I have included below the Editors' Note, sharing the central concerns of the issue.
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The Turning House 4.2Editors' Note
What is The Jesus Question? As we’ve found this semester, it’s easier to answer the question than to ask it. When we began asking the question ourselves, other questions quickly came to the fore: What role does Jesus play in the classroom and community? What role do our individual relationships with Jesus play in the classroom and community – and what are those relationships in the first place? What role does Jesus play in Union’s identity, as a training ground for both pastors and scholars? What role does Jesus play in the changing relationship between Union and Columbia University? By asking these questions, we soon arrived at larger issues – of ecumenism for a “non-denominational Christian seminary,” of christology, of financial stability, of institutional change and decision-making, and of Union’s relationship with various worlds of religion.
In this issue of The Turning House, we begin as a community to examine some of these Jesus Questions in a variety of writing forms, some of them new to the journal. As in the past, we have a number of opinion pieces: Durrell Watkins, Sarah Williamson, and Lindsay Willert address the meaning of ecumenism at Union. Seth Watson Pickens, Dionne Boissiere, and Anna Martin approach relationships with Jesus through poetry, and Jess Van Denend collects impressions from first-year students about their experience at Union. These individual pieces demonstrate that there is a range of approaches to answering the Jesus Question. Robert Birch took another approach when he brought the question directly to the community and reports his findings here. His piece, along with an investigative piece from freelance writer Eric Marx, introduces a more extensive reporting angle to The Turning House. Marx, Euan Cameron, and Sam Hunt scrutinize Union’s future as a Christian academic institution, looking particularly at its relationship with Columbia University. Elsa Peters, in her reflection on the Poverty Initiative, challenges Union to consider its institutional practices in light of its commitments to economic justice. At the same time as we looked inward with the Jesus Question, F. Xavier Borchardt looked outward to the questions of Jesus that abounded in the broader world with the premiere of The Passion of the Christ; he offers a review here. Finally, in a nod both to Union’s past and its future, Professors Delores Williams and Larry Rasmussen offer reflections upon their retirement, and in this issue The Turning House pays well-deserved tribute to all three of Union’s retiring faculty members: Williams, the Paul Tillich Professor of Theology and Culture; Rasmussen, the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics; and Rosemary Keller, Academic Dean and Professor of Church History.
In producing this issue, we – as editors and writers, as members of this community – have discovered just how difficult it is to raise the Jesus Question. In seeking some of the community’s answers, several writers encountered reticence or even fear of speaking on the record. Is this because many people do not feel sufficiently safe to participate in Union’s discourse about and around Jesus? Or is such reticence an indication of the manifold issues the Jesus Question raises? Or does it suggest that, at Union, it is more important to us that we puzzle over questions of Jesus, rather than offer ready and comfortable answers? The Turning House will attempt to answer neither these questions nor the Jesus Questions with which we began. But in this issue, true to our name, we aim to be a place that constantly keeps the community turning and moving, where members of the community can reorient themselves, as needed, for their journeys.
©MMIV The Turning House
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