Gallery Archives - ��Ƶ of Theology & Psychology

Underrepresented Voices Art Gallery 2024: Liminality

��Ƶ — Sat, 22 Jun 2024 14:30:12 +0000

In spring 2024, the BIPOC, Access (students with neurodiversity, chronic pain, and/or disability), LGBTQIA+, and QT BIPOC student groups collaborated to create an on-campus art show with the theme of “Liminality.”�� Ƶ students and alumni who identify as underrepresented within the context of ��Ƶ and/or within their profession had the opportunity to share their artistic and creative work together. The concept of the Underrepresented Voices art gallery began in 2023 when student groups co-sponsored the inaugural show.

Organizers described this year’s theme: “‘Liminality’ could be as broad as anything you, as an underrepresented student, would like to express about yourself. Or, it could be as specific as invisibility, minoritized experiences, subjugated knowledge, or beauty in the margins, the sacred mystery in your culture or identity, etc.” In addition to representing the BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, QT BIPOC, and Access student groups, the students who participated were also representative of the three degree programs: Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology (MACP), Master of Arts in Theology & Culture (MATC), and Master of Divinity (MDiv).��

As artist Roy Mong commented, the diversity expressed within the “Liminality” show extended to the wide variety of media and art forms represented as well.�� Artists displayed works with acrylic paint, oil paint, oil pastels, gold leaf, watercolors, cardboard, wood, and various fabrics. Some of the pieces in the show had been created as final projects for the Winter 2024 course titled “Narrative, Identity & Asian American Experiences,” taught by Dr. Jermaine Ma.

The “Liminality” show launched during spring residency, and the artists had the opportunity on Friday afternoon to share their experiences and insights with their classmates, both related to making the pieces as well as sharing them publicly. Students discussed themes such as courage and vulnerability. Artists shared their anxieties about visible imperfections, and wrestling with the felt need to justify or explain their work. They also described how they challenged themselves and learned through the creative process from exploring cultural identities to understanding and practicing new techniques. For example, Sunghee Kim used watercolor painting to display Jo-kak-bo, a traditional Korean patchwork technique, and Ryan Ho shaped bass and walnut wood into Kumiko patterns, a Japanese art style from the 7th century. Roy Mong described how the use of different colors helped him to integrate and appreciate different aspects of himself and his experiences.

Inspiration was another theme. The 2023 gallery had encouraged this year’s artists: in seeing the work of others they were inspired to share their work as well, to continue inspiration and conversation for future generations of students. The 2024 show also continued the themes of collaboration and engagement: two artists invited interaction and responses through a QR code while other artists invited sensory engagement through touch. Students at the reception expressed their gratitude and wonder to the artists for the depth of expansion and interconnection with the works.

Another theme that emerged was how uniqueness and individuality were expressed within the diversity of the art and media on display in the gallery. “By being significantly and uniquely you, you can encourage and uplift others. You are helping further the conversation,” said Roy Mong. As in 2023, belonging emerged as a theme as well. Natalie Ng described feeling “Not Chinese enough. Not white enough…With liminality, I’ve learned to somehow embrace it and be ok in the uncomfortable spots.” Describing liminality, Mong shared, “The edge is where you live.” “Making the unseen seen is the whole point of the gallery,” said Ng.

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Gallery: Commencement 2023

��Ƶ — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 16:54:44 +0000

On June 24, 2023, ��Ƶ community gathered at Town Hall Seattle to celebrate our graduating students as we conferred 92 degrees in our Master of Divinity, MA in Theology & Culture, and MA in Counseling Psychology programs. Commencement 2023 was solemn and festive as faculty, staff, students, alumni, friends, and families marked important transitions together. We watched our largest graduating class cross the stage and we welcomed them as new alumni, excited to see how they will serve God and neighbor through transforming relationships. We also blessed Dr. Chelle Stearns and Dr. Kj Swanson into the next phases of their respective professional journeys. Thanks to for capturing some of the gratitude, grief, and joy of this momentous occasion. The ceremony can also be viewed on .��

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Embracing Our Calling: 25 Year Anniversary Benefit Dinner Report & Photo Gallery

��Ƶ — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 17:09:29 +0000

On April 21, 2023, ��Ƶ community celebrated our 25 Year Anniversary with a fundraising benefit dinner on our campus in Belltown. We gathered around festive tables in the Large Classroom enjoying good food, drink, and conversation together, just as our founders dreamed and planned around kitchen tables years ago. The first two presidents of ��Ƶ, Dr. Dan Allender and Dr. Keith Anderson, encouraged us through their memories and testimonies and also through their perseverance and love. Dr. J. Derek McNeil received the sextant from the Board of Trustees during an investiture ceremony that had been postponed by the pandemic. Dr. Curt Thompson then gave the keynote address focusing on the meaning of jubilee. “Looking toward Jubilee” has been the theme for this anniversary year as we remember our story and as we imagine our future. Returning to the stage, Dr. McNeil, sextant in hand, encouraged us to keep a focus on the horizon as we rebuild and heal together during challenging times. Before the paddle call began, Mike and Myra McCoy shared what they had learned through their longtime journey with and commitment to ��Ƶ.

We are overwhelmed with gratitude for the support and friendship we received at our 25 Year Anniversary Benefit Dinner. Our community’s gifts and enthusiasm raised $245,000, a major contribution towards our annual goal of $1.1 million. We want to thank everyone for their generosity and also for their presence, partnership, and prayer. In the words of Keith Anderson, President Emeritus, “This was essential for us.”�� The benefit dinner was a moment to celebrate this community; bringing together founders, alumni, donors, and staff to reconnect and dream of our future as we collectively committed ourselves to the mission of transformative learning and restorative service.��

President and Provost, J. Derek McNeil, PhD, reflected: “Our celebrations this year marked the 25 years God has watched over this school, not that we are complete, but because we have a hope in what God will do in the next 25 years as we embrace our call to be healers and rebuilders. The support we received at this event strengthens my belief that God is not finished with us, and I am so grateful that we are not in this work alone. One of our board members said that being in the building together on that night was like being on ‘holy ground,’ and I agree. Our benefit dinner was not only a joyous celebration for us, it was a holy affirming moment.”

Join in the 25 Year Celebration through our Giving Page! And please enjoy the photo gallery below.

Special thanks to our sponsors including (in alphabetical order): , , , , , , , , and the .

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A Very, Very ��Ƶ Christmas

��Ƶ — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 16:30:42 +0000

‘Twas the week before Christmas and all through the school . . .”

Our staff and faculty participated in the second annual Office Decorating Competition, decking the halls of the school in festive colors and twinkling lights. From a ��Ƶ spin on It’s a Charlie Brown Christmas to an interactive scavenger hunt, departments had a blast putting their heads together to come up with fun, creative displays. Scroll through the photos below to take a tour through all the contest submissions.

From our family to yours, Merry Christmas!

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Symposia 2019: Flourish

��Ƶ — Fri, 11 Oct 2019 18:40:06 +0000

On October 5, 2019, ��Ƶ of Theology & Psychology hosted our fifth annual Symposia, featuring presentations by twelve alumni and Dr. Chelle Stearns as keynote speaker.

The spirit of dialogue and collaboration behind Symposia is rooted in this basic premise: We all have much to offer, and we all have much to learn. Our alumni engaged topics ranging from flourishing and female subversion to flourishing after suffering, reframing anti-oppression work, and internalized racism. We’re grateful for what our alumni are offering the world through their intelligence, creativity, and compassion.

In her keynote lecture, Drawn to the Water: Longing, Grief, and Flourishing, Dr. Chelle Stearns closed with these remarks:

“Human flourishing requires solace and expansiveness—it requires time and space to nourish one’s inner oceanic life. Flourishing also necessitates provocation and complaint. We need truth and honest engagement when it’s hard, perhaps especially when its most difficult or impossible. An expanded imagination is vital for any form of flourishing. Flourishing demands time and process, it needs people and many hands – like a labyrinth we have to take time to walk to the center of memory in our own lives, in the lives of others, and in our own culture. Then we need time to return to the outer edges of the labyrinth once more to reclaim what has been lost.”

Videos of the presentations will be shared in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, be sure to check out these notable presentations from our 2018 Symposia:

Step Into the River: Love that Crosses Barriers, by David Rice (MDiv ’10)

Grief, Compassion, and Connection, by Jeffrey Batstone (MACP ’10)

A Life-Giving Vision of Fat Bodies in the Church, by Kristen Gilfillan (MACP ’13)

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Relational Perspectives Series with Dr. Usha Tummala-Narra

��Ƶ — Wed, 25 Sep 2019 21:25:52 +0000

“In the US, race takes a particular form. Indians in the US and more broadly South Asians have, like every other cultural group that is raised upon migration, a framework for understanding race. More often than not these frameworks are less visible and more likely to be dismissed by notions of immigrants as people who choose to come to the US.”

Thank you to all who joined us for this year’s Relational Perspectives Series lecture with Dr. Usha Tummala-Narra. In an age of cultural fragmentation, learning spaces such as these are deeply important and we are grateful for the way Dr. Tummala-Narra told her story and brought awareness to the anxiety, racism, and xenophobia that is pervasive in our culture. During her lecture, Dr. Tummala-Narra wove personal experience with her own psychoanalytic studies, discussing how fear of immigrants reflects anxiety in multiple dimensions and carries with it much discriminatory potential.

“In the US and in parts of the world, the presence and growing visibility of immigrants triggered a sense of collective anxiety where dissociated defenses maintain emotional distance and identification with groups perceived to be threatening.”

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Entering Our 22nd Year

��Ƶ — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 21:48:23 +0000

“Oh sing to the Lord a new song;
sing to the Lord, all the earth!
Sing to the Lord, bless his name;
tell of his salvation from day to day.”

Psalm 96:1-2

As we entered into our 22nd year as a school Dr. Derek McNeil, Acting President posed the question: What does it look like to sing a new song together? What does it look like to sing songs of redemption in even the darkest or most fragmented places? A new academic year is a new beginning but we always begin with a pause, at Sacred Assembly, (Re)Orientation, and Convocation, to root in our mission of serving God and neighbor through transforming relationships.

We were honored to welcome a new cohort of 90 graduate students to our community last week. We welcome them with the knowledge that the needs around us are great and the culture is even more fragmented. President McNeil named the challenges of our times and what he often refers to as ‘wicked problems’ and called the students to learn beyond the traditional graduate school frame of learning and training and into a posture of service. It is a privilege to commit to another year of learning and service together. In a world so in need of restoration we are grateful for the opportunity to form and send pastors, counselors, social leaders, and artists to engage with wisdom, courage, and creativity.

As we share these photos to mark the beginning of a new academic year we look forward to singing a new song of redemption together for the sacred work that lies ahead.

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Learning Beyond Walls

��Ƶ — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 18:26:01 +0000

We believe that transformative education—the kind of learning that gets in your bones and changes how you see the world—cannot be contained to the classroom. When we go outside our building to learn from others, encounter new stories, and wrestle with hard questions amid the messiness and complexity of our world, that’s when the ideas and theories from the classroom are given new life.

Earlier this year, two summer-term classes took ��Ƶ students beyond our walls (and beyond Seattle). In Engaging Global Partnerships, Dr. Ron Ruthruff, Associate Professor of Theology & Culture, and Cheryl Goodwin, Director of Institutional Assessment & Library Services, led a group of students to Kenya, inviting them to let their assumptions, beliefs, and practices be challenged and clarified by the stories of a place and the people who serve it. That same month, spiritual director and pilgrimage guide (MA in Theology & Culture, ‘12) and spiritual director and retired faculty member Tom Cashman journeyed to the Sonoran Desert in Arizona to guide students through a pilgrimage grounded in the ancient Christian tradition of desert spirituality.

Engaging Global Partnerships in Kenya

“We’re taking a deep look at the history of colonialism and religion, and the relationship between a place and the people who inhabit it—especially in places of wounding. How can we enter those wounds in a way that is honoring to others’ stories and also helps us reimagine our shared future?”
–Dr. Ron Ruthruff

Pilgrimage to the Sonoran Desert

“During our time in the desert, we explored the ancient Christian tradition of desert spirituality with an emphasis on the apophatic way and the contemplative path. The word apophatic means ‘without image,’ and during our time in the desert we sought to abandon our expectations and preconceived notions of God through themes such as awareness, inviting us to non-dual consciousness; surrender, inviting us toward a posture of kenosis or self-emptying; and encounter, inviting us to be present to the desert, the Divine, and ourselves with loving indifference or non-attachment. Ultimately, the fierce landscape of the desert served as teacher and guide on our journey, teaching us how to tend to and be with the sacred and fierce landscape of the soul within.”
–Lacy Clark Ellman

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Welcoming Summer to Seattle

��Ƶ — Fri, 17 May 2019 13:00:34 +0000

We know Seattle is known for its gray, drizzly days, but here’s a little secret: Summer is pretty magical here. As the days grow longer, warmer, and brighter, it’s the perfect opportunity to take our ��Ƶ community outside the red brick building and into the sun. We did that very thing recently, gathering for a glorious sunset at Golden Gardens in Ballard. A group of students hit the beach to play some volleyball, gather around a fire, and welcome summer with open arms. In the midst of a busy term and the near-end of another academic year, what a gift it was to connect in this way.

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Do You Hear What I Hear?

Brooke Wellman — Tue, 25 Dec 2018 14:05:23 +0000

All of us here at ��Ƶ pray for a full and life-giving Christmas for you and your loved ones. On this holy day, we’re honored to share this beautiful art from alumni Brooke Wellman, inspired by the classic carol��“Do You Hear What I Hear?” and the hope that we will continue to look and listen for small glimpses of peace and light in our troubled culture.

“‘Do You Hear What I Hear?’ was written by a married couple in October 1962, as a plea for peace during the Cuban Missile Crisis,” says Brooke. “So again today I sing it for our country. For we could all use a little peace, goodness, and light.”

(Click below to see the full images.)

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Gallery Archives - ������Ƶ of Theology & Psychology