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Two new grant projects to explore migrant experience in Texas
The Institute for Diversity and Civic Life’s 2021 Migration Narratives Project includes two Austin Seminary grantees. Education Beyond the Walls received a collaborative grant of $19,700, shared with Austin Region Justice for our Neighbors, and Professor Gregory Cuéllar, associate professor of Old Testament, received an individual grant of $5,000 for his Arte de Lágrimas: Refugee Artwork Project. Both initiatives seek to celebrate the humanity of migrants and foster reflection on immigration policy and practices.
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Education Beyond the Walls at Austin Seminary will collaborate with Justice for our Neighbors to expand on the “Undocumented Stories” project, which began in 2017 with the objective of giving voice to members of the immigrant community in Texas. “The center of our project is education through the voices of our Latinx immigrant brothers and sisters to disrupt the conventional narrative about immigration and the immigrant experience,” says Mónica Tornoé, director of Latino/a Programs and of the Undocumented Stories project at Austin Seminary.
In August 2014, Professor Cuéllar and a small team of faith-based volunteers initiated the Arte de Lágrimas: Refugee Artwork Project. According to Cuéllar, “The stories of the ‘Other’ that this project aims to bring into public view are those of asylum-seeking children and youth from Central America’s Northern Triangle. As part of the broad humanitarian response to the influx of asylum-seekers at the Texas-Mexico border from 2014 to 2017, we saw art-making as a friendly activity for asylum-seeking children and youth to do while they waited at bus stations in McAllen, Brownsville, and San Antonio, Texas. In contrast to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s inhumane response to their arrival (many placed in animal-like cages and freezing detention cells), we felt the need to act by offering at the very least a neighborly welcome to the newly arriving asylum-seekers at the Texas-Mexico border. Hence, our project is less focused on the academic study of migration than on a faith-based ethics of care for refugees, migrants, and asylum-seekers.”
“Often in non-profit circles, client storytelling is seen as a tool for fundraising, a compelling way to connect with donors and show positive outcomes while asking for more funds,” Tornoé continued. “Too often, the hero of the story is the nonprofit which stepped into a person’s life at just the right time to do something good and resolve the problem. We want to challenge that narrative by centering the immigrant as the actor in their own story.” Funds from the grant will support publication of a book—which can be used in whole or in part alongside video clips of the storytellers—and resources for community and church education programs.
This grant will allow the digitization and archiving of original artwork by asylum-seekers (2014–2017, 2019), thereby ensuring future access to the stories they tell about migration and religion in the Texas-Mexico border region. This grant will also fund the production of a virtual storytelling art exhibit, using a selection of the digitized art pieces (see https://www.artedelagrimas.org/).
Campus to re-open for the fall semester
The Austin Seminary campus will re-open to the Austin Seminary community on Tuesday, September 7, beginning the 2021-22 academic year. All faculty, staff, and students will be required to have received a COVID-19 vaccination. Courses will be taught in classrooms and offices will be open. We anticipate that Discovery Weekend will be in person on campus, October 29-31, while Education Beyond the Walls events will remain primarily online. At this time, the Seminary does not plan to open the campus to outside individuals or groups during the fall semester. Decisions about opening to the public will reflect the guidance of public health authorities, and while this re-opening does not include a general opening to the public, as guidance changes, so will our response.
Austin Seminary takes seriously its responsibility and duty to provide everyone with a safe place for working and learning, therefore the Seminary is requiring vaccination against COVID-19 for Seminary students, faculty, staff, and members of the Board of Trustees. The goal is to protect—to the greatest extent possible—our students, employees, their families, and the broader community from COVID-19 infection as we all do our part to survive this worldwide pandemic. Students, faculty, staff, and trustees may obtain approval for an exemption of the vaccine requirement for medical reasons or objection of conscience.
community notes |
On May 19, 2021, the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest conferred the honorary Doctor of Humane Letters on Ora Houston, civic leader and a member of the Austin Seminary Board of Trustees since 2020. Houston was the first elected member for District 1 on the Austin City Council.
Daniel Clark Jr., the first African American to matriculate at Austin Seminary (1950-1951) died on May 15. He was a long-time member and elder at Pioneer Presbyterian Church, Beaumont, Texas, and attended General Assembly as a commissioner. In 2019 the Seminary hosted a Day of Memory and Hope and recognized Clark for the doors he opened for others.
Katrina (Kat) Olson will be serving as an instructor on the Austin Seminary faculty during a one-year externship, as part of her PhD program in homiletics and liturgics at Vanderbilt University.
In July, Andrew Frazier (MDiv’19) and Rykie Marx joined the Office of Admissions as recruitment associates. Marx is an ordained minister of word and sacrament in the Dutch Reformed Church and former chair of Pretoria East Presbytery in South Africa. Frazier is an ordained PC(USA) minister who served a two-year Lilly Pastoral Residency at First Presbyterian Church, Ann Arbor, following graduation.
De Puertas Abiertas grants for students of color
The Austin Seminary Board of Trustees at its May meeting approved a proposal to establish De Puertas Abiertas, a program to create nine full fellowships and offer 100% tuition discounts exclusively for students from the “Global Majority” (Black, Indigenous, Hispanic/LatinX, and Asian/Pacific Islander). The program goes into effect with the Fall 2021 term.
The De Puertas Abiertas Fellowships will be awarded to three entering students in the Master of Divinity program each year. Each fellowship, renewable for a period up to three years, will cover the full cost of matriculation: tuition, fees, and a stipend for campus housing and additional expenses. These merit fellowships will be voted upon by the faculty each spring and awarded to students from the Global Majority who demonstrate interest in and strong promise for leadership in the church and exceptional academic achievement.
The De Puertas Abiertas Tuition Grants will cover 100% of the tuition for students of the Global Majority who are enrolled full time in the MDiv, MAMP, or MATS program. Though given without regard to need, recipients are required to meet satisfactory academic progress, and the grants are subject to the availability of funds. Current students of color are invited to opt in to this new program.
The De Puertas Abiertas program is a response to past and present realities of theological education opportunities for people of color. Austin Seminary has a long and storied history for developing pastors and leaders for the church, but as an institution that crosses centuries, our ethos does not now look as it did 100 years ago. Some of those changes reflect ingenuity, scholarship, and character, and these we laud with photographs on walls and integration into our story; other decisions and parts of our history caused harm to our communities of color.
While a student, Hierald Osorto (MDiv’18) undertook an extensive study, with the support of Seminary Archivist Kristy Sorensen, into the history of Austin Seminary’s policies and practices with regard to race. He uncovered connections of shame, perhaps foremost the racist ideas of Robert Dabney, a 19th-century Virginia theologian who migrated to Texas and taught at The University of Texas and the Austin School of Theology. Although he died before the Seminary’s founding in 1902, Dabney’s scholarship surely influenced some of the early faculty. Yet Osorto also discovered advocacy for the education of Black Americans in the early 20th century by Austin Seminary’s third president, Thomas White Currie, and the beginning of Austin Seminary’s own racial integration, which occurred six years before the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown vs. the Board of Education. Even so, Osorto found that the experiences of Austin Seminary’s first Black students were complicated by the policies of the Seminary and the social tensions of the day.
In one of Austin Seminary’s more disturbing practices, early 20th-century students of Hispanic ancestry were not allowed in the classrooms but were kept separate—at desks in the halls—where they could gather what learning wafted through open doors and windows. It was through these puertas abiertas (open doors) that students of color found the education that encouraged their call to Christian vocation.
Austin Seminary has gone through a deliberate period of reflection on its history, culminating in “Days of Memory and Hope,” honoring its first LatinX/ Hispanic and African American students, faculty, and staff. Through these events, and the research leading up to them, we learned many of the ways students of color were kept on the margins of the community, even when enrolled as students. As part of a path forward and to honor the students who came before, Austin Seminary is pleased to establish De Puertas Abiertas—where students are not held outside but invited into full participation in this community of learning.
twenty-seventh speedway
The online Commencement on May 16 concluded with a series of video benedictions by the faculty, including those of Professor Aymer in front of Shelton Chapel and Professor Cuéllar with his bovine neighbors in the background.
Unusual times call for new traditions—like the first annual Graduation Water Balloon Tunnel! Remember your baptism, Class of 2021! Photos by student Aiden Diaz.
