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Saturday, December 7, 2024

Rodney Frey

Rodney Frey remains affiliated with the University of Idaho, as Professor Emeritus in Ethnography, while continuing his involvement in his local church and hospital. He's been with the university since 1998. Parts of this series were inspired by previously published materials he authored in "World of the Crow: As Driftwood Lodges" (University of Oklahoma Press 1987) and in "Carry Forth the Stories: An Ethnographer’s Journey into Native Oral Tradition" (Washington State University Press 2017), and with Tom Yellowtail and Cliff SiJohn in “If All These Great Stories Were Told, Great Stories Will Come” in Religion and Healing in Native North America, edited by Suzanne Crawford and Dennis Kelly (ABC-CLIO 2005). Core elements of this personal series appeared in a sermon he gave at the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Palouse, in Moscow, Idaho, on the 16th of June 2019.

When we walk the halls of a hospital – An Integrative Personal Story, Part 8

As a Lay Chaplain, with empathy having opened the door and now standing or seated beside the bed of someone less a stranger, I continue to listen with deep attentiveness.

When we walk the halls of a hospital – An Integrative Personal Story, Part 7

I ask myself, was I able to effectively engage this diversity, to the extent I did, because I had empathy – somehow already endowed with it? Or did my empathy grow as I continued to engage diversity, in high school, college and professionally – is empathy somehow learned?

When we walk the halls of a hospital – An Integrative Personal Story, Part 6

If it were to have some success in sticking, integrative learning should involve focused, deliberate and purposeful learning activities, a pedagogy that spins, separates, reconstitutes, and reconnects the spokes and hub in a single experiential event.

When we walk the halls of a hospital – An Integrative Personal Story, Part 5

The stories of the intersection of diversity and commonality, of empathy and intentional engagement traveled with me into the academy as an ethnographer.

When we walk the halls of a hospital – An Integrative Personal Story, Part 4

Each day, as I got out of my bed, I found myself walking the halls of the University of Washington Hospital, hooked up to life-sustaining IVs. As I passed by opened doors, anything but oblivious, I gazed into the rooms of perfect strangers. Each was on their own journey of crisis, some getting better, others, not so.

When we walk the halls of a hospital – An Integrative Personal Story, Part 3

During both my healing journeys, I never really feared the Lymphoma, never got angry at it, never depressed, never saw it as somehow an enemy, to be fought, battled and defeated, though it certainly represented the antithesis of my existence.

When we walk the halls of a hospital – An Integrative Personal Story, Part 2

As Tom explained to me, the world is like the great Wheel, made up of many different spokes.

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