Here at 天美视频, as we tend to the learning and formation that our students and alumni experience, we talk about the Student and Alumni Lifecycle. While there are some shared rhythms and formational pathways that all students follow through our degree programs, every practitioner who trains at 天美视频 has their own unique stories and journey through our programs. Over time, we have collected data from students and alumni to help us understand the seasons of formation that students experience.

The Office of Students & Alumni (OSA) provides Lifecycle programming to support students throughout each season of their lifecycle as students at 天美视频. These opportunities are designed to help you navigate your own pathway through your time in this community of learning practitioners.

We understand each student journey as happening in 3 phases: beginning, middle, and (s)ending. While your student journey will look different depending on your degree and pace, each student begins by applying and matriculating to 天美视频 and going through Orientation as a first year student.

First Year Student Lifecycle

The first year in graduate school can be quite a challenge. Whether you鈥檝e just finished an undergraduate degree or are returning to school after quite some time, becoming a student at 天美视频 means learning a new language, developing new skills, and examining your own beliefs and stories for the purpose of deep formation. This work takes courage, community, and practice.
What鈥檚 more, those of you joining us in our low-residency cohorts are entering this journey from different locations and with different needs for community and formation. Throughout the first year, your Lifecycle Gatherings will focus on helping you enter community and engage in dialogue together across differences of geography, social location, belief, and experiences.

By choosing again and again to opt-in to your own journey of formation and to listen with curiosity to one another鈥檚 stories, you have the opportunity to co-create a culture and posture of learning that will empower you for vocations filled with transforming relationships with individuals and systems. Lifecycle Gatherings will be a place where we collectively press pause, breathe, and re-engage that commitment together.

First Year Student Lifecycle Programming begins before the start of weekly classes with Frameworks & Intersections, a self-paced online course where you鈥檒l be introduced to the basics of our learning platforms, and begin your orientation into the culture and resources that will support your 天美视频 journey. Frameworks & Intersections continues as a series of synchronous online roundtable gatherings for all first year students for 9 weeks across the fall term.

These roundtables orient you to academic, relational, and spiritual resources that are essential to your work as a student practitioner. We鈥檒l connect you with student leaders, faculty, alumni, and staff for engaging conversation around how we co-create a supportive, challenging, and purposeful learning community that supports the needs of students from all backgrounds in their own particular lifecycle as practitioners in formation together at 天美视频.

We look forward to beginning this journey with you in just a few weeks!

Stay tuned to your student email inbox for information about Frameworks & Intersections and other Lifecycle Programming that will be launching towards the end of August.

For more information, you can contact , Supervisor of Accessibility & Vocational Programs at dtidwell@theseattleschool.edu.

The post What You Need to Know about Student Lifecycle Programming appeared first on 天美视频 of Theology & Psychology.

In these spaces of fear, we鈥檙e often less able to access our active practices of filtering our biases and choosing to act differently鈥攍eading to harm, most often of our Black and Brown community members. In the last few weeks in June, we鈥檝e seen anti-Asian assaults in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle and white supremacist propaganda posted in Seattle鈥檚 Chinatown and International District. We鈥檝e watched in horror the high profile lynchings in the form of police and vigilante killings of Black folks in Minnesota, Georgia, Florida, Washington, and undoubtedly more places before this piece is published. We鈥檝e seen the less publicized police killing of Black first responder Breonna Taylor when police broke into her home in Louisville, KY. And we鈥檝e heard reports of the devastatingly disproportionate toll of Covid19 among the Navajo Nation. And undoubtedly, between when this is written and published, there will be more names of people harmed鈥攕ome we will learn and more will never be published because the events aren鈥檛 filmed.

While we鈥檙e stuck at home glued to our digital windows to the world, many of us may become more acutely aware of acts of violence that have been happening all along. Under our current load of fear and stress, these traumas each have their own particular impact, but they also have a cumulative impact on each of us鈥攁nd most of all on those who see your own faces reflected in these particular victims and who live under this every day.

And I am a white man working at 天美视频, where our mission is: 鈥渢o train people to be competent in the study of text, soul, and culture in order to serve God and neighbor through transforming relationships.鈥� In the past months, I鈥檝e sat in Zoom meetings with students, alumni, staff, and faculty of this majority-white聽institution, and I have heard story after story from people of color about the impact of this season of isolation and visible violence, as well as specific experiences of discrimination, violence, silence, and pain.

Racism is a primordial wound on the heart of our culture and it touches us all. It is a sin that cuts in so many directions鈥攙ictims, perpetrators, bystanders, and descendants. And as I seek to understand my role in all this, and my turn of repentance, to love God and my neighbors, I am drawn back into wisdom from the Biblical texts.

In the story of Israel, God set in place cities of refuge鈥攑laces where people could flee from reckless vengeance killings. These towns were also set aside as the homes of the Levites, the priestly clan. The Jewish Talmud offers deeper understanding about the teachings on these places of refuge. Requirements are outlined: these cannot be large cities or small towns, and they must have a water source. If there is no water source, a well or a canal must be dug. The roadways into these cities must be twice the standard width of the highways going in and out of the largest cities. And every intersection leading toward these cities must be clearly marked.

In short, it was never sufficient to name a place as a city of refuge. The lasting work had to be put in, in order for it to be a legitimate place of hospitality for those in danger of violence. As much as I long to call myself a person who is anti-racist, is so much more than that. This language from the Talmud changes the way that I hear the gospel message preached by John: 鈥淧repare the way of the Lord and make straight paths for him.鈥�

And it changes the way that I read Isaiah 40:3-5:

A voice of one calling:
鈥淚n the wilderness prepare
the way for the Lord;
make straight in the desert
a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be raised up,
every mountain and hill made low;
the rough ground shall become level,
the rugged places a plain.
And the glory of the Lord will be revealed,
and all people will see it together.
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.鈥�

Last week, our community prayed this passage alongside . He gives voice to the ache and longing for justice present in this passage and in the Black community. As I listen to his voice I am reminded that there is no good news to the gospel of Jesus if it does not bring loving justice to our world.

In my own life as a white man, and in my work in 天美视频 community, it is not enough to be aware of violence. And it is not enough to name myself an ally. In order to credibly love my neighbors, I must join in the lament of my siblings in pain, and even more, we must together continue to do the mundane and invisible work of creating and maintaining access ways, and sources of life for Black, Brown and Native people in our communities. And as a white man, I must enter my own lament. My own source of life is cut off by racism when I do not engage in this justice work, where I myself am often the worker who joins late in the day.

In my particular work at 天美视频 this looks like grieving and strategizing with students; implementing and revisiting equity strategies as we distribute Covid19 benevolence funds; from the beginning, addressing racial and socioeconomic disparities as we lead workshops on self-care for ongoing trauma; and daily making space in our community rhythms of prayer to hold grief and explore our own work in justice building. It also means showing up in my own community鈥攄emanding justice and accountability for Stonechild Chiefstick, a Native man killed by police who have gone uncharged in my county last year, and for Bennie Branch and Manuel Ellis, both Black men killed by police in nearby Tacoma. And it means listening when my Black neighbor speaks about her fear for her teenager鈥檚 life, and doing work with our local police to ensure that this child is safe in our shared community.

None of these things give me or 天美视频 the right to label ourselves a place of refuge. Instead, they are some of the daily practices we engage relationally and, in so doing, are ourselves being transformed. We have the blessing of not being a monolith. And while we are a majority white learning community, we are also a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and multicultural community that continues to be shaped and led by one another. To be a place of refuge, dialogue, and repair in our society, we must be engaged in this work as a daily spiritual practice, inviting our souls, our economics, our politics, and our relationships to be contoured to the Spirit of God at work in the world.

This past Sunday, Christians celebrated the feast of Pentecost. Humanity has always been in need of God鈥檚 flames uniting us with all people in love and justice. The fires across USAmerica are calling out for love and justice for Black bodies in our nation. I believe that the Spirit needs us to be people whose lives are marked by doing the work that creates justice and peace.

As a school, we can never really be a permanent city of refuge, but we can be a place along the way where people join with God and learn from one another about how to build such places together in our homes and congregations; nonprofits and friend groups; therapy offices and neighborhoods. As a white person, a huge part of my learning is listening and bearing wit(h)ness, and another huge part is consistently acting, speaking, and sharing in this blessed work, especially when society privileges me in such a way that I could choose to simply check out and reap the benefits handed to me because of my white skin.

This is important, holy work. And it is important work to talk about together. As wrong as it is to put up signposts pointing to places that are not actual refuge, it is also crucial to illuminate the pathways where work really is being done. This both opens us up for accountability and brings us into dialogue with those who have much to teach us. There is not a 鈥渞ight鈥� way for white folks to do this work and come out looking good. We must move into it making mistakes and repenting all along the way. Some may experience this as a deterrent, but for those who receive it as the blessing it is, it is a way forward into sharing the weighty blessing of Pentecost.

One of the gifts of working in a place where psychology and theology intersect, is that while therapeutic changes often happen confidentially behind closed doors, the world of communities of faith are rich with public symbols and places to both contain and display communal grief and repair. Here, in the work of racial justice, we need both of these together. We need deep, internal, and interpersonal work. And we need communal and symbolic actions that disrupt oppression and create structure for cultural change.

May we join with the Spirit to create spaces of refuge and repair in our neighborhoods and in our world.

The post Stewarding My Own Whiteness in the Work for Justice appeared first on 天美视频 of Theology & Psychology.

During Lent we follow Jesus into the wilderness, where we wrestle with our common humanity and the arc of death and resurrection. It鈥檚 a season of repentance, traditionally signified by the familiar ashes and dust. Here, Daniel Tidwell (Master of Divinity, 鈥�10), Alumni Programs Coordinator, guides us into Holy Week with a reflection about the formational arc that holds together both death and resurrection. Daniel invites us to wonder how the mingling of ashes and glitter might call each of us to a new form of repentance, one that affirms the humanity in ourselves and in each other, calling us to the violence-defying love of the Spirit of God.

There is a formational arc to the season of Lent鈥攁 time of preparing for Holy Week where we play out the days of Jesus鈥� last meal with the disciples, his betrayal, trial, violent death, and then, hovering over death, the unthinkable鈥攔esurrection and the extraordinary/ordinary of life that follows.

Traditionally, new followers of Jesus are baptized at Easter. We recall creation narratives of passing through chaotic waters and the Spirit moving us with Jesus through death and into resurrection. We initiate this journey by reminding one another that 鈥測ou were made from dust, and to dust you will return.鈥� And so, it鈥檚 in the birth waters of Baptism at Easter that we are brought into a new life that has passed through death, and yet, lives.

We start with ashes sprinkled over the head or smudged in the shape of a cross, calling us to remember our common humanity; our of-the-earth dustiness鈥攁 notion linguistically rooted in our English words for humility, humanity, and humus, and held together in Hebrew with the name of Adam and the word for earth. In short, we mark our heads with dust and ash to ground us in the fact that we are mortal creatures of this shared earth鈥攊t鈥檚 an acknowledgement that death is part of all of our stories.

Two years ago, Reverend Elizabeth Edman started a movement to begin Lent by imparting ashes mixed with glitter on the heads of LGBTQ Christians. This was born out of grappling with the reality that for many LGBTQ people in our society, the reminder of our mortality and the presence of death is already as ever-present to us as the daily experiences of discrimination and violence that mark our lives. Family rejection; discrimination in housing, jobs, and healthcare; school bullying; sex trafficking; youth homelessness; and outright physical violence are daily realities. These traumas often occur in the name of God, adding another soul-wounding dimension to the violence.

The glitter-ash symbol is tied to a slightly older tradition that emerged in the last decade on the streets of San Francisco, where Episcopal clergy impart ashes alongside a charity group of drag queens known as The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Several years back, the two groups came together鈥攃lergy offering ashes and the Sisters offering glitter. LGBTQ Christians, alongside those of other faiths who have been harmed by religion, line up to receive ashes, glitter, or both. It鈥檚 an invitation for all who show up to receive recognition of their beloved humanity that shines despite violence and death.

While glitter isn鈥檛 a universal symbol for LGBTQ people, it does have a history鈥攃onnected with drag performers鈥� spirit of defiance and determination to show up vibrantly鈥攖o thrive鈥攊n a world that seeks to trample LGBTQ people through traumas, collective and personal. For many of us Christians who are LGBTQ, our bodies have long been marked for death by our own churches and families. And instead of following the arc through death to resurrection, we find ourselves stuck repeating only one part of the Jesus story.

Through the mingling of ash and oil on my own forehead, I am called to remember my shared humanity with every person on earth. The addition of glitter invites me to honor the particularity of my own experience of learning to thrive in a world where many fellow followers of Jesus have been the very agents of harm that have visited death on my own story. To be marked by both ash and glitter helps me hold together in my body that I am a part of this oh-so-human body of Christ. Human cruelty and fragility, and the need for resurrection, exist in me personally and in us collectively. Our repentance is tied up together, but how it gets played out may look different for each of us.

鈥淭o be marked by both ash and glitter helps me hold together in my body that I am a part of this oh-so-human body of Christ.鈥�

For fellow Christians who have done violence to your LGBTQ siblings, I wonder about your repentance and where you hear the spirit calling you to our shared humanity. Could it be that you, like Peter, need to be reminded to 鈥渃all no thing unclean that I have made holy鈥�? And for all of us who follow Jesus, I believe that the call to repentance is a call to turn away from death-dealing and toward life鈥攚hether we鈥檝e been involved in directing violence to ourselves or to others. Repentance is always a turn of love; a turn toward each other in response to the Spirit of God.

And here we are in Holy Week, at the end of this journey of Lent, where Jesus walks us into a place where we do not want to go鈥攁 place where those of us who love Jesus most dearly, and confess Jesus most devoutly, are confronted by the mirror of our own betrayal; our own breaking point, where we walk away from a God who gives and takes鈥攖oo much鈥攊n the face of human violence. Here Jesus, fully God and fully human, steps in to occupy the space of all types of victimhood, suffering violence鈥攑hysical, sexual, emotional, and spiritual; enduring cutoff, abandonment, condemnation, shame, and assault; facing abuse both systemic and personal. Jesus does not do this because God demands it, or because God cannot stand to face our violence. It is as God that Jesus faces this violence to break its hold on all of us.

On Saturday we鈥檒l face the day on the Christian calendar that is the most perplexing of all. In many ways, it is an un-day; an undoing of who we, as disciples, wanted Jesus to be. On Friday, Jesus walks, bodily, into the way of human violence. And, on Sunday, Jesus offers transforming wounds to welcome us into a new kind of life. But between these days, on Holy Saturday, we wait in the stark undoing of not knowing where or how the Spirit of God will show up. We see that Jesus took on our violence, and we are confronted with the devastation of death. This is not a place we want to linger.

This year, Holy Saturday also marks the 20th anniversary of the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Like every trauma, this particular violence echoes in our collective stories, and it throbs a particular ache within the bodies of those who survived it. All trauma, from violence large or small, leaves a wake. It is the lingering, chaotic water that follows death. And while we can name the impact of particular waves, the pervasive presence of violence has always troubled the waters of the human story. Love in response to violence has always been a defiantly vulnerable act.

鈥淭he pervasive presence of violence has always troubled the waters of the human story. Love in response to violence has always been a defiantly vulnerable act.鈥�

This is where the Spirit hovers鈥攂etween the death of God at the hands of our human violence, and the resurrection of God that raises not only Jesus, but all of us from the grasp of death. Here, in the ashes and void, there is a shimmer across the face of the water. There is a glimmering ache toward life within the wound of death. It is a Queer transition, demanding that the body that has suffered violence will, through love, come forth with a both scarred and holy persistence. Resurrected life is vibrantly defiant鈥攏ot as though death had not happened, but because it has undergone death and been transformed by love. This is why grief is core to repentance. Grief is the opening of love through which life moves forward out of death.

I try to imagine some reconciliation within the body of Christ over the violence done to LGBTQ people. I try to imagine some repentance in a society committed to keeping guns over protecting human life. I try to imagine repair of racist violence enacted through social structures, and unquestioned bias. And I am exhausted by the ever-presence of death. We need a Jesus who steps into this violence that leads to death. And we need a Spirit who breathes with us, into this chaos that has always been, and offers a lifeline of grief that pulls us through the waters and into hope.

As we walk through Holy Week, may we listen to the Spirit who hovers over us, re-membering who we are as humans, marked by violence, yet joined by a God who is fully with us. This God faces us amidst violence, enters death, and moves with us into life beyond鈥攍ife marked by death, yet survived by love. May we consider our own participation on all sides of violence and feel the Breath of God hovering in places of death and spinning grief into an opening for love.

The post From Dust to Glitter: Love Beyond Violence appeared first on 天美视频 of Theology & Psychology.

In the tradition of Christian scriptures, prophets are those individuals who, compelled by their understanding of what is good for society, raise their voices and call out for deep change. They call for things like fasting, turning from evil to good, and trading religious behavior for acts of justice and mercy.

With a description like that, the prophet鈥檚 vocation can seem almost glamorous. Yet, when I look at those who do the work of prophets in our own society鈥攃rying out for justice鈥擨 see that there are deep costs to speaking difficult truths for the sake of social change. I am left asking, what does it look like to care for the souls of prophets? And what resources are there for prophets who cry out against the very systems within which they live?

What does it look like to care for the souls of prophets?

The liturgical season of Lent is a time given to collectively answering the prophetic call to repent and do the deep work of turning away from evil toward what is good. But I find myself wondering, what does repentance look like for the prophet herself?

Most often, prophets are compelled by a mystic鈥檚 connection to God, and through dramatic actions, miraculous interventions, or eloquent speech, prophets risk life and limb to convince crowds or kings to change the course of societies.

Prophets risk much to call for change based on their deep convictions about what is right and just and true. This is a difficult line to hold. It requires vision, commitment, and tenacity. It is not a vocation for the faint of heart.

Yet within the prophetic vocation is the person of the prophet鈥攁 person who, like anyone else, requires relational connection and belonging in community. And often, the prophet鈥檚 deep convictions about justice have been forged through fiery experiences of deep injustice.

In many versions of the Bible, translators insert the heading 鈥淛onah鈥檚 Anger鈥� before the beginning of the fourth chapter of this brief book about a troubled prophet and his difficult journey to call others to repentance. Wedged into this wild tale of a divinely appointed quest, a 3-day stay in the belly of a sea-beast, and a heathen city miraculously repenting, we find the figure of the prophet himself. Jonah, a human who has come through immense trauma, is committed to his work鈥攑roclaiming the warning of God鈥檚 wrath against the evil city of Nineveh.

But then the unthinkable happens. The people of Nineveh (and even the animals!) repent鈥攖hey turn from doing wrong and begin to do right. And it is in this moment when we see that the prophet has become isolated and stuck. Lifting his voice to God, he declares it would be best if he could die.

What presents itself as anger cannot conceal a distress more closely linked with a deeper wound. The plant that grows in Jonah 4:6 is said to provide relief for his distress or grief. When the plant is destroyed and Jonah is scorched by the sun, we realize that the word translated 鈥渁nger鈥� that appears throughout the passage is itself a play on the word 鈥渂urn.鈥� In essence, anger burns when the vehicle for engaging grief is removed.

Anger burns when the vehicle for engaging grief is removed.

In this strange tale鈥攚herein a giant fish provides transit and animals repent in sackcloth鈥攁 plant stands in as a way to engage the prophet鈥檚 grief, opening space for compassion instead of anger. This man鈥檚 life has not gone the direction he desired. He鈥檚 been thrown overboard; chewed up and spit out. Now, when his wild-eyed truth telling is finally met with a change of heart, he is cut loose from his one focus to face the ache within himself that is in need of compassion, and in his isolation, it is enough to make him want to die.

In our world, the prophetic vocation is alive and well鈥攅mbodied in artists, activists, teachers, organizers, and many others who put their lives on the line to cry out against systems of injustice. And while we rarely see the kind of wholesale repentance that would make these voices obsolete, I wonder if the underlying grief of our prophets is still in need of care. So much of our energy can go toward changing policies and systems, that when laws are changed or wars ended, we can be blindsided by being left alone, holding our deep need for healing and repair.

When I stop to consider what the season of Lent might mean in terms of caring for our modern-day prophets, I think about repentance in terms of tending to the soul鈥檚 need alongside the pursuit of societal justice.

At the center of the Jonah story is an ancient song that the story was probably built around. In it, the author, in the voice of the prophet, cries out to God,

鈥淚 called to the Lord out of my distress,
聽 and he answered me;
out of the belly of Sheol I cried,
聽 and you heard my voice.鈥�

It is from this deep need to cry out from the deep place of despair that the prophet herself can enter healing. There is a need to be heard and met in the place of wounding that is often directly connected to the prophetic vocation. And it is out of healing, through voicing lament, that the prophet leads societies to turn toward justice, and engages in their own act of repentance.

Image courtesy of ; public domain.

The post Repentance and Care for the Prophet鈥檚 Soul appeared first on 天美视频 of Theology & Psychology.

My favorite advice I鈥檝e given myself as a writer is this: 鈥淭he best reading of your poem is your poem鈥檚 best reading of you.鈥� It鈥檚 strange to give yourself advice. But it鈥檚 stranger to imagine that we aren鈥檛 being shaped by the stories we tell. The act of concretizing living stories into words is, in effect, a means of setting our bodies free to dance around the story. To read it backwards and forwards, catching our breath between the lines.

The stories that shape me theologically are the stories that invite me to see and tell my own story differently鈥攖o believe in a God and a world bigger than I could imagine on my own. The Christian story is grounded in the presence of God who breaks in on our reality, making spaciousness within and among us in the particular contexts of our human lives.

Theological shifts are as much a matter of the body and heart as they are of the brain, and stories that spark theological shifts do so by tapping into our lived experiences of our deepest dread and desire鈥攃ategories written in our bodies.

What follows are four of the categories by which I understand stories to shape us. In each category, I鈥檝e recommended texts and films that I鈥檝e found to be personally significant shapers of how I think theologically. If you鈥檙e near 天美视频 this month, I鈥檇 recommend that you stop by the library and take a look at all the books and films our staff and faculty have recommended in celebration of Theological Libraries Month.

Stories write us.

What I鈥檝e learned is that careful, thoughtful, and spirited theologians share a sensibility understood implicitly by the best authors and filmmakers鈥攖hey know that stories shape our imagination. Instead of choosing one text to recommend in this category, I鈥檝e chosen a collection.

An anthology, like the collected stories of scriptures, offers many narratives that follow their own internal arcs. But the stories also play together to invite a reading of the whole in light of the parts and the parts in light of the whole.

For an anthology about the inbreaking of God, I can do no better than of Flannery O鈥機onnor. But to remind us that God鈥檚 inbreaking isn鈥檛 all apocalypse and thunder, I鈥檝e paired it with my favorite film about Christmas, saints, and imagination. , the 2004 film directed by Danny Boyle, invites us to let sacred stories write us through the power of imagination and hope.

Stories also right us鈥攏ot in a moral sense, but in the sense of setting aright that which has been upended.

Some stories have the power to turn what we have known on end in such a way that we realize what we have always known is truly the thing that was upside down. One way that we notice stories righting us is in the response of our bodies鈥攖he inner-ear equilibrium-spinning that makes us pause and take inventory before we can take our next step.

For this category I鈥檓 offering a documentary film double-feature: and (both released in 2014). When I saw these two films at the Seattle International Film Festival, each one left me with a deeply visceral response, and each left me with greater clarity surrounding how I think about what is good news in the context of competing masculinities in USAmerica.

Another way that stories shape us theologically is that stories rite us.

In a real way, the best stories are ones in which we undergo a transformation through participation. Be it , or the series, there are stories (often from childhood) that we鈥檝e experienced that invite us into bigger communities, narratives, and worlds. These are stories we undergo, and they capture our imaginations by naming truth and naming us in inarticulable ways. Like liturgical symbols, these stories don鈥檛 disclose doctrine, but they offer glimpses into mystery that pull us deeper in our journeys into God.

One book that captured me in just such a way was Sara Miles鈥檚 spiritual memoir . This story gave me a taste for sacrament that left me hungry and satisfied enough to keep coming back to a eucharist table that was more hospitable than I could ever have imagined. And again, it鈥檚 through waking our imaginations that these stories become rites whereby we enter deeper into God and our own stories; whereby we experience what it is to be beloved.

For me, the recent film (2014) has similarly awakened my imagination, inviting me to more. Its beauty and story open space to experience a world where the gift of our whole humanity is truly welcomed.

And finally, in a profound way, stories wright us.

It鈥檚 an archaic term to be sure, related to the old English word for work. In its best sense, literature works us. It works liturgically鈥攖he work of the people drawing us into the narrative patterns and structures of story that are bigger and older than us. These patterns are deeply enculturated ways of seeing the world and imagining who God is and who we are. Stories鈥攅specially old, culturally and theologically important stories鈥攁re like people. That is to say, each one self-discloses, teaching us how they want to be read.

The best of films always unfold in this way, teaching us how to watch them as we watch them over and over. One such readily available film is (2014). This film asks you to allow yourself to enter the fantastical world of this suspense story, extending an invitation to the parts of you most in need of kindness.

And for a final text, I recommend a book that has taught me much about learning to pay attention to the patterns that shape how we live in and see the world. is a classic architecture text that invites us to believe that what has come before might lend a way forward for the challenges we face as we try to live well together. It鈥檚 a book that teaches us about how to read stories by teaching us how to pay attention to how stories want to be read鈥攊f you let this book work on you, you won鈥檛 ever be able to see the world the same.

The post The Stories that Write Us: A Curious Curation for Theological Libraries Month appeared first on 天美视频 of Theology & Psychology.

Facilities Manager Daniel Tidwell reflects on the beauty that grows in the in-between spaces.

After graduating from 天美视频 in 2010, I moved to West Seattle, where I have lived ever since, learning to run and breathe beneath forests of big leaf maple and Douglas fir. For seven years now, I have called Seattle home鈥攐r more truly, I have been slowly finding that it was always this water, these forests, and this mountain that have been calling me home (there is, of course, only one mountain here that requires designation).

Many students begin and end their 天美视频 journey concomitant with their journey of life alongside Puget Sound, coming here for a few short years before returning to homeplaces and communities elsewhere. Others, having grown up on one side or the other of the Cascade Mountains, have always called this region home. And some, like me, become entwined with this landscape, softly settling into a belonging that had been waiting for us to be drawn out.

As Facilities Manager at 天美视频, I offer up a playful reminder during my talk each Fall on safety and emergency preparedness: 鈥淵ou know, that mountain over there鈥攊t鈥檚 a volcano.鈥� It鈥檚 a part of my one sermon to every person who comes through the doors of our building鈥攎y invitation to pay attention to this place, to how we are being shaped.

I spent most of my years as an MDiv student living in a studio apartment one block from the school. For two and a half years I walked through the pre-dawn hush to Pike Place Market, where I spent cold mornings below ground in the prep kitchen of a bakery. Coated in flour, I鈥檇 resurface and trek back, through wind and rain, to this brick building where we learn about the apocalyptic goodness of the story of God and about how we bear witness to the holy ground of stories of the people we encounter.

Now, I talk to students about how we care for each other by caring for the interstitial spaces, those gaps between solid things鈥攑ockets of time and space that draw connecting fluid of moments and meaning into the hollowed out places in the world. The examples I use are mundane: the space between the fibers in the carpet that hold onto spilled coffee, and the layers of a single paper towel that can hold more water when folded and fully dry your hands without the need for more wasted trees. We鈥檙e talking about the kind of spaces between more solid things that can contain things more fluid that might otherwise be lost.

This is a metaphor. And this is not a metaphor.

It鈥檚 not uncommon to hear words around this building about 鈥渢he space between鈥濃�攖he relationship that occurs between two people, the therapeutic encounter, the middle place of the Spirit. These are all ways of talking about the kind of shadowy fullness that is drawn out in the relational space between two people鈥攚ays of naming how two people, in relationship, can open up a space to contain the wild spectrum of our human stories.

But all this talk about interpersonal space is deeply rooted in the real spaces between solid bodies of matter. It is a recognition that our bodies matter, and our stories are written between us in very real measures of distance and time.

And if our stories are written in these tangible ways, so too, their redemption鈥攖heir intersection with the story of God鈥攎ust be written in the real landscapes of our lives with our bodies.

The interstitial space between us draws me out beyond myself, inviting me to listen, to pay attention. I know that, together, beautiful stories are being written鈥攕tories of movement and solidity, and stories of finding home that can hold the wonder of both bodies and betweens.

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