Mission Yearbook: Final Sprunt Lecture looks at Bible and present tricksters

“What happens when the God of liberation simply does not liberate?” asked Rev. Dr. Miguel A. De La Torre during the fourth and final installment of the 115th Sprunt Lectures recently held at Union Presbyterian Seminary. 

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De La Torre’s lectures began with a screening and discussion of the film, “Trails of Hope and Terror” that he helped make with his wife and son. The film documents the horrible conditions that Latinx immigrants face while crossing the border between Mexico and the United States. De La Torre is professor of Social Ethics and Latinx Studies at Iliff School of Theology in Denver.

His second lecture followed up on the topics of the film with an introduction to the immigration crisis and the third, titled “A Rejection of Eurocentric Thought,” deconstructed the philosophical underpinnings of that crisis.

His final lecture focused on an ethical response in the midst of such a crisis and within a view of history as one of chaos, not one of order and progress. De La Torre acknowledged the vulgarity of his title: “Ethics Para Joder,” while also espousing its real-world applications and its biblical foundation through the stories of tricksters who overturn the systems that oppress them and others.

“Why the vulgarity? Well, what’s really vulgar is how Latinos are forced to live in this country,” he said. “That’s what should be offensive, not the word that I’m using, and that’s where we need to put the focus.”

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The Rev. Dr. Miguel A. De La Torre delivered this year's Sprunt Lectures at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia.

“Struggle with me as I struggle with God, to try to see the face of God in the midst of really horrible things that are going on all around us,” invited De La Torre, explaining how for 10 years he read the Bible cover to cover annually and found that sometimes God was not present and sometimes, God even sent evil spirits. His real-life encounters echoed this absence of hope and presence of evil as he taught theology students through contextual learning trips.

De La Torre says he began to struggle when he took a group of students to Cuernavaca, Mexico. When his group encountered a row of dirt huts along an abandoned train station, one student reflected on the horrible conditions of the people living there but detected a glimmer of hope in a little girl’s eyes. Growing up as he did in a tenement apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, where his bathroom was a tin can, De La Torre had a more sober understanding of the girl’s future trajectory through a life of poverty than the student did. He wished to reject the tendency to idealize exceptional stories like his own escape from poverty’s downward pull. He described his response to the student’s need to see a hopeful future for a child as an “epistemological meltdown,” which led to his rejecting hope.

The mental reaction he had to his student’s statement of faith was the thought that the young girl in their gaze “was born into poverty, and she will die in poverty, as will her children and her children's children.” He felt for his student and other Christians who project an easy hope, that “the only reason you see hope in her eyes is so that you don't have to do anything about it. You could just trust God to take care of it.”

“What we are doing,” he explained in the articulation of hope, “is we are justifying and visualizing and ignoring all the others who don’t make it, who remain oppressed, who die in hopelessness.”

In Spanish, the word for hope is “Esperanza,” which comes from the root word meaning “to wait.” De La Torre focuses not on the outcome we wait for, but on the process.

“The ethics that I’m trying to do is, what do I do while I am waiting, as opposed to what may come after the waiting?” he said.

“You see, it doesn’t matter if God keeps God’s promises or not; that’s not what defines my faith. My faith is not transactional,” he said: “I will pray even when God doesn’t keep God’s promises, and I will pray to hold God accountable to what God is supposed to do.”

Beth Waltemath, Communications Strategist, Interim Unified Agency, PC(USA) (Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Jake Souder, Program Assistant, Educational Resources, Interim Unified Agency  
Roger Spalding, Prospect Research Analyst, Stewardship & Funds Development, Administrative Services Group (A Corp) 

Let us pray:

Loving God, lower our gaze so that we might see you face to face. Amen.

Mission Yearbook: ‘Trails of Hope and Terror’ film sparks lively discussion at Sprunt Lectures at Union Presbyterian Seminary

The Rev. Dr. Miguel A. De La Torre has written dozens of books, but it took making a film alongside his son and his wife to reach the crowds he’s yet to reach through his books.

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The Rev. Dr. Miguel A. De La Torre

De La Torre, professor of Social Ethics and Latinx Studies at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, recently delivering the 115th Sprunt Lectures at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. Before his first talk, De La Torre screened the award-winning 2017 film “Trails of Hope and Terror.” Watch the trailer here. His initial Sprunt Lecture is here.

“Nobody reads my books except other scholars. You’ve got to be a bit of a theological nerd,” De La Torre told those gathered in Lake Chapel at Union Presbyterian Seminary and online. “More people saw the film in the first week than the people who have read all my books put together.”

“How do we as scholars find new ways to communicate the work we’re doing? Making this film was part of that venture,” he said, urging the gathered scholars and others to “think of creative ways to get this information out to a wider audience that desperately needs it. Making complex issues accessible is the job of the true scholar.”

Filmmakers interviewed immigrants seeking to cross the border between Mexico and the United States as well as people who oppose such attempts. Among those interviewed are a pair of Presbyterian pastors: the Rev. John Fife, the emeritus pastor at Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona, Moderator of the 204th General Assembly (1992) and a co-founder of Sanctuary movement and organizer of No More Deaths; and Fife’s successor at Southside, the Rev. Alison J. Harrington.

After the screening, De La Torre highlighted some of the scenes the film depicts, including a Border Patrol agent kicking over jugs of water placed in the desert to aid migrants. In another scene, an agent dumps the water on the ground, then challenges the filmmakers by asking them, with cameras rolling, if they’d left the water. “If we said yes, they’d arrest us for littering,” De La Torre said.

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At one point, U.S. authorities did detain De La Torre’s team. They’d found a bale of marijuana nearby and threatened team members with arrest on charges of drug trafficking. “I went to their leader and said, ‘I am a professor at a seminary and these students will be pastors one day,’” he said. “I think you may want to check with your supervisor before you charge us with drug trafficking.”

Meanwhile, it was time for a worship service, and De La Torre and his students invited the authorities to join them. Instead, they held the team for a few more hours until word came from headquarters in Washington to let them go — but not before De La Torre’s identification had been run through a law enforcement database.

Perhaps not coincidentally, De La Torre has seen his tax returns audited every year since.

“I told John Fife that, and he said, ‘Welcome to the club,’” De La Torre said.

“Sometimes I just break down” while viewing his own film, he said, “and it’s kind of embarrassing. It still breaks my heart, especially after I got to know these people.”

During a question-and-answer session following his talk, De La Torre said filmmakers have recouped most of the money invested in the film, and plan to make the film accessible to the public.

“For some people, it’s better to embrace ignorance than it is even to watch a film,” he said. “I have had people watch the film and then threaten me because it rocked their self-identity. I believe my job as a scholar is to provide the means by which to raise consciousness.”

De La Torre is teaming with the Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb to edit a book scheduled for publication in September. “Tear Down These Walls: Decolonial Approaches to Barriers and Liberation” will have a look at “walls around the world,” De La Torre said. “We want the labor — we just don’t want the bodies attached to that labor.”

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Adam Slutzky,  Director, Project Delivery, Strategic Planning & Execution, Board of Pensions
Ashley Smalley-Ray, VP, Director of Compliance, Presbyterian Foundation 

Let us pray:

Loving God, you created us for life together. Help us create life-giving patterns of community. In the name of Jesus Christ, who came that we might have life in all its fullness. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - Healing the desire for truth in an age of misinformation

Sprunt Lectures address interreligious wisdom in the ‘post-truth’ era

July 23, 2024

The Rev. Dr. James Thatamanil in a kafiya scarf 

given to him by an attendee of the Sprunt Lectures 

at Union Presbyterian Seminary. (Screenshot)

“What is truth?” Pilate retorted to a Jesus on trial. According to John’s gospel, Jesus had told Pilate that he came into the world to testify to the truth and to be heard by those who “belong to the truth.” Despite finding no case against him, Pilate consented to Jesus’ crucifixion. Pilate was not the first or last person with power to believe truth could be bent to human will.

How, then, are humans to resist the delusions and lies of the ego, media, politics and culture and to “belong to the truth,” as Jesus proposes?

Over the course of four lectures titled “Seeking Interreligious Wisdom in a Post-Truth Era,” the Rev. Dr. John Thatamanil, professor of theology and world religions director at Union Theological Seminary, addressed an audience in person and online at the 113th Sprunt Lectures at Union Presbyterian Seminary. He built his case on a medical model defining the diagnosis, etiology, prognosis and therapy for a contemporary existence estranged from truth.

“Our collective incapacity to agree about just what the facts are may strike us as a peculiar feature of our moment in a highly mediated, postmodern world,” Thatamanil said as he explored the most recent examples of how we have become overwhelmed by information, manipulated by social media, polarized by politics, susceptible to conspiracy theories and incalcitrant to facing inconvenient truths about the destruction of our earth.

“The post-truth problem in our time revolves around the ways in which the circulation of misinformation and disinformation does not require a central agent or a regime,” said Thatamanil, who explained how, unlike Orwell’s time, “no one compels us by brute force to accept conspiracy theories or lies.” We do so because we want to or are manipulated to want to believe the ideas of those around us as we grant social media agencies and corporations access to our habits, networks, likes and dislikes until “we know only what we want to know and come to inhabit polarized communities, each in possession of its own facts,” said Thatamanil.

In his second lecture, Thatamanil turned to etiology and how humankind came to be people who as Jack Nicholson’s character said in “A Few Good Men,” “can’t handle the truth.”

The Rev. Dr. John Thatamanil leads a compassion meditation 

practice at the end of the 2024 Sprunt Lectures at Union 

Presbyterian Seminary. (Screenshot)

“The problem is a bifurcation of mind and heart,” posited Thatamanil, encouraging us to embrace ancient wisdom and recent neuroscience that show that emotions play a role in what we know. Philosophy means “love of wisdom” which suggests that truth is born from both desiring and knowing. “If the problem is a problem of desire,” said Thatamanil, “then it will not do to treat a problem of distorted desire with the remedy of more information.”

He proposed that our religious traditions are designed to tutor the heart, not just the mind. Therefore the prognosis for humankind is good — or such was the hopeful tenor of the third lecture, which explored the sage advice and transformative practices of ancient religions through sources in the Hebrew Bible and Christian Gospels to wisdom passed down through Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana Buddhisms and the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism. All these traditions illumine a path in which distorted, self-limiting desires based on untruths can be transformed into positive, other-invested desires based on a reality rooted in relationship and an interconnected existence. “The task of human life is to be trued to the real,” said Thatamanil, who said truth is “more than a set of statements,” but reality itself: “Truth is interbeing. Truth is God.”

The final lecture centered on the therapy of desire and included a 10-minute contemplative practice of compassion meditation. Thatamanil advised that we “invest ourselves in the reclamation of our attention” so that “our desiring is not left to the mercy of others.” But he also warned that we as individuals are not isolated patients curing personal desires. “The patient in question is the entire culture,” which he described as “a set of intersecting and nested global systems that wound and traumatize persons and communities.”

“We cannot rectify public desire without surrendering the thinking/feeling binary,” said Thatamanil, calling the underlying assumption that has for centuries dominated many cultures, especially in the West, a “deficient anthropology.”

Beth Waltemath, Communications Strategist, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Today’s Focus: 113th Sprunt Lectures at Union Presbyterian Seminary

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Lucy McDermott, Mission Specialist, Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, Presbyterian Mission Agency 
Robyn McEvilla, Accountant, Central Receiving Services, Administrative Services Group (A Corp) 

Let us pray

O God, the source of blessing and abundance, help us to see that your call to mission is our opportunity to give as we have received. We ask that you would bring peace to the nation and provide for all its people. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - Sprunt Lectures opening worship lifts up conflict and confusion in the church

‘Getting along’ was ‘never the mission,’ preacher tells worshipers at Union Presbyterian Seminary

July 20, 2024

Union Presbyterian Seminary Sprunt Lecture participants 

included, from left, the Rev. Dr. John Thatamanil, the Rev. 

Dr. M. Craig Barnes and the Rev. Lori Raible.

“The early church was very accustomed to conflict, both conflict with the world around them and conflict with each other,” preached the Rev. Dr. M. Craig Barnes, interim pastor of the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, and president emeritus of Princeton Theological Seminary during opening worship of the Sprunt Lectures on Tuesday.

The 113th Sprunt Lectures of Union Presbyterian Seminary were held online and in person in Richmond, Virginia, May 6–8. Guest scholar, the Rev. Dr. John Thatamanil, professor of Theology and World Religions at Union Theological Seminary, delivered four lectures on the topic of interreligious wisdom. Along with the four lectures by Thatamanil and two worship services preached by Barnes, the three-day event will include the presentation of the Distinguished Alum award to the Rev. Jimmie Hawkins, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s director of advocacy and adjunct professor of practical theology for Union’s Charlotte campus. The Rev. Lori Raible, pastor of Selwyn Avenue Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, spoke at the alumni luncheon.

This year, the event culminated with the inauguration of Dr. Jacqueline E. Lapsley as Union Presbyterian Seminary’s eighth president on the afternoon of May 8. Lectures and worship can be viewed through Union’s website or YouTube channel.

Lapsley, who served as the academic dean at Princeton Seminary during Barnes’ tenure there, introduced him in worship, noting his storied career in churches and seminaries, where he often served for exactly 10 years, as well as his serious commitment to theological education seasoned with holy humor.

“When there was a minor conflict that I needed to attend to as academic dean,” said Lapsley, “he would say, ‘Yeah, you’ve got a cleanup on aisle 7.’”

The Rev. Jimmie Hawkins

For his sermon, Barnes centered his message on the “challenges of conflict and confusion” in the church and theological education. He chose passages of scripture that cover the split between evangelists Paul and Barnabas, as recorded in Acts 15:36–41 and Acts 16:6–10. The Bible called it a “disagreement that became so sharp that they decided to part company.” The split between Paul and Barnabas could be seen from two perspectives, according to Barnes — as a decision “to bust up the team” or an opportunity to train new leaders and expand the reach of evangelism.

Barnes admitted that his seminary class on leadership through conflict was always full, but the takeaway was often surprising for his students: “The Bible doesn’t tell us much about how to resolve conflicts, but it’s very clear in telling us not to get distracted by them,” he said.

With relatable anecdotes and signature humor, Barnes explored the effects of conflict on our leaders and institutions and the need for what he calls “Plan B theology,” a belief that it is OK to change course and permission not to be right all the time.

Barnes advised leaders of churches and seminaries and everyday followers of Christ to “be clear about your mission.”  The mission, according to Barnes, is not that we all get along, but “to glorify and enjoy God.”

“It you find that all of your energy and joy is being sucked away, trying to make sure that everyone gets along,” Barnes proclaimed as part of the good news, “you are missing the point. That was never the goal, never the mission.”

Beth Waltemath, Communications Strategist, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Today’s Focus: 113th Sprunt Lectures held at Union Presbyterian Seminary

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Jessica Maudlin, Mission Associate II, Sustainable Living & Earth Care Concerns, Presbyterian Hunger Program, Presbyterian Mission Agency 
David Maxwell, VP/Geneva Press & Church Relations, Presbyterian Publishing Corporation 

Let us pray

Gracious God, we hear your call to love our neighbors, and we know that you intend for us to care for both their physical and their spiritual needs. Help us to respond to this hungry, thirsty world with love that pours from the river of living water that you have placed in the hearts of those who believe. In the name of Jesus Christ, who is living water for our bodies and our souls. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - For the first time, Union Presbyterian Seminary will be led by a woman

Dr. Jacqueline E. Lapsley will begin her new duties on July 1

March 30, 2023

Dr. Jacqueline E. Lapsley

The Board of Trustees has named Dr. Jacqueline E. Lapsley to be the eighth president of Union Presbyterian Seminary.

As the first woman to lead the seminary in its 211-year history, Lapsley is used to being a trailblazer. She was the first woman to serve as dean and vice president for Academic Affairs at Princeton Theological Seminary, a position  she has held since 2018.

She joined the Princeton faculty in 1998. A noted Old Testament scholar who has authored or co-edited a number of works, including “Women’s Bible Commentary,” Lapsley earned her Ph.D. from Emory University, an M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, an M.A. from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her A.B. from Smith College. “My father is an alumnus of Union,” she said, “and Brian Blount has been a cherished colleague for years. I’m delighted to be succeeding President Blount as he retires; he has positioned Union so well for the future.”

Co-chairs of the search committee Dr. Steve Allred and the Rev. Lori Archer Raible said, “As Union Presbyterian Seminary is poised to engage the many significant challenges facing theological education, Dr. Lapsley brings a depth of administrative experience, a deep devotion to Christian education, and an abiding commitment to the Church. These leadership gifts will help us build a stronger community across both the Richmond and Charlotte campuses as we strive to be the church in the world.”

Dr. Brian Blount

A cradle Presbyterian, Lapsley’s bold vision for theological education is rooted in the Reformed tradition and intentionally focused on diversity. “The diversity of the world God creates, redeems, and sustains must be reflected on our campuses in order to shape leaders for the world God so loves,” noted Lapsley. Dr. Rodney Sadler, Director of Union Presbyterian Seminary’s Center for Social Justice and Reconciliation, called Lapsley “a woman of God who has a proven track record of work in racial atonement with the aptitude and attitude to lead us to a greater focus on social justice and diversity.”

The Rev. Dr. Christopher Edmonston, Board of Trustees Chair for Union Presbyterian Seminary, agreed: “Her distinguished scholarship and fresh perspective bring an inspired and wonderful direction to the seminary. She is the right leader for the years to come. I want to thank the search committee for their faithful work.”

Lapsley will begin her duties on July 1. Blount retires on June 30 after 16 years at the helm of the seminary. Blount said, “I have known Dr. Lapsley for two decades. She is poised to continue her exemplary service in theological education at UPSem. I am elated the search committee chose her and the Board named her as the next president.”

Union Presbyterian Seminary, Special to Presbyterian News Service

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Melaina Wilson, Marketing Program Assistant, Presbyterian Foundation
Miatta Wilson, Mission Associate II, Christian Formation, Theology, Formation & Evangelism, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us pray

We know that the secret of bearing fruit is abiding in Christ and he in us. Through communion, servanthood and fellowship, we benefit from Christ’s strength so that we may be able to bear fruit and be a blessing to others. Help us to serve with humility and grace. Amen.