Recently I had a front row seat at my oldest son’s kindergarten graduation. Before receiving their diplomas, the children performed a montage of lessons they had learned during the school year—reading, writing, arithmetic…and world cultures. They conveyed the lessons with a cursory description of major holidays that took place within the semesters.

I don’t object to using holidays as a touchstone, but I surely failed at hiding my disappointment in the execution of the lesson. One child told us about the whimsy of Christmas—a winter holiday celebrated by most families present, even those not identifying as Christian. “Jewish people,” another child said, celebrate Hanukkah, and preceded to describe the function of a menorah which was depicted on a poster he had colored. Then a child approached the mic to explain how “Some people celebrate Kwanzaa,” all the while holding a different candleholder scribbled on a poster.

Students at Warren Wilson College, where I have taught full-time over the past five years, have often told me in office hours that they do not feel “safe” discussing race in the classroom. They are eager and motivated to learn scholarly content and to analyze their experiences, but they are very reluctant to articulate their thoughts out loud. The college is politically liberal and predominantly white (about eight percent of the students are students of color, including international attendees); it is small (about 500 students) and rural. Most students live on the campus. Thus it is a place where students know each other and reputation matters a great deal. To “say the wrong thing” is to potentially be called out, or even labeled a racist.

When the beloved author Ursula Le Guin died earlier this year at the age of 88, print and online tributes rightly celebrated her legacy of wonderful fantasy and science-fiction literature, as well as her place as a feminist literary icon, her facility with both trenchant satire and gentle children’s fables, her incisive social and political commentary, her generous support for aspiring young authors, and her abundant personal magnetism. But they generally made little mention of much having to do with religion, beyond noting how Le Guin had proudly received the “Emperor Has No Clothes Award” from the Freedom from Religion Foundation a decade ago. “Let the tailors of the garments of God sit in their tailor shops and stitch away,” she declared at the award ceremony, “but let them stay there in their temples, out of government, out of the schools.”

I am among the ranks of those in religious studies, who, at least for a time, seriously doubted that our discipline could be successfully imported into an online learning environment. Surely, I thought, interactions between students and professor would be trivial, discussions would be sanitized, and the depth of learning would prove inconsequential. Admittedly, for a time, I was influenced by the narrative that online education is a sorry excuse for the treasures that await those in traditional, face-to-face learning environments. Even more, I questioned the commitment and mettle of students who preferred online courses. If they were truly serious about the profundity of their learning, I thought, they wouldn't have taken the online path of least resistance.