“In most of my ministry work, I’ve worked with women because we had a really hard time getting young men to show up for anything,” said Baker, who was serving as director of campus ministry at Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pennsylvania.

He wondered if the absence of young Catholic men was a sign that the programming was not relevant in their lives.

“I simply wanted to ask—where are they and what are we doing wrong?” said Baker, who graduated this year with a doctorate in ministry from Fordham’s Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education. The hybrid doctoral program allowed him to take many of his classes online and complete the degree remotely.

“Before I started this program, it was hard for me to see the direct connections between ministry, theology, and spirituality,” he said. “These were three things that I knew were central to my work, but I couldn’t always articulate or see how they all connected.”

His doctoral thesis, “Men For and With Others: Engaging the Stories of College Men and Exploring Pastoral Postures,” aimed to examine some of the challenges of reaching college-aged men of diverse backgrounds and experiences.

The project led him to research topics in philosophy, spirituality, masculinity, gender, and feminism, along with current practices related to campus ministry in Catholic universities.

He also organized a focus group with college-aged men to develop potential interview questions for other young men who were disaffiliated from their faith. He later carried out the interviews at two Catholic campuses in the Northeast.

“I was very intentional in my work, especially in my interviews with people from some diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds,” he said. “That’s where you get into layers of privilege. Privilege isn’t just about men versus women. Privilege gets wrapped up in race, culture, and sexuality as well.”

Through the interviews, Baker learned that getting young men to participate in campus ministry was not a matter of “simply winning them over.”

Too often, he said, campus ministry is focused on “trying to deliver to people the things that we want to fill them with, [like]our preset agendas,” rather than recognizing the things that are distinctive in some young men’s lives—whether they are queer, black, atheistic, or from an interfaith background.

“We’re missing the richness of people’s lives,” he said. “We’re missing the insights and the wisdom for today’s spiritual age, which is wrapped up in the lives of young people who are already navigating a lot of challenging issues that previous generations didn’t deal with.”

Having recently been promoted to vice president for mission integration at Mercyhurst, Baker, a father of four, said he is looking forward to putting the lessons he learned about student engagement into practice in his own ministry.

“Part of what campus ministry should be able to do is serve all students regardless of their faith tradition,” he said. “I’m not here to bring my truth to students. I’m here to help them uncover their own truth. I want to make myself present to their stories and the theology and spirituality already at work in their lives.”

“Touching the Face of the Cosmos: On the Intersection of Space Travel and Religion,” was inspired by the 2015 anthology of the same name, that was edited by Paul Levinson, Ph.D., professor of communications.

In one of the day’s panels, Levinson, fellow Fordham communications professor Lance Strate, Ph.D.,and novelists Alex Shvartsman and David Walton sat for a wide-ranging discussion, “Science Fiction Looks at Space Travel and Religion.”

“As far as we can tell, we alone not only adapt our environment, we change our environment,” said Levinson. “There’s one form of literature that addresses those quintessentially human activities. That is science fiction.”

Panelists discussed works they felt most profoundly melded issues of faith and science fiction. For Walton, C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy (Scribner, 1996) —is the most provocative illustration of the intersection of faith and science. Shvartsman cited Stranger in a Strange Land, (Ace, 1987) by Robert A. Heinlein. The main character comes back from to Earth, having been raised by Martians.

“He’s been completely removed from human culture, so the book is seeing humanity through his eyes, and how he essentially starts a brand-new religion. It’s about what a religion is, and how one might be started, which I feel is both fresh and radical.”

Strate made a case for H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, in part because Wells was a student of Thomas Henry Huxley, who was known as “Darwin’s bulldog.” In the end of the story, when aliens are felled by disease, Wells speaks of “the humblest things that God, in his wisdom put upon this earth.” Strate said this was originally a reference to natural selection. In the 1953 film adaptation of the story, however a priest who is acting as a peace envoy is vaporized; an act that is treated as the aliens’ first—or original—sin. The same line of dialogue thus takes on a much more religious tone when they perish at the end.

“Religion is trying to find answers to core questions like ‘Who I am?’, ‘Where did I come from?’, ‘What is my purpose in life?’, and ‘Where are we going?” said Walton.

“These are the stories that science fiction writers grapple with whether they explicitly deal with religion or not.”

As for the genre’s effects on religion, when Star Wars: The Last Jedi came out, Strate noted that an op ed appeared in the magazine Tablet that criticized it as “Reformed Jedi-ism,” a none-too-subtle jab at Reform Judaism.

“There was something very positive that anyone could be a Jedi and be in touch with the Force. It was missing from all of Lucas’ work, but at the end of the last Jedi, they suddenly introduced this idea,” he said.

In many ways, Shvartsman said, science fiction writers are advance scouts for philosophers and religious leaders.

“If we develop interstellar flight, and humanity does spread to the stars, what will happen if the Messiah comes? Will he go around collecting people off those planets, or are people who leave Earth screwed? If we meet aliens and they’re intelligent, do they have souls?

“These are all really complicated questions, and the good thing for us science fiction writers is we don’t have to answer them. That’s not our job. Our job is to ask the question. But asking the question will give everyone else time to consider them and come up with eventual answers before the science catches up with the fiction.”

The conference also featured panels discussions “Triangulating Creed: Identifying Memories that Form Values (A Creed), which Portray a Future” and “What Little Children See in Space,” and a keynote speech, “Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?” by Guy Consolmagno, S.J., director of the Vatican Observatory.

Father Patrick J. Ryan, the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society, suggested that the collisions of various empires might have signaled, supported, and even inspired reformation in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

“Sometimes reformation has happened in reaction against colliding,” he said at the Nov. 14 lecture at the Lincoln Center campus. “At other times, the very collision of worlds has sparked reformation.”

Jerusha Tanner Lamptey, Ph.D., an assistant professor of Islam and interreligious engagement at the Union Theological Seminary, and Rabbi Daniel Polish, Ph.D., the spiritual leader of the Congregation Shir Chadash, acted as respondents to Father Ryan’s lecture.

A ‘tragic irony’

Father Ryan’s lecture, which coincided with the fifth centenary of the Lutheran reformation, took into account the reform movements that were incited by Kings Hezekiah and Josiah as well as the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah. He also explored 19^th century Reform Judaism.

“Reform Judaism enabled many hitherto purely nominal Jews or immigrant Jews to understand two basic elements of the faith, the oneness of God and the call of the chosen people to spread the light of monotheistic faith,” he said.

In the case of Christianity, Father Ryan stressed that the collisions of both empires and cultures have been significant in the Protestant reformations as well as the Anglican and Catholic reformations. He said that in the late 15^th century, Europeans first encountered new worlds in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. But the agents of the Catholic reformation were more likely to evangelize these populations than Protestants, he said.

Father Ryan emphasized that Martin Luther was, however, eager to convert Jews after becoming convinced by Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans that salvation would come to the Jews only after the evangelization of Gentiles was complete. The Lutheran reformation went down a dark path in 1543 when Luther published anti-Semitic writings that called for the violent destruction of the Jews.

“All of us who call ourselves Christian, heirs of one or another reformation—Protestant, Anglican or Catholic—need to examine our past in such a way as to liberate ourselves and our world from imprisonment in history,” he said.

Rabbi Polish likewise acknowledged Luther’s anti-Semitism, but said he was also struck by the commonalities of Reform Judaism and Lutheranism. Just as Luther rejected practices of the church that were not directly mandated in scripture, early reformers of German Judaism rejected the notion of an authoritative rabbinical interpretation of scriptures.

“Both Luther and early Jewish reformers shared commitment to the vernacular,” he said, adding that early Jewish reformers believed in a “perfect symbiosis of their German culture and their Jewish inheritance.”

Of course, this became a tragic irony in the context of the Hitler era, he said.

“The futile aspiration of early reformers to be accepted by their fellow Germans ended with the extermination of their community,” he said.

Authority in the past, present, and future

In his assessment of reform in Islam, Father Ryan affirmed that the first Muslims in seventh-century Arabia saw Islam as “a reform of what had come earlier in the Jewish and Christian tradition of faith.”

“Muhammad’s prophetic vocation made him, in the Islamic theology of history, the last of a series of great prophets and especially of those prophets who are characterized in Islamic tradition by the term rasul, messenger,” he said.

Father Ryan noted that between the 15^th and the 19^th centuries, Muslims like the Egyptian polymath Jalal al-din al-Suyuti and the northern Nigerian Usumanu dan Fodio considered themselves to be mujaddids or reformers of Islam.

Self-described Mahdis or messianic leaders also started uprisings in Sudan and Saudi Arabia in 1881 and 1979, which coincided with the start of the 14^th and 15^th Muslim centuries.

Like the leaders before them, these reformers believed that they were responding to perceived threats to the Islamic tradition by great empires or repressive regimes, Father Ryan said. There are some echoes of this as well in the ISIS insurgency that assailed Syria and Iraq after 2014.

“That the partisans of ISIS first chose to create their ideal state across the borders of Iraq and Syria demonstrates how much ISIS is a delayed response to and reaction against European colonial parceling out of the central Arab world in the aftermath of World War I,” he said.

Lamptey cited trends in recent Islamic feminist interpretations of Islam as concrete examples of contemporary Islamic reform. She said these distinct interpretations were focused on egalitarian or a recovery of “real Islamic tradition’.”

“They argue that the Quran is fundamentally egalitarian, that it depicts an undifferentiated, ungendered human creation, [and]a divine sovereignty….and that the Quran is silent on any accounts of women in a secondary status,” she said.

While the Islamic feminist pioneers recognized that there were limitations and discrepancies in these interpretations, she said they attributed them to context and human interpretation.

“They seek to address those concerns by returning to the supposedly pristine beginnings and uncorrupted sources of the Islamic tradition,” she said.

Their goal was to emphasize the dangers associated with the unrestricted Web, especially pornography and gender mixing. Rabbinic leaders discussed the internet’s encroachment on ultra-Orthodox Jewish values in an age they dubbed “a crisis of emune (faith).”

Nearly five years later, Ayala Fader, Ph.D., an associate professor of anthropology, sees this challenge in the ultra-Orthodox community as a critical moment of cultural and religious change. She said the internet has amplified existing tensions among the ultra-Orthodox. There is a sense that more and more ultra-Orthodox Jews are leaving their communities or losing faith, but continuing to practice publicly— living what they call “double lives.”

As a result, Fader said, the internet has become a nexus for these concerns, with leadership trying to control its use and those living double lives using it as a lifeline to connect with other religious doubters.

“I don’t know if so many more people are leaving than a decade earlier or if they’re just louder, more public, and more well-organized, but I think there’s a sense in the communities that this is a moment when they need to start thinking about how they’re going to move into the 21st century,” said Fader, author of Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn (Princeton University Press, 2009)

Fader has been awarded a $50,400 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her forthcoming book, Double Life: Faith, Doubt and the internet, which examines the community’s contemporary struggle to define authentic ultra-Orthodoxy.

“I was thrilled to be awarded the fellowship. It will give me sustained time to just focus on writing the book,” said Fader, who has been conducting research on this topic since 2013.

Fader first began the project by connecting with ultra-Orthodox Jews who had, during the mid-2000s, been active on the J-blogosphere, a Jewish blogging community. After interviewing members of various forums and Jewish blogging sites, she learned that the internet gave ultra-Orthodox Jews living double lives an opportunity to explore secular knowledge and activities, like going out together, and learning to bicycle and ski. It also provided a space where they could anonymously critique their communities and their rabbinic leadership.

“There are a lot of reasons that led people to lose faith in the kind of ultra-Orthodoxy they were living,” said Fader, who noted that the community had adapted to other types of technologies in the past—from newspapers and radio to television and books—without as much difficulty. “The internet is problematic because people need to use it for business. You can’t throw out the internet and you can’t keep it out. It’s also easily accessed, privately.”

Watch Ayala Fader discuss the ultra-Orthodox community’s response to “kosher” cellphones. 

To better influence their constituency to resist the lure of the internet, many rabbinic leaders are working closely with ultra-Orthodox schools.

“If you don’t agree to sign a contract when your children begin school [pledging]that you won’t have the internet at home, [and]that you won’t have a smartphone, then your kids can be denied access to school,” said Fader. “There are people who have left their communities—not because they didn’t have access to smartphones but because they didn’t feel they could continue to live these kinds of double lives.”

In recent years, there have been a few compromises allowing for some use. In 2013, the cell phone company Rami Levy Communications began selling “kosher smartphones” or rabbi-approved mobile phones that filter and block content considered immoral. Samsung, one of the world’s largest tech companies, debuted its first kosher smartphone specifically for ultra-Orthodox users last year.

Yet, despite efforts to permit some access to the Web, there is still a push to position smartphones as dangerous or contaminating objects, said Fader.

“There is a movement to not carry smartphones out in public, and an effort by educators in particular to create a sense of shame in having them,” said Fader.

She said the constant tug of war between the internet and religion isn’t limited to the ultra-Orthodox faith. It exists in many insular religious communities around the world.

“For religious communities that attempt to control their members’ access to the wider world, the internet is both an incredible tool and a dangerous piece of technology,” she said.

At a seminar held at Fordham that focused on ministering in a secular and post-secular world, participants said religious leaders working with students are facing a new set of challenges.

When MoTiv, a team of chaplains from the Netherlands, began to engage engineer students from the University of Delft in discussions about their calling in a course on personal leadership, they discovered that spirituality was important to the aspiring engineers’ identities.

“The most beautiful things happened in those three [to]four hours,” said Günther Sturms, a MoTiv coach and university Roman Catholic chaplain, who spoke on Feb. 10 at the Lincoln Center campus. “The students started to share their inner stories. They told us ‘We’ve never done this with our lecturers. We’ve never had these kinds of conversations about why we are really here.’”

The MoTiv team said they had to strip away their own ideologies in order to create a safe and sacred space in which students could talk openly about their existential perspective, and could feel nurtured.

“Our predecessor found out that religion—as it was presented at the campus—had become obsolete, so we couldn’t do anything our predecessor did before,” said Hans van Drongelen, a spiritual counselor and MoTiv trainer.

Along with the MoTiv team, Rabbi Irwin Kula, an eighth-generation rabbi and co-president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership (CLAL), shared how today’s campus ministers can steward religious heritage creatively to reach religiously unaffiliated people.

“One of the big problems that we have is the language problem,” said Kula, author of Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life (Hachette Books, 2007). “We literally don’t have a language that we can [speak], between legacy religions and the different types of secularism that we have.”

The MoTiv team said they’ve developed some practices that stem from a deep desire to understand student-engineers’ departures from established religion, juxtaposed with their apparent need to be guided by faith or inner motivations as they navigate the unknowns in their vocation.

“Maybe we need to become more curious,” said MoTiv coach Bart de Klerk. “This might be a trigger to redefine who we could be not only as [individuals], but as a community.”

Kula helps run CLAL’s Rabbis Without Borders, an innovative program training rabbis to minister outside of synagogue settings. He said that leaders who have a conservative predisposition lean toward wanting to conserve their religious tradition or else find new meaning in it. Those who he described as progressive are those typically interested in creating something new.

Both sides should be inquisitive if they want to change the religious landscape, he said.

“We need everyone in the drama,” he said. “Wherever you position yourself, if you want to grow, you better spend a lot of time on the side that you disagree with most.”

 Thomas Beaudoin, Ph.D., associate professor in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, organized the roundtable discussion in an effort to share contemporary perspectives on the issue. He said the participants’ perspectives “give us each something for our own work today.”

That was the question posed by J. Patrick Hornbeck, chair of the Department of Theology, to kick off “Dear Mr. President: Catholic Social Teaching, Civil Discourse, and the Trump Presidency,” a discussion presented by Fordham University’s Department of Theology and Office of Alumni Relations, featuring a distinguished panel of theologians, scholars, and journalists.

The question did not elicit a simple answer.

The panelists, Christine Emba, a Washington Post columnist; David Gibson, a national reporter of Religion News Service; Natalia Imperatori-Lee, Ph.D., FCRH ’98, associate professor of religious studies at Manhattan College; and Bryan Massingale, S.T.D., professor of theology at Fordham, brought complexities to the discussion— which was held at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus on Jan. 26.

Father Massingale said that truth is essential in discussing the incoming policies of President Trump, who won 52 percent of the Catholic vote, according to a Pew national exit poll. Whether Catholics identify as liberals, conservatives, Democrats, or Republicans, civil discourse cannot exist without “a respect for the truth,” he said.

Imperatori-Lee noted that Catholic social teaching also requires a place in our national discourse to speak the truth; she said this has been a challenge in recent days.

“The relationship between the way in which our nation is being governed right now and Catholic social teaching seem to be two realities that almost cannot come into dialogue at this point,” she said.

Part of seeking and finding truth is accepting the realities of the election, said Emba, who believes that one of the most important questions facing Catholics today is “what do we do next?”

“I think that the pursuit of the human good was set aside during the election in favor of partisan discussions and anger, and [pursuing]that will be the work of the administration both in the first six days and going forward,” she said.

Speaking “truth to power” 

Father Massingale highlighted the dichotomy between law and morality, and how that has contributed to polarization both within and outside of the Catholic community. But Catholics still have a moral obligation to stand up for the poor, what is sacred, and their convictions, he said.

“Trump may have won the presidency, but that election did not un-elect my conscience,” he said.

Imperatori-Lee said that in the weeks ahead, Catholics may find themselves on the “periphery” but must protect vulnerable populations. “This is our deepest Catholic calling,” she said.

Embracing Catholic social teaching in its totality

Some discussion focused on the visceral connection that many Catholics have to certain contentious issues. During the election, issues such as gay marriage and a woman’s right to choose took precedence over the totality of Catholic social teaching, which encompasses everything from the death penalty to economic and racial injustices, panelists said.

“I think that we as a church need to find a way to make all of those issues part of our identity, and also think about why we’re focusing on some and not particularly interested in talking about others,” said Emba.

Bringing all aspects of Catholic social teaching to the forefront requires a firm commitment to the Catholic tradition of civil disobedience, particularly against unjust laws, Father Massingale said.

“Civil disobedience is something that’s not only deeply American, it is also something that’s deeply Christian,” he said. “It’s founded on the basic conviction that human law is not absolute. Human law has legitimacy only when it is moral, and there’s a difference between legal legitimacy and moral legitimacy.”

As the discussion came to an end, the panelists were asked to share their vision for the future as the country prepares for the next four years under Trump’s administration.

“What I just keep saying to people is that the reason that Trump is president is because people voted for him,” said Gibson, who encouraged the audience to become proactive during a Trump presidency. He later continued, “Our problem is we’re partisan. We need to be political, and that means we work with people who disagree with us.”

On the heels of Abounding in Kindness: Writings for the People of God (Orbis Books, 2015), comes Johnson’s new book, The Strength of Her Witness: Jesus Christ in the Global Voices of Women (Orbis Books, 2016), an anthology of essays by women theologians.

“The 25 authors in this book speak out boldly about the significance of Jesus, but from very different perspectives,” said Johnson, Distinguished Professor of Theology. “The point brought to the fore is that women in different cultures have their own faith experiences, and when Jesus is seen with the female gaze, powerful new insights break forth.”

While Johnson has long called for a greater inclusion of women’s voices in theological discourse, the book was inspired by pragmatic reasons, as well.

“When teaching courses on ‘Christ in World Cultures,’ I became frustrated by the fact that the good standard books were written almost exclusively by men scholars,” she said. “Using the library reserve system I was forever supplementing these materials with essays written by women in various countries.”

The title of the book is an allusion to chapter four of John’s gospel, which tells the story of the Samaritan woman at the well. In the story, the woman has a lengthy conversation with Jesus and is moved so deeply that she leaves her jug at the well and returns to town to tell everyone about her encounter. Her testimony leads many people to believe that Jesus is the messiah.

Like the Samaritan woman, the authors featured in The Strength of Her Witness testify to the significance of Jesus, Johnson said, offering diverse perspectives on critical contemporary issues, such as racism, sexism, poverty, and the exclusion of LGBT persons.

The authors have clear recommendations for these issues: amidst racism, Christ’s message includes a “profound endorsement” of black women’s human dignity; amidst sexism, Christ’s first appearance to Mary Magdalene and his instruction to “Go and tell” provides grounds for women’s public leadership today; amidst poverty, working for justice provides a liberating force.

“The authors in this book signal the dawn of a new historical era,” Johnson said. “Their work, by turn challenging, comforting, and creative, makes clear the rich contributions that flow when women are empowered, both personally and structurally. It also demonstrates how much poorer church and society remain when only one gender speaks and decides.”

In addition to prioritizing women’s voices, the book is intentional in its inclusion of authors from around the world, Johnson said. This geographic diversity illustrates that the significance of Christ is not limited to American theology or to the Western world, but arises in and belongs to all cultures and nations.

“To bring women’s voices into a long-standing male conversation is one important effort of this book. To emphasize different cultural circumstances adds even more complexity,” she said.

Both the content of the book and its editorial arrangement have a clear implication: The message, though delivered by women, is meant for all people.

“The Samaritan woman of this book’s title did not address her words to women only, but to the whole town… women and men alike,” Johnson said. “Everyone can benefit from listening to wisdom, whatever the source. The riches in this book are not for women only, but for all who seek to immerse themselves more deeply into the meaning of Jesus Christ.”

Zoom out to see the journey as a whole, however, and you’ll find that the two paths dovetail. The army captain-turned-religious-educator is graduating with a master’s degree in religious education from the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education.

“It’s wasn’t too much of a switch,” Van Heusen said in a Skype interview from Koneitra, Lebanon. “I felt called to serve people, which is true for both.”

Van Heusen is a member of the Maronite church, an Eastern Catholic church that dates back to fourth-century Syria. Since October, she has been living and volunteering at a monastery in Koneitra to gain a deeper understanding of Maronite origins and witness how the tradition is lived out in the Middle East today.

Her focus in religious education is on youth and young adult ministries. It was from the monastery that she finished her master’s thesis, in which she develops a catechesis program for American Maronite youth.

“I love working with kids,” Van Heusen said. “The younger children understand so much. They still have that awe and wonder. And teenagers have such a thirst to learn, once you can get them talking and asking questions. Even young adults—in the parish [in Worcester, Massachusetts]where I was working, we would just sit sometimes for hours. They would tell me that it’s rare they can find someone who will just sit and talk with them like that.”

Before transitioning to parish work, Van Heusen was serving as an officer in the Army. She graduated from West Point with a bachelor’s of science in chemistry and life sciences, with a concentration in nuclear engineering. She toured widely as a military police officer, participating in force protection and peace and security operations in places such as Iraq, Guantánamo Bay, Kosovo, Israel, and Germany.

However, she couldn’t ignore a growing desire to work more closely with the Maronites, whose Syriac liturgy Van Heusen finds beautiful and “poetic.” Contemplating religious life, Van Heusen left the army and entered a Maronite convent.

She ultimately did not find her vocation with this community, and eventually relocated to Our Lady of Lebanon Maronite Cathedral in Brooklyn. It was there that she first heard of Catholic Extension, a national organization dedicated to supporting underserved mission dioceses across the country.

She was accepted to the partnership program between Catholic Extension and Fordham, which allows candidates to receive a master’s degree at no cost in exchange for two and a half years working in one of the mission dioceses.

Van Heusen will return from Lebanon in June and relocate to Darlington, Pennsylvania, where she’ll be assisting the pastor at Blessed Teresa of Calcutta Maronite Mission.

“One thing that I’ve loved about Lebanon is the hospitality of the Lebanese people, which is something they’re known for,” Van Heusen said. “I remember one of the sisters trying to teach me the word for ‘hungry’ in Arabic, and I said to her, ‘But Sister, I’m never hungry—I’m always being fed!

“The more I’ve learned, the more I’ve fallen in love with the liturgy and the spirituality.”

“He was yelling into the phone, ‘Get that woman home! How dare you—she belongs with her husband! Those children belong with their father!” MacNichol said of the experience that launched her 30-year career combating domestic violence.

“I was really shaken. I call that my baptism by fire. It was a call to make it my ministry to figure out how faith, theology, and religious communities intersect with this terrible problem.”

MacNichol, PhD, the co-executive director of CONNECT, a New-York-based nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing interpersonal violence and promoting gender justice, was the keynote speaker at the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education’s fourth annual pastoral counseling conference on May 6.

The daylong conference, “Spiritual Geographies of Domestic Violence,” discussed the stark realities of interpersonal violence and the ways faith communities can better serve survivors.

Intimate partner violence and domestic violence is defined as any actual or threatened physical, sexual, psychological, emotional, verbal, spiritual, or economic abuse that impairs one’s ability to function in a “self-determining or healthy way,” said MacNichol. Abuse is often coercive and recurrent, and the intent is for the abuser to maintain power and control.

Faith-based and religious communities could be invaluable resources for women, men, and children in crisis, but lack of education and unwillingness to confront these issues cause these groups to mishandle abusive situations, MacNichol said.

“The bible is full of family violence,” said MacNichol, who was recently named one of New York’s New Abolitionists. “We need to start asking ourselves what in our theologies promotes domestic violence? What in our interpretations of scripture and communal practices allow us to turn a blind eye to, or even rationalize and directly participate in, domestic violence?”

Many people judge the severity of abuse by whether or not the victims are physically injured, but MacNichol stressed that all types of abuse can cause lasting harm. The stress of nonphysical abuse can have dire impacts on victims’ overall health. Moreover, because the damage is not visible, victims are more likely to question whether the situation is, in fact, abusive.

“There has never been a domestic violence survivor that hasn’t said to me that the emotional abuse was worse than the physical,” she said. “You can see bruises, and they heal. But you can’t see spiritual and emotional wounds, and these take a long time to heal.”

We need to become more aware and less tolerant of invisible abuses, MacNichol said, or else a wide swath violence will remain undetected and unresolved. Faith communities have the ability—and the responsibility, she said—both to lead these conversations and to reduce inflicting further harm on victims (for instance, working to save an abusive marriage at all costs, rather than helping an abused spouse who is trying to escape).

“When you’re preaching on Sunday, think about how it might sound to someone who is struggling with violence,” MacNichol said. “We have to think about [how we]can create safe spaces where people can come for help… where we can accompany them through the maze of self-doubt and shame.”

The conference also featured Jill Snodgrass, PhD, an assistant professor of pastoral counseling at Loyola University Maryland and an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. Her talk, “The Prison Paradox: Liberated from Abuse Behind Bars,” detailed the pervasiveness of interpersonal violence and trauma histories among women in prison and the irony that these women find safety only after landing behind bars.

But the gathering at Tuff City Styles, across the street from Fordham’s Rose Hill campus, had a scholarly purpose. In keeping with the 2016 theme of the Association of Practical Theology conference, which took place April 8 through 10 at Fordham, the off-campus excursion was meant to exemplify the intersection between migration and theology, said Tom Beaudoin, PhD.

“We live in a world with boundaries and borders, which means we have to pay careful attention to who those borders benefit—who gets to have life and who doesn’t as a result of them,” said Beaudoin, the association’s president and an associate professor in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education (GRE).

“Practical theology in particular has a responsibility to be part of the living experiences of the neighborhood—to find out what brings joy and pain in the local environment, and how those are connected to the larger world… This starts with symbolically and literally going outside of the gates.”

Tuff City is an art supply store and tattoo and piercing parlor that also houses a professional recording studio. Street artists from around the world are drawn to its backyard graffiti lot, where they paint over its walls on a daily basis.

“Not engaging with and serving the neighborhood—including the arts—is to all of our detriment,” Beaudoin said. “There are resources to be shared, [and]this is a relationship that could be life-giving on both sides and utterly essential to the mission of this University.”

In addition to giving association scholars from around the country a glimpse of the Bronx, Tuff City provided an apt milieu for a talk by alumna Tamara Henry, PhD, GRE ’14, an assistant professor of religious education at New York Theological Seminary.

Against a backdrop of a graffiti murals and life-sized replicas of subway trains, Henry offered an introduction to the world of hip-hop and how urban art—including rap music, DJing, graffiti art, and breakdancing—pertains to the world of practical theology.

“Hip-hop is an art form that is hewn out of hardship—specifically, the hardships of young people in the 1970s and 80s living in the throes of postindustrial economic and social distress,” said Henry, who is the youth minister at Lenox Road Baptist Church in Brooklyn.

“These art forms become a way in which young people can ignite resistance to the moral and social ills that are plaguing their community … whether it’s pervasive forms of housing discrimination, racial discrimination, unemployment, or the dwindling quality of education systems.”

Hip-hop can serve as a pedagogical resource to illuminate themes relevant to both theology and hip-hop, such as “speaking from the margins, speaking truth to power, and contesting injustice,” Henry said.

The art form can also provide religious educators a window to their students’ world, Henry said, helping them to better understand how urban adolescents and young adults relate to their social and religious environments.

“Hip-hop has become a grammar of young people all across the nation,” she said. “We can begin to view it as an equally meaningful avenue through which religious identity is being formed and through which a new approach to religious education can be engaged.”

The conference initiated what Beaudoin hopes to become an ongoing partnership with Tuff City.

“They are interested in working with students to teach them about urban art, and I’d like to find ways to support and appreciate the Tuff City artistry within our gates and to deepen the partnership Fordham has with our neighborhood,” he said.

“There is a lot to engage with, not only around religion but also other aspects— art, urban life, racial diversity and justice, and local economic issues.”

Photo by Zenop Pomakian