Topics in Ministry courses provide intensive opportunities to explore theological, spiritual, and professional topics that expand and deepen the Union educational experience. Each course requires a separate registration form and a $150 registration fee. Please check the registration deadline for each course. Current Union students can register for these Fall 2022 (and only Fall 2022) courses through the SU 190 course registration form. Registration links below are for members of the community.

Thunder Exercises for Contemporary Spiritual Life
Dates/Times: September 16 (1-6pm) and September 17 (9am-5pm)
Location: In Person
Instructors: Su Yon Pak and Hal Taussig
Registration

In a retreat-like format, this course explores Thunder: Perfect Mind as a resource for spiritual and contemplative practice. Thunder is an ancient Nag Hamadi text, a non-dual self-proclamation of identities written and performed primarily in a divine mostly female and queer voice. Making space for prayer, meditation, silence, chanting, text study, spiritual reflection, spiritual guidance, and performance, students engage spiritual exercises with Thunder as a way to deepen their spiritual contemplative practice.

Imagination, Interdependence and Liberation: Practicing Yogacara’s Three Natures
Dates/Times: October 21 (1-6pm) and October 22 (9am-5pm)
Location: In Person
Instructor: Ben Connelly
Registration

How can we harness imagination in traditions that radically emphasize present moment awareness? How can teachings of interdependence provide a basis for a deep sense of always being supported while constantly challenging us to be aware of oppressive systems and harmful patterns in which we live? These questions are addressed in Vasubandhu’s seminal Yogacara Buddhist text, “Treatise on Three Natures”. Yogacara Buddhist teachings clearly show how the path to liberation from collective causes of suffering such as patriarchy, racism, and climate change, are inseparable from the personal, momentary, experience of our lives. This course is structured around the “Treatise on Three Natures” and balance teaching, dialogue, and meditation to make  space for integrated learning and transformation.

Bricks and Mortals
Dates/Times: November 4 (1-6pm) and November 5 (9am-5pm)
Location: In Person
Instructor: Donna Schaper
Registration

Before COVID-19, there was another pandemic. It was much slower moving and it involved bricks and their  mortals. Multiple congregations, of all flavors, going slowly out of business. Deferred maintenance joined membership declines to create enormous need to creatively adapt religious buildings to mission central and mission consistent purposes. This course addresses this challenge, considering it more of an opportunity than a problem. It helps the stewards of these buildings to concretely and spiritually address the shifts in economics and purpose, and guides them to develop productive plans in order to survive and thrive on their site. The course also provides an introduction for community members who see under-used often beautiful buildings as assets, and for artists, architects and urban planners who enjoy painting urban landscapes using existing visual context to support love of public place and space.

Dharma + Justice + Abolition
Dates/Times: In Person
Location: February 10 (1-6pm) and February 11 (9am-5pm)
Instructor: Karen G. Williams
Registration 

In the wake of protests confronting racial injustice and anti-Black racism in the summer of 2020, a newfound attentiveness towards abolition has reemerged. This course explores how the dharma informs our  understanding of abolition and what is the role of dharma in justice? Drawing on contemporary writings from QTBIPOC Buddhist practitioners, feminist scholars, and social justice movements as a way to ground our view, students collectively imagine a just world. Students engage in intimate conversations about what is at stake, and what do we need to undo and unlearn for liberation.

Death and Dying in Islam: How Best to Care For Muslim Patients 
Dates/Times: February 24 (3-8pm) and February 25 (9am-5pm)
Location: Online
Instructor: Maryam Sharrieff
Registration

This course covers death and dying from an Islamic perspective, focusing on how to care for a Muslim patient at the time of their transition and all consequent matters. Muslims place great importance on the preparation for death, dying and the afterlife. Students learn how best to support and serve a deceased Muslim, their family and community members. This course prepares chaplains, religious leaders, and community members on how to perform the Islamic rites and rituals of death. The following is addressed: actions to take when death is imminent; actions  to take at the time of death and who to contact; rights of the deceased; ghusl (ritual washing for the deceased) and shrouding of the body; janaza (Muslim funeral prayer); etiquette of mourning the  deceased; will writing and debt satisfaction; and cultural traditions vs. religious obligations.

Spiritual Practice for the Social Good: Cultivating Clear Awareness of Invisible Group Dynamics through Chan Practice
Dates/Times: March 3 (1-6pm) and March 4 (9am-5pm)
Location: In Person
Instructor: Rebecca Li
Registration

Are we aware that we may be perpetuating group dynamics that cause suffering to ourselves and others? Chan Buddhism emphasizes cultivating clear total awareness of constantly changing causes and conditions to live in accordance with wisdom and compassion. Yet, powerful but invisible group dynamics often compel us to act in contradiction to our bodhisattva vows. Understanding and awareness of these dynamics needs to be an integral part of our practice. In this course, students discuss sociological insights on subtle dynamics of solidarity,  conflict, power and culture and how to integrate conceptual understanding of these social processes into our spiritual practice for the social good. Discussion is conducted in the context of Chan meditation practice.

Organizational Leadership Competencies
Dates/Times: April 21 (1-6pm) and April 22 (10am-6pm)
Location: Online
Instructor: Tara Bedeau
Registration

All our work in organizations is grounded in an operational structure. This course focuses on the most common operational structure under which chaplains and other religious professionals operate. Students learn the basic operational components of an organization: budget, organizational charts, strategic relationships, etc., which enable them to navigate their role more effectively as an agent of change within the system.

Public Engagement Courses, offered in partnership with Union’s Center for Community Engagement and Social Justice, feature Union faculty and distinguished practitioners. These short courses, which are taken by members of the community alongside Union students, are offered in an intensive format, usually over the course of a consecutive Friday and Saturday. Each course requires a separate registration form and a $150 non-refundable registration fee. Please check the registration deadline for each course. Most courses require some pre-reading that may incur an additional cost. Current Union students can register for Fall 2022 (and only Fall 2022) courses through the SU 150 course registration form. Registration links below are for members of the community.

Gustavo Gutierrez and the Problem of Human Suffering
Dates/Times: October 7 (1-6pm) and October 8 (9am-5pm)
Location: Online
Instructor: Kelly Brown Douglas
Registration

How do you speak of the justice of God amidst unjust human suffering and oppression? This core dilemma in the book of Job is also the central theme of liberation theology. Gustavo Gutierrez, the pioneer of Latin American liberation theology, writes that “the innocence that Job vigorously claims for himself helps [us] to understand the innocence of an oppressed and believing people amid the situation of suffering and death that has been forced upon it.” Through careful examination of Gutierrez’s “On Job: God-Talk the Suffering of the Innocent”, this course examines how Latin American liberation theology responds to the predicament of speaking of a just God in the face of human suffering with special attention to the practice of ministry in an unjust world.

Faith and Human Struggle: Christian and Muslim Perspectives
Date/Times: October 14 (3-8pm) and October 15 (10am-6pm)
Location: Online
Instructor: Mona Siddiqui
Registration

Struggle is both a personal and universal reality of human life and always present in theological, philosophical and sociological literature. Human beings often wish to avoid struggle and yet it is during times of struggle that we become, we grow and we find deeper purpose in life. This course will explore the topic of struggle through the writings of celebrated Christian and Muslim scholars, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Syed Qutb, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali and Rainer Maria Rilke. Their writings reflect how their faith inspired them to rethink the universal themes of love, loss, the crisis of faith and personal salvation. They suffered from doubts and adversity but their faith and quest for God gave their lives hope and meaning.

Chaplaincy and Building a Movement in Poor Communities
Dates/Times: November 4 (1-6pm) and November 5 (9am-5pm)
Location: Online
Instructor: Sarah Monroe
Registration

As the religious landscape in the United States shifts with growing speed, chaplaincy has grown in importance cross institutions and disciplines. This course explores how chaplains could be a vital presence in poor communities, as poverty grows with equal speed. Taking lessons from The Poor People’s Campaign, grassroots movement building around the country, and hospital and jail chaplaincy, students discuss how chaplains could lead a movement to end poverty.

Place-Making as Ecojustice
Dates/Times: March 24 (1-6pm) and March 25 (9am-5pm)
Location: Online Course
Instructor: Lea F. Schweitz
Registration

Each of us are rooted in landscapes that have shaped us spiritually and theologically, but many of us find ourselves disconnected and dislocated from these formative places and by extension the places we inhabit every day. This course invites a deeper look into our ecomemories and a reconnection with our spiritual landscapes past and present. Students gain a new set of spiritual practices to cultivate both a more rooted spiritual awareness of the places they call home, and the resources for renewing a theologically robust land ethic to build a more ecojust future for a climate crisis world.

Crossroads and Confluence: An Examination of Gender and Race in the Movements of Ecological and Economic Justice
Dates/Times: April 14 (1-6pm) and April 15 (9am-5pm)
Location: Online
Instructors: Kelly Brown Douglas, Karenna Gore, Liz Theoharis
Registration

This course critically explores the biblical and theological traditions that have helped to cause economic and ecological injustice as well as biblical, theological and ethical mandates for addressing it. It highlights the intersecting and interlocking realities of racial, economic and ecological injustice as well as the impact and implications of binary ways of viewing human and non-human creation.

Anglicanism & Social Justice Program

The Anglicanism and Social Justice pilot at EDS at Union is a non-degree, virtual theological education program for lay and ordained Christian leaders. Over the course of four semesters, the program examines issues of racial justice, gender and sexuality, poverty, and environmental justice from a theological perspective, asking how the church is being called to respond. Throughout, attention is given to Christian biblical interpretation and the Anglican/Episcopal tradition as historical sites for sanctioning and/or resisting oppression.

During each semester of the 2022-2023 academic year, this expanded cohort will gather virtually for five (5) day-long events—including two Union weekend intensive courses—comprised of lectures from faculty, interviews with guest scholars, activists, and faith leaders, and small group discussions. Participants in the program are asked to read approximately five books per semester. Between sessions, participants engage with one another and the assigned readings via online discussion forums.

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Encore Transition Program

The Encore Transition Program at Union Theological Seminary engages a diverse group of 12-15 like-minded 55+ adults in discernment, dialogue, and experience with what an “encore” stage of productive, social-purpose focused adulthood might look like. Encore runs weekly seminar-style sessions to maximize participant engagement. Assigned readings and exercises are designed to provoke discernment, self-reflection, and contemplation.

RISE Together Mentorship Network

RISE Together at Union Theological Seminary is a female mentorship network that connects women of color seminary students and early to mid-career clergy to experienced women ministers, senior pastors, faculty, and community leaders. Through mentoring relationships, intergenerational and peer support networks, RISE members experience safe spaces for Renewal, Inspiration, Support and Empowerment.

Union’s advanced certificate programs are designed for students who want to apply spiritual and theological learning to practical societal application. The four-course, twelve-credit graduate program can be completed in as little as 9 months (but students have up to 24 months). Courses are taught by Union’s full-time faculty members as well as adjunct faculty and lecturers, taken with other Union students pursuing on-campus and online certificates and degrees. Courses are available on weekdays, weeknights, and, in some cases, weekends. Many courses can be taken online, but students will have a greater selection of courses and be able to complete the degree in the least time by taking some on-campus coursework. Courses are available in fall and spring term, with some offerings in January and summer. Certificates may serve either as a stand-alone credential for those interested in a particular area of focus or as a stackable credential that can later be applied toward a full seminary master’s degree.

Union’s Master of Arts in Social Justice (MASJ) is an online 36-credit master’s degree that can be completed in as little as two years. Working with Union’s dynamic faculty, the MASJ empowers students in the program to reimagine the work of justice. Designed for working professionals, students in the program will be equipped to think critically, intersectionally, and creatively about human and planetary flourishing and the ongoing pursuit of a more just society and equitable world. The program emphasizes social justice’s religious, spiritual, and theological roots and offers a wide range of coursework in racial and ethnic justice, gender and sexuality justice, and eco-justice. In keeping with Union’s unique approach to theological education, it underlines the importance of interreligious engagement with diverse religious traditions.