An Invitation from Our New President

This is a time of inauguration at Auburn—for me personally and professionally, as we celebrate the presidential inauguration on April 15th—and for Auburn institutionally, as we launch our new Web site and a new look. I welcome you to Auburn’s new Web site—our “virtual campus.”   The new site is a primary way you can participate in the life and work of this seminary without walls.  A hallmark of Auburn from its beginning – almost two hundred years ago—has been the practice of taking theological education outside the seminary into churches and community settings, even into prisons.  More recently, you have found Auburn in those traditional settings, and also in synagogues, mosques and other religious communities, in schools, corporate boardrooms, hospitals, and on radio, television and the Web.

This Web site is our newest attempt to reach you and an ever-broader public around the globe—and to be reached by you.  Our reason for launching this new site is not just practical but theological.  We believe that our understanding of the Divine is interwoven with every aspect of our personal and professional lives.  We believe in the power and possibility of your leadership. Learning about God is a lifelong focus, and whether you are a religious or a secular professional, a community volunteer, a teenager, or a seeker, you will find something to learn here, something that engages, challenges and supports you in fulfilling your call to heal and repair the world.

Auburn’s new tagline, Trouble the waters, heal the world, embodies our highest aspirations.  It reflects our intentions as we equip leaders for the challenging and complex world in which we live.  Surely the work will involve more than simply maintaining what has been.  There will likely be some troubling and some stirring things up along the way.  Healing the world with God’s help must be the goal of all our yearnings and efforts.  Our new watchword is also a prayer: “God--Trouble the waters and heal the world!”

Our new logo builds on our name, set against a blue background, but it includes much more. The logo can be seen as the globe itself, observed from a distance, or as expressing the transforming power of water, which is central to so many faiths. One viewer even saw in it the story of creation, in which form and order emerge from the void at God’s command.  The ragged edge implies that the work is unfinished. It invites us all to become part of the cloud of witnesses—those living and all who have come before—who have sought to love God with their hearts and minds, and to love neighbors and strangers, alike, as themselves.

We invite you to partner with us in the life and work of Auburn.  Let us hear from you with comments (below), use this Web site as a resource for your life and work, come to our courses and events, and celebrate this moment of new life and purpose.

Katharine Henderson
President, Auburn Theological Seminary