His mother said that he was “born to push a pencil and run his mouth.” And what world-shaping-words have come from her son, Princeton University Professor Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.. “There’s a story of me going to a Pentecostal church for the first time,” narrates Glaude, “this woman gets the spirit right next to me and I had no language to understand it.” He describes the experience as, “wholly foreign but decidedly familiar.” But he “has a language for it now.” And this language serves as a way into and means to understand such religious expressions as “transformative experience[s] for those who occupy those spaces.” Here Prof. Glaude deploys the language of reflective teaching and learning in order to illumine the teaching life as it has shaped him and he in turn shapes his students. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, where he is also the Chair of the Center for African American Studies and the Chair of the Department of African American Studies.