Updates as the year ends
This was not the year we expected or could even have imagined when DDH began its 125th anniversary year. It has been a challenging but rewarding year. Many of DDH’s students finished the academic year in places they did not expect to be—literally dispersed by pandemic responses, sometimes also finding themselves in unanticipated emotional, intellectual, and spiritual places. The 2020 graduates are nevertheless ready to lead and to serve, even as they know the contexts of leadership and service are changing dramatically.
Confronting us all are realities of health precarity, global interdependency, racist brutality, and social suffering. DDH and its students have been challenged, stressed, horrified, enervated, activated, and animated by these days—often some of each in the same day. Students’ questions—about the nature of community, about how to teach, learn, worship, care, comfort, oppose injustice, bring about transformation, heal, and prevent harm—are lived and very real. Seldom have the purposes and contexts for pursuing vocations of ministry, teaching, and community leadership been more manifest than under the life-altering conditions of economic, social, and racial disparities of health and safety in which we are living.
We don’t yet know exactly what campus life will look like in the fall—the University will announce its plans later this month. But we do know that 3 entering DDH Scholars will join 18 returning Scholars plus additional ecumenical residents in a remarkable community of learning and support. By providing full scholarship support, durable connection, and learning that orients lifelong service, DDH will continue to advance preparation for vocations of vision, understanding, and transformation. Scholarships, staff, and building maintenance will not be reduced. Thanks to the generosity of alumni/ae and friends, DDH is as well situated as we could hope for facing current challenges.
For the time being, DDH’s physical offices remain closed, as does the rest of the University, but the building is still “home” for ten students, six of whom are international students. DDH will continue to be a physical home next fall, using valuable lessons learned for creating a safe space. Not all 23 student rooms will be occupied in order to allow for more socially distanced interactions. Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder at Monday dinners won’t be possible, but conversation will rise in new forms. Study will continue in the library. The Chapel of the Holy Grail will still beckon and orient. As ever, students will go forth to envision and build new communities and ideas.
For 125 years, alumni/ae and friends have given their fierce dreams, their creativity and canny, and their most demanding ideas, not only to DDH but to the world. When we began this academic year, we could not have imagined the scale and scope of changes that would overtake us. To affirm that we are, nevertheless, grateful for what is to come, is to dedicate ourselves to prepare for a future that we cannot fully anticipate and that, ultimately, we will receive from the hands of others. Kristine A. Culp, Dean