosaura: Um, ‘simple’. ‘Simple’ and ‘fool’, yeah. Because ‘insensato’ is like . . . [small pause] oh, los necios! That’s fool. Repeated readings of the text, in both languages, seemed to help her make meaning from the passage as she compared the vocabulary words. Reading both versions side by side enabled her to compare words, insensato to fool, and necio to simple, clarifying the meaning of each. This in turn helped her to piece together the meaning of the scripture. Rosaura’s investment in reading complex religious text in Spanish resonates with scholarship that describes how “as part of their everyday cultural practices, religious youth demonstrate strong social and cultural commitments to navigating complex, religious texts” (Rackley, 2016, p. 2). Furthermore, her Spanish, by virtue of its significance in connecting her transnationally to Cuba, facilitated a global literacy, in that it was a key component of what Pahl and Rowsell (2012) describe as the “the thread of networks and practices that cuts across cultures” (p. 104). She brings her culture, her history, and her language into her bilingual readings of the Bible—the Bible which itself is an artifact with both local and global significance. Her bilingual reading practices show how “the local and the

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global rely on each other and manifest themselves in our objects, in our speech, and in our practices (Pahl & Rowsell, 2012, p. 103). Furthermore, her choice to “embed her identity” (Pahl & Rowsell, 2012, p. 102) in the scriptural reading of the Bible through her use of Spanish is an agentive move that can be further appreciated against the backdrop of her lived reality, where her language use is compartmentalized. Although she is limited to English at school, and Spanish at home, when she is free to read and think in her own space, she chooses to use her entire language repertoire.

Conclusion These narratives have offered a glimpse into the interplay of language, literacy, and religion in our lived experiences as bilinguals. Teasing out the details of our social and literate religious practices reveal how language and literacy occurred across contexts, while also shedding light on the contributions of religious faith practices to biliteracy development, to fostering positive transnational connections, and to deepening cosmopolitan understandings of the world. Because religion is an important domain of life for many individuals, families, and communities, exploring the literacies and social practices of religious practices can reveal much about how identities and literacies develop in religious spaces. For both Rosaura and I, the Spanish language was critical to our identity as Cuban American. We used both languages in tandem to make sense of complex Biblical passages and Spanish songs, for example. As a result of these practices, we developed more sophisticated literacies. I became biliterate, while Rosaura deepened hers. Rosaura became a “cosmopolitan intellectual” (Campano & Ghiso, 2011), becoming an expert user of both language modalities to make meaning when reading complex scriptural text. Being around youth embodying Nicaraguan-ness, Venezuelan-ness, and new Cuban-ness, as well as other ethnic ways of being in the world, helped me develop a more cosmopolitan understanding of Spanish speakers from other countries. My interactions in youth group deepened my knowledge of the geographical boundaries, political realities, and sociohistorical differences between our families and communities. Through all of these experiences, my increasing use of Spanish also helped to build my confidence and expand my bilingual competence, also instilling in me a more salient identity as Cuban American, and a deeper connection to my Cuban-ness. Transnationalism as a lived experience is increasingly common in our increasingly globalized world, and exploring the spaces of embodied transnationalism can reveal the multiple identities that individuals enact as they engage in multiliteracies (Pahl & Rowsell, 2012; Lam & Warriner, 2012). Exploring this interplay through a multiliteracies lens brings to light the key role of the Spanish language in the development of complex literacies across domains of practice, while also bringing to the surface the affordances of multiple modes, such as orality, music, artifacts, translanguaging, etc., in developing these literacies.

Two Young Cuban American Women 203 These narratives may also contribute to the body of work that suggests that literacies used and developed in and around religious practices are as sophisticated and consequential as those in school contexts (McMillon & Edwards, 2015; Volk & De Acosta, 2001; Rackley, 2016). As such, they can be a valuable resource for educators seeking to understand how youth engage with literacy outside of school in ways that enrich their lives and build their competence as literate beings and cosmopolitan intellectuals. In fact, Campano and Ghiso argue that “By virtue of their diverse vantage points and transitional negotiations, they [immigrant students] are uniquely positioned [as cosmopolitan intellectuals] to educate their peers and teachers about the world” (p. 166). Developing a vision for incorporating the religious literacies of youth into the classroom space could be tricky, given what Juzwik (2014), invoking Jefferson, refers to as the “wall of separation” between public schools and religious institutions. Yet in order for teachers to tap into the cosmopolitan potential and multiliteracies of their students, they have to invite students’ histories, languages, and out of school literacy practices into the classroom. The same way we turn to literature to learn about ourselves and the world, we can turn to the living, breathing narratives of our students. Tapping into narratives that reveal the social and literate practices of youth, and being open to their stories of religious practice, told in multiple languages, and experienced in various modalities, could be a first step in moving towards a more holistic and cosmopolitan vision of teaching in the 21st century.

Note 1. Nicaraguans in South Florida continue to celebrate “La Griteria”: www.miamiherald. com/news/local/community/miami-dade/west-miami-dade/article48610130.html

References Anderson, E. (2011). The cosmopolitan canopy: Race and civility in everyday life. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Baquedano-López, P. (2001). Creating social identities through doctrina narratives. Issues in Applied Linguistics, 8(1), 27–45. Bean T.W., & Dunkerly-Bean, J. (2015). Expanding conceptions of adolescent literacy research and practice: cosmopolitan theory in educational contexts. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 38(1), 46–54. Campano, G., & Ghiso, M. P. (2011). Immigrant students as cosmopolitan intellectuals. In Handbook of research on children’s and young adult literature (pp. 164–176). New York: Routledge. Clandinin, J. D. (2016). Engaging in narrative inquiry. New York: Routledge. Cummins, J. (1981). The role of primary language development in promoting educational success for language minority students. In California State Department of Education (Ed.), Schooling and language minority students: A theoretical framework (pp. 3–49). Los Angeles: National Dissemination and Assessment Center. Ek, L. D. (2009). Language and literacy in the Pentacostal church and the public high school: A case study of a Mexican ESL student. High School Journal, 92(2), 1–13. Fernandez-Soneira, T. (1997). Cuba: historia de la educacion Catolica 1582–1961. Miami: Ediciones Universal.

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Garcia, O. (2009). Bilingual education in the 21st century: A global perspective. Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Harper, H., Bean, T. W., & Dunkerly, J. (2010). Cosmopolitanism, globalization and the field of adolescent literacy. Canadian International Education Journal Comparative and International Education Society of Canada, 39(3), 1–13. Hirschman, C. (2004). The role of religion in the origins and adaptation of immigrant groups in the United States. Migration Studies, 38(3), 1206–1233. Jewitt, C. (2008). Multimodality and literacy in school classrooms. Review of Research in Education, 32(1), 241–267. Juzwik, M. (2014). American evangelical Biblicism as literate practice: A critical review. Reading Research Quarterly, 49(3), 335–349. Lam, W. S., & Warriner, D. S. (2012). Transnationalism and literacy: Investigating the mobility of people, languages, texts, and practices in contexts of migration. Reading Research Quarterly, 47(2), 191–215. Lynch, D., & Carter, A. (2015). Multilingual Miami: Current trends in socio-linguistic literature. Language and Linguistics Compass, 9(9), 369–385. Lytra, V. (2012). Multilingualism and multimodality. In M. Martin-Jones, A. Creese, & A. Blackledge (Eds.), Handbook of multilingualism (pp. 543–559). London: Routledge. McMillon, G., & Edwards, P. A. (2009). Why does Joshua “hate” school . . . but love Sunday school? Language Arts, 78(2), 111–120. McMillon, G., & Edwards, P. A. (2015). Examining shared domains of literacy in the church and school of African American children. Handbook of research on teaching literacy through the communicative and visual arts, volume II: A project of the International Reading Association. New York: Routledge. Nabhan-Warren, K. (2016). Hispanics and religion in America. Oxford Religion Encyclopedia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pahl, K., & Rowsell, J. (Eds.). (2006). Travel notes from the new literacy studies: Instances of practice (Vol. 4). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Pahl, K., & Rowsell, J. (2012). Literacy and education. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications. Papen, U. (2018). Hymns, prayers and bible stories: The role of religious literacy practices in children’s literacy learning. Ethnography and Education, 13(1), 119–134. Pastor, A. R. (2005). The language socialization experiences of Latina mothers in Southern California. In C. Zentella (Ed.), Building on strengths: Language and literacy in Latino families and communities (pp. 148–161). New York: Teacher’s College Press. Portes, A., & Stepick, A. (1993). City on the edge: The transformation of Miami. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rackley, E. D. (2016). Religious youth’s motivations for reading complex, religious texts’. Teachers College Record, 118(11), 1–50. Rackley, E. D. (2016). Latter-day Saint youths’ construction of sacred texts. Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-Day Saint Faith and Scholarship, 19, 39–65. Sarroub, L. K. (2002). In-betweenness: Religion and conflicting visions of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 37(2), 130–148. Smagorinsky, P. (Ed.). (2000). Vygotskian perspectives on literacy research. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Street, B. (2003). What’s “new” in new literacy studies? Critical approaches to literacy in theory and practice. Current Issues in Comparative Education, 5(2), 77–91. Vogel, S., & Garcia, O. (2017, December). Translanguaging. In G. Noblit & L. Moll (Eds.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Volk, D., & de Acosta, M. (2001). “Many differing ladders, many ways to climb . . . ”: Literacy events in the bilingual classroom, homes, and community of three Puerto Rican Kindergartners. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 1(2), 193–224.

13 I Had to Die to Live Again A Racial Storytelling of a Black Male English Educator’s Spiritual Literacies and Practices Lamar L. Johnson This chapter brings to light the spiritual component undergirding how I engage in transformative work as a Black male English educator. Through racial storytelling, I piece together childhood moments that illuminate the spiritual literacies I now embody. Drawing upon the metaphor of the Christian celebration of Easter experience to illuminate how one has to die to be born again when teaching for liberation, I demonstrate how my spiritual literacies are grounded in Black/African American religious traditions and within familial and communal knowledge. This narrative shows how articulating the centrality of spirituality can enrich the field of English education scholarship. It enacts and contributes to a more holistic narrative of Black English education scholars’ spiritual wisdom, connectedness, resistance, and liberation within and beyond institutions. Moreover, my weaving together of Black spirituality, knowledge-making, and teaching invites English educators and teacher educators to respond by exploring their own spiritual traditions, connections, and journeys to sustain liberatory, scholarly, and pedagogical work.

When Did You Die? Historically, Black churches have been utilized as spaces of resistance that push back against racial oppression (Ellis & Smith, 2010). Concordantly, Black churches were one context that centered literacy, language, and education. When I attended church, I experienced and engaged in language and literacy practices that informed my literacy experiences in schools; however, I quickly discovered that the language and literacy experiences of the Black church can sometimes be at odds with the traditional language and literacy learning and experiences I learned in schools. Attending a Black Baptist church taught me what Sealey-Ruiz and Greene (2015) call racial literacy—at an early age, I understood that as a young Black boy I would have to understand how race and racism operate in society and that I needed to be able to read the world through a critical lens that centered race and the Black experience. Additionally, the Black church provided me with the spiritual literacies of wisdom and discernment (the concept of spiritual literacies will be defined in the following sections). The elders of the church and the people from the community engaged

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us in African storytelling and intergenerational racial dialogue. Not only did my church showcase Black literacies, but also it centered and illustrated the versatility and beauty in Black language (see Smitherman, 1996). Black language was a part of the music we sang. Further, Black language and rhetoric were embedded in my preacher’s sermons. His rhythm, cadence, pauses, repetitions, satire, metaphors, signifying, and storytelling were nuanced in Black language (Alim & Smitherman, 2012). It’s common to walk into a Black church and hear the following being preached: “when the praises go up, the blessings come down! Can I get an amen from somebody?” I learned how to use Black language through attending church. Black language is comprised of different cultural styles and methods of discourse (Baker-Bell, 2017). To illustrate, the phrase “when the praises go up, the blessings come down! Can I get an amen from somebody?”, is an example of the call and response feature of Black language. Baker-Bell (2017) defines call and response as, “a mode of communication in which the audience constantly participates by responding to the speaker, and in most cases, the audience members act as co-producers of the text or discourse” (Williams, 2013, p. 414). Black language used to have my church lit. But don’t get it twisted—Black churches are not monolithic. Although they share similarities, they are also different. Nonetheless, with that being said, there is an unwritten rule in many Black churches: if the preacher can’t use Black language and rhetoric effectively, they are considered to be dull and dry. The Black rhetorical style of call and response between the preacher and the congregation made church exciting, especially how congregation members would become hyped from the preacher’s ability to make them become partners in the sermon. Black language is an official language with its own syntax, phonology, morphology, semantics, and pragmatics. During my PreK-12 experience, Black language was not validated. It was frowned upon by teachers and seen as “broken English” or “incorrect”. There was a distinct split between church and school. At church, my Black language practices were validated; however, at school, my Black language practices were devalued. During my K-5 experiences, I had many white female teachers and a few Black female teachers, yet white mainstream English was privileged and the skill and drill grammar lessons plagued our classrooms. However, at church, Black language and literacies were rooted in our (the children’s) communication styles, development, and practices. For particular holidays, the children and youth had to learn and recite scriptures and poems; we performed Christian-themed plays. The elders of the church had a direct focus on our language and literacy experiences and development through attending children’s church, Sunday school, weekly Bible study, choir practice, summer vacation Bible study, and visits to Historically Black Colleges and Universities within the state of South Carolina. These language and literacy experiences and development are a part of my identity as a Black male English educator and language and literacy scholar. Further, these dynamic experiences undergird my faith, and they inform how I approach my scholarship, teaching, and service through a spiritual lens. Being

I Had to Die to Live Again 207 a racial justice fighter and educator is soul work (Johnson, 2017). Soul work requires me to dig deep within, and it provides me with the, “opportunity to do introspective and spiritual identity soul searching” (Haddix et al., 2016, p. 390). Educating and teaching from the soul require me to bring my whole self(ves) and identities to my research, theory, writings, curricula, and pedagogical practices. To engage in true soul work, I/we have to want a world that is different from the chaotic white-supremacist-patriarchal and racially and linguistically stratified society that currently exists.1 However, it is important to note that before I/we can embrace a radical imagination, we have to undergo a metaphorical death which leads to our rebirth. In order to do such critical work and teach for full humanity and liberation, I had to experience a new birth. New birth leads to the rebirth of a liberated and transformative self—new thoughts, new way of speaking, new way of existing, and a new way of being. Liberation is an ongoing struggle; therefore, I have and will continue to experience rebirth. I was first introduced to this concept of rebirth in fall 2013 during a course I took titled, Educating Students of African Ancestry for Academic and Cultural Excellence for the New Millennium, which was cotaught by Dr. Joyce King and Dr. Gloria Boutte. This course introduced me to theories, theorists, methodologies, and practices grounded in Black educational traditions and African philosophical, spiritual, and cultural constructs as architecture for the effective teaching of Black people. During one of the class sessions, Dr. Boutte shared the following quote: The educator for liberation has to die as the unilateral educator of the educatees, in order to be born again as the educator-educatee of the educatees-educators. An educator is a person who has to live in the deep significance of Easter. (Taylor, 1993, p. 53) This quote uses the metaphor of the Christian celebration, widely known as Easter, which acknowledges Jesus Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection to illuminate how one must die and be born again when teaching for liberation and racial justice. Regardless of our religious, spiritual, and faith-based practices, educators who claim to be critical educators must experience and undertake a rebirth. While engaging in critical dialogue about the quote that Dr. Boutte shared with the class, another student powerfully and boldly asked Dr. Boutte, “When did you die?” In return, it was in that moment I asked myself, “when did you die?” The prior memories provide a depiction of my racialized experiences and language and literacy practices as a young Black male attending a Black church and how these racialized experiences and my language and literacy practices were invalidated within school contexts. To be clear, I would not be able to engage in and blend critical race work with religious and spiritual work if I did not undergo many metaphorical deaths. Throughout this essay, I provide several snapshots of the moments where I metaphorically died. Each moment

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whether it was humanizing or toxic has transformed my thinking and my existence within the world. I carry these memories and experiences with me in the present moment and they have morphed me into the English educator I am today. It is important to note that the racialized stories I share later are not detached from one another and that they are intimately connected. These stories are not told in the traditional and westernized ways of telling stories. The racialized stories I illustrate are storied in a nonlinear fashion. Engaging in storytelling in nonlinear ways is an art and language and literacy practice that remain within Black culture (Richardson, 2003). As such, I situate these stories within the fields of English education, language, and literacy studies, and teacher education to (a) illustrate the intricate relationship between religion, spirituality, language, literacy, blackness, and education; (b) complicate the connection between Black liberation and the Christian faith and the ongoing political struggle for racial justice, equity, and freedom; and (c) showcase the importance of embracing spiritual literacies within English education and English Language Arts classrooms. The questions that guide this line of inquiry are the following: (1) How do Black Christianity, African spirituality, race, language, and literacy relate, specifically historically and in the present societal and educational context? and (2) How do my racialized experiences and Black Christian and spiritual experiences shape my secondary English curriculum and language and literacy curriculum? I conclude with implications, recommendations, and questions that center on the utilization of spiritual literacies as a pedagogical praxis in English Language Arts classes, English education courses, and teacher education.

Teaching Me How to Pray As a child, I was surrounded by prayer. Before indulging in my meals, I would bow my head, close my eyes, and pray, “God is great and God is good. Let us thank Him for this food. By His hand, we shall be fed; give us Lord, our daily bread. Amen”. At five-years-old, my grandmother taught me the Lord’s Prayer. She told me it was an important prayer to learn and that I needed to recite it each night before going to bed—and I did. Prayer greeted me at the beginning and closing of youth choir practice. During that time, I couldn’t give a definitive definition of what prayer was, but I knew it was something that many Black people engaged in to communicate with God. At the age of six, I became an official member of a church. I remember this experience like it was yesterday. My church’s baptisms took place above the pulpit. With one hand covering my face and with his other hand holding the back of my head, Rev. Williams and I stood in a bathtub filled with chilly-water. My nerves were all over the place—the cold water and the glaring stares from the congregation did not help. Anticipating Rev. Williams taking me under the water, I blocked out his prayer because I was too busy praying for him not to leave me under the water for too long. Although I was being slightly dramatic thinking that he would drown me, nonetheless, my prayer was simple, “Lord, please don’t let this man drown

I Had to Die to Live Again 209 me. Amen.” In that moment, that’s when my conceptualization of prayer and my understanding of faith began to shift. Prior to that moment, I only prayed before each meal and before bed each night; I had never prayed a prayer that wasn’t taught to me. At that particular moment, my faith was tested, and I had to believe that God had me covered. Prayer moved from this ritual that I only performed a few times a day and it became a talk and conversation with God.

“In My Mother’s House There Is Still God” I remember reading Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in The Sun. I was first introduced to Hansberry’s work in Ms. Day’s sophomore English language arts classroom. In Ms. Day’s classroom, we read the traditional canon, so reading A Raisin in The Sun connected with me differently; there were characters who looked like me, whose struggles reminded me of my tribulations, and whose language reminded me of the language spoken by many Black people. In the play, there is a scene where the character, Lena (Mama), slaps her daughter, Beneatha, because Beneatha denounces God. After Mama’s powerful slap, she forces Beneatha to repeat after her, “In my mother’s house there is still God” (Hansberry, 1958, p. 53). As a 15-year-old Black male, I read this piece of literature through a spiritual and Christian lens that focused on and was undergirded by the Black experience. Beneatha has the right to challenge the concept of God; however, as a Black youth who practiced Christianity, I understood that Lena Younger did not want her children to deny God. Like many Black adults, Lena’s strong religious and spiritual beliefs gave her the strength and will to survive. Ms. Day did not engage the class in an in-depth analysis about this particular scene; I am not exactly sure why, but I’m sure it pertained to the law that states that we can’t discuss religion in schools, which I find ironic because schools still force children and youth to recite the pledge of allegiance. Christmas and Easter are two popular pagan holidays that are widely celebrated and privileged in schools. Christian ideologies and perspectives are privileged within educational contexts (Blumenfeld, Joshi, & Fairchild, 2018). Furthermore, the canonical novels and plays we encountered as youths had an explicit or subtle message that spoke to religion: To Kill a Mockingbird, Adventure of Huckleberry Finn, Great Gatsby, The Crucible, The Scarlet Letter, Julius Caesar, Native Son, and A Raisin in the Sun just to name a few. Although these texts had religious themes, the discussion of religion as well as any critical conversation pertaining to race and racism were scant throughout my English Language Arts classes. Similarly, any discussion or dialogue about the interconnectedness between religion, faith, and race and its correlation to the language and literacy practices and experiences of children and youth are avoided in English teacher preparation programs and in secondary English Language Arts classrooms. The previous racialized stories provide snapshots of my spiritual and Christian life and the language and literacy practices that shape my racial identity as a Black male English educator and English Language Arts teacher. Through the

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use of racial storytelling (see Johnson, 2017), I examine how my past Christian and spiritual experiences connect and inform my present and future selves. Racial storytelling is a theoretical and pedagogical tool that has aided me in a vast unearthing of my past, present, and future selves and displays the language and literacies that my Black male body brings to my scholarship and classroom. The previous racial stories allowed me to (re)enter moments that highlight how my lived experiences from attending a Black church inform how I think about the intersections of race, spirituality, Christianity, Blackness, anti-Blackness, and English education. Thus, my purpose in this chapter is to recollect and explore how my Black Christian experiences and spiritual practices have led to my rebirth and ongoing liberation. Therefore, it is important to note that the process of rebirth is fluid—we will experience many metaphorical deaths and rebirths throughout our lives.

Talkin’ and Testifyin’: African Spirituality, Black Liberation, and the Christian Experience The Black language scholar, Geneva Smitherman, reminds us that the way Black people worship is grounded in Africanized ideologies and practices (Smitherman, 1996). Furthermore, she demonstrates how Black churches engage in the act of talkin’ and testifyin’ which normally consists of a person reflecting and making a statement based upon their knowledge and personal experiences of how God has helped them to overcome their situation and as a way to express joy and happiness. Within Black culture, talkin’ and testifyin’ are ways to communicate a personal conviction. There are various ways Black people talk and testify. Not only do Black people verbally talk and testify, but we also communicate with and through our bodies to talk and to testify. There is a deep connection to spirit possession—we talk and testify through speaking in tongues and through catchin’ the spirit. I need you to bear with me for a few seconds, as I talk and testify about the convoluted and rigid structure of traditional Christianity. From a critical race perspective, the traditional religion and practice of the Christian faith upholds whiteness and paints the image of Jesus as a white man. On the contrary, Black people who embrace an Africanized/Black Christianity often believe that it is extremely critical for Black folks to view Jesus as Black. Historically and contemporarily, white descriptions and images of Jesus Christ are etched within society (e.g., church murals, Bible study books, Google images search, literature, films, and art); however, Black folks have challenged the white image of Jesus through referring to our Jesus as Black Jesus. Popular tv shows such as Good Times, Boondocks, Black Jesus, and Black Lightning (just to name a few) make reference to and acknowledge Black Jesus. In Angie Thomas’s young adult novel, The Hate U Give (2017), Thomas sheds light on this notion of Black Jesus. She writes, “Black Jesus greets us from a mural on the side of the clinic. He has locs like Seven. His arms stretch the width of the wall, and there are puffy white clouds behind him. Big letters

I Had to Die to Live Again 211 above him remind us that Jesus Loves You” (p. 88). Even the biblical description diverts from the blue-eyed and long, blonde hair version of Jesus. In Revelations chapter 1 verse 14, it reads, “His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire; and his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace”. Although the race and physical appearance of Jesus have been an ongoing topic for years, Black Jesus understands the struggle and symbolizes freedom. In addition to the dominant narrative of Jesus being white, Black feminist theologians have challenged and problematized race in Christianity and have shed light on other issues such as gender and patriarchy. In Jacquelyn Grant’s powerful book, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus, Grant (1989) contests that the image of Jesus Christ has been defined by men as a way to uphold our own privileged positions in the church and society. Too often, we hear and witness how sexism operate within churches. For example, as a child, I can remember hearing stories about why women can’t be leaders of the church or even have their own churches. In my own experiences, the women of my church were the choir directors, Sunday school teachers, and vacation Bible study leaders and teachers. In conjunction, the women were responsible for the food and for serving the men and other church members during our church events and celebrations. Grant (1989) raises several pivotal questions that dig into the exploration of Christianity, sexism, patriarchy, and racism such as the following: (1) In light of the struggle of women today, what is the meaning of Jesus Christ? (2) Why is Jesus used as a “weapon” against the “progress” or “advancement” of women in the church? (3) What is the relationship between the maleness of Jesus and the salvation of women? (4) How did Jesus challenge the established order—particularly in reference to women—or did he accept what was said about women by status quooriented people? and (5) In what way(s) can Jesus be considered the savior of women? (pp. 1–2). It is important to note that these questions center on the experience of women in general; however, for Black women, they cannot explore sexism without exploring the daily battles of racism they encounter (Lorde, 1984). In closing, I want to make clear that I cannot merely include the different types of perspectives regarding Christianity within the Black community but there are people who have made these points (Cone, 1980; Dantley, 2010; Ellis & Smith, 2010; Grant, 1994). It is beyond the scope of this paper, but we cannot forget about the rape culture and homophobia that rest within churches. Through the beliefs of traditional and deficit Christianity practices, people who are a part of the LGBTQ community are also ostracized and oppressed within the institution of church.

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To write this section, I lean on talkin’ and testifyin’. Through critically reflecting on my religious and spiritual practices, this section is grounded in Black Christianity and African spirituality. I aim to complicate the interconnection between Blackness, African spirituality, Christianity, racism, education, and justice. Further, I illuminate a need for Black Christianity and thinking about the ways it molds and is molded by English Language Arts and English education curriculum. This chapter includes an explication of how anti-Black racism and whiteness operate within traditional Christianity practices and why it is important for English education and language and literacy studies to acknowledge and understand the dexterity within Black religion, particularly in this case, African spirituality, Black Christianity, and Black liberation.

Testify #1: African Spirituality Prior to the enslavement of African people, Africans were spiritual beings with deep and dynamic spiritual practices. African Gods and divinities such as Sango and Amadioha (thunder divinities), Ani or Ala (earth divinity), and Macardt (divinity affiliated with death) did not stay in Africa but these African Gods, divinities, and ancestors came to the United States with our ancestors during the Middle Passage (Bruno, Wirdze, & Lum, 2018). Through the Bible, enslaved Africans and Black people were colonized but the works and practices of spirituality, in this particular case African spirituality is how they contested the Bible and white Christianity. For the purpose of this book chapter, I want to make note that religion and spirituality are not synonymous yet people often use them interchangeably. Thus, in this paper, I am specifically building upon the definition that religion is a rigid institution that has its own traditions, rituals, beliefs, and practices that focus on God or a higher being (Bruno et al., 2018). Former Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, contends, “spirituality does not come from religion. It comes from the soul”. Spirituality comes from deep within—it connects us to each other and to the Universe. Boutte (2015) writes that, “spirituality is an approach to life as being essentially vitalistic rather than mechanistic, with the conviction that nonmaterial forces influences people’s everyday lives” (p. 19). Spirituality is an energetic force that, “propels individuals search for meaning in life, wholeness, peace, individuality, and harmony and to reach their optimal force” (Bruno et al., 2018, p. 127). Spirituality is a long-standing tool that has been utilized by the Black community to manage and make sense of the dehumanization and oppression we have encountered historically and currently. African spirituality is an extension of spirituality. According to Bruno, Wirdze, and Lum (2018), they assert that, “African spirituality explores the spiritual forces that underpin the African world view (Epistemology, Cosmology, and Metaphysics)” (p. 127). African spirituality is reflected and connected to the psychological, racial, ethnic, political, and linguistic identity of Black people across the diaspora.

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Testify #2: The Christian Experience My perspectives on the Christian religion is shaped by the Black experience (as a collective) and my personal Black experience (as an individual)—that is, wrestling through my own issues of understanding Blackness, anti-Black racism, whiteness, and Christianity. I believe Blackness is an embodied experience that is connected to Black people’s culture, race, ethnicity, language, literacy, religion, and humanity. According to Dumas and Ross (2016), Blackness is an act of self-care, collective care, and resistance. Blackness is not monolithic—instead, it is dynamic and fluid. Blackness is intertwined with struggle, hope, joy, love, and pain; in this light, Blackness symbolizes liberation from the social-ills of racism, xenophobia, linguistic violence, economic injustice, and patriarchy. Historically and in the current moment, Black people continue to shout Black lives matter because of society’s disdain for Blackness and Black humanity. As such, I cannot fully explore Christianity without problematizing whiteness. Suffice it to say, we live in a world that is influenced by westernized values, white ideologies and Eurocentric traditions that are birthed from the hands of white supremacy. whiteness is a sickness and it symbolizes oppression. whiteness’ infectious nature functions as a system that provides unearned privileges and power to people who approximate as white. Thus, the working of whiteness is not separated from the church or from religion. The religion of Christianity was to oppress and not to liberate. During the enslavement of Black people, white enslavers justified chattel slavery through the practice of white Christianity. Our elders and ancestors such as Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass illuminate their experiences with religion, Christianity, and racism during the enslavement of Black people. white enslavers aimed to utilize religion, in this particular case Christianity, as a hegemonic tool to mentally and physically control Black people. Frederick Douglass denounced biblical justifications that were grounded in white norms and ideologies that justified the dehumanizing institution of slavery. Through his speeches and writings, Douglass challenged his audience and readers to question the hypocrisy and contradiction between white American Christianity and the institution of slavery. Douglass (1845) argued, “The church and the slave prison stand next to each other. . . . [T]he church-going bell and the auctioneer’s bell chime in with each other; the pulpit and the auctioneer’s block stand in the same neighborhood” (p. V). In Harriet Jacob’s autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs described how enslaved Black people were excluded from various religious activities. While attending church service, white enslavers forced enslaved Africans to sit in separate seating; in addition, enslaved Black people were often excluded from church ordinances (i.e., Holy Communion) (Ganaah, 2016). Enslaved Black people critiqued and challenged the notion of white Christianity. As such, they aimed to de-center, disrupt, and dismantle whiteness and white Christianity through their Black language practices, Black activism, and from the Black experience.

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Testify #3: Black Liberation and Black Theology Black liberation speaks to and against the political injustices of racism, sexism, and classism (Glaude, 2016). In conjunction, I contend that Black liberation is action-oriented and it reflects Black freedom, resiliency, and self-determination. Indeed, Black peoples’ political and religious consciousness are/were formed by our ongoing struggle and fight for justice. Explicating Christianity through the Black experience enables me to connect the story of Jesus to the racial, economic, and social conditions of oppressed people. Cone (2010) argues that, “the Gospel embraces the whole human person in society, in work, and in play. This means that the Gospel is inseparably connected with the bodily liberation of the poor” (p. 155). As stated in the previous section, enslaved Black people challenged white Christianity through infusing Blackness in/through/against the religious practices that were prescribed to them from white preachers and enslavers. In addition, Black folks challenged racism and the oppression of Black people through uprising. To illustrate, Nat Turner, an enslaved Black man, led a slave uprising in 1831 in South Hampton, VA. This insurrection illuminates Black struggle for liberation. Black female activist Shirley Chisholm reminds us that, “we must become doers, and producers, in the system, in order to be able to control our own destinies. We have the potential, but we must consolidate all of our strength for eventual liberation.” Enslaved Black people knew they had been what (Woodson, 1933) refers to as miseducated; therefore, they had to unlearn and (un)do the dominant narratives that included distorted beliefs about Blackness and false beliefs about the “purity” of whiteness. Unfortunately, these dominant narratives are deeply rooted throughout many historical time periods such as Reconstruction, Jim and Jane Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement. Similarly, Civil Rights activists such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X channeled the spirit and tenacity of Nat Turner, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman. Dr. King and Malcolm X challenged Black folks in the U.S. and abroad to develop a deep passion for liberation. The Black church played a pivotal role in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Dr. King demonstrated the significance of Black religion in the battle for racial and economic justice. To illuminate, Dr. King (1963) stated, I have watched white churches stand on the sidelines and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard so many ministers say, “Those are social issues which the gospel has nothing to do with,” and I have watched so many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which made a strange distinction between bodies and souls, the sacred and the secular. (p. 5) Black churches participated in sit-ins, freedom rides, marches, and other political activities (Cone, 1980/2010). Malcolm X argued, “I believe in a religion

I Had to Die to Live Again 215 that believes in freedom. Any time I have to accept a religion that won’t let me fight a battle for my people, I say to hell with that religion.” It is noteworthy to mention that although Dr. King and Malcolm X practiced different religions their commitment to Black freedom was at the center of their religious and spiritual practices. Black liberation and freedom are/were at the core of many Black religions (e.g., Black Islam, Black Judaism, and Black Buddhism) (Glaude, 2016). Across various Black religions, Black churchgoers advocated for Black people to defend themselves from white racism. Racism is hypervisible yet invisible because people are so quick to deny its everyday presence. The Black theologian, James Cone, critiques and challenges white theology that doesn’t speak back to and against racism. Cone is the founder of Black liberation theology. He states, “white theologians have not succeeded in making an empathetic bond with the pains and hurts of people of color” (p. 152). Furthermore, Cone’s Black liberation theology aims to answer the question of, “what does the Christian gospel have to say to powerless black men whose existence is threatened daily by the insidious tentacles of white power?” (as cited in Rhodes, 2018, p. 4). Black liberation theology, one dimension of Black religion—pushes Black people who practice Christianity to (re)imagine a new way of seeing, living, and existing in the world through embracing the spirit of the Black radical imaginary.

A Call for Spiritual Literacies in English Education and Language and Literacy Studies The literature from before revealed a pivotal need for English education and English teacher educators to explore the intersections of race, religion, Blackness, spirituality, and Christianity. As such, my religious experiences and understandings are intertwined with my spiritual practices and beliefs. Therefore, I invite English educators, English Language Arts teachers and teacher educators to reflect on their own spiritual and religious practices and traditions, connections and journeys to create humanizing curricular and pedagogical work. My scholarship and who I am as a Black scholar-activist and English educator are grounded in what I’m calling my spiritual literacies. Spiritual literacies reflect and comprise one’s spiritual wisdom, discernment, connectedness with the self and with others, resistance, and liberation within and beyond institutions and society-at-large. Spiritual literacies are revolutionary and divine, and it requires what Johnson, Bryan, and Boutte (2018) call “critical race discernment” which is a racialized third-eye. Furthermore, the authors state that, “the third-eye is more of a spiritual phenomenon than natural one and is designed to help Black children not only read the word (e.g., be literate) but also feel and read their world (e.g., understanding how they are oppressed and the need to work against such oppression)” (p. 13). When embodying spiritual literacies, I argue that English educators, language and literacy scholars, and English Language Arts teachers should develop and possess critical race discernment. We have to possess this

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skill and practice to feel. Critical race discernment is the cornerstone of spiritual literacies. Spiritual literacies are a practice and embodiment that requires the following components: rebirth, critical faith, critical spirituality, mindfulness, and self-care. See Table 1. Rebirth Rebirth is the (re)awakening and renewal of a person who has undergone a spiritual death which has impacted them to begin a new life and journey as a spiritual being. Educators who are spiritual beings will experience numerous rebirths throughout our lives because we are continuously learning and reflecting and growing deeper and more intimate with who our(selves) are on a soul level. A spiritual revolution is needed. Such an inclusion in English Language Arts classrooms can encourage English Language Arts teachers and youth to become more in tune with themselves on a personal and spiritual level. English Langauge Arts teachers and language and literacy scholars have the right tools at our disposal to create spaces where we provide contexts for youth to experience a rebirth. Simply stated, when we introduce youth to racial justice pedagogies, theories, and curricula, it could potentially lead to their rebirth as well as our rebirth. The anti-Black racial violence that rests within schools demonstrates and communicates that there are people in these spaces who haven’t gone through a rebirth and who are not committed to racial justice (Johnson, 2017). With this being said, a spiritual rebirth can revitalize our souls through focusing on purpose, the spiritual self(ves), community, and critical self-reflection. This notion of spiritual rebirth in the fields of English education and language and literacy studies would focus English

I Had to Die to Live Again 217 Language Arts teachers’ attention on teaching from the heart and soul while still providing youth with the tools to critically read the self and the world and excel academically. Critical Faith Critical faith is the belief and connection to a higher spiritual being. It is something we cannot see, but it’s experienced through deep trust, connection, surrender, and manifestation (personal communication Lumen, 2019). I believe critical faith is a personal commitment to justice and freedom; it’s not merely about what you say but what you do (Cone, 1980/2010). In previous sections of this chapter, I made reference to the radical imaginary. We cannot embrace and embody the radical imagination if we do not practice critical faith. By this I mean that our faith has to be attached to the social and political fight for justice and freedom. Critical faith is not anything new. My ancestors practiced critical faith. Historically, Black people have resisted dehumanization and oppression while assiduously fighting for our humanity through the practice of critical faith (Dillard, 2006). Our ancestors and elders knew that something new and different could be created but not without the praxis of exercising critical faith. Therefore, to (re)imagine English education and English Language Arts classrooms, we must begin to practice critical faith which is a commitment to the humanity of our children and youth. Cone (1980/2010) writes, “the concretization of faith, actualized through love, can only be done by connecting faith with the praxis of justice” (p. 163). In short, we can’t talk about having faith if we are continuously breathing life into whiteness and into the dehumanization of Black children and youth. Critical Spirituality Dantley (2010) centers critical spirituality within the field of educational leadership. Furthermore, he states that critical spirituality is rooted in the deconstruction of power structures, particularly as it relates to identity markers such as race, class, ability, language, sexual orientation, gender, religion, nationality, etc., and that the “spiritual” component is ever flowing, active, and intimate—it is connected to the self in hope for kinship with others, resistance, meaning, and the transformation of schools to become justice-oriented spaces. If secondary English teachers and English educators practice critical spirituality, it could possibly impact our beliefs, ideologies, and actions. Critical spirituality can move us to engage in a deep critical self-reflection process, and it propels us to create justice-oriented and humanizing curricula, pedagogies, and policies that create societal and political change (Dantley, 2010). I believe teaching is a spiritual calling (I’m talkin’ to my justice-oriented and racial justice educators); critical spiritual English Language Arts teachers, English educators, and language and literacy scholars are not only committed to the language and literacy development and academic achievement of youth but also committed to connecting on

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a soul level with others and believe in the radical (re)construction of creating a better society than the one we currently live within. Mindfulness The mindfulness component of spiritual literacies is about being and feeling whole through the constant state of being aware of one’s emotions, feelings, body, and energy. Through mindfulness, we (as educators) can begin to create spaces of joy and peace. I believe mindfulness is intentional and about remaining at the seat-of-self and at the seat-of-consciousness, even through the difficult and tumultuous times. Being mindful centers on emitting positive energy out into the universe—similarly, it is about changing your mindset and being more attentive to your thoughts. Self-Care Living in a world that is filled with racism, sexism, gender oppression, and violence, we have to practice self-care as a way to heal from the trauma and pain and as a way to take care of our physical, mental, and emotional health. Self-care makes us whole and it helps to improve the relationship we have with ourselves and with others. If educators aren’t whole or don’t take care of ourselves, we won’t be able to fully support the well-being of Black children and youth. It is noteworthy to mention that self-care differs across people (Baker-Bell, 2017). For example, self-care can be prayer, meditation, writing poetry, exercising, surrounding oneself with people, making nutritious foods, etc. In certain communities and spaces, self-care is relegated to spa dates and pampering of oneself. Nonetheless, this creates a class-based imbalance that comes with self-care. People from working-class backgrounds might not be able to afford this type of self-care in the same way. In short, self-care is multifaceted and operates differently across different racial and ethnic backgrounds. In this chapter, I have shed light on my racialized experiences as a Black Christian and the Africanized practices that are threaded throughout my Christian experiences and practices. My religious experiences shape and inform who I am as a scholar-activist and are interconnected to who I am as a spiritual being. Although I have grounded my practices in the Black experience, I believe spiritual literacies can be taken up from educators who are from different racial, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds. On one hand, many Black educators already come with certain spiritual practices based upon our racialized, gendered, and classed experiences. On the other hand, I know Black folks who are deeply religious but are not spiritually grounded. In addition, it is possible for white teachers to take up spiritual literacies. However, I don’t think these practices will come naturally because there is an abundance of unlearning to undergo. With this being said, we cannot teach spiritual literacies to youth in English Language Arts classrooms or in higher educational spaces if we haven’t internally done the

I Had to Die to Live Again 219 spiritual work to become whole as a person and as an educator through bringing the self into the classroom.

Conclusion and Spiritual Questions for English Educators, Language and Literacy Scholars, and English Language Arts Teachers In this piece, I utilize racial storytelling to wed together pivotal spiritual narratives from my childhood, adolescent years, and graduate school years to demonstrate how my Black male language and literacy practices, research and teaching are grounded in who I am as a spiritual being. This research is important as scholarship that focuses on educators’ spiritual literacies and their spiritual narratives are absent in the field. My goal was to put my past, present, and future self(ves) into conversation with one another, specifically as it relates to the intersections of race, language and literacy, Christianity, Blackness, and spirituality. I conclude this chapter with questions for language and literacy scholars, English educators, and English Language Arts teachers to consider, examine, and critically reflect upon. How can you utilize racial storytelling to explore who you are as a religious and spiritual being? How can engaging in a deep excavation of who you are spiritually shape and inform your pedagogical, theoretical, and methodological practice? How do your race, gender, religious, and spiritual backgrounds influence how you exist and operate within the world? How have your spiritual and religious experiences and practices been racialized? How do you take up spiritual work in your classroom and how does it shape your language and literacy curricula and pedagogical practices? What do your self-care practices look like and how often do you engage in self-care to elevate your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health?

Note 1. I do not capitalize the “w” in white. I have strategically chosen to decenter whiteness and push back against white supremacy that is embedded in language by making the “w” on white lowercase (Johnson, Jackson, Stovall, & Baszile, 2017).

References Alim, H. S., & Smitherman, G. (2012). Articulate while Black: Barack Obama, language, and race in the U.S. Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press. Baker-Bell, A. (2017). For Loretta: A Black woman literacy scholar’s journey to prioritizing self-preservation and Black feminist-womanist storytelling. Journal of Literacy Research, 49(4), 1–18. Boutte, G. S. (2015). Educating African American students: And how are the children? New York: Routledge.

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Blumenfeld, W. J., Joshi, K. Y., & Fairchild, E. E. (Eds.). (2018). Investigating Christian privilege and religious oppression in the United States (Transgressions: Cultural Studies and Education). Boston, MA: Sense Publishers. Bruno, B., Wirdze, L., & Lum, M. (2018). African spirituality: Implications for African diaspora education. In L. L. Johnson, G. S. Boutte, G. Greene, & D. Smith (Eds.), African Diaspora Literacy: The heart of transformation in K-12 schools and teacher education (pp. 127–137). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Cone, J. H. (1980/2010). The relationship of the Christian faith to political praxis. In C. Ellis & S. D. Smith (Eds.), Say it loud: Great speeches on civil rights and African American identity. New York: The New Press. Dantley, M. E. (2010). Successful leadership in urban schools: Principals and critical spirituality, a new approach to reform. The Journal of Negro Education, 79(3), 214–219. Dillard, C. B. (2006). On spiritual strivings: Transforming an African American woman’s life. New York, NY: State University of New York Press. Douglass, F. (1845). Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass an American slave. Boston: Published at the Anti-Slavery Office. Dumas, M. J., & Ross, K. M. (2016). “Be real Black for me”: Imagining BlackCrit in education. Urban Education, 51, 415–442. Ellis, C., & Smith, S. D. (Eds.). (2010). Say it loud: Great speeches on civil rights and African American identity. New York: The New Press. Ganaah, M. A. (2016). Themes of slavery, Christianity & descriptions of paradox in the practice of Christianity in two slave narratives: Harriet Jacobs incidents in the life of a slave girl & Harriet Wilson our NIG sketches from the life of a free Black (Master’s thesis, Norwegian University of Science and Technology). Retrieved from https://brage.bibsys.no/xmlui/bitstream/handle/ 11250/2460260/Masteroppgave%20Miriam%20Ganaah.pdf ?sequence=1 Glaude, E. (2016, August 29). African American religion. Retrieved from www.youtube. com/watch?v=afUlkMG9vVU&t=240s Grant, J. (1989). White women’s Christ and Black women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and womanist response. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grant, J. (1994). “Come to my help Lord for I’m in trouble”: Womanist Jesus and the mutual struggle for liberation. Journal of Black Theology in South Africa, 8(1), 21–34. Haddix, M., McArthur, S. A., Muhammad, G. E., Price-Dennis, D., & Sealey-Ruiz, Y. (2016). At the kitchen table: Black women English educators speaking our truths. English Education, 48(4), 380–395. Hansberry, L. (1958). A raisin in the sun. New York: Vintage Books. Johnson, L. L. (2017). The racial hauntings of one Black male professor and the disturbance of the self(ves): Self-actualization and racial storytelling as pedagogical practices. Journal of Literacy Research, 49(4), 1–27. doi:10.1177/086296X1773379 Johnson, L. L., Jackson, J., Stovall, D., & Baszile, D. T. (2017). “Loving Blackness to Death”: (Re)Imagining ELA classrooms in a time of racial chaos. English Journal, 106(4), 60–66. Johnson, L. L., Bryan, N., & Boutte, G. (2019). Show us the love: Revolutionary teaching in (un)critical times. Urban Review, 51(1), 46–64. King, M. L. (1963). A letter from Birmingham jail. Retrieved from https://web.cn.edu/ kwheeler/documents/Letter_Birmingham_Jail.pdf Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: Esssays and speeches. New York, NY: Ten Speed Press. Rhodes, R. (2018). Black theology, Black power, and the Black experience. Retrieved from http://home.earthlink.net/~ronrhodes/BlackTheology.html Richardson, E. (2003). African American literacies. New York, NY: Routledge.

I Had to Die to Live Again 221 Sealey-Ruiz, Y., & Greene, P. (2015). Popular visual images and the (mis)reading of Black male youth: A case for racial literacy in urban preservice teacher education. Teaching Education, 26(1), 55–76. Sealey-Ruiz, Y. (2016). Why Black girls’ literacies matter: New literacies for a new era. English Education, 48(4), 290–298. Smitherman, G. (1996). African-American English: From the hood to the amen corner. Paper presented at the meeting of Interdisciplinary Studies of Writing, Minneapolis, MN. Taylor, V. P. (1993). The texts of Paulo Freire. Buckingham, MI: Open University Press. Thomas, A. (2017). The hate u give. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers. Williams, B. (2013). Students’ “write” to their own language: Teaching the African American verbal tradition as a rhetorically effective writing skill. In K. C. Turner & D. Ives (Eds.), Social justice approaches to African American language and literacy practices [Special issue]. Equity & Excellence in Education, 46(3), 411–427. Woodson, C. G. (1933/1990). The mis-education of the Negro. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

14 (Re)Mystifying Literary Pedagogy Mary M. Juzwik

The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you (Luke 1:35, NRSV )

Several years ago, I found myself at an Anglican retreat center in Pleshey, a sleepy little village in the rolling farm country of Essex (U.K.). My spiritual director, Jannel T. Glennie, had told me about Pleshey some time ago, noting that the Anglican mystical writer and scholar Evelyn Underhill (who she’d been encouraging me to read) had spent a great deal of time in retreat at this place. Underhill described Pleshey as “soaked in love and prayer”, and there on silent retreat, I found shelter, safety, quiet, a place to crumble and cry. I’d come to England, on unpaid leave from my university position, with my 6-year-old daughter and her father, my philosopher husband, who was on an academic fellowship in Birmingham. Our marriage had been unraveling for some time, years really, and we thought the time away might help. He had gone away from us for a time, and one August day in Birmingham, my mother’s birthday, he phoned me to say: “I can’t go on, doing this marriage, any longer”. Stunned, unable to imagine being and becoming other than wife-to-my-husband, and far from home, I packed myself off to Pleshey. In those days at Pleshey, I took up the Annunciation story from the first chapter of Luke.1 So intensive was my reading that I committed the story to memory. I dwelt on the words, and they came into me, rolling around on my tongue before I thirstily drank them down. They were a soothing and baffling draught, both: Just as Mary was “much perplexed” by Gabriel’s words, so was I “much perplexed” by her story (and by my story). And so it was that the almost incomprehensible words of Mary—“Here am I, the servant of the Lord, let it be unto me according to Thy Word”—became a mantra or “breath prayer”. I prayed it when I became overwhelmed. Which was most of the time.

(Re)Mystifying Literary Pedagogy 223 I also took up Mary Szybist’s collection, Incarnadine, and read it straight through one afternoon. One particular passage similarly became a breath prayer that I often found myself praying in the days and months that followed, as I longed for the cool waters of the eternal to wash over me: “Mary always thinks that as soon as she gets a few more things done and finishes the dishes, she will open herself to God”. This opening line, from the poem “Update on Mary” resonated mysteriously. Something, perhaps, about the relations of naming—author, holy Virgin/Mother, lead character in poem, myself. I cannot say why I enjoyed rolling those words, too, upon my tongue. Over and over. Perhaps it reminded me that now—always now—is the time to open myself to God. While at Pleshey, I breathed these lines of poetry and scripture sitting in the prayer-soaked chapel, practicing yoga in my teeny-tiny room, drinking tea in the afternoon sun, weeping in my bed, roaming the Essex countryside—the language, like the juicy ripe blackberries I plucked from path side bushes, nourished my starved soul. When I returned to Birmingham, and eventually to the U.S., the texts remained part of me, and I continued to pray and ponder them while driving, dishwashing, walking the dog, taking out the trash, swinging from monkey bars with my daughter. The time at Pleshey, those days of emptying-out and listening, were perhaps as close as I had come to encountering God in the emotionally charged, relational, intimate ways described by the Christian mystics. And really, I cannot lay claim to mystical experience—just emotional desperation. But this experience has led me to listen intently to the experiences of others within the Christian mystical tradition. Simone Weil (1973), for example, writes about her encounters with the “Our Father” prayer in the Greek: at times the very first words tear my thoughts from my body and transport it to a place outside space where there is neither perspective nor point of view. The infinity of the ordinary expanses of perception is replaced by an infinity to the second or sometimes the third degree. (p. 72) Weil seems to describe experiencing unity with the divine happening not through anything she does beyond memorizing and uttering the scriptural text, but rather through opening up and receiving the offering of the text (Macaluso, 2016), as a force apart from her being. The text comes over and into her, overshadowing her, working within her body to transcend both perception and perspective. Similarly, many artistic renderings of the Annunciation through the ages show Mary reading (scripture, presumably) when Gabriel appears to proclaim that life-as-she-knows-it is no more. Not only am I a practitioner of prayer, mother, traveler, reader; I am also a teacher of literature, working across university departments of Teacher

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Education and English. From this vantage point, I am pondering: Is it possible to imagine literature pedagogy and literate engagement in classrooms as holding potential for the kinds of joy-filled, ecstatic accounts of textual engagements found in the mystical tradition? Another way of putting it: Can literature engagement be mystified? If so, how? I am interested in public school classrooms, rather than parochial schools where shared faith and/or textual traditions are assumed. Before the inquiry even begins, my inner critic quickly jumps in: “Really?! Don’t we have enough Christian-centric accounts of literary reading? Isn’t this where New Critics came from? Aren’t you simply re-hashing Western Christian privilege and elitist bourgeois notions of literary reading when you narrate going away on a retreat to process a marriage falling apart?” I am going to hold these questions open as I proceed, because I am still grappling with them—both in my faith and in my scholarly and pedagogical efforts to put Christian mystical writings into conversation with literary engagement in classrooms.2 It is these questions which lead me to add the “re” in the title: “(Re)mystifying”, rather than simply “mystifying”. For mystical literary reading to connect with pluralistic school environments, a fundamental transformation or perhaps translation is necessary. Following Wexler (2013), a democratization of mystical thought will be necessary, one that pulls mystical practice from its reputation of elite scholasticism, perhaps untethers it from specific religious traditions altogether, and articulates its offering for religiously pluralistic (and increasingly, inclusive of the non-religious) classroom spaces.

Simone Weil and Evelyn Underhill: An Introduction How precisely might imagining a re-democratization of mystical experiences with literary texts in pluralistic classroom spaces become possible? To help chart the way in exploring this question, I turn to early 20th century Christian mystical scholars Simone Weil and to a lesser extent Evelyn Underhill, in dialogue with my own readings of the Annunciation story and Szybist’s poetry about the Annunciation mentioned already. Although it may seem a leap, these mystical and poetic voices spark my imagination in conceptualizing what is possible for literary reading in classrooms. Let me begin by introducing Simone Weil and Evelyn Underhill. Simone Weil was born into a Jewish Parisian family in 1909. Her father was a physician, her mother was musically artistic, and the family lived comfortably. In her “Spiritual Autobiography”, she describes her upbringing as “agnostic”— her family was not religiously observant. She and her brother Andrew received brilliant educations. He went on to become a renowned mathematician, and Simone frequently felt overshadowed by his accomplishments. As a young adult, Weil taught philosophy to secondary school pupils for a period, and was by her friend Simone Petrement’s (1976) account, a beloved teacher. Weil devoted her early writings to politics and philosophy, and she was especially captivated by Greek philosophers and poets. But now she is best known for her later spiritual writings, which document her passionate engagement with

(Re)Mystifying Literary Pedagogy 225 Catholicism. In the end, she never agreed to be baptized into the church. The problem of religious pluralism vexed her: the Catholic church wasn’t “catholic” (small “c”) enough: You can take my word for it too that Greece, Egypt, ancient India, and ancient China, the beauty of the world, the pure and authentic reflections of this beauty in art and science, what I have seen of the inner recesses of human hearts where religious belief is unknown, all these things have done as much as the visibly Christian ones to deliver me into Christ’s hand as his captive. I think I might even say more. The love of those things that are outside visible Christianity keeps me outside the Church. (Weil, 1973, p. 95) On my interpretation, Weil’s concern about the Roman Catholic church includes a critique of the church’s narrow framing of Christ within western (via Roman) culture, which I interpret within my own wider concern about the “morality-oriented Christianity of the West” (Bourgeault, 2008, p. 45). Evelyn Underhill was more of a religious insider. At her birth, in Wolfhampton outside of Birmingham, England, she was baptized into the Anglican church. Although her family was not particularly religious—neither of her parents were practicing Anglicans—she gravitated toward the church and was confirmed in the Anglican church as a teenager. As a young woman, she (like Simone Weil) was intensely and emotionally drawn to Catholicism after a spiritual experience on retreat with a friend at a Convent of French Franciscan nuns. However, her husband’s objections, particularly his distress at the confessional, were obstacles to her going forward with reception into the Catholic church, and she never did. Instead she came to see her calling as working and writing and teaching from within the Anglican communion, and indeed she helped to shape the sacramental Anglican tradition in the early 20th century. She was the first woman to lead retreats within the Church of England, she was a beloved Spiritual director, leading many retreats at Pleshey (where I first made her acquaintance). A highly sought-after speaker and lecturer, she was a public intellectual who served as religious editor of The Spectator for a time and published the definitive book on Christian mysticism of the early 19th century (Underhill, 1990), a text that is still sold and discussed today. Both women were constrained by certain limitations facing women of their time, evident for example in Underhill’s husband Herbert blocking her conversion to Catholicism. At the same time, both women enjoyed notable educational attainment and scholarly achievement, in part due to the social positions into which they were born. Going more deeply into the work of these two mystical scholars, I first reflect on the idea of contemplation: how might literature feed the inner life of readers? Under what conditions might literary reading come to feel nourishing? Contemplation, I hope to show, offers a worthy pathway for literary engagement in our contemporary time of fragmentation and moral polarization.

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Contemplation: The Inward Turn The field of literature education has been in a years-long process of retraining its focus on literary approaches that advance action-in-the-world. Progressive projects under the umbrella of social justice, such as anti-racist pedagogy, students’ right to their own languages, gender equality, normalization of sexual and gender diversity, and more have captured English teachers’ imaginations and fill the pages of journals aiming to inspire English teachers (e.g., English Journal). For example, literary works might be chosen and read in a public school classroom with an eye toward bringing to attention systemic inequities and daily affronts and atrocities facing Black people in the United States—the rationale for my recent choice to use Claudia Rankine’s book Citizen in a young adult literature course I teach. It is in this sense that social justice has become a key idea in pedagogical conversations about purposes of literary engagement. I am interested in how these contemporary conversations about literature and social justice are beginning to attend to notions of the richness and mystery of the inner life—a contemplative stance, practice, discipline, or way of being, that turns attention toward individual experiences vis-a-vis the Ultimate, the Great Beyond, that-which-is-beyond-the-Self. How, then, might contemplative practice—inward-looking engagement and spiritual exploration on the part of readers—work alongside the outward-looking “social justice” turn in how the field of English education imagines literary reading. In the Christian mystical tradition, fortunately, working toward social justice or social activism operates in concert with contemplation and contemplative practice as distinct modes of connecting with the Divine. They are not opposing inclinations so much as looking in different directions with an eye toward the shared purposes of loving God and loving one’s neighbor (Mark 12:28–34) as mutually constitutive acts. I conceptualize contemplation as entailing a set of inward-looking spiritual disciplines or practices that help the practitioner listen for, and to, Divine truth and guidance. Such practices can include, for example, meditation, prayer, fasting, scripture study, and expressive/personal writing. Evelyn Underhill offers an instructive model of how such inward contemplation can be balanced with engagement and more outward-oriented action in the world. She devoted a great deal of time in her life to prayer, study, and writing—indeed she was a writer by vocation. Just as Jesus often retreated to nature for alone time to commune with God, so Underhill went on retreats twice yearly—often to Pleshey, as already mentioned. At the same time, she saw activities like public speaking, writing about spiritual topics for popular audiences, leading retreats within the Anglican church, and working with and for the poor as equally important to what she called, in rather monastic terms, her “spiritual rule”. Like many in the mystical tradition (King, 1998), Underhill devoted many of her considerable resources (e.g., her time and her money) to loving and serving God. She did not take vows of poverty, chastity, or solitude,

(Re)Mystifying Literary Pedagogy 227 but rather lived a comfortable (albeit professionally busy) middle-class life with her husband Herbert, a barrister. Underhill, through her study of the Christian mystics and through her own spiritual rule, came to believe that the movement toward unity is “the essential religious experience of man (sic)” (Underhill, 1990, p. vii). To open oneself up toward that unity, in her view, required some form of contemplative devotion. Wexler (2013), for his part, believes that for contemporary sociology, “mysticism can become a contemporary pivot, which provides an experiential alternative to a commodified, fragmented life of reduced and rationalized meaninglessness and [offers] a different direction and vocabulary of social interpretation” (p. 14, emphasis added). My aspiration, in dialogue with Wexler, entails “(re)mystifying literature”. The re- importantly indicates that I do not advocate all students are or should be moving toward unity with the Divine in the Christian tradition. That aim seems quite simply impossible, and in my view, it would be unacceptably coercive given the dominance Christianity continues to enjoy in pluralistic contemporary classrooms. Rather, I see the language and tradition of Christian mysticism offering imaginaries—or pathways—for engaging literary texts, by explicitly focusing on the inwardness of being. I believe such re-casting of literary reading may offer an “experiential alternative” for young readers.

Toward “The Infinity of the Ordinary”: Detachment and Attention The mystical tradition is rich with accounts of detachment—emptying of the will, submitting to not having my own way. I read Mary’s words in the Annunciation story—“here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be unto me according to thy Word” as exemplifying such emptying of will. And curiously, in praying these words, I find myself interpolating the word “Will” rather than “Word”. Such self-emptying pervades Weil’s (1992) writing about grace, for example: To implore a man is a desperate attempt through sheer intensity to make our system of values pass into him. To implore God is just the contrary: it is an attempt to make the divine values pass into ourselves. Far from thinking with all the intensity of which we are capable of the values to which we are attached, we must preserve an interior void. (p. 22) I also hear this void, this detachment in Szybist’s (2013) “Conversion Figure”: Girl on the lawn without sleeves, knees bare even of lotion, Time now to strip away everything You try to think about yourself (p. 6)

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In Weil (1992), I feel a kind of Protestant sensibility in the notion that no amount of “doing” can “strip us of everything” (p. 23) in this manner—only God’s grace swooping, and us looking toward it, receiving. The will of God. How to know it? If we make a quietness within ourselves, if we silence all desires and opinions, and if with love, without formulating any words, we bind our whole soul to think “Thy will be done,” the thing which after that we feel sure we should do (even though in certain respects we may be mistaken) is the Will of God. For if we ask him for bread he will not give us a stone. (p. 41) Such a notion of detachment may well seem utterly radical or unimaginable to those growing up in a world of unceasing, intense, and desperate self-authoring— Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. Yet to receive what texts might have to offer experientially, emotionally, to the inner life, at least movement toward such self-emptying, some practice of detachment seems necessary. Perhaps teachers and readers can ask the question before they enter into a work: “What do you/I need to leave behind today to enter into this text, this conversation about text?”3 I am also drawn to creating brief time for silence and quietude before and after reading engagements in classrooms—whether to write, to meditate, or to just sit in silence. Closely related, even intertwined at times, with the notion of detachment is Weil’s concept of attention. For Weil (1973), “attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object [of study]” (p. 111). Such textual attention, as I discovered at Pleshey, can become a form of prayer—although it might not be at all necessary to name it such. In her “Spiritual Autobiography”, Weil (1973) recounts two mystical experiences involving such textual attention. One involved George Herbert’s poem, “Love”: I learned it by heart. Often, at the culminating point of a violent headache, I make myself say it over, concentrating all my attention upon it and clinging with all my soul to the tenderness it enshrines. I used to think I was merely reciting it as a beautiful poem, but without my knowing it the recitation had the virtue of prayer. It was during one of these recitations that, as I told you, Christ himself came down and took possession of me. (pp 68–69) Here the recitation itself offers the looking inward—a kind of path to selfemptying, rather than the already-emptied, detached self, encountering the poem. That is similar to what I found with the recitation of Mary’s response to the angel Gabriel from the Annunciation story. The embodied practice of recitation—borne of suffering, affliction, emotional desperation—receives not only the gift of the poem, but the gift of Divine grace. The classical practice

(Re)Mystifying Literary Pedagogy 229 of literary recitation and memorization is re-claimed or re-discovered in this practice for a spiritual, as opposed to scholastic, purpose. Weil also narrates a related recitation practice with the “Our Father” prayer, mentioned prior, which she encounters when reading the text in its Greek: “the infinite sweetness of this Greek text, so took hold of me that for several days I could not stop myself from saying it over all the time . . . since that time I have made a practice of saying it through once each morning with absolute attention” (p. 71). When I read Weil’s testimony that the “text . . . took hold of me”, it deeply resonated with my experience reading the Annunciation and Syzbist’s poetry during the time in Pleshey and afterward. Weil’s description of recitation in Greek (a language she had studied deeply and knew well, although it was not her heritage language) makes me wonder if the “otherness” of the text’s language somehow beckoned her attention more than would a text in her vernacular French. As Weil drinks down “the sweetness of the text”, her attention is fully captured by it.

Literary Pedagogy Is it possible to imagine such a model of intense attention being brought to literary studies in school without the schoolish excesses of formalism and its idea that the meaning resides in the text alone? Certainly, the attention Weil devotes to these texts look scarcely like the kind of “close reading” propounded by the mainline Protestant architects of New Criticism, in the mid-20th century, at Episcopal enclaves such as Kenyon College and University of the South. Nor does this attention map onto the instrumental purposes so often claimed for literary studies and defenses of the humanities, at least in English Education circles—e.g., promoting empathy, combatting societal inequity, helping students live more ethical lives, and so on. It is a more inward, experiential, contemplative practice—more like reciting a mantra (in the yogic tradition) than traditional forms of literary memorization or recitation in school. Scholastic practices of inviting students to memorize literary texts or excerpts, including scriptural texts and excerpts, have roots in rhetorical education and were popular pedagogical forms of literary pedagogy in centuries past. But they have fallen quite out of favor in today’s schools. I do, however, remember early on in my teaching career, I took a group of eighth graders to see an extraordinary performance of Merchant of Venice, by the Royal Shakespeare Company. I then required all of them to memorize Portia’s “Quality of Mercy” speech as part of our study of the text. My middle school students—eighth graders, I think—gamely went along with it, probably because they mostly liked me, but I wonder if the task for them was done in “delight” or in grim, “teeth-gritting” application. I strongly suspect the latter. I also feel, looking back, that it was a certain kind of elitist educational move that Weil in particular and Underhill as well—both political progressives—would have disliked, an effort to school young people into a kind of distinction borne of “possessing” or “knowing” certain texts. I am no longer interested in that project at all.

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A more mystically attuned practice of recitation or memorization might feel more like spiritual retreat (what I experienced at Pleshey) than class session. The framing would need to somehow shift its pitch toward inward exploration and connection to the numinous. It might involve invoking the educational good/goal being joy or desire, rather than achieving standards, and as already mentioned, a critical component of literary reading for social change. It might involve inviting—but never coercing—students to open themselves up to the possibility of connecting with a text through pathways of detachment and attention. They would need (curricular) space to choose texts that move them or that they believe worthy of their full attention—texts they could trust enough to detach from who-I-am-in-the-here-and-now. To be sure, trusting in texts involves a deep process of transaction. In a way, this notion of re-mystifying literary response responds to transactional notions of literary response (e.g., Rosenblatt, 1994), much in the vein of Macaluso’s (this volume) discussion about a sacramental conceptualization of literary transaction. Re-mystifying literary response moves beyond Rosenblatt’s notion of transaction toward a process of readers suspending the thoughts and detaching or emptying the self to receive the offering of a work. Such detachment may attune attention-filled readers to yield to the text in wonder, to open themselves to mysterious and previously unexplored depths of their own being and becoming—past, present, and future. Such a process did I experience reading Szybist’s (2013) poetry, alongside the Annunciation story from Christian scripture, as described in the opening of this chapter. My own experience thus leads me to hypothesize that poetry presents a good place to turn for cultivating such literary response, because so much poetry— even poetry speaking to atrocities such as structural racism (Rankine, 2014)— can invite a deep drinking-down of the “sweetness of text”, in Weil’s (1973) words. Poetry offers texts short enough to invite and sustain intense attention. Even within a class study of a difficult book-length poetic text such as Rankine’s (2014) book, what if students were invited and guided to attend, deeply, to a single poem or poetic excerpt of their choosing? To ruminate on it, in the sense of a cow chewing its cud (Bourgeault, 2008, p. 150)? Perhaps to memorize, perform, recite, or invent in response? The process would involve attention to text’s formal patterns and properties, certainly, but in service of an inner attention pitched toward an experiential process of spiritual deepening or awakening to the previously unknown or unheard.

Literary Reading to Awaken Joy, Desire, Ecstasy If the notion of “union with the Divine” discussed previously is not the goal of literature pedagogy, as it cannot be in pluralistic public school classrooms, what ultimately might be the educational good of re-mystifying literary engagement? Again, the spiritual rule and correspondence of Evelyn Underhill is instructive. Underhill corresponded extensively with her spiritual director, Baron Friedrich Von Hugel, an Austrian Roman Catholic layman who inspired Underhill’s

(Re)Mystifying Literary Pedagogy 231 study of mysticism. Von Hugel captured what I see possible for re-mystifying literary response in a letter to Underhill: [Do] your studies, composition, speaking, etc. with a sense that all you are doing is, in its perfection, always beyond you. All that you are doing should always have a certain awe-inspiring Over-againstness, something of the great contralta, the infinite country of God” (Cropper, 1958, p. 95) Baron Von Hugel’s notion of “Over-againstness” evokes a kind of literary engagement that tunes to a beyond-rational grasping for that-which-is-beyondthe-self. As Weil (1973) puts it, in her wonderful essay, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”: Will power, the kind that, if need be, makes us set our teeth and endure suffering, is the principal weapon of the apprentice engaged in manual work. But, contrary to the usual belief, it has practically no place in study. The intelligence can only be led by desire. For there to be desire, there must be pleasure and joy in the work. The intelligence only grows and bears fruit in joy. The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade. (p. 110) The conditions and aspirations for literary study and engagement (and all school subjects, Weil would further suggest) are desire, pleasure, joy—living life more abundantly and fully. The quality of the inner experience of the student is the focus, rather than the outcome of the study. As I consider it, the purpose (the why) and the method (the how) of literary reading interweave to become nearly indistinguishable. with the kind of attention described in the previous section. In the words again of Weil (1973), “Twenty minutes of concentrated, untired attention is infinitely better than three hours of the kind of frowning application that leads us to say with a sense of duty done, ‘I have worked well!’” (p. 111). Such desire, such joy in intellectual exploration suggests an opening up, emptying out, a reception or perhaps release. Again, in the words of Weil (1973), “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them” (p. 112).

Conclusion I have joined the voices of others to testify that self-emptying, attention-filled literary engagement is possible. As I attempt to put this possibility into dialogue with the work of literary reading and pedagogy in public schools, I continue to grapple with the constraint that any God language or spiritual practice or

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orientation must attune to pluralism, to the diversity of religious (or nonreligious) lives, traditions, and practices in any given classroom space. Especially given how the “morality-oriented Christianity of the West”, already mentioned, continues to shape classroom and cultural norms and traditions in the United States and beyond, I recognize how very Western so much of my story and discussion here may resound. I cannot change these roots or responses; as I live with them, however, I am seeking new ways for my own lived Christianity to branch and grow, especially in dialogue with contemplative traditions beyond Western Christianity. On another front altogether, the decontextualization and recontextualization of mystical practices may well be troubling for the religiously devout, for those who live the truth that devotion to God is a lifelong practice, one that seems best done from the depths, within the entrenchment of a particular tradition. Yet I wager that pondering the (re)mystification of literature—as I have set out to do—suggests a path that many teachers and students alike may be hungry to try. What if we stopped trying to coerce students to be moved by the same texts as we are? What if we ceased trying to convince (or convert) students into our own literary interpretations? As Bellezza (1991) puts it, “We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light” (p. 62). What if we ever-so-slightly slowed the critical call to social action in response to literary reading? And what if we paused to take a deep breath, in an effort to create classroom conditions that ignite attention-filled responses to literature, inviting students into the vast “infinity of the ordinary”?

Notes 1. The story, as I encountered it in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, goes like this: In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.” Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be unto me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her.

(Re)Mystifying Literary Pedagogy 233 2. At present, I am working from an understanding of Christ and the Christian mystical tradition from a wisdom perspective (Bourgeault, 2008), which interprets Christ as a model of wisdom-in-action to follow, rather than a gift of salvation to simply accept or reject. 3. I thank Val Smith, a gifted dialogue facilitator who asked this simple question in the first book discussion in which I participated about Claudia Rankine’s (2014) book Citizen, held at All Saints Episcopal Church in East Lansing, Michigan.

References Bellezza, E. (1991). Hildegard of Bingen, warrior of light. Gnosis, 21(Fall), pp. 50–63. Bourgeault, C. (2008). The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming heart and mind: A new perspective on Christ and his message. Boston: Shambhala. Cropper, M. (1958). Evelyn Underhill. London: Longmans. King, U. (1998). Christian mystics: The spiritual heart of the Christian tradition. New York: Simon & Schuster. Macaluso, K. (2016). Entering into literary communion: Reimaging the relationships between readers and texts in the secondary literature curriculum (Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation). East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University. Petrement, S. (1976). Simone Weil: A life (R. Rosenthal, Trans.). New York: Pantheon. Rankine, C. (2014). Citizen: An American lyric. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf. Rosenblatt, L. M. (1994). The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. (Original work published 1978). Szybist, M. (2013). Incarnadine. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf. Underhill, E. (1990). Mysticism: The preeminent study in the nature and development of spiritual consciousness. London: Image. (Original work published 1911). Weil, S. (1992). Gravity and grace. London: Routledge. (Original work published 1947). Weil, S. (1973). Waiting for God. New York: Harper Colophon. (Original work published 1951). Wexler, P. (2013). Mystical sociology: Toward cosmic social theory. New York: Peter Lang.

Afterword The Gift of Babel Sandro R. Barros

In Genesis 11:1–9, we are told that the generations that followed the Great Flood were once united by a common language. From Eden, Noah’s children migrated westward, eventually reaching Shinar, where a peculiar desire was awakened within their collective consciousness: to build the highest tower ever known to Man. No longer satisfied with witnessing God’s glory through miracles, visiting angels, prophets, sunsets, or the occasional burning bush, humanity hoped to meet the Creator face-to-face. The Adamites’ aspiration to delight in God’s presence united them in a common purpose. It gave them a raison d’être, a holy mission forever destined to be replicated in the annals of history. The conclusion of this familiar tale follows a well-known script: an irate God, dissatisfied with humanity’s insolence in daring to come uninvited to His presence, confounded our language. In His eyes, we had crossed the established threshold of respect for authority. Some would argue that God’s punishment fit humanity’s crime, teaching us that our arrogance would be forever our demise. Yet, keen students of the Scriptures come to a different interpretation of Babel’s legacy. The scribes of the Old Testament tell us in Genesis 10:5 that Noah’s children were, in fact, the founders of multiple nations, each speaking its own language. This means that Noah’s offspring, having reached Shinar, began the construction of their tower while communicating with each other in different languages. The overlooked multilingual experience of Babel’s construction acquaints us with a version of the story that is far more exquisite and less dark than commonly preached. For God, in His infinite wisdom, did not curse humankind with languages; His gift was powers of enhanced awareness to appreciate and learn from what our differences can accomplish. And He did so as any good parent would, lovingly and pedagogically. The newly bestowed powers of enhanced awareness were meant to assist the tower’s engineers, architects, and workers in finishing their project as expediently as possible. But unable to grasp the intellectual dimension of

Afterword 235 this gift, humanity wielded their newfound abilities against their common interests. The tower’s workers proceeded in making impossible demands upon each other’s linguistic behavior. Amid passionate arguments about whose differences mattered most, and why specific languages were better suited for different tasks, few realized that the tower had begun leaning to the left thanks to the shifting soil that destabilized its foundations. The entire construction came crumbling down. The Tower of Babel owed its fate to humanity’s incompetence. It had nothing to do with God’s will. (. . .) As this collection of thoughtfully curated essays forwards, the time is ripe for rethinking the historical present of language and literacy education beyond Babelian debates. Indeed, despite our increased awareness of “diversity’s diversity” (Vertovec, 2007), centuries of Christian, colonial, and nationalist discourses run deep through our veins. How far will we go in order to come to terms with modernity’s foundational myths and the complex heritage of suffering and oppression we’ve inherited? What hurdles lie ahead if we refuse to dichotomize the sacred and profane voices that have shaped mainstream education around the pernicious belief in “one sustainable system of knowledge, first cast in theological terms and later on in secular philosophy and sciences” (Mignolo, 2011, p. xii)? Before the advent of modernity, citizens’ linguistic practices were characterized by a certain performative flexibility. The borders among named languages were not as neatly defined as we think of them today (Blommaert, 2010; Canagarajah, 2012). With the development of nationalism and the strengthening of the nation-states’ institutions, a stricter sense of language correctness and appropriateness emerged as a predominant concern of citizenship (Barros, 2017; Ofelia Garcia, 2007). The 18th century’s invention of “monolingualism” placed unequal demands upon different speech communities. Dominant elites’ literacies—generally white, male, and Christian-dominated—benefited most from the imposition of their preferred forms articulated as “normative” within linguistic markets and, therefore, propagated as valuable commodities (Bourdieu, 1991; Gramling, 2016). Racialized minorities’ linguistic practices, on the other hand, became attached to narratives that characterized them as “folk,” deficient, uneducated, and unworthy of full citizenship (Barros, 2017). The undergirding principle motivating monolingualism was, then, the hierarchization and management of language ( Gramling, 2016 ). To a greater or lesser degree, naming, sorting, and categorizing systems rendered monolingualism—a particular kind of monolingualism, that is—a “neutral” practice that expressed nation-states’ liberal values. The Romantic belief in the Herderian triad of “one land, one language, one people” compelled us to imagine citizenship as a phenomenon practiced not in spite of

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linguistic performances, but because of them (Bauman, Briggs, & Briggs, 2003; Canagarajah, 2012). Today, we confront the many costs associated with nation-states’ centuriesold attempts at controlling citizens’ linguistic behavior as if a language was “a tightly knit system that stands free of other semiotic resources, detached from the environment, a self-standing product, and autonomous in status” (Canagarajah, 2012, p. 7). Nation-states’ large-scale efforts at managing linguistic diversity have led to both desired and undesired consequences, favoring certain groups’ linguistic practices to the detriment of others. In many respects, the same foundational myths pervasive in the ideology of monolingualism also run through Christianity. Concepts of purity, authority, absolute right and wrong, and the social costs of deviating from the norm reveal that the “business” of diversity management comes with serious consequences to many people’s self-image and psychological well-being (Barros, 2018). As the authors in this collection highlight, one of the most significant challenges we face in the context of education is how to think and feel our way through the Trojan gifts inherited from modernity, like Christianity. These “gifts” continue to operate as belief systems that mold our expectations, dreams, and fantasies (Mignolo, 2011). We have destroyed countless worlds to protect these systems. But it is also through them that we may ethically rebuild what we’ve destroyed. Since the “multilingual turn” in applied linguistics (May, 2013), scholars have advocated for a reconceptualization of languages outside conventional notions about them as pure, discrete, fixed, and bounded entities. Recently, scholars have urged pedagogues to pay closer attention to how the language practices of their students are always embedded in an ecology of social and cognitive relations (Garcia & Wei, 2013; May, 2013; Otheguy, García, & Reid, 2015). Likewise, others have suggested that a return to a “pre-modern view” of language and literacy as witnessed in “contact zones” might help literacy pedagogues to relate more humanely to students’ communicative practices otherwise regarded as “deviant” in institutional settings (Blommaert, 2010; Flores & Rosa, 2015; Pratt, 1991). Thus, our understanding of language and literacy as a “regulated process of repetition in discourse, a product of performative acts . . . mediated by and constrained by historically sedimented patterns of usage” has made us more aware of language standardization’s trade-offs (Garcia & Wei, 2013, p. xii). By trade-offs I refer to the processes of inclusion and exclusion of language practices that have upheld categories of race, ethnicity, and language built through long-standing colonial distinctions that conferred to language the quality of “resource”. In a society plagued by inequality such as ours, the notion of language as a motley collection of “resources”, as interesting as it might appear for theorizing language and literacies, carries conceptual risks. The idea of languages as resources prompts us to think about issues of accessibility and equity, but also how institutional power continues to be used to fixate some linguistic practices as more desirable than others. This realization alerts us to the fact that there is still a significant barrier to overcome in literacy education, one centered on the

Afterword 237 deficit discourses that have characterized minoritized languages’ populations literacy practices as inappropriate in many areas of citizenship life, including schools. My concern for othered people’s literacies lies in how the concept of literacy itself has been politically mobilized within “salvation-minded” discourses to further marginalize ethnic and sociolinguistic groups (Wyss, 2003). These discourses have been successful in turning literacy into a monolithic set of ideas that when imposed onto others—as opposed to negotiated with—end up becoming “othered peoples’ hell”. I am paraphrasing here Jean-Paul Sartre’s (2015) famous existentialist line, which comes at the end of his play No Exit. In it, Sartre tells the story of three characters’ arrival in hell: Garcin, Estelle, and Inez. Slowly, these characters awaken to the reality that hell has neither torturers nor executioners, neither flames nor pain. Instead, hell stands for the eternal presence of others within us: Garcin: What? Only two of you? . . . I thought there were more; many more . . . So this is hell. I’d never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the “burning marl”. Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is—other people! (2015, p. 47) As Sartre suggests above, the Other’s presence cannot be extricated from us because the Other dwells within us, it’s part of who we are, part of our consciousness. Even if Sartre’s characters remained silent in front of each other for eternity, their existence would still signal something to the Other, a reminder of one’s real punishment: our presence in each other’s lives as semiotic animals. But Sartre’s existential pessimism could also be read as a chance for redemption. This redemption lies in the characters’ ability to reach out and live within the borders of each other’s words, live for each other’s utterances. Language may be their (our) problem, but it is also the only solution they (we) have to cope with each other’s existence. I bring Sartre’s play to bear in the context of this afterward because similarly, I think, the authors of this essay collection show us how there is no need to dichotomize sacred and profane literacies when we examine the foundations of Western educational discourses critically. Put another way, there’s no need to reiterate a style of thinking that is fated to leave us in the predicament that we currently find ourselves, which is, gazing at othered languages and literacies as if they were exclusively the problem of the Other and not ours. The future of English(es) in “Babel” depends on the decisions communities and institutions are willing to make concerning the cultivation of citizens’ dispositions to negotiate with ever-changing rules encouraging us to reimagine language and literacy beyond borders (Barros, 2013, 2017). Our ability to open ourselves to the multiple streams of possible meanings relies on our recognition of linguistic citizenship as the sine qua non of human diversity beyond multiculturalism as the expression of a “banal cosmopolitanism” (Jaworski,

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2015). Regardless of religious background, we desire to live under conditions that enable us to fulfill what we already intuit as an inalienable truth: “So in everything, do unto others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets” (Mathew 7:12); or still, “Love your neighbor as yourself ” (Mark 12:31). I wonder about the costs of an education that insists upon using the West as a frame of reference for understanding languages and literacies as “tamable” objects. In doing so, aren’t we fated to remain stuck in the same place making truth claims about standards’ universality, neutrality, and objectivity? These claims have never been useful to all individuals in the same way, nor can they ever be. Many are the places from which meaning emanates. The borders that define “appropriateness” move at the speed of will. However, upon close inspection, these borders are likely revealed as more porous than it would be convenient for us to admit. We continue to hear the litany of 19th-century intellectual debates on the nature of “good” and “bad” language, and how “good” language education ought to materialize in the context of public schools. Arguments in favor of standards are the same as they have been for almost 200 years: the adoption of a common language (and standards) benefits the “common good” of citizens; the ills of Babel will fall upon us if we abandon the belief in top-down standards; anarchy will ensue, and the nation will perish without a common language. In a way, these statements fulfill a pedagogical function in that they prevent us from radically trusting each other’s meaning-making sensibilities, thus falling into the trap of known raciolinguistic tropes (Flores & Rosa, 2015; Rosa, 2018). The greatest irony of it all is that languages, like nations, “lose their origins in the sands of time, only to fully realize their horizon in the mind’s eye” (Bhabha, 2013, p. 1). Which is to say, if we read, think, hear, and write long enough, we may realize that belonging to any democratic society demands the radical acceptance of the literacy of others as a gesture towards self-acceptance. As the authors have shown, decoupling Christian, colonial, and national discourses from the broader narratives of modernity is a project that challenges disciplinary conventions. Defying preestablished categories, however, can often feel as if the ground beneath one’s feet disappears. Who are we to trust? What authority isn’t repressive by nature? I would risk saying that few would be willing to give up on the idea that, for example, separating students into ESL classes or advocating for bilingual education as a “monolingual pluralization” is the best we can do to shift the linguistic mindset of the nation. But if we are sincere in our intentions to foster greater cosmopolitanism, all that dignifies humanity, including religion and spirituality, is a fair game in literacy politics (Boyd, 2012; Osborne, 1999; Wright, 2003). I want to believe that there is a future for English literacies in educational contexts beyond the monolingual impetus to establish it as a restrictive technology of citizenship regulation. I want to believe in Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) “Nepantla:” life in the midst of wor(l)ds, in the midst of peoples, in the midst

Afterword 239 of languages named and yet to be named. I also want to believe that there is an abundance of land upon which we may stand to continue building bridges towards possible utopias. In Nepantla, the universe makes but one demand upon us: that we prepare ourselves to meet each other halfway. In this sense, Babel’s redemption rests, precisely, in our willingness to recast the meaning of Babel; not as a curse but as God’s gift to humankind. And isn’t Nepantla what languages and literacy discussions should be ultimately about?

References Anzaldúa, G. E. (1987). Borderlands: The new mestiza = La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Barros, S. R. (2013). Of metaphors and spaces within: The language of curriculum and pedagogy in the hyperspace. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 10(2), 140–157. Barros, S. R. (2017). Rejecting Babel: Examining multilingualism without citizenship in the U.S. postnational scenario. Current Issues in Language Planning, 18(2), 117–135. Barros, S. R. (2018). English in the key of Babel: Feeling, affecting, and performing language. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 15, 193–214. https://doi.org/10.1080/1 5505170.2018.1462744 Bauman, R., Briggs, C. L., & Briggs, C. S. (2003). Voices of modernity: Language ideologies and the politics of inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bhabha, H. K. (2013). Nation and narration. New York: Routledge. Blommaert, J. (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boyd, D. (2012). The critical spirituality of Paulo Freire. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 31(6), 759–778. Canagarajah, S. (2012). Translingual practice: Global Englishes and cosmopolitan relations. New York: Routledge. Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2), 149–171. Garcia, O. (2007). Disinventing and reconstituting languages (S. Makoni & A. Pennycook, Eds.). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Garcia, O., & Wei, L. (2013). Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Gramling, D. (2016). The invention of monolingualism. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. Jaworski, A. (2015). Globalese: A new visual-linguistic register. Social Semiotics, 25(2), 217–235. May, S. (2013). The multilingual turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL, and bilingual education. New York: Routledge. Mignolo, W. (2011). The dark side of western modernity. Durham: Duke University Press. Osborne, T. (1999). Critical spirituality: On ethics and politics in the later Foucault. In Foucault Contra Habermas: Recasting the dialogue between genealogy and critical theory (pp. 45–59). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Otheguy, R., García, O., & Reid, W. (2015). Clarifying translanguaging and deconstructing named languages: A perspective from linguistics. Applied Linguistics Review, 6(3), 63. Pratt, M. L. (1991). Arts of the contact zone. Profession, 33–40.

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Rosa, J. (2018). Looking like a language, sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the learning of Latinidad. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sartre, J. P. (2015). No exit and three other plays. New York: Vintage International. Vertovec, S. (2007). Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(6), 1024–1054. Wright, A. (2003). Spirituality and education. New York: Routledge. Wyss, H. E. (2003). Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and native community in early America. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press.

Contributors

Sandro R. Barros I am an assistant professor in the teacher education department at Michigan State University. I hold degrees in Romance languages and literatures (Ph.D.) and Spanish linguistics (MA) from The University of Cincinnati. I’ve taught middle and high school Portuguese language arts and English as a foreign language for five years in Brazil, the U.S., and Argentina. My academic work lies at the intersection of critical applied linguistics, literary studies, multilingualism and citizenship, and language policies in education. I also contribute to the scholarship on the philosophy of Paulo Freire, particularly its application to grassroots curriculum and instruction in othered languages. My research interests emerge from my history as a Brazilian immigrant to the U.S. and a genuine curiosity for people’s affective relationships with languages: how they are conceptualized academically and non-academically and how they are used as tools for the exercise of political power. Like every Latin American male, at one point in my life, I hoped to become a priest. As a lapsed Catholic, however, I am equally at ease in churches, Afro-Brazilian temples, and Spiritist meetings. I have never spoken in tongues, but I enjoy prayer, meditation, and psychic encounters of the otherworldly kind. While in the Global North, I look for spaces to satiate my thirst for spiritual Nepantla, occasionally participating in Christian practices in denominational and nondenominational settings and (sometimes) attending seances. Kevin J. Burke I am an associate professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia. My research on religion sits at the crossroads of curriculum theory, theology, and queer studies with a focus on the ways in which U.S. public schooling continues to be imbued—in troubling and interesting ways—with Christian understandings of student, teacher, and curricular possibility. See Christian privilege in US education: Legacies and current issues (Routledge, 2017) with Avner Segall and The pedagogies and politics of liking (Routledge, 2017) with Adam J. Greteman for recent examples. Other work is rooted in youth participatory action research and engages humanizing frameworks to work for social change using multiple affordances of art. I was raised

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Irish-Catholic on the south side of Chicago where both sides of that hyphen mattered immensely to the people around me. I am a cradle Catholic, immersed in the theology and disgusted by the abuses of clericalism within the hierarchy of the Church. I am, at times, soothed by the ritual of the mass even as I despise the ways in which gender and sexual violence, both literal and symbolic, are perpetuated by its very existence. To the degree that I believe in anything spiritual at this stage, it’s in the rhythm of Micah 6:8, which we recited every day when I taught at a small Catholic high school in Phoenix: “You have been told, o people, what is good and what God requires of you: Only to do the right, to love goodness, and to walk humbly with your God”. Denise Dávila I am an assistant professor in the language and literacy studies program at the University of Texas at Austin. I completed my doctoral studies at The Ohio State University and earned an M.F.A. in creative writing for children from Vermont College. Prior to my academic career, I was a teacher in a culturally, linguistically, and economically diverse community of California. I was raised in a family that identifies as Catholic. However, my Salvadoran grandparents’ practice of Latin American espiritismo and my grandmother’s position as an espiritista significantly influenced my worldview as a young person. Nevertheless, discussions of my family’s spiritual identities beyond Catholicism were taboo outside of our home, especially in the secular space of my public school. Today, my scholarship is informed by my childhood experiences and investigates the possibilities for religious pluralism in literacy instruction and learning in both formal and informal spaces. I am personally interested in being spiritually connected with the Universe through nature, prayer, and meditation and doing my best to follow the ethic of treating others as I would like to be treated. Elouise E. Epstein I was raised as a cisgender “male” in a secular nuclear family at the tail end of the Cold War. My only exposure to religion was through several years of attending a Unitarian Universalist (UU) church. This experience taught the importance of justice, equality, respect, acceptance, and the search for truth, part of the UU seven principles. I earned my Ph.D. in policy history at Bowling Green State University, which provided me the opportunity to understand my gender dysphoria and set me on a path towards accepting my identity as a trans woman. Through this process, I have been able to reach back into my genealogical roots and embrace my Jewish lineage, an ongoing and lifelong journey towards spiritual fulfillment. My scholarship, historical inquiry infused with archeological methods, seeks to elevate the stories of the marginalized and outcast—those deemed by society as “other” and not worthy of basic human rights, much less a place in the historical record. William J. Fassbender I am a doctoral candidate in the Department of Language in Literacy Education at The University of Georgia. Before pursuing my Ph.D., I was a seventh and eighth grade language arts teacher and academic coach at a small rural

Contributors 243 charter school in North Carolina. My research uses qualitative methods to study English education teaching methods, specifically those related to the use of technology, and how educators use innovative strategies to improve literacy and writing in middle and high school classrooms. My current work investigates what goes into the making of an English teacher, with a focus on what can be learned from tech-savvy teachers. I am a lifelong member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA). Having been baptized and confirmed in the Lutheran church, I have additionally used church as a musical outlet, playing in praise bands since my teenage years. Over the span of my life, I have gone through spells where my attendance and involvement in church have been sporadic and my faith has been challenged. However, I have been drawn back into church since the birth of my son, believing that the Lutheran focus on grace, reconciliation, service, and their acceptance of people from all walks of life provides a foundation for the values I hope to instill in my children. Adam J. Greteman I am an assistant professor of art education and Director of the master of arts in teaching program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. My teaching and research interests lie at the intersections of feminist, queer, and transgender theories, philosophy of education, aesthetics, and art education. I am the author of Sexualities and Genders in Education: Toward Queer Thriving (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2018) and the co-author (with Kevin Burke) of The Pedagogies and Politics of Liking (Routledge, 2017). I completed my Ph.D. in curriculum, instruction, and teacher education at Michigan State University. I spent 16 years in Catholic education: 12 in a rural diocesan Catholic school and four in a midwestern Jesuit university. Because of this education, I have a strange fondness for liberation Catholic Theology and a general disdain for the Catholic hierarchy. Agnostic towards religious faith or non-faith because both rest on a certain foundational claim—namely the existence or non-existence of a “god”—I prefer to rest in uncertainty. Lessons, I believe, can be gleaned from religious and theological discourses and practices just as they can be gleaned from scientific and philosophical discourses and practices. Any and all discourses are dangerous. However, for me promiscuity is a way of life and a way of life that attends to the diverse ways in which bodies come to meet and interact with one another, with histories, ideas, and more. Heidi L. Hadley I am an assistant professor and director of the English education program in the English Department at Missouri State University. I have previously worked as a language arts and ESOL teacher at a suburban high school in Utah. My research interests include teacher education, the intersection of religion and education, reading instruction, and community-based youth literacy practices. I grew up as a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (often referred to as Mormon, a term I still prefer). I served a proselytizing mission in England during my college years. I have recently separated from the Mormon church, largely over the church’s stance on LGBTQ issues

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and women’s rights. Although I no longer practice, I consider myself a “heritage Mormon” because so much of my identity is still deeply intertwined and influenced by my religious upbringing and background. I currently have a certain amount of ambivalence toward religion in general, but I remain deeply interested in how religion shapes and influences the identities and practices of religious teachers and youth. Mitchell Hoback I received my Master of Arts in English from the University of Alaska Anchorage in 2017, as well as my Bachelor of Arts in English literature from the University of Alaska Anchorage in 2015. During my time in graduate school, my research interests combined literature and the arrival of English to the state of Alaska. After graduation, I chose to pursue business writing. I worked for a non-profit organization local to Alaska, Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, as a technical writer in support of project management. Currently, I am a technical writer for Wells Fargo and am living in Denver, Colorado. I did not grow up religious or practice any particular faith. Jacob D. Holley-Kline I am an MFA student at Eastern Kentucky University. Before pursuing an MFA, I graduated from the University of Alaska Anchorage with an English degree. In my last semester there, I worked as a research intern for Dr. Jennifer C. Stone on her project examining the history of English-language policy in Alaska. My goal was to find governmental, political, and educational documents originating between 1880 and 1890 that dealt with language and language control. I have two poems published in An Amazing Eclectic Anthology edited by John Garmon and Zend Lakdavala. In 2013 and 2015, I starred in the play Assimilation by Yup’ik playwright Jack Dalton. Set in an Alaska Native-ruled post-apocalyptic future where white people are considered “savage,” Assimilation follows three white students, Paul, Adam, and Michael, as they are assimilated into Yup’ik culture. By Dalton’s measure, turning history on its head in this way would make Alaska Native and Native American assimilation more digestible for white and Native audiences alike. In the healing circles held after each performance, I was privileged to witness Alaska Native Elders, adults, and children share their stories and experiences with boarding schools and the resultant historical trauma. This experience taught me the value of spirituality in keeping communities afloat, especially Alaska Native communities, and deepened my understanding of Christian colonialism’s effect on the world and its first peoples. As such, I identify with Christ’s teachings, not the institution of Christianity, and believe in the importance of Indigenous ways of knowing. Scott Jarvie I am a doctoral candidate in English education at Michigan State University. My scholarly interest in religion is largely because of my upbringing, a nominal Episcopalian growing up in Texas, the product of Catholic schools K-12 and on through an undergraduate and graduate degree. Christianity was thus the water

Contributors 245 in which I swam as a student, but I was nevertheless skeptical from the start. A budding interest in fiction further brought that worldview into question; that, and a dose of headstrong adolescence, a shift towards progressive politics, and some pretty-blatant anti-intellectualism in my Christian schooling eventually undid religion for me, and I’ve never quite recovered. My scholarly approach as such has been largely critical of the privilege and violence wrought in the name of religion and Christianity in particular, its historical persistence in curriculum and schooling and in U.S. society at large. Curiously though, reflection on my time as a teacher in Catholic schools and recent encounters with postmodern theology have opened me up to religion in an affirmative way—not as ritual or creed but rather as having interesting conceptual matter to think and live with (e.g., faith amid uncertainty, humility, mystery). My broader project as a researcher looks to literature and literariness as ways to reconceptualize the relationships between texts and persons in secondary English classrooms. I understand the writing I’ve done on religion as not separate from this but instead pointing to the way, for many of us, religion is one primary story in which we come to be, and so will in some sense always matter. Lamar L. Johnson I am an assistant professor of language and literacy for linguistic and racial diversity at Michigan State University. I taught secondary English for four years in Columbia, South Carolina; now, one thread of my research is preparing English education students to teach high school English through a critical race and justice-oriented lens. My work explores the complex intersections of language, literacy, anti-Blackness, Blackness, and education. My classroom and research reflect who I am as a Black male scholar-activist. That is, my racialized, classed, gendered, religious, and spiritual-selves not only shape who I am but also are interconnected and cannot be detached. My commitment to spiritual literacies, African spirituality, Black Christianity, equity, and justice extends through my research, teaching, service, and outreach. My devotion to justice stems from my experiences attending a Black church while growing up in Edgefield, South Carolina. I attended Pleasant Grove Baptist Church. Pleasant Grove taught me how to read the world through a critical lens that centered race and the Black experience. The Black church provided me with the spiritual literacies of wisdom and discernment. For the past few years, I have been attending a variety of Black churches that infuse Black Christianity, spirituality, African spirituality, the Black experience, and critical faith. I engage in spiritual practices such as prayer, meditation, writing poetry, exercising, and creating and sustaining bidirectional relationships with people who emit positive energy and radical love. Mary M. Juzwik I am a professor in the teacher education and English departments at Michigan State University and hold degrees in English from the University of Wisconsin, Madison (Ph.D.) and Middlebury College (MA). I taught elementary, middle, and high school English for six years and now study issues in English education, including religious literacy practices, pedagogies, and traditions. Focusing

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on American Evangelicalism, for example, I have conceptualized Biblicism as an interpretive tradition and literate practice dialogically negotiated through participation in diverse communities (e.g., worship services, Bible studies, youth groups). I have also investigated how evangelical youths’ activist literacies interact with secondary literacy curriculum, teaching, and learning in public schools. These scholarly interests emerged, in large part, from my own life story. My parents were part of the Jesus movement of the late 1960s and 1970s in northcentral Ohio, and my earliest childhood memories include attending home meetings (rather than church), being surrounded by people of all ages singing lively praise music to the strumming of acoustic guitars and the clapping of hands and tambourines, and being prayed over by my parents’ friends at Bible study because I was so “strong-willed”. In the mid-1970s, my family began attending a Grace Brethren Church (GBC) and I was schooled at the associated Christian school through eighth grade. My evangelical education continued in the GBC high school youth group and as an undergraduate English major at Wheaton College (BA) in suburban Chicago, after which I spent nearly 20 years mostly avoiding church. For the past decade, I have been participating in the life of the congregation at All Saints Episcopal Church (East Lansing, Michigan) and, in ebbs and flows, in spiritual practices such as prayer, meditation, lectio divina, yoga, and spiritual retreat. My current spiritual devotions flow within— and sometimes overflow—sacramental orientations to Christianity that center embodied spirituality. David E. Kirkland I am the Executive Director of The NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and The Transformation of Schools. I have also been described as an activist and educator, cultural critic, and author. A leading national scholar and advocate for educational justice, my transdisciplinary scholarship has explored a variety of equity-related topics: school climate and discipline; school integration and choice; culture and education; vulnerable learners; and intersections among race, gender, and education. I have analyzed the cultures, languages, and texts of urban youth, using quantitative, critical literary, ethnographic, and sociolinguistic research methods to answer complex questions at the center of equity and social justice in education. I taught middle and high school for several years in Michigan and also organized youth empowerment and youth mentoring programs for over a decade in major U.S. cities such as Detroit, Chicago, and New York. I currently lead efforts to enhance education options for vulnerable youth throughout New York City, and beyond. I have received many awards for my research and educational advocacy work, including the 2016 AERA Division G Mid-Career Scholars Award and the 2008 AERA Division G Outstanding Dissertation Award. I was a 2009–10 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, a 2011–12 NAEd/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, and am a former fellow of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Research Foundation’s “Cultivating New Voices among Scholars of Color” program. In addition to several other boards, I currently serve as a trustee for the

Contributors 247 Research Foundation of the National Council of Teachers of English. A Search Past Silence: The Literacy of Black Males, my fifth book, is a TC Press bestseller and winner of the 2015 Daniel E. Griffiths Research Award, the 2014 AESA Critics Choice Award, and the 2014 NCTE David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English. I am also co-editor of the newly released Students Right to Their Own Language, a critical sourcebook published by Bedford/ St. Martin’s Press. Robert LeBlanc I am an assistant professor of English language arts/literacy at the University of Lethbridge, a member of the directorate for the Institute for Child and Youth Studies (I-CYS), and Associate Editor for Language & Literacy. I hold a Ph.D. in reading/writing/literacy from the University of Pennsylvania, where I received the AERA Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Catholic Education SIG for my research with immigrant boys in their Philadelphia Catholic school. My research has appeared in journals such as Research in the Teaching of English, Written Communication, Language & Communication, Linguistics and Education, Classroom Discourse, Ethnography and Education, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Language Arts, and the Journal of Catholic Education. Baptized as a Lutheran of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, raised a Mennonite in an Evangelical church, today I am a member of St. Augustine’s Anglican parish in Lethbridge, AB. Kati Macaluso I am an assistant professor of the practice in the Institute for Educational Initiatives at the University of Notre Dame. I hold a doctoral degree in curriculum, instruction, and teacher education from Michigan State University, as well as undergraduate and Master’s degrees in English, theology, and education from the University of Notre Dame. My research focuses on the embodied and spiritual dimensions of literary reading and poetic writing and considers how those dimensions might help to reimagine middle and secondary language arts curricula and teacher education. My most recent publications include a co-edited volume, Teaching the Canon in 21st Century Classrooms: Challenging Genres, a collection of essays that, among other things, accounts for the undertones of religiosity that color English language arts curriculum and instruction. Raised Roman Catholic from birth, I attended Catholic schools from kindergarten through college and now serve as English education faculty in Notre Dame’s flagship teacher formation program in the Alliance for Catholic Education. As a practicing Catholic, a mother of four children who attend Catholic schools, and a teacher of English education in a program at a Catholic university dedicated to the formation of Catholic educators, I have given considerable thought to the ways that certain Christian theological principles—including accompaniment, mystery, communion, and sacramentality—necessarily shape one’s literate engagement as well as the formation of teachers committed to teaching literacy in a faithbased context.

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Samantha Mack I am Unangax from the Agdaaĝux̂ tribe of King Cove, Alaska—my positionality as an Indigenous woman shapes my experience on this Earth. I received my BA from the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) in 2016 with a double major in English and political science and a minor in Alaska Native studies, continuing on to receive my M.A. in English from UAA in 2018. Now in 2019, I am reading for an MPhil in Political Theory at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. As an Indigenous feminist my research has always been decolonial in nature, centering the survival and renewal of Indigenous communities in the face of ongoing state-sponsored colonial erasure. My current work addresses the ways that the United States, as a settler colonial society, utilizes public policy to justify Indigenous dispossession. My experiences living within and exploring Indigenous ontologies has also shaped my personal sense of spirituality, and I strongly believe in the sacred character of humans insofar as they are a part of the greater sacred universe—we hold the same metaphysical importance as the non-human entities and natural phenomena we live amongst, and as such it is immoral to hold dominion over them. Mary L. Neville I am a doctoral candidate in curriculum, instruction, and teacher education at Michigan State University. A former middle and high school English language arts educator, I taught for a total of five years in two Catholic schools in Jacksonville, FL and Detroit, MI. My research examines race, emotion, and literary response in high school English classrooms and pre-service English education spaces. My current work explores the ways teachers and students in two high school English classrooms discuss historical and contemporary issues of power and justice across various forms of literature. I am and always have been Catholic; my first two memories are reading from a Catholic children’s Bible and saying the Rosary. Moreover, my 12 years as a student and five years as a teacher in Catholic schools inform my work focusing on race and racism across Catholic spaces. While acknowledging that Catholic school spaces are replete with examples of injustice, I see Catholic social teaching, particularly the principle of the dignity of each human person, as a space of anti-racist possibility. In fact, the idea of “this place” in the final lines of Maggie Smith’s poem “Good Bones” reminds me of the possibilities which Catholicism holds: “This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.” Natasha Perez I am a “cradle Catholic”. As a second-generation Cuban American, I learned the faith in two languages: first, from my mother and grandmother, and then later, from the nuns at the Catholic school I attended through the fifth grade. Growing up, I never realized a distinction between being Catholic and being Cuban, so fused were these two aspects of identity in my young mind. During the middle school years, my mother, a devout Catholic who had attended Catholic school in Cuba, found a youth group for my sister and I to attend, to make up for the fact that we were no longer able to attend Catholic school.

Contributors 249 While I inherited the faith from my mother, I continued to choose the Catholic faith as an adolescent, and continue to do so even now as an adult. The Catholic faith gives my life direction, teaches me how to live a principled life, and fills my spirit. Possibly the biggest aspect of my personal vocation as a Christian woman is teaching. I was a teacher for 17 years before leaving to pursue a Ph.D. in literacy. At the time, however, I did not envision writing about religion. Although this was an integral part of my identity, like most Americans, I compartmentalized my spiritual and academic work life. For a long time, I did not think my narrative was worth exploring as a literacy project—after all, it’s all about religion, bilingualism, and home culture—what does this have to do with literacy and school? And this has become the very reason why my story had to be told: because it is just one of the many untold stories of sophisticated literacy practices taking place outside of the domain of school, supported by immigrant parents, in a language other than English, while practicing a particular faith. Allison Skerrett I am a professor of language and literacy studies in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at The University of Texas at Austin. I began my educational career as a secondary English teacher in Boston Public Schools. My research focuses on adolescents’ literacy practices, in and outside school, and English education in diverse classrooms. My scholarly openness to all of adolescents’ literacy practices as well as my own spiritual life has allowed me to notice and become intellectually curious about the religious literacies of the young people with whom I work. As a Protestant Christian, I feel that I am living out a scholarly responsibility and my mission as a Christ-follower to inquire into young people’s religious identities and literacy practices and to consider the implications of what I learn for young people’s productive participation in a diverse world, including in literacy classrooms. Although my own religious affiliation is a Protestant form of Christianity, I believe and respect that desires to engage in spiritual matters is a shared human trait and manifests as diverse religions and associated practices. I have published in journals such as the American Educational Research Journal, Journal of Literacy Research, Reading Research Quarterly, Research in the Teaching of English, and Urban Education. My book, Teaching Transnational Youth: Literacy and Education in a Changing World (2015, Teachers College Press) is the first to examine the educational opportunities and challenges arising from the millions of youths who live and attend school across different countries. Jennifer C. Stone I am a professor of English at the University of Alaska Anchorage. I completed my M.S. and Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Prior to my academic career, I taught seventh grade language arts in Maryland and coordinated the literacy curriculum for an after-school program for middle school students in Wisconsin. My research specializes in sociocultural and critical approaches to literacy studies. In particular, I examine the roles that language diversity, digital literacies, and popular culture play in American culture from both contemporary and historical perspectives. I also investigate the implications of such

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resources for curriculum and pedagogy. My most recent work focuses on the relationships between English, Indigenous languages, and world languages in Alaska. My publications have appeared in a number of national and international venues. I was baptized but never confirmed as Episcopal. I remember fondly attending church with my grandmother in the summers, where I participated in the choir. My immediate family attended church on Christmas and Easter, for baptisms and funerals, and sporadically more often. I currently do not practice or identify with any religion, but I do appreciate the power of community, the beauty of ritual, and the poetry of various Christian texts. I also have borne witness to the horrific ways that Christian doctrine has been weaponized in colonial contexts. I find my own spiritual experiences in the natural landscape and through meditation. Bree Straayer-Gannon I am a Ph.D. candidate in rhetoric and writing at Michigan State University. My research focuses on the intersections of religion, gender, sexuality, and education. In particular, I look at the ongoing impact of Evangelical purity teachings on the formation of gender roles, educational experience, and critical thinking. My dissertation examines the process of change through interviewing people who once ascribed to religious sexuality teachings and now have made a shift in their beliefs and practices. The implications of this study speak to the ways that educators view critical thinking and evidence of learning in the classroom, particularly in relationship to different discourse communities and cultures. I have presented nationally and am in the process of publishing on my religious work as well as my other interests including writing program administration, English language learners, and queer and decolonial pedagogy. My research is not coincidental as my own lifelong immersion in Evangelical teachings and culture has had a powerful impact on my personal and academic life. These teachings directly impacted my education owing to gender roles that prescribed a rigid life path. My work seeks a nuanced understanding of both the positive and negative impact of Evangelical culture on both individual lives, including my own, and larger systems of political and social control. Allison Volz I am a third and fourth grade teacher who is also an adjunct professor at The Ohio State University and Ohio Wesleyan University. My scholarly areas of interest include sharing and mediating diverse literature with students, particularly in urban settings, and the use of dramatic inquiry to engage students in the exploration of complex texts. I was raised Catholic, participating in CCD classes, celebrating my First Communion and regularly attending church with my mother and younger brother. My father was not Catholic and for the most part, did not join us, other than on special occasions. Eventually, I expressed less interest in attending church and the related classes, and my parents gave me room to make the choice for myself. Today my spiritual practice consists primarily of daily meditation.

Index

aesthetic/aesthetics 91, 136, 138, 141–142 Afognak 103 African/Black American 24, 26, 52–54, 56, 59–60, 69, 77, 82–93, 148, 163, 168–170, 198, 209–215, 217–219; Church 8, 86, 177, 195, 205–207, 210; culture 208, 210, 213; educational institutions 206–207; experience 205, 209, 213–214, 218; liberation theology 82–84, 214–215; -ness 83–84, 89, 208, 210, 212–214, 219 AIDS 179, 185–186 Akularak 102 Aleut 103, 106 Alutiiq 102 ambivalence 189 Angel Gabriel 222–223, 232 Anglican Church see Episcopalian anti-Black(ness) 82–84, 89, 92–93, 210, 212–213, 216 anti-Semitism 69, 150, 152–153 Anzaldúa, G. 238–239 art: discussions about 89, 114, 129, 223; education 162; public/murals 91–92, 129, 164–165, 167–169, 210; visual 89, 91 Asad, T. 2, 6–8 assimilation 96, 101, 134 attention 71–72, 133, 226–232 Babel 17–19, 234–239 baptism 175, 196, 208, 225 Baptist 104, 109, 111, 116, 163, 205, 245 Bible/Biblical: experiences with 46, 115, 180, 197; passages 28, 93, 145, 202, 211, 232; as set of beliefs 23, 29, 145, 213; Studies 52, 114, 116–117, 206, 210–212; as teaching tool 29, 103–104;

as text 7, 73, 77–79, 135, 157, 177, 180–181, 184, 193–195; translations of 97–98, 194–195, 197, 200–202 Black liberation theology 177, 205, 207–208, 210–215 Bonhoeffer, D. 128, 153–155, 158 Brown v. Board of Education 86 Buddhist/Buddhism 24, 162–163, 215 Butler, J. 7, 68, 129, 189 Catholic/Catholicism 4, 5, 6, 11, 19, 51, 53, 56, 60–63, 82–93, 96, 102, 104, 108, 116, 127, 138, 150, 162–163, 176, 180, 192–198, 230; Black 83–93; language 176, 179, 183, 185–186, 189; mass 52, 138, 196–198; Mexican 126, 129, 166, 194; and racism 68, 82–93; schools 2, 10, 19, 52, 69, 82–93, 180, 183, 192, 195–197; social teaching 83–85, 91–92 Christianization 5, 96–98, 100 Christian privilege 2–4, 49, 72, 79, 171, 209 Christmas 209 church 9, 29, 32, 33, 38, 84–87, 105, 111, 114, 116, 121, 165, 193, 195–196, 198, 199, 207–208, 210; institution 19, 22, 29, 51, 62–63, 90–91, 128, 155, 175–177, 179, 183, 185–189, 197, 205, 211, 225–226; political body 5–6, 50, 82, 213–215 cisgender 152 Civil Rights Movement 83, 85–86, 214 classroom discussion 43, 46, 51–52, 60–61, 63, 161–164, 166–167, 169, 209; transcript 167–169 clergy 6, 155, 192; see also minister; priest close reading 3, 75, 133, 138, 142–143, 229

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Index

colonization 6–7, 25, 96, 134 Communion/Eucharist 135–136, 140, 213, 225; literary 131–132, 138–139, 141–143 conservative 116, 146, 160, 192, 197, 212 contemplative practices 22–23, 225–227 cosmopolitanism 37, 194, 197–203, 237–238 crossing 53–55, 57–59, 62–63 Cuba/Cuban 176–177, 192–198, 200–202 curriculum 1, 9–10, 12, 25–26, 28–29, 34, 37–39, 43, 50, 67–68, 72–73, 75, 77, 85, 88–89, 128, 132–135, 138, 142, 154, 161, 171, 184, 199, 208, 212 Dena’ina 106 desire 3, 27, 34, 38, 41, 44–45, 111, 114–115, 119–120, 122–123, 151, 228, 230–231, 234, 236, 238 dialogue 11, 22–24, 26–27, 29, 32–34, 38, 40, 42, 44, 126, 136, 163, 169, 206–207, 209 divine/divinity 126–127, 132, 135, 138, 150, 155, 161, 175, 175, 181, 212, 215, 223, 226–228, 230 dream 69, 111–112, 114, 116, 118–123, 136, 236 Easter 175, 177–178, 205, 207, 209 embodied practices 22–24, 27–28, 32, 61, 125, 127, 129, 131, 136–138, 141–143, 192–194, 197, 202, 214, 228 English: education 5, 18, 37, 39, 42, 74, 96–101, 108, 205, 208, 210, 212, 215–217, 226, 229; Language Arts (ELA) 1, 3, 10–11, 51, 63, 67–70, 76, 82–85, 88–89, 92–93, 126–127, 132–136, 138, 142–143, 147–148, 153, 156–158, 161–162, 171, 176, 208–209, 212, 215–219; -only 68, 96–98, 100–102, 104–108; as a school subject 10, 67–68, 71, 79; as a second language (ESL) 199–200, 238 Episcopalian 96, 103, 222, 225–226, 229 Eskimo 102–106 Evangelical 37–39, 42, 44, 46–48, 68–69, 111–116, 121–123, 134, 145, 186 evangelization 97, 103, 135 face 17, 54–56, 59–60, 62–63, 234 faith 8, 11, 23, 25–34, 42–43, 45–46, 68, 116–117, 121, 123, 128, 135, 139,

150, 155, 166, 175, 177, 183–184, 192–199, 202, 206–210; -based schools 24; critical 216–217; inter187; multi- 21, 24–27, 33–34; practices 193, 202, 207; tradition 4, 10, 18, 224; true 11, 33 family customs/practices 151, 162–163, 193, 196, 198, 200 feminist theory 211 footing 51, 54, 57, 63 framing 6–8, 53–54, 60, 69, 72–73, 75, 101, 126, 132, 141, 143, 225, 230 free will 227–228 Freire, P. 6, 78, 134–135, 175–176 Frye, N. 71–73, 77, 79 fundamentalist/fundamentalism 72, 74, 79, 186 gay diaspora 150–151 gender 10, 12, 18, 37, 47, 70, 84, 112, 114, 122–123, 128, 145–146, 148, 150–152, 154, 157–158, 176, 178–180, 182–184, 181, 188, 198, 211, 217–219, 226 Genesis 17, 80, 234 globalization 5–6, 9, 113, 193–194, 198, 201–202 Gospel: Luke 222; Mark 226, 238; Matthew 125, 146, 238; passages 125, 214–215 grammar 72–73, 75–77, 97, 103, 206 Great Divide Thesis 6–8, 80 heteronormative/heteronormativity 128, 145, 152, 157 heterosexuality 145, 156 Hispanic/Latinx 23, 59, 163–165, 197–198 Hitler 127–128, 148–151, 153–155, 157 Holocaust 151–154, 156–159 homophobia 2, 152, 186–188, 211 homosexuality 145, 149, 150–152, 156, 179, 181, 183, 186–188 husband 69, 97, 111, 115, 119, 222, 225, 227 Hyda/Hydah 97, 105 ideal/idealized 69, 111–112, 114–115, 121–122, 184 identity/identities 31, 39–40, 43–44, 53, 67, 85, 87, 118–119, 145, 150–151, 154, 157, 177, 179, 182, 188, 200, 202, 206–207, 209, 212, 217;

Index formation 111–114, 197–198; religious 18, 21–27, 37–38, 48–49, 117, 176, 194–195; see also teachers ideology 7, 96, 108, 127–128, 149, 154–155, 175, 188, 236 imagination/imaginary 4, 8, 79, 123, 131–132, 186, 207, 215, 217, 224, 226–227 immigrant 5, 53, 56, 88, 192, 197–198, 203 indexing 53, 55–56, 61–62 Indian 18, 25, 101, 106 instrumentalism/instrumentalization of reading 127, 132–133, 137, 139, 229 interactional frame 51, 55–57, 64 Iñupiaq 102, 105 invisible 41–42, 44–45, 48, 215 Islam 8, 18, 25, 28, 30–33, 79, 91, 162–163, 215 Jesus/Christ 4, 18, 23, 28, 32, 69, 73, 96, 115, 122, 125–126, 128–129, 135, 138, 146, 149, 155–156, 169, 171, 175, 182, 192, 207, 210–211, 214, 225–226, 228, 232 Jews/Jewish persons/Jewish people 147–149, 152–153, 155–157 Judaism 67, 125, 162, 215 keying 54, 56–57, 62–63 King, M. L. Jr. 83, 93, 214–215 knowledge economy 132 language: Alaska Native 69, 96–108; Black 8, 77, 177, 205–210, 212–213, 215–219; bilingualism 5, 193, 196, 201–202, 238; chauvinism 68; God 175, 231; indigenous 5–6, 98, 203; monolingualism 18, 235–239; multilingual(ism) 18–19, 221–225, 52, 55, 102–104, 108, 176–177, 192, 196, 234, 236; Spanish 6, 52, 58, 192–202; suppression 5, 98, 102, 104, 106–108 LGBTQ 2, 42, 44–49, 126, 128, 145–147, 149–150, 152–153, 156–158, 179–180, 182, 211 linguistics 3, 6, 8, 19, 53–54, 55–56, 63, 74–75, 196, 235–237 literacy: academic 113, 124, 177, 196; digital 68, 114; events 52, 114, 195–196; multi 39, 193–194, 196, 202–203; practices 8, 12, 24, 27, 51, 68, 79, 114, 134, 162, 177,

253

192, 194–197, 203, 205, 207, 209, 219, 237; religious 10, 21, 27, 39, 161, 177, 179, 192, 194–197, 203; spiritual 176–177, 205, 208, 215–216, 218–219; youth 10, 11, 21–25, 27, 34, 113–114, 176–178, 193–195, 197, 203, 209, 216–217 literature/literary: children’s 92–93, 129, 134, 147, 152–153, 163; critique 17, 72, 74–75, 135, 224–225, 229, 230, 232; pedagogy 89, 177–178, 224–231 (see also English, education; English, Language Arts (ELA)); readings 12, 126–127, 129, 131–139, 141–143, 224–227, 162, 177, 229–232; response 91, 125, 127–129, 138, 142, 161–162, 230–232; transaction 127, 138, 230; young adult 90, 145, 147, 152, 210, 226; see also Communion/Eucharist Luther, M. 7, 127, 149 Lutheran 96, 128 Macdonald, J. 68 Malcolm X 85, 214–215 marriage 61–62, 69, 111–112, 115, 117–118, 121–123, 127, 139, 222, 224; gay 186–188 meditation 126, 218, 226 Methodist 96, 163, 195 Mexican 59, 165, 194; Americans 19, 52, 126, 129, 164, 166, 195; immigration 56; see also Catholic/Catholicism Midrash(ic) 78 mindfulness 45, 216, 218; detachment 227–228, 230 minister 145, 147, 214 mission/missionary 5–6, 10, 68–69, 96–108, 234 Moravian 96, 103, 107 multicultural 18–19, 21, 24–27, 33–34, 39, 237 multimodal 56, 113, 162, 176–177, 192–194, 196–197 Muslim see Islam mystery 125, 127, 131–132, 135–136, 141–144, 226 mysticism/mystical experiences 132, 141, 177–178, 222–228, 230–232 myth/mythologizing 67–69, 71–79, 162, 235 narrative 2, 11–12, 22–23, 26, 71–76, 93, 114, 122–124, 129, 134, 138,

254

Index

155–157, 164–165, 171–172, 176–177, 193–196, 199, 202–203, 205; Christian 3, 9, 69, 78, 145–149, 153; dominant 152, 170, 211, 214, 235, 258; inquiry 177, 193; social 145–146, 169 Nazism/Nazi Ideology 10, 126–128, 147–157 NCTE 1, 67, 75–76 Nepantla 238–239 news media 101, 129, 132, 136, 164, 166, 169–171 oral tradition 6–9, 79, 193, 195, 202 parochial school 10, 224 pedagogy 93, 137, 210, 215, 236, 238; anti-racist 85, 88, 205, 226; critical 6, 78; English 72, 78, 89 (see also English, education; English, Language Arts (ELA)); justice 39, 216–217; LGBTQ-affirming 46, 48; practices 39, 207–208, 219; religious 2, 67, 69, 128, 180, 224, 234; see also literature/ literacy poem/poetry/poetics 23, 71, 75, 90–91, 127, 131, 135–136, 138, 140–144, 162, 206, 218, 223–224, 228, 229–230 politics/political 1, 2, 47, 52, 59–60, 63, 68, 76, 90, 98, 113, 126, 134, 145, 148–150, 157, 175–176, 179, 180, 183, 185, 189, 194, 196, 202, 208, 212, 214, 217, 224, 229, 237–238; liberal 38, 125, 185, 235; Religious Right 145–146 pope 186–188 prayer 24, 28, 68, 115, 126, 192, 196, 199, 208–209, 218, 222–223, 226, 228–229 precarity 62, 68, 182 Presbyterian 96, 100, 104, 108; Board of Home 97 priest 7, 51, 54, 61–62, 83, 86, 90, 93, 127, 152, 186–187 prince 115, 121–123 Protestant/Protestantism 5, 7–8, 18, 24–25, 73, 88, 96, 126–128, 134, 149–151, 155, 160–161, 163, 171–172, 228–229 psychological violence 11, 145–146, 148, 155–156, 180 public schools 1–3, 7, 9–10, 18, 37, 39, 73, 82, 88, 96–97, 100, 108, 116, 128,

136, 140, 145–148, 158, 160–162, 200, 203, 224, 226, 230–231, 238 purity 67–70, 111–112, 122, 181, 214, 236 Quaker 96, 104, 108 queer/Queer studies 11, 128, 146, 150–152, 155, 157–158 race: anti-racism 83–85, 88–93, 226; identity 37, 85, 87, 114, 154, 177, 206–207, 209, 212; racism 10, 68–69, 75–76, 80, 82–85, 87–93, 205, 209, 211–215, 218, 230; rebirth 207, 210, 216 rationalism 27, 29–33, 57, 68, 127, 131–133, 138–139, 227 recognition 53–54, 62, 127, 135, 145–146, 151–153, 164–166, 169, 171, 176, 197, 199; mis- 48; theory 11, 40–42, 45, 47 registers 54–55, 61–63 religious/religion: diversity 18, 25, 34; education/Sunday School 194, 206, 211; -ity 3, 22, 39, 134; leadership 18, 27, 30–34; - pluralism 128, 161, 225, 232; in Social Studies 29, 147, 162; see also identity/identities; literacy; pedagogy; teachers; women religious retreat 92, 222, 224–226, 230 ritual 11, 51–52, 55–56, 60–63, 209 Robinson, M. 71, 131, 139–142 rural communities 8, 180 Russia/Russian 96, 101–103, 107–108 sacrament/sacramental 11, 126–127, 129, 131, 135–136, 138, 142–143, 225, 230 sacred 6–7, 22–23, 28, 32–33, 55, 71–72, 75–77, 195, 214, 235, 237 salvation 73, 126–128, 129, 211, 233, 237 Sartre, J. P. 237 school/schooling 3, 9, 18, 37, 72–73, 80, 90–91, 94, 101, 108, 132–133, 141, 179–180, 196; elementary 92, 161, 180; high 69, 82–83, 90–92, 115–116, 119, 130, 136, 140–141, 199; middle/ junior high 160–163, 197, 229; see also religious/religion scripture 7, 28–29, 125, 195, 197, 200–201, 206, 223, 226, 234 secular/secularism 4, 6–9, 17–18, 25, 28, 39, 63, 72–73, 97, 122–123, 131, 214, 235

Index self-care 213, 216, 218–219 Seventh Day Adventist 32, 96 sexism 84, 211, 214, 218 sexuality 10, 18, 37, 47, 69–70, 111, 146, 151, 154, 176, 183 silence 39, 48, 82, 142, 147, 188, 228 sin 17, 23, 38, 48, 67, 82, 97–100, 108, 120, 145, 175 slavery 84, 90, 213 social justice 38–39, 46, 92, 145, 147, 157–158, 213, 217 social media 112–113; Facebook 112, 228; Instagram 112, 228; Pinterest 11, 69, 111–112, 115–117, 120–123 soul 38, 125–127, 132, 138–139, 141–143, 154–155, 207, 212, 214, 216–218, 223, 228 spiritual/spirituality 1–4, 8–9, 11–12, 22–23, 30–33, 125–127, 131–136, 138–142, 176–177, 205–210, 212, 215–219, 224–231; African 8, 177, 205, 208, 210, 212; Black 8, 11, 177, 198, 205, 207–208, 210, 212, 215–220; critical 216–217; definition of 3–4; life 1, 28; potential of reading 131; practices 2, 126, 210, 212, 215, 218, 231; see also literacy standards/standardization 59, 165, 194; Common Core State 72, 75, 78, 132, 147–148, 157, 162; language 236 stylization 51–54, 56, 62–64 teacher education 1, 9–10, 18, 37–40, 42–43, 48, 161, 208 teachers: Christian 38–39, 46–48; English/ELA 9, 37, 63, 83, 147, 217, 226, 156–158; identity 37, 43; mentor 23, 39; preservice 18, 37–39, 42, 44, 47–49, 160–161, 163, 169–171; public school 1, 39, 49, 97; religious 22, 33, 48 testimonies/testimonials 11–12, 157, 176, 178, 229 theology/theological 2, 4, 7, 11–12, 38, 82, 84, 89, 91, 127–128, 135, 176, 180, 182–183, 214–215, 235

255

Thlingit 97 timeframes: 19th/20th century 68, 92; contemporary 9–10, 59–60, 63, 69, 79, 82–83, 89–92, 126–128, 147, 154, 156–157, 164, 176, 178–181, 184, 193, 225–227; medieval 135 transgender 146, 158, 176, 178, 180, 186 transnational(ism) 18, 24–25, 193–195, 197, 201–202 transphobia 185 Tsimpshean/Tsimshian 97–98 Unalaska 99 Unangan 106 Underhill, E. 225–227, 230–231 urban communities 19, 24, 52–53, 128, 160 Vatican 86–87, 176 Virgin Mary 126, 170, 192, 198, 223, 232; Annunciation 222–224, 227–230; Virgin of Guadalupe 129, 164–169, 194 voicing 54–56, 59, 61 wedding 69, 111–112, 115–116, 118–123, 196 Weil, S. 223–225, 227–231 Western Christianity 96, 126, 232 white/whiteness 7, 52, 59, 62, 69, 82–89, 93, 97, 100, 104–105, 148, 160, 163, 166, 168–169, 184, 198, 206, 210–218, 235; Americans 99, 108; nationalism 127; Supremacy 82, 89, 92, 207, 213 wife 117–119, 121, 127, 222 wisdom 12, 23, 29, 125–129, 177, 201, 205, 215, 233–234 women religious 90, 163, 225; Oblate Sisters of Providence 85, 88; Sisters of Notre Dame; Sisters of Saint Joseph 86; Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM) 87 World War II 147, 152 Yup’ik/Yupik 102, 105

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