Dear Union,
In 2016, as an early-career faculty member, I walked into my first Union classroom, and I have not stopped thinking since about how this place widened me. Union has been the compass I frequently revisited over the years, as I’ve reflected on what it means to be a scholar, educator, and leader in the world we are co-creating.
Union is a seminary of uncommon courage: a place that trains people not simply to hold belief, but to hold our beliefs, sacred texts, and history accountable to the urgent claims of the world outside these doors. Union does not ask us to choose between rigorous scholarship and a passionate commitment to justice. Union demands that we bring both, at once, into the same room. And most importantly, it makes this demand to ensure that faith, scholarship, and justice have an intelligible impact on the everydayness of life.
That capaciousness is one of Union’s deepest gifts. We are a community where Womanist and feminist theologies sit at the table with process thought and liberation theology and the wisdom of traditions beyond Christianity altogether. We are a community where the pulpit, the seminar room, and the public square are understood as continuous with one another, not as separate efforts and vocations. At its best, Union does not resolve these distinctives into a single voice. It holds them in generative tension—voicing something new into being.
This matters now more than ever. Theological education is being asked, from every direction, to justify itself, to say plainly what it is for. Union’s answer cannot be assumed; it must be lived. We will continue to demonstrate it in the seriousness of our scholarship, the honesty of our formation of faith leaders, scholars, organizers, and everyday citizens, and our willingness to stay close to the world’s wounds and brightest hopes rather than theorize from a safe distance. We will always hold fast to what is aligned and authentic to our legacy while asking, without flinching, where we must change in order to live into our calling more fully—and most imaginatively.
I have spent my career quarrying the places in which people have been told they do not belong or are not authorized to speak. And there, in those life-suppressing places—through creativity, tenacity, and a sheer will to make a way out of no way— people still find a way to speak. They defy all odds and give themselves over to what must be voiced, to what sustains their lives and the lives of others. That is not a marginal story. It is close to the whole story of how the Spirit moves through institutions that were not built with everyone in mind.
As I begin, I will be listening as a path for leading. And it will take all of us. I will seek students, faculty, staff, alumni and our friends whose experience of Union differs from mine. I welcome disagreement, and we will work to hold together our intellectual rigor, interreligious commitment, and an unapologetic moral imagination—not as a slogan, but as a lived vocation. Our responsibility is not only to preserve knowledge. Our responsibility is to cultivate the spiritual, intellectual, ethical, and relational capacities a person needs to meet a world of profound complexity with something more than despair.
You’ll often hear me hearken back to where my own formation began: North Carolina, where I grew up as a child within sharecropper lineages. There I came to understand education as a practice of freedom, a calling inherited rather than chosen, and one I am committed to planting forward, as seeds in the ground, in every classroom, meeting space, chapel service, and hard conversation ahead of us. Unexpected delight will meet us here, and unexpected delight will meet us in the world.
I am deeply grateful to Rev. Dr. Serene Jones for eighteen years of extraordinary leadership, for the courage and moral clarity she brought to this seat, and for the generosity with which she has welcomed me into this transition. I am grateful to the Board of Trustees for their confidence and to the search committee for their care in this process. And I am grateful to all of you, faculty, students, staff, and alumni near and far, whose devotion sustains this seminary’s beautifully stubborn sacred work.
I look forward to mornings crossing Broadway at 121st with many of you, stealing away time to slow down and consider what matters most, and, I hope, more days than I can count sharing unexpected moments in the hallways where the bones of Union’s testimony still hum in the walls.
I have said it before, and I will continue to say it. We are not merely building for the world we can see today. We are discerning, dreaming, and building for the world we are making possible in the next two hundred years. That is risky, worthy work, and I am honored to take it up alongside you, starting now.
Sincerely,
Rev. Dr. Lisa L. Thompson
President
Union Theological Seminary