Lori Brandt Hale: Pay attention is one of those phrases in my class, so by the end of the semester people start to roll their eyes just a little bit because I've said so many times, "Pay attention," or, "Look at this story, this person was paying attention." We talk a lot about vocation and finding purpose and looking for these opportunities, and yet a lot of what needs to happen, a lot of what can be very meaningful in our lives is right in front of us, and we have to pay attention and then take the steps to do the next thing.

Paul Pribbenow: Augsburg University educates students to be informed citizens, thoughtful stewards, critical thinkers and responsible leaders. I'm Paul Pribbenow, the president of Augsburg University, and it's my great privilege to present the Augsburg Podcast, one way you can get to know some of the faculty and stuff I'm honored to work with every day.

Catherine Day: I'm Catherine Reid Day, host of the Augsburg Podcast, and today I'm speaking with Lori Brandt Hale, associate professor of religion, and we're going to talk about the intersection of research and teaching in the Religion Department here at Augsburg University. Welcome, Lori.

Lori Brandt Hale: It's really nice to be here.

Catherine Day: What led you down the path of being interested in religion as a field of study?

Lori Brandt Hale: That's an interesting question. I grew up in a family that went to church, grew up in a small town in Iowa, and my dad sang in the choir, I went to every week. It was part of what I took for granted, I think. Although, I grew up in the United Methodist tradition, and that's a tradition that welcomes questions, so I didn't feel locked into one way of thinking about what it meant to be a Christian or what it meant to be a person of faith. But I would say I wasn't really that interested in studying religion until I got into high school and I had a chemistry teacher who set aside Fridays to pose ethical conundrums to us.

There was one week in particular that I remember very vividly. He asks us to imagine a scenario where... Without going into a lot of detail, we were forced to make a decision about whether to survive we would sacrifice a person who was in a vegetative state, or sacrifice a chimpanzee who had a 300-word American sign language vocabulary, and everyone tried to think about ways to get around this decision and he gave us no way out. We had to decide and none of us were willing to make the call.

So again, this was a small town where he could make the presumption with a lot of accuracy that most everybody in the classroom attended church of some kind, and so he asked us what our church leaders would say, and there were four of us there who went to the same church. And while everyone else in the room seemed to think they knew what their pastor or priest would say, whether they were right or not is a different question, they seem to know. We still didn't know. It became really clear to me that I had some really big questions about faith, about the tradition, about sort of existential questions too about life and death. And so when I went off to college, I decided I would take a few religion courses, and within the first semester, actually before the first semester, decided, well, if I was going to take a few classes, I'd just major in it as well. So that's how I ended up studying religion.

Catherine Day: And how did this intersection of an ethical dilemma and your interest in religion, how has that continued to play out in your interests, in your teaching, in your work?

Lori Brandt Hale: Really, I can't separate those things out. So most of my work in research is on the life and the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was a Lutheran theologian and pastor living in Nazi Germany. And because of the atrocities of what was in front of him, he became part of the conspiracy whose main goal was to take out Hitler, and he was executed for his role in that conspiracy. So he was only 39 years old when he died, but he wrote profoundly and prolifically about community and ethics, and what it means to be in relationship with other human beings, and how we should live our lives in the world.

And so everything I do, both in my research and then how that translates into the classroom, I think it still ties back to some of those basic questions that I started asking as an undergraduate student.

Catherine Day: Every once in a while it seems like we get handed a question that we discover may be the question of our lifetime. For me, I've struggled with the tension between creativity in the critic or the creativity in authority, which just plays out for me over and over again in how I address it. Do you think that you're still chewing on that question from high school, or has it transformed?

Lori Brandt Hale: Well, I think it's transformed. I mean, I think from that question and from those initial classes, I landed on three questions: who am I? Who are we collectively? And how are we supposed to live together? And those are questions that guided my work as an undergraduate and still guide my work now. I haven't strayed too far from those questions. I certainly have looked at them from different points of view and I've tried to incorporate different ways of thinking about those questions, but those have been central to my work and really also central to this way of thinking about the connection between thought and action.

So if I'm asking questions about who am I, and who are we, and how are we supposed to live together, then that leads to questions about what does that look like in practice, and what does it mean to be a community? And it's interesting for me to go back and see the threads from those early days, all the way 20 years into my teaching career.

Catherine Day: Because those are quite relevant questions for Augsburg, too. Did you find that coming to Augsburg helped you articulate those in a new way, or help you refine those questions?

Lori Brandt Hale: What I find over and over again is that Augsburg is the right place for me to ask those questions, that were a good fit. So I feel really fortunate to be here because the mission of this place that is really alive. I mean, I've actually spent time through various other organizations and work that I've done on other campuses, and I've never found a place where the mission statement is so present, and so authentic, and so much a part of how people talk about what's happening on campus and in the classrooms, faculty, staff and students.

And so when I think about those commitments to engaged citizenship and responsible leadership and thoughtful stewardship and critical thinking, they're part and parcel with the questions that I've been asking in my own work.

Catherine Day: What has been like to be at an institution that has deliberately engaged business and science and religion all in one place? Its physical co-location in the new Hagfors center, it goes beyond that as I understand it. How do you see that?

Lori Brandt Hale: Part of it is recognizing and helping students recognize that they live whole lives, and that problems that face us are interdisciplinary and complex. And so being really intentional about bringing together these three particular really large disciplines, but ways of thinking or disciplines honors that and gives people some room to explore and to, I don't want to sound cliche, but to pursue their vocation in ways that are authentic. So they don't have to divorce their thinking about what it means to live a meaningful life from their interest in chemistry for example, or their interest in physics, or...

Actually, I had a student, he probably graduated about 10 years ago, but he came in... He was actually a double major, a finance and religion double major, not a very common pairing, I don't think. And he was the kind of student who had started doing tax returns for his family members when he was in high school because he really enjoyed it, he was really good at it, but he had the strong sense of faith and a strong sense of calling, and so had been seriously considering going to seminary, feeling like if he was going to answer a call of some kind, that that was the path he needed to take.

When he got here, he was in several classes with me, actually was his religion adviser, he realized that he could do the work that was best suited for him, that he could live a meaningful life, a vocational life doing work as an accountant. And so, that's what he did. He finished his religion degree, but he went on and got a master's degree in taxation of all things, and he's found a way to merge those interests and those commitments, I think, right? So that it's not... We don't have to compartmentalize our lives or our thinking about what matters.

Catherine Day: You presumably do teach a Bonhoeffers here, is that correct?

Lori Brandt Hale: I do.

Catherine Day: Yeah. Why don't you describe for us a little bit about how the students experience that content and to what degree they're applying some current issues to the questions that Bonhoeffer was raising.

Lori Brandt Hale: So it's really fun to talk to students about Bonhoeffer and about his story. He decided to study religion when he was a teenager, and he came from a family where his father was a scientist, his older brothers were scientists, and they weren't all that excited about his choice. There were some personal experiences I think that led him to this decision. One of his older brothers was killed in World War I and that had a deep impact on him. So when he was 11, he had a twin sister, when they were 11, they started talking about these sort of existential questions that drove this interest I think for him in studying theology.

And so he got the blessing of his family, he went off to study. And he's the kind of person who he could do in two hours, what took most people 10 hours to do. So he finished his doctoral dissertation at the age of 21, which... that's crazy. So he wrote this amazing dissertation on the Church, it's called Sanctorum Communio, the communion of saints, and he was really interested in thinking about questions about community. One of the ideas that come comes out in that dissertation that resonates with me, it's his understanding that when you encounter another person, that person places an ethical demand on you and you're called to respond. And this is the thread that's going to get played out and developed in his theology over time.

So when I talk to students about him, I talk about his story, I talk about his beginnings, his studies, but then I talk about him going to New York City in 1930-31, and he went to Union Theological Seminary and he made these incredible friendships, and it was an incredible transformative year. One of his best friends that was an African-American student, and through that friendship and through connection with the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, Bonhoeffer had, I would call it a transformation of consciousness, where he started to recognize his own privilege, he started to recognize ways that people in America, in particular, African Americans were disenfranchised, and it changed everything he did from that point on.

As the story unfolds, I sort of introduce his biography, I introduce his theology that's emerging, and then we put him in context because he gets back to Germany, and within two years of his return to Germany, Adolph Hitler comes to power, and of course that changes everything and he is able to see so early the dangers of the national socialist, and he's unique in that and he was speaking out from the beginning.

So we talk about those moves that he makes, the ways that he understands ethics to be concrete, that you have to take account of what's in front of you and who's in front of you, and you have to respond accordingly. We talk about his understanding of vocation as responsibility, and we talk a lot about vocation here at Augsburg, and I think it's a new way for most students when we start talking about responsibility, and it gives them a way of thinking about responsibility that is not locked into a single activity or a single idea, because I think sometimes people think they have to find their vocation, and if they can't sort of find that magic intersection of what the world needs and what they're good at, that somehow they're lost and it's not static. It's a dynamic concept. And so Bonhoeffer gives us a different way of talking about vocation, sort of a hermeneutical lens, thinking about all the situations we're in in our lives, all the relationships we have.

Sometimes I get the chance to do a whole semester on Bonhoeffer. That's not all that often, but I usually do at least a couple of days talking about Bonhoeffer in my general education classes where we are talking about vocation and searching for meaning and what does that look like? And so, he becomes a really powerful example.

One thing that's interesting about Bonhoeffer, in addition to his own story, is the way he's been received, and his legacy is now quite controversial in so far as people all across the religious and political spectrum understand and interpret him differently. So that's another thing that I talk about with my students, and we talk about what some of those interpretations are, and how we start to unpack them, and think about which ones are legitimate, where there's room for people to disagree and stay true to a sort of an authentic reading of Bonhoeffer, and where people kind of stray outside those lines of appropriate readings.

Catherine Day: So he's not a simple good guy, bad guy.

Lori Brandt Hale: He's not a simple good guy, bad guy.

Catherine Day: And I would think that for the students, that's challenging to put their heads around. Could you maybe give us a few examples of how students have wrestled with those questions? Anyone come to mind in particular?

Lori Brandt Hale: If I push that question a little bit further in terms of how people both in the academic conversations and in public discourse, we're talking about Bonhoeffer, there's a question on the table right now, is this a Bonhoeffer moment, and what does that mean?

Catherine Day: It means societally.

Lori Brandt Hale: Yeah, we, as a society, or are we as individuals facing things that are in society presented with what would be a Bonhoeffer moment? And then-

Catherine Day: Do I need to become like Bonhoeffer? Or do I need to respond as an individual more significantly?

Lori Brandt Hale: Significantly, right. But that, too, was a complicated question because, again, what does that mean? And for some people that actually is a question about, because Bonhoeffer was involved in a conspiracy, an anti-Nazi conspiracy. And so is that what that means? And I would argue, and colleagues of mine would argue that that's not the right question, right? That Bonhoeffer's life is on a template that you can just transpose into another situation, that Bonhoeffer would call us to ask the question, who is Christ for us today? Or I have a lot of students who are not part of the Christian tradition and they might not be comfortable with that articulation of the question, so we would say, who is suffering when we look around? Because Bonhoeffer talked a lot about seeing the world, the events of the world from the perspective of those who suffered, from the view from below.

And so in terms of my students then interacting with that, I have a project that I do every semester with my religion 200 students in religion vocation in the search for meaning that we call the lived theology project. It doesn't have to be about theology, it doesn't have to be a religious project, but it's a project where students can think deeply about their own commitments and values, and then seek a way to act on those commitments in the world in some way, in some public way. And so I think there's a connection here with the way Bonhoeffer talks about faith as being lived out in this world, making this world a better place, that it's in the midst of life, right? That faith happens, that faith is lived out in sufferings and joys and perplexities and sorrows and the messiness of life.

And so students get to engage in this project where they get to identify what's important to them. And for some it comes from a religious identity or perspective, and for some it comes from humanist values, and for some it comes from some other deep place, and then what does that look like? So how might they serve the campus community or the neighborhood? And it doesn't have to be a service project. It can also be a public art installation, or it can be a public service announcement, or it can be something. And so I've got all sorts of examples of what students have done, but I would say we can connect the dots between Bonhoeffer and the way he lived his life, and then students having the opportunity to do the same kind of thinking at least about what matters to them.

Catherine Day: And so this idea of who is suffering, do they include themselves in that question, or are they more focused on the community when they're trying to respond to that question?

Lori Brandt Hale: That's an interesting question. So I think in some cases, the topics that they choose to work on come out of their own experience. So I've had students create events to address mental health issues, and that is both serving the community, but at the same time, sometimes the folks in that group are dealing with their own set of issues around that particular topic, or I had another group one time create a series at an event, and then a series of informational kinds of activities around eating disorders. And so, again, I think there's kind of both. And if you asked me the question in that way, there's both an outward move and an inward impulse at the same time.

I ask students now as they're thinking about their projects, as they're choosing their topics, as they're putting their projects together, I use a model that was actually developed by a cohort of teachers from across the country, including one of my own colleagues in the religion department, Hans [inaudible 00:18:18], on doing civic engagement. And so, in this model, students are asked to first recognize the complexity of their problem, so that when you're looking at any particular issue, it goes back to the things we were talking about before, it's interdisciplinary, it's complex. There's just lots of layers. So that's the first thing.

The second piece is to recognize their own social locations and the social locations of the people who might be impacted by their work or people they might be serving, and to take into account who has privilege, who has power, what does that dynamic look like, how can they be sensitive to all of those intersections of locations.

The third move is to think empathetically, so how are they approaching, again, approaching their work in ways that create or require empathy, and then finally to take action and to make something happen.

Catherine Day: I'm wondering if there is somebody who comes to mind that had a particularly startling transformation in the process of asking some of those questions and taking that apart for themselves.

Lori Brandt Hale: Now, I can think of... A couple of students come to mind who have had... they would have to answer which part of the class, which part of the experience was transformative, and whether it was my classes or their entire experience at Augsburg. But I can think of one student, a very recent student who came in as a self-described militant atheist and was very irritated, and irritated might be too soft of a word, about having to take two required religion courses, but came nonetheless and had a very good experience in his first course and with one of my colleagues, and then came to me for the second course.

In the course I teach, we talk a lot about only vocation, but civil rights and interfaith dialogue and pluralism, and we look at a variety of traditions across the world, religious traditions spectrum. And I would say he had a transformative experience and would still call himself an atheist, but is now interested in religion and interested in dialogue with people from a variety of religious traditions and expressions, has gone on to take seven religion courses and get a minor, and is one of the strongest proponents for maintaining the religion requirement in the general education, and recognizing the power of this kind of reflection, this kind of self reflection. He said if he had taken the classes just a little bit earlier, he would have actually double majored and gotten... but he couldn't quite work out the class requirements to do that.

But I think it speaks to the power of a transformative dialogue of being open to the other and recognizing that you can learn a lot about someone else and about yourself when you open up to the kinds of experiences that both I and my colleagues in my department try to create in our classes.

Catherine Day: When you focused on those, I think it was four parts, the idea that they have to take action after they go through the other pieces, what are some examples of the ways in which they take action?

Lori Brandt Hale: So I had a group a couple of years ago. They happen to be a group of athletes who wanted to work together and they started thinking about their own experiences in high school, participating in athletics and recognizing that there were a whole lot of students in their communities in their high schools who wanted to participate and could not afford the equipment. And so they worked together with one of the local high schools and created what they called a sports shelf, so kind of like a food shelf but with sports equipment. And so they did a drive where they got friends and teammates and others to donate old equipment. And a lot of them were single sport athletes here at Augsburg, but had been multi-sport athletes in high school. And so they had all this equipment sort of hanging around that they didn't use anymore. And then they worked with a local sporting goods store to get some donations.

I haven't followed up with them. Like I said, this was a couple of years ago. Their goal was to start this during the semester that they had my class, but that it would be an ongoing thing. They had made a contact appoint person at the high school, and they had a designated space where they would have cleats, and helmets, and rackets, and hockey sticks and whatever. And so if there were students in the school who wanted to participate and couldn't get the materials any other way, they could go and access them that way. So that's one example that comes to mind where they were able to use the things that they love, their own passions to make a difference, right? It didn't have to be something super complicated.

I think of another group that partnered with an organization at the University of Minnesota hospitals. It's a house... It's not the Ronald McDonald House. It's another organization that has a house where families with children who are in the hospital can come, and they work to put together these little bags of necessity. So the families are coming, they're under a lot of stress, they're trying to care for their children. And so they had bags that had things like hand sanitizer, and chapstick, and tissues, and granola bars, and they actually all worked with Thrivent Lutheran and got a small grant to buy all the materials and some really nice reusable bags. And so I think they got a $400 grant to do that kind of work.

Catherine Day: Both of those are so pragmatic, and I'm kind of interested in going back to that question of who was suffering. So they somehow also... I'm struck with the first group where they recognized that they're privileged, that they were able to afford something, and they somehow got conscious that not everyone could. How did that happen?

Lori Brandt Hale: In that particular case, one of the students in the group was a student who had struggled in high school to afford the equipment, and I think was able to share his own experiences with his group members in a way that, talk about transformation, transformed their consciousness and gave them that perspective that they didn't have before.

I think there's so many times when we're having conversations about whether it's about who's suffering or whether it's about recognizing that we, in our classrooms, which are so diverse now in so many different ways, that we have these identities that are different. And so students are learning how to not take a lot of things for granted. And part of it has to do with learning how to ask questions, learning how to see the other and not get so sort of locked in their own lane of checking off their to-do list, or whatever that might be that they stop and pay attention.

Catherine Day: If I may, I want to bring it back a little to Bonhoeffer and is this a Bonhoeffer moment, because whether we talk about climate change or the effects of other issues that are surrounding us, there's that tendency to say it's so big, I can't do anything. And I'm curious how it goes to your point of paying attention. So in what ways do they learn, in a Bonhoeffer moment, that possibly he could see things in a different way than they can see things and acted differently, but maybe could contribute to a shift that's important?

Lori Brandt Hale: Yeah. Well, I mean, one of the challenges in teaching Bonhoeffer is he's living in this very difficult time, and he made really big decisions that cost him his life. And so there's a point at which we read his story and say, well, that's fantastic, but I can't and I am not ready to do that. I'm not willing to do that. I'm not able to act in that way. And it can be really overwhelming. Even his idea of vocation as responsibility can be overwhelming because then we can just feel burdened by everything that we're supposed to do or have to do or have these responsibilities, especially when so many students now have so many responsibilities outside school. So they have jobs, and they have family commitments, and they have...

And so on one hand, there's no easy answer. On one hand we can continue to sort of make it a bigger problem by saying, well, in some ways, every moment is a Bonhoeffer moment, I mean, which is true if you take him seriously, but I try to help students step back, and this is where going back and recognizing that we all just have to play a part. And so we do have to figure out what it is we're good at, and what it is we like to do, and where our passions lie, and you do that thing, and you can't do all the things. And so, part of saying yes to a passion or a vocation is also saying no. I mean, that's a hard lesson.

Catherine Day: One of my favorite quotes, I've forgotten, haven't used for a long time, is the world is filled with need. Choose a path that speaks to you. If you want to change the world, create a beautiful model. And that was said, I believe by Ewing Kauffman of the Kauffman Foundation. But what has struck me about that is that it's intended, like you said, to go back to the individual and say, what is it that speaks to you, and also suggest or trust that someone else will be following a path that speaks to them, that will also contribute to the change you want to make. And so I'm wondering, in what ways do you think that an Augsburg education contributes to a shift in systems, addresses some of the changes to the systems that may... the structure, if you will, of the issues that we're talking about, whether it's racial disparities and ways in which we've treated one another that go deeper than just the individual?

Lori Brandt Hale: I would lean back into the mission statement and say that all four parts of the key, the-

Catherine Day: The Augsburg mission statement.

Lori Brandt Hale: The Augsburg mission statement, the call to be engaged citizens and thoughtful stewards and critical thinkers and responsible leaders, that those aren't just words. So when I go back to these [inaudible 00:28:32] theology projects with my students, a lot of them, the first inkling, the first inclination is to do a service project. And in fact, the two that I described, in some ways fit that bill. Whether you're providing meals or clothing or athletic equipment, you are serving a direct need, but you're not changing the cause of why those needs are in place.

And so, one of the things that I've encouraged my students to do is to always, even if they're doing that kind of project, is to take a look in their research, at least to understand the bigger systems in place that create those needs, and in some cases, encouraging them then don't work on the direct service end of it, work on the systemic change end of it.

So I had a group last semester who was doing some work on climate change. They were focusing specifically on the boundary waters, and they were writing lots of letters to Congress and they were doing kind of policy work instead of other groups who go down and pick up trash by the river, right? You need all of it, but trying to help students recognize that it all goes together and that just the service doesn't get the kind of systemic change that we need.

Catherine Day: Do you have some dreams for the next phase of your work at Augsburg?

Lori Brandt Hale: Teaching is one of those endeavors that is never done. I always feel like I can get better and can do better. And sometimes when I see students that I've had a long time ago, I say, "You should come back now because I'm doing it way better than when you were a student." I've learned a whole lot. So on one hand, there's always room to think more creatively and more critically about what I'm doing in the classroom. So that's kind of an ongoing goal, if you will, but I have some things I'd like to write that have grown out of my teaching and have grown out of my engagement with our students, and the things that I...

I'm so amazed by our students every day. I've learned so much from them about determination and perseverance. Some of them have stories I can't begin to kind of imagine in terms of the hardships they faced, and how they've gotten here, and how they managed to come and do the work, and they ask really good questions. In fact, I had a student just... I had class earlier this afternoon. I had a student ask a question that I just had never thought about, and I'm still thinking about that question. And so-

Catherine Day: Will you tell us what it is?

Lori Brandt Hale: So I'm teaching a class this semester called religion at the movies. And over the last week, the students have watched Cloud Atlas, which is a very complicated, interesting movie. We were talking about it in class today, and it operates under a cosmology and understanding of the world where the time is cyclical and there is life and death and rebirth. And so we were talking about ideas of liberation in Hindu and Buddhist thought around Moksha and Nirvana and the sort of the desire, again, as the Hindu tradition describes, as wanting something more, hitting a point in your life where you feel like there's something more and you're seeking that liberation from that cycle, from [inaudible 00:31:51] cycle of life and death and rebirth.

One of my students, if I may, one of my Muslim students asked a question about the relationship between Hindu liberation and Lutheran ideas of vocation and purpose, and-

Catherine Day: Wow.

Lori Brandt Hale: It's a fabulous question.

Catherine Day: It is, it's fascinating.

Lori Brandt Hale: And it raises all kinds of interesting questions about individual searches for meaning, communal commitments to ideas of justice and vocation, and where someone's, in their life cycle, where do these things land? And it's something we'll keep talking about.

Catherine Day: What would help you fulfill some of those dreams?

Lori Brandt Hale: The thing that I would like to write about, if I may sort of finish that thought, is this idea about the relationship of liminality and vocation. Liminality is this idea of being betwixt in between. We can talk about liminal spaces, so-

Catherine Day: We talk about the transition from winter to spring as liminal.

Lori Brandt Hale: Exactly, or the transition from childhood to adulthood. And I think about this a lot in my classes. We'd read some things that express this idea. We have a lot of students here who are bicultural, so they have liminal experiences. They might have one sort of set of expectations and rules and language and practices at home, and a different set of those same things at school. Or we have students who are very strongly committed to the LGBTQIA community, so students who are in gender transition have very powerful liminal experiences. We have the step up program here, students in recovery, drug and alcohol recovery. Those students describe some of their experiences as liminal experiences.

And so I'm fascinated by the ways that the experience of liminality both enhances and impedes thinking about vocation, and I would like to be able to explore that in some more detail. I've done some thinking about it over the years, but I think it's time to write something down about that. So I don't know what would make that possible. Having sabbaticals more than every seven years, that would be great.

Catherine Day: Who has inspired and mentored you in your teaching and research?

Lori Brandt Hale: There are so many names that come to my mind when I think about that question, and I'm really lucky that I had great mentors and teachers all the way through, high school, college, and beyond. So in high school I had a social studies teacher who ended up mentoring me for a summer research project that I did right before I went to college and really taught me how to write a thesis statement and how to defend an argument, and I'm ever grateful to him.

When I got to college, I worked as an undergraduate research assistant for a history professor, and he recognized... So I'm first generation college, and I grew up in a small town, and my parents are lovely and smart, hardworking people, but they didn't go to college, and he recognized right away that I had a lot of potential, but I was fairly provincial. So starting my freshman year of college, every time I went to see him, I worked for him about 10 hours a week, he quizzed me on a vocabulary word in preparation for the graduate record exams knowing that I would go to graduate school. And that was such a gift. And so when I think about him, I think about my other undergraduate advisor, and I just hope that I'm doing something even close to what they did for me for the students that I have. I can name a lot of names, but those are some of the stories.

When I got to graduate school, when I did my master's degree at one institution and then I left and did my PhD at the University of Virginia, I actually went with a fellowship. So I wasn't eligible for a teaching assistantship position, which on one hand was a gift, I had more time to do my coursework. On the other hand, I was going to come out with no teaching experience and not be as qualified to get a job. So my dissertation advisor, who was kind of an odd bird, I'll just say that, brilliant but a little bit odd, invited me to be his teaching assistant, but he had a really small class. This was at a big university. And so a lot of the teaching assistants had sections of a big lecture classes, but he just had a class that was 30 people. He said, "I'll lecture on Monday and Wednesday and you can come lead a discussion on Friday." So this is how we set it up, Fridays I will lead a discussion.

Well, it turns out he came to every discussion, which was very unnerving at first. I got used to it. He would sit in the back. He wouldn't say a word. He had no facial expression. I never knew how... So I stopped looking at him or worrying about him, I just focused on the students. But one day we'd been discussing this book, I'd been leading this discussion and I felt like it was just a train wreck. It was all over the place. The students were asking questions, I didn't know how to answer them. I was sort of prompting them. We just kept going down, kind of dead ends. And so I left class fairly disheartened and finally later in the afternoon, mustered up the courage to go talk to my professor.

I walked in and I said, "I'd like to talk about this morning. He said, "Okay." And I said, "Well, it was horrible." He's like, "What are you talking about?" I said, "You were there. You heard all the students just struggling with these questions and the discussion not having any neat conclusions." And he said, "Yeah, it's called learning. That's exactly how it's supposed to be." And he said, "I thought what you did this morning was just right." And that was so liberating to recognize that sometimes learning is messy and we don't always tie things up with a neat, tidy bow, that we have to let things hang and we have to think about them.

Now the advantage was he came back in on Monday and kind of did all that tidying up, but I've had to learn how to do that for myself, but I was really grateful for that experience.

Catherine Day: Well, it sounds like it put you in the perfect position to do what you're doing here at Augsburg. So thank you so much, Lori, for joining us today.

Lori Brandt Hale: Thank you.

Catherine Day: This has been the Augsburg Podcast. I'm Catherine Reid Day. We've been speaking with Lori Brandt Hale, associate professor of religion.

Paul Pribbenow: Thanks for listening to the Augsburg Podcast. I'm President Paul Pribbenow. For more information, please visit augsburg.edu.