Sam Hamilton-
Poore, director of the Program in Christian Spirituality and assistant professor of Christian Spirituality, wrote two articles that appear in the Spring 2009 edition of Hungryhearts, a quarterly journal published by the PC(USA) Office of Theology and Worship: “Space and Time for Breathing” and “Touching the Web of Life: An Ecology of Christian Prayer.” Hamilton-Poore preached on Oct. 11 at the Seventh Avenue Presbyterian Church in San Francisco, and led a two-part series on Christian spirituality at the Lafayette-Orinda Presbyterian Church on Nov. 8 and 15.
He will present “Building ‘Open Spaces’: Spiritual Formation for Life, Faith, and Ministry as Judicatory Leaders” for the 2009 Western Area Staff Conference, a continuing education conference for PC(USA) Middle Governing Body staff to be held in December at the Mercy Center, Burlingame, Calif. Hamilton-Poore’s book, Earth Gospel: A Guide to Prayer for God’s Creation, has been recommended by editors of the Sierra Club’s “The Green Life,” and was featured in Publishers Weekly. He is under contract with Upper Room Books to produce a companion volume to Earth Gospel.
Charlene Jin Lee, director of Student Formation and assistant professor of Christian Education, gave a set of lectures titled “Christian Education as Sacramental Praxis” as part of a continuing education series for Korean American Presbyterian pastors in Southern California. In September, she spoke at First Presbyterian Church of Garden Grove, Calif., on the role of theological education in cultivating the future church. She presented a paper as a panelist for “Living Out the Gospel,” a symposium sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Asian American Christianity, in November. Jin Lee’s current writing projects include “A Poetics of Religious Education: Understanding the Church’s currere as a Complicated Conversation” for Journal of Curriculum Theorizing.
Elizabeth Liebert, was installed as dean of the Seminary and vice president for Academic Affairs on Oct. 4 in the presence of the Board of Trustees and the Seminary community. Her essay, “Ignatius of Loyola, the Spiritual Exercises” appeared in Christian Spirituality: The Classics, ed. Arthur Holder (Routledge, 2009). In May, Liebert gave the Daniel Nelson Lectures at the Omaha Seminary Foundation. In June, she led a retreat for the Presbytery of St. Augustine and gave lectures at Riverside Presbyterian Church in Jacksonville, Fla. She co-led an eight-day retreat on the Psalms in Santa Cruz, Calif., in July.
Gregory Love, associate professor of Systematic Theology, has recently published Love, Violence and the Cross: How the Nonviolent God Saves Us Through the Cross of Christ with Cascade Books/ Wipf and Stock Publishers. In the book, which is written for pastors as well as seminary students, Love criticizes the penal substitutionary theory of atonement for its problematic portrayal of God’s character, and for the way it functions to support human violence. However, the alternative views of salvation offered by such critics as Marcus Borg are also problematic, for they erase the central message of the gospel: That God in and through Jesus effects a world-changing salvation. Going beyond these two alternatives, Love presents five models for understanding how a nonviolent God saves us through Jesus’ actions, including through the events of Good Friday. Also on the ways atonement models may function negatively for victims of violence, Love published “A Model of Damaging Self-Sacrifice, or An Event of Abyssal Compassion? Rita Nakashima Brock and Anthony Bartlett on Abelard and the Cross of Christ” in Theology as Conversation: The Significance of Dialogue in Historical and Contemporary Theology (Eerdmans, 2009). Love published three theological essays for the popular Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary series (Vol. VII), as well as three for Lectionary Homiletics. Love won a grant from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and was a colloquium participant in Washington, D.C., from June 15-19 for discussions on the Church’s wartime and postwar response to the Holocaust. On Oct. 23-25, Love was the speaker for Calvary Presbyterian Church’s all-church retreat on the topic, “Surrounded by Grace.” At the American Academy of Religion conference in Montreal in November, he elivered a paper to a joint session of the Christian Spirituality Group and the Colloquium on Violence and Religion, titled “Trauma, the Cross, and the Christian ‘Virtue of Self-Sacrificial Love’: Is Girard a Help, or a Problem?”
Christopher
Ocker, professor of Church History, was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study of the University of Constance, Germany, last summer, participating in the university’s “Center of Excellence: Cultural Foundations of Integration.” While in Germany, he conducted research on communication and conflict before and during the early Reformation. In July, he presented a paper before the Institute called “Religious Networks and Conflict Communication,” which surveyed communication genres and the adaptations of theological ideas in routine conflicts over monasticism before the Reformation. In June he conducted a workshop on “Jews, Friars, Religious Networks, and Conflict Communication” at the School for Jewish Studies, Heidelberg, and participated in a colloquy on “Confessional Plurality as Communicative Mover” in the department of history of the University of Graz, lecturing on “Religious Networks and Communication of Conflict: Two Cases Involving Friars.” Before going to Germany, Ocker gave a presentation to the Pacific Coast Theological Society in April, treating problems with the concepts of “Renaissance and Reformation.” At the annual meeting of the Western Region of the American Academy of Religion in March at Santa Clara University, he responded to presentations by Gary Macy (Santa Clara), Daniel Joslyn- Siemiatkoski (Church Divinity School of the Pacific), and Elissa McCormack (Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology) on “Power Relations in Christian History: Issues of Race and Gender.” Ocker’s contribution to the new Cambridge History of Christianity, volume 4: Christianity in Western Europe, c. 1100-1500 appeared this summer. His chapter offers an overview of “The Bible in the Fifteenth Century.”
Eugene Eung-
Chun Park, the Dana and Dave Dornsife Professor of New Testament, wrote three exegetical articles, “Matthew 10:24- 39,” “Matthew 10:40-42,” and “Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30” for Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (forthcoming in 2011). Park presented a paper, “Telling as a Critique?: Matthew’s treatment of the massive infanticide by Herod as a paradigmatic case of the abuse of imperial power” at the IASACT Conference held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong July 9–10. The proceedings of the conference will be published by Philip Wickeri and Pushpa Joseph as editors. He also gave a three-part lecture series on “Apocryphal Literature in Early Christianity” in October and November at First Presbyterian Church of Burlingame, Calif.
Lewis Rambo, the Tulley Professor of Psychology and Religion, has been serving as the interim director of the Doctor of Ministry Program since January 2009. Rambo was presented with the Sarlo Excellence in Teaching Award by the Graduate Theological Union at the GTU Commencement in May. The award recognizes the values of interreligious sensitivity and commitment, interdisciplinary approach and content in teaching, sensitivity to ethnic and cultural diversity, and creative classroom pedagogical methods and performance. He presented a paper on conversion at the North Park Theological Seminary conference on conversion in Chicago in September. He is completing work on the Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion (co-edited by Charles Farhadian). Comprising more than 30 articles about the nature of religious and spiritual transformation, the book will feature various academic disciplines (such as anthropology, history, psychology, sociology, etc.) as well as articles about conversion in diverse religious traditions (including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Confucianism, Daoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, new religious movements, indigenous religions, etc.). Several of the contributors from this volume, including Rambo, gave papers at sessions on “Rethinking Conversion” at the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in Denver in September. Rambo is in his 25th year as editor of Pastoral Psychology, which seeks to bring the resources of psychology and the human sciences to the practice of pastoral care and counseling and to scholarship in pastoral theology.
Judy Yates Siker,
professor of New Testament and vice president of SFTS Southern California, was in Jerusalem in July as a fellow of the Christian Leadership Initiative, sponsored by the Shalom Hartman Institute of Jerusalem and the American Jewish Committee. She and 11 other fellows studied and dialogued with professors from Hebrew University, as well as professors and rabbis from across Israel about the central issue of Jewish ethics and faith. In November, she attended the national meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, where she serves as chair of the Early Jewish/ Christian Relations section. She also completed an article on Anti-Semitism for a forthcoming book, Dictionary of Scripture and Ethics, edited by Joel Green. Closer to home, Judy preached at a number of Presbyterian churches in Southern California throughout the summer and fall. She was a participant in the Theological Education Emphasis weekend at Second Baptist Church in Los Angeles as well as guest preacher for Second Baptist on Sept. 27. In October, Siker spoke at the Western National Leadership Training Conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo., where she gave a lecture and workshop on “The Theology of Hope.” In late October, she was guest lecturer at UCLA on the topic of the “History of Christianity.” In November she offered a lecture series at Grace Presbyterian Church in Long Beach entitled “What a Difference a Lens Makes,” a look at the impact of culture on New Testament interpretation. She was also a keynote speaker for an educational event for Korean pastors and church leaders, sponsored by KPC and Hanmi Presbytery, on the topic of the “History of Preaching in the Reformed Tradition.”
R. Scott Sullender,
associate professor of Pastoral Counseling, led a retreat for the VA Chaplains on Sept. 17 in Palo Alto. The 24 chaplains, representing a variety of faith traditions, minister to both hospitalized veterans, and also to the current returning war vets injured mentally and physically in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. Sullender is an authority on loss, grief and trauma, which was the subject of a standing room only D.Min. class at SFTS in the summer. Loss, grief and trauma are the themes of an upcoming special issue of Pastoral Psychology that he is editing, under Editor Lewis Rambo.
