Lively Life in School Ministry

When people ask me about school ministry, they usually bring a set of assumptions.  They say things like “Oh, it must be so fun to just do Chapel with kids every day,” or “It must be so nice to be on a school schedule and not have to work as much as you do in a parish,” or “It must so great to have an easy schedule where you just do Chapel for a few minutes each day and teach a class or two.”  Like the work that everyone does, school ministry involves a lot more than most people see at any one glance. Read More »

Connections Between Chapel, Spirituality, and the Classroom

This is a quote from one 8th-grade boy who offered a homily on “Art and Spirituality” in our middle school chapel. Art has been a way for him to discover the gifts that God has endowed him with and to understand his relationship to God. This connection between spirituality and education is at the heart of Dr. Lisa Miller’s work at the Collaborative for Spirituality in Education based at Columbia Teachers College. Her research has encouraged me to find more ways to bring out the spiritual and religious dimensions of our students. One way in which we have done this at Campbell Hall is through our chapel program, where we are helping our students make connections between the subjects that interest them and their spiritual life. Read More »

Life Has Never Been Normal

I began teaching in the Fall of 2001. I was a 23-year-old graduate student, and with just about a week of training, I was thrown into a freshman English classroom to teach college writing to students not much younger than I was. So I had only been teaching a couple of weeks when the events of September 11, 2001 unfolded. Read More »