Dean’s Message of Welcome to the Great Joy of Learning
Welcome to Boston University School of Theology.
As you browse this website, I hope you will glimpse the extraordinary opportunities to learn here at STH. This is a great place for questing, questioning, discovering, and questing again.
I remember being a young girl when a wave of fear crossed the United States as people wondered if the educational system of the Soviet Union was out-performing ours and if U.S. children were learning enough to compete with the Soviets. This led to educational renewal across the country, but the renewal was based on competition and focused on a limited range of knowledge. Now, many years later, the Boston University School of Theology (STH) is building a partnership with a Russian school of theology, and people at STH are wrestling with sociological and theological questions about the global consequences of living in competitive cultures. An STH education invites people to question culture and create opportunities to reshape it!
I remember being a teenager when a wave of hope crossed the United States as the Civil Rights movement emerged in a highly visible way. I knew nothing of BU or STH at that time, and I certainly did not know that the School of Theology was an intellectual incubator for many of the ideas that fueled the movement. The School was founded by abolitionists, and the students and faculty in the late nineteenth century had reached out to the immigrant communities and the urban poor. The School was dubbed the School of the Prophets at that time, but prophecy never ceases. Martin Luther King, Jr., James Lawson, and many other Civil Rights leaders graduated from these halls, carrying with them a vision of equality and a mandate for courage. Now in the twenty-first century, STH is asking anew: what prophetic vision and courageous action is required of us today? An STH education asks people to open themselves to pain and poverty, injustice and war, ecological destruction, and prepare themselves to make the world a gentler home for God’s creatures!
I remember the sense of wonder that spread across the world when the system of apartheid collapsed in South Africa and Nelson Mandela emerged as the new president of the new South Africa. Wonder continued when Mandela visited the Robben Island Maximum Security Prison where he had been imprisoned for almost 20 years. Instead of berating his captors and speaking words of hatred about the old regime and the prison, he declared that this place would no longer be called a prison. From henceforth, it would be called the “Robben Island University” because the people who had been captives there were taking the lessons they had learned in that place and using them for good. What better definition of a university could one find? A university is a place where people learn from everything they study and experience, and then they use what they have learned for good. An STH education invites people to take all of their experiences—the good, bad, and indifferent—and weave them into a tapestry of goodness!
I remember another moment when, as a young teenager, I presented my science project in the state science fair. I was deeply immersed in my project, and I listened to many other young people present their projects as well. I explored the exhibits and marveled at what people had discovered. At the end of a long day, I wandered onto the back deck of the building. Standing alone, I looked up at the sky filled with stars; I was overwhelmed with a sense of God. The sheer quest for knowledge that was represented in the science fair, together with the sheer magnificence of the universe, touched me with the Holy. Years later, I walked in the wilderness late at night with my three-year-old son. The sky was ablaze with more stars than I had ever seen at one time. My son asked, “Does God live up there?” An STH education invites people to wonder and to open themselves to Holy Moments!
My colleagues and I invite you to join us in a journey of endless learning, awe, and passion so we might together offer Holy service in this Holy, hurting world.
Mary Elizabeth Moore
Dean
Published by Trustees of Boston University
One Silber Way
Boston, MA 02215
15 October 2009
Boston University
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