Product Overview
Pedagogy of the Ancestors is a practical and inspiring guide for anyone called to teach, mentor, and shape future generations with intention, humility, and compassion, knowing that our daily choices are the rain that waters the seeds of tomorrow.
Ancestors embody the past, and they also offer spiritual guidance and friendship to those coming of age. We see this across cultures and religious traditions. Communities rely on ancestral wisdom to educate and nurture future generations, but oppressive systems severe these roots. In Pedagogy of the Ancestors, Patrick Reyes explores the transformative roles of ancestors, as living memories and semidivine beings, in guiding and teaching younger generations.
Readers are invited to rethink education as rooted in our relationships with those who came before and those who will come after. Reyes calls on educators, caregivers, religious leaders, pastors, and mentors to teach and live as the ancestors our descendants deserve. Pedagogy of the Ancestors shares educational practices for those creating spaces of belonging and accountability, providing guidance on the skills and perspectives needed to mentor young people effectively. Through storytelling, rituals, and grounded exercises, readers are invited to reflect on their lineages, recognizing the gifts and traumas they inherit so that they may pass on hope and healing to the next generation.
Drawing on Indigenous wisdom, spiritual traditions, and Reyes’s experience as a scholar and pastor, Pedagogy of the Ancestors reframes education and mentorship as relational, future-oriented work. It emphasizes forming character, cultivating joy, and creating spaces where young people can flourish. Whether working with children, teenagers, or young adults, readers are encouraged to live on ancestor time, considering how their choices ripple across generations. Ultimately, the book challenges us to live at the speed of love, honor our ancestors by becoming cycle breakers, and sow seeds of healing for a flourishing future.
Reviews
"Reyes's Pedagogy of the Ancestors asks us to recalibrate our lives to ancestral time, to 'the speed of love.' As a practice of tending the cosmos and the soul, he invites us to embrace our generational and relational tethers to people and land, to teach and learn in all directions, so that all of us might one day heal and be well. Reyes nourishes the reader with personal memories and stories, and from that tending, long-buried stories of our own begin to surface and bloom. In a time when we are watching a world burn, it returns us to hope and to the work of becoming good ancestors."
—Christine J. Hong, Associate Professor of Educational Ministry, Lead Professor of the Doctor of Educational Ministry Program, Columbia Theological Seminary
"Written from years of lived practice and thoughtful reflection, this book offers fresh language for the sacred vocation of teaching. Reyes reminds us that our greatest lessons are often found not simply in what we say but in how we live, what we model, and the relationships we nurture. He calls us beyond being cycle-breakers to becoming cycle-makers—people who intentionally cultivate hope, wisdom, and possibility for those who come after us. This is an essential read for educators, mentors, pastors, leaders, and anyone who believes their life has the power to shape future generations. Reyes has given us not simply a vision for teaching but a way of living in which the future is always being formed in the practices we embody today. Reyes reminds us that formation is always intergenerational, embodied, and communal—that we do not simply tell stories; we become stories that others inherit."
—Sarah F. Farmer, Associate Director, Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning
"Reyes invites his readers to play and dream with him, his ancestors, and their own. Along the way, you encounter God's abiding desire for us to live and give abundantly. Deeply felt and carefully crafted, Pedagogy of the Ancestors is a healing joy to read."
—Alaina B. Kleinbeck, Executive Director of Grants and Services, Forum for Congregational Life
"Pedagogy of the Ancestors: Practices for Mentoring and Teaching Future Generations offers practical steps toward healing ties between one’s ancestors and the generations to come. It is a call to communal connection that circumvents a sea of self-help individualism. The book is theoretically rich yet hands-on through and through, guiding readers toward cultivating an awareness of how past and future communities of memory converge. The work involves listening to voices recognized in the academy and in religious leadership alongside voices of wisdom from our own family trees, chosen and/or biological, that have shaped us personally. What might the world look like if we work toward being good ancestors? Reyes offers invaluable insights toward this future."
—Jonathan Calvillo, Associate Professor of Latinx Communities, Candler School of Theology, Emory University
"This is one of the best books I've ever read on healing and ancestral relationships, and if I could, I would give it to everyone I know. Pedagogy of the Ancestors is not a book that feeds only our minds; the wisdom and care in these pages should be dropped into our bodies like medicine so that we carry and live it out in our precious daily lives. Read these pages as ceremony, because that’s what Reyes is teaching us—how to find deep connection with ourselves, with God, with the ancestors who hold us, and with future generations preparing us to show up for them. This work is holy, and it's exactly what we are made for."
—Kaitlin B. Curtice, Potawatomi author of Native and Director of the Aki Institute
"In Pedagogy of the Ancestors, Patrick Reyes offers educators multiperspectival insights into humanity's boundless opportunities to receive our ancestors' sacred baton of wisdom in the intergenerational relay toward reclamation and restoration. Reyes reminds educators that we are historically situated to play key roles in evolution and that we would do well to know how to receive our ancestors' inheritances, use them, and pass the wealth of knowledge and customs along with life-giving purpose. To teach in this way will breathe life and hope into the dusty old bones of the withered expert-ignorant classroom dynamic. Get ready to live the learning life anew."
—Pamela Ayo Yetunde, author of Casting Indra's Net: Fostering Spiritual Kinship and Community
"This book gave me permission I didn't know I was waiting for: to let my cultural ancestry and my spiritual ancestry belong to each other. This book is a reminder that wholeness, not selective memory, is where healing begins; that we carry both protagonists and antagonists in our bones, and that this tension is not a problem to resolve but an inheritance to tend. For those of us who work at the intersection of faith and community and who care deeply about what we pass forward, Pedagogy of the Ancestors is both an invitation and a gift."
—Elizabeth Le'anani Coffee, Managing Director, Lake Institute on Faith & Giving