This section features first-person accounts by GTU alumni about their achievements and activities, and reflections on how their GTU experience has influenced their life’s work.

 
Jill A. Schaeffer, Ph.D. ’99
Adjunct Professor, New York Theological Seminary, and Presbyterian minister

I grew up in an interfaith family of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. My grandmother’s dictum, “Love your own and respect others,” helped to shape my view of religion. That view was affirmed time and again at the Graduate Theological Union and in my professional life. In the wake of 9/11, I served as director of NYDRI (New York Disaster Recovery Interfaith Task Force) between January 2002 and April 2003. I learned how people of all faiths can come together to help others despite differences that have divided them: human beings first, religions second. 

Prior to my doctoral work at the GTU, I studied at San Francisco Theological Seminary, and even then I gravitated toward the GTU for depth of its courses and perspectives as well as the gift of its people. I developed the skill to listen with others, not just to them, an essential tool for working with people suffering the effects of the 9/11 disaster. One afternoon a coordinator from Church World Service and I were discussing how we could be of concrete service to 9/11 “victims.”  My colleague bristled, “Don’t use that word ‘victim.’  They’re not victims, they’re persons!”  My perspective changed abruptly. Where once “victims” meant “them” while “helpers” meant “us,” now I grasped our shared humanity. 9/11 affected each of us, from the pastors, parishes, social workers, counselors, and teachers suffering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder to the prison detainees working with the Islamic Circle of North America. The NYDRI board resembled the GTU in miniature: Jews, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Roman Catholics, Methodists, Orthodox, and Baptists were all represented.

While at the GTU, I took insightful seminars on Troelstch, Calvin, and Barth and participated in incredible conversations within my doctoral area of philosophical theology. Later, as pastor to an elderly congregation, I learned how to spell out hope from the pulpit in as many ways as parishioners could imagine their own futures. Cutting out doctrinal lingo in order to get real with people facing death strengthened my faith, for sure, but without the critique of theological concepts encouraged at the GTU, my service might have been more of a monologue and less of a conversation between persons and pastor.

In my current work teaching both students at New York Theological Seminary and inmates in the Master’s of Professional Studies Program at Sing-Sing Correctional Facility, my doctoral work in philosophy, particularly logic, has come in handy. At Sing-Sing, I use it to expose some stereotypical thinking among the mostly Afro-American inmates; at the seminary, I help students examine their use of religious and particularly moral language that may deny others their full humanity.  To encourage students to acknowledge and affirm their own contexts without generalizing and projecting their experiences and values onto others is a work all by itself, and one that I could not undertake without the rigor and breadth of my experience on “Holy Hill.”