Return to Distinguished Alumna/us Award

A prospective student once told me that while visiting the Divinity School he asked House residents during a Monday Night Dinner three basic questions. Was it true that: 1) As a ministry and religious studies program thoroughly enmeshed within a top-tier research university, one feels that weight throughout all of the courses and campus ethos? 2) Irrespective of one’s personal background, affiliations, or any markers of identity politics, both in and outside the classroom the Divinity School is a place where the best argument wins? And 3) In the midst of all of this, not so much as an escape but rather as an oasis, is the Disciples Divinity House?

The House Scholars and ecumenical residents at Monday Night Dinner that evening all nodded their heads: “yes,” “yes,” and “yes.” If that prospective student had arrived in 1971 and found David Vargas and Clark Gilpin studying in Willett Library we can imagine they too would have also answered “yes” to all three.

Perhaps a more appropriate way to hear their answers is to take a page from Clark Gilpin’s book, namely, A Preface to Theology where he makes a bit of an ethnographic turn to historically examine what American theology is by focusing on what theologians actually do, specifically through three publics: the church, the academy, and civic society.

The church

Within the church, as the son of a pastor within the Iglesia Cristiana (Discípulos de Cristo) de Puerto Rico, David Vargas’s leadership in congregational ministry began in 1966 before he was even formally ordained in 1970, pastoring no fewer than three Discípulos’s congregations until he, Margie, and their young family moved to Chicago for him to pursue further graduate studies. And even during his time at the Divinity School he served as interim pastor of First Hispanic Lutheran Church Chicago. Here, within the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) of the U.S. and Canada, he has most visibly served in the general expression of the denomination, namely in the Division of Overseas Ministries, but also Obra Hispana and DHM, and by extension Global Ministries with the United Church of Christ beginning in 1983 as the Area Executive Minister to Latin America and the Caribbean but also as Vice-President and then President of DOM until his retirement in 2011.

Former Dean W. Barnett Blakemore wrote about the 1949 International Convention (precursor to the denomination’s General Assembly) in which graduates from the various Disciples related schools and divinity houses were asked to stand, and to even Blakemore’s surprise a large portion of the Convention’s leadership on the front stage were DDH Chicago alumni (Quest for Intelligence in Ministry, 102-3). But for most of us in the church of these more recent decades, David, along with Dennis Landon, has been the face of DDH on the denomination’s general stage. Yet, when time came for a sabbatical, which he could have taken anywhere in the world given his global relationships, he went to a local Disciples congregation in Hammond, Indiana. Like the Disciples and UCC missionaries that he shepherded throughout the Americas for 28 years, I remember David saying that he went to Hope Christian Church to listen and learn from them much more than to teach or lead.

While not technically a P.K., W. Clark Gilpin could be considered be one de facto given, especially, his mother’s strong leadership and pastoral presence in the Disciples of Christ in his home state of Oklahoma. Not one to go by “Reverend,” let alone “the Rev. Dr.,” as an ordained Disciples minister Clark Gilpin’s pastoral presence infuses the academy from which he studies the history of American Christianity, such as with opening prayers at the Disciples breakfast at the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature, and in worship at gatherings of the Association of Disciples for Theological Discussion. Even decades after they moved from Hyde Park, it was not uncommon to hear someone fondly recall at University Church Chicago, “well, when they were members here, Clark and Nancy would...”

The academy

Clark Gilpin attended the University of Oklahoma as an undergraduate, earned his MDiv at Lexington Theological Seminary, and holds his PhD from the University of Chicago. Upon graduation in 1974 he taught at Kenyon College in Ohio and then at the Graduate Seminary of Phillips University, returning to Chicago a decade later in 1984 as the sixth dean of the Disciples Divinity House and then from 1990-2000 as dean of the Divinity School, followed by becoming director of the Martin Marty Center. In addition to numerous articles and chapter contributions, his books include the previously mentioned A Preface to Theology, an intellectual biography on the colonial advocate for religious freedom—Roger Williams—and the co-edited volume American Christianities.

A testament to his vision within the academy is the proliferation of the use of this plural—Christianities or Catholicisms— by other scholars that signals a diversely descriptive rather than an implicitly normative approach. For many of us, he interlaced this approach through courses where he strove to diversify the readings on the public church, shepherded MDiv senior ministry projects, and compelled many of us to continue to research on our own in this vein, such as Sandhya Jha and her antiracist history of the Disciples of Christ. Since retiring as the Margaret E. Burton Professor, emeritus, he has published his third book, Religion Around Emily Dickinson, is working on a fourth on the “letter from prison,” and all along the way still teaching Disciples history and thought at DDH but also conversely, such as this past year, about the history of the MDiv degree to newer faculty at the University of Chicago.

Similarly, David Vargas also majored in history in his undergraduate studies at the University of Puerto Rico and earned his MDiv at the Evangelical Seminary of Puerto Rico where he also received an honorary doctorate in 2003. Almost like an academic dean, David’s tenure at DOM emphasized a very pedagogical approach to the global mission field but predicated on mutual relationships of trust, in the vein of Paulo Freire, with missionaries more as students than teachers. His commitment to popular education has ranged from the funding of scholarship programs for indigenous youth to earn university degrees in medicine, law, and education but to also providing refuge in the U.S. to Latin American and especially native intellectuals violently targeted for what they teach. On the other hand, in his mission to make us a more global church he has translated the Latin American liberationist concept acompañamiento not just into a praxis of interpersonal solidarity but as a structural vocation of “critical presence” for our institutional church.

Whether it was before, during, or after studies at the Divinity School, it should also be noted the numerous House scholars over the past three decades who have spent significant time with our overseas mission partners, be they in Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Mexico, India, France, Congo, South Africa, Australia, and elsewhere. David brought with him this decolonial and more global engagement when he first came to Chicago as he held colonial era documents in the Regenstein Library related to but conspicuously outside of Puerto Rico, as he convinced Mircea Eliade that it was more appropriate for him to submit his research paper in Spanish rather than English, and when he was told that he would have to wait a couple of months for an appointment to meet with his advisor, Martin Marty (we suspect that was the real beginning of the idea of “critical presence” for David). “How happy it makes me to now hear Spanish spoken in this House,” David once told me after he had a conversation with Santiago Piñón in the Common Room.

Civic society

And so the academic public for David has been not only integral to a civic society but he has pushed that notion of “society” into a faithful construal of a wider south-to-north globalizing world, which, as a House trustee, he has ensured that DDH has not been spared.

Respecting the extent to which Clark tends to guard his privacy, perhaps little should be said here regarding his faithful engagement with society. And yet, it has periodically been evident, such as during a Disciples history and thought seminar in which he launched into an impromptu excursus on the deceptive use of public survey data by opponents of Obamacare. Or his own surveys of Mexican spirits, specifically tequila, and these notes over here about a “Cactus Clark” somewhere back in Oklahoma... but perhaps it’s best to just leave what’s private as private.

A closing

Regardless, for these reasons, and many more left unmentioned here, it is a humble privilege to refer to both of you as our mentors, teachers, pastors, and colleagues; and for us to hope that your lives’ exemplary work has,

• for you, Clark, been what John Dewey or E.S. Ames would have called “an experience,” and
• for you, David, echoed that eschatological cry from the Caribbean – ¡Hasta la victoria, Siempre!