Sharing Table Fellowship
New Office of Multicultural Relations at Princeton

by Heather Roote Faller

With the rise of technology, globalization, migration, and immigration, the world is getting smaller. On a daily basis we can watch events unfolding in real time on the other side of the world via the Internet, using a computer manufactured in another hemisphere, and then discuss those events over lunch with people from another continent. More voices are entering the conversation, voices that need to be heard. But without leadership, dialogue, and a conscious effort to understand the other, this plurality of voices can fall into cacophony, and communion can break into chaos.

It is in this context that Princeton Seminary has established an Office of Multicultural Relations, the first of the Presbyterian seminaries to do so. Located in the Department of Student Life, the new office will focus on the concerns of international students, and promote campus programs relating to opportunities for and appreciation of multi- and crosscultural experiences. It will also facilitate the life and work of the racial-ethnic councils of the faculty, and assist various Seminary constituencies in providing learning opportunities regarding multicultural and racial-ethnic concerns.

Plans for an office to meet these goals have been in the works for some time. Dean of Student Life Nancy Lammers Gross remembers that former dean Jeff O’Grady made sure to highlight it in their transition meeting. “We hoped that [such an office] would make us more responsive to our mission statement regarding diversity and multiculturalism, so that we are an open place where everyone has a voice and a stake in institutional and community life,” she said.

William Shurley, former moderator of the Seminary’s Student Government and a 2007 graduate, says, “It was my experience as a student that Princeton Seminary’s diversity was a great strength. At the same time though, the great diversity among the student body sometimes led to our differences in how we experienced our socio-economic, theological, racial, and gender backgrounds becoming divisive.”

The Reverend Victor Aloyo (M.Div., 1989), formerly director of vocations, will lead the new office. Aloyo’s whole ministry has been marked by working among people from a variety of cultures, from pastoring a multilingual church in Brooklyn to serving as program director of the Hispanic/Latino(a) Leadership Program (HLP) under the auspices of the Center of Continuing Education. He came to Princeton as a student seeking just such experiences of cultural richness. “I needed to experience theological education in a culture other than my own,” he said. “I needed to experience diversity of thought, and I needed a whole different understanding of the church.” Aloyo grew up in Brooklyn, and said that at PTS he met people from Washington, Florida, Texas, and Ohio, and “their stories opened my eyes to the reality that the world is bigger than Brooklyn.”

The Seminary’s strategic plan takes this reality into account: the world is bigger than Brooklyn, and bigger than Princeton, and bigger than the United States. Christianity, too, is expanding beyond the borders of the “global North,” that is, Europe and the U.S. Also, the center of gravity of the faith is shifting to the “global South,” that is, to Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The strategic plan affirms that the Seminary’s mission is to prepare men and women for ministry, and that the context of ministry has changed, requiring “more collaboration with other disciplines and engagement with other faith traditions.” As the Seminary endeavors to form “leaders who will be fluent, courageous spokespeople who are capable of being both insiders and outsiders…who do not fear, but welcome, what is unfamiliar and complex…who will challenge the sectarianism of modern intelligentsia and cultural and national xenophobia,” it must collaborate with research institutions and congregations here and abroad, and it must begin this collaboration with the students on its own campus.

The students who live, study, and worship together on the Seminary campus come from all fifty states, and this year’s M.Div. junior class alone includes fifteen new African American students, three new Hispanic students, and sixteen new Asian/Pacific Islander students, as well as twenty-two new international students representing Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Germany, Ghana, Hong Kong, Hungary, Korea, Myanmar, Russia, Scotland, and Taiwan. This diversity creates new opportunities for dialogue, for learning, and for sharing the gospel.

Aloyo acknowledges that some people may experience this larger, and at the same time shrinking, world as a threat to community and identity. He says, “The dominant culture tells us to hold on to our identity, or our integrity is jeopardized.” However, he believes multiculturalism can enhance identity and integrity, and he explains the importance of a multicultural identity: “‘Multicultural’ means all cultures, not just immigrant groups; we are all from different cultures, and our question is how to create a better atmosphere for dialogue. Whether one’s ancestry is European, South American, Asian, or African, we all have something to bring to the table.”

Shurley is optimistic about the mission and potential of the new initiative. He says, “It is my great hope that the new Office of Multicultural Relations will help remind all of us that as part of the Princeton Seminary family, our unity is in our shared faith in Jesus Christ, and that we can marvel at the myriad ways God allows us to experience that faith.”

Sharing table fellowship with those who are different was threatening to many in Jesus’ day, and is threatening to many still, but in the end, Aloyo sees a diverse community as an opportunity, and facing resistance to it as a key part of the work his office will do.

“We are called to relate to one another, and not only to relate to those who are just like us. There will always be resistance: change is taking place, and we as human beings don’t like change. I welcome that resistance as a good starting point for conversation.”

For Aloyo, resistance is not the end of dialogue, but where it begins. He welcomes conversation with alumni/ae about their experience at PTS around multicultural issues; he can be reached at multicultural@ptsem.edu.

PTS Women’s Center Celebrates 35 Years

by Kathryn Lester

When she heard Katharine Sakenfeld’s name, Freda Gardner realized that life was about to change. There would now be two female voices on the PTS faculty instead of one. Gardner, now professor emerita of Christian education, became the first female faculty member when she joined the Seminary faculty in 1961. Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, the William Albright Eisenberger Professor of Old Testament Literature and Exegesis and director of Ph.D. studies, joined the faculty in 1970 as only the second woman. That year ushered in the beginning of the 1970s, a decade that Sakenfeld called, “transformative.” One year after Sakenfeld’s arrival, these two women helped found the Women’s Center.

Last March, about sixty women gathered in the Main Lounge to celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Women’s Center. A series of events culminated in a banquet on Friday night. After an introduction by President Iain Torrance and a musical interlude by four female students, Sakenfeld was honored for her work over the past thirty-seven years.

She spoke about the changes since she started teaching at PTS. In the twenty-five years between 1945 and 1970, only fifty women received degrees; in 1970, about ten women were on campus, a number small enough that, when all the women were moved into dormitory housing, they fit on one floor of one dorm. In 1975, about fifteen women graduated, and by 1980 that number had more than doubled. The number has continued to increase. The Class of 2009 includes fifty-three women and is the first class in PTS history to have a female majority.

Despite her hesitations about teaching at a seminary, Sakenfeld said, “God was good.” At PTS, she met Gardner, an “extraordinary role model on how to survive this place and still be a prophetic witness. She would take the time and energy to raise questions and issues.” In 1971, Gardner sent a memo to then-president James McCord about beginning a formal organization for the women on campus. She believed they needed a “safe space” where they could honestly talk about current anxieties and future expectations. This marked the beginning of the Women’s Center.

The women met in the Stuart Hall basement, surrounded by sheetrock and mold. To make that space their own they decided to paint a wall mural. After discussing biblical texts with a local artist, they agreed to depict the story of Zelophehad’s daughters demanding their inheritance, a story recorded in Numbers, chapters 27 and 36. The artist designed the mural, and each woman participated in the painting. It graced the basement until Stuart Hall was renovated in 1986. In 1992, the Women’s Center moved to the lower level of the Mackay Campus Center, where it is located today.

 In 1976, Gardner and Sakenfeld taught the first women’s studies course together, initially covering issues of feminism, racism, and classism because no other course did. Later, the class narrowed its scope to focus on theological and ministerial issues in women’s studies.

Such courses were important in part because at the time women had to carve out their own way. Sakenfeld said that when she was growing up, she had no example of a female minister, or even a female Christian educator. Even after attending Harvard University Divinity School and being ordained, she had not yet met another ordained woman. And before she came to Princeton Seminary, Sakenfeld said she “hadn’t heard the word ‘feminism.’ If anyone had said that it was about being a pioneer, I would have headed in the opposite direction as soon as possible.”

Yet for many women at the time, being a pioneer was inevitable. Many would be the first women in their congregations to go to seminary, the first to lead worship, or the first to preach. Rose Mitchell, a 1977 M.Div. graduate and now vice president for Seminary relations, recalled the time she prayed at a church’s session meeting. “It got into the minutes that I was the first woman to pray at the meeting. I was not aware of that milestone, but for everyone else it was a big deal.”

The all-male norm was powerful, deep, and wide. Sakenfeld recalled a heading in the Speer Library card catalogue: “Man—including women.” She told how one day in class a professor, as usual, turned to his coed class and said, “Gentlemen, let us pray.” A voice rang out, “And women!” She recounted how Gardner, in her first years on the faculty, received an application for a faculty retreat that asked, “Which gentleman would you like to serve as your roommate?” Somehow, she did not believe they had coed rooms in mind!

And students’ attitudes weren’t always supportive. “I came to seminary feeling called, but ninety-five percent of the men thought we were here to find husbands!” said Gail Ricciuti, a 1973 M.Div. graduate. “It took twenty-four to forty-eight hours after getting here for me to become a feminist. The men took themselves for granted. They would ask women, ‘Why are you here?’ and that question made no sense to me!” Ricciuti went on to become the first female minister to be vice moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church and now teaches preaching at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School.

Some men did offer support. The Men’s Auxiliary to the Women’s Center was founded in 1975. Paul Rorem, now PTS’s Benjamin B. Warfield Professor of Medieval Church History, was a seminarian at that time and a founder of the auxiliary. They started a bake sale, to show their support. An invitation to the Seminary community read, “Having our sisters prepare [for the ministry] with us is new. This bake sale is one concrete way to show support for the only organization to support these sisters—the Women’s Center.” The sale was named the Bobby Riggs Memorial Bake Sale, in honor of the male tennis player whose career died after he boasted that he could beat any woman in tennis—and then lost a nationally televised match to Billy Jean King. One year, “in honor of our namesake,” the bake sale auctioned off a giant tennis racquet cake. Today the bake sale continues, and still offers a significant financial contribution to the Women’s Center’s outreach programs, like Womanspace, a local agency that works to end domestic violence.

The Women’s Center today wants to “give space and time for people to talk about what women face during and after seminary,” said 2007 M.Div. graduate Jessica Hauser Brydon, who served as co-moderator of the center in 2006–007, along with M.Div. senior Alisa Ferlicca. Brydon said that the center’s objectives include “bringing in other voices” through collaboration with other campus organizations. For example, in February, the Women’s Center cosponsored a worship service with the Association of Black Seminarians. There are also efforts to integrate different theological views and not worry so much about all women being on the same page. “We now have theological and denomination diversity,” said Brydon. “We can hold each other accountable.”

Like the first class in women’s studies, the women of today’s Women’s Center know that racism and sexism are part of the same matrix of patriarchal power, and both must be challenged. “I got involved as a woman who wishes to bridge gaps and heal race relations,” said Tiffani Mitchell, an M.Div. senior, who is a board member of both the Women’s Center and the Association of Black Seminarians. “I came to the Women’s Center because I am interested in women’s issues, first and foremost. But I also came because I don’t think that a campus of this size and racial diversity should have an all-white board. Period.”

Along with worship services, the Women’s Center sponsors lectures, panel discussions, monthly lunches with female faculty members, and workshops on domestic violence and other topics of concern to women.

Brydon and Ferlicca urged women on campus to participate in these opportunities, to study with “female professors…. Go hear women preach, teach, and lead in churches and social service organizations…. Be intentional about getting a field education placement where you can work with a woman. It is important to have a good support network.”

Louisa Watkins, an M.Div. middler, said that she came to seminary looking for strong female friends and teachers. “The PTS faculty, especially professors like Sakenfeld, have not shied away from these [feminist] issues. They have continually reasserted this question of being female as a question for the church. I appreciate that because I have to ask, ‘What does it mean to be female in the church? How do I interpret the Bible as a female? What is my ability to embrace the theology of the Bible and the church?’ If I overlook those questions, I am overlooking my role in the church and the church’s role in the lives of so many.”

Tiffani Mitchell said, “When I see a woman in the ministry and academy, it gives me an idea and picture of what I can do…. When I see the things that fellow students are doing with their experience as Black females, I realize that I am in the company of greatness. That is what makes me appreciate my role on campus.”

Kathryn Lester is a middler M.Div. student at PTS.

“Picturing Paradise: Textiles from the Peruvian Women of the Pamplona Alta as Visions of Hope”

The textile exhibit Picturing Paradise, on display in the Erdman Art Gallery in the fall, featured pieces from Peruvian women of the Pamplona Alta. These women live with their families in a shantytown of Lima, Peru, and create detailed, colorful textiles expressing their visions for a more hopeful future. The exhibit was a testament to their optimism and dedication to strive for better living environments for all living things.

Curator Rebecca Berru Davis, a doctoral student in art and religion at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, acquainted herself with the women of the Compacto Humano cooperative in January 2006 during a three-week fieldwork trip. The trip and the exhibit were part of Davis’s master’s program in art history at the University of St. Thomas. While Davis was visiting Princeton Seminary in March to be interviewed for a scholarship award from the Hispanic Theological Initiative (HTI), Joanne Rodriguez, HTI’s director, read about the textiles (or “cuadros”) on Davis’s résumé and was interested. She suggested that Davis submit the textiles for exhibit in the Erdman Gallery.

At her presentation for the exhibit’s opening on November 1, Davis said, “While spending time getting to know the women and their art, I was struck by the strikingly positive images they created despite their austere surroundings. I wondered how they persevered, so I asked them to draw from a past event or their present reality to illustrate what inspired or motivated them to carry on each day.”

Funded by grants from the Luanne Dummer Center for Women at The University of St. Thomas and the Society for the Arts and Religion in Theological Studies Luce Fellowship, Picturing Paradise was divided into two themes. The first, Hopes and Dreams, reflected the artists’ hopes for themselves, their families, and the world they live in. The second, works of Inspirations and Motivations, displayed their ideal communities and environments, and the resources that nature provides, sustaining them.

An album at the exhibit contained photos of the artists and their families, with statements written by each artist explaining what the artwork represented for them. For some, it was the simple hope of owning a car or a home, so they could have a family life, pursue an education, and work in a steady profession. For others, it was a dream of a peaceful world without war. Lucy Garcia Corahua wishes to live in a world without racism and violence, and where the environment is more habitable for animals, so humans can share the land with them fairly once again. Karina Heredia Vela dreams of getting an education, getting married, and having a professional career—opportunities Americans can take for granted because they’re available to so many. Vela said she hopes to use these freedoms to help “move my family forward.”

Several pieces were particularly striking. “Selva” (The Jungle), by Fidencia Linan Retuerto, depicts a jungle scene flourishing with fruit and vegetation that people climb trees to reach. This piece represents Mother Nature as the provider in a perfect world, which the Lima community depends on to sustain them. Many pieces in Inspirations and Motivations center on ideal daily life: People are riding in cars and taxis among others who are working, while some are cooking and playing. There are depictions of shopping at fruit markets, children in school, and weddings. The spirit of powerful women emanates from each textile.

In a textile by Garcia Corahua that was part of the Hopes and Dreams theme, children hold hands in a circle, playing in a landscape where elephants, giraffes, and parrots enjoy the fruit on trees. Swans float in a river, and the simple harmony of humans and nature radiates a joyful feeling. In a textile by Teresa Condori Vegu, a helicopter painted in camouflage hovers over a scene in which nurses stand outside a hospital while people shop at a fruit stand near their homes, with mountains in the background.

There is a recurring image in most of the pieces: A vibrant yellow sun shines in the blue sky, a metaphor for hope and a brighter future ahead that is within reach of the people it shines upon. Some days the sun may not come out, but it always returns, just like the optimistic spirit of these Peruvian women. In the photo album statement by curator Davis, she writes that one of the artists, Julia Linan Retuerto, told her, “I had never thought of sharing my dreams with anyone, because no one ever asked us about our dreams.” Now we know them.

—Russell Carstens

Hispanic Leadership Program Navigates New Waters with Salguero at the Helm

by Barbara A. Chaapel

The most recent U.S. census reported that by the year 2010, people of Hispanic descent will be the largest minority population in the nation. That statistic alone fuels the Reverend Gabriel Salguero’s passion for educating leaders for the Latino/a church—he prefers the word Latino/a to Hispanic to refer to a U.S.-born or U.S.-resident person of Hispanic culture—and for the church as a whole. “Either by birth or immigration, we’re looking at a Latino/a explosion,” says the new director of PTS’s Hispanic Leadership Program (HLP), “and many of them are people of Christian faith, be they Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, or evangelical.”

Salguero believes that reality sends a clarion call to the church, and the Seminary, to prepare both Latinos/as and Anglos to serve in the new multicultural communities of faith. That goal is consonant with the Seminary’s strategic plan, which emphasizes globalization, and partnerships with churches in the global South.

HLP’s new director rises to that challenge wielding a broad smile and a razor-sharp mind. He has lived the demographics. Both of his Puerto Rican grandfathers fought in World War Two as U.S. soldiers, though they spoke only Spanish. “As a young man, Dad was a heroin addict on the streets of Puerto Rico until he had a radical conversion to Jesus Christ,” Salguero says. He himself spent his early childhood in the projects of Long Branch, New Jersey, and wore clothes from the Salvation Army. For him, the church was central and salvific. Both his father and mother became Pentecostal ministers.

Not surprisingly, the church called him, too.

After college at Rutgers, Salguero went on to New Brunswick Theological Seminary for an M.Div., during which he spent a year at PTS studying ethics with Max Stackhouse and Peter Paris, both now retired.

By then, the twin values of education and faith were his lifeblood. He entered the Ph.D. program in Christian social ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York, which he is still pursuing, thanks in large part to grants from the Hispanic Theological Initiative (HTI), first funded by the Pew and Lilly Foundations and now part of Princeton Seminary. HTI provides grants, mentors, and programs to help people of Hispanic descent navigate the Ph.D. process so they can become teachers in seminaries and universities and train leaders for the Latino/a church. Hispanics represent the smallest number of faculty in the U.S. academy, and HTI is inexorably raising the numbers.

“I owe a great deal to my five years with HTI,” Salguero says. “It is a model program for how to help minority scholars. It is a credit to Princeton Seminary that we understand the necessity for it and support it.”

The HTI connection opened the door for Salguero when the Seminary’s Center of Continuing Education came looking for a new director of HLP in the spring of 2006.

Salguero describes the Hispanic Leadership Program, now in its eighteenth year, as a place where Latino/a leaders are equipped to “engage a globalized society from an informed theological and ethical perspective.” It is centrally about continuing education for church leaders, and its program is three-pronged. First, HLP offers continuing education for Latino/a clergy through events that provide theological, practical, and ministerial training. These events, like all HLP events, are offered in both Spanish and Portuguese.

Second, HLP offers a commissioned lay pastor (CLP) program—training lay people who can serve a church as pastor. This program is being broadened to include theological and biblical training for Latinos/as who have an interest in theological education even if they do not wish to serve as commissioned lay pastors. The program also fulfills the academic requirement for certification as a CLP.

“We have satellite CLP programs in Newark, Paterson, Trenton, and Philadelphia,” explains Salguero, “and our faculty includes Ph.D. students, pastors with five or more years’ experience, and seminary faculty. But they all have to be fluent in Spanish or Portuguese. That’s a big challenge!” A core value of HLP’s commissioned lay pastor program, Salguero says, is academic excellence.

The third prong of HLP is providing training for volunteer lay leaders in the church. “We offer wholistic training for the whole church—lay and clergy, paid and volunteer,” Salguero says. “If you leave any potential leaders out, you hinder the church from being all it could be. We are contextual, but also wholistic.”

HLP programs have included a workshop on immigration and an art exhibit of textiles by Peruvian women. Upcoming is a retreat for Latino/a leaders. And Salguero, along with the Center of Continuing Education’s program director Raymond Bonwell, will soon offer a certificate in not-for-profit management. “We want to teach leaders of churches, parachurch groups, NGOs, and other nonprofits how to run an organization on a small budget. How do you raise funds, write a grant proposal, build a coalition in the community?”

For Salguero, HLP is both contextual and wholistic. “We understand how culture impacts ministry, so sensitivity to cultural milieu, Hispanic and otherwise, is essential in effective ministry,” he says. “We also know that the Latino/a church has something to say to the larger church and world.”

Salguero envisions HLP developing partnerships with religious leaders from seminaries in Cuba, Argentina, Puerto Rico, Spain, and the United States, enabling them to spend time at each other’s institutions to develop “a global theology from a Latino/a perspective.”

Those who follow the development of HLP can expect to see a serious focus on issues surrounding immigration. Salguero wants HLP, and Princeton Seminary, to be a place where “we can have reasoned discussion about immigration, sanctuary, and multiculturalism. We need to educate people about the new immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, and other places in Central and South America, both the undocumented and the legal. We also need to help people understand the hybrids—the second-generation Latinos/as like me whose parents were from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and the other Caribbean islands. These bilingual and bicultural Hispanic Americans were born in the belly of the beast, in the Empire.”

Salguero continues in the cadences of the preacher: “Immigration built this nation. We will always have immigrants. If we think this is a new challenge, we have historical amnesia.”

Like many Latinos/as, from tomato-picker to professor, Salguero is a tireless worker who does many jobs. In addition to directing HLP, he is pastor of Lamb’s Church of the Nazarene, near Soho in Manhattan. The fully multicultural congregation has members who are Latinos/as, Asians, African Americans, and Anglos. He is also serving on the Equal Opportunity Employment Advisory Commission for the State of New Jersey, and is a board member of Sojourners.

In the latter role, he helped host the Sojourners Presidential Forum last June in Washington DC, attended by Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards. (You can see Salguero on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAn8UvjOol4.) The forum addressed issues of poverty, faith, and values.

“This is where my heart is,” Salguero says. “Our church leaders must learn to navigate between the public sphere and the faith community. We must teach church people to speak prophetically, to advocate for issues of biblical justice, and to do this with people of all faiths.”

Perhaps the most immediate of Salguero’s challenges is to make the PTS community aware of HLP and its mission.

“Most of our work is not on PTS’s radar screen,” he admits ruefully. “Some people at the Seminary tell me they wish we had more Latinos/as here as students and faculty. But they don’t see the Latinos/as that are part of our community—those who vacuum the Erdman Center bedrooms, or serve food in the dining room, or cut the grass on the quad. We had a leading Latino scholar in professor Luis Rivera-Pagán. We have a student group of Latino/a Americans (AL/HAS) whose former moderator is now one of the leaders of Student Government.”

Are these people visible or invisible, Salguero wonders. “Some Latino/a scholars use the Emmaus Road story as a paradigm for the Latino/a presence in the North American church. Like Jesus was among the disciples, but they didn’t see him.”

Salguero thinks that part of President Iain Torrance’s long-range vision is that Latinos/as—and others from different cultures—are seen as part of the Seminary’s mission. “That’s part of both the challenge and the promise of globalization,” Salguero explains. “To minister to and with the stranger among us, who is in reality the neighbor.”

The mission is a paradox. Salguero believes it’s a matter of understanding the two-thirds world within the first world, of training leaders from diverse backgrounds in the global North. Of learning from those formed in faith in distinct cultures.

The challenge is large. Salguero knows that HLP can’t do it all. But he believes that Princeton Seminary can be a leader in these efforts. Salguero quotes Spanish poet Antonio Machado, “Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.” Loosely translated, it means “Traveler, there is no road, the road is made by walking.”

For more information on the Hispanic Leadership Program, go to http://www.ptsem.edu/ce/HLPenespanol.php. For more information about the Hispanic Theological Initiative, go to http://www.htiprogram.org/index.htm.

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