Thresholds of Becoming: A Reflection on Pedagogy, Poetic Theology, and What Comes Next
By Jill Y. Crainshaw
Yearning for light, we wander.
Someone has lit a lamp.
A flame dances obligato,
bedazzles aching eyes,
choreographs bone-tired feet.
Over the past two and a half decades, theological education has undergone profound transformation. Curricula have shifted. Institutional resources have contracted. Students arrive carrying different questions, question that are often heavier, more urgent. These changes are not speculative. They are already shaping theological education. As Frank M. Yamada observes, we are living through a “new normal” in which teaching becomes an improvisation. Theological schools are learning again and again how to listen, adapt, and reimagine their work in a world marked by social upheaval, environmental injustice and grief, and spiritual hunger.
I began my academic career at Wake Forest University School of Divinity when it was founded in 1999. My own scholarly and pedagogical journey has followed a similar arc, not away from my core commitments, but deeper into them. Those commitments have been shaped from the beginning by feminist inquiry and resistance, which keep calling me to notice whose voices are missing, whose bodies bear the weight of exclusion, and what pedagogies can widen the circle of belonging.
As a white queer feminist woman with decades of experience and a heart and mind still eager for growth, I continue to learn to teach and lead not from certainty, but with a strengthening sense of curiosity and compassion and a willingness to be changed. I continue to discover what it means to try to show up with integrity and openness, in classrooms, in institutional spaces, and in my still-unfolding vocation. This is what encountering a new generation of religious leaders is teaching me.
My teaching has shifted in response to the questions students bring and the needs the world presses upon us. I’ve developed courses on spirituality and health justice, leadership amid despair, disabilities theology, and queer embodiment, not as departures, but as expressions of my commitment to justice-rooted theological reflection. These commitments cause me to ask not only what we know, but how we live with what we know and how we hold what we cannot yet explain.
Amid these shifts in higher education and continuing social crises, I’ve come to describe my work as poetic theology. For me, poetic theology is a form of creative, critical, and embodied inquiry that explores theological questions through image, metaphor, silence, and breath. My poems are not an aside to my academic work; they are its distilled and attentive expression. In poetic theology, language becomes liturgy, metaphor becomes method, and story becomes scholarship.
Poetic theology as I understand it is a methodology that aligns with broader movements in interdisciplinary scholarship and creative-critical hybridity. Poetic theology also contributes to a broader and deeper tradition of public scholarship and creative theological expression. It invites connection, fosters healing, and makes space for those whose voices, bodies, and lives are often overlooked in academic and ecclesial settings. I write not to explain but to evoke, not to persuade but to provoke, not to lead but to accompany.
My poetry and poetic theological scholarship emerge from the quiet edge of a long arc of becoming as a white queer woman shaped by feminist resistance, institutional tensions, and deep listening. Poetic theology, as I practice it, is deeply feminist, not in the abstract, but in its insistence on attending to bodies, memory, and silenced voices. It resonates with feminist care ethics that insist on justice-oriented relationality. For example, Christie Schultz’s “Leading with Feminist Care Ethics in Higher Education” (2016) helps frame kindness not as sentiment but as a feminist act of resistance, a way of tending to communities where transformation becomes possible.
As a poetic theologian, I do not speak with the fire of the protest mic, but with the quieter passion and weight of memory, soil, and story. I aspire through poetic theology to engage the textures of grief, hope, queerness, memory, and aging–not to resolve them, but to dwell with them faithfully and honestly. My hope? That my poetic theology speaks from the thresholds of institutions, identities, and aging bodies where transformation often whispers rather than shouts.
This poetic orientation has reshaped my approach to teaching. It reminds me that education is not about transmitting content but creating space for shared meaning-making. I have become nimbler not by abandoning scholarly and theological tradition, but by weaving it into new forms. I have surprised myself and rekindled my passion for pedagogy by learning to teach online and in hybrid settings. I’ve created asynchronous resources, restructured classroom practices around communal care, and held space for students navigating unprecedented personal and cultural disruptions. I’ve watched as my classroom became not only a site of learning, but of accompaniment, resistance, resilience, and spiritual reorientation.
At the center of this evolution is a “pedagogy of kindness,” not as transactional sentiment or surface, but as a systemic commitment I deem central to communal transformation and health. This stance also aligns with feminist care ethics, which affirm that tending to communities with attentiveness and justice-rooted compassion is foundational to transformation.
Echoing Catherine J. Denial, kindness, for me, is not an optional or acquired virtue. It is a foundational theological and ethical stance that resists dehumanization and seeks justice. It shapes how I hold space in conflict, design learning environments, and engage institutional life. Kindness is not a soft skill. It is a structural practice, a political and prophetic act, and a way of attending to the conditions under which people can thrive.
I’ve come to understand kindness not as sentiment but as an ethic, a stance, a powerful form of resistance. Emerging from this understanding is an Advent blessing I crafted for a Wake Divinity chapel service:
May the road rise to meet you
not with ease, but with truth.
Go as one who listens
for whispers beneath the noise
for God in the hush between stars.
For me, poetic theology finds its pulse in this posture of listening.
I am still learning to teach and live in this poetic tension where the road vanishes, and we trust what we cannot yet see.
We search for direction,
but the stars have shifted.
Maps curl at the corners.
New roads are drawn
in stardust and ash.
I am excited to be continuing this journey. I am still listening and still growing into who I am as a teacher, poet, scholar, and person. And in the quiet of poem, classroom, or conversation, I return often to these questions: What is being born here? What is longing to be named? And how might we listen our way forward—together?
Sources:
Crainshaw, J. Y. (2021). The writing work of the people: Liturgical writing as spiritual, theological, and prophetic work. Church Publishing, Inc.
Denial, C. (2024). A Pedagogy of Kindness. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Schultz, Christie. (2022). Leading with Feminist Care Ethics in Higher Education: Experiences, Practices, and Possibilities. 10.1007/978-3-031-17185-7.
Townes, Emilie M. (2017). “Womanist Etho-Poetics.” The Scholar & Feminist Online, March 30. Barnard Center for Research on Women. Accessed [date you accessed it]. https://sfonline.barnard.edu/womanist-etho-poetics/
Yamada, Frank. (2020). Living and Teaching When Change is the New Normal: Trends in Theological Education and the Impact on Teaching and Learning. The Wabash Center Journal on Teaching. 1. 23-36. 10.31046/wabashjournal.v1i1.1580.
Dr. Jill Y. Crainshaw is a poetic theologian, professor, and ordained minister who has taught at Wake Forest University School of Divinity since its founding in 1999. Her work—rooted in liturgical studies, feminist theology, and poetic expression—explores the sacred through image, metaphor, silence, and breath. She holds degrees from Wake Forest University and Union Theological Seminary in Virginia (Ph.D.), and her career spans over two decades of teaching, writing, and institutional leadership. Jill’s scholarship engages embodiment, queerness, ecological and social justice, and the thresholds of faith and formation in a fragmented world. Her teaching is guided by a pedagogy of kindness, and her poetic theology is both academic and lived, shaped by curiosity, contemplation, and deep listening. Jill is the author of seven books in her field of practical theology. She has also written several collections of poems, including When the Sun Was a Poet (Kelsay Books, 2025).