Pirin Mountains, viewed from Bansko
(Photo by Daria's friend, Vili)
My friend Daria grew up in the town of Bansko, situated in the shadow of the Pirin Mountains in southwestern Bulgaria. Another shadow cast over the whole country was that of communism, effective from 1944 to '89. Under that shadow in her youth, Daria describes the Orthodox church in her hometown as only being frequented by grandmothers and the priest. Everyone else had too much to lose under the fear of being monitored and reported, thus losing jobs and livelihoods.
Daria recalls being drawn by a spiritual hunger for the biblical narrative at a young age, and the only place in which it could be experienced in these conditions was secretly in the home. So her grandmother would read her stories from an old, dusty family Bible. Even at a young age and under such tight restrictions, Daria had a quiet reputation for knowing stories from the Bible. For instance, her eye doctor would ask her to recite them for him when she spent a few weeks in the nearby town where he practiced. The doctor had no other way to hear these stories than from this five year old girl.
Prior to moving to Virginia to take up studies here at EMU, I was an information technology (IT) worker, or a “computer guy” to the layperson. My last full-time job in the IT world was as Manager of Software Quality Assurance at a health information management systems company in West Des Moines, Iowa. The IT world is a marvelously diverse one in a number of ways, which is particularly apparent in the vastly white state of Iowa, and my last employer was no exception. Amidst the numerous and wonderful working relationships I had with people from cultural upbringings far different than my own, one in particular stands out: my relationship with Mohamed.
Through circumstances whose details escape me now, Mohamed's and my working relationship eventually came to a place where our faith commitments – his Muslim, mine Christian – somehow naturally came up in conversation at the office. He and I both were in supervisory positions in different departments whose collective work brought us together for business, and it was around the edges of these meetings where our deeper conversations began to form. This prompted us to begin having periodic lunches together at a nearby Mexican restaurant, wherein we would gather over chips and salsa and the “Speedy Gonzales” lunch dish to further discuss our faith journeys and the challenges to people of faith in our secular age. In our talks, Mohamed would wisely point out that he was not the representative for all Muslims everywhere for all times, but simply one representative among many in a long tradition. So read on to learn more about my friend, Mohamed, and were his life as a Muslim in America has taken him...
Earlier this month, Aaron, my friend from seminary, and I headed out to Richmond, Indiana to Bethany Theological Seminary, which is affiliated with the Church of the Brethren. Bethany was hosting an event called "When Strangers are Angels" and was pulling together people from the three so-called "historic peace churches": Mennonites, Quakers, and Brethren. There were numerous motivations for me wanting to make this trip, chief of which was connecting and reconnecting with some folks from my flock of believers, the Brethren. Being one of the few Brethren in a proudly Mennonite academic institution here in the Shenandoah Valley has been by and large a wonderful, spiritually transformative experience, but there are times when I long to commune with Brethren folks.
So when I heard about this event, I cooked up a way to connect it with a seminary class called "the believers church," taught by our wonderful church history professor, Nate Yoder. The seminary also graciously helped us, financially, to get out there and back. We made contact with three scholars, one in each tradition, and secured interviews with each one while we were at the event. The following 10-minute video is the fruit of this road trip, the interviews, and reflection in the context of this class. After the break, I'll offer some further commentary...
When I came to Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) in 2008 to begin graduate studies, I did so specifically to be dual-enrolled in both the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) and the Seminary (EMS), working toward a degree in each program. When the time came to plan my seminary classes for the first semester, I sat down with Sara Wenger Shenk, the associate dean of the Seminary, to do so. As I look back on that experience from a year and half ago, I seem to recall that my first impression of Sara was fairly neutral. She struck me as quiet and reflective, perhaps even a bit intimidating to someone new to the university community, such as myself.
But over the course of my time here at EMU, I have come to see a tremendously deep well of wisdom, insight, and zeal for her work and community from Sara, not to mention a profound awareness and expression of her Christian faith that has made an equally profound impression on my own faith. In the crowd of wonderful professors, mentors, leaders, advisors – both academic and spiritual – and friends that I am exposed to here, Sara stands out. It is the intention of this paper to describe the kind of leader that Sara is. I will do this by way of relating my own experiences of her leadership in her various roles, along with elements of her own reflections on her formational journey that has brought her to this point. In addition, I have interviewed two other people in the Seminary context and will incorporate their reflections into this paper, providing a multi-dimensional view of Sara Wenger Shenk's expression of leadership.
Read on after the break for my reflections on Sara and her leadership...
The title of this blog post essentially describes what I've learned through the analysis process of this long project for class. After interviewing four EMU faculty members, asking each of them to essentially tell me the story of their spiritual-vocational journey, it's come to that assessment: "Smart people wresting in church." The phrase is basically an interpretation of the top 5 themes that emerged from analysis of the interview transcripts. More about that process later, but here is the top 10 in a pretty pie chart:
Lisa taught the first class I took at the CJP in the fall of last year: Analysis - Understanding Conflict. While I was new in the program, there were other students with me who were not only new to the program but also new to American culture in general. Yet somehow the class quickly formed its own identity that was very close-knit, familiar, and friendly. In the midst of learning all sorts of conflict analysis tools, using them to analyze case studies such as post-election violence in Kenya in late 2007 (with two men from Kenya who had experienced it themselves), Lisa presided over all this with a wisdom and intelligence that flowed seamlessly into the classroom and the students, in the elicitive manner that I've come to understand as distinctly CJP. I knew from this class and from this instructor that this was not a typical graduate academic program.
Later that academic year, this past spring, Lisa and I participated in a facilitated round-table discussion on the topic of theology and peacebuilding, in which she made her case for the deep level of resonance that her faith has had in her peacebuilding practice and the deep overlap and common ground she sees between the two. (Aside: Mark Thiessen Nation and Peter Dula were also participants in this discussion.)
It was for these reasons that I wanted to interview Lisa as part of this project: my deep respect and admiration for her, as well as her continuing efforts toward integrating theology in her work as a peacebuilder. She is the only faculty member that I interviewed who isn't dealing specifically with theology in her role at the university. In this video, Lisa reflects on the joys and trials of being in a multi-faith peacebuilding program connected to a Christian, Anabaptist, Mennonite university:
To borrow terminology from Stuart Murray's excellent book, "Biblical Interpretation in the Anabaptist Tradition," I see in Lisa a strong focus on the very Anabaptist quality of a "hermeneutic of obedience," where how well someone is interpreting Scripture is measured by how they're living their life. This is a bit of an oversimplification of both Murray's book and Lisa's theology, but it's a helpful analogy for me.
Thank you, Lisa, for such an honest and even (at times) emotionally challenging interview, as well as good encouragement for the challenges of my "dual citizenship" here at EMU.
My first encounter with Heidi here at EMU came in my second semester last year while writing a term paper on the theologies of baptism for John Calvin and a somewhat recently-discovered 16th century Anabaptist figure, Pilgram Marpeck. Heidi's dissertation covers Marpeck, so a classmate and I sat down with her to get some help with sources for our papers. Her sharp intellect and clear articulation of theological concepts quickly struck me. Later that spring, EMU hosted popular Christian thinker, writer, and speaker, Brian McLaren, and Heidi was coordinating the events for his time on campus, and I was asked to play guitar for a few songs during an evening speaking event.
When I sat down with Heidi for this interview in late October, I knew it was going to be a great conversation, and it was. What particularly stood out in this interview is how she immediately named her family and life in the church as pivotal starting points for her faith and spiritual formation. At the end of the interview, when talking about theology in a conceptual sense, she tied it all together with her early childhood experiences, bringing us full circle in the discussion. This was in the midst of talking about Anabaptist particulars in theology, and what it can offer the broader church (something she works at). Here's a video that offers some of her reflections:
There were other themes not explored in the video that were significant, such as the strong tie of theology to an education and early vocation that wasn't primarily theological (largely social work in various forms), but to which Heidi quite intentionally brought her faith and practical theology to bear. At various points through the interview Heidi named bridge-building as something she's been doing in various ways and to varying degrees much of her life. This is where I really level with her, as I see much of what I'm doing here at EMU, studying in both the CJP and Seminary, working toward those two degrees, as a theological experiment in bridge/peace-building.
The following video is the edited form of an interview I conducted with my theology professor at EMS, Mark Thiessen Nation. Mark is one of the leading scholars of John Howard Yoder, an influential theologian-ethicist from the latter third of the last century, who was also Mennonite. The first time I had Mark in class at seminary was one of my very first classes, "Christian Tradition," which he co-taught with two other wonderful professors. I was immediately drawn to Mark's sharp intellect and his clear articulation of theological concepts. As I've gotten to know him better, I've also come to appreciate his sense of humor. He's a smart alec like me.
In this 15 min. video, Mark is essentially telling the story of his spiritual formation, which has led him to where he is now, vocationally: a theology professor at a seminary.
I enjoyed having this conversation with Mark. We laughed frequently and it felt very natural, even though there was a camera sitting there, pointed at his face the whole time. I also enjoyed analyzing it. One thing that I came to appreciate is the centrality of the church in Mark's journey. Doing a simple word frequency analysis of the transcript showed that the word "church" came up more than anything else. Despite his vocational situation in the academy, Mark is still very much involved in the life of the church, and it continues to be where he situates his work. This is important for me to consider, as I'm in the midst of constantly discerning where my spiritual journey will take me next, vocationally.
Don't read into this deeply, but I laughed out loud when I saw this little statistic from the word frequency analysis of the transcript: the word "Jesus" and "Yoder" were mentioned the same number of times in our conversation. Again, I'm not trying to make any sort of critical statement by pointing this out, but my fellow students - or anyone familiar with Mark - will get a chuckle out of this. He is, as I said, a Yoder scholar. (e.g. a new book of Yoder essays he helped edit: The War of the Lamb: The Ethics of Nonviolence and Peacemaking)
Mark is also my neighbor. Last year, he and his wife, Mary, invited my family over for supper. I was immediately struck by how many books this man has. We entertained my daughter during discussion after supper by having her go through his shelves of biblical commentaries in the adjacent room and find ones that were out of order. When she found one, she'd show it to Mark and he would reshelf it correctly. So here's a picture to show you just one corner of his office and the bookshelves. But there are two other walls that you don't see...
I also get a kick out of the pictures hanging above his computer monitor. There are other family and personal pictures in his office, but these are the folks that are looking at him from the wall as he's working on his computer. I recognize John M. Perkins, Stanley Hauerwas (with whom Mark shares a friendship with), and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
I really like Mark, and I hope that came through in this post. He's a neat guy and I'm thrilled to be studying under his tutilege and it's a bummer that he's on sabbatical this year (although I'm sure he doesn't asses it this way). You might see some footage from the interview repeated in subsequent posts, as I'll be working with material from all four interviews I conducted with EMU faculty in a more collage-like fashion, exploring the similarities and differences in how these conversations went with more or less the same line of questioning.
For Howard's research class tomorrow morning, I'm supposed to provide a report on the first interview for our project. Well, I've completed three interviews since I last posted here, so I'll use this space to talk about the process and the progress. Read on for more!
Last night, I sent off interview requests to four EMU faculty members, along with the interview guidelines document, which I will re-print here. This essentially is a schedule for each interview session:
Briefing
Talk about the recording equipment, how recording will be used
Talk about the photography at the end of the session
Interview
Question: Tell me about the earliest experience you can remember where you thought about God.
Question: Tell me about when you started to become interested in theology in the formal, academic sense.
Question: What is theology to you now? How do you think about it? How do you practice it?
Debriefing
Make observations about themes I heard in responses, and ask for clarifications or elaborations
Ask if there's anything else they'd like to share
Promise that transcripts will be delivered and approval asked for
Promise that final product will be made readily available to them
Thank them for the interview, prepare again for the photography
Take Photos
My prof, Howard, also suggested that I be ready with a list of follow-up questions for each listed above, so I still have to get those ready before I do the first interview. I haven't heard back from any of them yet, but read on if you're interested in who they are...
This post is mostly of the housekeeping/full-disclosure variety. It's the note form of my project proposal for my class w/ Howard Zehr & Paulette Moore: "Research as Art and Transformation." One thing I like about the project described in my previous post is the way in which Paulette and her partner used the blog. They used it not only for the final form of the project, but also the entire process of creating the project, from concept to realization. So I'll be aping that paradigm here...
When I came to 
