Drawing on Cornel West's prophetic revision of American pragmatism and fictional cases of teaching from Toni Morrison's Beloved, Teaching at the Crossroads of Faith and School develops an alternative conception of the role of the teacher for a contemporary educational milieu marked by increasing religious diversity and marred by controversy over the appropriate relationship between religion and education. Jeffrey Ayala Milligan offers a critical analysis of traditional conceptions of the teacher's role as 'centers that cannot hold' in the midst of ongoing cultural debates between religious critics of public education and secular suspicions of religious ideas in the public school.