Two troublesome portraits of religious studies professors often exist in the minds of some students at any given time: the Guru, or wise spiritual teacher, and the Deceiver. These metaphors capture student perceptions of us that may be ill-informed and beyond our control. We will examine and compare how our own chosen metaphors for teaching -theological typologist and neutral enthusiast -respond creatively to the unchosen metaphors of guru or deceiver. We cannot avoid being cast as gurus/ deceivers, but we can discern how our own metaphors for teaching engage "unchosen" student metaphors for us. This exercise can enhance our self-awareness about our own normative agendas in the classroom, and help to sharpen colleagues' conversations about our sometimes differing assumptions regarding the discipline and teaching of religious studies.We would wager that early on in their careers, most religious studies or theology professors are confronted with two common kinds of scenarios: students coming to our office hours and sharing, in pain or wonder, stories of their own religious or spiritual journeys, hoping we will understand and shed further light on their situations; and students avoiding or dropping a course with us because it seems dangerous to their faith or their souls. These scenarios may occur in different proportions for faculty members, given the range of our pedagogical styles and the types of religious studies courses we offer. But most of us are familiar with scenarios like these that occur on a spectrum between what we might call perceptions of us as gurus on one end, and as deceivers on the other: persons who either foster or threaten students' own existential bearings in the world. We will share examples of these dynamics with some of our own students at Western Illinois University, but we trust that these images resonate with many religious studies professors. In this essay, we examine how an analysis of our own metaphors for teaching -as faculty members -can make us more aware of how we each engage the energy of students' own metaphors for us as gurus and deceivers.Awareness of these dynamics can serve as one kind of reality check for our own assumptions about how much we do (or do not) have normative agendas in the classroom; it can also help sharpen interpersonal conversation between colleagues about their sometimes differing assumptions regarding the discipline and teaching of religious studies. The model we stumbled upon for reflecting on just how we engage student metaphors for religious studies teachers had its genesis in our quite different visceral reactions to some of the preliminary findings of Barbara Walvoord's recent study of teaching and learning in introductory religion courses. It evolved during our preparation of a jointly delivered paper at the American Academy of Religion on metaphors for teaching. Our conversation around both of these events will identify the kinds of internal IN THE CLASSROOMTeaching Metaphor

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Explores the variety of codependency theories and the origins of the notion. Offers a theological assessment and critique of such theoretical frameworks and suggests a sample of pastoral responses to codependency theories.C o depen den cy theories provide vocabularies that are frequently used to describe patterns in sexual and familial relationships. They appear in countless self-help books,' are used by dozens of support groups," and have been adopted by an increasing number of therapists, social workers, and pastoral counselors. Most importantly, many persons, especially women, have found the language of codependency to be a helpful description of their own experiences, circumstances, and actions. Pastoral caregivers'must develop a critical theological understanding of these theories if they are to minister effectively to such persons.Those who use the label codependency characterize it in terms of both specific behaviors and more general descriptions of the identity of the codependent person. Specific behaviors of a codependent person might include trying to manage or control another's (especially a partner's) feelings and behavior even when one has relatively little power to change the other; constantly worrying about the whereabouts and activities (e.g., while under the influence of alcohol) of one's partner; or trying to cover up or compensate for the embarrassing, inappropriate, or destructive actions of one's partner. According to advocates of codependency theory, these behaviors reflect an identity characterized by obsession with or attachment to one's partner, emotional overinvolvement or enmeshment in someone else's life, personal boundary distortions, a lost selfhood, and alienation from one's own feelings, needs, and desires.Codependency theorists thus assume that emotional investment in relationships, especially the process of rooting self-identity in one's connections to (rather than autonomy from) others, is more problematic than not.

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