HTI Open Plaza

In this episode of OP Talks, Rev. Dr. Tony Tian-Ren Lin, talks with writer Grace Loh Prasad about her debut memoir The Translator’s Daughter (Mad Creek Books/The Ohio State University Press, 2024) and her life as the daughter of professor parents in Taiwan during the era of White Terror. Prasad’s father, a polyglot who was the first Taiwanese PhD graduate from Princeton Theological Seminary, translated for the United Bible Societies. Her mother descends from the first Christian Convert in Taiwan. Prasad talks about living in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the United States, and being a “third culture kid,” her asterisked American identity, and metaphysical homelessness.

In this episode of OP Talks, Amirah Orozco, a doctoral student of Systematic Theology at Notre Dame, talks with Dr. Raúl Zegarra, Assistant Professor of Roman Catholic Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity School, about his book A Revolutionary Faith: Liberation Theology Between Public Religion and Public Reason (Stanford University Press, 2023). The book, which is in conversation with the work of theologians Gustavo Gutiérrez and David Tracy, delves into how religious organizing and mobilizing can help enrich and strengthen democracy.

Dr. Zegarra’s work “shows how liberation theology advocates have been able to produce a new balance between faith and politics that advances an agenda of progressive social change without reducing politics to faith or faith to politics,” writes Stanford University Press.

Amantina Durán medita sobre los regalos de su hija

In this episode of OP Talks, Dr. Javier Viera, President and Professor of Education and Leadership at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, and Dr. Maria Liu Wong, City Seminary of New York Provost, discuss her recent book  On Becoming Wise Together: Learning and Leading in the City (Eerdmans, 2023). This work proposes “that intercultural and communal understandings of theological teaching and learning suit the context of a complex and quickly changing urban world better than individualistic, rational Western habits of knowing.”

According to Dr. Wong, “This book reframes traditional Euro-North American conceptions of theological education by reflecting critically on my lived experience as a British-born Chinese-North American woman, a family member, an immigrant, an urban theological educator, a maker, a gallery curator, a community gardener, a Girl Scout troop leader, and a scholar.”

This conversation and the book are part of of the Theological Education between the Times (TEBT) series, an initiative out of HTI member school Emory University Candler School of Theology that “gathers diverse groups of people for critical, theological conversations about the meanings and purposes of theological education. The project begins with a recognition that theological education is between the times, on the way. And it works in the confidence that we do not walk this road alone.”

In this episode of OP Talks, Rev. Dr. Joanne Rodriguez, HTI Executive Director, talks with Dr. Luis G. Pedraja, President of Quinsigamond Community College, about his leadership trajectory from professor to senior administrator. The Cuban-born theologian started his career as a faculty member before becoming a chair, then later a dean and a provost. He describes transitioning between roles and the lessons learned. “You have to get buy-in from the people you are leading,” Dr. Pedraja says, looking back at his earlier days as an administrator. “If that doesn’t happen, whether you are right or wrong, it doesn’t matter. You have to be a leader that brings people along with you.”