Welcome from Union's President, Serene Jones

Biography

Vision Paper

Inauguration

Convocation Address

Dear Alumni/ae and Friends,

Have you seen the inaugural issue of Union Now?

Playing on the name of our historic Union News, this new publication seeks to bring you both news of Union’s current events and why they matter now.

As the theme of this first issue, we chose “Finding Voice” because of Union’s longstanding commitment to speaking out on the pressing issues of the day. Now, as in the past, that voice is strong and takes many forms. On the music front, our Gospel and Seminary Choirs daily fill James Chapel. On the teaching front, iTunes University podcasts and web links now bring digitized sounds into the mix with the traditional voices of classroom lecturers and seminar discussions.

Among the students, the shouts of courtyard Frisbee-players can be heard alongside a chat about rooftop gardening or a strategy session on anti-poverty organizing. The chants of Orthodox liturgy fill the evening air, but by early morning, it is Yoga ohms and then at mid-day, a folk-sung communion service. Throughout the week, faith-communities ranging from Unitarian to Roman Catholic to Pentecostal bring their ritual sounds into play with those of Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists along with an ever-growing host of hearty spiritual seekers. Everywhere, the non-stop voices of Union’s school life buzz.

For our alumni/ae readers, many of these voices should sound familiar, albeit cast in different temporal and cultural registers. Through our 174 years, our halls have crackled with unusual speech-forms and unusual speakers. Think of Charles Briggs, Eunice Jackson, Robert Seaver, James Cone, and Beverly Harrison, each of them speaking in tongues not heard before in theological education. Think of firebrands and scholars like Bonhoeffer, Niebuhr, Bennett, Trible, and Forbes, their voices spilling into the world and changing it. Think, too, of our current faculty who, through their writing and interviews, regularly fill newspapers, television, Internet sites, and radio waves with the buzz of theologically rich opinions. Whether it’s through a faculty longing to expand theology’s boundaries or students reaching for an education that otherwise would have been off limits to them, we keep speaking… time and again.

Indeed, in the past as in the present, Union is home to voices as diverse as the city in which it lives, and, like the city, this diversity can also generate serious challenges. In our classrooms, voices sometimes clash, as the wounds and injustices of our collective lives find expression in language that is neither soothing nor beautiful. In our chapel, the blending of so many religious traditions often sounds more like a traffic jam than a symphonic orchestration. It falls harsh on the ear. Our politics, too, can sound discordant and coarse as our deepest passions and faith commitments pour forth in words not soft but restless and unyielding.

How do we manage it? Keep it functioning? And intelligible? As in ages past, the community is constantly learning how to find pleasure in the rough-and-tumble play of faith’s messy, lived expressions. We listen for the interesting echoes in discordant sounds that others might quickly dismiss as noise—and to find beauty in an unexpected tone or an unruly rhythm. We try to cultivate a quality of spirit that is as open to love and mystery as it is to truth and goodness. As is so often the case in our ordinary lives, it is Union’s quality of heart as much as its seasoned reason that holds our community together, time and again. Even the building itself, the body we inhabit, within its thick walls and open courtyard, keeps offering to all who enter a sense for both the carefully scored and the wildly improvisational sounds of God’s voice in our midst.

With this first issue of Union Now, I hope you will enjoy reading about the many ways Union’s community is finding and giving voice. Throughout the magazine, you will also find web addresses for more information and additional resources. I invite you spend time with the magazine and the additional media, to listen to the voices of Union now, and to add your voices to our full and growing speech-choir of faith.

Joyfully,

Serene Jones
President, Union Theological Seminary