Seminaries

‘Lean in and look up’

Dr. Mark Ward and the Rev. Dr. Jeffrey Bullock, two retiring administrators at the University of Dubuque, were anything but retiring Saturday, speaking to graduates during commencement exercises at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary with passion and honesty.

The psalmist and the solar eclipse

Seeing the “diamond ring” is the holy grail of amateur astronomers: that moment in a total solar eclipse when the edge of the sun’s corona bursts forth with a sparkling burst of light at one point while the rest of the rim is illuminated like a ring. I had no chance of seeing that where I was, located many miles away from the path of totality. All I saw was a solar “croissant.” But I did consider the experience holy. 

The future of Black faith and resistance

“This annual lecture continues Dr. Cone’s dynamic legacy of prophetic Black theological and religious thought that pushes hard against the conscience of America,” said the Rev. Dr. Serene Jones, president of Union Theological Seminary in New York City, who held a moment of reverent pause as she asked the audience to consider the legacy of the Rev. Dr. James H. Cone, who had been a professor at Union for 50 years. Cone died in 2018. The event on April 3, held at the seminary’s James Chapel and streamed online, was the fourth annual lecture to be held in his honor.

‘I’m glad someone did that for me as well’

Describing himself as an “almost empty-nester” with a daughter set to soon attend college in Scotland and a son preparing for higher education two years later, the Rev. Dr. Andrew Pomerville, the president of Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary since July 2023, says he’s seeing the world more and more through the eyes of younger people.

Easter and transgender visibility fall on the same day this year

As the International Day of Transgender Visibility falls on Easter this year, Christians wrestle again with the ways that religion wounds those on the margins of society and in what ways the resurrection calls Christian into new ways of seeing, believing and loving.

‘The devil is in our doctrine,’ lecturer tells Princeton Theological Seminary

“Calvinists don’t really do the devil,” Dr. Philip G. Ziegler, professor of Christian Dogmatics at the University of Aberdeen, said on March 18 as he named the “strong sense of human responsibility and the demystifying impulse that marks Reformed theology” before setting out the plan for his six lectures to prove the doctrinal importance of the devil. Ziegler presented his case to about 150 attendees in person and online during the 2024 Annie Kinkead Warfield Lectures.