BUSTH Professor Dana Robert Receives Boston University William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professorship
The following is an excerpt from BU Today’s article “William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professorships Honor Mark Grinstaff, Gary Lawson, and Dana Robert” by Joel Brown, featuring Truman Collins Professor of World Christianity and History of Mission and Director of the Center for Global Christianity and Mission Dana Robert, published on April 14, 2022. Click here to read the full article.
“One of the things I’m excited about is that I’ll be the only Warren chair actually teaching what William F. Warren taught,” Dana Robert says, sitting in her book-lined office at the School of Theology. “He came here and taught mission, and then he taught world religions. He was a mission theologian.”
Mindful of the connection, she even went to Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge a few years ago and found Warren’s grave and those of several of his BU colleagues, along with that of his wife, Harriet Merrick Warren. Harriet Warren was a founder of the Methodist Woman’s Missionary Society at about the same time BU was founded and Warren installed as its first president.
Robert draws a direct connection between those 19th-century Methodists who founded BU and the concept of the “beloved community” and another famous denizen of the School of Theology, Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS’55, Hon.’59).