In today’s episode, I talk with Elissa Cutter of Georgian Court University in Lakewood, NJ. I first met Elissa when we were undergrads at Georgetown University in Fr. Walsh’s Hebrew Scriptures seminar. In this conversation, we talk about her early interest in politics, stemming from growing up in a political family; her experience studying theology in France after the 9/11 attacks, and her work on feminist historical theology.
Dr. Elissa Cutter is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Theology at Georgian Court University in Lakewood, NJ. She earned her BA in French and Theology at Georgetown University, her MA in Theology from the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, and her PhD in Theological Studies from Saint Louis University. Her research focuses on Mother Angelique Arnauld, the 17th century abbess and reformer at the convent of Port-Royal, as well as the wider Jansenist movement in France. She is also an editor at Women In Theology.
I apologize that I didn’t have this episode out last month, but I was beset by illness that I’ve only recently come out of. I’m planning to release three episodes over the next two months to make up for the gap, so look forward to those.
You can also see the full transcript for this episode below.
Thanks as always to Matt Hines of the band Eastern Sea for providing the music for the Daily Theology Podcast.
Transcript of Episode #52 - Elissa Cutter
[Opening Music]
Stephen Okey: Welcome to the Daily Theology Podcast, a podcast on the craft and vocation of theology.
I'm your host, Stephen Okey.
In today's episode, I talk with Elissa Cutter of Georgian Court University in Lakewood, New Jersey. I first met Elissa when we were undergrads at Georgetown University in Father Walsh's Hebrew Scriptures seminar.
In this conversation, we talk about her early interest in politics stemming, from growing up in a political family; her experience studying theology in France after the 9/11 attacks; and her work on feminist historical theology.
I apologize that I didn't have this episode out last month, but I was beset by illness that I am still coming out of, which you can perhaps hear in my voice. I'm planning to release three episodes over the next two months to make up for the gap. So look forward to those.
I hope you enjoy the episode and thank you for listening.
[Music Transition]
Stephen Okey: Today for the Daily Theology Podcast, I'm talking with my friend, Elissa Cutter, from Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Elissa, thank you for being here.
Elissa Cutter: Yeah. Thank you so much for inviting me.
Stephen Okey: I like to begin by asking, how did you get into studying theology?
Elissa Cutter: Yeah, thank you. Gosh, I feel like my story is, is very convoluted. And it is, you know, like so many others it was not my intention to study theology initially. I think I should start with a little bit of background, which is that my family was actually very involved in politics in Massachusetts.
So, the closest person to me in this, as a kind of role model in this was my grandfather, and he had been Attorney General of Massachusetts, and he also ran against Ted Kennedy for the Democratic nomination for Senate.
Stephen Okey: Wow.
Elissa Cutter: And lost.
Stephen Okey: Yeah, yeah, I figured.
Elissa Cutter: Um, but that, that was actually a big thing, like, in the debate, he, there was this line, and I, I'm probably going to misquote it, but he basically said to him, if your name were Edward Moore instead of Edward Moore Kennedy, your candidacy would be a joke.
And, yeah, so people felt bad for Kennedy, apparently. And, so, yeah, my grandfather lost. But it, so he wasn't just, I should note, my grandfather was also running a little bit on his name as well. His, um, uncle at the time was Speaker of the House of Representatives. So, like my family had been involved in politics for a while in Massachusetts.
Stephen Okey: And these were the McCormacks?
Elissa Cutter: Yes, these are the McCormacks. John W. McCormacks was Speaker of the House under Kennedy. And my grandfather's name was Edward. And I basically decided that I, I wanted to be the first female senator from Massachusetts. So shout out to Elizabeth Warren, who was the first female senator from Massachusetts.
Um, but that was what I wanted to do, and so I decided to go to Georgetown. I wanted to be in DC, and I also went in as a French major because I was interested in kind of international stuff and I had been studying French for so long and I wanted to keep doing that, so those are, that's kind of the background.
The very first semester I was at Georgetown, I was taking, the United States political systems class, which was the required class for the government major. And at the same time taking the kind of gen ed requirement of Problem of God, with, Father King. And the U.S. Political systems class, just bored me out of my mind.
I very quickly decided that that was not going to be my path. And at the same time, I was so fascinated by, by Father King's class and the ideas that he was putting out in front of us. And I, I just, I wanted more of that. So initially I decided to do a theology minor along with my French major. But what happened was I, as a French major was planning to go abroad in my junior year, and one of the things that French major or language majors at Georgetown have to do is you have to reach a certain level in a second language as well.
So I had been taking Brazilian Portuguese, because why not? And when I went to discuss studying abroad with my advisor, they basically said, Don't take language while you're abroad. So I had taken my sophomore year, I had done a year of Brazilian Portuguese. They were like, don't take language while you're abroad because, First of all, it's going to be the wrong kind of Portuguese.
You're going to be doing Portugal Portuguese in France, and you don't want to be doing that. It'll kind of mess you up, but also, it'll be, you know, extra hard to take another language through, you know, something that's already a second language. Except that in order to graduate, I would have to pick up exactly where I left off when I came back.
So, I was kind of freaking out with my roommates, like, I'm not going to be able to graduate because there's no way that I can do this, this is totally unreasonable of them. And one of my roommates said, why don't you just do a theology major? So, like, quite literally, this was like super practical considerations that actually made me a theology major.
Stephen Okey: I don't hear that very often.
Elissa Cutter: But I remember that moment though, weirdly enough, like she said that, and I just kind of like stopped my rant in the middle of our apartment. And it was like, yeah, like that makes sense. So I do feel like in some ways there was this like, providential hand guiding me along the way, and, you know, leading me to make all of these decisions.
So, anyway, I ended up not going abroad for a whole year, as you know, because we were in classes together, because of 9/11. So I was actually originally supposed to fly out of Boston to go to France, like the Friday after 9/11, and at the time, the Boston airport was not going to be open, and it was not sure when it was going to be open, so there was no sense of, like, when I would actually be able to get to France.
Stephen Okey: I mean, I think people forget that, like, all airspace was shut down for, like, four days after 9/11, and then, I mean, in D. C., it was several weeks, because I, I remember being on the lawn in front of Healy the first time we saw a plane fly over after 9/11, and you just saw everybody just stop and look, at what had previously been a very normal occurrence, like, you just learned to stop conversing with people when the planes flew over.
Elissa Cutter: I know it was, it was such a wild experience. So Georgetown gave us the option of either waiting and going abroad whenever we could get there or coming back to campus. And I actually opted to come back to campus and then just go abroad for the spring semester.
So, I mean, that was a, that was a huge effect, but I ended up coming back and taking a bunch of, you know, theology classes, which I think I was in with all of them with you at that time, and then I went abroad to France and in France as well I was also mostly taking theology classes.
So there's actually an interesting thing I should add in here. So I was studying in Strasbourg, which is the only public university in France, which has a faculty of theology. The reason is that when France got rid of theology in all of their universities, Strasbourg was part of Germany, so, uh, you know, all of that weird history and back and forth of that area between Germany and France, it's now French, but, they still have a faculty of Catholic theology and a faculty of Protestant theology there.
Stephen Okey: What was it like studying theology in France? I mean, even in Strasbourg, like, I imagine there was still some amount of, you know, the sense of laïcité and religious resistance and so forth.
Elissa Cutter: Yeah, I mean I had classes with monks and nuns at the time, you know. So I had an ethics class that I took there, a class in the history of the liturgy, which was very hard to do through another language, I will say. Actually the class that inspired me most and this one's kind of interesting because it's what really led me on my path was not one of my theology classes, but I took a class in 16th and 17th century French literature. And in that class it was three hours every week, and the first hour was lecture, and then the second and third hours were like discussion section.
And in the discussion section, we read Pascal's Pensées. And that was the only book that we read the whole semester. And, but here's, I know, but here's the interesting thing about that. So. It wasn't so much what kind of the teacher was teaching us about how to read the Pensées, but what I had learned about how to interpret texts from our Old Testament professor, Father Walsh.
So he was super into language and like word choice and analyzing the meaning of words and I applied that to the Pensées and it just like opened it up for me. And I got really, really into that. And then basically when I came back from studying abroad, you know, I had had this experience of kind of only doing theology or practically only doing theology.
And I was like, this is what I want to do all of a sudden. I just like the light went on and I decided, no, I don't want to do whatever else I had envisioned myself doing at that point. I don't even remember
Stephen Okey: You had by this point long given up being the first female Senator from Massachusetts. Yeah.
Elissa Cutter: Yeah. So I didn't want to go into politics anymore.
I mean, this was also like, after, you know, the 2000 election. And I remember waiting up with people in Leavey watching the election results all night because it didn't end. So yeah, it was definitely a disillusionment point at some point in that whole process.
But yeah, I, and then I went on and now I, I grew through Pascal, but weird other twists and turns that I don't need to go into necessarily. Now I study Jansenism and the Port Royal nuns, so.
Stephen Okey: So beyond the lights coming on moment of encountering Pascal, what was it that made you, as someone coming out of, you know, a Jesuit University, and eventually, I mean, you went to St. Louis University for your doctorate program, also a Jesuit school, what was it that drew you to studying the Jansenists?
Elissa Cutter: Well, it was definitely Pascal. I mean, that was the initial, the initial impetus. You know, it's, it's hard to remember, because I did my master's thesis on Antoine Arnault's early writings. And I, I don't entirely remember how I got onto that specific topic. I do remember reading, this is going to be a weird thing, but I, I read Dale Van Kley's book on the religious origins of the French Revolution.
And there is this footnote that I've since pointed out to people that just really bothered me. And it's, it's funny cause it's just a footnote. But when he's discussing, some of the 18th century ideas, and he's saying that these ideas are Jansenist ideas, and there's this footnote that basically says, these may be more Gallican ideas than Jansenist, but at the time, Jansenism had been so radicalized that it's the same thing, or something like that.
And I was like, no, it's not, those are two different things that were both present in France. But they're not the same. So you can't point to Gallican ideas. So I feel like I should explain what Gallicanism, okay. Yeah.
Stephen Okey: And Jansenism for that matter.
Elissa Cutter: Yeah. Okay. Well, so Gallicanism is this like particular view of the church in France, especially in early modern France, but kind of throughout French history, where it's not the Pope, it's the French Church that's in charge of the French Church. And there's different types of this, depending on who exactly you think has that responsibility, whether it would have been the king, the parliament, the bishops, there was also kind of a theological version of this as well, but that's basically the idea of Gallicanism.
Jansenism is a little bit also more complicated, and I think that there's two things to distinguish. Which is, the movement and the theology. In terms of Jansenism, I define Jansenism according to basically three to five characteristics. I think I'm landing on five right now.
These are, first, an Augustinian theology of grace.
Second, a rigorist view of the sacraments, so especially in terms of kind of confession and being truly sorry for your sins and before you can take the Eucharist, so kind of abstaining from the Eucharist, because of that.
And then conflict between the Jesuits and the Jansenists.
Stephen Okey: So number one is Augustinian view of grace. Number two is a rigorist view of the sacraments.
Elissa Cutter: Three is the hatred of the Jesuits. So but these also lead into other things, which is why I'm, I'm up to five characteristics now.
So the combination of the Jansenist view of grace and the rigorist view of the sacraments led to a tendency for people to withdraw from the world, whether that was formally like the Port-Royal nuns into religious life, or like the, what were known as the Solitaires, which were the men who lived next to Port-Royal and kind of withdrew from their government service, which kind of pissed a lot of people off, who live semi-monastic life next to the convent in Port-Royal. So this tendency to withdraw from the world is a Jansenist characteristic.
And then the fifth one is related to the Augustine aspect of it, which is the tendency to see the ideal of Christianity in the early church, or the example of the early church.
Stephen Okey: That one sounds in particular why I think people sometimes see Jansenism as akin to some elements of the Protestant Reformation, which often had this very idealized or, or rose colored vision of the early church and the structure of the early church and the sense that that had just simply been, you know, corrupted by centuries of Rome and the papacy and, and, and councils as well.
Elissa Cutter: Yeah, and the, the, I mean, there's other kind of complicated aspects related to that, and which is the, you know, the influence of Augustine was also another thing that is connected to, you know, people accuse them of being crypto Calvinist for their views that they took from Augustine, but also there's this complication with the Arnauld family that half of their relatives were actually Protestants.
So the family at the center of the controversy, like, had that tangential influence as well. Yeah.
Stephen Okey: Okay.
Elissa Cutter: But, but here's the thing about Jansenism, and when we look at it in the 17th century, and this is my big kind of peeve about when we throw the term Jansenism around in the modern world is that all of those views as the people held them in the so called Jansenist group were super prevalent in 17th century France.
So they can't, they're not identifiable theological characteristics of Jansenism as a theological heresy. So what makes Jansenism problematic was their inability to submit to papal condemnation, basically, or to the king at the time.
Stephen Okey: So they're essentially rebels, right? Like, they're sort of unwilling to, you know, accede to either the church or the political hierarchy, right?
Elissa Cutter: Yeah. I just, I'm still grappling with some of that as well though. And I think that's why I'm so interested in Mother Angelique because in her reform, you know, before all of the controversy started, she's not like some of the later generation of the nuns who were more disobedient and obstinate about their views, but she did also died before anything happened.
So we don't know what she would have done, you know. So I just, that's why I'm so fascinated in all of it is that I think it really, when you look at Mother Angelique in particular, but the nuns more generally, it, it complicates what we think of as Jansenism and it forces us to rethink kind of the tradition and what we think we know about it.
Stephen Okey: Is that predominantly a feature of, a feature of their being women, of their being vowed religious, of just their location, of the, the family connections, what is the contribution to our understanding that you think comes especially from this community in terms of complicating and challenging our views of Jansenism?
Elissa Cutter: I think it's primarily because of them as women, but in some ways you can't separate that from them also being vowed religious, because like every single woman in the family, including Angelique's mother, eventually became a nun at Port-Royal.
Stephen Okey: Oh, interesting.
Elissa Cutter: So those, those things definitely go together.
But what I kind of want to ultimately argue is that we need to pay more attention to these women's voices as theological voices and think about how does incorporating women's voices explicitly as theological sources complicate our understanding of first, you know, the trajectory of tradition, but also theology as a whole.
Stephen Okey: And so this leads me to, I know that you're currently working on a book on feminist historical theology.
Elissa Cutter: Yeah.
Stephen Okey: And so that's sort of like your opening pitch, we need to, in a very basic way, at least consider the contributions of women to church tradition, church history, to consider them in their own contexts.
So in thinking about a feminist approach to historical theology or feminist historical theology, one possible read of that is simply a matter of changing attention to sources. So who are we reading?
And we can point to, I'm sure for many people listening, when they have taken courses or taken comprehensive exams or whatever else, a lot of times the sources are just overwhelmingly men, overwhelmingly priests, bishops, things like that, maybe your list had a Julian of Norwich in there, right? Like, that's sometimes as far as they get.
So one part is, on a very basic level, sources that we pay attention to. But there also might be other aspects in terms of methodologically, you know, the way that we read, the types of questions that we ask, and so for you, what, what in this book that you're working on, and this larger project you're working on, what, what do you mean by feminist historical theology?
Elissa Cutter: Right. So I think that feminist historical theology is kind of fundamentally reading the sources in a different way. There is this tendency to make distinctions when we look at certain sources in the tradition, and to consider some of them as kind of properly theology and others as spirituality, meaning that they're practical.
And I mean that distinction has its own problems in the first place, and that's part of the argument is that it's not that they're just spirituality or only of interest to kind of the practical component, but they have underlying theological ideas that are expressed through these texts and in order to get at those ideas, you have to read them in a different way.
And so one of the things that you have to pay attention to, especially is attention to genre and understanding the genre of the text in the time period in which it was written. So I take a lot of inspiration. You know, I already mentioned having been inspired by our Old Testament professors.
I take a lot of inspiration from biblical scholarship, especially feminist biblical scholarship in this work. So that's, that's the big thing.
I think the other kind of point of comparison in terms of reading it, it's reading the text in a different way in the way that you might read a work of literature for its underlying theological views.
So that's kind of the biggest methodological piece for me is, reading the text differently. But it's also reading the text with a kind of feminist assumption that these women are doing theology in the first place, and that that has to be the foundation for then kind of reading these texts in a different way.
The other kind of real piece of all of this, what makes it a kind of feminist historical theology for me is first the broader contextualization of the ideas in both the historical period and kind of the theological history, and then the evaluation of these ideas based on feminist principles.
So, are they ultimately oppressive or liberative to women and what can we do with that today.
Stephen Okey: I have this impression that in the divorce we sometimes see between theology and spirituality, especially among academics, that sometimes the default assumption is something like theology is more rigorous and more reasonable and spirituality is more soft and emotional.
And then that very easily gets grafted onto, you know, theology is done by men and spirituality is done by women.
Elissa Cutter: Exactly.
Stephen Okey: Or it just happens to sort out that way, like who saw that coming, you know? And I, I find it strange, in that regard, in part because, I mean, even some of my favorite spiritual writers are men. I mean, so... You know, there's that sort of weird mix of things.
And it speaks to, this is a total tangent, but I still think about this from a conference I was at this summer, but I heard this very interesting presentation at the College Theology Society about women on Instagram who have these sort of very curated, I think the speaker called them like trad wives was like the term for it and who have this very like traditional Catholic understanding of how to be and they're really good at the social media influencer part of it in terms of perfect images, crafting all this sort of thing.
But one of the things that struck me was the speaker was talking about these like guidebooks that the women follow that are these sort of models for how to be a good traditional Catholic wife and mother. And all are nearly all the ones she was talking about are written by men.
Elissa Cutter: Oh, really?
Stephen Okey: There are these, there's these like male, like men written manuals for women, which I mean, you know, people, people can write advice for whomever they want, but one of the, my follow up questions was are there these kinds of manuals for how to be, you know, like the good Catholic husband and father, which I'm sure there are, and are any of those written by women?
Elissa Cutter: I doubt it.
Stephen Okey: My hunch is no, I could be wrong. Listeners, if you know, let me know. It's just a curiosity that I have. But it was just sort of another example in this example of how, I mean, it's sometimes subtle and it's sometimes very explicit the way that gender feeds into even these ways that we think about our discipline.
Elissa Cutter: Yeah. I, I I mean, everything that you've said is, is things that I've been thinking about, especially, you know, in terms of, I, I wanna be clear that I don't want to like downgrade the idea of spirituality, but I think that as you noted, that there's like an implicit hierarchy in how we think
Stephen Okey: mm-hmm
Elissa Cutter: of spirituality versus theology, and. I think both that that's wrong, but also that every single text that we think of as spirituality or that we push into the spirituality category is a work of theology as well. And it's important for us to use this method of like reading the text for their theological views, not just as works of spirituality.
Stephen Okey: Do you have a sense for ,as a historical theologian, when you think the split between theology and spirituality, is at least kind of very obvious? Because I think also about like, you go back to Augustine, like, come on, Confessions is clearly both right like it's clearly a spiritual text, it's clearly a theological text.
I feel the same way reading, at least some of Aquinas, I mean, the Summa, I think is maybe more theology than spirituality, but even that like people often thought of primarily as philosophy, not, you know, theology per se. But even, you know, into, texts that we read, right?
Like, like Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross or, the autobiography of Ignatius, like they're clearly doing both on some level, whereas today, in the last century or so, they seem much more clearly divorced. So, I don't know. Do you have a sense for when you think that happens or why you think that happens?
Elissa Cutter: I couldn't pinpoint a time, but I mean, the early modern era, I'm, I'm thinking about, the divisions that occurred. I mean, part of it is the rise of the universities, you know, in the medieval era. Because of that kind of by the early modern era, we have these kind of different trajectories that were all still considered theology, but, you know, it's the, the academic and like the practical, and the mystic. And so, like, at some point after my period of expertise, I would say the mystic and the practical got a little, got divorced from what was seen as properly theological. But I couldn't pinpoint, you know, an exact time.
Stephen Okey: Yeah. No, that's fair.
I, I've been working with graduate students this semester in a course on research and writing. And so they have a ton of writing to do. And a lot of the course is about reflecting on your own patterns of writing and things like that. But we had a, actually, I think a pretty successful assignment and activity where they had to write like a, a one page theological reflection.
And it was essentially about like, you know, them, them and their relationship to Jesus. And people wrote, you know, often very sort of autobiographical, very personal accounts for that relationship and how they understood it, how it had developed, key insights, things like that.
And then they had to share these with everybody, and the next activity included, identify and summarize the theological argument in the reflection.
And, and they were all able to do it. Like every one of them had no trouble looking at a couple others and saying, like, this is the argument that they're making. And it's like. There you go, like these things go together, you know, there's always some amount of implicit argument being made and there's always some kind of theological assumptions, sometimes spelled out and sometimes left implicit.
So, yeah, all that is to say, I'm entirely on board with you of recognizing that, a strong separation between theology and spirituality, is misleading, uh, at best.
So I guess to build on them, the questions about, about working in feminist historical theology, I know something that you've contributed a lot to in the last decade or so has been the Women in Theology blog.
And so I wanted to ask about your time working on this, in part because I used to write for a sibling or cousin blog, which is the source of the name of this podcast, that has, you know, since disappeared, has gone off into that good night, whereas you, y'all are still going strong, which I think is impressive. And so, how did you get involved? What has been life giving for you about it? And how has it been helpful in your growth as a theologian?
Elissa Cutter: I would probably identify myself as part of the kind of maybe second generation of the blog.
So I joined the blog when they put out a call for contributors while I was working on my Ph. D. And it had been that the kind of original contributors to the blog wanted to expand and invite new people in. They invited about, I think, five of us in, and two of us are still there. And none of the original people are unfortunately there.
And I think that's part of kind of how things go is that people have time for it at different parts of their career and it does something to be able to kind of have these conversations. For me, I like having a place to kind of play around with ideas. You know, a lot of what I talked about in terms of kind of the methods of feminist historical theology, I have a two part blog series where I explore some of those ideas for the first time and engage with Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza in particular, as a model for how I do work in other periods of history.
So, it's allowed me to kind of... write things that I'm working with, but also to play around with ideas, especially, you know, some of my popular culture posts. I don't know if you saw my, my most recent one, which was looking at the Barbie movie in comparison to Blaise Pascal.
Stephen Okey: That is very much, that is very much up your alley.
Elissa Cutter: It was, it was just funny. I, I, so I'm doing a lot of Pascal with my students this semester, and as I was kind of preparing for my classes, like the month before that I had gone out and seen the Barbie movie and I was reading, you know, Pascal on diversion.
And it just kind of hit me, like, all of Barbieland is Pascal's idea of diversion. Um, and so I, I had, but I had a place to explore that comparison on the blog, and that's one of the things that I love about it. You know, there's this community of women that is part of this blog, and it's definitely different from when it first started out.
I think, you know, the, the first core group were, were close friends when they started the blog. So that had, that was an aspect that was there. And they kind of brought us into that community. And since then, it's a little bit more, I don't want to say professional because that's not the word, but, you know, we still have associations with, with the people on the blog and some of them I am friends with, but the immediate community is a little bit more business like I guess.
Stephen Okey: Yeah. I understand. I think that the Women in Theology blog was, and has been really successful at having kind of a, something to coalesce around, you know, conceptually that that gives you all, I don't know, I, I, I think it helps hold you together in a sense, as a project, in a way that our project was, was never gonna hold long-term. All that is to say like, I'm deeply impressed that it's still going, like, I mean, it's gotta be almost 15 years later.
Elissa Cutter: I don't, I haven't been keeping track of the time, but one of the things that I love about it is that it is such an ecumenical space. You know, a lot of the circles that I, other than kind of maybe like AAR you know, I'm in a lot of Catholic circles, um, in terms of ideas, so I appreciate being a part of this space where I can interact with women, you know, who come from other Christian traditions, and to explore ideas with them.
Stephen Okey: Yeah. So you mentioned reading Pascal with your students, and I wanted to ask you about teaching, and some of the things that I'm always curious about with teaching are one, I guess I'm always curious, who are your students? Are they, never sure the best way to ask this question, but are they interested in what you are talking about?
Are they simply there because they have to be there? Are they persuaded? Do you get to work with, you know, students who are maybe theology majors or who are, you know, really into the kinds of things you're talking about? What's it like for you as a teacher?
Elissa Cutter: It's definitely a mix. I teach mostly the gen ed classes, and then periodically I'll do a class that's an upper level kind of religious studies that's cross listed also with our MA program. One of my favorite classes to teach in that sense, I get to teach the methods class, and that is, that is one of my favorite ones to teach because it's always interesting discussions, with the students.
But for the most part, I, I definitely have students who are in the class because they have to take a religious studies class as part of their gen ed. And I think that's the same, you know, almost anywhere though.
I, I remember in my problem of God class, which I've already talked about, I thought that Father King was amazing, and I, and he was, but I do remember this one girl in class speaking up towards the end of the semester and I don't remember exactly what she said, but she was like complaining about his teaching style or, and like to his face, which I was like, Oh my God, I would never do the thing.
Um, so obviously, you know, even in that class where, you know, what he did ultimately kind of changed the trajectory of my life like someone else really hated it.
Stephen Okey: Not everybody was on board.
Elissa Cutter: Yeah. And so I think that that's kind of the same. I had a student in my office this week who is in the nursing school, so does not have a lot of flexibility in her schedule and she was like this class is amazing and I want to take more religion classes. And it was kind of like I know you're a nursing student, so I don't know how to advise you on this but like do the best you can like wherever you can fit it into your schedule try and take another class, you know.
So there's, there's definitely kind of the students that are, that it does reach them, you know, some of them were like, especially the area that I am in, in New Jersey is the very kind of, Italian area, Catholic Italian area.
So, a lot of my students have a kind of religious background, but it's kind of way in the background for a lot of them. And so sometimes this, you know, what we do in class makes a connection and brings back something that they already experienced and speaks to them in that way. And I think that's wonderful, but it's, it's not necessarily my goal in, in the classroom.
I have kind of shifted my teaching in a lot of ways to think about it being a gen ed class. What can I give them that's going to help them? And my approach is mostly how can we read and interpret a religious text? Because where there's some kind of similarities with other fields and interpreting text, I think religious texts take a particular attention, or an approach in a slightly different way of in terms of kind of what you're looking for if you're going to interpret them religiously.
Stephen Okey: Yeah, it's taken me a while, but I have to remind myself on one hand, my undergraduate students are not all going to be like me, and so they're not all going to find this fascinating.
Elissa Cutter: Right.
Stephen Okey: And you know, they're also not all looking for, you know, what is the field of study that is going to help me work out my internal issues, which on some level is why I did theology in the end.
I mean, similar to you, like when I started at Georgetown, I was a philosophy and a math major, and I maintained the math major till the end, but my first philosophy class that I was so excited for just bored me to tears. And I did not enjoy it at all, and it was so hard for me to go back and take, like, the second philosophy class I had to, because I had been so put off by it, and I was, like, in high school, like, I loved reading philosophy, my mom had been a philosophy major, like, I was in, and this course, so totally turned me off, but the problem of God class I had with Father Steck was just like, it was like a light being turned on.
I was like, oh, I'm going to keep doing this now.
Elissa Cutter: I feel like it's interesting to comment that we were both double majors. I don't know that anyone is not a double major. When they study theology, I did know someone who I think was the year below us at Georgetown who was a double major with philosophy and theology but everyone Everyone else was like one that's kind of practical and one that's
Stephen Okey: Well, I, I've talked about this with like people at my own school because here, just because of, you know, different requirements and things like that, it's difficult to double major, like across different colleges within the university, which I understand. But I also like thinking back to, you know, there were, I think there were like 10 of us in theology, the year you and I graduated and thinking back on them, like basically all of us were double majors, I mean a couple of them have gone on to be doctors, people have gone on to other fields, and things like that, but we were basically all double majors. And for some of us If we could only single major, it would not have ended up being theology. Like it was a possibility that the school made for us.
But the other, the other thing I also try to keep in mind with my students is that I don't need them to be like me in order for the class to be helpful and fruitful and interesting, and I, I think about this thing I did, this was last fall, and I had a new sort of most fundamental core course in scripture. And I, I did this thing I'd never done before, but a friend of mine had floated as a possibility and it was an 80 minute class. And every day we started with just silence. And we started with like three minutes the first couple of days, but it got up to 10 and for like three months, the first bit of class, 10 minutes of silence, they knew coming in.
No, like looking at phones, no, nothing just deliberate silence. And the strangest thing is that like semesters later, I will see students from that class, none of whom have gone on to take any more religion than they're required to. But that is the thing that they reference. It's like, that stuck with me. I still do that sometimes. It's real helpful. And I think it helped us get into a space where we you know,
Different ways of interpreting scripture and the, you know, the senses and all that sort of stuff. But it's also a practice that people apparently some, at least several people found very helpful. So.
Elissa Cutter: You know, Father King used to do that.
Stephen Okey: Really?
Elissa Cutter: One of the things I remember from his classes, he would always, he would take attendance and then he would say, let's pause for a moment of prayer and just there will be silence for a little bit. And I, I'm, I've always wanted to do that. Like, like you did. And so I'm, I'm inspired that you did it, but I always felt it felt different coming from him as a Jesuit versus me as a lay woman.
Stephen Okey: I say, give it a try. I, I did often feel self conscious about it, and then, but it's funny too, especially when you have these like, when it's like, one minute, that's one thing, when you have like, these longer, you know, ten minute periods, it's so funny how... you know, you notice all the sounds, right? So every chair squeaking, things like that, you notice sort of how people try to manage it in terms of, you know, sitting back, putting their head down, crossing their arms, you know, like the, the postures that they adopt. And then you have this, it's, it's almost, it becomes this liturgical sort of thing because it becomes the, the moment where people are able to shift from their previous class, their, their on campus job, whatever it was into now we're doing something different. And so these sort of transitional moments, I found actually quite helpful. And so, I mean, you don't have to do 10 minutes. Like it was a big chunk of class. You have a 50 minute class.
I would not do 10 minutes, but it was great. And I don't think I would do it for every class I have, but I, like, it was. It was such a balm in that class.
Elissa Cutter: That's so great to hear. I love how just having this conversation, we can end up talking about these ideas that we have in terms of our teaching.
Stephen Okey: Yeah, I was going to ask. To kind of follow up on that. I saw, and if I'm wrong, correct me on this, but have you done teaching and traveling abroad as part of a course?
Elissa Cutter: I'm, well,
Stephen Okey: You're working on it.
Elissa Cutter: I'm working on it. So we have a course right now that's supposed to run this coming spring break in Paris.
And we need like four more students to sign up, uh, you know, in order, in order for it to happen. So, I don't know when you're going to have this podcast out. So at that time we may have had to cancel the course or we may be planning to do it.
But I am so absolutely passionate about this, for multiple reasons. One, I'm passionate about study abroad, you know, that was my own experience and it was so transformative to me. But the other thing that I did while I was at Georgetown at the end of my freshman year, I went on a trip that was run, it was Dr. Sens and I can't remember the other professor, but there was two professors from the classics department and it was advertised as read the classics where they were written. And we went to Greece and we started in Athens and went like all through the country. And I have these pictures of us like, reading, I don't know, Plato next to like the pool at the hotel, because that's where we all gathered together to have our class.
You know, it, it was amazing, and you know, we got to go and see all of these locations and I had actually been to Greece before, which is part of the reason why I wanted to go on this trip. But again, like, I kind of, as soon as, or not since then, but like, since I started studying all this stuff in the 17th century, I, I, and traveling abroad to do my research, I've, I've wanted to share that experience and I've wanted to design a course that was read these 17th century texts of French spirituality and go and visit the churches that these people attended and and see the ruins of the convent of Port-Royal and all of that stuff.
This is kind of going to be that it's not going to be exactly that, but I'm so excited about this idea and to be able to kind of share this experience with with students.
Stephen Okey: Nice. I don't know how anyone could hear your passion for it and not also want to go. So,
Elissa Cutter: uh, yeah, I wish that was true.
Stephen Okey: I, I would go in a heartbeat, so
Elissa Cutter: Thank you. .
Stephen Okey: Yeah. So is the whole course just over spring break, like that's the whole course? Is is that
Elissa Cutter: No. so the way that's what I would have wanted but the way that it is, is we're actually going to be, the trip itself is a lot of going to the locations, and then the three of the courses that I'm offering that semester are going to have content that ties into this. So that's part of the reason why I'm doing a lot of Pascal this semester is it's kind of a test run for how I'm going to do the course in the spring. So I'm doing two sections of the Christian tradition course where we are going to be doing probably not exclusively, but you know, we're going to do Augustine's Confessions.
But other than that, a lot of it is going to be learning about the Christian tradition through texts from 17th century France. And then I am teaching a class in social justice ethics that semester too, which I'm also going to tie into this trip, in part through the, the worker priests in France, and I have, I did a bunch of research over the summer, found the locations of where they met and where they lived and which parishes they attended.
And so there's going to be kind of that aspect of it as well. And then I'm, I'm co leading the trip with a colleague in the business school who teaches the business class. Yeah. So we're kind of getting connected with some French businesses that can help us kind of raise some other kind of ethical questions as well and in kind of this whole conversation, so it should be a lot of fun. I'm, I'm really looking forward to it.
Stephen Okey: I hope you get to pull it off. I, this was pre COVID, but I taught a course on the theology and spirituality of pilgrimage and at the end of the semester, so like in May, I took a group of like, I think there were seven students who went, and a couple of faculty, we did two weeks of the Camino to Santiago in Spain.
And they, like, they had to, you know, we met, you know, maybe once a week during the semester. So we had to have, you know, that part of the course, and then we sort of concluded it during the walk, even though we really only like met to like discuss a couple times during the walk, because you're walking all day, like you're tired, you know, it's, it's, you know, physically demanding, but there's, there's also.
And that's one of the things I, I tell people about doing the Camino and what I recommend to everyone, there's so much leisure time because like you walk in the morning, you get food, you get cleaned up, you do your laundry, and then there's still hours before you're going to fall asleep and like, you're not going to do work.
You know, like you didn't bring your laptop with you, most likely. And so there's just tons of time to like, you know, commune and get to know people and walk around and see places and all sorts of stuff. And it was great. It was such a wonderful experience and I really want to do it again. I just don't know when that's going to happen.
So, so yeah, I, I, I hope you get to do this, it's such a great experience or can be such a great experience.
Elissa Cutter: Yeah. Yeah.
Stephen Okey: Well, that's, that's all I have. I don't know if you have other things,
Elissa Cutter: Yeah I don't think so. Yeah.
Stephen Okey: All right. Well, I'm so grateful that we had this chance to talk, so thank you for being on the show.
Elissa Cutter: Yeah. Thank you again so much. I've really enjoyed this conversation.
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