#harvard chaplains

[eretzyisrael]

by Dion J. Pierre

Addressing the behavior, Harvard Chaplains issued a statement, which is now being pointed to as a symbol of higher education’s indifference to the unique hatred of antisemitism, as well as its permutation as anti-Zionism.

“We have noticed a trend of expression in which entire groups of students are told they ‘are not welcome here’ because of their religious, cultural, ethnic, or political commitments and identities, or are targeted through acts of vandalism,” the office said, seemingly circumventing the matter at hand. “We find this trend disturbing and anathema to the dialogue and connection across lines of difference that must be a central value and practice of a pluralistic institution of higher learning.”

It continued, “Student groups who are singled out in this way experience such language and acts of vandalism as a painful attack that undermines the acceptance and flourishing of religious diversity here at Harvard. Let us all endeavor to care for one another in these divisive times.”

Recent Harvard graduate Shabbos Kestenbaum, who addressed the Republican National Convention in August to discuss the ways which progressive bias in higher education fosters anti-Zionism and anti-Western ideologies, described the statement as a moral failure in a post on X/Twitter on Tuesday.

“Disappointing,” he said. “After Harvard Jews were told by masked students ‘Zionists aren’t welcome here’ outside of the Hillel, the Chaplain Office finally released a statement that did not include the words Jew, Zionism, Israel, or antisemitism. A total abdication of religious responsibility.”

Kestenbaum noted in a later statement that Harvard’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, Sherri Ann Charleston, has so far declined to speak on the issue at all. He charged that when Charleston “isn’t plagiarizing, she and DEI normalize antisemitism,” referring to evidence, first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, that Charleston is a serial plagiarist who climbed the hierarchy of the higher education establishment by pilfering other people’s  scholarship.

[girlactionfigure]

THURSDAY HERO: Rabbi Herschel Schacter 

Rabbi Herschel Schacter was a young U.S. Army chaplain who helped traumatized Holocaust survivors rebuild their lives, and later became an influential leader in the Orthodox movement and a strong advocate for Soviet Jewry.

Herschel Schacter was born in Brooklyn in 1917, the son of immigrants from Poland and the youngest of ten siblings. His family was religious, and he was educated at the finest yeshivas before obtaining smicha (rabbinic ordination) in 1941. Rabbi Schacter served as a pulpit rabbi for a year before enlisting in the Army after Pearl Harbor. After attending Army Chaplain school at Harvard, he was sent to Europe with the VIII Corps and fought in the Battle of the Bulge.

Rabbi Schacter was one of the liberators of the Buchenwald concentration camp. He stayed in Germany for two and a half months after the war, tending to the broken spirits of survivors, most of whom had lost their entire families. Many were the only survivor from their entire town; everyone they ever knew had been murdered. A famous photograph shows him leading Shavuot services at Buchenwald (above). This photo occupies an entire wall at Israeli Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem.

What Rabbi Schacter saw at Buchenwald was hell on earth. The inmates who were still alive – barely -were emaciated, lying on filthy planks and covered in lice, hollow-eyed ghosts blinking in the sunlight and without the energy to even lift their heads. The stench of rotting flesh and feces was overwhelming. 

Rabbi Schacter noticed Yisrael Meir Lau, 7 years old, hiding behind a pile of corpses. Known as Lulek, the child had lost most of his family and had been on his own since age 5. Rabbi Schacter cared for the boy and helped him immigrate to Israel, where he would one day become Chief Rabbi.

Rabbi Schacter’s son Jacob, a prominent Orthodox rabbi and professor at Yeshiva University, wrote in a piece for Tablet Magazine, “My father spent the rest of his life describing what he saw in Buchenwald and what he did during his 10 weeks there. His work focused on a number of different areas: he tended to the psychological needs of survivors; he worked hard to reunite families; he founded a kibbutz outside Weimar for young survivors preparing to make aliyah [move to Israel]; and he organized a transport of children to Switzerland.”

Another story that illustrates Rabbi Schacter’s massive impact concerns Yoav Kimmelman, a 16 year old from a Hasidic home who lost every single member of his large extended family, around 60 people. The Holocaust destroyed Yoav’s faith and identity as a Jew. According to Rabbi Jacob Schacter, Yoav was “done with God, done with Jewish life, done with Jewish destiny, done with the Jewish people.” Rabbi Herschel Schacter reached out – literally – and singlehandedly brought Yoav back to Jewish life. It happened when Rabbi Schacter was taking 200 child survivors to Switzerland. He wanted young Yoav to go with him, but the boy had no interest in being around fellow Jews and he refused to go. Rabbi Schacter asked him to come to the train station to say goodbye and while there, the rabbi reached down and physically dragged Yoav onto the train. The teen was angry and sullen, but the rabbi convinced him to join a minyan and read Torah in the DP camp. Long story short, Yoav Kimmelman remained religious and at his death, he left 80 descendants, all of them Torah Jews. “That’s all because my father had the guts to pull him onto that train when it left the station,” said Rabbi Jacob Schacter.

Rabbi Herschel Schacter became a prominent leader of Orthodox Judaism in America, helping to rebuild from the ashes and grow the movement. He was elected president of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations in 1968. Dr. Rafael Medoff, in his book “The Rabbi of Buchenwald,” wrote: “He was the first Orthodox rabbi to reach that level of leadership. Until then others saw Orthodox leaders as fit to be heads of Orthodox groups, but not larger ones. Rabbi Schacter broke that mold. He was sufficiently savvy and sophisticated to represent the entire [Jewish] community, not just the Orthodox minority.”

At the very beginning of the movement to free Soviet Jewry, in 1956, Rabbi Schacter was part of the first rabbinical delegation to visit the USSR since 1917. He then went to Hungary to help Jewish refugees flee during the Hungarian revolution. 

Rabbi Schacter served as a pulpit rabbi in the Bronx for more than 60 years and was known as a brilliant and inspiring orator, beloved by his congregation. He passed away in 2013 at age 95 and was survived by his beloved wife Pnina, two children, four grandchildren, and eight great-grandchildren. Pnina Schacter died in 2018.

For healing the broken spirits of Holocaust survivors and helping them rebuild their lives, and for his devotion to the Jewish people and his decades of leadership, we honor Rabbi Herschel Schacter as this week’s Thursday Hero.

[christianity-crucible]

This is the story of how Julie Rodgers, an out LGBTQ+ blogger, was recruited by prestigious evangelical Wheaton College as a chaplain to support its LGBTQ+ students. Then they gradually worked to silence her and then force her out.

Here is was I wanted to specifically talk about here:

Wheaton College is a model for Evangelicals in many ways. Often considered “the Harvard of the Christian schools,” faculty have a range of beliefs on every debatable issue and the students are some of the brightest and most earnest I’ve ever encountered. Wheaton’s administration knows that in order to be a rigorous liberal arts college, they have to engage critical issues with cognitive complexity and charity. They know they need to welcome diversity in order to be relevant. More than that, they want to welcome diversity because our world is diverse and every human matters. Wheaton showed extraordinary courage when they hired me. At a time when Evangelicals are supremely anxious about all things LGBT, they hired an openly gay writer to work in their Chaplain’s office as a spiritual leader. Even though I could sign the Community Covenant at that time, I was a risk—a risk they took because they care about their gay students and know they need an advocate. They’re not alone in their desire to show support: Evangelical leaders approach me often with whispers to say they love gay people. They say they’re grieved by the way the church has treated sexual minorities and they long to see us move past this—they long to love without qualification. Then they unload their fears about how much they would lose.

I'm old. I remember the gay liberation movement from my teenage years, and the advent of AIDS entirely as an adult. My foundational memories of cis straight anti-LGBT bigotry come from the 1960s and '70s, and evangelical bigotry from the 1970s and '80s. And there are things evangelicals just didn't do then. They were NEVER compassionate toward us or ever sorry for anything "the church" had done to us. We were almost always "the enemy" in their eyes, and always foreign. It was Catholics who stepped up to provide hospice services for people with AIDS in those early years. It sure as fuck wasn't the born agains.

There have been great changes and subtle changes between those years and now. More than a few snuck up on and surprised me in the last ten years.

In the latter two paragraphs in the excerpts above, Julie Rodgers talks about evangelical educators who "care[d] about their gay students" and hoped to provide them an advocate to help them deal with the large number of bigots among evangelicals.

Based on all the statements of practicing evangelicals I've seen online over the past few years decrying evangelical LGBTQphobia, I can believe that there may have been officials at Wheaton who sincerely wanted to help their LGBTQ+ students against the hostility, but also that they folded when they discovered how bigoted the school's donor base was.

[lboogie1906]

Rev. Dr. Nathan Wright, Jr. (August 5, 1923 - February 22, 2005) was born in Shreveport. He and his brother and sisters grew up in Cincinnati. He attended St. Augustine’s College and transferred to Temple University. He served in the Army Medical Administrative Corps during WWII.

He graduated from the University of Cincinnati. He joined the Journey of Reconciliation which was sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality and the Fellowship of Reconciliation. He and seven other African Americans, accompanied by eight whites, rode together on buses in the South, publicizing the 1946 SCOTUS decision that outlawed segregation on interstate buses.

He earned a B.Div and M.Div from the Episcopal Theology School. He worked as a rector of St. Cyprian’s Church in Boston and chaplain of the city’s Children’s Medical Center. He served on the Massachusetts Governor’s Advisory Committee on Civil Rights.

After earning a Ph.D. in Education from Harvard University, he served in the Department of Urban Work of the Episcopal Diocese. Confronted with white resistance to integration in the South and widespread racist practices in the North, leaders of the SNCC declared that any progress for African Americans could only come through organization and activity separate from whites. He agreed with them and strongly advocated Black Power. He chaired the National Conference on Black Power held in Newark in the wake of a race riot in the city. Over 1,000 delegates from 126 cities representing 286 African American organizations attended the conference. He wrote two books on the Black Power movement, one of them the popular Black Power and Urban Unrest.

He wrote many other books. He became a professor of Urban Affairs and founding chair of the Department of African and Afro-American Studies at the State University of New York at Albany. He lectured at various colleges and universities throughout the country. He served as Director of Communications at Passaic County Community College.

He was survived by his wife, two sons, and three daughters. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

[monasteryicons]

The story of the Four Chaplains

WHEN A TORPEDO from a German submarine struck the USAT Dorchester shortly after midnight on Feb. 3, 1943, panic ensued. At that moment, four chaplains emerged from the chaos: Methodist preacher George Fox, Jewish rabbi Alexander Goode, Presbyterian minister Clarke Poling, and Catholic priest John Washington.

The four had met at Chaplain School at Harvard University and became good friends. Together they boarded the Dorchester in January 1943. They had been at sea for less than 10 days when the torpedo struck. In the aftermath of the attack, the four chaplains calmed the men, organized an evacuation, and distributed life jackets. When the life jackets ran out, they gave up their own.

Life jackets, however, weren’t the only thing in short supply. The Dorchester had only enough lifeboat space to accommodate one quarter of its men. The officers offered spots to the chaplains, but they refused to go.

As the survivors rowed away from the ship, they could see the four chaplains – linked arm in arm, praying for the souls and safety of their men. Before the sun rose, the Dorchester was done. So were her four chaplains and nearly 700 others. Only 230 men survived.

Posthumously, the four chaplains received the Distinguished Service Cross and the Purple Heart. In 1988, Congress declared Feb. 3 “Four Chaplains Day,” and the Episcopalian Church honors all four men on that day with a liturgical feast.

“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” JOHN 15:13

[crossmap]

Chaplain Daniel Cho meets one on one with students – including those from other faiths or no faith – to help them see Scripture in a new light.

[kellykullberg]

About Trace Thurlby’s Children’s Book- Things God Cannot Do

Kelly Monroe Kullberg, a resident of Columbus, Ohio, was a Central American mission­ary. She was also a chaplain with the Harvard Graduate School Christian Fellowship and wrote the award-winning book, "Finding God at Harvard: Spiritual Journeys of Christian Thinkers." In addition, Kelly Monroe Kullberg helped bring people and parts together to co-create a children's book for the Global Orphan Project titled "Things God Cannot Do" by Trace Thurlby.

"Things God Cannot Do" is a children's poem that connects God's nature to his steadfast promises and the gospel's hope. The book's message is the hope of the gospel. The book explains how the father greatly loves everyone in his world and has things under control even though it doesn't seem like it. The book aims to rekindle in a child a sense of wonderment and opens up a new way children think about God.

The paintings in the book are illustrated beautifully by award-winning artist Rosemary Adcock. The child's illustrations were painted by Kelly Kullberg's granddaughter. The illustrations capture a loving closeness between parent and child and, in careful strokes, express the story in the visual form of how much God cares for his children.

[loveerran]

Please make sure to click the article link and read the bios of these amazing women! Note the diversity in their life experiences.

I also want to point out that the church has endorsed its first female military chaplain, previously a role restricted to men and one which required two changes to official policy to make happen:

Being a chaplain traditionally involves some very specific duties, as noted in the church website's description:

Female Chaplains

Female Latter-day Saint chaplains may perform marriages, funerals, memorials, worship services, counseling, classes, and other needs of ministry. If services or ordinances are needed beyond the scope of one’s authority, the chaplain will facilitate the service taking place with authorized personnel. This protocol is also used for administration of the sacrament and priesthood blessings.

[holy-ghost-fire]

Original caption: "Japanese-American Chaplain. This newly-commissioned U.S. Army Chaplain is Lieut. Hiro Higuchi, a native of Hawaii, of Japanese parentage. He is now in training at Harvard, and is the second chaplain of Japanese ancestry to receive a commission in the U.S. Army Chaplains Corps. Higuchi is 36, married, and has a seven year old son. He has attended Oberlin College and the Universities of Hawaii and California. He represents the Congregational Christian Communion. 1943."

[churchtech]

Tim Keller Congratulates Atheist on Harvard Chaplain Presidency; Evangelical Defends Vote

Tim Keller Congratulates Atheist on Harvard Chaplain Presidency; Evangelical Defends Vote

On August 30, 2021, Tim Keller, the Christian apologist and former senior pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York Metropolis, congratulated his buddy Greg Epstein on Twitter for being elected the president of Harvard’s Chaplain group. The controversy for some studying Keller’s tweet is the truth that Epstein is an outspoken atheist. Keller’s submit read: “Congratulations, Greg, in your…

[endtimeheadlines]

Harvard just appointed its new Chief Chaplain who doesn’t even believe in God

(ETH) – In a move that trendwatchers say reflects Millennial spirituality, Harvard University’s chaplain corps is now led by a humanist. According to Church Leaders, Greg Epstein, who became the school’s first humanist chaplain in 2005, was unanimously elected to coordinate a 40-member team.

The 44-year-old, called the “godfather” of the humanist movement, wrote the bestselling book “Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe.” Epstein’s colleagues and the students he mentors say the chaplain encourages interfaith dialogue and helps people explore life’s big issues.

Continue reading Harvard just appointed its new Chief Chaplain who doesn’t even believe in God at End Time Headlines.

[lboogie1906]

Dr. Mildred Fay Jefferson (April 4, 1926 - October 15, 2010)was born in Pittsburgh, Texas, but raised in the town of Carthage, Texas. She was the only child of Millard Jefferson, a Methodist minister and chaplain in the Army, and Guthrie Roberts, a teacher. She graduated summa cum laude from Texas College with a BA in Medicine and graduated from Tufts University, with an MS in Biology. She graduated from Harvard Medical School, where she was the first African American woman to earn an MD. She interned at Boston City Hospital, where she was the first woman to serve on the staff and she was the first woman to be granted membership in the Boston Surgical Society. She became the first female surgeon general at Boston University Medical Center where she served as assistant clinical professor of surgery.

She married former Navy lieutenant Shane Cunningham (1961-1978). She began her career in activism by helping to establish the Massachusetts Citizens for Life Counsel. The turning point was the 1970 decision by the American Medical Association to allow member physicians to perform abortions ethically in states where the procedure was allowed.

She was asked by a colleague to sign a petition started by physicians who objected to the American Medical Association’s decision to defer to state law regarding abortion. She and her colleagues formed the Value of Life Committee. She served on the organization’s first Board of Governors. She became one of the nation’s most popular “pro-life” spokespersons, traveling throughout the country to speak on the subject.

She co-founded the National Right to Life Committee and served as vice chairman of the board, chairman of the board, and president. She claimed responsibility for bringing future President Ronald Reagan into the “pro-life” movement after hearing one of her lectures. She took her anti-abortion campaign into politics, running unsuccessfully for the Senate from Massachusetts in 1982, 1990, and 1994.

She was awarded twenty-eight honorary degrees from various universities and colleges. She founded the Culture of Life Studies Program which she promoted in public schools across the nation. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

[harvestheart]

This is awesome and inspiration for a more promising future.