Alumni News
Director of Youth and Children’s Ministries, Full-Time, UMC: Baton Rouge, LA
St. John’s United Methodist Church (Baton Rouge, LA) is seeking a full time Director of Youth and Children’s Ministries to lead and direct ministries with the next generation (birth-12th grade) and their families.
St. John’s is a friendly, loving, and generous congregation located in a diverse and growing neighborhood of south Baton Rouge, less than 10 minutes from LSU. The church has dedicated spaces for youth and children, a gorgeous and spacious campus, as well as a thrice weekly client-choice food pantry with its own vegetable garden. They are passionate about worship, spiritual growth, community outreach, and are committed to ministry with the next generation. Baton Rouge has a robust park system, incredible cuisine, a rich culture, great universities and educational opportunities, and is only an hour from New Orleans.
Required qualifications include leadership experience in youth and/or children’s ministries or an equivalent field and an understanding and endorsement of United Methodist Wesleyan Theology. Other sought-after qualifications include sharp organizational and communications skills, experience in volunteer recruitment, program development, group facilitation, and recreational play. The successful completion of a criminal background check, training in our Safe Sanctuaries policy, and the most up to date Covid-19 vaccination are required.
Salary is deemed competitive in the church/non-profit market, is commensurate with qualifications and experience, and may be in the range of $47,000 to $55,000. Position also includes benefits such as a Health Reimbursement Account, continuing education, paid time off, optional 403(b) retirement savings plan, and moving expenses.
Applications are being accepted now and will be reviewed on an ongoing basis until the position is filled. If you’d like to be a part of this strong, vibrant, and welcoming congregation, qualified applicants should submit a resume, cover letter, and the names and contact information of three references to jobs@stjohnsbr.org.
Please find the full job description here.
Part-Time Music Position, Episcopal: Cambridge MA
This is a part-time salaried position with an expected average commitment between 15 and 20 hours per week. Salary range $20,000 - $22,000.
The responsibilities of the position include: selection of sacred music for liturgies; playing the organ and piano at weekly rehearsals and Sunday services; directing and accompanying the choir; and recruiting and mentoring musicians to enhance the sacred music program of the Parish.
Saint Peter's Episcopal Church, Cambridge MA
https://saintpeterscambridge.org/
Memoir “Coming Alive” by Rev. Dr. Anne Ierardi (STH’90) Wins Next Generation INDIE Book Award
The content below is provided courtesy of Rev. Dr. Anne Ierardi's (STH’90) newsletter, which can be found here.
I was excited to learn that my book, Coming Alive, memoir, tied for first place in the LESBIAN/GAY/BISEXUAL/TRANSGENDER/QUEER+ category for the Next Generation INDIE awards. There were nine finalists, including the other winner. Robert Steele won for Banned in California Jim Foshee- Persecution, Redemption, Liberation ... and the Gay Civil Rights Movement.
My book discusses the journey I took to get me to here. I recount how I lived through the early days of gay, feminist and religious liberation. It shows how I faced cultural, gender and sexual orientation prejudices. Along the way, I survived losses in my extended Italian family and found my voice as an artist. The book shows my courage, persistence and authenticity. Coming Alive will speak to people of diverse faiths and cultural backgrounds and help them in their journeys through time, identity and development.
Get your copy from Amazon. Visit www.amazon.com/author/anneierardi.
Read more about Coming Alive from our recent news release here.
Rev. Rashad D. McPherson (STH’15) Serves as The Music Director at The Broadway League’s Black to Broadway Initiative
This press release was originally published by The City Life Org and can be found here.
The Broadway League’s Black to Broadway Initiative presents the second annual Broadway Celebrates Juneteenth concert, a free outdoor event centered around Black artistry and community. This 90-minute concert is open to all and takes place at Duffy Square in Times Square (Broadway between 45th & 47th Streets) on Sunday, June 19, 2022, from noon – 1:30pm (rain or shine). Black to Broadway thanks its sponsors United Airlines and M·A·C (Make-up Art Cosmetics) for their support of Broadway Celebrates Juneteenth.
Broadway Celebrates Juneteenth features Black performers, and allies, from a variety of Broadway shows performing their own works of art, with their song, dance, and poetry accompanied by live music provided by The Music Performance Trust Fund. In addition, the event will welcome notable guest speakers to celebrate this momentous day.
Rashad McPherson (Music Director) is a performer, musician, composer, and arranger living in New York, NY. Rashad studied music formally as a piano principle and Music Business major at Berklee College of Music (Boston, MA). Though Rashad began his recording career as a Gospel Music recording artist, the music that he has released most recently is socio-politically conscious and inspirational. Rashad is preparing to release a live, visual performance album that he recorded at a NY Soundstage. This project will feature several new songs and will be accompanied by numerous live performance videos. Rashad released the lead single from this project, “In the Stone,” this past May 20, 2022. Rashad made his theatrical music directorial debut with the world premiere of Bayard Rustin: Inside Ashland; written and directed by Steve H. Broadnax, III (People’s Light Theatre). He composed and co-arranged the score alongside Jason Michael Webb.
Rashad is a seminary-trained and ordained minister. He graduated from Boston University: School of Theology (Boston, MA) and Union Theological Seminary (New York, NY) in 2015 and 2017, respectively. Currently, Rashad serves as the Associate in Ministry and Music at Marble Collegiate Church (New York, NY). There he is the lead contributor for racial justice programming.
Read the full article here.
Prof. Luis Menéndez-Antuña Featured in BU Today
The following is an excerpt from BU Today’s article “My Coming Out Story: Luis Menéndez-Antuña” by Alene Bouranova, featuring Assistant Professor of New Testament Luis Menéndez-Antuña, published on June 8, 2022. Click here to read the full article.
STH assistant professor on creating space for exploring identity and religion
I’m not a big fan of the coming-out narrative. It assumes that you’re hiding somewhere, and then there’s a moment of enlightenment where you realize who you truly are and decide to share it with the world. I’m not saying that that’s not a good narrative. I think it works for some people. But I don’t think it works for everyone.
So for me, there’s not a coming-out narrative that I endorse for my own personal life. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t had to share my sexual preferences with the world at certain points. (The first time I said, “I’m gay,” to somebody was to a very close friend when I was 21.) I’m actually very open about it; I love talking about sex and sexuality. I’m very open professionally, personally, spiritually…you name it.
Rev. Vernon K. Walker, Jr. (STH ’16) Featured in Wbur Local Coverage
The following is an excerpt from “Cambridge nonprofit gives away ACs to help residents beat the heat,” published on Amanda Beland in Wbur Local Coverage. The original article can be found here.
Cambridge nonprofit gives away ACs to help residents beat the heat
As summer arrived early in New England over the weekend, a nonprofit in Boston handed out air conditioners and cooling kits packed with water, thermometers and adhesives meant to cool the skin.
Reverend Vernon K. Walker, senior project manager with the group, says the purpose of Sunday's event was two-fold: Cooling down residents in the short-term, and educating them on the impacts of extreme heat and climate change in the long-term.
"It's not just about giving those resources out, but we also want to empower people with knowledge so that they will not underestimate the gravity of heat waves in extreme heat," Vernon said.
Vernon said the group is concerned that communities of color are likely to be disproportionately affected by the impact of climate change. For instance, he noted many urban residents live in "heat islands," which regularly experience hotter temperatures than those with less asphalt and more trees.
"For us, climate justice is racial justice," Vernon said. "We can't separate the two because we know that racial injustice, the people that are disproportionately affected by racial injustice are the same folks that are disproportionately affected by climate injustice."
Read the full article here.
Prof. Shively T. J. Smith to Speak at White House Historical Association Event
Assistant Professor of New Testament Shively T. J. Smith will be the featured speaker for the White House Historical Association Event “Conversations Between a First Lady and a University Dean: An Untold Story.” The event will take place on Thursday, June 9 at 5:30pm ET, and interested viewers can participate by signing up through the Association’s Zoom link. The conversation will follow the decades-long correspondence between first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Howard Thurman, dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University from 1953-1962.
Mr. Nathan Turowsky (STH ’17) Publishes Commentary on Thomas and the Super-Thomists
The following is an excerpt from Mr. Nathan Turowsky's commentary “Thomas and the Super-Thomists,” published on May 24, 2022 in Where Peter Is. The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Boston University School of Theology, its employees, faculty, or students.
. . . .
Not only does Aquinas come in for feting as a uniquely correct or authoritative theologian, he is something of a Catholic cultural icon even in contexts that have nothing to do with academic theology, Eucharistic piety, or anything else for which he is widely known. I’ve heard people suggest him as an intercessor for needs ranging from minor health complaints to family members in danger of losing their faith, as if he were a medieval-Marian-piety-esque jack-of-all-trades. Even in the heyday of pre-Vatican II Neo-Scholasticism he did not have a cultus of this kind; those were the days in which church after church, at least in the United States, saw a statue of St. Anthony and a statue of St. Thérèse installed on either side of the sanctuary. A popular cultus of Aquinas is in itself welcome because it indicates a more erudite Catholic laity, but looked at in combination with the trend towards attempting to rehabilitate the “Aquinas knows best” current in Catholic philosophy, it begins to look like an awful lot is being placed on the Dumb Ox’s admittedly broad and sturdy shoulders.
Why is this? A simple answer, as I alluded to above, is that there was a time when St. Thomas’s positions and reasoning style were seen as not only examples but exemplars of sound theology, and sound theology is a major issue in the Church, especially in the corners of the Church that think that the current magisterial authorities lack it. There is a disproportionate overlap between Catholics whose experience of the faith emphasizes formal theology, those who take conservative or traditionalist views on what that theology ought to express and how it ought to express it, and those whose formation in the faith was heavily influenced by practices developed in Neo-Scholasticism’s period of dominance. All three categories also overlap disproportionately, perhaps especially among laypeople, with Catholics who are interested in serving the Church as educators or in various media apostolates.
All of this, combined with the fact that Leo XIII and Pius X really did speak extremely highly of Aquinas in terms of his quality of thought and reliability as a theological and philosophical authority, produce an intellectual environment in which St. Thomas has a stature almost like that of Karl Marx in pre-1950s leftist political thought: if he speaks directly to something, he’s right about it unless proven beyond all reasonable doubt otherwise, and if he doesn’t speak directly to something, figuring out what he might have or would have thought about it is a surefire way to arrive at a sound position. Of course, eventually even diehard communists mostly came to acknowledge that Marxism was not actually a complete worldview in and of itself that could be applied to every imaginable scholarly question, and I expect that eventually even diehard Catholic traditionalists will acknowledge this about Thomism. Certainly the fact that there is at least one dogmatically defined subject (discussed below) on which Aquinas was wrong means that it’s already impossible to elevate him quite as much as Marx used to be elevated on the far left.
So what’s the problem? Simply put, the problem is that even if Thomas Aquinas is generally a reliable key to Catholic theology and attendant areas of philosophy, and even if the sense that he’s more than that, some sort of para-magisterial authority in his own right, is probably a passing phase in Catholic thought, he still should not be overemphasized at the expense of other thinkers who might illuminate certain issues better. St. Bonaventure’s contemplations on the “book of Scripture and the book of Nature” and the relationship between Time and Eternity might, for instance, better situate environmental theology than anything in Aquinas. I have also seen those particular concepts applied to the rationales underlying the sacrament of marriage. Non-Scholastic anonymous mystical texts like The Cloud of Unknowing and Revelations of Divine Love, many of which are written in late medieval vernacular English, might provide keys to ecumenical contact with Eastern Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, and even Judaism and Islam, as might much of St. Teresa of Ávila’s body of work.
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Read The Full Article
Nathan Turowsky is a native New Englander and now lives in Upstate New York. A lifelong fascination with religious ritual led him into first the Episcopal Church and then the Catholic Church. An alumnus of Boston University School of Theology and one of the relatively few Catholic alumni of that primarily Wesleyan institution, he is unmarried and works in the nonprofit sector. He writes at Silicate Siesta.
Rev. Ellsworth D. Comins, Jr. (STH’67)
This obituary was originally published by The Daily News on June 2, 2022, and can be found here.
Hampton - Rev. Ellsworth D. Comins, Jr., 90, called home to his Heavenly Father Tuesday, May 24, 2022 – beloved husband, father, uncle, cousin, grandfather, great-grandfather, and minister to many in his lifetime, at age 90 after a valiant battle with Alzheimer's disease.
Ellsworth was born in Springfield, MA, the son of Ellsworth Davidson Comins, Sr., and Elizabeth Y. (Sherman) Comins. He was a graduate of Yale University, Yale Divinity School and the Boston University School of Theology. Ordained in the church in which he grew up, Old First Church, Springfield, he went on to serve congregational churches of the United Church of Christ in Boxford, Framingham, and Merrimac, MA. Ellsworth married his high school sweetheart Norma Wilson of Longmeadow, MA in 1954, and together they raised a daughter Jane Elizabeth Comins McCord (Thomas) of Reading, MA, and a son, James Davidson Comins (Marissa Peck) of Lafayette, CA. We share so many cherished memories of those years of camping trips and hikes, skiing, school days, Holly the Collie, Pleasure Beach, love and laughter.
Ellsworth married Denyse Lemire in 1997, and they shared over 25 wonderful years together, celebrating family gatherings and weddings, supporting Cecile Lemire (Memé) as she grew older, welcoming grandchildren and being faithful supporters at their sporting events, and even venturing to Paris.
In addition to Denyse, Jane, Jim, and their spouses, and former wife Norma, Ellsworth leaves behind Denyse's family: Stephanie Bartlett and David Scala of Rye, Geoff and Judi Youngclaus of Kingston, Jennifer and Ronan O'Doherty of Dover, and Sarah and Jeff Smith, also of Kingston. He was the proud grandfather of Kendall and Kelsey Comins, Colin Brown, Ali and Drew Peterson, Kylie and Keegan Youngclaus, Cameron Youngclaus, Sean and Meaghan O'Doherty, and Lexi and Carli Smith, and newly a great-grandfather to Jax.
Ellsworth was predeceased by his sister, Mary Louise Comins Crozier, his nephew Scott Crozier, and his great-nephew, John Povey. Also mourning his passing are Mary Lou's spouse Donna St. Germain and niece Martha Crozier Povey, great- nieces Kaity Povey and Maya, and many nieces and nephews from the Wilson family. He leaves behind also his cousins, Joni Reed of West Springfield, MA and Ruth Fields of Enfield, CT, and their families, and many cherished friends.
A talented pianist, classically trained, he loved music and delighted in sitting down at the piano, able to play almost anything he heard by ear. A scholar and teacher of theology and the Bible, history and current events, his sermons were rich indeed, even if sometimes prepared late on a Saturday night. Most beloved of all were Ellsworth's smile, sparkling blue eyes, warm heart and welcoming hugs and handshakes, and he will be sorely missed by all who knew and loved him.
Ellsworth loved all his family dearly, felt blessed to have been called to serve in ministry, and continued to serve in volunteer roles after his retirement. He enjoyed the outdoors and was a life-long swimmer.
Calling hours will be held Tuesday June 7, 2022 from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Remick & Gendron Funeral Home-Crematory, 811 Lafayette Road, Hampton. The funeral will be held at 11 a.m. on Wednesday, June 8, 2022 at the First Congregational Church of Hampton, 127 Winnacunnet Road, Hampton. In lieu of flowers, memorial gifts may be made to the First Congregational Church of Hampton, or to Partners in Health in Haiti [https://www.pih.org]. Please visit www.RemickGendron.com to view Rev. Comins memorial website, sign his tribute wall or for directions.
Rev. Leah R. Pogemiller (STH’85)
This obituary was originally published by Tribute Archive and can be found here.
Rev. Leah R. Pogemiller (STH'85)passed after a brief illness at Carle Foundation Hospital on May 31, 2022 in Urbana, IL. Eldest daughter born April 10, 1960 to Gerald E. Pogemiller and Rita R. Redfern in Iowa City, Iowa.
Leah graduated from Joliet West Township High School 1978; received a Bachelors of Science and Religious Studies at University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign 1982; and received a Masters of Divinity in Old Testament and Pastoral Counseling at Boston University School of Theology in 1985. Leah was an Ordained Deacon in Central Illinois Conference of United Methodist Church in 1984 and Ordained as an Elder in Central Illinois Conference of United Methodist Church in 1987.
She served as Pastor in the Central Illinois Conference of United Methodist Church and Illinois Great River Conference of United Methodist Church from 1985-2019. She was the Second Clergywoman in the IGR Conference appointed as a Senior Pastor of a local church.
She served as a Student Pastor at Community United Methodist Church in Brighton, MA from 1984-1985, Senior Pastor in Illinois at Verona United Methodist Church-Mazon United Methodist Church from 1985-1989. Associate Pastor at Monticello UMC from 1989-1997, Senior Pastor at Asbury UMC from 1997-2004, Clinton UMC from 2004-2011 and Champaign First UMC from 2018-2019. Leah was appointed as District Superintendent in the Vermillion District of the Illinois Great Rivers Conference of the United Methodist Church from 2011-2018.
She was involved in the following:
Trustee of the Wesley Foundation at the University of Illinois.
Pastoral Care Instructor of The School for Licensed Local Pastors for IGR Conference UMC
Director of the Board of the United Methodist Ministries Credit Union
Numerous Conference Boards and Committees of the IGR Conference of UMC
Member of The Alumni Assoc. of the University of Illinois
She was an avid fan of the Chicago Cubs and University of Illinois Sports.
Her parents and stepmom, Judy Gandy-Pogemiller, preceded her in death.
She is survived by sister, Gail (Bob) Stewart; brothers, Jay (Leann) Pogemiller and Steven (Colleen) Pogemiller; step-brother, Michael (Jessica) Gandy of Henderson, NV; nieces and nephews, Ryan (Kelly) Pogemiller, Kyle (Jeremy) Pogemiller-Kermani, Megan (Shane) Crabtree, Emily (Fiance’ John) Pogemiller, Kristina Stewart, CJ Stewart, Hannah Pogemiller and step-niece, Tori Church-Gandy; great nieces and great nephew, Abigail Pogemiller, Logan Pogemiller and Daphne Pogemiller-Kermani; and godsons, Deven and Zachary Long. She also is survived by many cherished friends.
Memorial Services will be held at Wesley Church and Foundation 1203 W. Green St., Urbana, IL 61801 on June 15, 2022 at 3:00 pm with Revs. Dan and Gay King Crede presiding. Cremation Rites were afforded and inurnment will be at Wesley Foundation Urbana with a private family service.
Memorials may be directed to The Wesley Foundation – Urbana, IL or the Preacher's Aid Society.