Fourteen months ago, the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis was on a bus winding through Western Kentucky on the Poor People’s Campaign’s Real National Emergency bus tour and envisioning a major march of tens of thousands of people in June 2020.
The Rev. Fred Davie, executive vice president at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, has been appointed chair of the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board by both Mayor Bill de Blasio and City Council Speaker Corey Johnson.
The Rev. Dr. Hugh Fleece Halverstadt, one of theological education’s foremost experts on managing church conflict, died April 14 at The Pines continuing care community in Davidson, N.C. Described by his former colleagues at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago as good-humored, wise, supportive and always authentic, he was 81.
The Rev. Richard Avery, half of the Avery and Marsh songwriting duo along with his longtime collaborator Don Marsh, died March 15 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was 85.
The Rev. Bertram Johnson has joined Union Theological Seminary in New York City as a new interfaith minister and will be training and mentoring a newly-forming student peer spiritual care team this semester. He began his work last month.
As a boy growing up in Brazil, the Rev. Dr. Cláudio Carvalhaes said he was afraid of the dark. At bedtime it comforted him that his father had the light on in the next room. “I could see the light where he was, and that was my resting place,” said Carvalhaes, associate professor of worship at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, during last week’s “Responding to an Exodus: Gospel Hospitality and Empire” celebration of 35 years of ministry by Presbyterian Border Region Outreach’s Frontera de Cristo. Carvalhaes led a Friday morning workshop he called “Preaching from the Darkness” at First Presbyterian Church in Douglas, Arizona.
The Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis was delivering an impromptu sermon at the end of a long, hot day riding around Western Kentucky on a bumpy bus when she turned to the story of a leper who approached Jesus.“The leper said, ‘If you choose, you can heal me,’” Theoharis said. “’If you choose, you can heal me.’“Now that leper had gone a lot of places up to that point. He went to the HMOs of his day, and they turned him away. He went to the hospitals nearby, they had closed down. But Jesus traveled around the land opening up free healthcare clinics, never charged a co-pay. The leper said to Jesus, ‘If you choose, you can heal me.’“The question before us this afternoon is, ‘Do we choose?’”
Giving seminarians the tools and the confidence to use their access to the media effectively once they become pastors or do other ministry was the task at hand Wednesday for five Presbyterian communicators speaking at Columbia Theological Seminary during a talk and webinar titled “The News and the Good News: The Impact of Ministry on Journalism.”
Why is it important for church leaders to have a voice in public media? This is among the topics to be explored by seminary students, pastors, church communicators and others during a March 20 event jointly sponsored by the Presbyterian Writers Guild and Columbia Theological Seminary.
The Rev. Dr. Horace T. Allen, Jr., an ecumenical Christian scholar of worship and liturgy, professor and longtime member of The Consultation on Common Texts — described as “an ecumenical consultation of liturgical scholars and denominational representatives from the United States and Canada who produce liturgical texts and curate a three-year lectionary in common use by Christian churches worldwide” — died on Feb. 5.
