Alumni News
Professor Wariboko quoted in Christianity Today article
Walter G. Muelder Professor of Social Ethics Nimi Wariboko was quoted in an article on the life and legacy of German evangelist Reinhard Bonnke, who passed away last Saturday, and Bonnke's “deep sense of humility.” Read the full Christianity Today article here.
Dean Moore’s 2019 Appeal Letter
Dear Alumni/ae and Friends,
With autumn upon us and winter before us, I am reminded of the wondrous beauty of change. There are times when change brings disarray, anxiety, and grief to our personal and communal lives. Other times it gives birth to new beginnings, beginnings born out of hope, promise, and courage. This year, the School of Theology (STH) has celebrated a number of changes that I’d like to share with you because, without your continued support, none of this would be possible.
This fall, we celebrated the completion of the first-ever Boston University capital campaign. The School of Theology raised $29.4 million for its own “On a Mission” campaign, after the 2010 campaign goal of $15 million was revised to $25 million in 2015 and surpassed in 2018. The impact of your abundant generosity includes the following:
- 19 Endowed Scholarships
- Six Named Scholarships
- Two Endowed Centers
- Center for Practical Theology
- Tom Porter Religion and Conflict Transformation Program
- Two New Programs
- Theology and Latinx Studies
- Faith and Ecological Justice
- Two New Chairs
- Harrell F. Beck Chair of Hebrew Scripture
- Truman Collins Professor of World Christianity
- Two Endowed Housing Funds
- Earl and Millie Beane Housing Fund
- Charles and Elizabeth Kenosian Residence Fund
- One Endowed Community of Learning
- Anglican Episcopal Community of Learning
- One Named Faculty Scholar
- Bishops Scholar of Homiletics and Preaching
- One Named Lectureship
- Father Vincent Machozi Lecture on Building Justice and Peace
- LEED Gold certified renovation of the lower level into Community Center
These are not mere accolades, but tangible accomplishments that will result in an enhanced learning community and strengthened research environment. Just last month, the School of Theology installed Professor David Schnasa Jacobsen as the inaugural Bishops Scholar of Homiletics and Preaching, and you are part of the cloud of witnesses who made this a reality. About two months ago, we announced the formation of two new programs at the School of Theology: Theology and Latinx Studies and Faith and Ecological Justice. With these programs established, we remain on the cutting edge of theological education and will continue attracting brilliant minds and loving hearts.
Another change is on the horizon. At this time, you may have already received news of my retirement plans. I have loved serving this great school because of the amazing people who have traveled these halls. Please know that I plan to make this last year count, serving the community with my full self as we work together to build greater student and faculty support systems and to deepen the roots of our academic and co-curricular programs.
STH is moving in the right direction, and I ask that you consider making a gift to the STH Annual Fund as we strive to maximize our potential. Your support, with a gift of any amount, to the STH Annual Fund will help nurture our students and equip them to create boundary-free communities of love all over the world. We are so very grateful for your financial and moral support, and for the work you help us do. Gifts of all sizes are welcome and much appreciated, and your gift increases our alumni participation rate, which helps with foundation grants. Thank you again for your consideration.
With appreciation and blessings,
Mary Elizabeth Moore
Dean, School of Theology
www.bu.edu/sthfund | www.bu.edu/sth/alumni/giving
P.S. In this time of change I ask for your renewed support of the STH Annual Fund, funds which will help keep the school going while our recent campaign has allowed the school to grow. The Annual Fund supports students’ contextual education opportunities, community and spiritual life programs and outreach to our alumni and friends including the annual publication of focus. Thank you!
Assistant Professor Shively Smith Awarded Vital Worship Grant for 2020
The Calvin Institute of Christian Worship announced it will fund 15 grants to Teacher-Scholars for 2020-2021 as part of its Vital Worship Grants Program. Assistant Professor of New Testament Shively T. J. Smith has been awarded one of these prestigious grants for her project entitled “Visual Explorations of Interpretative Practice with Howard Thurman.” She will focus on the relations among congregational public witness, scriptural engagement, and visual hermeneutics, seeking to explore Thurman’s exhortation to do “what makes you come alive.”
Please read the original announcement here.
By Faith Magazine Honors Gil Caldwell (’58)
Congratulations to Gil Caldwell (’58) for being named a Super Elder in the September/October issue of By Faith Magazine! By Faith is a publication celebrating the gifts and ministry of Black United Methodist Churches.
School of Theology Hosts RVS Conference
Boston, MA – On November 19 and 20, the Boston University School of Theology (BUSTH) hosted the Religion, Values, and Social Practices Conference here in Boston. Conference participants included faculty, staff, and students from partner institutions of The Research School (RVS). The conference is a collaborative effort of BUSTH and RVS, which was established in 2009. RVS is a supplement to the PhD programs at member institutions, which include eight universities and colleges in Norway and two universities in Sweden, with BUSTH as an international partner. The main mission of RVS is to help PhD students complete their dissertations and degrees in the estimated time and contribute to their research so that the dissertations have high international quality. An interdisciplinary school, members from a variety of academic disciplines study psychology of religion, religious studies, education, religious education, sociology of religion, and theology.
The two-day conference kicked off on Tuesday with a welcome from Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Bryan Stone, and the first plenary session given by Assistant Professor of Religion and Society Nicolette Manglos-Weber, Cultivating Analytic Empathy in the Study of Religion: Four Framing Concepts.
Participants then selected among several paper presentations for late morning and afternoon sessions, including paper presentations given by Judith Oleson, Executive Director of the Tom Porter Religion and Conflict Transformation Program, and Albert and Jessie Danielsen Professor of Psychology of Religion and Theology Steven Sandage. The afternoon sessions were followed by a tour of BU's campus and student fellowship at a nearby pub.
Wednesday's opening plenary session, Religious Conversion and Ethnic Identity Among Latino Evangelicals, was presented to a full STH Community Center by Assistant Professor of Sociology of Religion Jonathan Calvillo. One of the following morning sessions included a paper presentation given by STH PhD student Dan Hauge. The conference concluded on Wednesday afternoon, and from STH, many participants will be traveling to San Diego, CA for the annual meeting of AAR/SBL.
"The Norwegian partnership with Boston University School of Theology is a rich one that traces back to 2010, when we first gathered to share research on religious knowing in congregations and other social contexts", Dean of STH, Mary Elizabeth Moore remarked. "The conference and sustained partnership provide a huge opportunity for our faculty and students, who have been meeting regularly in Norway, Greece, and Boston to build significant research projects and relationships."

Deans’ Message: With Thanks for the Voice of the People
With Thanks for the Voice of the People
Dear Community,
We write with gratitude for the strong and important letter that you wrote to the three deans. Such a thoughtful letter deserves a response, which we offer here, but we want to begin with our genuine appreciation for your willingness to write this. We are listening carefully, albeit imperfectly, to the pain, anger, hurt, sadness, and harm that you express, both in your letter and in other recent moments in our community life. We honor you for being your honest selves, and we lament the enormous harm that you have experienced, some caused by the violent deaths in our society in the past two months, some by the decades and centuries of US and global violence, some by the appearance of Ben Shapiro, and some by the responses or non-responses of your deans. We deeply regret that harm and hurt, and we are actively planning opportunities for the community to share their responses and reflect together in what you have aptly described as a “community dialogue in which our community can process, grieve and respond.”
The most immediate hurt has been caused by the presence of Ben Shapiro on the BU campus, but we are surrounded by other examples of racist legacies, violence run rampant, and the destruction of lives that do not fit white heterosexual norms. We recently mourned the police shootings of Bennie Branch and Atatiana Jefferson, and their deaths are tragic reminders of the vulnerability of black and brown bodies. Of the 783 police shootings in the US thus far in 2019, the numbers of African American and Latino/a deaths continue to be out of proportion to the population of the country, 158 Black and 127 Hispanic or Latino/a. Our society violates children and young people every day, whether in direct shootings or in cultivating a sense that violence is a cure for personal and social ills. Today we have witnessed yet another school shooting in which a young man shot his classmates and then turned the gun on himself. Police shootings and school shootings – all shootings – need to stop.
In such a fraught world, any speaker who feeds divisiveness and speaks without honest recognition of the legacies of slavery, racism, able-ism, poverty, sexism, and heteronormativity will perpetuate the legacies. We disagree with Shapiro’s message and believe that America was indeed founded on slavery, and on genocide, and that continues to shape racist attitudes and ideologies. To claim that America was founded on freedom as a way of denying these realities is not only misleading and distorting, it is immoral.
You have offered two critiques that we think deserve attention: 1) STH administration should have taken some form of public action against Shapiro’s visit, and 2) our ‘failure’ to do so represents a hypocritical and cowardly (“head in the sand”) abandonment of our school’s professed identity and mission as a school of the prophets. We would like to share with you why we made the choices we did, but with full awareness that we might have been wrong.
In response to the first critique, we have two thoughts. First, Shapiro was invited to campus as a part of a student-organized event. As university faculty and staff, our relationship to students is not one of equal power. We think it highly inappropriate for us to utilize the power of our positions to condemn students or engage them in a confrontational manner. We have no problem with their peers doing so. But, we think it is unfair for faculty and administrators to “punch down” by issuing a statement against the decisions of a student group. Second, we did not speak publicly about the event because we did not want to give Shapiro any more recognition than he was already getting. We don’t think that ignoring what we identify as “hate speech” is always the right strategy for working toward racial justice. To the contrary, we think that confronting and rejecting such speech can be the most powerful action that one can take in the cause of justice. However, in the case of Shapiro, we do not see him as an influential thought leader whose ideas must be denounced lest he win the day. We think he works through insults and seeks influence through his ability to elicit visible and vociferous dissent, which he can then portray as a sign of his stature. Thus, we really believe that the most effective way to counter his hate speech is to ignore him, while continuing our work of telling a different story more loudly and more forcefully than he is telling his.
This leads us to the second critique – that we retreated from our legacy in some way. The student letter invokes King’s witness as a part of their critique of our actions, but one of the critiques levied at King was his insistence on choosing his antagonists carefully. Other activists, especially students, often thought him weak or too gradualist because he didn’t respond or react to every indignity or mobilize in the face of every injustice. The SCLC received countless requests to get involved in local fights over various forms of segregation. But, they carefully refused the fights that would unnecessarily elevate antagonists whose stature was too low to make a significant structural impact. Prior to any nonviolent direct action, they conducted power analyses and identified the key centers of power that they wanted to target and topple for maximum impact. If an antagonist was not deemed worthy of the effort, they ignored them so as not to magnify that person’s impact. They may not have always been right in their determinations about what to fight and what to ignore, but making the determination was itself a mandatory part of the ongoing fight for justice.
Leaders in the Civil Rights movement also knew that different people occupied different roles within the fight. We think the very existence of differences touches on the theological question of what “prophetic” means. We think people often reduce that concept to confrontational protest and dismiss the constructive work of community-building and cultural transformation that is actually at the heart of the biblical witness of prophetic ministry. Along with the theological question of what prophetic ministry is, we would add the practical question of how to achieve your aims. We three do not think that the best way to combat hate speech is to prohibit it; because it just goes underground and festers. We think that you combat lies and distortions with truth, and you need to hear truths from every direction. You can’t restrict hate into non-existence. You have to overwhelm it under the preponderance of love.
We are expressing our perspectives here, but we do not think that our answer will suffice as a response to your letter. It did not satisfy King’s detractors either. But, it’s what we believe, even as we know that we may be wrong.
We close again with appreciation. Your letter not only levied a strong critique, but you suggested a constructive way forward. We will be having the community gatherings that you have wisely requested, and we expect and hope that people will express their honest and diverse views there. Students who wrote and signed the letter have already expressed themselves with power. We have also shared ourselves honestly in this letter, not to ask you to agree but to invite you to ponder your own concerns and views. Our STH community is on a journey to deeper understanding, not just to listen to the sounds of our many voices, but to hear as deeply as possible the hurts and passions that people carry. To do this is to journey with Howard Thurman in the “search for common ground,” where agreement will never be found but where dignity, mutuality, and genuine transformation abound.
With appreciation and hope for important conversations ahead,
Teddy Hickman-Maynard
Bryan P. Stone
Mary Elizabeth Moore
Rev. Mariama White-Hammond (’17) featured in Washington Post article discussing lower-level prosecutions in Suffolk County, MA
“All those prosecutors who say this is going to endanger our communities, have they been to our communities?” said the Rev. Mariama White-Hammond (STH ’17), a pastor and activist in Boston. “Those of us who live this reality know it’s a little more complex than the ‘lock ’em up’ policies that have been sold. I don’t believe those policies are working for our communities.”
The School of Theology appreciates and respects your tireless activism, Mariama.
Click here to read the entire article.
Professor Wariboko to Deliver 41st W.E.B. DuBois Lecture at University of Maryland, Baltimore
Walter G. Muelder Professor of Social Ethics Nimi Wariboko has been asked to deliver the 41st W. E. B. Du Bois Distinguished Annual Lecture of the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB). His lecture, titled “The Future of Du Bois: Consciousness, Citizenship and Epistemology in Africa”, is scheduled for Wednesday, November 13. The W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture Series was started by the department forty years ago to acknowledge the achievements of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the inimitable Black scholar and political activist of the early 1900s.
In his lecture, Professor Wariboko will examine how consciousness, citizenship, and epistemology combine to affect how Africans and Americans evaluate the importance of “public things” in democratic life. Congratulations to Professor Wariboko on this exceptional recognition.
To read the full lecture description, please visit the UMB website at https://africanastudies.umbc.edu/w-e-b-du-bois-lecture-series/.
Five Ways to Create an AIDS-Free World
In preparation for the annual observance of World AIDS Day on December 1, Don Messer (STH ’66, GRS ’69) wrote an article for United Methodist Insight, a forum for discerning God’s will in the United Methodist Church, which highlights ways the UMC and others might support those who’ve lived and died from the disease.
By: Don Messer (STH ’66, GRS ’69)
Several years ago I wrote a short book entitled “52 Ways to Create An AIDS-Free World” in which I argued that every person is called to take personal and social responsibility for HIV and AIDS education and prevention. The good news is that the disease is not genetic; it is completely preventable. There is no known cure or vaccine, but there are steps everyone can take to reduce and eliminate transmission of the virus. Each of us can make a difference.
Today I am not going to repeat all 52 ways—but I am going to lift up five ways that you can protect yourself and your loved ones. Five ways that will help change the course of history in the Philippines from a rising epidemic to a declining one. My goal today is to be candid, not controversial. Yet I realize that some of what I say may be upsetting to some people because of their religious, political or personal views. But stopping the epidemic requires truth-telling and honest conversation.
Hate the disease, not the people infected.
First, hate the disease, not the people infected. Too often people infected are treated as pariahs, scorned by family and friends, marginalized and stigmatized by church and society. The virus is our enemy, not the people infected and affected by the disease.
Fear and mistreatment of persons living with HIV continues to spread the disease in the world. People don’t get tested or treated because of how they think people will react. Repeatedly I have been told by people living with HIV that “worse than the disease is how people treat you.”
Just this week I read in the New York Times ( 10/27/19) about the serious outbreak of HIV in the small city of Ratodero, Pakistan. Nine hundred children have been tested for HIV. Further testing suggests that one in every 200 citizens is infected. Panic and fear are spreading. Some are claiming it is “God’s affliction” on them. One man killed his infected wife by strangling her. Another woman was tied to a tree by her family to shame her.
Continue reading here.
Assistant Professor Copeland Wins Award at CATA Conference
October 26, Rochester, NY – Assistant Professor of Theology Becky Copeland was this weekend awarded the first prize for the best paper in this year's God's Wisdom and the Wonder of Creation Conference of the Canadian-American Theological Association (CATA). Her paper, "Wells, Springs, and Commodification: Water Rights and Hagar's Tribulations," won The Jack and Phyllis Middleton Memorial Award for Excellence in Bible and Theology. Given in memory of Jack and Phyllis Middleton, parents of J. Richard Middleton, president of the Canadian Evangelical Theological Association (CETA) from 2011- 2014, essays considered for the award must address the intersection of the Bible and theology and can be interdisciplinary in nature.
Dr. Copeland's essay will be published in a forthcoming issue of the CATA Review. Congratulations to Professor Copeland on this fantastic achievement!

