Faculty Profile

Why I Teach at SPU

I choose to teach because college was a transformative experience for me, and I want my students to have that same life-altering four years in their early adulthood. I realize that it is an enormous privilege, and lucky coincidence, that my students and I have the freedom, relative wealth, and safety from violence to undertake this re-fashioning of (their) young American lives. Most people living now, or ever, aren’t in the same fragile, beautiful boat as we are. This being so, our privilege demands we teach and learn to serve others and to conserve the natural world; we do not live for or by ourselves in some artificially sealed, hyper-mediated space, as much as we are told we do, or should. This process of teaching and learning is what you might call Kingdom work. A college education feels like the best place where it can happen, so I return to the classroom each year in perpetual hope that I can matter to my students’ development and that they might return the favor. We always work it out.