Currently, Green is preparing to defend her dissertation this summer toward completion of her doctorate in religious education and practical theology in the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University. Her work brings together theological ethics and critical pedagogy in interdisciplinary research on liberative education for marginalized populations.

In particular, Green focuses on theological education in contexts of confinement, an area she was drawn to as the result of her work in women’s prisons. For the past two years, she has directed the Certificate in Theological Studies Program at Arrendale Prison for Women, a collaborative project among Emory’s Candler School of Theology and three other Atlanta seminaries.

“What my students [at the prison]have shown me is that theology is—in their words—a matter of life and death,” said Green, who taught in the program for five years before being appointed director.

“Religious language often gets co-opted by our criminal justice speech. Words like ‘redemption’ and ‘transformation’ come to mean something very specific in a prison. And what I’ve seen is that theology is able to provide spaces and resources to critically engage these concepts—to discern and distinguish between God’s redemptive reality for the world and what the systems of the world make us think.”

Theological education offers a kind of liberation, Green contends. She argues in her dissertation that when we analyze, engage, and confront theological discourse, we grow in our ability to critically engage with other systems and structures—such as the criminal justice system.

“Liberation is different from freedom. Freedom is a state of being, but liberation is a process,” said Green. “In my students’ case, there is ‘freedom’ as in being released from prison, but there is also freedom as a state of mind, a sense of agency—and that can be actualized inside. In their study of theology, they have found ways to do that.”

“What my students [at the prison]have shown me is that theology is—in their words—a matter of life and death . . . Theology is able to provide spaces and resources to critically engage these concepts—to discern and distinguish between God’s redemptive reality for the world and what the systems of the world make us think.”Green has also served as associate director of Theological Education Between the Times, a project funded by the Lilly Endowment, and was assistant director of the Youth Theological Initiative at Emory’s Candler School of Theology. She is a licensed minister in the National Baptist Convention USA.
Before beginning her doctoral studies, Green worked in business management and strategic marketing, focusing on the needs of women and families of color.

She will complete her degree program in June and join the GRE faculty for the 2019-20 academic year.

“Jesuit pedagogy is deeply committed to social justice and to pushing the boundaries of what we mean by religious education, which is why I was drawn to Fordham,” she said.

“I’m thrilled about getting to continue my work on criminal justice so that we can think differently about what theological education looks like both for the church and for the broader community—especially the spaces we forget to think about.”

— Joanna Mercuri, GRE ’19

Alshorman is the first student in Fordham’s Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education who is also a Muslim imam. Every Tuesday at 5 a.m., he leaves his home in Lake County, Florida. Several hours later, he lands in LaGuardia Airport. From 5 to 9 in the evening, he sits in a Rose Hill classroom and learns about religious education. From 9 at night to 2 in the morning, he studies in the Walsh Library with his 20-pound backpack, loaded with textbooks and snacks. And when the library closes at 2 a.m., he returns to the airport and heads back to Florida, to his full-time job as an Imam at the Islamic Center of South Lake County, and to his wife and their four children.

“It’s tough,” Alshorman said. “But one of my professors at Fordham once told me, ‘Maybe God has chosen you to do this.’”

He explained that Imam means “leader” in Arabic. “To be an imam means you are the leader of your community. You are the leader of your mosque. You are a spiritual leader—a mentor.”

An Evolving View of Islam

Alshorman was born into a Muslim family in Jordan. When he was a teenager, his father suggested that his son become an imam, just like him. Alshorman agreed.

He spent his twenties studying Islam. In the 2000s, he earned a bachelor’s degree in Islamic law, a master’s degree in the Holy Quran, and certification as an imam and Islamic studies teacher in Jordan. In 2014, he received a Ph.D. in Islamic studies from the Graduate Theological Foundation in Mishawaka, Indiana. Today, Alshorman is a 39-year-old imam at the Islamic Center of South Lake County in Clermont, Florida—a post that helps fill the shortage of imams in the U.S.

His years of education have helped him serve as an imam in both his native Jordan and multiple mosques in Florida for the past two decades. But perhaps most importantly, he said, they’ve vastly altered his perception of Islam. He realized what he’d seen growing up didn’t match his now-enlightened interpretation of the Quran. One example is gender segregation. The separation of women and men in mosques is a tradition inherited from the Byzantine empire, he said—not an actual rule in the Quran.

“This is the way we grew up: ‘Islam says this is forbidden,’” Alshorman said. “But when you go deeper, Islam doesn’t say that.”

“This is the reason I keep studying—to teach people real Islam. To teach people what God, or as we say in Arabic, Allah, really wants … There is a difference between religion and habits, cultures, and traditions.”

‘Religion Without Education is Miseducation’

Now Alshorman, a GRE doctoral student in religious education, wants to pass on his knowledge to the next generation of Muslims.

“I believe a religion without education is miseducation,” he said.

Last year, he officially began classes at the Rose Hill campus. One course will help him better nurture the faith of Muslim children and teenagers in his mosque, he said. Another gave him a better understanding of the history of religious education from the biblical and apostolic periods to the present. Now he’s learning how to design a curriculum in religious education.

“When I get back to my community [in Florida], everything I learn here at Fordham—I teach to my community,” Alshorman said.

In Florida, Alshorman is not only an imam, but also a co-founder of the Interfaith Council of Lake County, an organization established three years ago to bring people from all religious backgrounds together—Muslims, Christians, Jews, Unitarian Universalists, Baha’is, and others.

‘Brothers and Sisters’

“[Fordham] teaches me a lot about other religions and to understand other religions,” Alshorman said. “Y’know, I think of them [interfaith council members]  as my brothers and sisters. Even when I have a personal occasion, I invite them. And they come.”

Someday, Alshorman wants to be a religious education university professor in the U.S. or Jordan. Part of that stems from his love for the Quran. Some of his favorite parts of the book are the sections on how to speak kindly to people.

“How to be truthful, how to say good words—to speak good with people,” he explained, thumbing through a few Arabic verses on his smartphone.

“[I want to teach people] the right Islam—how to be a true Muslim, how to be a true believer, how to have peace, how to live with every other kind of people,” Alshorman said. “We are human beings. We are brothers and sisters.”

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.”

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.”