Disciples Divinity House

Garry Sparks, a June PhD graduate, has accepted a visiting professor appointment at Christ College, Valparaiso University (the honors college). This year, in addition to being a DDH Scholar, he was the Divinity School’s Mellon Dissertation Fellow, the highest dissertation award. His dissertation, which focuses on sixteenth-century texts that he translated from the original K'iche' language into both Spanish and English, uses cultural ethnography as essential to theological method. He argues that the Americas’ “first theology” emerged in a mutually transforming dialogue between Christian theology and Mayan spirituality—a dialogue that is conveyed in a variety of historical texts as accessed through a contemporary process of dialogical translation.

Chris Dorsey, also a PhD student in theology, anticipates graduation in December. Until March, he was the Vice President for Marketing and Development at Chicago Theological Seminary. He is writing on the medicalization of health care in Senegal. He has been named the 2011 Faculty Fellow at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan.

Joe Blosser, a June graduate in the Religious Ethics area, wrote his dissertation on Ernst Troeltsch and Adam Smith. He will move from DePaul University in Chicago to a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Religion and Philosophy and Director of Service Learning at High Point College, a United Methodist school in North Carolina. The college's service-learning program in will be inaugurated in 2012-13 under his leadership.

Santiago Piñón has been named to a tenure-track position in the Department of Religion at Texas Christian University; he is now completing his dissertation and is aiming for fall graduation. A student of theology, he attends to theological interventions between colonial power and the indigenous peoples of the Americas, in particular, the sixteenth-century Spanish Dominican Francisco Vitoria and his work, the Law of the Nations.

All four are ordained Disciples of Christ ministers. Mr. Sparks and Mr. Piñón both completed their MDiv degrees as well as their PhD work at the University of Chicago Divinity School as Disciples House Scholars.

“Throughout my entire time at DDH I have tried to be true to myself and have resisted becoming someone other than the person I was when I arrived,” Mr. Piñón commented. “Of course, I have experienced change. . . . Yet, the change I have gone through hasn’t changed me. I am still the guy who hates wearing ties and a coat, who prefers cheap beer to fine wine, and who reads Tillich, Unamuno, Dussel, and Nietzsche. Nonetheless, I have changed. In addition to becoming a more critical scholar, academic, and theologian, I have also become a more patient husband, a caring father, and, I hope, a better friend. These changes would have been impossible if it had not been for the Disciples Divinity House. . . . I owe a debt that can never be repaid.”