faculty news & notes

In addition to teaching eleven weeks of online Summer Greek, Margaret Aymer (New Testament) has been busy addressing the needs of the church during the crisis. She was a guest for Westminster Presbyterian Church’s “Big Questions for a Changing Church,” which is being used in Sunday school classes nationwide. She participated in “Juneteenth: A Conversation About Race and America,” sponsored by Congregation Agudas Achim, Austin. And her sermon from the Just Worship Conference last fall is in digital circulation, including being shown by Madison Square Presbyterian in San Antonio in July.

Gregory Cuéllar (Old Testament) is the author of a successful grant application to The Wabash Center of Crawfordsville, Indiana. He and his working group—composed of tenured Latinx faculty in theological education—learned in May that their Race Critical Consciousness grant proposal, “Expanding the Latinx Vision of Borderlands at ATS Member Schools,” earned $85,000 to fund their research. The impetus for the research arose from a concern that little is being offered at the Association of Theological Schools (ATS)- member schools to expand students’ vision of the U.S. southern borderlands. Says Cuéllar, “This pedagogical and epistemological gap can inadvertently perpetuate abiding racial prejudices against the many Latinx people who migrate through or who are settled in the U.S. borderlands.”

In June, William Greenway (philosophical theology) was the bi-annual speaker for the Ethics Committee at the Austin Heart Hospital, where he has served for many years, presenting on “Agape Ethics and Prejudice: The Conscious, the Unconscious, and the Structural.” In late July he gave a presentation at a nurses forum, also at St. David’s Heart Hospital, on “Agape Ethics, Moral Injury, Moral Distress.” He is completing final edits on a new book, Reasonable Faith for a Post-Secular Age: Open Christian Spirituality and Ethics (Cascade, forthcoming).

Timothy Lincoln (library) attended the Atla annual conference June 17-19. Because of the pandemic, the conference was held virtually rather than in Detroit. Atla is a membership association of librarians and information professionals, and a producer of research tools, committed to advancing the study of religion and theology.

Jennifer Lord (homiletics) preached for Andrew Frazier’s (MDiv’19) ordination at First Presbyterian Church, Ann Arbor Michigan, on March 9, 2020. In April she completed a fiveyear commitment of editorial work for Connections, the nine volume, Austin Seminary/WJK lectionary commentary for preaching and worship. Lord wrote the 2021 Celebrating the Gifts of Women Sunday PC(USA) resource, “Racial Equity and Women’s Intercultural Ministries”; she wrote “Baptismal Liminality: Corporate Worship and the Church’s Betwixt and Between” for Reshaping the Liturgical Tradition: Ecumenical and Reformed (forthcoming, OSL press); and she was a video-lecturer and panelist with Cynthia Rigby for the EBW presentation “Sacraments, Bodies, and the Future of Worship.” She also became a grandmother (pictured below with baby Sage)!

Andrew Zirschky has been called by the Austin Seminary Board of Trustees to be director of the Nashville extension of the Seminary’s Master of Arts in Youth Ministry (MAYM) program. In his new role, beginning July 1, Zirschky oversees the Nashville extension of the MAYM degree and teaches youth ministry courses. The MAYM program represents a partnership with the Center for Youth Ministry Training (CYMT), based in Nashville, where Zirschky has served as academic director since 2010. In that capacity he also served on the faculty of Memphis Theological Seminary, teaching practical theology and youth ministry. The expansion, announced earlier this year, of Austin Seminary’s MAYM degree program to include on-site instruction in the southeast region of the United States, was approved by accrediting bodies in May, making it the nation’s largest graduate program in youth ministry for mainline Christian denominations.

With a focus on youth ministry and a background in the Church of the Nazarene, Zirschky earned his MDiv and PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary where he received the Arthur Paul Rech Prize in Theology and Pastoral Ministry. He is the author of Teaching Outside the Box: Five Approaches for Opening Scripture with Teenagers (Abingdon Press, 2017) and Beyond the Screen: Youth Ministry for the Connected But Alone Generation (Abingdon, 2015). He has broad experience in the creation and administration of innovative programs, particularly in youth ministry, including two programs at CYMT for which he received Lilly Endowment grants of more than $1 million each. He has served as a consultant to Lilly Endowment and Princeton Seminary, among others. Over the past decade he has taught courses at Austin Seminary, Memphis Seminary, Princeton Seminary, and Wesley Theological Seminary.

He will continue to live in Nashville and will teach in Austin and Nashville.

Thomas Piketty, French economist and advocate for social justice, follows up on Capital (English ed., 2014) with an expansive book chronicling the interplay of wealth (capital) and the stories that elites tell to justify their relative wealth (ideology). Using the best available data, he chronicles the ebb and flow of “inequality regimes” from pre-revolutionary France to the neo-liberal resurgence of wealth inequality around the world since the 1980s. He broadens his earlier analysis to include discussions of the evolution of the economies of India, China, the Soviet Union/Russia, and Brazil. He stresses that in every case ideology mattered as much as technological change or what counts as wealth (e.g., owning financial instruments versus land ownership). While most defenses of wealth imply that the rich deserve to be well off and the poor are poor because of God’s plans or their own moral defects, Piketty’s global analysis demonstrates that large differences between the haves and the have-nots are the result of social interactions. Things could have been—and can in future—be otherwise than they are.

Piketty also documents the changing demographics of politics. Liberal parties (like Labour in the UK and the Democratic party in the USA) used to receive most of their support from relatively uneducated working people; now they are parties of the well-educated “Brahmin left” with scant support from the working classes. Parties of the right and the left seem to be satisfied with the current amount of economic inequality in their countries (perhaps echoing the position of Bernie Sanders). According to Piketty, experience demonstrates that religion can be used to defend existing inequality regimes as well as challenge them. When

Christian Britain abolished slavery, for instance, parliament compensated former slave owners for the loss of their property; the Christian abolitionists gave no thought to indemnifying former enslaved persons.

Piketty is concerned that too much inequality between the richest 10 percent and the poorest 50 percent of people within a country and globally is morally indefensible and does not promote economic growth. He worries that unjust structures are too easily perpetuated by pitting disadvantaged groups against each other (e.g., the anti- Muslim policies of the Bharatiya Janata Party in India). He concludes his book with a proposal to establish “democratic socialism.” In his scheme, the current system that sacralizes private ownership is replaced by a regime that prevents inherited wealth and class privilege from being endlessly recycled. Key features of his plan are progressive taxation on annual income and wealth, provision of guaranteed basic income, and equitable access to education. Unlike Sovietstyle communism (which failed spectacularly both from an economic and humanist perspective), Piketty’s democratic socialism insists that workers hold board seats on private corporations (on the existing German model) and that elected assemblies debate and pass taxes in a transparent manner. If all of this seems unlikely, Piketty would remind us that in 1870 Sweden had the largest gap between the rich elite and the poor masses in Europe; by 1980 it was the most egalitarian society in the world.

Piketty’s book is a stunning scholarly achievement showing that local economies have been linked for centuries and that economic arrangements are human works, not baked into creation. For Christians experiencing a pandemic that has placed racial and economic disparities under a bright light, Piketty’s book is timely reading. v

The Austin Seminary Board of Trustees took the following actions with regard to faculty at its spring 2020 meeting, May 22-23:

• Granted tenure to Gregory Cuéllar, associate professor of Old Testament, effective July 1, 2020, and approved a six-month sabbatical, August 1, 2021 – February 1, 2022

• Promoted Carolyn Helsel to associate professor of homiletics, effective July 1, 2020, and accepted her sabbatical report

• Reappointed Paul Hooker as associate dean for ministerial formation and advanced studies, effective July 1, 2020, for a renewable annual term

• Reappointed David Johnson as associate professor of church history and Christian spirituality, effective July 1, 2020, for a renewable annual term

• Accepted the sabbatical report of David Jensen

• Accepted the sabbatical report of Eric Wall.