Dr. Chelle Stearns joined Dr. Paul Hoard and Dr. Doug Shirley for this third podcast in the Ghosts & Shadows Conversation Series. She taught at The Seattle School from 2008-2023 as Associate Professor of Theology and now serves as Affiliate Faculty. Listen to the insights, experience, and theological imagination she brings to this exploration. [Podcast has been edited for length.]

Ghost & Shadows Conversation Series

In this season as The Seattle School has been looking back at the first 25 years, we, Dr. Paul Hoard and Dr. Doug Shirley, have been exploring what it means to live with the legacies and histories in our community, as well as how to engage with these proverbial ghosts and shadows, these systemic inheritances. Together in this series titled “Ghosts and Shadows,” we’ve examined the past and looked towards the future through three essays, and we also invited colleagues to join in the conversation and share their reflections in a series of podcasts including Dr. Curt Thompson and Dr. Monique Gadson.

Our Guest for this Conversation

Dr. Chelle Stearns served as Associate Professor of Theology at The Seattle School from 2008 – 2023 and now serves as Affiliate Faculty. She is the author of Handling Dissonance: A Musical Theological Aesthetic of Unity and has published essays on subjects such as trauma and Christology, music and trauma, and Pneumatology and the arts. Her current research and writing are at the intersection of theology, music, and trauma.

Transcript

Dr. Paul Hoard:
I am Dr. Paul Hoard, an associate professor of counseling psychology at the Seattle School. Dr. Shirley and I have been working on this project we call Ghosts and Shadows in this season where the school has been looking back at the first 25 years and looking ahead to the next 25 years. And as we are preparing to move from this building to a new location, we’ve been exploring what are the proverbial ghosts that haunt us, the ghosts and shadows with us in our community, as well as how to engage with those ghosts and shadows, what we think about systemic inheritances. We’ve written a few essays and we’ve also continued the conversation in a series of podcasts with a few colleagues to help us reflect together. Dr. Chelle Sterns joins us for this conversation. She taught at the Seattle School from 2008 to 2023 as an Associate Professor of Theology. We are excited to listen to the wisdom, experience, and theological imagination she brings to this conversation.

Dr. Doug Shirley:
Well, back today with Dr. Chelle Stearns. Chelle, thank you so much for being here. We’ve looked forward to, Paul and I’ve looked forward to talking to you for a while. This is our project on Ghosts and Shadows and what it means to be in an institution and a learning community like ours. Looking back at the 25 years that we’ve inherited and contributed to, and then also at the 25 years ahead. Really excited to be in conversation with you probably for two reasons. One, just how long you’ve been a part of the school and the eyes and the wisdom you have for us that way. And then also any theological imagination you might have for if this project is entitled “Ghosts and Shadows.” How do we work with the ghosts and shadows that we inherit just because we live and breathe and move in certain places? And so in this case, this place, Seattle School. So welcome. Thank you for being here.

Dr. Chelle Stearns:
It’s great to be here. Thanks for inviting me. 

Dr. Paul Hoard:
Yeah. Well, I think what strikes me again is how the stories that we tell often then circle around the students. And I say we tell what I was told I’d say now coming in, there was a lot of like, oh, well watch out for our students. When I came in, there was, our students are kind of assertive. They’re aggressive, they, they’re very opinionated. These were some of the things that were sort of passed on to me as I got started. And I think what it makes me curious is what’s that reflection of in terms of us, even actually what you’re saying in terms of wanting to get a bigger picture of the whole curriculum. It’s just how much we can end up being so siloed from one another.

And then of course, then the symptom comes out in the students and how they’re metabolizing everything that we’re saying. And I think, yeah, it makes me curious about now what’s it about us right now, that’s this, that we can tell a story about students. I think that’s where it’s like, oh, it’s easy for us to talk about students as the problem or where students are. But I think the bigger than, what makes me curious is about what’s happening with us on a more of an institutional, because students, students move through us. That’s what students do. They move through an institution, but we’re the ones that stay or become it.

Dr. Doug Shirley:
I had kind a similar, even when you use the phrase whole curriculum, I thought, well, was there one? Because we’ve still worked at building a whole W-H-O-L-E, but it’s been so very difficult because we have been so this personality does this, this personality does that, and good luck sort of thing. The other thing, I guess I heard two other things when you said: good night theology is by itself triggering. Holy cow, we got to talk about that. And two, a 90 person classroom.

Dr. Chelle Stearns:
Oh, yeah.

Dr. Doug Shirley:
Right. So the interplay of, you said half the students’ in a fetal position in a 90 person classroom, theology by itself is triggering. Whoa.

Dr. Chelle Stearns:
Yeah. Fun stuff. And then I stayed for 15 years.

Dr. Doug Shirley:
Yeah. So tell us about that. How did you make your way?

Dr. Chelle Stearns:
Well, I’ll start with the students. I mean, I think there is something to, what does that reflect about the faculty? But there’s also, I’ll say this in a really positive light. Students after studying lots of trauma theory, students feel like they have agency. And I think that, and that’s sometimes really difficult for them because they don’t have as much power, but they still feel like they can challenge. And I remember one student made the comment when she came back later on a panel, one of the symposia, we put our bodies in the middle of the classroom and then the teachers had to work around us. And I’m like, so I think that’s a really significant thing, especially when thinking about theology. I think there’s often been times when students have come into the school, and I’ve heard this in different ways over the years: I’ve had a theology that I was basically told and told I had to assent to.

I had to memorize the right theology to remain orthodox, or I had to memorize the right theology to remain in the group. And now I’m doing this psychology, which I’ll say just human growth and development and attachment styles often disrupted the students in significant ways. And that also they were also taking that class at the same time as my fall class at that point. And so you begin to go, so they’re not just deconstructing their theology, they’re deconstructing in such a way that they’re beginning to understand themselves and their families, their own systems, their relationships. And then they come into a place where this strange person is hosting a class, even bringing in a guest speaker, and they’re supposed to trust when we’re talking about sin. And for me, I’m just like, I’m a new person. We’re going to talk theology. This is just what we do. And oh, these students have agency and they have desire to know something better, and it’s hitting up against their theology or their lives in really, really significant ways. So for me, I think at the time I was like, what is this crazy thing that’s happening? I look back now and I go, wow, it’s really amazing that students felt like they had the capacity essentially to say no. What all emerged for 90 students in a classroom? I don’t know.

And there’s probably a lot more to the story than that. But the question was how then to invest them in the work at a graduate school? And it made me realize, oh, okay, I can’t do theology in a vacuum.I can’t just talk about the Christian tradition. This is a holistic, this is why I talk about the whole curriculum. Because there was something even at that point that the students understood or felt or hid back against. And we could talk about personalities, we could talk about things like that. But the reality is we kept inviting them back into this process of thinking through their own stories, thinking through their own, where does this hit me? And I’ll say, as a theologian, I was always told never to ask any of those questions and incorporate that into theology. So here I was like, oh, these students have a lot of agency. They’re going to hit back because they care. This matters to them. So they’re not going to just come and sit blindly and repeat back the questions. They dove in. I did this project called a God Body Map and the projects that came out of that, there was art in my office all over the place. And I was like, so as much as they might be stirred up and doing things from other classes or in their own lives, they also were, oh, but you want to know my story, you want to see me?

And I was like, wow, that kind of diving in I think is rare. So there was something also amazingly compelling to what our students are. So, Paul, back to your question of what is it about us? But I’m like, yeah, students who care, they’re willing to get into the fight. They’re willing to be a bit rebellious or to do just beautiful great, great work. So that also was really stunning.

Dr. Doug Shirley:
What makes me think about, Paul, something you said last night, the gift of trauma is that it requires us to go where we don’t want to go. And, Chelle, that’s kind of been theology and trauma or the theology of trauma or the trauma of theology. I don’t know how you would put the puzzle pieces together, but is it right to say that’s a place that during your time here you settled into that intersection? Is that a right thing to say?

Dr. Chelle Stearns:
Yeah, I mean for me it probably because it’s so much more of a interdisciplinary stumbling through, and it was really in some ways, students who were looking for some sort of language, some sort of what’s going on. And yeah, I’ve heard people at the school talk a lot about students coming in, very trauma-based. They have stories. But don’t we all? How did we all get to the school and teaching at the school? I mean, that’s the whole unpacking in and of itself. But I think part of that was really in some sense, I don’t know.

I think for me, there was a strong, strong sense of needing to reimagine redemption that wasn’t simply a regurgitation of penal, substitutionary atonement. I mean, Serene Jones that first put together in some ways, some of the language, I mean more recently, around why would someone, because she tells a story in her trauma and grace book about someone running out of a service during communion or during the Eucharist and being really triggered by the violent language of the death of Christ. And what do you do with these moments when the language is so reliant upon the violence or so reliant upon death? And I don’t want to say we can’t talk about the death of Jesus, but there is something to how we, and I think this is where the merging of those early years, how we tell the story really, really matters. And because the stories we tell, the stories that kind of embody our lives in many ways, shape and they construct our world.

And so I think, I began to see, even just a couple of years into the school that there just needed to be a restoring that happened theologically. And the struggle for me always was, how do I do that without losing the center of faith? We do that without losing the center of Christianity, and yet finding new paths forward that helps us think through, well, what are we being saved from? What are we being saved toward? Or even, I remember one time, O’Donnell, a couple of times, and I did a comparison between atonement theories in psychology and atonement theories in theology, and what is the balance or what is the conversation or the dialogue between these two things? And so she kept asking me, why do you need to be rescued? And I’m like, psychologically, I don’t know. But it made me realize, oh, in some ways we accept the simple story theologically, or we accept the simple story in our faith and it often answers some sort of felt need or answers something. And so that began, I call it the haunting of Christology for me. So if Jesus isn’t only that, and so instead of throwing out Jesus, I found my Christology getting deeper and deeper, wider and wider. And yeah, we could talk about that more if you’d like, but

Dr. Doug Shirley:
What it makes me ask, I love hearing you talk as a theologian who was making their way into how you do your job from a, I have to teach this content and process. I’m still working with it. And you came in under the orders, the communal orders, you don’t want to know about that. And so I’m even curious– how if redemption, if your theology has gone deeper and wider, what is the redemption of “You don’t want to know about that”? What’s the redemption of that haunting? That’s what we’re chasing. That’s what we want to chase here, is not just the what are the dirty clothes, the dirty socks in the closet that we could really get rid of, but also what are the things we need to listen to? And that might be really hard to listen to. And when we say things like, you don’t want to know about that, we miss opportunity, we miss redemption.

Dr. Chelle Stearns:
Well, I think it was later on when I started reading Judith Herman and realizing whenever we shut down the stories, no matter what they are, those stories have more power. And in some ways, by not talking about these things, they just remained there and hovered over us.

And especially when it has to do with stories around even the haunting of–something was inappropriate or someone was harmed. And sometimes this language gets thrown around haphazardly rather than. So even the ghost or the shadow of a story that wasn’t maybe even true begins to actually have power and it digs its way into the community and the dynamics. And I’ve always been amazed at how much students gossip in the background. And so those things begin to have more life that they actually should have as opposed to actually getting to know your ghosts. Or what is it? I think it’s a Rilke poem. It was quoted in Ted Lasso. So I can say this, that idea of getting to know your inner dragons. And so it almost feels a little bit like that. There are these dragons that are wandering the halls, but no one’s acknowledging them. But you keep going past them and hoping that they don’t breathe fire on you. And then you realize later on, oh, that was just a little lizard, and he doesn’t breathe fire at all. And so that’s maybe part of the dynamic as well, of when you don’t talk about it, it might have more power than it should.

Dr. Doug Shirley:
I have a Judith Herman connection, but Paul, anything you want to work on? Have you read her newest book, Shelly, Truth and Repair?

Dr. Chelle Stearns:
I need to, I just bought it. I heard her do a seven-minute interview on NPR when it first came out. And I was really struck by her sense of what do people who have experienced violence really want in the process of healing.

Dr. Doug Shirley:
And how all of our systems are rigged against that really largely. And she does this thing, she gives us this idea of a moral community. She’s talking about legal reparations for folks who have endured trauma hardship, but she also talks about the moral injury that comes to bystanders in community who have watched something problematic happen. So you take this sort of perpetrator, victim dyad, but the idea that that’s always surrounded by a community and the community experience is injury. But we load up the, let’s say, whether it’s two groups of people or two individuals or whatever, we load up the players, perpetrator and victim, but everyone around needs restitution. And so this argument that when we seek restitution in a more dyadic form between victim and perpetrator, the injury and the moral incongruence that sits in the community doesn’t get resolved. And so when that doesn’t get resolved, that injury perpetuates, which I think then sort of feeds this haunting that you’re talking about, around why stories then become bigger, badder. Is that going to hurt me too? I’m already injured, but I’m more injured by my own complicity and there’s not a chance to do anything about that. And so I have been really taken by that. She’s largely speaking of that, again, in a legal system, what it looks like to seek a moral community from a legal perspective. But man, oh man, I just wonder what does that mean for us? For instance, where have we been bystanders injured in processes and therefore adding to frameworks that are not helpful?

Dr. Chelle Stearns:
Yeah. Paul, I don’t know if you want to jump in there.

Dr. Paul Hoard:
Yeah, no, I’ve got a lot of different thoughts in terms, especially when we think about, I’m not as familiar with Judith Herman’s work, so I don’t have as much to throw in there, but there’s a lot of categories and ideas that you’re both bringing up. Having a minute, trying to get my thoughts together and all that. Well, because I think even I won’t want to shoot and yell an Amen with my own work around inner passivity in particular and what happens in this kind of communal sense of when you’re not the active agent, but you’re still benefiting from the agency of other people. And this way that we are together and that we end up a form of complicity that’s sort of this disavowed hidden complicity where we may not be the ones that actually did the thing, but we still benefit from it. And so we let it be, and that becomes this way that we both then pretend we’re not guilty, and so try to avoid that conscious guilt.

But it’s these stories that continue to haunt us, that stay in us. And yeah, I guess I’m putting that together sort of slowly with some of the things you’re saying actually in terms of our own school and these stories that when they’re passed on to us or when we see them or when we’re a part of them or when we hear of them, there’s a sense in which we’re already in it, whether we were in the room when it happened or not, and they’re kind of continuing to float around. And I think, yeah, the question is, we don’t want to go into, let’s name ’em and somehow exorcise the demons. And I think that’s a lot what our blog posts, Doug, is about trying to not do that. Also, not pretend they’re not there, but is sort of like, okay, so what’s another way through to listen to them, to give them so that these stories can be told and therefore hopefully transform the stories. So the dragons can be the lasers, like you say, Chelle, and that we can now have a relationship with them and that we can be transformed in them.

Dr. Doug Shirley:
It makes me wonder, so if I put together what I hear each of you saying, so, Paul, inner passivity and, Chelle, agency of students, it makes me wonder, even this thing we were talking about earlier of students are able to say no, students are able to kind of do things that maybe we don’t even feel free to do as faculty. It makes me wonder about our inner passivity related to something not quite conscious around here. I’ll look at it in myself. For instance, I could see myself adding to a dynamic where a student’s behavior is, let’s say problematic or something, but because they have agency and because they’re able to say no, something in me wishes that I could have said no in the ways that they feel free to say no. And so even if the way they’re doing it ain’t great, something is like, oh, that. And so even that, I think your phrase just now, Paul was like, well, let me let it be right. And so then even what happens to me when I’m in a classroom and there’s this impulse in me, well let that be because there’s an inner passivity in me that says, well, at least somebody’s getting it, even if I don’t get to get it, either past or present. That’s a helpful frame.

Dr. Chelle Stearns:
Well, yeah. And you bring it back to– every student that comes in is bringing, if they’ve been in church, if they’ve been in a community, so they bring in their whole family, but if they’ve been raised in a church, they also bring in that whole church community or the multiple church communities that they’ve been a part of. And let’s say they didn’t have a good experience or the theology that was given to them, for example, not to bring it back to theology, but let’s bring it back to theology. And a phrase that I started using in class is kind of a theology of gaslight lighting, that sometimes when things have come up or just from their own experience in these, whether it’s in their family, whether it’s in a church community, that essentially then they get silenced or they’re told that there’s nothing to see here.

These are not the droids you were looking–for those Star Wars fans out there–but there’s something in that process where they see something and they go to name it, and then they’re just said, no, that’s not really real. And so in some ways to have paths of intellectual development, paths of psychological development, paths of maturity that allow them to have the agency to say, I don’t know how to name this right now, and all the things that are coming with me, I’m now not responding to you as a teacher. I’m actually responding to my church community back home or to my mother or to my father, to whomever, that pastor who–that stupid youth pastor or whatever that said that weird thing or had a pattern of, kind of name your thing that’s there. And the problem is that then you’re not really in the classroom as an academic space. All of a sudden you’re in this very psychological space. I’m like, well, now we’re not talking about theology anymore. Now you’re talking about your experience with your youth pastor who probably had very minimal either psychological or theological training.

I have great experience. I have great stories from my growing up in a Baptist church as a woman that also come out. And that’s the other funny thing. Now we’re getting into “What am I responding to when the student says that?” and now there might be this battling of past ghosts in the classroom. Am I actually addressing the student or am I addressing something in my own past that? And so yeah, you begin to see that moral injury or that community that’s around us that has helped us understand who we are or maybe named us in inappropriate ways or deceitful ways, or you need, as a woman growing up in a Baptist church, it was kind of like, why don’t you get back in the box? This is what you’re supposed to be as a woman. Stop asking the questions you’re asking and don’t study theology. You need to go back to these roles. These are the biblical roles. And I’m like, no, those are cultural roles. So all of those things begin to kind of swirl around when we begin to have these conversations. So again, kind of coming back to what happens when someone begins to name something in a classroom, even if it’s inappropriate, they’re beginning to understand, oh, I don’t have to live in the silence that has haunted me in a way, that has caused me to disbelieve my own reality.

Dr. Paul Hoard:
I love what you’re bringing up there. I mean, there’s so much in there, but one of the things that caught me was that I think I felt is that tension when you said this is no longer an academic space. And the tension that reels, because on one hand, that’s how beautiful, that we’re not stuck doing just academic stuff, that we’re not decontextualizing our information, that we’re allowing our students and ourselves to be real and for this to impact them. And also, I think I’m aware just in my own classrooms of how that can also become really problematic because we actually are here for an academic purpose, and there is an academic side to what we want to do here. And like you said, in a class of 90, that’s not how you do group therapy. When you’re doing that kind of work on people’s stories and helping ’em do that, there’s reasons that there’s the frame that we put in for it that’s not there in a classroom. So yeah, I just find myself with that.

Dr. Doug Shirley:
It speaks to what you’ve been saying, Paul, of this tension: we haven’t known whether to call ourselves part of the academy or not. We kind of came in trying to act like we weren’t really a part of it, but of course we are a part of it. And so that me, not-me thing. And so you strike me as someone who has very clearly made their way in the academy. You have a place in the academy, you’ve owned your place in the academy. Have you heard Paul talk about this thing of, or even just if we say it now, this sense of, well, we’re not that we’re not your traditional school. We’re not. Are we a training center? This confusion around, are we academics? Are we not academics? Are we allowed to talk academically with each other? So I wonder if you have anything, have anything there?

Dr. Chelle Stearns:
Yeah, I mean, it has been nteresting in an American, not a British sense. When Brits say interesting, it’s like, oh, you’re dismissing me. But it has been an interesting tension the entire time. But I think the way I’ve begun to think about it is: you do your own work. You do your own academic work, just like you do your own psychological work so that you’re prepared in some ways to be more improvisational in the classroom or in what you ask students to do, that there’s a little bit more of a give and take or a back and forth. And so I find myself just reading a lot more, retooling my classroom in a way that I probably wouldn’t have in other places, because in some ways, the stirring of the pot or the stew that is the classroom often has shifted and changed so much.

I mean, 2020 with George Floyd and the Black Lives Matters movement really rising up and the conversation in the entire country around racial tension, racial inequality, it rose in such a way that that’s a great example of, well then what do you do in your classroom? That’s not something that’s just going to stay outside neat and tidy, but in some ways, that was a bit of how I was trained to be a theologian is that you ask the isolated question. I mean, it’s a very modernist way of understanding it, but when you are inviting these things into the classroom, you have to be ready to improvise. And so just like a jazz player, you know your chords, you know how to change. So here’s a great–I have a friend that used to play at Canlis here in Seattle with Jack Brownlow, who was a great jazz pianist way back in the day in Seattle.

And so one thing that he used to do to our friend is he would just change keys in the middle. And our friend was a bass player, so he had to learn how to keep up with, if he changed keys in the middle of a song, partly because if someone ever came up and started singing with him, that’s what he would do to get ’em to stop singing. But that’s what we do in the classroom all the time, is all of a sudden we have to change keys and figure out, well, do I know how to play this tune in any key with any mood, with any kind of context, rather than I’m the content holder and you as students are the people who are, this is the banking model in education. And so in many ways, we, by entering into this, we are academics because we keep up and we read more and more, we become aware of things. And I realized that when I talk to people at other seminaries, especially around theology, most people go to college or go and get their PhD and then they teach the same thing for the next 30 to 40 years.

Dr. Doug Shirley:
Yeah.

Dr. Chelle Stearns:
They don’t go and go, oh, well, I guess I should read a lot of Black theology now. Oh, I guess I should read some feminist work. Oh, I guess I should. That’s just not normal. But to survive at this school, oh my goodness, that was one of the first things I began to do, is fill in the holes of my education and wonder, well, how does this more contextual theology work into how the tradition has gone? And so that’s a very long, but I’m like, for me, that’s where the academy has really helped me. I can go to a conference and I can hear Willie Jennings and J. Kameron Carter talk about, well, what is, and, Brian Bantam, this is a session I went to a long time ago about “What’s the future of Black theology?” And I’m like, well, I don’t think I’ve read any Black theology.

And so that becomes this kind of entry into, okay, so now I can dive deep into something that I have little experience of, but yet at the same time have being invited into because I am a part of the academy. And so in some ways, it’s always an opportunity to be curious, learn just a little bit more, dive a little bit deeper and realize, oh, people are asking the same question I’m asking only maybe from a different perspective or the shift happens of. So how does that help me to go back and rethink my own work as I go along? So I think of it as a dynamic back and forth.

Dr. Doug Shirley:
That’s really helpful. That helps put words to, I have patience for a lot. Well, I hope I have patience for a lot of things, but one of the things I don’t have much patience for is when students start saying, well, we’re just guinea pigs. You’re just trying out this new thing. We’re just guinea pigs. Because I, me, there’s the immediate response that I hear you speaking to of like, well, we could be doing the same thing we’ve done for the last 10 or 20 years. I would much rather be in a place where we’re trying to listen to Covid, for instance, and what does it tell us, as opposed to, wait, we got to get back to what we did 20 years ago. So that’s really helpful. Yeah.

Dr. Paul Hoard:
Yeah. No, and I love the framing of the academic side is what facilitates unto something else. It’s unto a freeform, a jazz in the classroom. And I think sometimes it’s pitted as opposed to that, it’s this stuffy thing that is either about our own trying to be pretentious and whatever else we’re doing, as opposed to, no, this is my words. This is how I play. This is the way I go play, is that I’m going to go read a book on something and then play with these ideas. That is a form of play for me, and that’s what I want to invite the students to. And that’s what the way I hear what you’re saying, Chelle, is I want to saturate myself in more of the conversation that I’m inviting students into so that wherever we end up going in the classroom, I feel comfortable to be able to go with them. I have touchpoints in there. And to guide them in that and to help, not just to tell them what it is, but to continue to bring frame and context and to then point them in directions that are going to be more interesting for ’em.

Dr. Chelle Stearns:
Yeah, and I maybe bring it back to, as we’re talking about ghosts and shadows, of working with the story rather than trying to control it and saying, no, this is the right way to go.

And I think in the classroom it’s always a challenge. [DS: Yeah.] One thing that’s very, very live right now within American Christianity and North American, Canadian and American churches is the conversations around LGBTQ issues. And it’s not just kind of like, it’s no longer, what do we think about this? It’s now you’re either in that part of the denomination or that part of the denomination, or you’ve now been kicked out of your denomination, and so the lines are being drawn. So whatever we’re talking about in the classroom, really it has taken a whole new life within. So if I think about my own academic work, and I do, I see doing theology, doing my own theology as an act of prayer. It is a deep part of my own spirituality and my own faith. And so I don’t just kind of randomly read things. This is part of my, what God is inviting me into.

And so it helps to deepen my own faith, but so that when we are in the world and things are really beginning to shift, I mean, these are the students that are coming into the classroom who are like, I got kicked out of my church, or These are their own ghosts and shadows. I got kicked out of my church. My church got kicked out of its denomination. I was on the floor when the denomination was having this conversation, and I realized how much I was being erased by so many people. Or I feel terror when someone talks about LGBTQ+ issues because I have a different opinion than them. And so all of those things are being, it’s center stage in the church right now, and I realize how much, if we aren’t in some sense, if there’s not a school having these conversations and really talking well both theologically and psychologically about what’s happening in the church, and they’ve always been by kind of bifurcated. We realize this is where we get to, we begin to have doctrine over humanity, cradle over unity within the church and a lot because people feel deep, deep terror, get back to trauma in the church. And I’m like, so what ghosts and shadows are within the church that so many denominations right now cannot actually have good conversation and keep the family system together.