Write a short (500 word) essay addressed to a non-specialized audience describing your research question/thesis. What are you planning to do? Why is it important? To whom is it important? Present this in class and submit it here.

Yeah, it’s been plenty of minutes since I’ve written here. And yet I thought of y’all as I got ready to do this school assignment! You who know me in real life — and I’ve mentioned it some On Here — know that I’m working on a PhD, in Christian education, formally speaking. That, in a nutshell, is why I quit posting routinely; all my words have been going to school these days, though I miss this and y’all mightily.

To bring you a little more up-to-date, as of January 2025, I’m embarked on an intense push to complete all my necessary coursework. And (good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise) I’m on target to do just that by the end of this May. Please God that comes to pass; it’ll be a total of six PhD-level courses (!), though not all concurrently.

Anyway. One of my classes is “PhD Research,” a pass/fail combo of research techniques in general and dissertation-proposal specifics. My summative work for this class will, in fact, be a draft of my eventual dissertation proposal… I can’t speak as definitively for my classmates, because I know some of them are still pretty all over the map! (And why not? It’s a big world of ideas. 🙂 ) The assignment above? A solid stepping-stone. If I can’t tell y’all what I’m up to, I haven’t figured out what I’m up to enough to research it. Plus, I found out while doing my Th.M. thesis that those things are too big to write my way in and out of.

So what am I working on?

When I reflect on Jesus’ charge to “love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength” (Mark 12:29-31), I notice that the congregations I’ve been part of have been great about bringing our minds to learn more about God and grow deeper in faith — but in Sunday School heart, soul, and bodily strength have been left to themselves. I am convinced that we don’t end up developing in areas where we’re not giving our attention. So if we are to love God in all our human ways — heart, soul, and strength along with mind — we would be wise to spend time in learning using our bodies and our hearts, as well as our souls.

As a poet and reader of poems, I suspect that poems (biblical and beyond) give us a way to simultaneously connect our hearts and minds with God, developing more strands of knowledge and faith. Poems operate in ways unlike prose — the reader more actively brings herself into understanding the poem, and poems are able to be true in multiple ways at the same time. When poems are read in community, we bring these multiple truthful understandings together in ways that help us hold on to overflowing truth without pushing for a single “right” answer. When these poems engage with the Divine, and when readers approach these poems seeking to meet God there, this experience of multiple overflowing truth offers a glimmer of God’s own overflowing abundance. Together reading and discussing such poems, people practice expanding their understandings and gain comfort with multiplicity. When we are more comfortable with Divine and human overflow, we have more flexibility to meet our God-given neighbors in love and partnership.

So I want to persuade faith leaders and community members to branch out in the ways they formally learn about God, incorporating more body-learning, more learning that connects with emotions, and more learning that strives to connect transcendently with God. More specifically, I want to share poems as an effective way to deepen individual and collective faith, so that more communities incorporate poems into their faith-forming practices. With my research, I hope to share how and why poems can do what they do to connect to God, as well as to recommend some approaches for reading poems theologically in community.

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That’s what I’m up to… year after next, if my committee gives me the thumbs-up. First I finish these classes. Next I spend a year preparing for and taking my qualifying exams. And then I get to roll up my sleeves and focus on this work!