For the Rev. Shelvis Smith-Mather, the road to the majestic halls of Oxford University took a journey of nine years and three continents. But it is, he says, a “crazy, wonderful, beautiful story.”
“And… a long story, but the details of the many stops and starts along the way speaks to how it has come together now in God’s time,” he said.
When Tony and Lilia Acabal were determining where to send their children to school, they both carried deep memories of the struggles they faced years ago as new immigrants.
An African American CREDO conference hosted by the Board of Pensions in partnership with Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary drew 17 African American ministers to Roslyn Retreat Center in Richmond, Virginia, to cultivate wholeness — specifically, their spiritual, vocational, health, and financial well-being.
Dr. Jelani Cobb, a staff writer at the New Yorker, historian and the Ira A. Lipton Professor of Journalism at Columbia University, concluded a lecture before an audience at the University of Louisville Wednesday with a personal story that may say as much about race relations in the U.S. as the hour-long lecture that preceded his story.
Michelle Phillips, the acting director for the Presbyterian Youth Workers’ Association (PYWA), said a recent face-to-face-gathering of the Christian Formation Collective was “like a spider web tingling and then finally coming to life.”
Knowing that the membership and leadership of the Association of Presbyterian Church Educators (APCE) is nearly 100 percent white — and that its organization didn’t reflect the diversity of God’s beloved community — APCE formed a task force this year to look at white privilege, racist systems and oppressive practices inherent in its structures.
Maryville College in Maryville, Tenn., long affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), has been listed in U.S. News & World Report’s “2020 Best Colleges” guidebook, ranking third overall in the “Best Regional Colleges-South” category.
