New Students

Alumni/ae Notes

Meadville Welcomes New Residential Students               

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From Lee

Responding to Katrina: Lessons beyond the classroom

Quite a few members of the Meadville Lombard community traveled south this summer to help with the Katrina rebuilding efforts in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Renee Zimelis Ruchotzke, a student in our Modified Residency program, went to Biloxi and Pass Christian, Mississippi, earlier this year with a group from Kent State University, when Renee was serving as Campus Minister. “This is the way the world should be: people helping people, strangers becoming friends,” Renee was quoted in the Kent State Magazine.

Eliza Galaher, (right), is a fourth year residential student who also went to Biloxi, Mississippi, with a group from the Unitarian Universalist Church of Davis, California, where she was finishing up her ministerial internship. The group kept a blog with photos and comments about the work they did and the people they encountered for members of the Davis congregation.  (full story)

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We would like to draw your attention to a few new features on our website:

• First, we have added a discussion/blog area to our site, with the hope of drawing anyone interested in Unitarian Universalism and Liberal Religion into a conversation about a new reformation in liberal religion. In the summer edition of @ML, we told you to look for ways for you to join the discussion and this was one we came up with. Part "blog," part disucssion board, it has grown to include topics beyond reformation to questions such as "Why Worship?" Michael Hogue, associate professor of Theology, has been administrating and facilitating the site and has since introduced several different themes. As are most blogs, ours is a work in progress. We are updating the look of it, as well as giving it a name that reflects the diversity of topics we hope will catch the eye of a wide cross-section of the UU community. Toward that end, we need to hear from you. Take a look at the discussion/blog section as it is, then send us an email to tell us what topics you would like to see discussed on our board. Your input is invaluable.

• Second, check out the home page of our website: we are now featuring sermons from our students, faculty, and alumni/ae with links to text or downloadable audio. The links are updated weekly, so bookmark our home page and check it often to read, or hear, sermons from UU ministers throughout the country. 

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Editions of The Unitarian Review from the 1880s
Donated by the Redmans

The Library was pleased to receive a gift of two boxes of The Unitarian Review from Mrs. Annette Redman. The journals date from the 1880s and belonged to the Reverend Ed Redman, Mrs. Redman’s late husband. Our library only had copies dating up to 1874.  Anthony Heacock, Assistant Librarian says “We are most grateful for her kind gesture, as it is particularly difficult for us to find older reference materials such as these. We are always happy to receive donations of this type, as they are invaluable sources of information to our students, ministers, and scholars within – as well as outside – our denomination.”

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New in the Stacks

Compiled by Jesse Breeden

An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, by Pankaj Mishra (Picador 2005). Mishra offers a modern approach to the ancient teachings of the Buddha, applying them to the political, religious, and economic struggles of the present and recent past, and describing his pilgrimage to various Buddhist holy sites. The book is a combination of Buddhist history and personal experience. Any student of Buddhism, humanism, or incurable curiosity will likely find this an exciting, informing, and wholly fascinating piece of literature.  (more books here)

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Learning for Life

Ferry Beach Offers Students Introspective Course
on the Arts in the Ministry

Each summer, Meadville Lombard offers one intensive course at the Ferry Beach Camp and Conference Center. Thiis past summer, John Tolley, Vice President for Enrollment & Student Services and Associate Professor of Ministry here at Meadville, taught the course "Liberal Religion and the Arts: Art as Spiritual Practice." The course was designed to provide tools for future and current ministers, all religious professionals, and lay leaders to more deeply and authentically engage their communities through the arts. We had students enrolled from our Master of Divinity program, from our Doctor of Ministry program, and at least one student from another theological school.

Tolley says the site at Ferry Beach is the “perfect setting for such an introspective week and the staff at this UU affiliated campground on the ocean in Maine were the perfect hosts.” Meadville Lombard is considering offering more than one class per summer at Ferry Beach in the future, as well as offering more courses tailored to lay leadership.

(Right: Students pose on the beach with Rev. Dr. Tolley and with the masks they created as a part of this course.)

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Faculty and Staff

The Rev. David Bumbaugh delivered a sermon and a lecture at Chautauqua Institute this summer. The lecture, “Religion and the Virtuous Public” can be previewed here.

The Rev. James Ishmael Ford has been selected as the second John Lester Young Fellow at Meadville Lombard. As the recipient of the fellowship, Rev. Ford will serve as our minister in residence this quarter. Rev. Ford has been a Unitarian Universalist parish minister since 1991. He is currently serving as senior minister of the First Unitarian Society in Newton, Massachusetts. He is the first UU minister to be acknowledged as a Zen Master, having received Dharma transmission (full authorization as a teacher) in two Zen lineages and guides the Boundless Way Zen community, an experiment in joining Unitarian Universalism and Zen Buddhism into a single activity. He is also an adjunct teacher at the Pacific Zen Institute as well as a member of both the American Zen Teachers Association and the Soto Zen Buddhist Association (in North America). He is the author of In This Very Moment: A Simple Guide to Zen Buddhism (1996/2002, Boston, Skinner House Books) and Zen Master Who? A Guide to the People and Stories of Zen (forthcoming November, 2006, Boston, Wisdom Publication). Read more about Rev. Ford in at UUWorld online. 

The Rev. Dr. Neil Gerdes spent the summer on a “mini-sabbatical” spending his time doing, among other things, “a lot of reading on spirituality.” After General Assembly in June, where he was a delegate from First Church as their Affiliate Minister, Neil went to Greece, where, he says, “a highlight was going to the island of Tinos, one of the holiest and most popular pilgrimage sites for Greek Orthodoxy because it has an icon there painted, supposedly, by St. Luke. I attended as well some services, one at the Orthodox Cathedral in Athens where the Archbishop blessed an assembly of Greek soldiers, sailors and their officers before they all marched off to Parliament. When I commented that with 97% of Greece being orthodox the separation of church and state doesn't appear to be much of an issue, my Greek friend, and professor, who was with me informed me that many believe that the Archbishop is planning on running for President of the country. Interestingly enough the Roman Catholic cathedral several blocks away had literature in its racks decrying their status as an "alien religion" with few rights.”

M. Susan Harlow is on sabbatical until the spring.

The Rev. Dr. Susann Pangerl recently returned from Babes Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania, where she was invited to present a paper at a the “Philosophy of Pragmatism: Religious Premises, Moral Issues and Historical Impact” conference. Pangerl presented “Democracy: The End of Religion? In Search of Practices for a Living tradition” which is part of a manuscript that develops a constructive theological argument using the resources of pragmatism and psychoanalysis for Unitarian Universalism religious practice. Babes Bolyai is one of the most productive academic centers in the world in the study and development of pragmatism, especially as developed at the University of Chicago in the early 20th Century. And, while there, Pangerl met with the dean and faculty of the theological department of the University and has asked to serve as a consultant in their newly-established masters program in pastoral care—and was invited to teach it.

Tom Haverly joined Meadville Lombard  as a Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies and our Coordinator of Online Education. Tom is a Chicago native, and received his MDiv from Nazarene Theological Seminary, his MLS from Syracuse University, and his PhD from Edinburgh University. He is an ordained Episcopal priest with six years of parish experience in western NY state. He has 25 years experience teaching Biblical studies (and sundry classes in religion and philosophy). For eleven of those years he was also a theological librarian at Colgate Rochester Divinity School. His reading and writing interests include Biblical studies, oral tradition and performance, communication and media studies.

Jon Rice, went to Colombia this summer, with Christian Peacemaker Team, a peace action organization sponsored by the Mennonite Church. He reports: "We stayed on the Opon River, in the countryside and, at times, in Barrancabameja, an oil town, standing with the campesinos, who are being threatened by paramilitary groups that want them off of the land. I was there for two weeks."

Joan White joined Meadville Lombard on October 16, 2006, as the Vice President for Institutional Advancement. Joan most recently served as Director of Development at Roosevelt University. She has held a number of development positions in higher education over the years, including positions at the University of Chicago, Chicago Kent College of Law, East Tennessee State University, Quillin Medical School, and Valparaiso University School of Law. She possesses a great deal of experience and a deep passion for the transforming nature of education.

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We are so very grateful to all our supporters this year. We are especially pleased to announce that our Partners in Ministry Society has nearly doubled in membership in the last fiscal year. To view the honor roll, click here.

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