Teaching the Millennial Generation in the Religious and Theological Studies Classroom

This essay provides an overview of the distinctive challenges presented to teaching and learning in religious and theological studies by the conditions and characteristics of “millennial” students. While the emerging literature on this generation is far from consistent, it is still instructive and important to engage, as students that are immersed in technology and social networking have different facilities and difficulties that educators would do well to carefully address and critically employ. Teachers in theological and religious studies are distinctly positioned to grapple with such conditions, particularly around the practices of identity formation, media literacy, and embodiment. Attention to the development of such practices engages key issues for both the millennial students and the religious and theological studies teacher: virtual reality, spiritual identity, globalization and violence, critical consumption and ethical creativity, focused and contemplative thinking, and intercultural and interpersonal respect.

The Lily and the Lotus: Notes on Translation

This critical/creative project considers Stéphane Mallarmé’s critical poems in his 1897 Divagations as an invitation to explore the notion of criticism and the relationship between the conceptual and the nonconceptual aspects of writing and thinking. Informed by Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the face, Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of theTranslator” and the myth of Orpheus, I consider ways to approach that which may not be said or thought by following Mallarmé’s method of combining poetry and criticism to create a wandering, unclassifiable text where we may imagine the nonconceptual as a remoteness, as the presence of an absence.