Teaching

In spring 2026, I taught two sections of Introduction to Ethics (see here for course syllabus) and a course entitled “Introduction to Practical Wisdom,” which argues that, like other rabbis and wisdom teachers of the ancient world, Jesus gathered around himself a circle of disciples and taught them the practice of a way. He invited them to live into a certain story (about the arrival of the “Kingdom of God”), by orienting their lives around certain fundamental moral principles (chief among them, the love commands), patterning the regular rhythms of their lives around certain bodily, mental, and social practices (voluntary poverty, shared life with the margins, nonviolence, the eucharistic meal, familial community, and more), suggesting that the expected outcome of this would be the acquisition of certain individual and communal virtues (humility, compassion, and more), and that the upshot would be life under the rule of God, in which there is reconciliation, justice, abundance, healing, joy, and the divine presence. The class then investigates four other “way” traditions—Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Buddhism, and Gandhism—and asks of each what if anything can be appropriated unto more effective practice of the Way of Jesus. I try to argue in this portion of the class that Jesus followers have quite a bit to learn from these traditions. (See here for course syllabus.)