I believe the orphan is history's moral mirror — so I help students read the past, the clinic, and the scriptures as maps of what belonging costs, and what it heals.

My courses begin with a question that sounds ancient but isn't: What does a society owe the child it cannot place? That question runs through Hammurabi's law code, the Hebrew prophets, the Roman patria potestas, the Victorian poorhouse, and the DSM's diagnostic grid. I teach because I believe that question — followed with rigor and honesty — opens up everything else: how power works, how theology forms, how institutions rise and fall, and how human beings understand what they owe one another.

I don't teach these subjects as museum pieces. The orphanage isn't just history; foster care and family separation are policy debates happening right now. The DSM isn't just a clinical manual; it's a philosophical claim about what counts as a broken person. And the biblical vision of the yātōm isn't just ancient Near Eastern sociology; it's a live challenge to any community that calls itself covenantal. I bring scholarship to bear on real questions — and I ask you to bring your own experience to bear on the scholarship.

My approach is narrative-driven and transdisciplinary. Whether we're reading an 1880s orphanage inspection report, a Pauline adoption metaphor, or a DSM-5 entry on attachment disorder, the method is the same: slow down, ask what vision of human belonging is embedded here, and follow the evidence where it leads. You won't just accumulate facts; you'll develop a new way of seeing.

If you're a historian, a social worker, a pastor, a clinician, a policy thinker, or simply someone haunted by these questions — you're in the right place. Come ready to read carefully, think across disciplines, and let history ask something of you, not just inform you.