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“It begins with curiosity and an eagerness to go deeper, even when it’s challenging.” Dr. Julie A. Duncan, Associate Professor of Old Testament, delights in her role as director of Garrett’s Master of Theological Studies (MTS) program, where she helps guide students as they narrow their inquiries. Distinct from Garrett’s other degrees, the MTS is designed for students who want to learn the foundations of academic research, all building toward a 50 – 80 page thesis—the program’s capstone assignment. “We help students explore their passions,” Dr. Duncan says. “Students enter with broad questions like, ‘How does God relate to human suffering?’, and through their coursework they home in on deeper, more specific topics that bring out their personal contexts; ones which push them to find their voice.”

The degree is structured to facilitate this personalized attention. Light on required courses, students pursue the elective classes that best guide their research. “What I studied was never dictated by a top-down approach,” says Colton Bernasol ’22, an MTS graduate who is now a PhD student at Garrett. “We started with the questions that animated me, then determined the classes that helped me reformulate those questions around my own particular life experiences—like how colonialism can destroy the meaningfulness of language.” Students also benefit from the fact that Garrett belongs to a consortium of 12 schools across Chicagoland. “It’s such an amazing gift to a student with a very specialized topic,” Dr. Duncan says, “to have such an array of courses to choose from.”

Bernasol is quick to name how professors intentionally connected course materials to his home communities. As a child of Mexican and Filipino heritage, this meant grounding the sweeping history of colonialism in his family’s own experiences at different ends of the Spanish empire. “In a Christology class, Dr. Bedford assigned us to ask an elder about their theology, so I interviewed my grandma—a migrant farmer from the border of Texas,” he offers as an example. “Or, in a class with Dr. Bantum, he guided my interest in racial hybridity by designing a course that used hybridity in multiple senses; hybrid texts that exist as both theology and literature, but which also explore racial hybridity itself—folks like Gloria Anzaldúa or the novelist Viet Than Nguyen.” Instead of trying to mold intellectual interest around a course of study, the curriculum is built around students’ passions.

This approach leads to an incredibly broad range of focus areas. Some recent MTS thesis titles include: Interpersonal Communion: Ethical Implications of Including Very Young Children in Worship, The Lover Who Pleases Me: Bridging Christian Erotic Theology and Practice from the Late Antique to the Medieval Periods, Wouldst Thou Like To Live Deliciously: A Church Hungry for Monsters, and Mosali or Mohumbu?: An Examination of the Translation of the Greek Word δοῦλος in Lingala Based on Luke 17:7-10. For current MTS student Wendy Cordero Rugama, it directed their attention to the Neo-Pentecostal churches she grew up beside in Costa Rica. Their thesis, Poisoned Sustenance: A Feminist Analysis of Latin American Neo-Pentecostalism in the Context of Neoliberal Subjectivity, examines how women seek liberation from oppressive neoliberal economics within these spaces, but also how patriarchy circumscribes that agency. “This research has been so life giving,” she notes. “It allows me to seek God in a different way.”

Indeed, one distinctive feature of Garrett’s MTS  program is how the seminary encourages students not to separate religious academic inquiry from faith as a lived experience. “So many of our projects are not just intellectual exercises, but often deep exploration of a troubling or painful theological question,” Dr. Duncan observes. Within this method, Bernasol’s personal encounter with his grandmother is venerated as a place to seek theological truth. [JD1] “She was part of a generation that didn’t grow up to read, but she has been an anchor in my life for thinking about God,” Bernasol shares. “After that interview, I realized how much she had shaped my theology. The Garrett faculty have made me consider my accountability to the church, my accountability to multiple forms of community when I think about who I’m writing for.” Research can also be its own kind of spiritual formation. “I came from a Christian context that was very certain of everything,” Cordero Rugama says. “When that stopped working for my faith, asking questions became a creative process that offers me hope and allows me to seek God in a different way.”

That search doesn’t end with graduation. Many students, like Bernasol, continue their studies by pursuing doctoral degrees and careers in academia. Increasingly, however, others use the MTS as a foundation for myriad vocations, grounded in the same reverence for learning. “I received a long letter from a graduate who told me how the critical thinking skills he received were crucial for teaching 5th graders,” Dr. Duncan recalls. “Or a minister serving a rural church in Texas shared how studying theology let him better identify the theological worlds that shaped his congregants, helping him to respond to their needs pastorally and from a place of deeper understanding.” [JD1] Cordero Rugama intends to widen their inquiries after graduation through ethnographic research with the women about whom she’s writing her thesis. “The flexibility of this program has been so clarifying for me,” they say. “It’s made me look at how people survive and negotiate life as a source that describes the undeniable presence of God.”

Ultimately, one of seminary’s greatest blessings is the gift to do this work beside others. “Students learn together in a colloquium, where we have sessions on research techniques, how to develop a thesis, how to write a longer project,” Dr. Duncan says. “But we also have vocational sessions: how to apply for a doctoral program, how to get your paper accepted at a conference, how to find work as an independent scholar writing book reviews for periodicals.” This collaboration encourages students to see the connections between their own research and cultural contexts and the work of their peers. It also offers resilience and courage. “It taught me how to embrace my own self and story as important and meaningful especially in how I relate to God and neighbor,” says Mark Tao ’24, another MTS graduate. “By being in community, I felt encouraged to practice proactive self-consideration and self-compassion.”

Scholarship doesn’t have to be a solitary pursuit, and the best work honors the debt we all owe to broader interconnectedness. “I took a feminist and womanist theology class with Dr. Joh, where we met digitally as people read these texts all around the world,” Bernasol offers. “Some folks were in India, some folks were in Korea, others across the United States. Different questions motivated our reading of the text, and it was so eye-opening to confront patriarchy and global inequality through all these lenses, mediated by digital community. I’m so grateful for that gift.” Dr. Duncan is likewise thrilled that this is the spirit which shapes Garrett’s classrooms. “We do everything we can to show them that we’re in this together,” she concludes. “We’re not competing. We’re traveling side by side on this existential journey.”

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At a school where students spiritedly discuss ontological realities, there’s one truth about which few would argue: Paying taxes isn’t fun. But for international students, that routine if undesired task is made woefully more complicated by the U.S. tax code’s arcane rules. Last week, Garrett board member Tom Scott met with international students to discuss their unique challenges when preparing 2024 returns—helping to demystify the process and ensure that students are receiving the best deal possible while remaining fully compliant to IRS requirements. “The best way we can be welcoming as an institution is to walk with people side by side,” Scott tells me. “One of life’s biggest surprises is completing your tax form and finding out you owe a big sum of money, so it’s very important to think about what you owe in advance because the rules for international students are so different.”

If tax preparation is hard enough for U.S. citizens that it frequently garners laughs in standup comedy, non-citizen taxpayers’ process is enough to make you weep. “International students are subject to very different rules regarding how much of their income is taxed and what forms they need to file,” Scott explains. “Under tax laws, they may be characterized as nonresident taxpayers, but some are characterized as resident taxpayers, and still others are considered dual status taxpayers.” This status is determined by a convoluted metric that involves factors like what type of visa the student has, the visas they’ve held in the past, and the duration of all U.S. stays dating back to childhood. And that’s just the calculus that determines what forms the student fills out, let alone the expertise needed to complete them! “If you use any of the popular tax software programs, for example, they won’t even bother to ask you about this stuff,” Scott notes. “So, you could easily fill out the wrong tax return.”

To reduce confusion and minimize the likelihood that students make an error when filing their returns, Scott offered hands-on training where students brought their questions. He comes to this work with more than fifteen years of experience doing volunteer income tax preparation for low-income families. “In a typical year, about 25% of those are immigrants,” he notes. “I just love working with immigrant families and immigrant students—I love the energy, the courage, the sense of hope for what the future can hold. It’s one of the most personally rewarding things that I do in life.” Offering these services at Garrett holds particular reverence, though. In addition to serving on the board, Scott was baptized in Howe’s Chapel, and his family’s story has intertwined with the seminary’s story for generations—this tax initiative is just one new chapter.

It’s also an expression of Scott’s Christian faith. “I’m following the biblical command to love your neighbor and welcome the stranger,” he says simply. “Jesus calls me to live my life in a way that’s responsive to his teachings.” As vitriol and controversy over migrants’ lives swirls in Washington D.C., it’s also his way of focusing on what he can control. “The number one thing I can do is focus on where I can make the world around me better,” he says. “It’s why I deliberately seek out tax prep, and why I serve on the board of Northern Illinois Justice for Our Neighbors.” Instead of believing any delusion that he alone can solve the world’s problems, he identifies where he can make significant difference. “Jesus called us grains of salt,” he says. “Salt isn’t the dish. It’s a little thing that makes the whole dish better. He talked about us as mustard seeds—mustard seed isn’t the plant, it’s just the start of something.”

Similarly, last week’s session is just the start of how Scott envisions Garrett can help international students better prepare to file their taxes. “We have a real opportunity to be more proactive, more welcoming, more planful with our students in a way that gets them ready for what will then happen six months later when they have to sit down in a room and fill out a tax return,” he says. By helping students more accurately fill out their withholding tax forms for their job income and create plans for how they will handle the taxes on other types of income, Scott hopes to create a culture at Garrett where no student receives a surprise bill in April.

Visible joy fills Scott’s face when he discusses these plans, the kind of fulfillment that comes from living out one’s religious principles and giving back to an institution that seeds so much good in the world. “A gift to Garrett is one of the most impactful investments anybody could make anywhere because of how it ripples many decades into the future through the lives of the students we help form,” he notes. “Whether you are training somebody to minister in a local church, serve as an academic or professor, or work in a community organizer, these are enormously impactful vocations.” His work is also a reminder that, while making a financial contribution is an incredibly meaningful way to support Garrett’s mission, there are many other ways to give. “The biblical call is to offer every ounce of who we are and what we have,” he concludes. “Money is simply a part of that because we’re also stewards of our talents, our personal energies, and our life experiences. What’s important is to offer the support you can and do so with a passion.”

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