Date: April 28th
Time: 12-1:00 PM CST
Location: Main 205 and Online (link sent after registration)

Please RSVP by April 21st through the link below!

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Date: March 27, 2026
Time: 9AM-5PM CT
Location: Main 205 and Online

Registration closes on March 23. Lunch will be provided to in person participants. Participation is free for the Garrett community. Talking about race and racial discrimination can be hard, but it’s important to understand how to fix these ongoing social issues. When we talk about belonging and diversity as strengths for communities and organizations, we must also recognize the challenges preventing these goals. Understanding antiracism and what it requires from leaders is key to creating diverse, fair, and welcoming places. This workshop aims to give participants a foundation of these concepts and practices to facilitate deeper, future learning.

The post Animating Antiracist Ways of Being with Crossroads Antiracism appeared first on Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary.

This year’s Homecoming theme, “Founded by Grace, Transforming with Hope,” reflects the powerful journey of CAAM and its ongoing impact. We are honored to feature Asian alumnae, faculty, and pastors in our programming, which will include insightful presentations, faculty-led sample classes, worship, and a Community Meal.

Whether you’re an alumnus, friend, colleague, or family member, we invite you to join this special celebration. Let’s come together to honor 40 years of CAAM’s legacy and the transformative hope it continues to inspire.

For a schedule of events, hotel information, and to register, go to:

Garrett.edu/homecoming2024

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Every month, Garrett-Evangelical international students host a luncheon, “Let’s Talk Globally,” where they educate the rest of campus (and alumni who watch online) about pressing theological and humanitarian issues in their home country. Students from Myanmar led the March convening, offering witness to the atrocities suffered in the ongoing civil war. Bringing in two Burmese experts, Rev. Dr. Khen Chum (GETS alum 2023 and Associate Professor of New Testament at Chin Christian University in Burma) and Dr. Lama Htoi San Lu (a Lily Teaching Fellow at Hartford International University), their talk on the “Burmese Church’s Response on the Military Coup Today,” sought to situate current actions by Burmese Christians within broader history of the region.

            While Myanmar* gained independence from the British Empire in 1948, Dr. Chum outlined how newly won freedom soon shifted into military control. Aung San, heralded by many as the “Father of Burmese Independence,” worked tirelessly throughout his life to end the British occupation. Tragically, he was assassinated in 1947 in the transition to independent rule, and the ensuing government never implemented the plans he envisioned. “The period from 1948 to 1962 was marked by growing political instability and several wars between armed ethnic groups who used this instability to arrest, imprison, and torture many political activists and civilians,” Chum noted, “then Burma was ruled by a brutal military regime.”

            In 2015, Burma held the first democratic election without military interference in more than fifty years, and the National League for Democracy won in a landslide, ending the junta’s control. Unfortunately, just six years later, the military orchestrated a coup, overthrowing the elected government. Since then, Chum says, “the military has killed thousands of innocent civilians, and burned thousands of houses, churches, and schools,” in a reign of terror designed to suppress any resistance.

            Into this broader history, Dr. Lama Htoi San Lu testified in devastating detail how violence impacts the people, and the theoethical dimensions of how the Church should respond. She told the story of a young woman, pseudonymously named Marip Lu, “who was drugged, kidnapped, trafficked and captured by a Chinese family in the Henan province of China.” For six years, Marip Lu was held captive, until she fled back to northern Burma where she was reunited with family, “leaving behind her three-year-old son she was forced to birth and raise after being repeatedly raped and abused.” Dr. Lama made clear this is not an isolated story, “The local women’s activists who helped Marip Lu escape say there are hundreds of women who have had similar, brutal experiences.”

            While Dr. Lama is glad to see more churches participating in efforts for political freedom, she wishes the experience of Marip Lu would “change how we imagine and understand liberation movements.” Churches, she says, solely focus on freedom from military rule. “I am more interested in a liberation movement that understands and takes serious the intersection of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and religion,” she confesses, “Theologians like Marcella Althaus-Reid from a Latin American context, Delores Williams’ womanism in the US, Kwok Pui-Lan and many others have pointed out what some forms of liberation theology are missing.”

            Into this context, she offers the Lord’s Supper as the ritual Christians should turn to when thinking about liberation. “The Eucharist is not just simply liturgical practice, it is also an active Christian resistance to militarism,” she says, drawing on Asian American feminist ethicist Keun-Joo Christine Pae’s work, “Militarism violates eucharistic theology grounded in the unity of body and the spirit in which participants are united in Christ.” When we participate in the ritual, we affirm our resistance to all that fractures this fundamental unity. “We are invited into a theological and ethical understanding of the communion,” she says, “that asks us to imagine and then embody a new world where “peace does not have a militarized faith face.” Click here to listen to Dr. Lama Htoi San Lu’s full remarks.

This theme of eucharistic conversion struck a chord with those assembled. Toward the end of the gathering, one international student described his experience working as a hotel clerk in 2012, a time before he became politically active in resistance. That hotel has now been bombed, he says—all the people who worked in it have been displaced. He’s been protesting in the streets, speaking out against “how the military has been brutally and systematically controlling the rise of human beings.” Visibly distraught, his voice trembled with emotion but persevered in power. “When you pray for Burma, and pray for us, do not pray for victory and peace, but for transformation,” he asked, “Without transformation, peace and victory cannot survive for a long time.”

* Presenters alternatively used “Myanmar” and “Burma” to refer to the country, this article will do likewise

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This event is co-sponosored by Center for Asian/Asian American Ministry and Stead Center for Ethics and Values. Register to join online.

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Join the Center for Asian/Asian American Ministry and the Rueben P. Job Institute as we contemplate how we all have been affected by the devastation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, with communities of color disproportionately and severely impacted by it. Many lives have been lost or sacrificed, and many more lives are engulfed by hardships of all kinds and unresolved and complicated grief. In other words, we are living through a pandemic that is overwhelming our psychological and spiritual resources, relationships, and social intelligence and puts us in a continuous and unremitting heightened state of physical, cognitive, behavioral, and emotional arousal. This in-person, interactive, and embodied conference will speak to these issues and guide participants in spiritually centering themselves with collective practices that hopefully render their “hearts strangely warmed and awakened.”

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Presented by Rev. Dr. Reginald Blount on the Occasion of the Launch of the Center for Ecological Regeneration

The history of centers and institutes at Garrett-Evangelical begins with the creation of the Center for the Church and the Black Experience. Instituted in 1970 as one of the primary emphases of the seminary, the Center for the Church and the Black Experience has been a beacon of hope and inspiration for Black students, pastors, churches, and communities for nearly five decades. It has been instrumental in fusing Black people and Black religious life into the entire seminary community.

In 1984, the Center for Asian and Asian American Ministries was formed to serve the needs of Asian American students, pastors, and churches. It continues today as a vital home away from home, a haven, for our Asian descent students. The Center for Asian and Asian American Ministry invites our Asian descent students to explore, critically reflect, and thrive spiritually, academically, and experientially at Garrett.

The Hispanic-Latinx Center was established in 1988 to bring Hispanic-Latinx culture and experience into the life of the seminary. The Center’s mission is to meet the needs of Hispanic-Latinx students, pastors, parishioners, and community leaders in creative, insightful, useful, and organic ways.

In 1997, The Jerre L. and Mary Joy Stead Center for Ethics and Values was developed in order to draw together seminary resources, graduate professional schools, area pastors, and laity to address the compelling ethical issues facing contemporary society. The Styberg Preaching Institute was launched in 2005 to partner with the church by preparing persons for vital, effective Christian preaching. And in 2012, the Rueben P. Job Institute for Spiritual Formation was established as an initiative for continuing education in spiritual formation of laity and clergy.

We share this with you today to acknowledge the key role our centers and institutes play in the history of and expanding vision for who God is calling us to be as a seminary. Not only do our centers and institutes enrich seminary life through lectures, workshops, conferences, and supporting our students, but they also offer new perspectives, resources, and continuing education opportunities to the wider community outside of the seminary.

We are pleased that the Center for Ecological Regeneration joins this history and look forward to the ways in which it will both work alongside our existing centers and institutes, as well as provide new spaces for the work of ecological regeneration and environmental justice.

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