Alumni News

Rev. Casey Bradley (STH ’12) Appointed to First United Methodist in Oneonta

This article was originally published by ALL Otsego on May 25, 2023 and can be found here.

The Rev. Casey Bradley of Richfield Springs has been named pastor of the First United Methodist Church in Oneonta. He will begin July 2, filling the spot held for five years by the Rev. Marti Swords-Horrell, who is retiring.

Bishop Hector Burgos appointed Bradley, 36, after the local staff-parish committee interviewed him and gave a positive review. Bradley holds a bachelor’s degree in social work received in 2009 from SUNY Plattsburgh. He graduated from the Boston University School of Theology in 2012.

Bradley then went on to serve various churches over the next decade, including Lake Luzerne Methodist Church, South Corinth Methodist Church and, most recently, the Richfield Springs Methodist Church. Bradley will be ordained at the Upper New York Conference session on June 2 in Syracuse.

“I am very excited to serve a church that is open to the community, a very affirming church. I want to take time to see what’s working and see how I can have an impact on the church and community,” he said.

Past experience with technology should serve Bradley well in his new position.

“I have had a computer in my house since I was born. I am happy to see this church has embraced it,” he said.

In fact, in his former job in Richfield Springs he had to work hard to get the church streaming.

“Closing the church [during the pandemic] helped convince people that technology is an important part of ministry,” he added.

Rev. Bradley will move to Oneonta with his wife, Heather, a clinical social worker, and their dog Cyder, a beagle mix.

Rev. Swords-Horrell arrived in Oneonta on July 21, 2018. She became the pastor of the First United Methodist Church in Oneonta and her spouse, the Rev. Dana Horrell, became pastor of the United Methodist Church in Cooperstown. The couple previously served small churches in Albany and Troy.

Rev. Marti, as she is known, said she became the “pandemic pastor.” When the church closed for eight months, she began live-streaming Sunday services from home.

“I am proud of the way we responded, using our gifts, graces and talents. Just like libraries and hospitals, we joined the digital generation. We are in a new world and we have to adapt,” she said, noting the church will continue to Zoom services.

“I want to give thanks to our staff. They did 110 percent all the time,” she continued.

Swords-Horrell also praised the church’s team of nurses, who helped members register on-line for vaccinations.

Swords-Horrell was ordained on June 11, 1983 and again on June 9, 1985 and she applied her organizational skills while here. The church hired the Rev. Paul Nixon, a pastor and consultant, to begin a long-range planning process, she explained.

Swords-Horrell said the church is particularly concerned about families with small children, who are being stretched economically and socially.

“So many who are working from home are socially disconnected. Some really don’t have a family here, so the church can become their family,” she said.

Swords-Horrell and her husband are moving to Cincinnati, Ohio to join daughter Maddie, 32, and spouse Ross, who will soon move from Austin, Texas to Ohio. Son Nathan, 35, and his wife, Rio, will remain in San Francisco.

Rev. Marti will be feted at a Farewell Luncheon on June 11, following a 10:30 a.m. service at celebrating her retirement. The First United Methodist Church is located at 66 Chestnut Street.

Rev. Dr. Carlton “Sam” R. Young (STH ’53)

This obituary was originally posted by UM News and was written by Sam Hodges, with contributions from Tim Tanton. It can be found here.

If all the Rev. Carlton R. “Sam” Young had ever done was edit The United Methodist Hymnal, he’d have a secure place in United Methodist history.

Photo by Mike DuBose, UM News.

But he did so much more.

“Young was the undisputed dean of Protestant mainline church music at the end of the 20th century as a church musician, composer, educator, hymnal editor, choral conductor and mentor,” said C. Michael Hawn, professor emeritus of church music at Perkins School of Theology.

Young died May 21 at the VA Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee. He was 97.

Survivors include his wife of 76 years, Marjorie Lindner Young; their children Robert Young, James Young, Carol Young Wilson and Richard Young, and grandchildren Brook Young, Rebecca Sword, Dyami Wilson, Lena Wilson, Kirby Wilson and Raymond Young.

Though more prominent in the 20th century, Sam Young remained productive until near the very end, and in 2022, published a memoir that attested to his sharpness and wit.

He titled the book “I’ll Sing On: My First 96 years.”

All this week, Hawn has collected tributes to Young from members of The Hymn Society in the United States and Canada.

“His contributions to hymnody and church are unparalleled,” wrote Richard Shadinger, an emeritus music professor at Belmont University in Nashville. “We will miss this great scholar and human being.”

Born on April 25, 1926, in Hamilton, Ohio, Young was such a large baby that his family nicknamed him “Samson,” which turned into “Sammy” and finally “Sam.”

His mother died when he was just 1, and his father, a Methodist pastor, entrusted his upbringing largely to grandparents.

Young started piano lessons at age 6 and went on to learn brass instruments and string bass. He became a jazz lover under the influence of an uncle who played with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra and jazz legend Bix Beiderbecke. Young played in jazz combos himself, and some of his church music would include jazz touches.

When World War II ended, Young was in the Air Force, training as a gunner. Once discharged, he took advantage of the GI Bill, earning degrees from the Cincinnati College of Music, the University of Cincinnati and the Boston University School of Theology.

A pastor friend influenced Young’s decision to become an ordained Methodist elder, but with a focus on church music. Young shared with UM News, in a 2020 interview, what the pastor told him.

“He said, ‘The music of the church is not theologically informed. It’s performance. It makes sounds, but it doesn’t relate to preaching, and it doesn’t relate to the liturgical year. You can do something about that.’”

Young would serve local churches as music minister early in his career, but soon became a multifaceted contributor to the denomination.

For example, he taught church music at Perkins, the Candler School of Theology and Scarritt College, mentoring a generation of United Methodist music ministers.

Young directed the music for nine General Conferences, including the 1968 Uniting Conference in Dallas that officially formed The United Methodist Church. From 1980 to 1990, he led the United Methodist Youth Chorale in international concert tours.

Young’s arrangements of others’ music would find their way into many songbooks and hymnals. He composed more than 200 choral and organ compositions for the church and wrote nearly 50 hymn tunes.

Some, such as “Star-Child,” text by Shirley Erena Murray, and “This Is a Day of New Beginnings,” text by Brian Wren, remain popular choices for church choirs.

Jorge Lockward, minister of worship arts at the Church of the Village in New York City, spoke this week of his admiration for Young’s compositions.

“He was able to write melodies with learned simplicity,” Lockward said.

Milestone accomplishments for Young were editing The Methodist Hymnal of 1966 and The United Methodist Hymnal, which first rolled off the presses in 1989.

With the latter, he and the hymnal revision committee had to balance the demands of various constituencies within the big-tent denomination. Newspapers reported on controversies over inclusive language and whether “Onward Christian Soldiers” should be dropped as militaristic. (It was retained.)

Young wanted to honor tradition, but he insisted on shaking things up, adding gospel music and spirituals. Duke Ellington’s sacred jazz piece “Come Sunday” made the cut, as did Spanish-language hymns.

“We’ve still got the highbrow stuff, Bach, Mendelssohn and Vaughan Williams, everything we had,” Young told The Associated Press in July 1989. “But we’ve expanded it to include that which had not been included.”

Hawn calls The United Methodist Hymnal, which is rich in liturgy as well as music, a benchmark for mainline Protestant hymnals.

“The meticulous and inclusive process made it the most ecumenically and ethnically inclusive compilation of congregational song produced during this time and arguably one of the most influential shapers of United Methodist worship practice and theology,” Hawn said.

The United Methodist Hymnal of 1989 remains the denomination’s principal songbook, used in thousands of churches across the U.S. and beyond. With cumulative sales of about 4.7 million copies, it may well be the best-selling Methodist volume of all time, said Neil Alexander, former president of the United Methodist Publishing House.

Alexander was among those reflecting on Young this week.

“Sam was a force of nature in his ability to envision and implement major projects that benefited many, a unique source of insight with his deep knowledge of hymnody, a broadly respected scholar and a stunningly gifted musician,” Alexander said by email.

After his work on The United Methodist Hymnal, Young would write “Companion to The United Methodist Hymnal,” a 940-page volume offering background on the hymns and their composers. He’s the author of several other books and scores of scholarly articles on different aspects of hymnody.

From 1994 to 2007, Young was a consultant, transcriber and editor for the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries’ Global Praise Project. He had a key role in bringing out such songbooks as “Beams of Heaven: Hymns of Charles Albert Tindley,” “Steal Away to Jesus: A Collection of Spirituals,” “Africa Praise Songbook,” “Caribbean Praise” and “Songs for the Poor: Hymns by Charles Wesley.”

“He was always out front in a prophetic way, regarding congregational song, the sung theology of the church … and so inclusive of all styles of music and the expressions of all people,” said Barbara Day Miller, associate dean emerita of worship and music at Candler.

Lockward was on staff at Global Praise and recalled Young as an important encourager to him there.

“He treated me — I was very young and very green — as a colleague from day one,” Lockward said.

Young traveled the world as a visiting professor and lecturer on church music. In his last years, when caregiving for his wife and his own multiple myeloma limited travel, he still made daily trips to the upstairs home office he called The Owl’s Nest and worked on various projects.

At age 94, and in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, he came out with a new songbook titled “Today I Live.” Even after that, he kept writing music, collaborating with Day Miller and with her Candler colleague Don Saliers, who once described Young as the “Mr. Music of United Methodism.”

Last year saw the publication of Young’s memoir “I’ll Sing On.” Hawn, in a review for UM News, said it “offers an essential perspective on developments in Protestant mainline church music within an ecumenical context.”

On April 19, a few days before his 97th birthday and a little over a month before his death, Young emailed to Nancy Graham the introduction she had requested for her forthcoming biography of the English church musician and hymnody expert Erik Routley.

“It was in great shape,” Graham said of Young’s submission.

She added that for three years, as she labored on the book, she had frequent calls and email exchanges with Young, who had known Routley well.

Young corrected her on certain things — and cheered her on.

“While there are many people I couldn’t have written the book without, Sam was one of the biggest,” Graham said.

The Young family has not settled on plans for a memorial service. But two family members shared memories with UM News.

Joan Stoutenborough, a niece, said Marjorie Lindner Young really made possible Sam Young’s career by taking the lead in raising their children. She also recalled that Sam Young would write music for family occasions, such as weddings and memorial services.

When inspiration hit, he took advantage, she added.

“He’d get up in the middle of the meal and go to the piano and work out something that was running through his head,” Stoutenborough said.

Rayda Young, wife of Sam and Marjorie’s son Richard, hopes people will recognize that the great church musician also was a man of great compassion.

Fighting tears, she said that when her and Richard’s son Raymond was diagnosed with autism at age 2, Sam Young became a champion of all people with developmental disabilities.

And he showered love on his grandson.

“He said this every time we went to Nashville. It was, ‘Raymond, we’re so glad you’re here.’”

Dr. Harry Fehr Booth (STH ’62)

This obituary was originally posted by Hoffman Funeral Home and Crematory and can be found here.

Harry Fehr Booth was born in 1927 in Boston, MA. He died peacefully in Carlisle, PA, on December 1, 2022, at home with his wife of 37 years, Ann Heermans-Booth. He was son to Edwin Prince Booth and Elizabeth Gertrude Fehr Booth; brother to Edwin Bray Booth and Francis Booth; father to David Alexander Booth, Helen Elizabeth (Nell) Booth, John Francis Booth (d. 2022), and Paul Edwin Booth; grandfather to Helen McGary Booth-Tobin, Jane West Booth-Tobin, and Elijah Aaron Afanasy Booth; and great grandfather to Elizabeth (Ellie) West Peterson. He was previously married to Jean Daniels Booth Rankin and to Martha Hopkins Booth.

He studied Classics and Philosophy at Harvard College (AB 1949). He studied social ethics at Boston University School of Theology (PhD 1962).

He was a gifted musician with a fine tenor voice. As a young man he sang solo recitals, and leading roles in community opera companies. He continued to perform more casually from time to time, and a love of vocal music marked his life. Also, as a young man he was a gifted athlete who enjoyed many sports. He remained a fan, particularly of the Boston Red Sox, to the end.

His teaching career was defined by long service to Dickinson College, from 1964 until his retirement in 1993. Though trained in theology, his approach to the study of religion was encompassing, cosmopolitan, and multi-disciplinary. A care for social ethics, exemplified in his admiration for Dietrich Bonhoeffer, lent coherence to his wide-ranging interests. He was a beloved teacher and colleague whose most celebrated courses involved religious themes in literature, history, and the arts. He loved collaboration with colleagues across the campus, and cherished team-teaching in thematic courses across the arts and sciences. He and Ann spent two happy years leading Dickinson’s program at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England.

He was a notable conversationalist—quick, amiable, insightful, and generous. In retirement he sustained weekly conversations with two separate groups of friends. One read and discussed books from every quarter; Harry took equal delight in the books and in the friendships. The other group grappled with the dismaying politics of recent days. He happily cultivated the beauty of land and home on Ridge Drive, tending the corner of the world he shared with Ann to make it a place of welcome.

His children and grandchildren remember his steadfast, attentive, non-judgmental love.

Dr. Donald E. Jones (STH ’69, STH ’70)

This obituary was originally posted by Rose Lawn Funeral Home & Cemetery and can be found here.

Donald Edward Jones of Gulf Breeze passed away at home on Monday, Dec. 19 at age 81.

He is survived by his loving wife of 56 years, Bess Orvis Jones; children, Melodee Allmon (Joseph), Matthew Jones, and Michele Jones; brother, Richard Jones (Anniece); grandchildren, Madison Allmon, Dylan Allmon, and Caroline Broxson; special sister-in-law, Maggie Griscom (David); and numerous nieces, nephews, and dear friends.

He was preceded in death by his parents, William and Laura Ann Jones, and his beloved uncle and aunt, Lloyd and Clara Compton.

Don was born on Nov. 13, 1941 in Portsmouth, Virginia, and spent his childhood in several parts of the country before his father retired from the Navy in Pensacola. Don graduated from Escambia High School and Missouri Valley College, where he met Bess. They married on Aug. 6, 1966, in Kansas City.

A lifelong learner who was curious to his core, Don continued his education at Boston University's School of Theology and devoted his professional life to serving and helping others, first as a minister and then as a mental health counselor for more than 30 years. He believed in faith, family, and the true ability of people to learn, grow, and change for the better.

Pastoral Leaders, Full-Time & Part-Time, UMC: Mountain Sky Conference

Do you enjoy God’s creation? The Mountain Sky Conference of The United Methodist Church has towering mountains and expansive prairies. Recreational opportunities abound with many national parks and forests, world-class fishing and rafting streams, and ski resorts. United Methodists have had a faithful witness across the four-plus states of the conference (Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and one church in Salmon, Idaho), providing a grace-filled witness of God’s love for all persons through missional engagements with their communities.

We are seeking pastoral leaders interested in traditional and fresh expressions of ministry. Student pastors, and entrepreneurial and innovative spirits are welcome.

See current openings at: https://www.mtnskyumc.org/MSAopen

Please direct inquiries and resumes to Rev. Lynn Miller Jackson at lmillerjackson@mtnskyumc.org.

Settled Pastor, Full-Time, American Baptist: Madison, NH

Fulltime settled pastor position. Opening available now-June 2023. Financial information available upon request.

Contact: juliabbutler@gmail.com

Second contact person is Reverend Jim Smith (603)-819-9124, email: pastorjim@twe.com

Church is located in Madison, New Hampshire, in the Mount Washington Valley(MWV) region of Central/Eastern NH.

Church profile can be found on church website: www.themadisonchurch.org

Our church recently purchased a comfortable, older home near the church for our parsonage. The home has 4 bedrooms, an office with private entrance, 2 full bathrooms, a lovely enclosed screened porch, and a 2 car garage with an attached shed.

Jinwoo Chun (STH’01) Left His Comfort Zone to Extend Hospitality to Immigrants, Addicts, and the Previously Incarcerated

This article was originally published in focus magazine, the annual scholarly publication of the BU School of Theology, in May 2023. The full magazine is available here and this article can be found on page 23. 

God Didn't Leave Me Alone

By Steve Holt

The call to become a pastor came to Jinwoo Chun at around six years old— an age when most of his peers would have been preoccupied with the newest toy or cartoon. Chun had watched his father lead and minister to Methodist congregations of thousands across South Korea. His father’s lifestyle, one he characterized in Korean as “sharing and caring,” was most attractive—a lifestyle Chun’s father learned from his father, also a Methodist pastor.

Jinwoo Chun (STH'01)

“I can say if my father was a police officer, I probably would have dreamed of becoming a police officer at the time,” says Chun (’01).“If I became a pastor, probably I would be able to live like him. But I knew nothing about the pastor’s life at the time.”

More than four decades after that first call to ministry—romanticized as it may have been—Chun has pastored churches from Boston to Coventry, R.I., to Belfast, Maine, to Acton, Mass., where he now serves St. Matthew’s United Methodist Church as its lead pastor. It’s a congregation he says is developing a reputation for hospitality to those from all walks of life, including refugee families, individuals reentering society after incarceration, those who are LGBTQ+, and those suffering from food insecurity. His role, he says, is to help parishioners— many of whom work in academia and skew white and wealthy—exit their comfort zones and build relationships with neighbors who are hurting or marginalized.

“Sometimes I got looks from my own congregation: ‘Why is our pastor hanging out with the guys with tattoos who are swearing all the time?’ But that’s kind of normal to Jesus’s life. That became my second home.”

“The church started with a passion to do something,” he says.“My role is to transform it into something relational, so it’s not about just fulfilling needs: ‘this is something I have, and this is something you don’t have.’ [These acts of mercy are] based on Jesus Christ’s greatest commandments: loving God and loving others.”

Out of the Greenhouse

There’s a Korean word for a child being raised in a sheltered, overprotective environment that translates to “greenhouse” in English. Chun characterizes his younger years as a greenhouse, untouched by the harsher realities of the world. As a preacher’s kid, he attended megachurches his father led in mostly affluent communities in Seoul. But once he began to pursue a life of ministry and mission,“God didn’t leave me alone to continue living in the greenhouse,” Chun says. He attended Methodist Theological Seminary in Seoul, and after briefly considering a move to India to become a missionary, Chun entered the MDiv program at BU.

One of his earliest memories of stepping out of the greenhouse came during an internship at the historic Church of All Nations in Boston’s South End, where Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS’55, Hon.’59) once trained while studying at BU. One day, Chun was volunteering with the congregation’s feeding ministry and sat to eat with one of the guests—who was unhoused— only to become physically ill at the unshowered man’s stench. He left sick and in tears, ashamed of his reaction to a fellow human who God loves. His perspective expanded further when he met a young woman working through the trauma of being trafficked to a drug dealer by her father, and encountered a mother and her young son running away from an abusive father who was addicted to drugs. “Is this real?” he remembers thinking. “I thought that was only in extreme, violent movies.”

These experiences, along with gentle nudging from his mentor, Rev. Gary Shaw (’78), led Chun to consider staying in New England after graduating from BU to pursue a ministry appointment here. In 2009, he was ordained into the New England Conference of the United Methodist Church. Coming from Christianity in South Korea, where some churches had hundreds of thousands of members, Chun didn’t know if he’d mesh with New England’s smaller congregations. In the end, he says, “God really touched my heart.”

“God chose me for St. Matthew’s...to do my best to help people understand how your faith works in that process—why we are doing what we’re doing.”

His transformation didn’t end there. Chun was appointed pastor and elder at Belfast United Methodist Church in Belfast, Maine, in 2010, where, in addition to traditional preaching and counseling duties, he began attending a Narcotics Anonymous group that met in the basement of the church building. Not being an addict himself, Chun felt like an imposter at times. Still, he continued to show up, week after week, to sit with and learn from neighbors who were on their own journeys from brokenness to healing.

“I saw myself as broken,” he says. “But being broken, I had the faith and hope that they would have a different ending in their story, either on the earth or in the life beyond this life.” He never tried to get his new friends to attend services upstairs; if anything, he worked to make the congregation’s worship services more reflective of the authenticity he experienced at the NA meetings. Over five years, members of the NA community became his friends, and Chun would spend time with them outside of meetings. “Sometimes I got looks from my own congregation: ‘Why is our pastor hanging out with the guys with tattoos who are swearing all the time?’” he recalls. “But that’s kind of normal to Jesus’s life. That became my second home.”

A Home For the Marginalized

In July 2020, Chun was appointed lead pastor at St. Matthew’s United Methodist Church. Leaving the friends he’d met at NA was one of the hardest aspects of the move, he says. Every now and again, someone on his NA group chat will suddenly stop responding, and Chun knows they have succumbed to the disease they fought so bravely.

Moving to a new congregation in the middle of a pandemic presented other challenges and opportunities—beyond the implications of uprooting his family. (Chun’s wife, Hyeweon, works as  an organic chemist, and his son, Joshua, studies biochemistry at Northeastern University.) The first services Chun presided over were remote because of the COVID-19 pandemic, making group worship and congregational cohesiveness difficult. At the same time, Chun scheduled one-on-one and small group sessions with each member, where he focused on spiritual formation and relationship- building.“I think that’s one of the reasons God chose me for St. Matthew’s,” Chun says. “We had a lot of different outreach programs because they have passion for justice, and I’ve been trying to do my best to help people understand how your faith works in that process—why we are doing what we’re doing.”

St. Matthew’s United Methodist Church in Acton, Mass.

And under Chun’s leadership and inspiration, the congregation is doing a lot. Despite the relative affluence of Acton—and many of the parishioners at St. Matthew’s—the area still has plenty of opportunities for social justice work. St. Matthew’s members minister to individuals being released from prison through their WELCOMEBACKpack program, which provides bags full of everyday necessities to those who are reentering community life.As he went from room to room in the church building, putting items like toiletries, notebooks, and books in the 48 backpacks the congregation gave away in 2022, Chun says, he was reminded of the metaphorical journey incarcerated neighbors have taken to and away from prison. “I was praying for them, and I was able to participate in their hurt, their journey,” he says. Chun says he would like to now help lead the church’s new mission, outreach, and advocacy to expand beyond meeting material needs to making more relational connections, like traveling to prisons to visit inmates.

The congregation’s commitment to refugees and migrants is also near to Chun’s own heart, in part because it’s his story. Chun preaches regularly what he sees as a clear scriptural directive to welcome “strangers” and “aliens” in a foreign land and reminds parishioners that even Jesus was an immigrant. In early 2022, the congregation adopted two Afghan families who the International Institute of New England helped resettle in nearby towns. Members, including Chun, would drop by to say hello, take them out for ice cream, and generally ensure they had what they needed as they settled into their new lives in the United States. A few parishioners who work in higher education are helping an older teenager in one of the families plan for life after high school, whether that’s college or something else.

The outreach has made an impact. Last summer, after Chun dropped off an air conditioner for one of the families as temperatures soared in Massachusetts, the father sent him a text asking how old the pastor is. When they realized Chun was a year older than the Afghan father, the man started calling Chun “big brother.”

“My big brother,” Chun recalls the father writing, in broken English,“we cannot thank you enough. It’s more than just one air conditioner, it’s our heart.”

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Prof. Dana L. Robert Keynote Speaker at 14th Annual Underwood International Symposium in South Korea

On a stop on her lecture tour, Prof. Robert poses with STH colleague Prof. David Cho (third from right, middle row), PhD student Tim Shin, and former students Prof. Joohan Kim of Hanshin University, Prof. Myung Soo Park, President of the Korean Association for Political and Diplomatic History, Rev. Dr. Seung-Jung Ju, Senior Pastor of Juan Church. Also pictured are the presidents of International Association of Mission Studies, the orean YWCA, New Brunswick Seminary, the senior Pastor of Saemoonan Presbyterian Church, multiple faculty from Pyongtaek University, her friend Prof. Jinhong Kim, among others. STH alumnus Prof. Soo-Young Kwon was also in attendance.

June 2023 — William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor Dana L. Robert recently returned from a five-day trip to South Korea where she was the headlining presenter at the 14th Annual Underwood International Symposium, and the featured speaker at three educational institutions. Prof. Robert presented seven lectures at two churches and three universities as part of her tour, including Saemoonan Presbyterian Church, the oldest Presbyterian Church in Korea founded by Horace Underwood, and Yonsei University, Soongsil University, and Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary. 

In an article covering the Underwood lectures, Prof. Robert is quoted, “If Underwood were a missionary today, it would be a reciprocal missionary that moves actively around the world, rather than a one-way trip from the West to other regions.” 

Watch her keynote address from Saemoonan Church below, starting at 00:37:15.

Thank you to the Global Institute of Theology at Yonsei University for the following coverage of her lecture at Yonsei University.

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BUSTH Publishes Annual FOCUS Magazine for 2023

May 2023 – The Boston University School of Theology (STH) is pleased to announce the publication of its annual scholarly magazine, focus. The magazine’s theme this year is bridging the gap between culture, divine love, and each other. The magazine features close-ups on distinguished alumni including Spring 2023 Lowell Lecturer Dr. Bill Banfield (on our cover), interviews with new faculty members, and thought-provoking articles written by alumni, students, and faculty. The featured sermon was preached by 2022 distinguished alumnus Howard-John Wesley (STH'97), senior pastor of Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, VA.

Any questions about the magazine can be directed to sthcomm@bu.edu.

Read the full magazine here.

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