…To the young, schooling seems relentless, but we know it is not. What is relentless is our education, which, for good or ill, gives us no rest. That is why poverty is a great educator. Having no boundaries and refusing to be ignored, it mostly teaches hopelessness. But not always. Politics is also a great educator. Mostly it teaches, I am afraid, cynicism. But not always. Television is a great educator as well. Mostly it teaches consumerism. But not always.

It is the “not always” that keeps the romantic spirit alive in those who write about schooling. The faith is that despite some of the more debilitating teachings of culture itself, something can be done in school that will alter the lenses through which one sees the world; which is to say, that non-trivial schooling can provide a point of view from which what is can be seen clearly, what was as a living present, and what will be as filled with possibility.

What this means is that at its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living. Such an enterprise is not easy to pursue, since our politicians rarely speak of it, our technology is indifferent to it, and our commerce despises it. Nonetheless, it is the weightiest and most important thing to write about.

—from the preface to Neil Postman’s The End of Education (1996)

In my last post of “Teacher/Poet” I introduced media theorist Neil Postman’s “10 Principles for Technology Education” and set about close reading one of them, “#3,” and then offered the reader the full list at the end of the post, promising to write a sequel soon, again applying these principles to generative AI, and especially considering generative AI’s use (or non-use) in schools. Here, reader, is my fulfillment to that promise, part two.

That meaty quote from the preface of The End of Education, the book where the “10 Principles” were first published, gives you a helpful frame for interpreting where Postman is coming from in his delivering us these principles. “At its best,” he writes in 1996, “schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living.” Indeed. But in 2026, how relentless the push is, and from so many people in power, to incorporate AI into the schooling of all of our children so that they are “ready for a changing workplace.” Ready, not to make a life, but to make a living.

I’ll argue at the end of this essay that this utilitarian strain has actually always been present (and often dominant) in American education—and I don’t think Postman pays enough attention to it. At the same time I cannot help be inspired by his consideration of schooling and learning. As the old biblical Proverb has it, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” (29:18.) We’ve got plenty of technicians working the vineyard, very few visionaries. I’m delighted to deepen your introduction to one such visionary here, reader. Let’s get back to that close reading of his “10 Principles,” starting from the top.

1. All technological change is a Faustian bargain. For every advantage a new technology offers, there is a corresponding disadvantage.

2. The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population. This means that every new technology benefits some and harms others.

—Neil Postman’s First and Second Principles of Technology Education

In the Faust play that I have read, Marlowe’s, I don’t remember the title character thinking so much about humanity. Or if he did, only insofar as those humans affected him, and his concerns. This tracks with the creators of generative AI and LLMs, in spite of tech bros’ claims to the contrary. The biggest beneficiaries of the “AI Boom” right now are the companies who have created the technology. Other temporary beneficiaries may include people with expertise and education in a particular field—the more advanced, the better. Some of these report learning to do more and faster with that knowledge and expertise when aided by these new products. But the less educated a user of an LLM is, the more likely an LLM seems to lead the user astray or even hinder cognitive development. (And for younger folks, learning to write, recent studies show that excessive LLM use can be devastating.)

As there is clearly a correlation between income and education, AI seems to be harming poorer and marginalized communities at a much higher percentage than it is affluent ones. In addition, the environmentally and community-damaging data centers needed to power the “boom” are being built in economically depressed neighborhoods. AI as a tech phenomenon is exacerbating existing inequalities: The rich are getting richer; the poor are getting poorer.

3. Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Like language itself, a technology predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and accomplishments and to subordinate others. Every technology has a philosophy, which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards.

—Neil Postman’s Third Principle of Technology Education

I wrote on this principle in my first post, so those interested in a deeper dive can check that out, but these two paragraphs offer a distillation of what I think he’s up to:

“To stick with Postman’s language, what ‘perspectives and accomplishment’ are LLMs ‘predisposed to favor and value’? And which are they predisposed to ‘subordinate’? Efficiency comes to my mind right away as an accomplishment that LLMs value highly. Tasks that previously took large amounts of time can now be done in seconds. Productivity goes hand in hand with this value: Because LLMs can do so much and so quickly, they allow users and companies the capacity to produce more, and with less human labor. What is subordinated, then, in this embrace of LLMs is the distinctive value of human labor, which is often messy, has fits and starts, and sometimes goes nowhere at all before it arrives at its destination.

The product—the thing you want accomplished when you set out to start your labor—is valued immensely by the LLM and by LLM users. Process—how a human being labors to create or make the product is devalued steeply, so steeply in fact that many human beings are already losing their jobs in the face of this technological revolution.”

4. A new technology usually makes war against an old technology.

—Neil Postman’s Fourth Principle of Technology Education

There may very well be other “old” technologies AI is “warring against,” but I am most interested in this essay in exploring how AI is at war with books.

At war against a book as a physical, time-bound thing. As a representation of unique and singular voices (though of course not all books or perhaps even any are truly “singularly” authored). At war against this artifact that is a record of its own making, and includes the many people and communities that went into its making.

AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI took millions of these artifacts and forced the LLMs they have created to “ingest” them. Post-ingestion, though the LLM might benefit from processing the particular voice, style, and “content” of the book, all that went into the making of the book has been erased. Flattened.

From an intellectual property/copyright standpoint, because the companies purchased physical copies of the books that the machines later “ingested,” it’s possible the companies could get away with what is clearly theft. But regardless of how these courtroom struggles play out between the authors and publishers and the AI companies, the Postman point holds: These are battles in a larger war that the new technology is waging against an older, more textured one. In Postman’s language, AI competes with the book for “time, attention, prestige, and ‘worldview.’”

The reader of this blog might well say that books were already being displaced by newer technologies, like the Internet. Surely this was true, but to my mind the current—and unapologetic—thefts of intellectual property mark a new kind of aggression. The ingestion of authors’ works into LLMs deprives these authors of both money and prestige. And because AI is being pushed by so many in power into so many aspects of our lives, it is also front and center in the time and attention we must give and pay it. With so much time and attention lavished on AI (no, the new tech has not “freed us up” to do more, as promised), there is less time and attention for that older and more leisurely act, the act of reading.

5. Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. A new technology does not merely add something; it changes everything.

—Neil Postman’s Fifth Principle of Technology Education

Reading over what I’ve written on principle #4, especially in light of conversations I’ve heard between historians Matt Seybold and Jeff Jarvis around the introduction of print with Gutenberg, I’m inclined to complicate some of what I’ve made seem like a “book good / AI bad” binary, which I admit I can lean into, and even moreso now that I am actively publishing books, and for profit.

In one of these conversations on his excellent podcast, American Vandal, Seybold pointed out, in an offhand manner that the act of publishing a book is itself a privatizing and a commodification of ideas and imagination—in other words, something I criticize about AI, just an older form of it. And as Jarvis said in that conversation, (“The Gutenberg Parenthesis” was the episode, I believe) the truly revolutionary technology of our era, which is still relatively young, is the internet, a technology that has had massively democratizing effects (though, since the AI boom, as Seybold and other guests to his program have noted, has been significantly degraded, or “enshittified,” to again use Cory Doctorow’s term.)

LLMs really wouldn’t be the powerful and impressive machines they are without the massive amounts of data they have access to from the internet. (See Audrey Watters’ brilliant Teaching Machines for accounts of much less impressive but no less dogged attempts by technologists like B.F. Skinner to embed forms of “artificial intelligence” into K-12 classrooms and universities in the middle of the 20^th century. Teachers and schools then were much more inclined to resist, where now they are folding to Silicon Valley.) The internet really did, to use Postman’s phrase, “change everything,” and Jarvis argues we are still catching up to that change.

Was and is the internet as a technology “at war” with books? Perhaps not as openly as AI is as a technology, but I do think it is and was. As I started writing this paragraph, I was tempted to say earlier versions of the internet were like these beautifully gargantuan world-spanning libraries. Except if that metaphor were to hold then every time you touched a book, let alone checked one out, the library would take note, mark your habits and interests, monitor them, store them in a cloud. Except if the metaphor were to hold, the library wouldn’t be free but an indispensable engine of capital, always trying to sell you on something, hook you on some new product….No the metaphor doesn’t hold.

6. Because of the symbolic forms in which information is encoded, different technologies have different intellectual and emotional biases.

—Neil Postman’s Sixth Principle of Technology Education

“Symbolic forms” is an important phrase here. In relationship to what I’ve been mulling over in this essay, it seems worth asking the question: what are the “symbolic forms” that information is encoded in in books versus the internet versus an LLM or chatbot? I’ll give it a shot. The book: words on a page, between covers. The book: can be held in one’s hands, given as a gift. Thrown against a wall in frustration. Ignored for years. The book: can gather dust. The internet: a website with links. The internet: multiple ways in with the eyes—video and text and photographs. The mouse and your finger working together to scroll. The touchscreen on your phone. The internet: portal to your wallet. The internet: jumbled space—so much of your logistical and imaginative and intellectual and capitalistic life rolled into one. You buy food and clothing and watch movies and catch up with friends and everything in between. But the “symbolic forms”? These massive companies—Facebook/Meta, Twitter/X, Google, etc.—they shape all these experiences, they gather the data on you. Surveillance has always been at the heart of the internet as a form. And with an LLM this extends. Chatbot: mirror to your desires? Spooler of text at command? Your personal sycophant-in-chief?

As I tease out what the “symbolic forms” of book versus internet versus LLM might be, I consider too the second part of Postman’s sentence: “Because of the symbolic forms in which information is encoded, different technologies have different intellectual and emotional biases.”

The bias of the book as a technology seems to be towards absorption, immersion. If you are reading a book and you resist absorption and immersion, you will probably put the book down, do something else. But the internet and the attendant technologies (social media, and now AI) that comprise it, encourage, rather than absorption, a kind of restlessness. Jumping here and there, with momentary frissons of emotion that lead to other momentary frissons of emotion. It’s hard to go on the internet (definitely on a social media platform) and simply “find the thing you’re looking for.” You don’t close up the browser with the same ease and finality that you close up a book. We finish books. We never finish living our online lives.

7. Because of the accessibility and speed of their information, different technologies have different political biases.

—Neil Postman’s Seventh Principle for Technology Education

It’s important to remind myself as I write these reflections that Neil Postman wrote these 10 principles in 1996, when the Internet was still a very young technology. At the time, at least as teenage me remembers it, there was a sense of this vast “openness” to the web. It seemed to be accessible to anyone, provided you had the means to connect to it. (“having the means to connect to it” is a pretty big caveat though, now that I’ve written that phrase out.) But in terms of “political bias,” the internet seemed, like books, to resemble a pretty deeply democratic technology. The passage of time has surely complicated such a simplistic understanding, and our current fascist American administration complicates that understanding even more. Trump and Co. have made great use of (and been used by) Silicon Valley titans who reveal an internet that is less and less a commons for public benefit and more and more a privatized engine for commerce flowing to particular companies—often the companies of the titans themselves.

When it comes to AI as a technology, the impacts on labor specifically are profoundly undemocratic. The emphasis of this technology on accessibility and speed has meant companies cutting the jobs of many people, and increasing the precarity and uncertainty for many more.

For my own particular labor—as a teacher, specifically as a teacher of reading and writing—I am struck by the ways in which educational technology’s weaving itself into the infrastructure of schools has muted teacher’s resistance to this technology. That is, since there are already many, many educational technologies that schools mandate teachers use on a daily basis, “folding in” this additional tech (generative AI) into other “Learning Management Systems,” as it has been folded in with Canvas, for instance, makes it harder for teachers to refuse the use of it, even when there are already studies suggesting prolonged use may do cognitive harm to young people. (Let me link you again to MIT’s June, 2025 study, “Your Brain on ChatGPT”)

8. Because of their physical form, different technologies have different sensory biases.

—Neil Postman’s Eighth Principle of Technology Education

I’m inclined to say the internet, the LLM, the chatbot, and the book are all in their way “biased” towards the visual. Though with each of these technologies there are important oral and auditory qualities, too. With the internet, there are so many videos benefiting equally from sound as sight, and these are of course aggregated by AI companies now as well. With books, we know there has been a boom of audio books recently and humans have often delighted in the act of reading things aloud. Still, the visual does seem like the primary sense here. So, if we take this principle along with #4, there does seem to be a real sense in which the internet and LLMs and chatbots are “warring” with books for our eyeballs’ attention.

I am no literacy expert. However, I’ve read and experienced enough in twenty years of teaching high school English and living a literary life to know that the kind of reading you do online or on your phone is often very different in quality than the kind you do with a book in your hand. As most people understand intuitively, the online kind of reading is more likely to lend itself to utilitarian or extractive modes (get what you need for the thing you’re doing and move one) rather than the immersive ones I mentioned earlier. And the kind of processing that LLMs and other AI models do, is of course not reading at all.

If you consider my insight in #6, about the ways the internet and the LLM interact with our attention in contrast to books, then it’s probably true that in the “war for our eyeballs” these technologies propose radically different ways of “seeing.”

9. Because of the conditions in which we attend to them, different technologies have different social biases.

—Neil Postman’s Ninth Principle of Technology Education

As you’ve noted in other pieces here, I am unapologetically reading generative AI through the very specific lens of a high school English teacher. So, for me, the “conditions” to use Postman’s word, relate specifically to the institution of the school, particularly the high school. In my experience and estimation, as it relates to high school, AI as a technology is biased towards atomization and conformity. Atomization, because the technology leads to hyper-individualized responses to the users’ prompting, and so has the social effect of lessening interactions with actual human beings (other students and teachers), thus weakening community bonds. And conformity, because use of LLMs encourage a replication of what has been done before, rather than the trial or testing of something new.

In addition, the mandate (coming from the very top of the United States Government) to integrate AI into all K-12 schools exacerbates this conforming effect: Teachers and students “refusing to play” the AI game could find themselves ostracized from a class activity or assignment (in the case of a student) unless the scaffolding and communication from the teacher is handled extremely thoughtfully, or (in the case of a teacher) ostracized from fellow faculty and administrators or outright fired for refusing to use the technology. In my estimation this situation fits hand-in-glove with Postman’s Seventh Principle: AI is uniquely well-suited to a powerful fascist government, the one we are experiencing now in the United States in 2026.

Postman himself noted in his long career reflecting on education that there are times when teaching should be a “conserving” activity (see his 1979 book, Teaching as a Conserving Activity) and times when it should be “subversive” (see his 1969 book, Teaching as a Subversive Activity). I’m no “Postman-whisperer” and don’t claim in this essay to speak for him. I do think, though, for those teachers aware of the fascist turn in our politics and the way it has deformed our classrooms and schools, subversion is a more appropriate path than conservation at this particular moment. Or, perhaps to put it in a more nuanced way, it is a moment to both conserve and subvert: conserve time-tested practices for learning (including the reading of actual books), and subvert the ill-conceived corporatization of our institutions (via, in one way, wholesale “integration” and incorporation of generative AI into everything).

10. Because of their technical and economic structures, different technologies have different content biases.

—Neil Postman’s Tenth Principle for Technology Education

Karen Hao has pointed out in her excellent book, Empire of AI, that the technology of generative AI does not necessitate the kind of hyperscaling done by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, nor the kind of “everything machines” like ChatGPT. In fact, in concluding Empire of AI, she offers the example of a Maori community indigenous to a region of New Zealand that is using generative AI—with the full and transparent consent of the community—to preserve a language that might otherwise have been lost. This kind of use and preservation is immensely valuable to that particular community and as an exemplar to all human beings. But while it is immensely valuable, it of course is not nearly as financially profitable. The “content bias,” again to use Postman’s terms, is against focused, limited-in-scale projects like this one and for “everything machines” like ChatGPT—a product that scrapes vast amounts of the internet and published human thought and writing (without permission) to feed its creators’ desire for profits and control.

Books, of course, aren’t “pure” either, when we consider the “content” between their covers. Many books have been and will continue to be written simply to sell copies. And most publishers (myself included) have a commercial interest in the books they put out into the world. We want the books to sell. But even the crassest, most commercialistic or sensationalistic writing is necessarily focused on a particular content area or topic, whether that’s celebrity gossip or how to make millions with sports gambling, or whatever. The “content bias” of print, then, while it isn’t necessarily tilted toward quality, is at least biased toward specificity, maybe even expertise. LLMs can certainly cannibalize this specificity and expertise (witness the already-mentioned massive theft of books by OpenAI and Anthropic) but the actual output of their machines is decidedly “mid” as Tressie McMillan Cottom has so memorably put it. The “voice “of the machine may attempt to imitate the writers it ingests but it doesn’t do anything new. While use of LLMs is provoking a scare for publishers like me, there is still the bedrock reality that actual readers don’t want to read writing produced by an LLM. They want human-produced writing, which they perceive as more valuable.

I noted in my last installment that as I have been revisiting Postman’s The End of Education, I have been listening to ’s wonderful podcast The American Vandal, which offers great insights into all of the “principles” touched on here, and in significant ways updates them to account for Edtech’s targeted incursions into schools and universities these past thirty years since Neil Postman’s book was published. Both Postman and Seybold share a profound distrust of the corporatization and financialization of so many of our civic institutions. Since I’m putting the two of these thinkers in conversation with each other in this series, I should note that Postman, at least in 1996, didn’t seem to see schools and universities as vulnerable to this process as Seybold does in 2026. Perhaps this is simply because these institutions in 2026 are much weaker after decades of being attacked? That may be, but I think it is also because Postman has a greater faith in what he calls the “American Experiment,” a myth (his word) about our national history which he finds helpful for schools, especially public schools, to propagate. This passage from The End of Education is representative:

“Public education does not serve a public. It creates a public. And in creating the right kind of public, the schools contribute toward strengthening the spiritual basis of the American Creed. That is how Jefferson understood it, how Horace Mann understood it, how John Dewey understood it, and in fact, there is no other way to understand it. The question is not, does or doesn’t public schooling create a public? The question is, what kind of public does it create?....The answer to this question has nothing to do with computers, with testing, with teacher accountability, and with the other details of managing schools. The right answer depends on two things, and two things alone: the existence of shared narratives and the capacity of such narratives to provide an inspired reason for schooling.”

Postman’s insight at the top of this section—that public education creates a public—is profound, as is his question about what might be the “right kind” of public. But (and I offer this “but” with some trepidation) I think the “American Creed,” as it relates to education, has always had some deep inequities baked in, and certainly ones that go back to Jefferson.

For the mass of Americans—and Jefferson wouldn’t speak against this—the purpose for education is that it is supposed to prepare citizens for the workforce. In modern parlance, that means it is a “pipeline” for the corporation, for business. This idea, which is anathema to folks like me (and Postman), is nonetheless present from the beginning with Jefferson, who though he may have venerated the ideal of a “citizen-scholar” for certain lucky and talented few, saw public education’s purpose as much more pragmatic for the rest of us. School, in America, was very often in practice a great sorting machine. This is the part of the “creed,” I suppose, that doesn’t get mentioned, or maybe is folded into a subordinate clause somewhere that you don’t pay much attention to. But it’s right there in Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of the Virginia,” first published in 1785, and quoted extensively in Harvard president James Bryant Conant’s 1940 essay, “Education for a Classless Society.” (I pull these dates to show the durability, and importance of Jefferson’s thinking. Conant in his commitment to standardization and standardized testing set the course for schooling that we continue to experience to this day.) Anyway here is the money quote from Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia,” where he turns his attention to schools and education:

“Another object of the revisal is, to diffuse knowledge more generally through the mass of the people. This bill proposes to lay off every county into small districts of five or six miles square, called hundreds, and in each of them to establish a school for teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. The tutor to be supported by the hundred, and every person in it entitled to send their children three years gratis, and as much longer as they please, paying for it. These schools to be under a visitor, who is annually to chuse the boy, of best genius in the school, of those whose parents are too poor to give them further education, and to send him forward to one of the grammar schools, of which twenty are proposed to be erected in different parts of the country, for teaching Greek, Latin, geography, and the higher branches of numerical arithmetic. Of the boys thus sent in any one year, trial is to be made at the grammar schools one or two years, and the best genius of the whole selected, and continued six years, and the residue dismissed. By this means twenty of the best geniusses will be raked from the rubbish annually, and be instructed, at the public expence, so far as the grammar schools go.” [Emphasis mine]

The central creed—and thanks to Michael Sandel’s excellent book on the topic for showing this connection between Jefferson and Conant—is meritocracy. It is not that all Americans are entitled to an equal quality education. It is that the ones (note all boys and men) that are tested and tried as the “best geniuses of the whole” are selected and then moved onward to the next stage. If you demonstrate aptitude for great things, then, and only then, you move on to receive benefits that help you achieve for greatness. As for the rest of the students, as Harvard President Conant put it in his 1940 essay, “Education for the Classless Society,” referring to the “Jeffersonian Tradition,” testing was the central way to handle the “horde of heterogenous students” that “descended” on secondary schools throughout the United States. Harvard became the birthplace of modern standardized testing, and Jefferson’s vision for education was part of the rationale for why that happened. Jefferson and Bryant Conant can help us understand too why the corporatized (branded) College Board and its suite of meritocratic “Advanced Placement” tests have come to dominate and set the conversation for what high school education is and can be. It also helps explains why, in recent years, and even months, the company has pivoted explicitly to “workforce preparation” in its AP course offerings (AP Business with Personal Finance) and even in the way it presents all of its courses.

How does all of this connect to AI and schools, specifically in an American context, in 2026? I don’t think it is an accident that at the very same time Trump is pushing AI adoption in all public schools, kindergarten through and 12^th grade, that there is a very popular and very privatized “Classical Schools” movement that offers young people a mostly tech-free education. This movement has even created its own rival standardized alternative to the College Board’s SAT—the “Classic Learning Test.” I also don’t think it’s an accident that some of the folks active in the shaping of this privatized alternative to public schools and schooling and who serve on boards for this movement, are actively looking to dismantle and hollow out education as a public good. For an exemplar of this, see Chris Rufo’s aptly titled address, “Laying Siege to the Institutions” made at Hillsdale College in April, 2022. One such institution he his cohorts have openly “laid siege to” is public education, from kindergarten through twenty-second grade. The gloves, and the masks, are off.

I will be the first to tell you that I am someone who benefited greatly from a “great books” education. And incidentally, my alma mater, University of Dallas, has recently made headlines as the first U.S. university to award credit for the Classic Learning Test and its offshoots. I see the value in this kind of learning: reading great books with good teachers, talking about them at the seminar table. It’s called “classic” for a reason—this transformational and important work and has proved valuable to human beings for centuries, maybe even millennia. And I do wish more public schools and universities would commit to reading “great books” (determine that “greatness” how you will with consultation of your community) and talking about them at the seminar table.

At the same time, as Chris Rufo’s influence eloquently testifies, it cannot be denied that the “Classical Schools” movement is flourishing at the same time, and in part because of Trump’s fascist government. The movement fits hand in glove with Trump’s1776 Project, with his “Make America Great Again” vision, and with his vision of privatizing everything under the sun—including education. His administration’s new school voucher program is very good for Classical Schools, and for any private school. It is also working to hollow out public education.

I myself teach at a private high school, and so my own institution would theoretically benefit from my state’s “opting in” (it hasn’t yet) to Trump’s voucher program. Speaking for myself, though, I oppose the use of public funds for private education. And as a teacher who has witnessed firsthand in 2026 how this fascist federal government utilized public funds to terrorize citizens of the city where I teach through a monthslong ICE occupation, I would encourage other private school teachers, especially ones who teach at Catholic schools, to stand in solidarity against these policies. After all, the same “Big Beautiful Bill” that earmarked all that money for vouchers also ramped up spending for ICE.

Solidarity can’t just be a sentence in a document, something that sounds nice but we would never consider acting on. I’ve been thinking about solidarity a lot this past week as I’ve been writing this piece, finishing up another school year as a teacher, and now reading Pope Leo’s new teaching document on AI, Magnifica Humanitas.

Throughout Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo makes it clear that we must view this technology through the lens of what he calls the “social doctrine” of the Catholic Church (he begins the encyclical with a pretty robust survey/summary of the last 130 years of Catholic Social Teaching from Pope Leo XIII all the way up to John Paul II, Benedict XVI and his immediate predecessor, Francis). Seeing through that lens of social doctrine for Leo means seeing this technology through the eyes of its victims.

Pope Leo would clearly co-sign Postman’s first two principles of technology education: “The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population. This means that every new technology benefits some and harms others.” Pope Leo sees and names in this document that the current version of generative AI being deployed around the world has been built on the backs of the poor in exploitative ways (see paragraph 173), constitutes the threat of a “new colonialism” (see paragraph 178, is the Pope reading Karen Hao??), and is being weaponized to wage wars (see Chapter 5, 182-227). This is moving, and prophetic (in the biblical sense), and I would hope inspires not just Catholics but all people of good will to take action in big and small ways to “join the conversation” around how to use (and not use) this technology in responsible ways. And if the table where the conversations are happening is not being opened in an inclusive and democratic way, demanding the table, the conversation be re-shaped.

For Catholics like me there is also the awkward but I think necessary obligation to name as Pope Leo does in Magnifica Humanitas that the call towards this social responsibility, this solidarity, is not particularly new. Since Pope Leo XIII and Rerum Novarum in 1891, the Catholic Church has taught, for instance, that the dignity of the human worker must be respected, and that all workers must be free to form unions, to give a particular example that touch specifically on having a more “inclusive and democratic” conversations about AI. Because of course, there are many leaders—especially corporate ones—who don’t want these conversations. As Audrey Watters aptly puts it: “AI isn’t coming for your jobs. Your bosses are coming for your jobs.” If you are an individual, atomized worker sitting across the table from a manager who wants to automate everything with AI, you’re out of luck, and probably out of a job. If you’re collectively bargaining with a union supporting you, you have power.

I wrote a few paragraphs earlier “Solidarity can’t just be a sentence in a document, something that sounds nice but we would never consider acting on.” The sentences of Magnifica Humanitas about labor, unions, and workers have some bite, oblige us to do something. Pope Leo writes, “Labor unions, which the Church has consistently supported, are called upon to be open to new types of employment and the corresponding needs of workers, in order to represent and defend them.” (Par. 155). And then continues a few sentences later to say, “every introduction of automation and AI should be accompanied by verifiable measures to protect the employment, retraining and participation of workers. In this way, technology will be oriented toward freeing up human time and capabilities, rather than producing exclusion.” (Par. 156) Again, if these sayings by the leader of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church are to have any meaning, leaders of local Catholic institutions will have to actually put them into practice.

It’s all fine and good for Catholic leaders in the United States left, right, and center to laud Pope Leo’s message on AI and reiteration of support of the dignity of workers (as they have been doing these past few weeks). But questions do arise. For instance, why in the United States, a country with nearly 150,000 K-12 Catholic schoolteachers do only a few thousand (around 5% at most) enjoy the protections of a union? Why, when faculty members at Catholic universities organize in solidarity to support the most precarious of teachers—adjunct instructors—do leaders of those universities move swiftly to crush said organizing? (For a recent example of Catholic union-busting, read this 2024 National Catholic Reporter piece about Marquette University’s move to “squash unionizing efforts.”)

There are other ways. Three distinct unions for Rutgers University—representing as Academe Magazine put it, “tenured and tenure-track faculty, non-tenure-track instructors, librarians, adjuncts, graduate workers, postdoctoral students, researchers, and clinicians,” struck together in April, 2023. This meant actual solidarity—folks with more privilege and prestige standing in line with those more precarious. As a result, Rutgers’ adjuncts, while still enduring some of the same slings and arrows as others across the country, made historic gains: after collective bargaining, their minimum pay per credit hour is now $2,777 per credit hour, more than twice the national average of $1,166. (To be clear that increase is inadequate, but it is an achievement, step in the right direction.)

I mention the Catholic/Pope Leo connection in closing this essay because it highlights common ground that folks have with regard to AI that exists across typical left/right political divides in the US. We now know that resistance to building data centers to fuel the AI boom cuts across party lines. I would hazard a guess that “AI-fying” K-12 (or K-22) public schools as Trump has mandated also has broad resistance. The problem, of course, is solidarity. Many conservatives are now sending their children to private schools, a number of those (1500 strong and growing) are “classical schools.” For the classical schools, certainly, AI is not really an issue. You don’t do ChatGPT with Plato or Dante or Euclidean and Non-Euclidean Geometry. And you’ll have plenty of support if you just want to ignore Trump’s Executive Order nonsense on AI. A privilege your public school counterparts don’t enjoy.

As I was finishing this essay up last night, I just read a very thoughtful and incisive guest essay at ’s “The Classical Ed Review” on the difference between “Artificial and Actual Intelligence” by director of the Director of Curriculum and Academic Resources for the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education (ICLE), Jake Tawney. One of Tawney’s insights here, that a “neural network” like artificial intelligence can’t “pursue truth, possess understanding,” or “apprehend essences” draws on Aquinas, but also on Neil Postman. Consider this helpful gem on how use of a technology shapes the user:

“Per McLuhan and Postman, the use of a technology will form us not merely by its misuse, but also by its mere use. Our interaction with A.I. will continue to shape the way that we think about intelligence itself, and the consequence may be that more and more people will come to define intelligence in terms of how a neural network functions.”

This is wisdom, for sure. For my part, I want to elevate and engage voices like Tawney’s. But also challenge them. In the political context we find ourselves in, where privatized alternatives are not simply proposed but done so with the intent to “lay siege” to public goods like education, it is not adequate only to make a case for “liberal education” in your own house. If your neighbor’s house and prospects are being laid waste, and you’re benefiting as a result, you have a responsibility to them as well. I’m not 100 % sure what is entailed by that responsibility in the long term, but in the short term it at least means meaningful dialogue with public school educators and leaders (and I think that would go vice versa for public school folks reading this), and consideration of what “movement growth” for your group might mean for the larger population as a whole.

NOTES:

-As I’ve mentioned, all of American Vandal is worth your time, but particularly for those interested in issues surrounding educational labor and AI, I recommend the episode “Theory at the Bargaining Table” with Anna Kornbluh and Dominique Baker. It’s focused primarily on issues that apply to higher education but certainly can be adapted for K-12 contexts.

-Another thinker whose work I’ve been drawing on these past months has been , whose series of lectures, now in book form, The Age of Insecurity, makes a compelling case for solidarity and a public commons. And her chapter/lecture “Consumed by Curiosity” focuses thoughtfully and specifically on education. And her May, 2025 reflection on what a “universal right to education” might mean in the AI age is beautifully put.

Neil Postman proposed a course on “technological education” in his 1996 book The End of Education. A major part of the “course content” for such a class would be study, discussion, and consideration of ten principles of technological change that Postman posited in the book. All of them are worthy of study, but I’d like to spend some time close-reading “#3,” which offered some particular challenges to me as I considered my own approach to generative AI. Here is the full quote of this principle of Postman’s:

“Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Like language itself, a technology predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and accomplishments and to subordinate others. Every technology has a philosophy, which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards.”

How would I apply this principle to genAI as a technology, specifically to Large Language Models (LLMs)? And what is the “powerful idea” that is “embedded” in an LLM like ChatGPT?

When I type in the question—as I have conditioned myself to do—into Google, “What is a Large Language Model,” I see as the first response in the “AI Overview” that an LLM is “a type of AI designed to understand, generate, and process human language by predicting the next most probable word in a sequence. Built on transformer architectures and trained on massive, varied datasets, these models use billions of parameters to recognize patterns, allowing them to summarize, translate, generate text, and act as chatbots.” The “overview” notes on the right side the “sources” for this definition as Wikipedia, the University of Arizona, and IBM Corporation. One powerful idea embedded in an LLM would seem from this definition to be the sheer breadth of data it has its disposal: it has been trained on “massive, varied datasets,” and the models use “billions of parameters.” Paired with this idea of the breadth of data encompassed would seem to be the idea of massive output—the ability of an LLM to “predict the next most probable word in a sequence” in the form of summary, translation, and chatbot response.

To stick with Postman’s language, what “perspectives and accomplishment” are LLMs “predisposed to favor and value”? And which are they predisposed to “subordinate”? Efficiency comes to my mind right away as an accomplishment that LLMs value highly. Tasks that previously took large amounts of time can now be done in seconds. Productivity goes hand in hand with this value: Because LLMs can do so much and so quickly, they allow users and companies the capacity to produce more, and with less human labor. What is subordinated, then, in this embrace of LLMs is the distinctive value of human labor, which is often messy, has fits and starts, and sometimes goes nowhere at all before it arrives at its destination.

The product—the thing you want accomplished when you set out to start your labor—is valued immensely by the LLM and by LLM users. Process—how a human being labors to create or make the product is devalued steeply, so steeply in fact that many human beings are already losing their jobs in the face of this technological revolution.

How do LLMs “make people use their minds and their bodies”? And how does it, again to use Postman’s language, “codify the world”? LLM users value speed and efficiency. We learn to think fast(er), and not be as concerned as in previous eras where in particular the information or answers we have gotten have come from. For instance, in the example above, where I “cited” the AI Overview from Google, I didn’t think to parse out what part of the definition of an LLM came from Wikipedia, what from the University of Arizona, and what from IBM Corporation. You would have been right to question my quick acceptance of the received “definition.” After all, these are very different sources, with very different filters and biases. As we can see from this small example, the nature of a basic internet search has now changed, and not for the better. (It has become “enshittified,” to use Cory Doctorow’s phrase.)

The question of what LLMs make us do with our bodies is an intriguing and interesting one, and one I confess I haven’t thought much on up until this moment. It would be foolish to assert that there are no cases where LLMs can benefit people’s physical health in ways previously unavailable. Over the summer I listened to a fascinating interview with a Kyle Keane on NPR about ways AI is being used to help people with disabilities. In fact, Keane offered specific cases of ways the technology substantially improved his own life: He has found that assistive technologies using AI have been a huge aid in helping him live with his blindness.

“I like to use phones when I get confused,” Keane noted in the interview. “I use cameras to help navigate me around the world. And so every once in a while if I want to do route planning and I can take a photo and I can say, Hey, I wanna get to this fabric store on the other side of the street and it says, okay, walk to the blue car and I can’t see blue. And I have to say, okay, is that to the left or the right of the giant truck that I hear? And if it tells me the wrong thing, I’m gonna head off in the wrong direction. So I need the systems to be able to report out with really specific and accurate information, the directionality of things, so that I can orient myself relative to the information that it’s building.”

Clearly, this “orienting” Keane describes is an incredible gift to a person unable to see. And it requires the massive datasets (of visual images here rather than text) described in our definition above. What does this technology make Keane do with his body, to use Postman’s language again? I think the answer to this question is pretty similar, actually to what LLMs make everybody do with their bodies when interacting with a bot: Wait for the answer. LLMs make human bodies wait for the answer before they make a decision and continue with what they are planning to do with their time. For someone in Keane’s position, who has embraced the new technologies, this waiting is one of great consequence:

“…if I’m reliant on a technology and it’s not actually going to be stably held as a priority inside of a company that I’m relying on to use their technology, they can take that feature away at any moment, right? That’s not just an inconvenience. Sometimes that is, can be life or death. If I’m out on the road and somebody suddenly switches off a capability that I’ve used to travel the world, and I do travel quite a bit and I use lots of technology to do it. The reason I have so much technology is because I have backups upon backups of different types of adaptations that will allow me to get out of any given scenario because I don’t feel I can rely on anything except my own training as a human and knowing that I can recover from different scenarios.”

Keane’s experiential knowledge of assistive technologies is an important check for me, or anyone really, who is critical of generative AI. Whether we like it or not, the technology has become interwoven in many people’s lives. They’ve come to count on it. And so the question of how to make the (mostly) for-profit companies who are responsible for the tech accountable to the public who are using their technology—that is incredibly important. At the same time, I don’t want to lose the other aspect of this thread, the idea that for all people, one of the key things LLMs make us do with our bodies is “wait for an answer.” Internet searches, now more and more “powered by AI,” are a common example: We pose a question or type something into a search bar, then wait to see what comes up on the screen, so we can determine our next course of action. The human face, hovering over that screen (big or small), is an iconic bodily representation of what our bodies are doing in relationship to this technology.

If the world, for an LLM, is one vast dataset, then we, too, our recorded words and actions, are part of that dataset. What is on the surface of these actions—what can be processed by the machine sorting the data—is what is “amplified,” to use Postman’s terms. What is below the surface—the uncategorizable, qualitative experience of living—that cannot be captured by sorting or processing, but it is that which makes us human.

I wrote the above reflection, mostly in July of last summer, after reading Postman’s End of Education. I’m sharing the whole of the “10 Principles of Technological Change” below, and, since a lot’s changed in the past year with regard to this technology, and its application and “embeddedness” in classrooms in particular, I am going to offer a kind of “close reading” of each of the other nine in a follow-up post that I’ve been working on this spring, especially thinking of my work as an English teacher. In the meantime, reader, I’d love to hear your thoughts on these principles:

1. All technological change is a Faustian bargain. For every advantage a new technology offers, there is a corresponding disadvantage.

2. The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population. This means that every new technology benefits some and harms others.

3. Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Like language itself, a technology predisposes us to favour and value certain perspectives and accomplishments and to subordinate others. Every technology has a philosophy, which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards.

4. A new technology usually makes war against an old technology. It competes with it for time, attention, money, prestige and a “worldview”.

5. Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. A new technology does not merely add something; it changes everything.

6. Because of the symbolic forms in which information is encoded, different technologies have different intellectual and emotional biases.

7. Because of the accessibility and speed of their information, different technologies have different political biases.

8. Because of their physical form, different technologies have different sensory biases.

9. Because of the conditions in which we attend to them, different technologies have different social biases.

10. Because of their technical and economic structure, different technologies have different content biases.

NOTES:

-When I wrote this piece last summer, I hadn’t listened or engaged too deeply with Matt Seybold’s brilliant podcast . I’ve remedied that this past year and have done some from pretty deep dive into the “back issues” of the Vandal, which I think are indispensable in coming to terms with this particular iteration of, as he might put it, “EdTech incursion” into the classroom. My follow-up piece, “part 2 of 2,” is indebted to and in conversation with Matt’s work. A good introduction to him, in regard to this reflection specifically, is his piece “Against Technofeudal Education.”

-For the English teacher readers reading this post, it’s worth noting that the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) recently released a document, informed by conversations and meetings with a number of notable and respected English teachers on “Guiding Responsible Classroom AI Use.” I have to say, along with other teacher/writers ( and have a little BlueSky thread on it that I enjoyed and contributed to), that I was pretty disappointed by this document’s lack of any substantive critique of AI use in schools. As well as by its assumption that incorporation of AI into classrooms (specifically English classrooms) is a foregone conclusion. Their explicit language in the document is “where and how” to use the technology—never “whether” such a use would be worthwhile in the first place. (And many teachers, myself included, don’t find much use for generative AI at present.) But that’s my critique. Read the document for yourself. Whatever you think of it, it will have consequence on teaching and learning in the year ahead, especially for ELA teachers.

-Speaking of other consequential documents on AI, Pope Leo XIV is reportedly releasing his first papal encyclical, Magnifica humanitatis, very soon. Keep an eye on The Holy See’s website, so you can read his full analysis, unfiltered. Considering Pope Leo’s choice of name (after Pope Leo XIII) and the reported decision to time this document publication with the anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum, a document specifically dedicated to the dignity of workers, I’ll be very interested to see his insights on AI and labor in particular.

-Finally, as I noted earlier, One Subject Press celebrated one year as a publishing company over the weekend, May 15, at Inkwell Booksellers in Northeast Minneapolis. It was a wonderful event. And huge shout-out to Inkwell for their generosity as a host. I read from Good Teaching: A Provocation, local poet Greg Watson from his wonderful book of poems, The Shape of Your Absence, and another terrific local poet, Suzanne Swanson, from her forthcoming book, A Whole Life Left. We also had a lovely write-up in local MPR on the event and our press here. (Shout out to poet and mentor Deborah Keenan for her “blurbing” of our publishing company. It meant so much.)

I’ve been listening, on repeat, to Andrew Bird’s album, My Finest Work Yet, this past month. Every song is a gem, but the line above, from “Archipelago,” has hit especially hard. Our enemies are what make us whole: I feel this, in my bones, to be true. But how can it be so? And how can I be open to this truth working in my own life? How can I manifest it with my own words and actions?

So I don’t spin off the rails into a sermon of my own straightaway, let me ground my thinking in the song itself, or at least in the lyrics of the song, which I realize is not the same thing as the song, a masterpiece linked here, which I encourage you, dear reader, to check out now before reading further. (The close reader of this Substack will also note that this consideration of enemies is a recurrent one for me—I published another essay studying Wendell Berry’s poem “Enemies” in March, and which I think is definitely in conversation with Bird’s song.)

But to “Archipelago.” The title, it seems to me, and the other island-like terminology riffed on later in the song (“atoll”) are alluding to that classic John Donne line from one of his sermons: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” In this song Bird seems to be singing and writing to that same deep truth Donne saw all those years back—we humans, whether we want to be or not, are intimately “involved” (Donne’s word) with each other. “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls,” Donne writes later in the same sermon. “It tolls for thee.”

But I think Bird is doing more than simply “updating” Donne’s sermon for the 21^st century, though that’s surely an inspiration. Take a look at the first verse of Bird’s “Archipelago”:

What if one day we just refused to play?
With no one to hate, they’d be out of a job.
You’ve gone off script, you just can’t walk away
Leave us naked, fleeced, and racked with sobs.

Hating, and the indiscriminate anger that fuels that hating, is of course big money for a number of very rich people. And “refusing to play” that game of hating—going “off script” as Bird puts it—would put those big rollers “out of a job.”

But the last two lines of that verse are tricky. If you agree with what I see as the logic of this stanza (and song) that “going off script” means refusing hatred, then those last two lines seem to point to the consequences for the person who refuses. Which is total and complete vulnerability. Hanging in there (“you just can’t walk away”) with your enemy and not hating them has the potential to leave you (us) “naked, fleeced, and racked with sobs.”

Songs hit home at different times and for different reasons. And the songwriters themselves hear their own music in different ways when they play their songs for different audiences, and in different times. Here’s Bird, writing about “Archipelago” in January of this year, on his Substack, accompanied by a solo recording of the song:

“I wrote this song somewhere around 2016-2017. I think I was trying to see what was happening in our country from a different angle, instead of contributing to the already noisy scrum. Nothing will piss off an ignorant person more than saying ‘I’m not mad at you.’ They’re thinking, ‘Wait what? You’re taking away my whole worldview that keeps me from facing my own sad existence.’

We are so unwell as a people that we seek to be whole through hate and violence.”

Somehow when I’d first read this post a few weeks ago, I’d failed to recognize the connection between the time stamp (January 15, 2026) of the post and the clear allusion (repetition) of Renee Good’s words before her murder at the hands of an ICE agent: “I’m not mad at you.”

Watching and hearing Bird perform his solo version for this Substack post I am struck by the irreducibility of this song—how inextricably wed the lyrics are to the violin and guitar and the whistling (of course there is whistling; it’s Andrew Bird, after all.)

And so, in light of realizing this irreducibility, I’m loathe to do much more “close reading” of one part of the song (lyrics) apart from the whole (voice, instrumentation, etc.).

So I’ll simply recommend the masterpiece to you, written and composed in the heat of one crisis, to be heard afresh in light of another.

Thank you, Andrew Bird.

NOTES:

-In my parish Bible study last month, we were studying and discussing Walter Wink’s wise and insightful exegesis of Matthew 5, and watching his lecture, “Nonviolence for the Violent”. As the group members pointed out, there were many resonances between the Roman occupation that was a reality for Jesus’ original listeners and the Federal ICE occupation in Minneapolis/Saint Paul where we live. I quote from the near the end of that lecture in the video, but every minute of it is worthy of greater study (and application.) Transcript can be found here.

-For local readers of this blog, I wanted to share again that One Subject Press will be celebrating its one-year anniversary as a company on May 15, 6-8 pm at wonderful local bookstore, Inkwell Booksellers in Northeast Minneapolis. I’ll be reading from Good Teaching: A Provocation, and other (local) One Subject Press authors will be reading from their work—and many books will be available to you. Click here for more details, and respond to this email if you’re planning on coming!

What a gift it has been to get to know Father Stan Chu Ilo through the editing of this book, Dilexi te: A Church Formed by Love. And what a gift, too, to get to know better the thinking and vision of Pope Leo XIV through close study of his apostolic exhortation, Dilexi te. As I have done with some of the other One Subject Press releases this year, I thought one of the best ways to introduce this book to readers would be via conversation with (one of) its authors, Father Stan, who wrote the powerful introduction, commentary, and leadership guide for applying the wisdom of Dilexi te to our lives, and the life of the larger church. Below is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation the two of us had last Saturday morning, April 18, 2026.

Zach Czaia
Greetings and welcome back to Teacher/Poet. We have a special Teacher/Poet episode today. As you’ve noticed on this channel, we have been featuring the work of One Subject Press and its authors for publication. We’ve got today the author of Dilexi te: A Church Formed by Love. (I should say one of the authors because the primary author of Dilexi te is, of course, Pope Leo XIV.)

We have Father Stan Chu Ilo here today. I’m going to give a little background on Father Stan and who he is. And then we’re going to jump right into a discussion of this amazing book. Before I do that, I just want to say thank you, Father Stan, for being on the program.

Fr Stan Chu Ilo
Thank you very much, Zach. It’s good to be here.

Zach Czaia
So this is unique for me as a publisher, getting to re-encounter the book afresh. I’m going to be reading from the text a little bit. As a fun way to introduce Father Stan, I’m just going to read from the back of the book [the “About the Author” page.] And then we’re going to jump into some questions. [Quoting “About the Author” page]: “Father Stan Chu Ilo is a Catholic priest of Agwa diocese, Nigeria. He is a senior research professor, Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology at DePaul University, the Coordinating Servant of the Pan-African Catholic Theological and Pastoral Network, PACT-PAN”—we might talk a little bit about that later in this conversation—”the director of the Church of the Sheaves: Equipping the Saints for Mission as Gift Exchange, a project of the Dicastery for Evangelization, and the chaplain of the St. Anne’s Igbo Catholic Mission Apostolate of Chicago and the environs.” And not only that, “he’s the author and editor of more than 22 books and publisher and editor in chief of Voice Afrique, Catholic news analysis from Africa by Africans for Africa and the world.” I think I got it all, Father Stan! So delighted to have you here.

Fr Stan Chu Ilo
Thank you very much.

Zach Czaia
I think a great way to start this conversation would be to talk about Saint Augustine. You are a theologian and definitely Augustine has been an important theologian for you. Can you talk about why he’s so important to understanding Pope Leo XIV and why [his theology] is a really helpful lens for this book?

Fr Stan Chu Ilo
Yeah, thank you very much, Zach. When Pope Leo was elected and in the first speech he gave to the world, he called himself a son of St. Augustine. And he belongs to the Augustinian order, and he was a two-term leader of the Augustinian order.

We know that, for the Augustinians, just like Saint Augustine, community matters a lot. The church. But also Augustine was very concerned with what you might call the saeculum, which eventually today we talk about the “secular world,” but for Augustine there is no separation really.

Rather, what makes that separation is the love that we pursue. So, if everything is ordered toward love, then the saeculum is suffused with the sacred. Actually, because of the way he understood the incarnation, the way he understood the human person, you know—in the Confessions, he says and several times repeated, “God is closer to me than I am to myself.” And how is that possible? You know the famous quote that we attribute to him, from The Confessions: “You have made us for yourself and our lives are restless until our soul rests in you.” Now that tells you how Augustine understands the human person and also human culture. So if you say, “God is closer to me than I am to myself,” then the human person, or persons, make up society. Then the incarnation becomes really the center of history. But this center of history is around love.

So when the Roman Empire collapsed, which was what led Augustine to write The City of God, the Romans were blaming Christianity to say, “Well, up until now, we Romans, we worshiped our own gods. The gods defended Rome. And now we’ve embraced Christianity and this huge civilization collapsed.” So, they say, it’s the Christian God that is culpable, couldn’t defend the empire.

And that’s why Augustine wrote The City of God. To say, no, it is not that God did not defend the city or the empire. A civilization stands or falls by the loves of the citizens. The Romans loved themselves, and forgot God. They forgot their neighbors. So an empire, a society is built on what? Justice. And a city without justice is as good as a band of armed robbers. So it is the love then. How does, then, the love distinguish the City of God that is the saeculum ordered by love? Love of God to the forgetfulness of one’s neighbor. Love of God to the forgetfulness of yourself. You see, that’s the way. But then in the City of Man and the city of chaos, of disordered love, it is love of the self to the forgetfulness of everything. So it’s driven by greed, selfishness, and pride of self. Those are the signs of this disordered love and that’s what Jesus conquered. Greed and selfishness—by giving his life on the cross. Pride of self by emptying himself to be born like one, like us.

So this really is, if you want to understand the foundation of Pope Leo, the foundation of Dilexi te— it’s actually: how can we build a new civilization of love where we are selfless, we are humble, and we empty ourselves? And it is by emptying ourselves like Francis [says in] that famous prayer: “it is in dying that we are reborn. In giving, we receive.” This what I call in the book the hermeneutics of reversal. Because the order of history in the world today is that you manipulate, make the poor expendable. And that’s the City of Man. That is the City of Chaos. That is what led to the decline of the Roman civilization and the collapse of that civilization. And in our own time, I think that could also bring about the collapse of…the American Empire or the global order…[These] must be ordered by love.

Zach Czaia
That’s profound and thank you so much for that, Father Stan. I think one of the things that really resonates with me about the way you’re talking about love is it cuts against the grain of kind of a modern Western conception, which is so individualistic and atomizing in many ways. And this idea that I hear you talking about here and, definitely also in the book as well, is about sort of a reordering of love.

[Hearing you just now] made me think of a passage from your book. I was rereading the text this morning and I want to read the passage aloud for you now. It’s from your chapter “Reading Dilexi te with Saint Augustine.” So listeners can hear both the text of Pope Leo and you.

And a little background before I read: this book includes the full Apostolic Exhortation of Pope Leo and then Father Stan has two introductory essays. [“Introduction: An African Reading of Dilexi te for the World Church,” and “Reading Dilexi te with Saint Augustine.] And then interwoven are reflection questions throughout the book. So this is from the introductory essay, “Reading Dilexi te with Saint Augustine.” So we start with you quoting Pope Leo from the document itself: “In paragraph 114, Pope Leo warns the church against, ‘the temptation to moralize poverty and to see the poor as authors of their misfortune. rather than bearers of a suffering they call us for solidarity and conversion.’ And then you write, ‘With this concise and unsettling diagnosis, he exposes one of the deepest wounds of modern civilization and one of the most enduring sins of Christian societies, the persistent confusion between economic condition and moral worth. When Christians judge the poor instead of loving them, they not only betray the gospel, but invert its meaning. The gospel that should liberate becomes a tool of condemnation. The victims of injustice become its accused.’”

One of the things I’m really struck, both by Pope Leo and by you is, is [that] you’re willing to talk about economics and structural systems [in this context.]. And I wonder if you might expand on this for listeners a little bit. Because that, that to me, was very powerful throughout your writing and Pope Leo’s [in this book].

Fr Stan Chu Ilo
Yeah, this is very true in my own life and in the work I do because, you know, I always tell myself: Preacher, preach to yourself. And when I write…I’m addressing, I’m addressing me. I’m addressing the gospel. First of all, I must read it.

So this is what I have noticed as an African in my humanitarian work. So I want to begin from that perspective where the people see—a lot of people see—Africans as we are unfortunate. The problem is corruption. The problem is a civil war. The poverty in Africa, rather than being seen for what it is as a global structure of sin, injustice, and evil. Rather than see what Pope Francis called economies that kill, we have this “winner takes all economy,” neoliberal capitalism, without morality, without love, without compassion and justice…[I]t becomes, really, a structure of destruction. Our economic systems, our social policies, our trade policies: these are all, if you put all of them together—John Paul II in Sollicitudo re socialis, you know, discusses this very elaborately—the social sins. Structures of sins, which you know in Catholic social teaching, if you draw that even wider, is the structure of violence. Because poverty cannot promote a just, peaceful, and harmonious society, where the majority of the people are wallowing in, swimming in the dirty waters of poverty and suffering.

I see this every day. I see it in analysis when people talk about me, my world, my culture. I see it in the United States when people talk about African Americans. And I don’t distinguish myself. They are me and I am there. They look like me. We are all in this together. People see African Americans, sometimes you see that in discussion about social policy in the United States to say, “Oh well, this is not a welfare state. These guys are the authors of their own misfortune. Oh, it’s because of the drugs, it’s because sexual promiscuity. They are lazy.” So it’s really the same thing.

If you bring it in spirituality as a priest, when you see a sinner come to you at a confessional, you know, I say, “It could have been me.” One of the most public expressions of this was done by Pope Francis. You know, the last place he visited was the prison. The day before, when he was discharged from the hospital, a few days before he died, he went to the prison and said, “Anytime I come here, I say it could have been me. Why them and not me?” So that’s, if you like, the foundation of this thought that you also find in Dilexi te, that we should stop making poor people feel bad so much about themselves. We should begin to ask the question: Why are they poor?

I put it the other way: What kind of society are we that we have people suffering this way among us? Rather than say: What kind of people are these people to be suffering this way? And when we do that, it then brings together what you find consistent in Dilexi te as well as in Catholic social teaching. That we have to hold together charity and justice. [Brazilian bishop] Hélder Câmara, you know, said, “When I feed the poor, I’m charitable. They call me a Christian. But when I ask why are they poor? they say I am a communist.”

So it is this strong tie, this connection between charity and justice, in the section that you just read. And that goes back again to Saint Augustine, you know. Because he’s not about just helping the poor, but he says, “What society, what kind of society are we in?” One of his sermons says that, so the money that you have in your pocket, does not belong to you. It belongs to everyone. And that takes us to the Acts of the Apostles because everything really in these dynamics, in Catholic social teaching, Catholic theology, broadly conceived, Catholic doctrine, the spiritual works of mercy—they are all connected. It goes back to the early Church that says there was no one among them who suffered because everyone among them who needed something was supported through the collective contribution of the community. And that’s why people said, you know, one of the earliest testimonies of non-Christians for Christians—positive testimony—was “See how they love each other. That they are prepared to die for themselves.”

I think that we should—the world should—Christians and people of all faiths, because you find zakat in Islam or in Judaism or in Buddhism, Hinduism—charity is central to all the religions. So we should actually take this seriously and should be warriors like Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa said, you know, that in the world we have succeeded in finding the cure for many diseases, advancement in technology. Now we can go around the moon, Artemis Two. But, I mean, she didn’t say that [about Artemis Two], this is me adding that. But that the greatest shock, the greatest scandal in her own thinking is that we have not found, as humanity, an answer, a cure to the fact that there are so many of our brothers and sisters who feel unloved. So I always say, you know, if I was to advise Pope Leo, the next synod should be a synod on how to love each other.

Zach Czaia
That’s beautiful. Wow. So much so much to chew on there. I’m really moved as I continue to hear you just in terms of what I would consider a deep balance [between justice and love.] It’s not the case that we can’t thirst for justice and love one another deeply. And I love the way you flip [this question]: should we be questioning the poor or should we be questioning the systems that are creating the poor?

I think that’s profound. Throughout the book, you know, which comes from this African lens that you’re talking about, you are, I would say questioning, skeptical of this sort of paradigm of, you know, Africa as holding out its hands for the beneficence of Western nations. And you’re saying, “No, the African people have agency.” Right? And just thinking about that African lens, I wondered if you might talk a little bit about how, so far, you’ve experienced Dilexi te being received in Africa and African countries. I think that would, that’d be really helpful, especially with, what we’ve seen in the news. And I know you’ve been talking with various outlets about Pope Leo’s 10-day visit. And we’re recording this April 18th. [Pope Leo’s Apostolic Journey was from April 13 to 23.] So he’s in the midst of that, but I’d love for you to speak to some of that.

Fr Stan Chu Ilo
Thank you very much, Zach. I think that I always approach analysis of Africa through my theory of total picture approach. That’s total picture approach method. That’s what I propose, which is really my appropriation of the church’s own method. When we study theology, Catholic theology, we talk about the nexus mysteriorum. That all the mysteries are interconnected. Or if you bring it even to the Trinitarian model, again, you find the pericoresis: God the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, they’re so interconnected. Interconnected: They work together, and this working together is the dynamism that gives life to the world. So that’s how I come to Africa. Because sometimes people look at symptoms. They don’t look at the bigger picture. So when you look at the bigger picture, what you see in Africa is not a bunch of unfortunate folks who are caught in a trap of poverty and social miasma out of which they don’t know how to escape. This is how sometimes they frame the continent. But I see assets. So I have pressed and continue to push for what I call an asset-based approach to understanding and engaging Africa, not only in the church but in the wider political, social, or economic sphere. That means what is working for people? How can we get more of it? Because people, you know, the resilience of African society amidst this very catastrophic socio-economic global structure, the capacity of the people to bounce back, this resilience is a very important attribute that we must build on. A society that has witnessed multiple iterations of unjust structures and interventions, slavery, colonialism, apartheid, ongoing racism, globalization, you know, the crisis of modernity. Modernity told Africans a lie.

When [people] talk about the convergence, convergence towards what? You have this “U curve” that they say, as you democratize, as you embrace Western economic orthodoxies, then you become, there’ll be a “convergent” world where there is an equalization and equality, the realization of the common good for everyone.

This is really what Christianity, I think, why what I call Pope Leo’s “Africa First Policy” is very significant. Because he sees Africa not as a problem to be solved, but as a people with assets to be harvested, to be harnessed. He sees Africa not as broken history, but he sees Africa as an emerging, constantly evolving history. Where God is really revealing to the world new ways of living together in community, new ways of sewing together broken pieces, shattered lives, new ways of sowing seeds of hope because of the communal or relational resilience. People might be confused or might, when they watch the news, think that the entire African continent is imploding. Yes, I don’t want to minimize the seriousness of the crisis of history, especially the crisis of governance facing many countries in Africa, including sadly in our churches.

But you see that Africa constitutes, especially if you [look] even globally, the population density in Africa now is really expanding…Joe Studwell just published a book, How Africa Works, making this case that actually Africa is underpopulated and that the Asian tigers and then the economic revolution, if you call it in China, that you cannot remove it from the population. Population matters. So we can look at the population of Africa or of the church when you compare that to say North America or Europe where the church here in North America or in Europe is a “graying” church. There is a high percentage of disaffiliation. I know that this year people rejoice that there seems to be a bounce back…and people are rejoicing that maybe 100,000 people [have been] added to the church in North America. In France, you know, in Italy, and if they’re rejoicing that they had 10,000 new Catholics in the United States, think of it that in Nigeria alone, you know, you’re talking about 50,000. Last year alone, 8 million people became Catholics.

So Pope Leo recognizes this. So the question for me and for everyone listening and indeed for some of us who are leaders, either in the academy or in humanitarian sector, in the church or public political leadership: What are you doing with this number? This massive number? 70 % in some countries of Africa. 70 % [of the population] is the young people. The youth constitute 70 % in some, 60 % in some, 63 % [in others], but there’s no African country where the population of youth is less than 60%.…We’re talking people under the age of 35. Can you imagine what this youthful population can bring about if they’re equipped with the right kind of education, with the right kind of skills, with the right kind of social connectivity, with the right kind of ethics? Can you imagine the innovation, that they will bring about? Social innovation, spiritual, moral innovation. I think that this is what we should be focusing on: how to build on these assets rather than see these numbers as just rising poverty. And then people want to say, the population is growing so also will poverty grow? It can be so, but then it is a warning to Africa. and the world. If we do not equip these young people, then they will turn against society. And it’s not going to happen only in Africa. Immigration will continue to increase. Terrorism will continue to increase because an idle hand is a devil’s workshop.

To go back to the original reflection: that we are dealing with assets here. And this is why Dilexi te is both an encouragement, but also a warning….Dilexi te talks about education, especially….You know, education is what we do as a church. The Catholic church in Africa educates more non-Catholics than even some government agencies in places like Uganda, Ghana, even in Algeria where the Pope visited. Catholics constitute less than one percent of the population. You don’t have up to 10,000 Catholics in the whole country. But we are pulling our weight there. You go to Chad. The same reality. You go to Uganda. You go to Northern Uganda in the refugee camps in Adjumani. Catholic Church is running the schools, running the hospitals, and people come in there, and they’re not asking you to bring your baptismal certificate. They just take care of you because you’re a human being. And I think that’s really very important for us in this understanding.

The final chapter [of Diexi te] talking about almsgiving is not just saying “do alms.” It’s also saying [that] the charity we owe to people today is to equip them. That’s solidarity. Solidarity is not simply to stand with in that general sense. It is also to solidify their agency, potentiate their capacity. And what better way to do it than education?

Zach Czaia
My soul is singing, Father Stan, as a 20 year high school teacher, to hear what you’re saying. And I agree with you about the hope. There is tremendous reason for hope, but also there’s a tremendous responsibility. And especially when we think about the ways that, you know, here in the States and then elsewhere, we [have] viewed Catholic education—it has not always been as an obligation. It has been like, “Well, this is something special for people who can afford this kind of education.” And that’s not what you’re talking about, which I think is powerful and important to hear for all of us.

As we think about wrapping up this conversation, which has been amazing for me, we could talk a little bit about maybe you as a pastor as well? One of the things I love about you and your work is that you’ve kind of got your two feet in many different places. I mean, you’re an incredible intellectual, you’re a theologian. And you do a lot of humanitarian work. And also, as I noted in your acknowledgments, you have experience working with everyday parishioners and taking this Augustinian lens and putting it into a language that everybody can understand. I think it’d be awesome to hear, as we conclude, how this kind of intellectual work can translate into the everyday work in a parish setting?

Fr Stan Chu Ilo
Chapter three of Dilexi te talks about the body that serves. [In my reflection] I then I talk about this Franciscan teacher, Brother Tabichi, who was nominated, and who won the Global Teacher Prize in 2019. You know, listening to your question immediately draws me to that. He was a teacher. He is a teacher but he considers himself first as a Franciscan. So the same here [with this question]. Why? Why do I do what I do? It’s because I consider myself first a Christian Then a servant of God’s people as a priest. So my education, my scholarship, must take me back first to my knees before God. This is very important for me. Saint Augustine, when a deacon asked him how he, that deacon, would be very effective as a minister in the church, Augustine said, “Humility, humility, humility!” Three times. You know, Trinitarian. I will give you the same answer: Humility.

And Saint Augustine again said on the teacher the same thing reinforced in De Doctrina Christiana, one of his most powerful books that I cited in Dilexi te, the distinction between uti and frui. He makes the distinction [between those two.]. He says that you should call no person on earth a teacher, for we have only one teacher. And that’s Jesus Christ. And according to Saint Augustine, in the school of Jesus, we are all students. So for me then, the work I do is driven by a deep sense of connection to my Lord and Savior who kept me alive.

I was born after the Civil War in my country. Many of my classmates died. Many of my colleagues, students, fellow children like me in the seventies couldn’t survive. They died from kwashiorkor, this terrible disease. People didn’t know what to call that disease. So the word kwashiorkor emerged from the Biafran war in Nigeria because of this disease the world had never known. Never in the history of humanity, had the people suffered so much. So for the first time, starvation was used as a weapon against our people in Eastern Nigeria. That’s how I saw, I see my life. I grew up seeing. I studied in schools with bullet holes all over. Geckos, water geckos, lived in those holes. Birds lived there. Lizards.

Everywhere you went, we saw the external signs of our broken humanity. People that I later now knew were suffering from PTSD, post-traumatic stress from the war. People with broken limbs. So many people, paralyzed, lying in the streets, begging for help. So, growing up in this kind of environment, when I see the world today—what’s going on in Gaza, in Lebanon, or the attack on Iran, or in Ukraine, or the killing of Israelis, people killed on October 7^th, when I see the destruction of lives in Congo…I have been to these places. Been to the concentration camps—Dachau in Germany and many of these places. The Holocaust Memorial. I see myself then called to be a healer, to preach the good news of love. Love is who we are. Love is our origin. Love is our destiny. Through love we will be judged.

The judgment is upon this earth. Without love we see what we have made of this beautiful earth that God created. That’s why Pope Leo begins his papacy saying we have to build bridges of friendship. That’s one of my favorite lines in the Dilexi te is paragraph 120. It says “The Church does not have enemies. The Church does not have enemies to fight but brothers and sisters to love. Friends.”

And that’s the last thing I [want to] say, about Saint Augustine. Going back to his Confessions, the friendship between Saint Augustine and Ambrose of Milan. Saint Augustine was a rhetorician. He was well known in Milan. He was a bad guy. The Archbishop knew him because he had quite a significant following. He lived a very rough life, sexual promiscuity, and he did not believe in God. He debated God. His mother, Monica, was praying always that he be converted. Augustine came to the cathedral, listened to the Archbishop. Then he decided to visit the Archbishop, Ambrose of Milan. It’s a very fascinating passage in The Confessions that tells me really what I need to be as a priest. And I encourage others to even try to get to that level. Augustine said when he came, the Archbishop was immersed in the scripture, reading the Bible. But then he said, “This man looked up and saw me.” The man of God, Augustine says, welcomed me with a warm heart. I began to love him, Augustine said, not because he was a bishop or anything but as someone who welcomed me as a friend. That’s a very moving passage.

When I was teaching The Confessions, one of my students who wrote on this said that this opened his eyes. And then the student opened my eyes to a [reality] that for Augustine, perhaps is not so evident. Perhaps what began his confession was not that he heard in that dream, “take and read,” you know. Or the power of Ambrose’s rational reasoning about the intelligibility of the Christian faith. Perhaps in that split second, when the man of God who was reading the Bible, looked up and there was this gaze, like the gaze of Jesus and Peter, this eye contact. And Augustine saw in the eyes of Ambrose. He said, “The man of God: I began to love him.” And through that love there was a transformation. The friendship began.

One of the powerful works Ambrose wrote, to the priests of Milan is De Officiis. Where he defined the priestly life as a life of friendship. Friendship with people, especially the poor. Jesus, in John says to his disciples, “I do not call you servants or slaves. I call you friends.” I think that this is what drives me. Because we need to create in our parishes these communities of friends, these communities of relationship among priests, among and between priests and laity that really gets rid of the leprosy of clericalism or even episcopalism...That [puts] the bishop is on a pedestal and others are lower. This is how we bring people into the circle of love where all of us will find a place and then center ourselves on this relationship with God. The poor need to become our friends. Friendship, you know, makes you equal with the other. And that’s how you share.

That’s what the incarnation is. He stepped into the chaos of our own lives. He became our friends by this divine solidarity. And assumed our human nature and transformed it by being present to it, by embodying it. So Dilexi te invites us to embody, to become the wounded and broken flesh of our own people. And so when it hurts us like it hurts them, then, in putting the balm of love, we are also healing our own naked humanity.

Zach Czaia
Wow. Thank you. I felt like I was in the classroom with you hearing that story of Ambrose and Augustine! And I’m so grateful too because you’ve, woven, Father Stan. We started, in this conversation talking about Augustine and the City of God and we wove back to relationship and friendship. And I think that’s a beautiful place to close this conversation. And I just want to say again how grateful I am to have had the privilege of working with you on this manuscript.

Fr Stan Chu Ilo
Thank you, Zach.

Zach Czaia
I will definitely link through One Subject Press so anybody listening can find the book. But for people who are interested in your ministry and work, are there places where readers and listeners could follow you, could look to hear and read more from you?

Fr Stan Chu Ilo
Yes, we do have a YouTube channel. Pactpan: That is for Pan-African Catholic theology and pastoral network. And the website is www.pactpan.org. And we produce every week videos.

I have also an app, “Daily Walk with Jesus.” Anyone can download it for free. Every day I give a short reflection on love. You know, I really like to talk about love because I think the world is so beautiful. God created a beautiful world. One of my popular books is Someone Beautiful to God, which is just to encourage people to find something beautiful in the other. We don’t have to be looking at each other from that perspective of deficit. But the book, I think it’s too big! You know, we have two pages for every day [of the year]. So it’s close to 800 pages. So it’s like a Bible that I carry. So now we turn it into an app that everyone can listen to.

Zach Czaia
Beautiful. Thank you.

NOTES / GRATITUDE

-Because of Pope Leo’s recent 11-day trip to Africa, Father Stan has been a regular visitor on a number of news outlets, offering his distinctive wisdom and analysis. Check out this recent interview, April 24, on CNN via PACTPAN’s Youtube channel here.

-I had the gift of connecting with Father Stan Chu Ilo because of Father Joseph Brown’s beautiful A Retreat with Thea Bowman and Bede Abram: Leaning on the Lord (Second Edition), which we published in October, 2025. Gratitude to Father Brown, who has been a supporter of the One Subject Press since its beginnings. If you don’t know his work, this book is a terrific entry point.

-For local (to Minnesota) readers of this Substack, I wanted to share that we’re having a celebration of the 1-year anniversary of One Subject Press’ launch at Inkwell Booksellers Company in Minneapolis. Friday, May 15, 6-8 pm. Would love to see you there and meet in person!

I regularly wonder about the value of what I’m doing as a teacher. Of convening meetings with teenagers where said teenagers are required to take time to slow down and read books they otherwise would not. There is something deeply conservative about this social role that I am playing, especially at this moment in history, as more and more technologies promise to free up more and more time for us humans to do what we “really” want to be doing. One thing I know for sure: A good number of the teenagers I teach do not “really” want to be reading books, let alone books written by others long since dead.

So one strategy as a teacher is to “sell” the books students are reading in class. To connect them constantly to our own world through video, social media, and the way I talk about and approach the text we are reading. Pushing, for instance, as I did in a recent unit on Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, the potential resonances between the oppression at play in that novel and the oppression within our own community as a result of the ICE occupation where we live, in Minneapolis.

I don’t have any problem with these kinds of moves. And so long as I make them within a context where a critical mass of the young people discussing these connections have done the work of reading the text, there is the possibility of generative disagreement, even debate. Which is, for instance, why I was so delighted when a student responded to my question about Their Eyes Were Watching God’s relevance to the ICE occupation of our city with these words: “Mister, I think that’s a stretch.”

This student made this judgement based on evidence both from the text of Hurston’s novel (he referenced specifically the kind of “silencing” Janie was experiencing and Black folks more generally in the novel as a whole) and from the experience and data that we were seeing all around us with the ICE occupation (surveillance, intimidation, and violence) and judged that the situations were not similar enough to make a comparison between the two very valuable.

I should note that this student made this distinction in a class meeting where he was in his own home, attending class online because of that very occupation. He first typed his thinking into a chatbox, then “turned on his camera” (as many of his classmates were reticent to do), and finally spoke his truth. It sparked some good conversation. But the conversation happened slowly, and even more slowly because of delays caused by the fact that more than half of the 25 students were, like this student, online, and the other half gathered in a semi-circle around my lap-top and our Smartboard at the front of the classroom. Nevertheless, I was encouraged by the discussion in those trying times, and encouraged even moreso by how much students were referencing the text we were reading.

After this discussion, we popcorned our way through an out loud class reading of chapter eight of the novel, Janie’s truth-telling confrontation with Joe Starks on his deathbed, with some students reading from home, their voices projected through our Smartboard system, others sidling up close to my laptop to read aloud from the classroom semicircle. A weird class, a weird time—one I won’t soon forget.

In many ways this experience was a good preparation for our next unit, which I’m in the midst of right now: Shakespeare’s Macbeth. For the first time in my career, I’ve been intentionally using “The Folger Method,” a way of instruction I’ve heard touted enough times by enough English teachers I trust that I figured I’d give it a go myself. Part of my rationale for going for it: I don’t know if I’ve ever felt, at the end of a Shakespeare unit, that I’d done justice to the Bard; why not, I wondered, try something new?

“Shakespeare’s language is not a barrier but a portal.”—Corrinne Viglietta and Peggy O’Brien, The Folger Guide to Teaching Macbeth

The subtitle of the essay which I just quoted from above is as provocative as it is grand and sweeping: “The Folger Method: You Will Never Teach Literature the Same Way Again.” (Never? Woah. That’s bold.) But I have to admit that after a month of trying to embody this principle day after day in the classroom—Shakespeare’s language is not a barrier but a portal—the effects have been very positive. None of the nine “essential practices” proposed by Viglietta and O’Brien are brand new to me (or probably to you, reader, if you’ve got classroom experience as a teacher) but taken together and practiced consistently, they have made me feel more connected to what we are reading (in this case, Macbeth), made me feel more connected to the students I’m teaching, and, perhaps most importantly, made me more aware of how the students are understanding and connecting with the text. Four of the “practices” Viglietta and O’Brien sketched were especially helpful and I’ll offer a brief word on each of them below.

1. 20-Minute Play

This is the practice of performing what the authors call an “express tour” of Macbeth on Day 1 of the unit. As directed by the guide, I scissored up 25 key lines culled from the different parts of the play into little strips (“Out, damned spot!” “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…” etc.). Then students drew those lines at random and practice reading them with different tone and intonation. And THEN, we all stood up in a circle as I dramatically read the “express tour” plot of the play, and every few sentences or so, cued up one of the students to “come to the middle” and read, with feeling, their banger Shakespeare line. It was a great way for everyone in the class to “know the story” in an embodied way. And also made clear that ALL of us in the class would be embodying this story throughout the unit with our words and action. I’d definitely do it again, no matter the Shakespeare play we’re studying.

2. Choral Reading

I hadn’t thought before about, especially for shy or not super confident readers, how freeing it could be to be saying Shakespearean language out loud simultaneously with other people. We started this practice, as the guide suggests, with those famous opening lines from the 3 witches, and kept up with it in other places as well, paying attention to tone and stress as we did so. It was a great way in to reading the text (and frankly, to increasing volume in some of those more timid students.)

3. Cutting a Scene

This was probably my favorite of the nine practices. As O’Brien and Viglietta note, cutting Shakespeare’s text is what directors have always done to make his work come alive—it’s just part of the work of good theater. What was illuminating to me as a teacher was how the sequence of making progressively bigger and bigger cuts of scenes the guide proposed (from 60 to 30 to 8 lines, for instance) forced students to think about how they wanted to interpret the scenes they were presenting to their classmates. Because, the guide (and I) required them, on a number of occasions throughout this unit to then perform their “cut scenes” for the whole class.

4. Group Scenes

Again, there isn’t anything revolutionary about this practice. Readers of this post surely have their own memories of performing some scene of Shakespeare’s for an English class. (And I’ve definitely given a version of the “group scene” assignment myself.) But having this assignment come as a culmination of practice where students have to “cut,” close read, interpret, and present throughout the unit (and not just in the final project) makes this group scene—which I acknowledge students are in the midst of completing right now as of the writing of this post—much more meaningful. Students “drafted” their scenes from the “menu of options” last week; I can’t wait to see what they’ll be creating and filming this week in class.

My own extra-class additions to the unit (through homework assignments) were primarily to reinforce the work this method of instruction does around tone and stress—and how tone and stress reveal varying interpretations of key scenes in the play. So I assigned students for homework to close read a short section of Macbeth and then look up at least two YouTube clips with actors performing the same lines that they close-read. They were required to take notes on what they observed in the video clips and then needed to record their own 30-second to a minute dramatic video performance of these lines, with an explanation of why they performed the lines the way they did.

As so much of the Folger method work does, my idea with this assignment was to help free students from the assumption of one “authoritative” way of performing Shakespeare, or from thinking that the film version we’d been watching together in class, the Coen Brothers’ 2021 Tragedy of Macbeth, was the “only” way to play the scenes. In addition, it provided regular, non-public opportunities for them to practice “going for it” themselves with real choices in tone and stress, imitating actors playing with the text, and trying some of those moves themselves. These assignments were a delight to read and watch: honest, creative and playful inquiries. I would definitely do them again as a way to add to the class experience, and to provide some accountability to students to get into the text themselves outside of class.

A final note: Macbeth just finished a run this past March at our local world-class theater in Minneapolis, the Guthrie. I would have loved to have taken both sections I taught to the show but I’d already exhausted my departmental allotment taking them to see a terrific contemporary play in the fall, Primary Trust, by Eboni Booth. But the Guthrie did give me a generous discount for a small group to see Macbeth at an evening performance. And even more exciting, the actress playing Lady Macbeth, Meghan Kreidler, also a local rock and roll musician, was kind enough to come into the class to talk with the students about her experience. The timing of the visit was fortuitous, too: students had just finished reading and watching the play, had “drafted” the scene they’d be working on as small groups. A conversation with Meghan about their work—more on that momentarily—was a gift to them as they worked on bringing those scenes to life.

I titled this essay “I Don’t Teach Like a Champion,” a deliberate dig at a very influential book by Doug Lemov, originally published in 2010. The influence of this text and the techniques Lemov observes and promotes have been most keenly felt at urban high schools like the one where I teach. I want to be clear in this writing: Many of these techniques are very helpful—“backward planned instruction,” “wait time,” “positive framing,” “no opt outs.” It is valuable to “begin with the end in mind” in planning lessons and units. It is vitally important to make the classroom a warm and positive space for students—and I completely agree with Lemov that warmth does not preclude “strictness” and clear boundaries. How beautiful to have in our repertoire as teachers that simple two-word phrase, “wait time” as a common language to pause impatient teachers (we’ve all been there, haven’t we?) champing at the bit to move on with the lesson, before students have actually understood what we’re saying. These moves are incredibly useful. I myself have used these techniques (and any others in the book) and will continue to use them in the future. They’ve been part of my formation as an educator and have helped me survive and grow in the profession. So thank you, Doug Lemov, for your work in popularizing these helpful techniques. And thank you to the administrators and teachers who worked to make these techniques come alive through their example.

But—and there’s a big but—as in all things, context matters. As mentioned earlier, Lemov’s book of techniques was published in the midst of a heyday of technique-centered cultural revolution, one occurring not only in American education, but in America more broadly. And if we take seriously the criticism of folks like Jacques Ellul, author of The Technological Society, published in 1954, maybe that heyday started much, much earlier. To adapt Neil Postman’s phrase from, I think, The End of Education, published in 1995, techne, is more than a tool; it’s a god we sacrifice to, and is right up there at the top of our American Mount Olympus, probably sitting right next to its good pal, Efficiency.

To be clear: I have no problem with good technique, for teaching or chopping onions or strumming a guitar. But when these techniques crowd out—as they have in education—substantive conversations about the ends or purposes (Postman again) of what we are doing as educators in our school communities or our classrooms, then I do object.

Teach Like a Champion, first published in 2010, is now in its third edition. It’s not just a “teacher’s bag of tricks.” (If it was ever that, and if administrators and officials looked at it that way, I’d be less critical of it.) No, at this point, the book is not really a book at all, but a brand. A way of justifying a particular vision of education—especially targeted at reaching ‘underserved youth’—that emphasizes individual teacher moves and techniques (the number of these has gone up from 49 to 62) at the expense of bigger conversations around systemic issues plaguing those schools and communities. Conversations, incidentally, that neither the teachers or students, have much voice in addressing. We, collectively, are the labor that powers the schools, but we do not have a seat at the table in arranging the conditions of our own labor. You might object with something along the lines of, “But Doug Lemov isn’t writing that kind of book!” To which I’d reply, “Exactly.”

I’m tempted to climb the to another level of my soapbox (are there other levels to this thing, Zach?) and write about what teacher and student agency and voice might look like in terms of crafting, as others have spoken about in a higher ed context, a “student data bill of rights,” or at the very least, coherent policies around AI use that incorporates multiple points of view on the technology. But I risk losing my own thread. After all, we were talking about Macbeth. The connection, though, isn’t, to use my student’s phrasing, that much of a stretch. Not only does the total embrace, and now re-embrace of technique-centered resources like Teach Like a Champion obscure systemic issues everyone must face, it also diverts energy and focus from discipline-specific study and preparation for educators.

Part of Teach Like a Champion’s allure for administrators is that it is a one-size-fits-all resource: perfect for all-faculty professional development. Surely there was (and perhaps still is) some benefit for an early career teacher to get training in these tools in the early days and years of work in the classroom. But what about those who have “survived” that time, and are looking to grow and deepen as educators in a particular content area? (Say English literature?) The “one size fits all” nature of the resource starts to feel like an essential piece of the Champion brand, especially in the urban school setting: Because so many teachers here either burn out or move into administrative roles, there is an ever-present pool of early-career teachers to learn how to be the “champion” Lemov encourages them to be. But for teachers like me, who have stayed in the classroom, and who don’t want to burn out or become an admin, that word “champion” starts to feel less and less like the right word for what we are trying to do. “Professional” is more than adequate. (Less catchy, though. Teach Like a Professional just doesn’t have the same giddyup.) Instead of watching a carefully curated video clip of a champion teacher demonstrating “cold call,” or “no opt out,” I’d really like to use what little PD time I have available to me to learn from folks in my discipline, who could care less about educational branding but who are thinking deeply about teaching literature to young people. Hence, my interest in this post in Folger’s Shakespeare resources.

There are those who might object to my opposing a discipline-specific resource like Folger’s with a one-size-fits-all resource like Teach Like a Champion. “Isn’t that apples to oranges?” And, “Can’t we just have both, Zach?” To the first question: yes, but we never seem to have time to communally eat the “oranges” (oranges would be the discipline-specific resources in my version of the metaphor.) To the second, I say simply: there’s limited time in the day. My two cents is that when administrators gather the entire faculty (or student body) together, rather than throwing one-size-fits-all tools at them, they offer opportunities for input and voice on pressing systemic issues affecting the school, and offer a democratic way forward that honors the consensus view of your school community, parents, students and faculty alike. That’s messy work, especially in our times, but immensely valuable, and gets at the question of vision, in a positive way. (Vision is an important and neglected ‘god’ in our educational Olympus. It is up there, though!) See Teacher-Powered Schools and their network for examples of what this democratic model of education looks like.

To repeat in a different paragraph what I wrote earlier: Rather than being lionized as champions, many teachers simply want to be treated like professionals. One basic aspect of this professional treatment is having the time and resources to confer with your colleagues in the larger scholarly community within your discipline. To the administrators who prioritize this kind of professional development, I salute you. This kind of attitude keeps many a mid-career educator (like me, for instance) in the game.

For instance, one of the striking things about the Folger Guide to Macbeth is that it was created by a collection of both secondary teachers and university professors who have long experience teaching Shakespeare’s work. Their essays appear, as they should, alongside each other. And the unit plan, which I’ve referenced above, is not in any way “dumbed down” for the high school level, and in my opinion could be adapted for middle school, or college use.

I mentioned earlier in this essay that as part of this unit, I invited in to our classroom Meghan Kreidler, who played Lady Macbeth in the Minneapolis-based Guthrie Theater’s recent production of the play. As Meghan’s visit is fresh in my mind—she just came in to our class last week, and I wrote up the notes from the visit the next day—I thought I would conclude this essay with some reflections on the gift of that visit, and how I see that conversation in relationship to the technique/vision themes I’ve been riffing on here.

Meghan Kreidler was, to put it simply, a delight to be in conversation with. As a way of introduction, students introduced themselves to her with a favorite song or musical artist. (I thought that would be a fun way to start, since in addition to being an actress, Meghan is also the lead singer for the band Kiss the Tiger, based out of the Twin Cities.) After these introductions and after Meghan shared her own story of coming to theater, performance, and Shakespeare (which included extensive high school experience on the stage at Eagan High School and a classic-focused theater BFA at the University of Minnesota), students jumped in with questions: “What music are you listening to right now?” “How do you balance playing a particular role and keeping your own authentic voice as a person?” “What was your favorite part of playing Lady Macbeth?” “What was the hardest part of playing Lady Macbeth?”

I was deeply impressed by the way Meghan took her time in responding to these excellent questions, especially to the Macbeth-specific questions. Her way of proceeding opened the door for all of us in the room to a deeper interpretation of the play, and the way she spoke of her work on the production with others at the Guthrie invited the students to think in a like manner about the scenes they had chosen, and were preparing to rehearse and then film. It was beautiful and moving for me to witness the back and forth between Meghan and the students.

To a question a student asked about how she prepared for the role of Lady Macbeth, Meghan responded that the way she prepared was to immerse herself in scholarship and criticism written about Macbeth so as to better understand not only the many nuances of her character but also how that character fit into the play as a whole. With regard to the “hardest scene to prepare for” question mentioned above, Meghan noted that, for whatever reason, the scene before the banquet, after they have killed Duncan, when she wants Macbeth (and her) to be able to “enjoy the fruits of their labor” (murder) was very difficult to get into and understand at first. But as she worked to see this scene more and more through the lens of love for her spouse in the scene, she was able to find a good angle of entry. Along these lines—the “love” lines, I mean—Meghan mentioned in the conversation with us that in the opinion of one scholar (I think she was referencing Harold Bloom) Macbeth and Lady Macbeth have the “happiest marriage” of any of the couples in Shakespeare’s many plays!

I’d shared with Meghan before her visit what I’ve shared in this post, that students would be cutting, preparing, and then ultimately filming their own scenes from Macbeth. Would she be willing to observe some early-stages reading and rehearsal on this assignment-in-process? Maybe offer some notes? She was delighted to.

One of the groups performed the opening part of that crucial early scene in Act 1 where Banquo and Macbeth first encounter the weird sisters and hear the prophecies of the future. I invited the students to run the opening lines for Meghan and our class and then share what they saw as the “heart” of the scene from their character’s point of view. Then Meghan jumped in with her thinking and response. For instance, Meghan was able to share with this group who had yet to “cut” their scene that in the fast-paced version the Guthrie had just finished producing, the director had actually chosen to cut the majority of the lines students had just finished reading aloud from the three weird sisters.

In addition, Meghan noted that one way the actors playing the weird sisters got into their respective roles was to identify different core motivations for action (one saw their role as purely a conduit of a message, another as an instrument of chaos and evil.) And the student-actor playing Macbeth was very interested to learn about Meghan’s translation of the prophecies of the weird sisters, regarding Macbeth’s elevation to the Throne of Cawdor: “It’s like they’re telling Macbeth he’s going from soldier to Vice President.” And she further noted that one of the things that informed her preparation for the Lady Macbeth role was a discussion with cast members about to what degree Lady Macbeth had already discussed this elevation in status and role with her husband. So that their decision to murder Duncan could seen as the fruition, the execution of prior conversations and plans.

I hope these notes I’ve offered above capture the excitement I had in those conversations—yes, reader, it is a very nerdy deep dive, I realize that—as well as the excitement I have for students as they continue to dive back into the text of the play (“reading is re-reading” I’m often saying to them) to create their own filmic interpretations of these scenes. I’m profoundly grateful to Meghan, a working artist generous enough to share her own processes with students, so they can see their own schoolwork in relationship to the real work of theater-makers.

As I’ve been reading and revising this essay for posting, I’ve also been reading and listening to scholar Alexander Manshel, who has written extensively on the subject of “high school English” in a recently published article, and has a full-length treatment on the subject coming out soon. “The high school English classroom is the most influential literary institution in the United States, and the most overlooked by literary scholars,” Manshel begins. And he moves on to argue for more robust conversation and collaboration between and among high school English teachers and their English professor colleagues who teach in universities. Another thrust of Manshel’s argument is his insistence on understanding the history of high school English. Interestingly enough, one of the key dates he notes on his timeline of the modern era is 2010, which in addition to being the year Teach Like a Champion was published, is also the same year when the Common Core Standards began to be implemented in states across the country.

It should come as no surprise that a book like Teach Like a Champion, one laser-focused on de-contextualized and non-discipline specific “teacher moves and skills” became immensely popular (more than a million copies sold) at the same time that the now chopped-up and discretely identified skills or standards of the Common Core were being disseminated into schools. And for those of us who teach Advanced Placement (AP) courses, it is also no surprise that the skill-emphasis baked into the Common Core has now been embedded into the curricula of these courses as well. David Coleman, formerly chief architect of the Common Core, took over as CEO of College Board and has worked in that capacity since 2012.

Coleman’s tenure/reign encompasses the 10+ years I’ve taught AP English courses. During that time, I have attended numerous AP institutes and workshops that have been led by and attended by countless brilliant and passionate high school English teachers. In that decade-plus of attendance and engagement with peers, though, I have always been struck by how much of the conversation at these institutes and workshops is dominated by the test that students take at the end of the year. The overriding question of these gatherings, in my experience, is not the question of what literature we teach and how we teach it, but rather “how to help students earn the best possible score” on the end of year exam. (To me, this is profoundly dispiriting.)

In addition, and to the larger point that Manshel makes in his article, at no time in these conventions of hundreds of deeply gifted high school English teachers has there been space and time made to meet with professors of English at neighboring colleges and universities. Which is strange, if you think about it, because part of the College Board’s argument for AP is that students, by taking AP courses, will have the equivalent of a “college experience” in that subject or discipline.

As the reader of this Substack knows, I could rail (and even rage) on this topic for days, and in a very unhelpful manner. In lieu of that (nobody needs it, least of all me), I’d simply recommend Annie Abrams’ brilliant and incisive book on this topic, Shortchanged: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students, which among other things, analyzes the history of the AP, as well as the ways its current iteration has moved drastically away from what its humanities-focused founders originally intended.

And notably for the purposes of this essay, Abrams notes that those founders included a coalition of professors and high school humanities teachers. To bring things back home to Shakespeare, it’s worth noting something striking about the Folger Guide to Macbeth that I’ve been using to guide my work with students the past month: among its twelve contributing writers and editors, six are high school teachers. So the make-up of the authors is both high school teachers or professors and scholars who specialize in Shakespeare and his works. Pretty danged cool.

Yes, Folger, like the AP, is a “brand.” Unlike the AP, though, the Folger’s conventions and workshops are unapologetically discipline- and author-specific, running the range from middle school to college context. In our current educational moment, where public schools are being gutted and discipline-specific alternatives (see the “Classical Schools” movement) are often exclusively coming from the political right wing of our country, I want to celebrate work like this, which doesn’t necessitate the destruction of a public or cooperative vision of education for it to move forward (as the “Classical Schools” movement often does, either implicitly or explicitly). This kind of work is encouraging, even inspiring, to me.

As I’ve shared elsewhere on this platform, one of the key motivators for starting our publishing company, One Subject Press, and the “Teacher/Writer” series within that company, is to give space and esteem to the voices of teachers doing the beautiful and life-giving work that comprises their vocation and profession. Writing a book, entering a larger conversation—that is one way. But there are many others. If this rambler of an essay provoked you to consider ways you might do likewise, reader, then I’m doing my job.

NOTES & CONNECTIONS:

-If you were intrigued by the Alexander Manshel article, I highly recommend Trevor Aleo’s podcast interview with him on Conceptually Speaking. It’s a great conversation, and a great podcast.

-This essay obviously gets pretty ‘punchy’ in spots, and especially as teachers look to productively work with and not against administrators in their buildings, I think it’s important to avoid binary thinking that oversimplifies matters. With that in mind, I highly recommend recent conversation on Marcus Luther’s podcast, Broken Copier, with wise long-time administrator, Ruth Poulsen, on the question “What if we tended the soil of our schools?”

-Huge shout-out to actor and musician Meghan Kreidler for taking the time to talk with the classes I teach! One of the students asked her what was her favorite song that she’d written and performed with her band, Kiss the Tiger? Meghan named “Out of My Mind.” It’s a beauty.

Having the (Awkward AI) Conversation

I’ve been talking with students much more these days—individually and as whole group classes—about their use of Generative AI on writing assignments. There has definitely been an uptick in use, and I’m not sure what exactly has been the cause. I teach 12th graders, and it is March, so some of the increase might have to do with a general readiness to be done (and done quickly) with anything high school related. Some might be from feeling the crunch on time and other responsibilities. (Many of the students I teach support their families financially from their own incomes.) There was also the not-insignificant fact of the federal occupation by ICE agents of the city of Minneapolis, where I teach, which led to more than a month of “hybrid instruction,” as in the days of the pandemic, with many of the students I teach doing online schooling. Then, as now, some bad habits crept in. Then, as now, it was much easier to cheat, to cast around for tools and plans for alternatives to simply showing up and reading the strange and wondrous literary text, or meeting oneself that intimidating blank white page (or Google doc.)

I will share with you what I have shared with students: I am, by nature, a very conflict-avoidant person. (I’m a type 9, if the Enneagram’s your thing, the “Peacemaker.”) So, the necessity that this moment is calling me to as a teacher—frequent one-on-one conversations where I have to “stay curious” about student intentions while also honoring my instincts (and the evidence) that a student is not doing the work they are claiming to have done—well, let’s just say I have not jumped in head-first to these conversations. In fact, if I’m being honest with you, reader, looking back on the past two years since AI became the prevalent and seemingly omnipresent technology it is now, there are a number of conversations I could have (should have) had with students but let the moment pass, offering all manner of rationalizations to myself: I don’t want jeopardize trust if I don’t have all the evidence. Who can blame them for cheating? The system itself is broken. Am I really SURE this is not their voice? Etc., etc., etc.

At the same time that I’ve been avoiding having these tough conversations one on one with students, I haven’t been shy about sharing with my whole group classes my skepticism of GenAI’s capacity to actually help them grow as readers and writers. I have facilitated (what I hope are) open and honest discussions about AI and their own experiences with it, especially in school. I have shared with them the work of writers I admire—folks like , , , , , etc.—so students can see the rationale for my own class policy, which is essentially a ban on using GenAI for any English class assignment. But when I have read student work that I am not sure is written by that student, I have generally avoided confronting the student about my suspicions.

Starting this fall, though, as I was sharing more of my views around AI within my department and school community more generally, this reticence to confront students began to break down. I knew other teachers I admired were having these conversations, and so when I noticed writing that felt “off” to me (not in the student’s voice that I had grown to know and love) I sought these colleagues out for how to have the conversation with the student that I knew I needed to have. And gently, ever so gently, I began to ask students the hard questions I had avoided for so long. “Hey, can we talk about your latest assignment? This doesn’t sound like your voice.” Or: “Can you tell me more about your process for writing this?” Or, more bluntly (it is March after all): “Did you use AI on this assignment?”

When I surfaced concerns about AI use with a particular student with my teaching coach, this wise human (who also teaches 12^th grade English) shared with me an app she uses, “Revision History,” which can be embedded in Google Docs, and can tell you, for example, how long a student spent writing an assignment, or when a student copied and pasted on to the document. In spite of my reservations about the surveillance aspects of this technology—which I must say, do remain—I began to use it. I have to say, it has been a big help in giving me—and the student—a specific piece of evidence, beyond the very real but still sometimes nebulous “this doesn’t sound like your voice.”

When I say to students in one-on-ones, “I noticed it took you twelve minutes to write a three-page short story. It took me an hour to do this assignment myself. Can you explain what’s going on here?” it is harder for students to deny the truth. Often, as a number of students have now admitted to me, they simply typed up what the LLM had spit back to them after feeding it a prompt.

So the tech, “Revision History” in this case, for the time being, anyway, is an aid in helping me stick with a conversation I’ve been needing to have. In my experience, the “sticking with” has been the key element, as at the outset of the conversations I’ve had on this theme, most students deny using AI at all, even when faced with the evidence I’ve just shared. I have to point them back to it a couple of times, sharing that nothing they’ve told me has actually changed that evidence, or satisfied me that they haven’t used Generative AI or an LLM in their work. This insistence of mine is, of course, uncomfortable. And opens me to the possibility of my worst fear being realized: that I would falsely accuse a student of cheating. I do try to name this fear aloud for students, both in these one-on-ones. I can’t deny this terrible possibility exists.

The other day, in class, after a week that included a few of these conversations, I decided to address the issue directly with the classes I teach, deciding also to share with the students something I hadn’t before, or at least not as more than an aside—the fact that in addition to being a working writer, I am now an independent publisher as well. This fact was very much to the point of the phrase I wrote on the white board before the class started, so I wouldn’t forget to say it, or chicken out in underscoring it to the students: “No consent, No compensation.”

After saying the phrase aloud, I shared that this reality hit home on a personal level for me as a publisher: AI companies had used, without permission, and without compensation to the authors, the work of millions of writers, including some writers that I knew personally. I noted that this principle of consent and compensation also applied in schools and classroom settings as well. “I’ve created many of the prompts for our writing assignments myself, or adapted them from the work of other excellent teacher/writers. And I did not”—I made sure to emphasize this point—“give you permission to feed these prompts into an LLM, nor did any of these teacher/writers I’ve collaborated with. I, and they, don’t get compensated by these companies when you use our work to train the machines. And neither do you for your work.”

I went on. “And if you feed a student short story” (they were writing letters to each other on their creative work and a few had clearly used LLMs to make those letters) “your partners likely didn’t give you consent to share their work to train the machine, either. And even they did, I didn’t give that consent to you in the assignment.” I continued. “The estate of Zora Neale Hurston” (we’d just finished reading Their Eyes Were Watching God) “didn’t give you permission to train the machine on her novel, which is not in the public domain. It’s protected by copyright.”

I explicitly named the “Revision History” tool my coach had suggested I use, and named also how I used it to flag potential cases of AI use, including the two biggest red flags I mentioned earlier in this essay, time spent on the document and suspicious cutting and pasting. Because this was a tool I was using to verify that writing was indeed the student’s work, I requested that students share all upcoming assignments as Google Docs with “edit” share settings with me in the future.

I asked, as I often do: “Does that make sense?” A good number of students nodded. I asked if any students had questions or concerns. The predictable crickets. Some of the students looked wide-eyed around at each other. Others looked like they wanted the earth to swallow them. I waited an uncomfortable beat or two, and then we moved on to our lesson on Macbeth and how the Great Chain of Being helped us understand the historical context of Shakespeare’s play.

How much impact will this little speech have? Who knows. Much more important in terms of AI use, I am sure, are those one-on-one conversations that I have had and will continue to have with the students I am privileged to teach. But my little soapbox speech at least served to make transparent and specific both the “stakes” for me as a human being and their teacher, as well as my way of proceeding—things that may not have been totally clear to many of my students. As I continue to navigate my own ramshackle English teacher’s boat through these increasingly stormy waters, such principles seem to be more and more important to name aloud.

RELATED READING:

-I’ve admired (from social media distance) ’s work as a teacher for a long time now. And as I was writing this essay thought a lot about her decision to “go analog” (only handwritten assignments) in her classroom as a way to address some of the same issues I surface above. Experiences this year have made me wonder if I’d be willing to take the leap. Read more about her decision and experience here.

-Old friend and wise principal , over at “Sustainable Schools” is writing on a similar theme with his excellent essay, “How To Hold a Student Accountable.” I’ve been in the game 20 years and still I struggle to do this well. But I’m grateful for voices and presences like Andrew’s to help us all along the way.

-In case you missed it from my earlier post last month, my new book, Good Teaching: A Provocation is out! Buy a copy here direct from One Subject Press. Thanks, readers, for your support of the press and its growing community of writers, which, yes, does include me.

Enemies / Wendell Berry

If you are not to become a monster,

you must care what they think.

If you care what they think,

how will you not hate them,

and so become a monster

of the opposite kind? From where then

is love to come—love for your enemy

that is the way of liberty?

From forgiveness. Forgiven, they go

free of you, and you of them;

they are to you as sunlight

on a green branch. You must not

think of them again, except

as monsters like yourself,

pitiable because unforgiving.

*

This short poem bothered me for years. A brilliant former student of mine (who I perceived to be brilliant and lazy) memorized it for a required assignment in the twelfth grade AP English class I taught. It was the one assignment that year I remember him finishing on time, and completely. He knew the poem, backwards and forwards. This was seven years ago.

As for me, after my student’s recital, I remember reading Wendell Berry’s poem over and over again. The language was simple and direct, and yet, I had to admit that I didn’t really understand it. It didn’t grip me. This frustrated me, in part because, before encountering “Enemies,” I’d read quite a bit of Berry’s essays and books and liked them very much. He was, for me, (and I know for many others) a prophetic voice calling for greater responsibility–for ourselves, our children, and perhaps most importantly, the land we all shared at this moment in history. In fact, that critique of our American irresponsibility with regard to the land was summed up aptly in his 1977 classic book, which I’d read more than once, The Unsettling of America.

I’d gathered from that book and other things I’d read by him that Berry was a Christian. But this particular poem, which seemed to be homing in on one of Jesus’ central gospel commands–love your enemies–I struggled to connect to Berry’s larger body of work, or to my own understanding of Jesus and his presentation in the four canonical gospels. I really couldn’t make sense of the poem. Or rather, to say it more clearly, the sense the poem did make seemed circular and overly pessimistic.

The poem begins with a kind of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” set up for how to consider your enemies: “If you are not to become a monster,” the poet commands us, “you must care what they [your enemies] think.” But that instantly becomes a problem, because as the speaker confesses moments later, “If you care what they think, / how will you not hate them?” Okay. Perhaps this is true, but how is that helpful when considering an actual enemy, you know, in your actual life?

Then, after some strange consideration and imagery on forgiveness (more on that momentarily), the poem closes on a similarly bleak note regarding the enemies mentioned at the start of the poem: “You must not / think of them again, except / as monsters like yourself, / pitiable because unforgiving.”

So much for the gospel as “good news,” I remember thinking. And then put the poem out of my head after this particular student finished his recital and then graduated later that year. So the poem sat, inert on some dusty shelf in my brain for the next seven years. In the interim, the pandemic happened. George Floyd was murdered a mile or so from our high school. My wife and I welcomed a child into the world. All the while, I continued to teach poetry to twelfth graders at the school. And I kept making my students choose poems from the Poetry Out Loud website to memorize and recite in front of each other.

As a general rule, when I make my students do an assignment for my classes, I like to do the assignment myself, to try it on for size. Troubleshoot it. In the case of the “memorize a poem” assignment, the purpose of me memorizing a poem has been to show a kind of solidarity with the students. But if I’m feeling lazy (as I confess I often am), I simply dip into the memory banks and recite a poem I already know. But this particular year, I remembered I’d recited already-memorized poems the past few years, and wanted to recite something new. I remembered my brilliant and lazy student from seven years back and the Wendell Berry poem that had bothered me. I read it again.

This time, rather than bothering me, what I had thought of as the poem’s circularity and pessimistic tone meshed with my own sense of the gospel that “Enemies” was riffing on. Berry’s poem was still Berry’s poem, but I was in a different place to receive it. “Enemies” was no less disturbing than it had been seven years ago, but now the gospel itself felt disturbing. Earlier in my life I’d imagined a Jesus who brings calm and solace to all who seek him. Yes, but why? I mean, was this not the same literary character who famously says, “I came not to bring peace, but a sword”? Who purposely acts to “set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law”? (Mt. 10:34-36) Among other things, Jesus functions to bring out almost perpetual conflict in almost all the narratives of the gospels.

That’s a tangent, though. The core of Berry’s poem on this re-read was where forgiveness entered, a part I had just glossed over the first time I read the poem.

For it is forgiveness that is the only answer the poet gives to those two impossible questions that open the poem: How are you to love–and not hate–your “monstrous” enemy? And where (in the hell) is that love supposed to come from?

“From forgiveness,” the speaker calmly answers. “Forgiven, they go / free of you, and you of them.” And then, in the next line, we get the only true image in the entire poem, which encapsulates how enemies stand in relation to you after they’ve been forgiven: “they are to you as sunlight on a green branch.”

Come again? Your enemies actually nourish you now that they have been forgiven? This is very strange. And even though forgiveness is at the center of the poem, we end, as mentioned before, with enemies in their distinct and different corners, and the command: “you must not think of them again.”

I have recently made a friend, an Eastern Orthodox priest, Father Marc Boulos, who likes to say that the closer and more carefully you read the scriptures, the more certain it is that you will come to a day when you hate the message those scriptures bring you. Seven years ago, I could not have received that as a true statement. But now I see it as real wisdom, and clear as day. The Torah, the Prophets, the Wisdom writings, the Gospels, Paul’s Letters–all of them shine a relentless (and harsh) light on the darkness inside each of us. What’s to like about that? What’s not to hate?

In other words, loving your enemies is impossible to do on our own power. And yet, for some reason, it is commanded of us by Jesus.

It would be possible at this point in the discussion to talk about the Christian idea of “grace” and how that action or gift or whatever it is from God acts when we humans are not capable or deserving of that action or gift. But that word “grace” actually takes us away from this particular distinctive poem and its poet. To my mind, it’s better to consider Wendell Berry’s own vocabulary and way with words, which, as a side benefit, actually renovates that over-used English word, “grace.”

A key theme for Berry in all of his writing, and one that goes against the grain of so much in American culture is the idea of submission. Consider the way Berry speaks of his own decision, after receiving a Guggenheim fellowship and making a successful entry into the New York literary scene, to leave New York and return with his wife, Tanya, to the home of their births, Port Royal, Kentucky. In a 2019 New Yorker interview, Berry said about this moment:

“I came back here with some fear and trembling, but also a sense of doing the right thing. People give us credit for knowing what we were doing. We didn’t. We came back here because we wanted to…We had everything we owned in a Volkswagen Beetle. I don’t want you to make me sound like some kind of mystic, but you know I felt a great, deep relief–as if I was following at last, my true path.”

“Fear and trembling” paired with a “great, deep relief”: those seem a pretty apt way of characterizing the way Wendell Berry approaches the impossible gospel command to love your enemies in his poem. In other words, we who hear are invited (no, commanded) to submit to the wisdom of that teaching without even necessarily understanding it. Later, in that same New Yorker interview, Berry characterizes his relation to land and his marriage with the same verb, submission:

“You know, if you’re going to have a marriage and you haven’t submitted to it, then it’s half a thing, which is really nothing. So if you’re submitting to ownership [referring to land] without submitting to being owned, it’s still half a thing. It amounts to nothing.”

As I hope is clear to the reader at this point, there is nothing glamorous about this submission that Wendell Berry is talking about, both in this interview, and in the poem, “Enemies.” There is likewise nothing glamorous about the gospel command to love your enemies. The obedience of that command–the carrying out of it–is slow, painstaking, self-negating work.

And yet.

As any human who has ever lived knows, without that work of love and that breaking in of forgiveness, where would we all be, but in a world of our own hurts and our own pains?

*

So that is a personal reading of this poem, and I hope testifies to the ways that this poem reads differently at different moments of a particular reader’s life. How it shines forth where it was once dull. Grips where it once only glanced off one’s consciousness. That is an important layer or level to any reading of a poem, maybe the most basic layer or level. But, as with anything Wendell Berry writes, this poem also functions as a social and political critique, and gathers in meaning and power in light of recent events in American history and society, as well as in light of Berry’s role and stance in relationship to those events.

But that last sentence I wrote sounds a bit abstract and cryptic when I read it over. Let me ground things again in Wendell Berry’s own writing. In this case, I am talking about his 2022 book, The Need to be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice. As the title suggests, this book considers what it means to be a patriot (a loyal lover / dweller of the land one lives on) and the complicated meaning of that patriotism in light of the racism and racial prejudice that has plagued the United States since its inception.

I mention The Need to be Whole in connection with Berry’s poem “Enemies,” because, in a real sense, this book written nearly thirty years after the poem, illuminates Berry’s poetic lines in page after page (and there are almost 500 of them in The Need to be Whole.) Throughout The Need to be Whole, Berry is reflecting on the history of the American Civil War: what led up to it, how we as a people conducted it, and the unfinished and abandoned business of the “reconstruction” of the south in the war’s aftermath.

Berry refuses to accept a North = Good, South = Bad binary in approaching the Civil War. Following in the footsteps of agrarian Southerners like Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, he underscores that industrialization was the real “winner” of the war, and that both black and white people in the south were further alienated from the land they had been taking care of for years. For that reason, while Berry makes it clear to unequivocally state the evil of chattel slavery in the U.S., he speaks against the taking down and replacing of monuments of Confederate soldiers. From his point of view, simply erasing the evidence of history doesn’t change the fact of it happening. And from a spiritual standpoint, he argues that it may obscure the ways enemies may need to forgive one another.

Along these lines, Berry gives an account of his own encounter with a monument that angers him, that of James B. Duke, owner of the American Tobacco Company, the same tobacco company, which through its monopoly, unlimited “by neither economic constraint nor compassion,” dispossessed Berry’s family and community of so much of the land they’d work generations to cultivate. Berry hadn’t before realized that it was this James B. Duke who was the founder (in his philanthropic end-of-life era) of Duke University. And so in a visit to the university, Berry finds himself face to face with his family’s age-old foe. Their great enemy. Berry writes:

“There stood my enemy in his imperturbable bronze, and there I stood thinking of my grandparents in their disappointment, grief, and fear. I will say that I was troubled, for I did not enjoy, and I could not admire my feelings in that moment. But I was also clarified. That confrontation made plainer to me than before the actuality of that man, his life and fortune, our mutual history, and the difference between us. I became more able to imagine some stories that I know.”

I can’t help but think again of the concluding stanzas of “Enemies” considering Berry’s final reflection on the statue of James B. Duke: “It may be that my encounter with my enemy’s likeness forces a necessary question: Can I forgive James B. Duke? Maybe so. When I imagine him coming to Judgment, I freely wish he may find mercy. And perhaps I am free of him; I rarely think of him, which maybe proof of a kind.”

You must not / think of them again, except / as monsters like yourself is ringing in my ears as I read those questioning, wondering lines thirty years after he wrote the poem. “Perhaps I am free of him; I rarely think of him.”

It’s my belief that poets, if they are any good, make (or maybe better, live into?) their own personal lexicons. If you want to understand the way a word or phrase is working in a poem, yes, of course, you will want to look at it in the context of that particular poem, that artifact. But the word or phrase grows in resonance from studying how it has been used over a lifetime of work with words, and specifically in the context of other poems written around that same time.

Wendell Berry published his poem, “Enemies” in 1994, in a collection titled Entries. Poems honoring his immediate family ground the book in the commonplace and every day, as so much of Berry’s work does: a daughter’s wedding, reconciliation with his mother, love poems for his wife, a long sequence honoring his father who has recently died. It is in almost the exact mid-point of the collection (within “part II” of IV) that the reader finds “Enemies.” The poems that precede it and follow it prophesy or mirror themes from The Need to be Whole, and the whole section (part II) which “Enemies” is found in is explicitly sociopolitical in intent and theme. Poetry as social commentary.

“Anglo Saxon Protestant Heterosexual Men,” which comes just a few poems before “Enemies,” as the title suggests, deflates the importance of those descriptors while at the same time that it acknowledges the speaker’s privilege within that group. And a poem later (and only two poems before “Enemies”), in “Madness,” the speaker uses that unwieldy phrase again, this time to cast doubt on the enterprise of trying to find out who is more deserving than whom of receiving benefits (or perhaps in 2022, Berry might use the term “reparations”) for wrongs done:

…This madness comes

when the lineages of faith

and craft are severed, and the truth

of anything cannot be known

because anything supposable

can be endlessly supposed.

Another poem later and the reader will come upon “Enemies.” Then, immediately following it, there is the strange gem, “The Mad Farmer, Flying the Flag of Rough Branch, Secedes From the Union,” which, as the title suggests flips the usual American connotations of those words, “union” and “secede.” In this poem, which marks the end of part II of Entries, it is destructive things that are coming together; and it is a creative and courageous act from the poet’s point of view to secede from those unholy unions. A representative stanza:

From the union of self-gratification and self-annihilation,

secede into care for one another

and for the good gifts of Heaven and Earth.

Naturally, there have been a good number of Berry’s liberal and progressive readers who are irritated by the contents of The Need to Be Whole, especially its arguments against reparations and the destruction of Confederate monuments (as well as Berry’s refusal to look at the American Civil War in the binary terms I mentioned above.) Whether or not you agree with Berry’s approach to leave Confederate monuments standing—for the record, I don’t—what I’m trying to show with these examples from Entries and their continuity with The Need to be Whole, is that this distinctively Southern, agrarian sociopolitical lens has always inflected his work, including poems like “Enemies.”

It’s impossible for me to read Berry’s poem about “enemies” where the speaker considers “monsters” locked in implacable, unforgiving hatred of one another without thinking of the United States’ bitter civil war. It’s impossible for me to read this poem without thinking, as Berry does, in The Need to be Whole, about the way that war (obviously) did not solve or resolve the problems of racism and prejudice. And finally, impossible for me to read this poem without thinking of our deeply binary, polarized political climate that persists to this day. You can read the poem adequately on a personal level. To me, it means more when it hits on an American sociopolitical level, as well. This poem tells more truth about our nation-state than books on books of (supposed) histories.

If the reader is a newcomer to Berry’s work, I hope this essay has been a helpful introduction. If, like me, you are returning to it, I hope this writing helps you return again, and again. And remain haunted by its message, as I continue to be.

Gratitude & Connections

-Shout out to Robert Eric Shoemaker for prompting this essay a few years back. Grateful for friendship with this terrific artist and translator. Check out his work here.

-Father Marc Boulos’ work on lexicography in the Bible definitely inspired me in this essay. He is active on his Substack, . His podcast, The Bible As Literature, is excellent.

[Below is the preface I wrote for my new book, Good Teaching: A Provocation, available now from One Subject Press.]

It’s a commonplace observation but one that I’ll begin with anyway: The education system is not working for many, many young people. Though people working in American schools may disagree on a lot of different issues, most can agree on this one. But what I have struggled with throughout my career as an educator is how little the voices of teachers are included, much less heeded, in our local and national conversations about education and schooling.

So, I raised my own voice. I’ve written a book and started a publishing company which has a series dedicated to amplifying the voices of other teacher/writers. The Teacher / Writer series has a mission statement, which you can flip back to the very last page in this book to read.

I did my best to distill in a few sentences what we, the teacher/writers in this (growing) series, hope to accomplish with our writing. If you, too, are “hungry for greater depth” in the ways we imagine teaching and learning, you have come to the right place.

At the same time, I have to admit that my own words as a writer tend to subvert and complicate things like goals, aims, and mission statements. My chief mentors in writing and in living have been poets and prophets, and sometimes those mentors have occupied the same vocation at once. The poets and prophets I have known are unimpressed by Strategic Initiatives or Five-Year Plans. They—we—are given words to say, to sing, to write. They—we—say them, sing them, write them. And then we go back to doing our daily work. For me, in 2026 at least, a good part of that is teaching.

If Good Teaching and the series it is a part of are doing their work, then these songs, sayings, and writings will help make clear to us teachers what are fruitful avenues for the work right now, what about the work is worth continuing in the future, and what can be left to die.

Administrators often ask teachers to justify their pedagogical decisions with data. Of course there is value to this request, this particular kind of scrutiny. They, the administrators, want to know we teachers are reading our exit tickets and that they actually affect our next lessons. They want to know that we are studying our end-of-unit surveys and that those surveys help improve our new and revised unit plans. They want to know that those standardized tests the students take year after year in subject after subject inform the ways we teach the skills of our courses. Okay. Fine. Fair enough. But the proposition of this book is that there are other data to consider, no less important, but much harder (maybe impossible) to quantify. To count.

I offer as an alternative to the quantitative data of surveys, exit tickets, and standardized tests the qualitative data of the oldest of human forms of communication, the story. I offer my own teaching and schooling life, in focused and hopefully meaningfully edited ways so that you, dear reader, may learn from it. This book, after all, is called Good Teaching, not Good Teacher. I make no claims about personal goodness in that regard (or any other), but I do claim that telling honest, heartfelt, and human-made (no AI-bots, please) stories about the art and craft of teaching will help inform new visions of teaching and schooling for the next generation.

I don’t make any claims for the eternal durability of these words. Why would I want to? As has happened a number of times over the two decades I’ve been a teacher, I have found myself in the writing of this book in a crisis over whether and how I want to continue to, as I put it in one of these chapters, “stay in the game” of teaching. My own way of coming to answers to a crisis of this kind is to tell stories, to consider where I’ve come from, to share the good, the bad, and the ugly of my profession, to write and share poems, and to connect with others facing the same forks in the road that I am. That is what I’ve attempted to do in the poems and essays that comprise this book. They are the ways I’ve tried to answer the “whether to” and the “how to” of staying a teacher in what I hope is a satisfying narrative arc. Because they are provisional answers woven together in a book, they will of course be particular and messy and time-bound. But they matter to me. And my belief, egotistical and stubborn though it may be, is that they will matter to many other readers, especially to other teachers. If you answer to that calling in any way, shape, or form, know that it’s for you that I wrote this book.

February, 2026
Saint Paul, Minnesota

NOTES:

-This is the sixth title I’ve published with our new publishing company, One Subject Press. The other five, each of which is a beauty (I know I’m biased), can also be found at our website:

Seven Last Words, a powerful reflection on the seven last words of Christ by Alice Camille;

Scapegoats, a terrific debut collection of short stories by April Vázquez;

From Glory to Glory: A Pilgrim’s Notes from the Badlands of Grace, a moving pilgrimage and memoir-in-essay form by Fr. Pat Hannon, CSC;

Fr. Joseph A. Brown’s magnificent theological reflection, A Retreat with Thea Bowman and Bede Abram (Second Edition);

Scott F. Parker’s Teaching without Teaching, a beautifully concise and provocative little book which kicked off the “Teacher/Writer” series that my own book is continuing.

High School Teacher’s American Sonnet
After Wanda Coleman & Terrance Hayes

1
Stutter better. Butter your own
bread. Beat the odds, but not
your loves. Eat, ate, have eaten,
will eat the words you write,
wrote, have written. In the future
will the poem write itself? The computer
filter for us what we feel
before we feel it? Utsutsutsutsut:
I approximate with letters the sounds
my fourteen-month old makes. I make
a poem with one line each
for every month he’s lived. I have
love and a home with windows and ten minutes
before I need to leave for school.

2
You have ten minutes before you need to leave for school.
School: that fat anthology of notes you take
for the test that never comes, that candle
burning down to the nub, but the flame, high and wild,
and school’s voice whispering from within: Even now,
as I fuck with everyone’s life, including yours, my own remains
solid, supreme, a flickering good thing.
And the sun with its rise,
and your son, breath by small breath, in his crib
dreams dreams that you will never know.
You say, to be in school but not of school,
but what does that mean? Maybe,
to teach, with your words, and your gestures, and your patience too, but know
the child and his dreams knows more than you will ever know.

3
The child and his dreams knows more than you will ever know.
Knows touch to trust and touch to fear
and the clear unblinking gaze. He looks through you
to the heart of the matter: A blade of grass, a leaf, an acorn,
first tentatively held, then gripped, then put into the mouth
as all things are, tasted.
The dream is sound, it holds the child safe.
And you pay attention as you have never paid before
though yours is a fraction of the child’s, who looks through you
to the heart of the matter. Out the window, in the street
the rain falls, and you listen to its patter,
and his breath going in and out,
and yours too, and you are both home today,
a long way from school.

This poem is a record of a path traveled. As with a few other of the true poems I’ve been given in this life, when I read over its contents, I am sure I am not the author. Sure that what wisdom lives in these lines is not from me. And yet it is also true that whatever wisdom does live in these lines is inextricable from the experience of being a new dad, of holding Isaac, this beautiful boy I call “my son” (of course he is not mine anymore than the air I breathe is mine), of watching him grow, of trying to teach him and of being taught by him, even as he himself has learned his first steps and words.

As the note under the title of the poem makes clear, the form of this poem, the particular kind of sonnet it is—that is not mine either. Within the rich Black literary tradition that has formed me (and probably has formed you, too, American reader, though you may or may not acknowledge that formation), there is a strain that is at once radically practical and radically subversive, that is both, as this poem puts it, at the same time “in, but not of” the institution, the nation-state, the America.

Wanda Coleman (the elder) and Terrance Hayes (the student, following in her footsteps) are two luminous witnesses to this mode of truthtelling, and without their own renovation of the sonnet form—the “American sonnet”—my own “High School Teacher’s American Sonnet” would of course not exist.

Therefore, I invite the reader of this poem and essay to read Coleman’s magnificent American sonnets as well as Hayes’, but also to read the essays they’ve written that outline and trace a particular kind of art-making, a way of being “in but not of” a world not made for them. (Of particular interest in relationship to this theme is Hayes’ 2023 book Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry.)

I also want to say that this was the first poem I’ve written that I’ve memorized, and indeed recited in front of other people. Considering my own continuing role as a teacher, this act—first of memorizing and then of presenting its contents to others—provoked no small amount of fear and trembling on my part. I look back and smile a bit at how much fear and trembling, given that all I did is what I’ve been asking students in my classes to do for years. “You’ve spent the time creating the work,” I tell them again and again. “Now stand and speak your truth.”

The poem hasn’t lost its power for me since I first wrote it and committed it to memory. And while Isaac—for whom the poem and the book it will close is dedicated—is now almost three years old, he remains the playful agitator of my soul he has been since his birth. He continues to “look through [me] / to the heart of the matter,” to joyfully disturb and unsettle me. I pray the children in your life do the same for you, dear reader.

Poem Recommendations for the Moment

-Thanks to Father Joseph Brown, SJ, for alerting me to the existence of Amanda Gorman’s powerful new poems honoring the lives of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. And Nate Tinner-Williams at The Black Catholic Messenger gives them helful context here.

-Tish Jones, poet and executive director of TruArtSpeaks, performed this powerful poem, “The Children Are Watching,” January 11, 2026 at the Target Center. Hard to imagine a more apt title for this moment.

It has been a delight reading the fiction of April Vázquez. And what an honor to be able to publish her wonderful first collection of short stories, Scapegoats, as One Subject Press’ first fiction title!

As I’ve done with previous One Subject Press releases, I thought it would be fun to conduct a “publisher’s interview” with the author. In the days leading up to the release of her book, I sent the below questions to her, and she was kind enough to offer these thoughtful responses.

ZACH: As I shared with you in our conversations about this collection, one of the things that hooked me right away as a reader was the voice you establish (in each story) right from the beginning lines. (“Here’s the way the rain works…” which opens the title story has now become one of all-time my favorite fictional openings.) And this collection also offers a great variety of characters and points of view from which those voices are spoken. Can you talk about your process of discovering the voice of a story or a character?

APRIL: I often start with a character and spend some time with them before constructing a story. For instance, I spent two years thinking about the priest in “Father Chuy of the Sagrada Familia” before I started writing. I knew he would be one of the dozens of priests who have been killed in Mexico for speaking out against narcotrafficking, but for a long time that was all I had. I wanted to know him well before I tried to tell his story… which ended up being a quite different story, that of a boy who rejects Father Chuy’s martyrdom and chooses a path of vengeance instead.

Play researcher Stuart Brown discovered that the absence of imaginative play in childhood was a strong predictor of violence among the murderers he studied. I think his conclusion, that play can literally save your life, feels equally true of the imaginative process involved in writing, which requires, as Atticus Finch put it, walking in another person’s shoes—“acting,” which comes from “playacting,” which started out as simply “playing.” There’s something especially liberating about allowing yourself to play the villain.

ZACH: From your biography, I know you spent a decade in Guanajuato, Mexico. Half of the stories in the collection take place in Mexico (many include Guanajuato as a key setting) and these stories include a good deal of Spanish language throughout, though the reader does not need to know Spanish to read them. Could you talk about how you approached the imaginative work of crafting fiction that is written in English but that is also clearly informed by your own experience living in Mexico? And how you did that act of literary and cultural “bridging” in your writing for this book?

APRIL: Isabel Allende wrote that magical realism is not a literary device, because the world is actually full of magic. I would add that life seems even more mysterious and magical in places where poverty and proximity to illness and death facilitate openness to the spiritual dimension of life. I wanted to convey in the stories that life in Mexico is fundamentally different from life in the United States, and the use of Spanish is one way to reinforce that. It’s also an issue of utility; words often have connotations that only work in the original language. In “Scapegoats,” Martina’s mother’s name is explicitly linked to her abandonment of her child. In “Too Beautiful To Be Believed,” the idea that it’s Teo’s turn to collect on la tanda carries a different sense than the English “won the lottery” or “hit the jackpot” because la tanda is not just random luck; it’s a communal effort. Teo’s good fortune is made possible by the investments of his uncle and his friends and is also a return on his own acts of kindness.

ZACH: As your editor, I shared in conversation with you that I saw the theme of the “scapegoat” as a thread that connected these stories and their distinctive characters together. Rene Girard’s theory of scapegoating seemed like it could illuminate some of them—and Vic Sizemore in his Afterword deepens this thinking. I wondered for you, as a creator, was Girard someone in the back (or front) of your mind as you were composing any of these stories? If so, now that they have come together as a full collection, do you see any of his insights shaping the way you see your own accomplishment here?

APRIL: One of the first things I did when I arrived in Mexico was to read Girard’s work. His philosophy is central to my worldview, and, although I wasn’t always conscious of it as I wrote, it does permeate the stories in this collection. Of course, it’s most explicit—and was most intentional on my part—in “Scapegoats,” where Martina’s envy operates almost purely as a mimetic desire for legitimacy. The irony of “Scapegoats” is that the story concludes with Martina’s conscious decision to sacrifice herself, in a certain sense, as well. Jean in “Blessed Are They That Mourn” and the unnamed narrator of “The Chameleon” are similarly motivated by destructive levels of envy.

ZACH: We are privileged to have a beautiful and powerful painting by Emma Kathleen Hepburn Ferrer, “The Argive Ritual to the Warder of the Dead” as the cover image for Scapegoats, a painting which you specifically requested. Can you talk about your own attraction and interest in Ferrer’s work? And in this painting specifically as it relates to your own stories?

APRIL: The image is incredibly powerful because it reaches back into something primal, something deeply embedded in the human subconscious. But while the painting depicts an ancient ritual, it also carries a sense of urgency because that pattern is still playing out right now against marginalized groups like trans people and immigrants. What Girard makes clear is that God is always, always on the side of the victim. And Ferrer—brilliantly—invites the viewer to reflect on the experience of the scapegoat and see the paradigm as God sees it.

ZACH: We share an interest in teaching and education. You have been a classroom educator previously (both in Mexico and the States) and are currently finishing up a PhD program at the University of Delaware where, as your faculty page states, your work “centers on expressions of agency in academic settings and the impact of young adult literature on youth identity development.” Do you see connections between this important educational work you’re doing and your own creative, literary work? If so, what might they be?

I would say that both my academic and creative writing are informed by the same values. In the best of cases, I’ve been able to find venues where I can blend genres—like an article in The English Journal about extracurricular poetry spaces that’s accompanied by one of my poems. In the worst, I chafe under the constraints of academic writing and daydream about writing stories!

What an honor for One Subject Press to be publishing April’s work! Buy a copy now at our website here.

“…Instead of chains, let us dare to think of constellations, their intertwining full of wonder and awakening. In them lies the ability to navigate challenges with hope, but also with courageous revision, without losing fidelity to the Gospel. We are aware of the difficulties: hyper-digitization can fragment attention; the crisis of relationships can wound the psyche; social insecurity and inequalities can extinguish desire. Yet, precisely here, Catholic education can be a beacon: not a nostalgic refuge but a laboratory of discernment, pedagogical innovation and prophetic witness. Drawing new maps of hope: this is the urgency of the mandate.”

—Pope Leo XIV, from the Apostolic Letter, “Drawing New Maps of Hope”

I have found myself consistently encouraged by the words of Pope Leo XIV since his taking office last May. And as a Catholic educator for nearly twenty years, and as a Catholic college and high school student for ten years before that, his call to renew and revitalize the church’s commitment to Catholic education definitely “hits home” in all kinds of ways for me personally.

Let us dare to think of constellations, their intertwining full of wonder and awakening. Ok, Poet Leo! Striking that at the heart of this papal teaching is a metaphor, an image: the intertwining of stars. Striking, too, that Pope Leo, head one of the largest (maybe the largest?) institutions in the world, calls the reader to center the person over the “programmes” institutions (Catholic or otherwise) might have or might be running.

There’s a balance to Pope Leo’s approach to technology and specifically AI, too, which I appreciate. He makes clear that our Catholic institutions must avoid any “technophobia,” but at the same time maintains that any use of technology “requires discernment in didactic planning, evaluation, platforms, data protection, and equitable access.” And Leo continues with specific regard to AI: “Artificial Intelligence and digital environments must be oriented towards the protection of dignity, justice and work; they must be governed according to criteria of public ethics and participation; they must be accompanied by adequate theological and philosophical reflection.”

This is a timely note by the Pope, especially for an American audience. Note that President Trump, in December, issued an executive order that blocks states from regulating AI use. Taken alongside Trump’s push with his April, 2025 executive order, “Advancing Artificial Education for American Youth,” which aims to get educators to “utilize AI in their classrooms to improve outcomes” from kindergarten on up to the twelfth grade, it’s clear that Pope Leo’s mandate for “adequate theological and philosophical reflection” on AI and digital environments is an urgent one indeed.

I trust that other Catholic school leaders will be studying and looking to apply insights from Leo’s writings in the months to come, but I figured why not offer my own two (or three) cents on this platform? These notes are of course, necessarily limited and provisional, but they give you, reader, some sense of how Leo’s reflections land with one “on the ground” laborer in a Catholic (high school) vineyard.

So, without further adieu, here are a few of my takeaways on what Leo-inspired “discernment and reflection” might mean for school communities, specifically regarding decisions on AI.

1. Reflection and Discernment Require Space, Time, and Freedom

As alluded to before, President Trump is working in tandem with the Tech Bros of Silicon Valley. And we can see their philosophy of “move fast and break things” in real time, especially as it concerns AI. People, including and especially for our context young people, are being broken in the process of adapting the latest software or update. Leo writes, “The specificity, depth and breadth of educational action is the work – as mysterious as it is real – of ‘making the being flourish [...] is taking care of the soul’, as we read in Plato’s Apology of Socrates (30a–b). It is a ‘profession of promises’: it promises time, confidence, skill; it promises justice and mercy, it promises the courage of the truth and the balm of consolation.” This “taking care of the soul,” as he beautifully puts it here is necessarily slow going. “Specificity, depth, and breadth” cannot be modeled or practiced without taking your time (as a teacher and student), and it is easier than ever to undermine these values if you are always looking to implement the latest tool or technology.

If we are taking Leo seriously in this document, there is good reason to slow down, learn more about the technologies in play, and make sure whatever use we as teachers or schools make of them in our schools and classrooms will not be harmful to kids, both in the long and short run. Obviously, it is not possible to do real reflection and discernment if you are being pressured to use the technologies, now. For a thoughtful and at times heartbreaking essay on a public school teacher facing exactly this kind of pressure, I highly recommend ’s October essay, “Adults Are the AI Problem in Education.”

2. Reflection and Discernment Must Be Done Communally

Throughout “Drawing New Maps,” Pope Leo lays an emphasis on how decisions are made in schools. “We must continue to promote,” the Pope states, “participatory educational communities, in which lay people, religious, families and students share responsibility for the educational mission.” Earlier on, specifically addressing colleges and universities, Leo called participants to “sit around together, without unnecessary hierarchies, to touch the wounds of history and seek, in the spirit, the wisdom that springs from the lives of people.” With regard to a set of technologies that prioritizes efficiency above all things—it is one of the gods of these technologies for sure—it is vital to prioritize each party and person affected by our decisions about the technologies. And accept that it may be the wisest thing we can do in our school communities to inaugurate messy and human conversations about our use (and non-use) of them.

3. Reflection and Discernment Must Be Oriented Towards Educating the Whole Person

Against a view of education that centers almost entirely on the productivity of students and their preparedness for the workforce (again, see Trump’s April “Advancing AI for American Youth” executive order as a particularly damaging illustration of this view), Pope Leo reiterates the wisdom gleaned from the 1965 Vatican II document, “Gravissimum educationis,” warning not to “subordinate education to the labor market” but rather to “put the person at the centre.” For Leo, this means that “Education is not only the transmission of content, but also learning of virtues.” And notably, Leo names as new “co-patron” of Catholic Education alongside Thomas Aquinas, Cardinal John Henry Newman, who famously fought for and embodied the ideal of a liberal arts education pursued for its own sake, for growth in wisdom, not growth in economic gain. Memorably adapting the sixty-year-old wisdom of “Gravissimum educationis” to a new era, Leo writes that “a person is not a ’skills profile,’ cannot be reduced to a predictable algorithm, but is a face, a story, a vocation.” This line of thinking stands squarely in opposition to the FOMO idea of AI use in schools (thanks Emily Bender and Alex Hanna for that phrasing), that is, “you must use this AI technology now or you will be helplessly out of touch when you enter the workforce.” If the technology is reducing the person, or the subject under study, then the technology and its value must be re-examined, not the subject, and certainly not the person.

A Scriptural Lens

The careful reader will note my use of “principalities and powers” in the subtitle, a nod to New Testament biblical language. Some readers of this stack might not want to “go there” in terms of decision-making regarding AI, but as I am a Catholic school teacher taking seriously the idea of “discerning the spirit of our age and moment,” along with Pope Leo, I think it worth my time to do this in line with these sacred texts. An immense aid as I’ve done some of this thinking and discernment is the theologian and scholar, Walter Wink. (Thanks, , for introducing me to Wink’s work. What a gift it has been.)

In Wink’s work examining New Testament writers’ use of the different textual variants of power, he helps the readers see the totality of the way these words functioned in the Greek texts—archon, exousia, dynamis, among other key words for power(s). I say totality because Wink noted that the New Testament writers were always talking interchangeably about “spiritual” (good angelic as well as bad satanic) aspects of these powers as well as the “human” (institutional, governmental, military, etc.) ones, and very often at the same time. This was not an either/or kind of thing.

Wink offers a contemporary example to make his point, and one that illuminates my own thinking regarding discernment of technologies:

“Before us we have the chairperson of a political committee. Which is really the power here—the person, or the role? Not the person—she can be replaced with another, and the job will go on being done. Not the role either—for some use it to great benefit and others irresponsibly. Is it then the person-in-the-role? But then what authorizes her to act? Is it then the authority invested in her by the constituting charter of the group? But what gives the charter its binding character? Where is power finally to be located, unless we see it as the total interaction of all these aspects, visible and invisible? And how is power to be brought to heel, unless it is addressed on its own terrain—unless that is we address not only the physical manifestations of the group but also its ‘spirit’ or ‘angel’?”

I mentioned earlier in this essay that a god of the new technologies being lumped under the general heading of “AI,” is the god of Efficiency. To use Wink’s language, it seems important to name this god, and its “spirit.” On a practical level, when you automate something, you can do it much faster, and at greater scale. It’s clear how and why these technologies would be very attractive to companies, and now governments, in our surveillance-capitalist age. And I very much agree with writers like Emily Bender and Alex Hanna and Karen Hao (among many other prophetic and skeptical voices) that we should see through the hype and misuse of language around AI and call companies and governments to account for regulating the technology. But there is also a spiritual element in play.

David Dark, a far deeper student of Wink than I, in a different context, talks about a “robot soft exorcism” that students of the Gospel can make, drawing fellow humans out of their “robot” role (whether that be an institutional, technological, or ideological robot) and into a non-hierarchical human-to-human one by naming the evil happening, in the moment. This seems very much to the point with regard to school leaders—specifically Catholic school leaders—and the way they are approaching their use or non-use of AI technologies. “Exorcism,” of course, will conjure up for many readers rolled-back eyes, and heads flipping to other sides of heads, but Dark’s point (and I think Wink’s before him) is that the bad spiritual energy is not going to manifest in that obvious way. But if we are going to talk about integrating ChatGPT into our Learning Management Systems, let’s not forget to mention that Kenyan workers had to first filter out, for two bucks an hour, thousands of racist, hateful and toxic images to make this LLM as “safe” as possible. Or that a young person took their life at the behest of one of those chatbots. We are on spiritual terrain here.

To use Pope Leo’s language from “Drawing New Maps of Hope”: it is painfully clear in these cases, that the “person” was not “at the centre.” In fact, these are people that are seen by companies (and perhaps governments now too) as a kind of collateral damage. That view—which is capturing many minds and hearts and at high levels across institutions—is one which may demand a kind of “exorcism,” though as Walter Wink and David Dark show, you don’t need to be a priest or Catholic or Christian to perform it.

A Big Catholic (AI) Tent

As I was in the midst of wrapping this essay up, I received in my inbox, courtesy of Commonweal Magazine a piece titled, “Pope Leo vs. Palantir,” written by Father , SJ, a writer whose work I admire. The essay is a terrific distillation of key priorities of “Drawing New Maps of Hope,” which Spadaro sees as “interior life, technology, and peace.” “The student is not a cog,” Spadaro writes. “Education, Leo insists, is a constellation that binds heart, mind, and hands. Education, for him, is another name for peace—because it teaches us to appreciate differences and to grow in dialogue.”

This view of education binding “heart, mind, and hands” Spadaro contrasts vividly with the “Meritocracy Fellowship” launched by Palantir Technologies:

“The fellowship, open only to exceptional students who pledge not to enroll in an accredited college the following fall, pays roughly $5,400 a month. The message could hardly be clearer—or colder: higher education is obsolete, learning is a waste of time, what matters is knowing how to perform. It’s not only a provocation; it’s a political act. Palantir, whose empire runs on data and artificial intelligence, isn’t just recruiting talent; it’s shaping the future of education as a battlefield between freedom and economic power.”

As Spadaro notes, this narrowing of education couldn’t be further from the vision of Pope Leo’s new co-patron, St. Cardinal John Henry Newman, who “warned that to reduce education to the mere acquisition of skills was to betray its soul.”

That writing like this is coming from, as Father Spadaro’s byline indicates, “the undersecretary of the Dicastery for Culture and Education of the Holy See,” is encouraging news indeed. I also note that, there is no single, uniform “Catholic response” to the rise of AI. “The Catholic Church,” as my old boss Bob Zyskowski, longtime publisher for The Catholic Spirit diocesan newspaper in Saint Paul & Minneapolis, used to say, “is a big tent.”

So, at the same time that folks like Father Spadaro are noting the contrasts between Palantir and Pope Leo, the recent November 6-7 “Builders Artificial Intelligence Forum” hosted by the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome included Palantir (Canada), as well as Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Kurzweil Technologies as participants. This gathering, which Pope Leo addressed with a one-page exhortation, had the purpose of “[bringing] together companies leading in Catholic AI, venture capital and angel investors, as well as prominent AI thought leaders and researchers.”

Perhaps it makes sense in a forum for “building and scaling” AI technologies that there were no workshops on the environmental and social impacts of building data center after data center all over the known world. Still, a wondering that I have as an outside (but interested) observer of a conference like this one is where is the space for conversation about whether folks should be “building” out this industry at such a large scale at all? And how does that building out square with recent Church teaching on the environment, especially in a document like Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ (“On Care for the Common Home”)? For surely “Catholic AI” companies will require the building of massive amounts of data centers as well as companies like OpenAI and Microsoft?

In addition, as I look over the programs from the past two years of this conference (2024 and 2025), I notice that, unless I am mistaken, there were no women presenters in 2025 and only one woman presenter, Alexis Haughey, founder of Catholic Institute of Technology, in 2024. This lack of basic gender representation (a historic problem for the Catholic Church) is notable in conference such as this one. How can we assure full and representative conversation on AI in the Catholic Church if women don’t even have a seat at the table?

I offer these outside critiques (and for folks reading this who were at the conference, please feel free to correct me where I’m wrong) at the same time that I welcome the actual ASKING for permission to “ingest” vast amounts of data from scholars and writers and theologians that companies like Longbeard (another sponsor of the conference) and TrekAI have made part of their policy for building their own LLMs. That is a welcome change from the status quo of intellectual property theft that OpenAI has made their company standard. But I hear a lot of the same language from these companies and their leaders that I have heard and read from leaders of big tech companies. Consider this profile of Matthew Harvey Sanders, founder and CEO of Longbeard, in The Catholic Register:

“Tapping into the ‘two roads diverged at a yellow wood’ motif, the founder and CEO of the Toronto-based Longbeard technology company said civilization has a choice to adopt the ‘golden path’ or the ‘dark path.’

The 43-year-old defines the ‘golden path’ as many choosing to purposefully utilize the extra time freed up by AI and robotics to rededicate themselves to living life more aligned with God’s intention. This could include ‘being closer to nature, living in community, having bigger families and devoting more time to art and asking life’s big questions through philosophical reflection.’”

The “golden path” that Sanders proposes of course assumes that human beings have to take a path that includes a plethora of AI technologies. (We’ve already crossed that rubicon, he has asserted elsewhere.) “If we’re going to be on the AI path, then let’s be on the ‘golden’ one.” This is a remarkable similar line of thinking that someone like Sam Altman has given: we’re competing with China for AGI; if someone’s going to reach AGI capability, it should be us, the “good guys,” not them, the bad ones. The “inevitability” argument for “building and scaling out AI” has actually been around for quite some time.

A report I’ve read on the Builder’s AI Forum noted that there were some “differences of opinion” while “participants broadly agreed that Catholics — with their intellectual and ethical tradition and focus on human dignity — must help shape AI’s future.” It’s hard for me to argue with the last part of that sentence. At the same time, as Catholics—and everyone else—continue to shape this future, it is imperative that the table for that “shaping” include more voices, including ones that are skeptical of the building and scaling that the biggest and wealthiest voices in the room are advocating for. Consider this essay one such skeptical offering.

Recommendations:

-As noted, Emily Bender and Alex Hanna’s book The AI Con, is a terrific read. And what is even better, the two of them have sustained the close attention they pay to the language of AI hypesters in a thoughtful (and fun) podcast, Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000. Check it out. It’s great.

-Commonweal Magazine had my number this week! In addition to that great little piece by Antonio Spadaro, the new issue has an excellent essay by (whose work I don’t usually love), titled “Escaping the ‘Torment Nexus’” all about Christian and social democracy, Popes Leo XIII, XIV, and Francis and AI. Included in the piece is this gem of a penultimate paragraph: “It won’t suffice for the Christian to merely declaim that tech corporations should do this or that. They won’t compromise in the face of moral exhortation or calls to goodwill, no matter how eloquent—not without countervailing pressure exerted by other associative bodies. In the teeth of the Torment Nexus, then, the Catholic task is to repair and reempower such bodies, starting with unions, and to stimulate long-atrophied muscles for Pope Leo’s ‘unified action.’ We should also imagine new tripartite forms, such as AI ethics boards that place organized labor and civil society (including the Church) across the table from technologists.” AI ethics boards that place organized labor and civil society (including the Church) across the table from technologists. Yes to that proposal, a thousand times.

-What about you, dear reader? Any recommendations along these themes?

Our two-and-a-half year old has a black t-shirt with a painting of a tiger on it. And I’ve blabbered Blake’s famous opening line enough times around him when he wears the shirt that he too has even learned to say the line—and sometimes even do the follow-up, “in the forests of the night,” which is very cute. After one of these little father-son tyger-fests as we put on the shirt, I tried to say the rest of the poem out loud to him from memory but couldn’t get beyond the first quatrain. That bugged me, so I found the poem online, copied it out word by word and was in the process confused and in awe of it all over again. Here it is, reader, in all its strange glory:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And water’d heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Isn’t it such a strange and inspired choice, those “what the’s” that pepper this poem? (“What the hammer? What the chain?” Blake asks. And I: “What the heck is going on here?”) They omit so much in order to get the reader (I think now, after a whole bunch more re-readings) to imagine the Creator of the original Tiger stealing fire from the stars (oh, it was no gentle gift from the celestial bodies, not according to this poem—the stars defended the theft with their “spears”). And not only that, in order to forge the original ferocious creator, God has to use a “hammer,” a “chain,” and an “anvil.”

But that way of interpretation isn’t quite right either because the whole poem proceeds not as declarations but as wonderings, awe-filled questions, the gist of these piled-on preguntas being: what kind of God is it who could make such a ferocious creature as a Tiger? And how could that be the same creator that made the more comparatively snuggly Lamb?

There’s an old saying about poetry, and I don’t know who said it first, along the lines that “all poems tell about the making of a poem.” When I keep this little nugget in my brain, I consider that maybe Blake is also talking about the audacity of human creation, too. Of what artists do. A poet like Dante who renders monstrous triple-headed Satan in hell chewing on the traitors Judas, Cassius, and Brutus is also the same poet who paints a luminous and captivating Beatrice leading her wayward Pilgrim and his guide Virgil up the steps to Paradise.

And yet while it’s certainly true that “God don’t make junk,” as singer Ethel Waters said, when we human artists put our pens to the page, or our brushes to the canvas, or chisels to the stone, we tend, unlike the Almighty, to come up short at the making’s end.

I think of the painter Gulley Jimson in that wonderful film (based on the Joyce Cary novel I haven’t read), The Horse’s Mouth. Gulley has just finished painting a massive tiger within an even more massive mural painting on the wall of a very rich person whose house he has appropriated (unbeknownst to them) for his artwork—they’re away on vacation. But having spent all this time and energy on the tiger, Jimson is not satisfied. He recites parts of the Blake poem from memory, addressing his painted tiger as he does so:

What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Jimson’s answer? “Not mine.” And then, turning to regard the stuffed tiger he’d been using as a model, he concludes that he should have gotten a live tiger from the zoo to work from. His artistic dissatisfaction only deepens when he finishes the entire mural a few days later. “Not what I meant,” he says. “Not the vision I had…Why doesn’t it fit? Like it does in the mind?”

I first watched The Horse’s Mouth in my tenth grade art class, where Mr. Tebbut was my teacher. More than twenty-five years later, I still think back with gratitude to those fifty minutes a day I spent in the bowels of Bandas Hall at Saint Agnes High School in Saint Paul, Minnesota, rendering still lifes onto a big sheet of white paper, listening to NPR classical (or sometimes jazz), considering Tebbut’s decisive dismissal of junior Jason (no relation to William) Blake’s suggestion that we put on some Limp Bizkit or Rage Against the Machine instead as accompaniment.

I don’t remember ever seeing an administrator observe Tebbut’s class—or for that matter any of my high school teachers—but if they had, they might have been hard-pressed to define what exactly it was he was teaching on a given day. Mr. Tebbut never lectured. He didn’t use the chalkboard. He rarely demonstrated himself what he wanted us to do with our own work. There were some brief, koan-like wisdom sayings he would repeat again and again. Draw what you see, not what you think you see. Don’t erase. Keep the line. Aside from those, I remember little of his instruction. Did he sidle up next to students to observe what we were doing? Offer comments or suggestions as we worked? While that seems possible, I honestly can’t ever remembering much of that happening.

Almost every week he would give us a homework assignment for us to do in our sketchbooks: to make a pencil drawing of something from our lives at our homes—books or glasses or a baseball glove. Sometimes it was a self-portrait. He did put a grade on these assignments—they were out of 100 points—and he usually added a brief note (sometimes as little as a phrase). Of course there was no rubric or anything like that.

I don’t remember my exact scores, but I know that I never earned a 100. (I don’t think I ever got higher than a 90.) And even though I was definitely a high achiever in high school (certainly got higher grades in all my other classes), getting these comparatively lower grades in art didn’t bother me at all. I was delighted to do these homework sketches (Sunday afternoon was my usual time), and even more delighted to know that Mr. Tebbut, my teacher, would consider my work each week, would see what I had made, would note my growth as an artist.

Obviously I’ve gone pretty far afield from “Tyger, Tyger”(what exactly is your thesis, Mr. Czaia?), but the truth is, it’s very often the case that whenever I read or hear William Blake’s work, I think of tenth grade art class and Mr. Tebbut and The Horse’s Mouth, the wonderful movie starring Alec Guinness as Gulley Jimson. As I imagine certain art-works and experiences are for you, reader, the poem and the poet and the teacher and the movie are all tied together in some strange way in my mind and body, and probably always will be.

Mr. Tebbut never offered an interpretation of The Horse’s Mouth, and I don’t remember us ever discussing the film after watching it. I think he just wanted us to have the experience of watching it. I’m grateful for this desire, because I don’t think I would have ever sought it out as a fifteen year old boy on my own.

Watching it again later in life, though, I can’t help but hear and feel Blake throughout, and not just in that part I quoted from earlier, either. The poet Blake stood in incomprehending and awefilled wonder at the beautiful and terrible in God’s creation. The fictional artist Gulley Jimson views his own vocation with a related deep ambivalence. Gulley is shadowed throughout the film by a young aspiring artist, Nosey. Nosey runs errands for Gulley, fetches materials and models, and helps him get out of all manner of jams. And yet, in spite of Nosey’s unfailing loyalty and dedication, more than once Gulley fairly shouts at his apprentice, DON’T BE AN ARTIST!

I love that. (My wife, a classically trained vocalist, likes to throw this at me from time to time. I throw it right back.) I think Gulley knows that nothing he can say is going to dissuade young Nosey from following this path. But he’s going to tell him up front the truth about it all the same: it’s trouble, and all the way down the line.

It’s hard to see the dissident, prophetic, and much-maligned-in-life William Blake disagreeing with that sentiment.

As long as I’m leaping from place to place in this free-association bonanza of an essay, I must say that I would be remiss in my explorations if I didn’t also include the sacred name of Brian Doyle, a writer whose work I was lucky to discover early in both my teaching and writing careers, and return to often, especially when I am in need of soul-recovery. (Feels like more and more often these days.)

Brian Doyle was a deep student both of The Horse’s Mouth (unlike me, he actually read the novel by Joyce Cary) and of William Blake. As I was composing and revising this essay, I couldn’t help myself from dipping into Brian’s wonderful “Billy Blake’s Trial,” which, in addition to offering a “a careful account of the trial for sedition of the poet and printer William Blake, in the year of 1804, on a fitfully wet day in January in a wooden room by the sea,” also reveals much of Brian’s personal reasons for, as he puts it, taking more than five years writing the essay that is “befriending and comprehending” William Blake.

To befriend and comprehend: what a magnificent way to describe the act of reading. And at the same time, the kind of “befriending and comprehending” of an artist on the page or in their work is very different than doing so in person. I love and am thrilled by Blake’s poems. Maybe it would have been fun to throw back a pint with him at the bar? Or maybe we would have driven each other crazy. In the movie the brilliant Gulley Jimson drives everyone around him crazy.

I’ve said before about poems—and maybe someone else has said it before me, if so I apologize for my theft—that one of the things I love about them is that the good ones completely and utterly dispense with the small talk. There’s no “hi, how are you doing,” and pleasantries about the weather. Immediately, you are in the presence of a Big Question or overwhelming image, or breathtaking honesty. (Blake, of course, is this way in spades.)

When it’s comes to teachers introducing poets—or in the case of Mr. Tebbut, films about art and artists—to students, there’s a lot to be said for the “less is more” school of thinking, especially when that aura is woven throughout the teacher’s being. Truly for my tenth grade art teacher, Bob Tebbut, there was no game or guile about him other than facilitating as much artistic “befriending and comprehending” as he could manage. While to some, that simple uneffacing act of opening the gate for the student to enter the new land may not seem like much, to me it was and is the height of wisdom. Teachers like Bob Tebbut transform lives. Certainly he changed mine, and for the better.

DON’T BE AN ARTIST! I can still hear Gulley shout.

Oh, but I did. Oh, but I am.

NOTES:

-This isn’t the first time I’ve read and shared a Blake poem on this platform. If you were intrigued by this reading check out, “Phillis Wheatley & William Blake In Conversation, On Appropriation”.

-For the Brian Doyle fans out there, did you know that our publishing company, One Subject Press, carries his magnificent novel, Cat’s Foot? Check it out here.

“Religious practices that encourage us in how to feel without assisting us in how to live are not only useless but perhaps harmful.”

This quote from the Afterword of Alice Camille’s deeply practical devotional, which I am honored to be publishing as a second edition this year with One Subject Press, sums up in a sentence the author’s angle of entry for the entire work.

The text of Seven Last Words will not be a surprise, nor will the themes that Camille has chosen for these meditations. Humility. The Kingdom. Discipleship. Suffering. Thirst. The Cross. Surrender. They are as timely in 2025 as they were in 1998 when the book was first published. They were timely to the first followers of Jesus, and all those who came after. To adapt Ezra Pound’s famous definition of poetry to this context: they are the news that have stayed news.

What distinguishes Camille’s writing on these familiar final words of Christ? For one thing, Alice Camille is always bringing the reader deeper into the text of the scriptural words. Rather than isolating Christ’s words from the cross from his teaching as it is given to us in the gospels, Camille carries the thread between Jesus’ life, his teachings, and his final witness on the cross. Furthermore, she shows how the witness of Jesus is coherent with and reliant on all of the Old Testament for its full meaning. So, in this concise meditation we are not only drawn close to the scandal of the cross, but to the cry of the prophets, the laments of Job, the heartbreak and challenge of the Psalms. And always, as Camille writes, with the aim of instructing us in how to live more fully as a disciple, a student, of these words.

“One holy person is worth all the sermons on holiness we might ever hear,” Alice Camille writes, also, in that same Afterword. This book inspires us as readers to be confronted by the ever-ancient, ever-new scriptural words. And then to turn our gaze to our own lives, which are always in need of transformation. If we’re listening closely in these moments, we learn that we too, are also called to be that one holy person that others might learn from.

Notes:

-In a very real sense, One Subject Press, which began a year ago in January, wouldn’t exist without the literary and theological labors of Alice Camille. Aside from this wonderful second edition of Seven Last Words, which you can find here at our website, I also wholeheartedly recommend her outstanding scripture introductions, Invitation to the Old Testament and Invitation to the New Testament, as well as her concise and thoughtful reflections on the lectionary—check out her reflections on the current liturgical season, “Cycle A,” here.

-If you’ve been keeping track, Seven Last Words is the fourth book we’ve published in 2025. Thank you for support of this young independent publishing company! Check out our first three titles, Scott F. Parker’s brilliant educational manifesto, Teaching without Teaching, Father Joseph Brown’s deeply dialogic, poetic, and imaginative Retreat with Thea Bowman and Bede Abram: Leaning on the Lord, and Father Patrick Hannon’s incisive and ruminative memoir-in-essay form, From Glory to Glory: A Pilgrim’s Notes from the Badlands of Grace.

“Poetry now has as many categories as popular music. What plays at Harvard won’t get anyone on the dance floor in East Los Angeles, and that’s just fine. All styles are possible, and everyone is invited.”

-Dana Gioia, “The State of Poetry”

All styles are possible, and everyone is invited is a beautifully true statement about poetry. And it’s hard (for me at least) to think of a more credible speaker on that state of affairs than Dana Gioia, a writer whose poetry and criticism I have read and admired and argued with for the last two decades.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Dana Gioia these past few weeks, in large part because of the changes (read damage done) to the federally funded Poetry Out Loud program Gioia launched twenty years ago when he was chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), a post he held from 2003 to 2009.

It’s hard for me to imagine my first poetry units, lessons, and activities separate from this program which centered poetry as a community performance art necessitating memorization and recital. How beautiful it was to hear fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen year olds making words on the page come alive in their own voices, with their own bodies! Literary testimonies. How wonderful to note the difference and variety in what poems students chose to memorize and recite! (And yes, many youngsters chose poems based on length, shorter the better. I can’t blame them—I did require and assign a grade to this assignment after all. But you would be surprised how many students pushed their memories and vocabularies to accommodate thirty, forty, even fifty line poems.)

So within this context it is important to note that throughout the twenty years of Poetry Out Loud’s flourishing—more than four and a half million students in the U.S. and U.S. territories participated during this period—the Poetry Foundation has been a partner and funder, supporting the federally funded program with, among other things, its vast treasure house of published poetries—a true illustration of “all styles are possible, everyone is invited.”

And so, as a result of this consequential partnership between the Poetry Foundation and Poetry Out Loud, students who participated in our school and regional competitions memorized poems by Natalie Diaz and William Blake; Jimmy Santiago Baca and Ada Limon; William Shakespeare and Li-Young Lee. Living poets as well as those canonized as “great” mixed and mingled on the page and in our ears and mouths. One of my favorite activities as a teacher was simply giving students time to browse Poetry Out Loud’s vast digital repository of poets, living and dead, to find one who spoke to them.

I should note here, too, that I teach and have taught for most of my career at a school with a student body that is almost entirely students of color—mostly Latino and Black students. How vital it has been to offer this collection of poetries—one that is actually representative of the cultures and experiences of the students I have taught. It was not a small thing—that repository, that partnership between Poetry Out Loud and Poetry Foundation. It is not a small thing that the repository is now gone. Not a small thing that the partnership, at the end of this year, will have been dissolved.

The cause of this dissolution? No specific reason is given on either Poetry Foundation’s or Poetry Out Loud’s (now greatly reduced) web pages. But it is pretty clear from the language that is given that politics is at the heart of the matter. On the opening page of Poetry Out Loud’s updated website, we are greeted with this message: “In recognition of America’s 250^th Anniversary in 2026, the 2025-2026 Poetry Out Loud program will focus on poems that celebrate the rich tapestry of American history and culture. Click the ‘Find Poems’ tab for an updated list of poems for this year’s competition.”

When I clicked the “Find Poems” tab, I could no longer find Natalie Diaz’s “Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglican Seraphym Subjugating of a Wild Indian Reservation,” which seemed odd to me, especially considering the fact that it was one of the poems recited by the 2019 champion (from Minnesota, woot woot!) Isabella Callery. Nor could I find Keith S. Wilson’s poem “Black Matters,” which was recited by this past year’s champion, Isavel Mendoza. In fact, no living poets and their poems are available for students to memorize and recite in the national competition. (And notably, what poems are offered from canonical writers like Langston Hughes, for instance, have been changed.)

These erasures are not surprising, given that the poems I’ve mentioned, and so many others on the old site, subvert any notion of an “America” that can be easily and straightforwardly celebrated now in the 250^th year of its existence.

It’s doubtless worth taking the time to express anger and grief at the absurdity and obscenity of a decision like this. At the narrowing of possibilities it might represent for students and for teachers. So here is your moment, reader, for that expression. Feel free to relieve yourself, punching pillows or cursing into the wind while the kiddos aren’t around or doing something else creatively non-destructive. Because I will be moving on in this essay. I’m going to swerve. (“He’d tell you what he was going to do,” Jamal Mashburn said of Larry Bird. “And then he’d go and do it.”)

Okay? Let’s swerve together.

Actually, full disclosure, reader: I already had been swerving. I serve as the Poetry Club advisor at my high school. For many years, part of the work I did as Poetry Club advisor was organizing and facilitating our school’s Poetry Out Loud competitions—and supporting the winners as they prepared to compete in city and state finals in Minnesota. But a few years ago, a terrific local spoken word arts organization, TruArtSpeaks, approached us with the opportunity to host a school slam that would feature student-created poems. Since students were already reading and studying and discussing a good number of poems in the classes that I taught, and since I didn’t have time, bandwidth, or money to do both Poetry Out Loud and TruArtSpeaks, I opted for TruArtSpeaks (celebrating 20 years themselves this year, woot woot!) The recent events described above seem to show the wisdom of this prioritizing.

And anyway, any teacher can organize their community’s own poetry slam or poetry recital (or combination of both) with or without the funding or blessing of institutions. And if you’re not making any money off the event (in other words, it’s for educational purposes), you don’t need to obtain or pay for permission to share and disseminate the life-giving work of folks like Natalie Diaz, Keith Wilson, Ada Limon, etc. etc. etc. Though, if you’re a teacher, you should of course get your English Department to buy their books and line your classrooms with their collections and put them in kids’ hands every chance you get. (As we do at our high school.)

While I was writing this essay, I’ve been reading a book, Dark Days, written by yet another great living poet, Roger Reeves, who I had the pleasure to hear perform his poetry as the keynote speaker at the recent Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writer’s (ALSCW) conference at Ohio State University. In Dark Days, a book full of illuminations, of lights, Reeves returns often, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, to this question: why, as a Black person, would he “want to be an American?” This wondering comes to a particular point in the essay, “Intimate Freedoms, Intimate Futures,” where Reeves critiques the 1619 Project, led by Nikole Hannah-Jones.

Reeves writes:

“I want to hold in question ownership and its erasures, the desire to belong to a country through an origin story, through centering. I want to hold in question the Project, not just the 1619 Project but the project of becoming an American. It is not a piecemeal endeavor, one that only involves selecting the history we find most noble, most laudable, most favorable or casts us on the right side of history. Becoming American requires donning the bloody clothes of our genocides and dispossessions, our erasures.”

Reeves goes on in this essay to offer a close-reading of a significant Black-Indigenous relationship in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and then highlight the ways that the 1619 Project, through privileging an (historically inaccurate) “origin story” for Black folks in the U.S., also has the effect of erasing Native folks and their own histories from that story.

One of the (many) things I love about Reeves is how much his sociopolitical and literary thinking is grounded in his own life—experiences and stories he shares generously with the reader. And so, in this essay he offers the instance of his own cross-cultural friendship with a Native poet, “G-“ and a visit Reeves makes to speak at the high school G- taught at in the Pacific Northwest. Reflecting on his visit with these students, Reeves writes: “There, in that classroom, I sought to create this intimacy through what has brought me closest to myself and others—poetry. Poetry has brought me my closest friends and co-conspirators.”

What a linguistic pairing! —“friends and co-conspirators”. In the very next lines, Reeves expands on this element lying in potential in all real friendships:

“Friendship is the most radical alliance one can make because it is one of the few things not organized and administered by the government—unlike marriage and family. It is improvisational, contingent, errant, and opaque, and sits outside of large-scale legal apparatuses.”

The true poem and the true friendship, they are deeply subversive acts, and especially when they are conducted, improvised in the context of empires and imperial nation-states. That’s what I take Reeves to be saying. It’s also what I know to be true from forty-three years of living on this planet.

To loop back to where I started this essay, of course the most authoritarian administration in the history of the American Empire would not want to facilitate these acts of subversion via living poets, most especially not poets from marginalized communities who have truths to tell regarding America’s “genocides and dispossessions,” to use Reeves’ language again. And so it makes sense that this administration would look to neutralize Poetry Out Loud’s power when they had the chance, especially now that they are wanting to commemorate their own cherished “origin story” about 1776.

This decision is one idiocy in a growing series of idiocies, and I don’t plan on investing any more time in venting anger about it. Rather, so long as I am given keys to an English Language Arts classroom in this country, I will look to continue sharing poems (and novels and plays and stories and essays) with the students I teach, and try to open space for them to read as deeply as possible, to talk about what they are reading, to create their own art in response. And to help students—and myself first—to tune out the noise and nonsense around us, and tune in to the song that generations have been singing before us, and, God willing, generations will sing after us. Always, I tell myself, the poem awaits. The poem awaits.

Notes:

-As I noted in my video introduction, I am 10 days late to the “Give to the Max” day promotion. But there is no worthier poetic cause for Twin Citians than TruArtSpeaks! Check out their website and give here.

-As I was writing this essay, I learned about the California-based poetry organization, “Get Lit,” which has a program where students memorize and recite a “classic poem” and then compose their own poem in response. How cool is that?! I shared with my students this video of high school student performing her recital of “Buen Esqueleto” (by Natalie Scenters-Zapico), which itself is a response to Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones.” The calls and responses keep echoing down through the generations. The poem awaits. Long live the poem.

I’ve had the privilege of getting to know the work of Father Patrick Hannon since 2022, when I was honored to be tapped to “blurb” his wonderful book on the Our Father, Such Dizzy Natural Happiness. (Among other I passions that I learned I shared with Pat reading that book, one notable one was a mutual love for the great Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh.)

Pat Hannon is a writer who delights readers on a sentence-by-sentence and paragraph-by-paragraph level but also one who consistently takes the big risk of being open and vulnerable in page after page. He takes equally seriously his dedication to craft and to vision as a writer—and the reader is the lucky beneficiary of this work.

When I learned Pat was interested in publishing this book, From Glory to Glory: A Pilgrim’s Notes from the Badlands of Grace, with One Subject Press (shout out to Greg Pierce and ACTA Publications for the recommendation), I jumped at the chance. And now that I’ve had the chance to work as editor to help bring this book to publication, I have to say that my admiration for Pat has only grown. He has been thoughtful, generous, flexible, and agile in his ability to respond to my feedback. And patient, too—which is a blessing indeed, especially when working with me, who while I have experience, am still very much learning on the job the skills I need as a publisher.

Now that Pat and I have completed our work bringing this beautiful book to press, I thought it might be of interest to readers of this Substack to get a better sense of the book he’s written to present a kind of interview or conversation I’ve initiated on From Glory to Glory. I shared the questions below in email, and Pat was kind enough to respond.

I hope what we’ve shared below gives you a good introduction for the book, as well as the voice of Pat Hannon, a writer who I believe you will find to be very good company indeed.

ZACH: You’re at almost precisely the one-year anniversary of the sibling Camino that inspired this book. (mid-October to early-November, 2024.) Can you tell me more about the genesis of that pilgrimage, both for you personally, and for your siblings? And how soon on or after that trip did you know you wanted to write about your experience there?

PAT HANNON: I am responding to this question on November 11. A year ago today I was with two of my sibs/peregrinos (Margaret and Julie) in Assisi, Italy. My sister Sally and her husband David (the other two in our Santiago pilgrimage) had returned to Oregon and the remaining three of us wanted to spend a week in Rome. Spending time (on my birthday, no less!) in the town Saint Francis grew up in was waaaay up on my bucket list. Before joining the Congregation of Holy Cross, I looked seriously at the Franciscans because of my deep love and admiration for Francis. I mention that journey to Assisi because my reason for making the trek to Assisi was the same reason why I decided to walk the Camino: I want to be a holy man. It’s my deepest desire, frankly, because in choosing to walk that road—whether along the way I run, race, stumble, or fall—I know I am giving glory to God as Francis did and all the holy men and women I have known on planet Earth. Walking the Camino, I hoped, would work the muscles of my heart, my soul, in a kind of ambulatory spiritual boot camp that might make me a lean, mean (in a good way!) loving (that is, forgiving, grateful, generous) machine. Kermit the Frog once lamented, “It ain’t easy being green.” Yep, it ain’t easy growing into my full humanity. I am, still, a work in progress.

I mention in the book that my sister Sally and I had talked about walking the Camino years ago, and while we brought it up occasionally, it remained one of those pots simmering quietly on one of the back burners of my stove. But then she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease a year and a half ago, so my sister Julie (who also had expressed an interest in walking on the Camino, who is also so giving you have to stop yourself from taking advantage of her!) and I decided it was time to act. Sally (a holy woman) said yes, her husband David (kind, peaceful) jumped on board, and Margaret, who grabs at any chance to hang out with family said she was going too, and, God love her, you don’t say “Nah,” to Margaret. She’s one of those people you want to have around you because she is mind-blowingly generous. So as far as I was concerned, I was surrounding myself with these amazing people who would inspire me on the Way to Santiago. Boy, was I lucky.

I knew eventually I would want to write about my journey. I simply didn’t expect it to happen so quickly. I gave a presentation about the Camino early in the spring semester of last year, and that became a chapter in the book. It also gave me a frame for the entire essay collection: exploring the idea of pilgrimage from various angles and perspectives. Once I came up with a list of those pilgrimage-adjacent subjects, I was off and running.

ZACH: One of the things I love about this book is how freely it moves between and among texts that have inspired and nourished you. And I use the word “text” broadly because, of course, for you, that includes song and film, as well as books, and poems and essays. I’m curious how you work as a writer, with this “hum” of other voices in your head as you compose your own work. Can you share a little about your own writing process? The particular joys and struggles you experience as you write and revise?

PAT HANNON: Your question made me chuckle because in an hour I’ll be heading off to the writing workshop class that I teach here at the University of Portland! I propose to my students early on that there are essentially two kinds of writers: the ‘architect’ writer and the ‘gardener’ writer. The former spends a fair amount of time planning: outlining, scaffolding, figuring out how the work is going to be structured and then that writer begins to create the work. The latter tills the soil and then scatters the seeds and then waits patiently to see what comes up. Well, I am that gardener-writer. I sometimes envy my architect-writer colleagues, for they appear, at least, to be less frantic. But I’ve come to love the adventure of writing: not knowing how a piece is going to end up looking like, where it will take me, when I will be inspired by a memory, a line from a poem, a song, a play, a thought. Brian Doyle was an early mentor of mine and he once told me, “Hannon, just start writing, and trust that you’ll end up with something worthy.” So I try to silence the judge-editor inside and just write. Eventually, something begins to take root and begins to grow. Honestly, I get humbled by the process because writing is for me an exasperating, exhilarating, wild ride that only occasionally I feel I am in control of. I also tell my students, “Remember, revision is a holy word!” I have bookmarks made up for them with those words on them which I hand out on the last day. I can’t say I enjoy the revision process because I’m a bit of a perfectionist, but I do understand its necessity as part of the writing process. It too becomes an exercise in humility (a word that shares, by the way, a root with the word human) which, we writers all know, is the very reason why we write: to become more fully human.

ZACH: This is a book that is difficult to “pigeon hole” in terms of genre. It’s certainly got the hallmarks of memoir—personal writing about a particular moment, and moments, in time. But it also works episodically, chapter by chapter, with personal essays that come to shape the larger narrative whole. So I’ve come to describe it to readers as a “memoir in essay form.” I’m curious for you as a writer, though, how you came to understand the shape of the book as it came to you over this past year? Who were there mentors or models as writers that were important to you as you composed it? How so?

PAT HANNON: I like the way you describe the book, though I might switch the order! I am at heart an essayist of the ‘personal’ essayist tribe. So I love the fact that some idea will pop into my head one day and then the wheels of my thinking, imagination, memory begin to spin. The other day, for instance, I was musing with a colleague about the difference between a dead end in the road and a cul-de-sac. It was a fun conversation. Soon after I scribbled on a slip of paper, “Write about a dead end.” I can’t wait to see where I go with that idea! So it was the idea of ‘pilgrimage’ that grabbed hold of me early on that I wanted to explore. That idea (and not me) would be the central focus of the book. But, as Phillip Lopate reminds us essayists (he has been a huge influence for me), the essayist inhabits the piece as a distinctive voice, a sensibility that sees, hears, smells, tastes, and touches the world in a distinctive way. I do, of course, wanted narrative to inhabit the book as well—in fact, that ‘memoirish’ element is crucial to the book’s success. The true stories I tell, though, act in tandem with my thinking and imagining as I mine the idea and see what I might uncover, discover.

So once I settled on the list of eight subjects/ideas related to the pilgrimage experience (thanks for your helpful input, by the way, as we narrowed the rather lengthy list of possible subjects!), the outline of the book came into focus and I was ready to start. As I said, I had already written one of the chapters already, so I had a sense of the scope I expected for the subsequent chapters.

So many writers—living and deceased—encouraged me along the way as I wrote this book; all of them are generous voices happily echoing in my head: Phillip Lopate and John McPhee, for sure, but then there are: Brian Doyle, Michael McGregor, Flannery O’Connor, Virginia Woolf, Annie Dillard, Hemingway, Orwell, Shane MacGowen (from the punk band The Pogues…I think he was a holy saint of a broken man), lots of Irish poets, playwrights, novelists. In every case, these writers kept me honest, kept me from playing it safe, kept reminding me that imperfection is clear evidence of our lovely humanity. They also reminded me that writing—though often painful—can be so fun and pleasurable too.

ZACH: Some of the most moving sections of this book involve your ministry as a priest—both in the context of working within traditional church settings—the confessional, celebrating mass, etc.—but also as a working artist, that is, someone who is always open to seeing the world “charged with the grandeur of God,” as the Hopkins poem you quote in the book puts it—whether in the natural world or in intentionally sacred spaces like churches. Can you speak a little bit about the way you see your vocations as artist and as priest intersecting?

PAT HANNON: Awhile ago I was asked a similar question, and my answer still works! I am a Hannon, a Holy Cross priest, a teacher, and a writer. And now, honestly, I cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. We in Holy Cross live and work by the motto our founder Blessed Basil Moreau gave the congregation at its founding in France back in 1837: “Ave Crux Spes Unica”: “Hail the Cross Our Only Hope.” The symbol of our community, then, is a cross with an anchor. The Cross: the great sign of a love that has no rival whose greatest expression is compassion. The anchor: that which steadies us in turbulent storms. For me writing, as a creative act, is an inky act of hope.

The lens through which I see the world is sacramental, and thus always hopeful. Fundamental to my understanding of the human and of the Divine is that God desires to be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched, for to be known is to be loved. So I approach my writing life much as I approach it as a priest, a religious, and a Hannon: I am intensely curious and intrigued by the human (even as I am occasionally frustrated with and depressed by my species) because I believe that the holy and the human are interchangeable terms. Writing allows me to nurture the interior life much as prayer does. As a priest-teacher, I get to stretch my extroverted muscles happily. Writing has made me a better (more humble, grateful, generous) priest/confessor. Being a priest has given me the courage to be braver (more honest) than I might have otherwise been.

-Buy a copy of Pat’s beautiful book, From Glory to Glory: A Pilgrim’s Notes from the Badlands of Grace, here at One Subject Press.

-And if you’re interested in our first two books, learn more about Father Joseph Brown’s A Retreat with Thea Bowman and Bede Abram: Leaning on the Lord here , and Scott F. Parker’s Teaching without Teaching here.

Earlier this fall, and , two teachers I admire, were talking on Marcus’ podcast, , about the “heaviness” of teaching at this particular moment. Both Marcus and Adrian were struggling to articulate the source of this heaviness. In fact, it many ways it didn’t make sense at all. Their unit planning was going well. Their lessons seemed to be landing with students. School and class initiatives they’d spearheaded were bearing fruit. Still, something seemed off. Marcus noted that while it was true individual lessons went well, there didn’t seem to be the “glue” connecting those lessons to each other (in spite of intentional planning), and the lessons he was teaching didn’t always seem to be “talking to” or having pertinence to the world he and his students were living in.

It was around this point in the conversation, in this struggling-to-come-up-with-the-words moment that Marcus said, “It’s kind of like this: the problems facing us in education are large. But the solutions we are presenting to our students are so small.”

That framing, of large problems and small solutions, has stuck with me since I first heard it a few weeks ago. It was a relief to have my own feeling and thinking about teaching summed up so succinctly by someone across the country, who has never met me. (Though, I must say, who I have been grateful to connect with online and through social media.)

Like me, both Adrian and Marcus are parents as well as teachers, and as Marcus continued to explore his own sense of “heaviness” about this school year, he acknowledged that a lot of that feeling for him personally might have to do with the fact that this fall his own six year old son entered kindergarten, entered a system of education about which he, the teacher and parent, has on occasion expressed some skepticism, some doubts.

My own son, Isaac, is not yet three years old, but I echo many of Marcus’ misgivings about sending this child of wonder into the four walls of a small-solutions machine of modern (American) education. Also known as a school.

Of course, school has many benefits for people, young and old. It is also a place where curiosity, inquiry, play, loudness—so many great gifts of childhood—have been known to die. In connection with this fact, Adrian and Marcus began discussing a poem that Adrian had earlier shared with Marcus, and that both had shared with their classes to spark discussion. (Side note: I love that the same text is being used by 5^th and 10^th graders alike.) The poem is called, “First Grade” by Ron Koertge:

Until then, every forest
had wolves in it, we thought
it would be fun to wear snowshoes
all the time, and we could talk to water.

So who is this woman with the gray
breath call out names and pointing
to the little desks we will occupy
for the rest of our lives?

Wouldn’t it be great if this poem was not telling the truth? Having read it now a dozen times since first hearing it on the podcast, I can’t get over how concise it is, how quickly the talking-to-water children of stanza 1 accommodate themselves to the gray-breathed woman of stanza 2. How swiftly they occupy those little desks. It’s heartbreaking, really. Makes me want to just go off into a corner and cry.

Of course Marcus doesn’t want that narrowing of the world and imagination for his six year old boy. Of course I don’t want that for Isaac. And none of you who are parents reading this essay want (or have wanted) anything of the sort for your own children. And yet.

And yet we have ourselves accepted, complied with, obeyed a system of educating our young that is very, very small indeed. And now, in addition to the little desks Koertge sees in his 1990 poem, we now have little screens, too (one to one), which will also occupy (and surveill) the kids the rest of their lives.

What to do—specifically as a teacher and as a parent—in the face of this narrowing? There are many humane and creative responses to this problem and problems that stem from it. And Marcus and Adrian talking about it, writing about it—what a gift. For me, anyway, in the fullness of their humanity inspire creativity, intentionality, and in some cases, resistance to the system they work within. I marvel that both of these teachers continue their projects (Marcus’ podcast, Adrian’s Substack) while also teaching full time.

I know it would not have been possible for me to have started the publishing company, One Subject Press, (one that is now actively selling more than 40 titles) and still teaching those five sections of English, 120-130 students, that I’d done year after year. (I know, I know, many of you public school teachers—your loads are much heavier. I stand in awe of you.)

When Isaac was born in 2023, I requested and received from my school a .8 schedule: two sections of 12^th grade AP English (.4) and .4 responsibilities as a campus minister (I work at a Catholic school) where I work with student retreat leaders and support our school’s robust service program. On Tuesdays—when the 12^th graders I work with in AP English go off campus to their own work-study internships—I don’t go in to work at all. I am home, rediscovering the wonders of pick-up trucks, duplos, and the dizzy-making “spinner” Isaac so loves at our local park.

This, to me, is sane. Possible. When I consider the work that teachers like Marcus and Adrian—and many mare—are doing on schedules tighter than mine and with workloads heavier than mine, I marvel.

At the same time—and I might be projecting here, so correct me where I go wrong, Marcus, and Adrian—I sense as I read and hear both of these teachers a growing resistance to business as usual. I sense as I hear and read teachers who are actively resisting replicating the “gray breath” of Koertge’s first grade teacher themselves, whether in their own fifth or tenth or twelfth grade classes or in their own (my own) complicity with a fundamentally flawed standardized testing system. In this sense, I hear them returning daily to the fray of teaching with fighting words.

“We can walk and chew gum at the same time,” I’ve quoted Marcus as saying in an earlier essay I wrote on this Substack.

By which I understand him as saying, “We teachers can do this grind, work this labor, grade the papers and at the same time we can also speak up about ways we might re-imagine and re-create the system that’s making the labor and work a grind for so many students and teachers alike.”

Yes. And also, let’s not forget that once “Every forest had wolves in it…” and once we, too “could talk to water.” The children’s voices—our own voices—are real ones, true ones. And if we are honest with ourselves, we know that our school system in its current form is stilling so many of them. In the time it took me to write that sentence above some forest in some kid’s imagination has been de-wolfified. In that same time, some kid lost their water-tongue. Gray breath spreading everywhere, a fog cascading down hallways all across this land.

As I was in the process of writing and re-writing this essay, I was re-reading—no re-hearing, a book on CD in my car on my commute in to school, as read by the author— ’s brilliant and heartfelt Inciting Joy. Everything about the book hits home for me, but most especially pertinent to this essay is his chapter on school, “Dispatch from the Ruins”. (Looking back on the past two to three years of my life, I realize now what an important event it was in my life, reading Ross’ book, and specifically that chapter. I will always remember that the book was published the same year our son, Isaac, was born.)

“Dispatch from the Ruins” is an embarrassment of riches. Among other treasures it includes: an incisive consideration of Melville’s Benito Cereno; a reflection on how and why Ross has done away with grades in his writing classes at Indiana University (only after he got tenure, he is careful to say); as well as a deep critique of the way the modern university is implicated in all of the societal woes it pretends it can stand outside of and itself critique. Above all, though, this chapter (and all of Inciting Joy) weaves in personal stories from Ross’ life in and out of school that illuminate how school has functioned for him.

In one of these stories he weaves into the chapter, Ross is working at a basketball camp run by Bob Hurley, and he’s teaching kids to do lay-ups. Ross shows the kids the move he wants them to do—dribble once, twice, then shoot the ball into the basket, just so. Then they start doing it, one after another. Except not, Ross reports, one of his young campers (seven or so years old), who when it’s his turn, holds his ball and says simply, “I don’t wanna.” (Ross, attentive Melville reader that he is, of course sees the youngster as an “itty bitty Bartleby,” a phrase I, as teacher, am definitely going to steal.)

In the moment, Ross wants to wring the kid’s neck. Wants to force him to comply. As he winds his way through the essay, though, it becomes clear to me as a reader that this unnamed “I don’t wanna” basketball camper is actually a key wisdom-bringer for the author. And could be to any teacher who reads the essay.

That is, when I encounter my own Bartlebies in the classroom I might pay more attention to myself. I might ask myself some questions. Is there violence rising within me? If so, where does it live? Do I feel the need to compel this young person to do something I want them to do? Why? How does this “need” manifest in me? Finally, is it possible for me to make space in my own body and mind for admiration for this youngster, carrying their difficult truths, reporting back to me what’s going on for them?

“I don’t wanna” may very well be one of the sanest responses for an individual living within the world and systems we find ourselves, be they basketball camps or high schools. And, as Ross Gay testified, “I don’t wanna” is damned inconvenient, an interruption for teachers and counselors alike. OIt might also be the most important part of our day—the unplanned and unlooked for lesson we needed to learn.

So I write (and re-write) in my notebook in the wee hours of a Tuesday morning, while my son sleeps, my son who I will be able to play with today.

So I write in an unhurried manner—in what I was going to call a “privileged” manner, but no, I won’t do that. I won’t call privilege—taking time to be with my son for a whole blessed weekday—something that I think should be normal for dads the world over. And most especially for dads like me, who teach (like Marcus, like Adrian), and who want to be able to spend a day with their toddler. Lord knows, if they want to, and do take this day, they’ll (I’ll) hear sane (and insane) versions of “I don’t wanna.” Which is to say, they’ll (I’ll) learn a lot.

And if they—like me—find some gray breath spilling out their mouths the next day at school as they’re calling out names and pointing out little desks for the kids to sit in, I hope, at the very least that they (that we) will be haunted (in a good way, I mean, joy-haunted) by the experience of a day’s interruption in our week. Interruption, of course, like privilege, isn’t the right word either. After all, these are our children. Whyever would we settle for something so small?

NOTES:

-In case you couldn’t tell, I’m a pretty big fan of Ross Gay’s work. And I just found out that he, and another poet I love, , have started their own Substack with writing exercises! It’s called —meaning, from what I can gather, that you can benefit from their collective poetic genius free of charge with a Monday writing exercise prompt. And that if you want to benefit all week long—good idea—you can subscribe.

-I was not intending to have written such a male-focused essay here, but now that I’ve written it, it makes sense to me that I’ve done so. So much of what I’ve written here applies to all folks in education, but in some particular ways to boys and young men. The truth is, as many educators know, “the boys aren’t alright,” and are struggling in special ways in our school system (though it isn’t always politically correct or expedient to admit as much.) I highly recommend the work of . His book, Of Boys and Men, is excellent, as is his Substack. And his work offers imaginative solutions on the micro and macro level, not mere handwringing.

-As always, please do write a note, a challenge, a question in the comments below.

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” - Robert Frost, “The Figure a Poem Makes” (1939)

Doing these two jobs—teaching high school English and running a publishing company—is ever surprising work. After putting the two-and-a-half year old to bed last night, I readied myself for the task of checking my personal (read ‘publishing’) inbox for the day’s emails. In the moment before opening my laptop and signing int to my email, I realized something: while I had some inklings (and hopes) about what I might find, it was truly anybody’s guess as to what might appear in bold type as “unread,” and who might be the sender of said emails.

Writers, like all humans, are full of surprises. But in our commitment to the practice of rendering surprise on a regular basis, in combinations and sequences of words, we can make the simple act of checking and reading one’s email an adventure—not merely a grind. At least that is what I have found as a start-up publisher, nine months into his ‘first season’ at the helm. Or, as Coach Eric Taylor of Friday Night Lights fame, once said to his wife Tammy, then the principal at their shared high Dillon High, “Never a dull moment, babe.” (For the record, he was talking about life with her, in his marriage. No matter what the topic under the discussion, though, it’s always a great line.)

“Never a dull moment, babe.” Likewise the act of reading and discussing literature with teenagers. Or, to adapt the words of the paragraph I just finished writing above this one: Teenagers, like all humans, are full of surprises. And when you give them the chance to read and discuss a worthwhile text (novel, play, poem, story, song), and on their own terms, you really don’t know what they’re going to say about it.

Along these lines—and somewhat relatedly—I feel at this point a desire to make a teacherly confession. Here goes: I don’t make PowerPoint slide decks. And haven’t for pretty much the entirety of my 20 years as a high school English teacher. Or I should amend that slightly. For the past ten years, I have always posted, on a Google slide, our class “objective” for the day, and a rough (1 to 4 points) agenda, which we sometimes accomplish. Yes, I have a unit plan (again, rough sketch) for what we’ll be up to the in the class day to day, and which is fluid and ever shifting. But, though, of course I share both of these plans with the students, over the years, I’ve found that both the unit and daily lesson plan are things I create more for the administrators who evaluate me, and for me as well, as a spur to stay at least a little on task.

But my true feeling on these matters is that if you are teaching students how to read and write in a genre of literature such as poetry or fiction, the content of what you’re teaching is going to come up, unbidden and unscripted, as you and the young people in your care are struggling to read whatever literature you’ve assigned them, or as they are trying to say what they need to say in the writing prompts you’ve assigned them. For instance, at this moment in my AP English classes: a student crafting an ode to honor their beloved deceased cat, or coming to a very strong opinion on Troy Maxson’s infidelity in August Wilson’s play, Fences.

Ah, Fences. While it is true, as I mentioned before, that teenagers are as surprising as a general rule, it’s also true that in the three years since I started assigning August Wilson’s play, one very predictable response to Troy’s stumbling confession of cheating—“I’m going to be someone’s daddy” is that of indignation, rage.

It’s almost as if the students themselves are embodying the shocked surprise and anger of Rose herself. In the discussion we had last week on that section of the play as well as on an excellent NPR article focused on Troy Maxson, “Heart, Heartbreak as Big as the World” (shout out fellow English teacher Susan Barber for this and many other wonderful Fences resources. And by the way, Susan makes of slide-deck making—not that I used hers—an art form. Do I contradict myself? Very well. I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.) a number of students homed in on lines from an actress quoted in that piece, Tamara Tunie, who played Rose in a 2008 Kennedy Center production of the play.

“‘As Rose, even when we were fighting, I just loved that man,’ Tunie says.

That’s one of the reasons Rose doesn’t leave when Troy has an affair. Rose, Tunie explains, buried her own hopes and dreams. She accepted her husband’s flaws—because that’s what one does in a marriage”

One of my students questioned this reading by the actor. In the play, this student asked, does Rose really “accept” Troy’s flaws? Yes, she stays with Troy, and even agrees to raise the child he fathers with Alberta, but, this student pointed out, in that point of the text when she agrees to do so, she also says, memorably: “From now right now…This child got a mother. But you a womanless man.”

I don’t know why it gives me so much joy that students like the one I just described care enough to make (impassioned—you should have seen her!) cases for they think one fictional character did or didn’t accept another fictional character’s flaws (for of course this point was debated). I’m not exactly sure why it matters so much to me that students are cultivating a reading life. Are questioning. Are considering. Interpreting. Not taking everything they read on the internet at face value. I don’t know exactly why, but I do know I felt joy in the moment listening to the students debate this scene, and I feel joy now recounting it for you, reader.

I would be remiss in this joy-recounting, too, if I didn’t give a shout-out to Ariel Sacks. Over the last spring, summer, and now into the fall, I have studying in my ramshackle way Sacks’ wonderful Whole Novels for the Whole Class, which makes a strong case (and plan) for doing whole class instruction on texts read in common but that also works to make that experience one that students make their own, one that does not reduce or alienate them from the books they are reading, as too often the conventional English Language Arts classroom can do.

I don’t think I would have gotten the response about Tamara Tunie and the NPR article had I not taken the time at the top of our seminar discussion had I not taken the time to do what Sacks calls in her book the “Go Around”—giving every student in the 11-12 student circle of chairs the opportunity to share an insight or opinion about the text that they want to talk about. (I type and project each of these 1-2 sentence gems on the board in front of our discussion circle, so we can refer back to them throughout the conversation.)

The conversation, then, is not scripted but springs from actual interests and questions that students have in response to the text. And, to bring it back to where I started, opens the classroom space up for the unlooked for, the surprise.

I began this essay with that very homely digital experience—the moment before the email sign-in—and specifically from the point of view of my role, one I’m just learning to play, of a fledgling publisher.

Interestingly, for me, anyway, this moment is not one filled with dread. There’s no “what now?” More “Oh. Interesting. What’ next?” Yes, I had a plan for this year with One Subject Press about what writers I knew I was going to approach to publish their work, and, thank God, many of these writers responded positively, took a chance on a publisher (and editor) who learning every day, and sometimes ‘on the job.’ Who doesn’t always know what he doesn’t know, but isn’t afraid to ask a lot of questions to learn. I thank these writers—and designers and editors—I work with often, for their insights, and their patience with me. And I hope I will aways remember to do so.

But the other interesting thing about the plan I had for who and what and when I was publishing what I was publishing was that as I began to “live into it,” the plan, of course, began to shift—and grow. New writers connected to me from ones I’d reached out to earlier. Certain projects became back-burners while others were ready to go. On the challenging side, as I got into the nuts and bolts of my work—editing a manuscript, creating a sell sheet, designing a website—new and unforeseen skill sets I’d known I’d need but didn’t possess began revealing themselves, crying out: learn me, learn me, learn me. So I’m trying, learning, as I put, it in my ramshackle way, a lot of things at once. Exciting and unnerving at the same time.

For many teachers I know—definitely for me—the above description fits how a year plan or unit plan happens in real time, with real kids in your care. It’s never the same—or shouldn’t be—from year to year. The kids change and grow. You the teacher change and grow. So the plans—flawed and provisional from the outset—they must change and grow, too.

My old and beloved creative nonfiction professor, Pat Francisco, at Hamline University where I studied writing used to love to repeat Robert Frost’s famous axiom about reading and writing: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”

When I started out as a writer (and as a teacher, too), I gravitated much more toward the first half of Frost’s statement—striving for authenticity, openness, honesty, vulnerability, on the page and in the presence of my students. In my poems and personal essays, I leaned into material that pushed or challenged me, that didn’t allow for pat answers or explanations about who I was. As a teacher, I made it a point of doing the writing projects that I myself assigned. And, rather than writing out all of my examples for prompts or lessons ahead of time, I deliberately made space and time to do some of those “live” in front of students so they could see me struggle. I wanted to make the process of writing explicit and real.

I’ve kept these practices central, but over the last five or six years, I’ve gravitated more toward the second half of Frost’s challenge, and am seeking as much as possible—is it possible? I think so—to cultivate a greater capacity for surprise. Or, to use another similar word that scripture scholar Ellen F. Davis favors in an analogous discussion on the topic of preaching, astonishment. In a chapter in a book, Wondrous Depth, on preaching on the Old Testament of the Bible (a too-often neglected section), she highlights the example of 12^th century monk, Bernard of Clairvaux, who composed no less than 86 sermons on one Old Testament book, The Song of Songs. (And, notes, Davis, “he only gets up to chapter 3, verse 1!”)

The way Davis describes Bernard’s method of preaching mirrors how I aspire to teach, to read, to write, and (lately) how to edit and publish books:

“Thus Bernard’s sermons offer us a model of the preacher as a skilled reader who in turn teaches the congregation how to read, leading them word by word through his own amazed reading of the text.”

His own amazed reading of the text. Isn’t that lovely? If you’re going to be working with words for your life’s work, as I am, then Bernard’s way is the way, par excellence, in my opinion. How beautiful to chew (“masticate” as Bernard reports) on the words of scripture over and over, “like a grain of spice, until it yields its full savor.” Of course, as many, many writers know, this is the way so many of our best insights come. We are reading (others’ work or our own) a line, a sentence, a passage for the second or third or fiftieth time, and paying attention to it, when all of a sudden we notice something we have not noticed before.

And if we’re lucky enough—as I am—to read a beloved text (like Fences, say) in the company of teenagers, there’s a whole community of humans paying attention, noticing, and saying their piece.

So, at end of this rambler, a prayer:

Let us have our lesson plans (and slides if we need them.) Let us have our budgets and our calendars. Yes, yes, of course. But let us also have the joy (or horror) of an honest-to-god, unlooked for surprise.

Let my life never be so orderly it cannot be interrupted or upended, so that at its end, I can say and truly mean it: Never a dull moment, babe.

Amen.

NOTES

-ELA teachers: if you haven’t read the work of either Ariel Sacks or Susan Barber, what are you waiting for? They are models of what I’m talking about in this essay. I stand in awe of their witness. Check out Susan’s book (co-authored with another great English teacher, Brian Sztabnik) 100 Percent Engagement, which has 33 ACTUAL LESSONS that she and Brian teach. (And I’ve shamelessly stolen more than a few of them. Adapted, let’s say that. Adapted.) Or check out Ariel Sacks’ Whole Novels for the Whole Class or her more recent and equally wonderful Who Gets To Write Fiction?, which offers practical ways to incorporate creative writing in your English classroom.

-And for the readers of this Stack who go with me on the spirituality/religious text side of things, you can’t go wrong with anything by Ellen F. Davis. That book on Old Testament preaching, Wondrous Depth, lives up to its title. For a more general introduction to Davis, check out this conversation between Davis and one of her former students, On Being podcast host, Krista Tippet here.

“When people lose the story behind the song, they lose the power to actually affect change in their lives. The Spirituals are about persistence. The songs are about dreaming for a day that has arrived. You have to give people respect that they did not give up hope, no matter how much hell they had to go through all day long, because the option was not to kill the other, the option was to kill the spirit within. ‘I’m not going to let you do that to me, I’m not gonna let you force me to kill myself. I’ve been in the storm; just give me a little time to pray.’” -from Performing Spirit: Listening to the Poet Luke (Joseph A. Brown, SJ), in the Summer, 2025 issue of Dappled Things magazine

I’ve been in the storm; just give me a little time to pray.

This beautiful (lived) saying by Father Joseph A. Brown, a poem in its own right, would be an apt epigraph for the whole of A Retreat with Thea Bowman and Bede Abram: Leaning on the Lord, a book that One Subject Press has the honor of bringing back into print, with a second edition that honors Sister Thea and Father Bede and incorporates the wisdom of a new generation of Black Catholics, with a foreword by Cynthia Bailey Manns, director of adult learning at St. Joan of Arc parish and one of four lay Americans who participated in the ongoing Synod on Synodality, and Father Maurice Nutt, CSsR, a Redemptorist missionary preacher, spiritual director, and Thea Bowman biographer.

As folks who read this Substack know well, aside from being a publisher and poet, I am a high school English teacher. In that role, I have witnessed the generosity of Father Brown in relationship to my students on numerous occasions—as a scholar of Africana Studies, as an artist, and as a wise elder. He has shared his poetry and fielded questions (live and on zoom) with them. He has corresponded with students many, many times as part of the “Dear Poet” project I run each year. He has read class-assigned novels and facilitated group discussions on them. He has helped em-cee remote poetry slams (thanks, Commonweal Magazine!). And most recently, he read and watched ‘alongside us’ August Wilson’s Fences, and then in Zoom conversations, shared about his own experience portraying that play’s protagonist, the unforgettable Troy Maxson.

I share this relationship backstory from my interactions with Father Brown not only to underscore my own belief in the writer—not that he needs my ‘belief,’— but to communicate also the way he witnesses as an artist and teacher in the world. There is no compartmentalization with him. No bucket for “religious action” in this corner, “artistic expression,” “political action,” there. No. It’s all one, woven beautifully and prophetically together.

It’s no small thing, then, when a wisdom-teacher like Father Brown takes the time to account for (and even better re-enact) the impact of teachers who influenced him. And so we have this beautiful seven-day retreat in book form, which in addition to bringing us readers into contact with the voices of Sister Thea Bowman and Father Bede Abrams, teachers who taught with and alongside Father Brown at the Institute for Black Catholic Studies in New Orleans, also embodies a shared communal practice of song and prayer.

In his introduction to the book, first published in 1997, Father Brown wrote, “Both Thea Bowman and Bede Abram are present in many homes, classrooms and faith communities years after their deaths. Their writings, the tapes of their lectures and sermons, the anecdotes that punctuate the gatherings of thousands of their generations of friends, associates and listeners have served to root them in the faith development of a truly catholic Church.”

Amen. I can only add that this presence of Sister Thea and Father Bede in “homes, classrooms and faith communities,” which Father Brown witnessed to in 1997 is even more true in 2025. And, in light of our current moment, which both Cynthia Bailey Manns and Father Maurice Nutt testify to in this new edition, their witness is more necessary than ever.

Reader, please do, as Father Brown summons at the outset of this book, “come out the wilderness, leaning on the Lord.” I promise you won’t regret answering that call.

Notes

-In case you missed the link above, here’s the link to One Subject Press to buy this beautiful book. And check out more of our options there.

-For a brief stint in 2022, I, like seemingly the rest of the world, had a podcast. Mine was called “Open Your Hands: Conversations on Craft & Vision in Poetry,” and my first guest was none other than Joseph A. Brown, SJ. The topic that kicked off our conversation was Father Brown’s beautiful poem honoring Thea Bowman—which he read at her funeral—“Everybody’s Mother Was Born in Mississippi.” Here was my initial podcast recital of the poem, and here was the conversation that followed it between me and Father Brown.

-One of the updates and revisions to the second edition was to consider additional resources for and about Black Catholics in the past quarter century. Needless to say, there’s a lot to add to that list. The #BlackCatholicSyllabus by Dr. Tia Noelle Pratt is an invaluable resource in this regard, one I’d recommend to everyone. And Dr. Noelle Pratt has a new book out this fall with University of Notre Dame Press—Black and Catholic: Racism, Identity, and Religion. I can’t wait to read it.

“There’s a line I use when teaching about building AI literacy in K-12 classrooms: ‘At the end of the day, it’s just sex ed.’ Every time I share it, I’m met with nods, chuckles, and that look of sudden clarity that says: this makes perfect sense.”

— Zack Teitel, head of the English Department at York Region District Board in Toronto

is not alone in promoting this analogy. Google the phrase “AI in schools and sex ed” or something similar and you’ll find reasoning that matches up with what he shares in the LinkedIn post I’ve linked here. In fact, I’ve heard a similar framing from friends and colleagues at my own school.

Language matters very much when you’re talking about your own relationship with a technology, and even more so with an entire community’s relationship with that technology. I had a visceral No reaction when I heard this “AI Literacy as Sex Ed” analogy the first time. That No has only deepened as I’ve thought and read more about it.

Teacher / Poet that I am, I want to spend a little more time looking critically at this particular framing, and why I consider it to be so wrongheaded. Zack Teitel’s post is the most extended and coherent presentation of this framing I’ve yet seen, so I’ll take some time with what he has written.

(And I’ll tag you when I share this Substack post more broadly, Zack, so feel free to respond in the comments below. Though I am admittedly bringing some heat to this conversation, I do want to represent your views fairly. So do let me know if I’m misrepresenting you. And if you wanted to share or engage with this in a more extended way, I’d definitely be open to that.)

Teitel writes in that same LinkedIn post, “When we tell students to avoid AI altogether, we’re offering an ‘abstinence only’ model, and we know where that leads. It ensures young people engage with AI without the necessary tools, context, or (most importantly) care. And while communicating AI abstinence to students won’t result in a Diaper Genie or a course of serious antibiotics, it does similarly increase the odds of lasting harm.”

The analogy is straightforward enough: education about AI is equivalent to education about sex. Fair enough. I don’t know many teachers who are against talking about what “safe AI” use might look like, just as I don’t know many educators who are against talking about what “safe sex” might look like.

But the analogy falls apart when we take the next step, and consider the broader sociopolitical context. In the United States, for example, the President has decreed an executive order that promotes and incentivizes teachers to use generative AI in their classrooms from the kindergarten to the 12^th grade. In no sex ed course that I know of has a teacher finished a lesson, and then turned to the students and said the equivalent of “Alright, now let’s practice a bit with each other, but safely.” The exception to this might be the old “let’s put the condom on the banana” activity, but this practical application is of course only seen as “safe” in a school setting because it is so completely removed from an actual sexual relational context.

In contrast, in many classrooms now, teachers are encouraged to experiment with and have their own students experiment with new and untested AI technologies.

Consider another contemporary technology, the smartphone. A decade or less ago, educators were discussing similar “transformative” impacts that the phones could have on lessons, ways they could make the school experience more interesting and interactive. Now, a large number of schools simply ban the use of them altogether, citing the damage frequent and (often addictive) uses of the device have on students. Is not a cell phone ban at a school a form of “abstinence only” with regard to the technology? How would that be different from the approach Teitel denigrates with regard to AI?

The Smartphone is a powerful technology and has clearly changed the world and the way we humans interact with it. It also has some benefits in education. But there are also reasons why those exercising care for young people may want to remove it from the environment altogether.

What is strange, though, is that there are many schools that have taken the step of banning the use of smartphones (an older, more known technology) at the same time they are embracing a newer, lesser known technology, AI, with as many potential risks and harms for young people.

Or maybe this is not so strange when you consider the two directives that asks her students to pay attention to, when considering higher ed’s sudden embrace of AI: follow the money and pay attention to who’s got power.

Ed tech companies stand to make a killing (and are) by AI adoption in schools, and as I noted earlier, President Trump has incentivized AI use and adoption in school to an insane degree. (In the April, 2025 Executive Order, “Advancing Artificial Education for Youth,” American K-12 educators are asked to “integrate the fundamentals of AI into all subject areas.”)

To his credit, Teitel himself acknowledges that the Ed Tech companies’ priorities are “growth and monetization, not student well-being,” noting that “if we don’t step in with care, they step in with branding.” The first part of that is true, of course. But by headlining his own argument with a simplified binary framing (those who refuse generative AI use in schools as fearful vs. those who adopt and educate as responsible), Teitel plays into the hands of those very same Ed Tech companies he is so concerned about preying on the children. And inadvertently or not, he focuses attention at the individual teacher opposing AI use in the classroom as a problem.

What voice or power do teachers actually have if they, like me, do not agree that the “fundamentals of AI” should be “integrated” into their discipline? I know many other teachers, especially humanities teachers, who think this way. And yet, over this past summer, the second largest teacher’s union in the United States, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) spent $23 million to launch the National Academy for AI Instruction, in partnership with Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic. There’s no evidence that I’ve seen or heard yet that the teachers in that union had a vote or voice in that decision.

Teitel asks teachers to be skeptical of companies like these in that same post I’ve referenced. But when your own government and your teacher’s union invite and incentivize an embrace of technology produced by private companies, there are limits to how “skeptical” and “critical” you can be.

In situations like this one, outright refusal of Ed Tech’s offer to re-shape the education landscape seems like a more responsible choice.

“If we don’t step in with care, they step in with branding.” Well, as we’ve seen “they” are already “stepping in with branding.” My question to Zack Teitel, and others offering this (admittedly catchy) slogan is, why does anyone need to “step in” at all? A refusal to use the technology does not indicate that one is afraid of it. It may simply be a judgment that it is not appropriate at this time for classroom use.

Teitel, like me, is an English teacher, and from the evidence of this post clearly a thoughtful and humane one. But reading his work, I do want to ask him what he sees as the actual benefits for students in using generative AI in terms of their improvement as readers, writers, and thinkers?

I see a lot of examples of ways the technologies provide shortcuts and efficiency hacks for students to complete “products.” I have not seen evidence of how the technology helps students in developing an actual practice of reading, writing, and thinking. In fact, there is already evidence that extended AI use can short-circuit development those practices.

And so, while I am hoping to lead students in critical discussions of AI, and will definitely, as Teitel argues here, listen to what my students have to say about their own experience of the technology, I will not frame or position refusal to use AI (my refusal or my students’) as equivalent to an “abstinence” from the technology. That phrase, as Teitel himself acknowledges, is a loaded phrase. And I would say in this context very unhelpful.

Post-Script / Update

I wrote the above reflection in late August, just as the school year was beginning, and since then, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and working with the 12^th graders I’m teaching.

I made clear from the opening of the class that, while we would definitely be discussing AI throughout the year, my expectation is that, in a course that demands a significant amount of creative writing and one that is based on helping them develop their own distinctive voices as a writers, they would not use generative AI in any of their work. I also acknowledged that, on a practical level, this was not something I could “police” effectively, nor would I want to. We would have to proceed at a trust level.

In one of our first activities, I shared with them the recent New York Times podcast conversation between Tressie McMillan Cottom, Jessica Grose, and Meher Ahmad, “What AI Really Means for Learning”. Over the course of a week, we had smaller group (10-12 students at a time) seminar conversations about this conversation, which, as I was upfront about, represented a pretty skeptical view of AI’s value in a classroom, particularly humanities classroom, space.

While these conversations were happening, I assigned students for one of their first writing tasks to write me, their teacher, a letter about AI in schools. “Tell Me What You Really Think About AI in Schools”. In this letter, I encouraged students to use their experience and “I” voices to share their honest responses to the topic. And, in order to represent a broader and more representative view of AI, and AI in schools, I also assigned them the task of reading and incorporating at least one other source (aside from the New York Times’ “What AI Really Means For Learning” conversation) into this letter.

So they would know my own position and bias with respect to these other sources, I grouped them in to three categories—“AI Skeptics I Admire,” “Pro-AI Folks I Disagree With But Who Are Important,” and “A High School Teacher’s AI Perspective That Represents A Lot of Folks At My School” (But not mine). I’ve provided links below for this of course incomprehensive and deeply idiosyncratic list:

1. AI Skeptics I Admire

Tressie Mcmillan Cottom: Minilecture on Politics, AI, and Inequality (Tiktok video) Text essay on video here:
“What Makes Me Mad About AI in Education”/
“AI Slop Education” / Audrey Watters

2. Pro-AI Folks I Disagree WIth But Who Are Important

“AI Will Empower Humanity” / Reed Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn)
“A President’s Journey to AI Adoption” / Jose Luis Cruz Rivera (president of Northern Arizona University)

3. A High School Teacher’s AI Perspective That Represents A Lot of Folks at Our School’s Approach to AI (not mine, though)

“Teaching AI Is Just Sex-Ed” / Zack Teitel

This week-long process of both listening to, and reading, the perspectives of students on this issue was a helpful one. And for those interested in doing an activity like this, I would emphasize that both of the elements in the activity—the smaller group discussions and the letter writing—were equally important, and fed each other.

During the small-group discussion (and a practice I’m planning on using throughout the year), I used Ariel Sacks’ technique that she introduces in Whole Novels for the Whole Class—I went around the circle of ten to twelve students, and transcribed on the Smartboard projector 1-2 sentences of what each students wanted to talk about as a key inference, quote, or critical insights from the New York Times piece “What AI Really Means for Learning.” Students then decided which of those insights they wanted to discuss or question or delve into more deeply. (While those 10-12 students were discussing in the seminar, the other half of the class was working on their letters to me.)

In the discussions, there were some areas of strong consensus, others of vast disagreement. There wasn’t anybody in the classroom who disagreed with Cottom and Grose’s assessment that generative AI had “zero place in the K-6 or K-7 classroom,” and a number of students were surprised and disappointed to know that that was something on the horizon for their younger siblings. But Cottom’s assessment of AI as a technology as “not that revolutionary” (she goes into why it is “mid” in this New York Times op ed.) and along the continuum of other technologies incorporated into classrooms—TV, VCR, tablets—definitely stirred up some strong opposition, and especially from most of the males in the class, many of whom used the technology outside of school settings for video and image editing and definitely did see these as impressive tools.

This line from Cottom a number of students quoted and wanted to comment on: "Perhaps one of the biggest threats that A.I. poses to education isn’t that it’s going to make educators useless, but that it is going to make educators so much more necessary than we are willing to invest in." A large number of students expressed concern about AI generated material being given feedback by teachers using AI. I echo what noted in his own discussions with students about AI in the ELA classroom: the 12^th graders I teach felt it is hypocritical for students to be held to account for AI use on their assignments if teachers are using it to give feedback themselves.

As for the letters, there was a real mix of viewpoints. Some students expressed deep concern and frustration that schools were embracing the new technology, especially given our current environmental crisis. There were even a few students who used the letter to question what they saw as a poorly designed system of school (too many assignments, not enough time to do them, transactional view of education, etc.) which was ripe for AI-ification. Others—again, mostly boys—wished schools would do more to incorporate the technology in the class (One even argued for a school-sponsored and vetted chatbot.). But the most popular view was a kind of middle road, or balance: there needed to be some care or concern around use of AI in the classroom, but not outright banning it. In fact, many of the students cited—wait for it—Zack Teitel’s “Teaching AI Is Just Sex Ed” as the most helpful resource they looked at. One of them—I had to smile—even noted than when he was crafting his own letter, Teitel’s essay was “his muse.” (So, there you go, Zack. If you’ve made it this far: you hit a home run with my students!)

What to do with this disconcerting information? I accept it. I accept that I, and many of the students I teach, have very different views regarding the uses of a new technology. This is not terribly surprising, either, as I am 43 years old and they are 17 and 18. I imagine there are lots of topics and issues on which we would have very different views.

Knowing that many of the students I teach, for instance, find it a reasonable practice to copy and paste a challenging reading (say a poem or a short story or a personal essay) into ChatGPT or similar and have ChatGPT “summarize” the literature for them does not change my mind that such a practice does damage to them, and to learning communities they’re part of, in ways they might not understand right now. Students who find this a reasonable practice have vastly different values than I do. Insofar as I am a teacher who wants to help cultivate the value of reading and trying to understand a text on its own terms, submitting to the text’s language and intricacy and even—dare I say it?—wisdom, I am intentionally offering a counter-cultural practice.

I must be aware and patient with myself and my students that slowing down in this way—of holding a line that others want to cross—cuts against the grain. But I also know, from long experience, that lessons we teach in the classroom, that practices we seek to cultivate there, sometimes don’t bear fruit in our students until years later. It has been the case that students who, when I taught them, had their heads down on their desk during class periods, or never turned in writing on time (or much at all), have returned years later to share a poem or a story with me, have told me that reading and writing mattered to them. That it helped them make sense of the life they were leading. The world they were living in.

When I consider this—the “long(er) view” I guess I could call it—then I get a little less angsty about everything that is happening. After all, I’m just one solitary witness, “making” as Scott F. Parker put it, “my learning public.” The witness will last beyond the walls of the classroom or the time of the class period. Or, to adapt James Carse’s terminology, Efficiency’s a finite game with winners and losers. But Wisdom is infinite play—the only thing is to keep it going. And I believe it will go on—the learning, too—long after I’m gone.

Notes:

-If you’re a teacher reading this post and would like to know more (or try out) the “Tell Me What You Really Think About AI in the Classroom” assignment I’ve shared yourself, please do reach out. I’m happy to share resources. Also, I’d love to hear your own experiences navigating AI in the classroom space.

-As I was crafting this essay, I learned that the chair for the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), Jennifer Sano-Franchini, in her address to that group’s annual convention this past April, expanded on what it might mean to refuse generative AI in Writing Studies, as a professor and teacher. Sano-Franchini and her colleagues Megan McIntyre and Maggie Fernandes expand on this refusal in their incisive “Refusing GenAI in Writing Studies: A Quickstart Guide” They open by writing: “This guide positions refusal as a disciplinary and principled response to the emergence of Generative AI (GenAI)3 technologies in writing studies.” To me, this collective response is encouraging. And also does not frame refusal in a fear-based way, as Teitel’s analogy of “teaching AI as sex ed” does. I recommend their work highly.

I had been re-reading and studying afresh Daniel Berrigan’s work this summer, paying special attention to the two poems I’ll share in this essay, “Credentials,” and “The Trouble With Our State.” I’d only just finished a draft of the essay, notes really, a few days before two acts of violence—one a shooting behind the school I work at, Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, another the more well-known mass-shooting at Annunciation Catholic School and Church just a few miles south—rocked my world.

After the long week of teaching and tending ended, I opened my notebook to these two poems and notes and realized—as I have before—that Berrigan and his work was talking to this moment, too.

Credentials / Daniel Berrigan
I would it were possible to state in so
Few words my errand in the world: quite simply
Forestalling all inquiry, the oak offers his leaves
Largehandedly. And in winter his integral magnificent
order

Decrees, says solemnly who he is
In the great thrusting limbs that are all finally
One: a return, a permanent riverandsea.
So the rose is its own credential, a certain
Unattainable effortless form: wearing its heart
Visibly, it gives us heart too, bud, fulness and fall.

I am in awe of this poem, and the feeling I get reading it is that the poet is himself in awe of (and jealous, too) of those magnificent creations he renders here, the oak and the rose.

Daniel Berrigan was of course a Jesuit priest, and it’s hard for me not to think of the fellow Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” where fish, dragonflies, and stones testify as simply as the rose and oak do in Berrigan’s poem. “What I do is me,” as Hopkins puts it in his poem, “for that I came.”

But though these two poems might “rhyme” in the way they admire the self-witnessing of beings in the natural world, they veer from each other when they touch on us, the human beings.

While Hopkins expands the frame to include Christ “playing in ten thousand places,” Berrigan begins his poem wondering at his own particular “errand in the world.”

That phrase “errand in the world” invites us as readers to connect the words of Berrigan’s poem with his life, specifically the bold actions he took on behalf of peace. “I couldn’t not do it,” he said of his burning of draft files in 1968, in protest of the Vietnam War, his part in the famous Catonsville 9 action. Like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, his prophetic words cannot be separated from his actions in the world. Like them, Berrigan spoke from the place where he stood. And as a coherent prophetic witness, Berrigan’s words and actions call everything we Americans hold dear into question. As said so eloquently in a 2019 podcast episode about Berrigan, the Catonsville 9 action, and Berrigan’s life and witness generally, is a “buried memory”—repressed, actually—in American history.

I found myself immediately drawn to this poem based on the title alone. Credentials. We Americans love our credentials, don’t we? By what right and authority are you saying these things? In our meritocratic eyes, how can you prove you’ve earned the right to speak? But for Berrigan, the rose talks back to this idiocy, is “its own credential…/ wearing its heart visibly.”

This is the prophetic way, and of course includes Jesus himself, who never did satisfy his critics as to his pedigree and credentials. And the rose “wearing its heart visibly” aligns with all prophets inside and outside of religious traditions, who testify nakedly, vulnerably to the truths they see. “I can’t not do it,” they all say, in one way or another.

The three-part gift from the rose that gives us heart is intriguing too: “bud, fulness and fall.” Fall. Like any prophetic word or blessing in the scriptures, this witness of the rose cuts two ways, points at the same time to the beginning, the fullness, and the end. Like the oak tree’s roots—“riverandsea.”

It’s a fearless poem. A clear-eyed poem. I imagine it as the kind of poem Berrigan might have recited to himself, a gift of the spirit that kept on giving him courage and strength. Anyway, I take heart from it and in Berrigan’s witness, especially in these dark days.

As I was reading and re-reading “Credentials” and the other poem I will share with you in a moment, I also took the time to watch the documentary, The Holy Outlaw, filmed as Berrigan was on the run, a fugitive from the law following his participation in the Catonsville 9 action.

A number of others, inspired by the Catonsville 9, orchestrated similar actions during this time, and the filmmaker interviews a pair of priests from the Milwaukee 14, who confiscated and then burned approximately 10,000 draft files in that city.

I was struck by the comments of one of the priests interviewed, Father Robert Cunnane, who mentioned that the two common ways of thinking about Berrigan were as that of a “nut” or a “prophet.” Father Cunnane said he actually preferred the “nut” viewpoint to the one that saw Berrigan as “prophet,” because the language of “prophet” makes his action seem somehow out of reach, beyond normal human grasp. But for Father Cunnane and his thirteen other very human collaborators in Milwaukee, the action they took was very much in grasp, as straightforward as taking paper from another person—admittedly by force—and then burning it. Like Berrigan, the much less famous Father Cunnane said a version of “I couldn’t not do it,” when referring to his own participation in this illegal action.

I note that poetry, like prophecy, sometimes gets a similarly “mystical” treatment that, in my experience, is accompanied by a dismissal. Oh, poetry. That’s a lovely thing, but far beyond my ability to read and understand, much less write it myself. This attitude irritates me, as does the poetry that unnecessarily hides its insights or its urgency. Some poetry of necessity will be difficult to understand, will take work. And doubtless there are poems of Daniel Berrigan in this category. But I defy you, reader, to be confused by the lines I give you below. You may not like what they say, but they are clear as daylight, or a storm cloud.

The Trouble With Our State
The trouble with our state
was not civil disobedience
which in any case was hesitant and rare.

Civil disobedience was rare as kidney stone
No, rarer; it was disappearing like immigrants’
disease.

You’ve heard of a war on cancer?
There is no war like the media
There is no war like routine
There is no war like 3 square meals
There is no war like a prevailing wind

It blows swiftly, whispers
Don’t rock the boat
The sails obey, the ship of state rolls on.

The trouble with our state
—we learned it only afterward
when the dead resembled the living who
resembled the dead
and civic virtue shone like paint on tin
and tin citizens and tine soldiers marched to the
common whip

—our trouble
the trouble with our state
with our state of soul
our state of siege—
was
civil
obedience.

This is not a complicated poem, though it strikes deep. As the reversal at the end of the poem makes clear, the “trouble with our state” is that we, the citizens in it, obey its dictates blindly, drinking in the fear of resisting them with our morning coffee—“Don’t rock the boat” much more in our bloodstreams than “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”

Berrigan was nothing if not political in his approach to art and artmaking, and of course this poem is political. Even directly so. But to dismiss him and this poem as the work of a “radical lefty” as we might justifiably dismiss Trump’s supporters who stormed the capital on January 6, 2021 as “radical right wingers” is inadequate. The radical nature of Berrigan’s witness had political ramifications and motivations, of course, but its roots were in the gospels of Jesus Christ, not any political ideology.

There is no war like a prevailing wind. And what an evil idiot wind has blown our way these past weeks. I write these words in the aftermath of yet another school shooting, this one in my backyard, and at a Catholic school. What would Berrigan say to this fresh horror?

I don’t know. I know that Berrigan did say of his own courageous action at Catonsville and encouraging others: “Know where you stand and stand there.” (Thanks again to David Dark who reminded me of this and expanded on this saying in the podcast I’ll link you to below.) What this saying means to me now is to stand in grief. To stand with tears on my face as I try to get ready to teach in a classroom. A classroom, which, as it happened, a day before the Annunciation shooting, has windows that looked out on another shooting the day before. A person gunned down on the streets we walk down every day—and many others wounded. The street blocked off with police tape.

Know where you stand, and stand there.

I told a colleague the other day, walking up the steps to school in the aftermath of both shootings that I felt numb. But I don’t want to feel numb.

I learned that David Dark, that beautiful teacher and scholar I’ve been quoting here repeatedly has published a book with a simple title that speaks to the moment I am stumbling into, trying to stay conscious and sane: We Become What We Normalize. (None of this is normal. Dan Berrigan reminds me it is important to keep some (sane) measure of anger always burning, to say no, actually, none of this is normal. Not the active shooter drills. Not the lockdowns. Not the violence followed by the vigils. Not the political opportunism in response to it all. Not the violence so many of us fund and benefit from in places we don’t see. Not the mass deportation of human beings. Not the building of concentration camps. Not the armageddons and genocides we continue to create in different parts of the world while we mourn our own neighborhood apocalypses. None of this is normal.

So, at this moment, at the start of another school year, I’ll stand with my one voice, amidst the numerous others standing beside me, students, teachers, staff members. I’ll feel the tears on my face and the anger in my belly. I don’t know what to say yet, but I know where I stand, and I’m standing there.

*Poems by Daniel Berrigan used with permission of the Daniel Berrigan Literary Trust.

Notes:

-Please do continue to support the students, faculty, and staff at Annunciation School in Minneapolis. Donate here.

-Here’s the podcast I referenced earlier, from 2019, where talks about his essay on Daniel Berrigan with The Project on Lived Theology Podcast.

-Finally, in case you missed last week’s special issue on our first new One Subject Press title, Scott F. Parker’s Teaching without Teaching, check that out here. And if you’ve already read the book, please do leave a review wherever book reviews are found.