Teaching
I love to teach. My professional path nearly brought me into academia full-time until I realized my calling was to be out in the world, helping people in more immediate ways than the classroom. The classroom still calls me back and that has taken the form of congregational programming, graduate classes, day-long trainings, retreats on spiritual practices, and work with adults, children, & youth around identity formation to name a few. Below you can find the most recent spaces I am teaching and projects I am helping to create or offer to others.
Humanist Studies Program
I’ve been connected to what is now the Humanist Studies Program for more than fifteen years. I was a student in 2009 of what was then known as The Humanist Institute, a three-year graduate program in Humanist Studies and Leadership. My time at The Humanist Institute was one of deepening my personal understanding of Humanism both as an identity for myself and as a movement to support in the world.
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Today, the Humanist Studies Program is part of the American Humanist Association (AHA) and is the only path to an accredited graduate degree with a concentration in Humanist Studies in the United States.
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This is due to a partnership between the AHA and United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities which allows Humanist Studies Program students to transfer the four core classes of our program into either a Masters of Divinity or Master of Arts in Leadership Studies. Those who do not require a graduate degree to further their goals can obtain a Certificate in Humanist Studies directly from the AHA.
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My role with the program is to chair the Education Committee of the AHA and to teach two of the four core courses: Humanist Worldviews: Then & Now and Humanist Leadership: How to Lead an Organization. A bit about the four courses I and several colleagues (James Croft, Vanessa Gomez Brake, & Kristin Wintermute) co-created and share with students is shared below.
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I welcome inquiries from potential students curious about this program or wanting to discuss alternative paths to Humanist leadership. If you would like to learn more about this program, visit the Humanist Studies Program page.
After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.
– Philip Pullman
Religious stories are human stories, and human stories are religious stories. Stories make us who we are and change us. This is the power of stories, they connect people, they change people from individuals into a community. Stories create connections not only among people together in the present but across generations, across cultural boundaries, and across imagination. We are invited to think differently and to think through the words of another what it might be like to live in their world for a moment.
Within a small group context in my congregation, we explored the world of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time as sacred story. What does it mean to approach fiction, in the form of the written word and on the screen, as lessons that help us become more fully human?