To my current and former students: I think it is important that you know what teaching at Shorter University has meant to me. In our time together over the last six years, I have watched you come into the "Introduction to Biblical Literature" class with equal parts zeal, fear, and curiosity. At every step you thought critically, conversed articulately, and demonstrated a willingness to engage the Biblical narrative with your hearts, souls, and minds. It has been a privilege and honor to build relationships with you and to watch, as my greatest mentor and former Shorter professor says, "the familiar become unfamiliar and the unfamiliar familiar."
To my classmates and fellow alumni of Shorter University: We sit poised at a crucial time. We find our alma mater led away from the homeland of faith and dialogue into the exile of a land governed only by dogma and certainty. There are many among us content to hang our harps by those trees in defiance. This loss has been hard, but we have borne it out as followers of Jesus, one well acquainted with sorrows, one whose own rejected, despised, and condemned him and rendered him anathema to their particular understanding of God's world. Perhaps this was because he called out what was true, noble, and good, because he, as I and so many others, sat with music majors and education majors, pre-med students and homosexual ministry majors, and found in them a reflection of God's own image. Jesus' parables had as their lone narrative thread the radical assertion that those who claimed to know God were often the first excluded from the new Kingdom that God was (and still is) building. We may sing a dirge for the beloved community we once knew, but we must commit our steps to envisioning the wideness of God's mercy. We are the fortunate ones. We are the bearers of the great hope and legacy modeled for us at Shorter. Our best response will not be protest or condemnation but a legacy of Shorter graduates who sow love, nurture peace, and model grace -- so much so that when the heirs of this current age go forth into the world, they are called to account for the bigotry and narrowness they espouse.
Read Full Article »