Dear alumni/ae and friends,
In many of my recent public lectures and in the class I am teaching this semester, I’ve been teasing through the notion of democracy and the role faith communities should play in helping it thrive in the US. I fear that as a society, we are moving toward a stance that a poorly educated public can sustain a vibrant democracy. Nothing can be further from the truth. A vibrant democracy is built on the foundation of an informed and educated public and part of that education must involve the nature of things religious and how they affect our daily lives. The more capacious our understanding of religious worldviews, the better we understand the ways in which folks domestically and globally are responding to the world around them as well as their values and their cultures. This increased understanding can help us look into our perceptions and feeling about what our faithfulness must be.
This is an important entry point for teaching students who will go into a wide variety of ministries that can and often will disrupt the traditional canons of theological thought and spiritual assumptions. It’s vital that we encourage our students and ourselves as teachers to approach our work and ministry with a different pair of lenses that prompt different questions and use different resources that may be from conscious social locations such as class or cultures or gender or race or sexualities or religions. We can do this while holding traditions in our grasp, but not allowing tradition to beget holified intellectual and spiritual inertia.
Today’s world does not need pedagogies that are a threshing floor for arrogant or aloof scholarship that is totally divorced from experience, or encourage us to be supporting players or as “interesting” side chapters in the debates within our disciplines or in our religious bodies. As quiet as it’s kept, theological schools are a part of the formation of citizens who we hope will use their eyes, minds, souls, and hearts to building God’s new heaven and new earth…now.
Best,
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Emilie M. Townes
Dean
E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Chair
Professor of Womanist Ethics and Society
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Nominations are now being accepted for the Distinguished Alumni/ae Award. All nominations must be received by Monday, November 5, 2018. Learn more about previous recipients of the award. All award nominations must be received by Monday, November 5, 2018.
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Gene Davenport (BD '60; Ph.D.'68), 82, died at his home in Jackson, Tennessee, on September 9, 2018. Davenport was president of the Student Cabinet when James Lawson was arrested, which he explains in the book, Vanderbilt Divinity School Education, Contest, and Change edited by Dale Johnson. Davenport was an ordained Methodist Minister.
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James Sandlin (M.Div.'69), a former Sarratt Student Center director who worked tirelessly to expand cultural offerings on campus and to improve the quality of life in Middle Tennessee, died Sept. 19. Sandlin, 77, passed away at his home in Unionville, Tennessee, after a brief illness.
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The 2018 Cole Lectures will be delivered by Gary Dorrien, Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, on October 4 and 5 in Benton Chapel.
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In fall 2019, VDS will offer a master of theology designed to deepen the theological foundations for students’ vocational and ministerial practice in a particular discipline.
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Highlights from the MLK to BLM Symposium, held on September 20, including videos of panel discussions and lunch keynote.
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The Carpenter Program to host Resistance+Faith+Art: Race and Sexuality Summit, a daylong teach-in on Oct. 27 at Fisk University, that centers experiences of black and brown people on issues of human sexuality, faith, and emerging models of activism and organizing.
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