ACHTUS Award

About an hour west from here, in Crawfordsville, IN, there is a wonderful…magical…some here might say utopian, place…a Shangri-la of sorts for teachers and scholars of theology and religion. Established in 1995, it is a place that, as stated on their website, “supports theology and religion faculty and doctoral students reflecting on their teaching practice – in both theological education and undergraduate education, in North America.” I speak, of course, of the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, the recipient of this year’s ACHTUS Award, an award given to an institution or organization for institutional contributions in keeping with the mission of ACHTUS.

The Wabash Center has a substantial history of supporting Latinx theology and religion faculty and doctoral students. In nominating the Wabash Center for the ACHTUS award, ACHTUS members noted the long and continually growing list of Latinx participants in–and leaders of–the various colloquies and workshops hosted by the Wabash Center, several of which have been partnerships with the Hispanic Theological Initiative. I’m not going to recite the list of names, but I invite the Latinx folk in this room who have been workshop participants and/or leaders, or who have done anything with Wabash for that matter, to stand briefly as a visual testament to the Wabash Center’s commitment to working with Latinx teachers of theology and religion over the years.

I am grateful to be among this group, as a participant at a 2013 Workshop for HTI Fellows and a 2014-2015 Pre-Tenure Theological School Faculty workshop, which itself was remarkably diverse along racial, gender, and denominational lines. By regularly putting groups like this together, under the aegis of its policy of confidentiality–remember, “What happens at Wabash, stays at Wabash”–the Wabash Center provides a creative space for conversation, support, networking, strategizing, and even conflict that better equips teachers and scholars of theology and religion at different professional levels to navigate our various academic institutional spaces and improve our craft as teachers. As one ACHTUS member wrote in their nomination, “[Wabash] workshops have…challenged Latinxs to engage across other cultures to greater diversify our teaching repertoire as well as learning from others some of the challenges of being a scholar from an underrepresented group. The fact that most programming mixes together scholars from various fields and religious traditions means that Latinx participants are able to network across differences in a welcoming, engaging, safe, and respectful setting. ACHTUS membership and Latinx scholars, in general, have greatly benefited from Wabash’s outreach and resources throughout the last two decades.”

As this recommendation for nomination points out, the Wabash Center leadership has shown demonstrable evidence of their commitment to being allies to scholars of color in a context where finding true allies is difficult: academia. They know how to offer wisdom and encouragement and nudge us along…maybe by encouraging us to write for their eminently useful journal, Teaching Theology & Religion (we’re always reminded of that pile of books for review, after all). But perhaps more importantly, they know to step back and just let us talk. They have also demonstrated a concrete appreciation of Latinx theological pedagogies, as seen in their funding of grants for “Teaching Faculty Latinamente” at the Catholic Theological Union and for Latinx peer mentoring clusters, and in their willingness to let the Latinx participants in the 2008-2009 Workshop for Latino/a Faculty at Colleges, Universities, and Theological Schools more-or-less take over and lead the group in a “Convivencia en la Cocina” at Wabash Avenue Presbyterian Church. Here to accept the ACHTUS Award are Executive Director Nadine (Dena) Pence and Associate Director Paul Myrhe. Join me in congratulating the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion as the recipient of the 2018 ACHTUS Award.