EDS Faculty Visit Wilson Chapel

(l to r) EDS faculty members Suzanne Ehly,
Kwok Pui Lan, President of Andover Newton
Theological School Nick Carter, EDS professor
Lawrence Wills, EDS Board Member and former
chair Brett Donham, and professor Stephen Burns.

By Dr. Kwok Pui Lan

Last Friday when the temperature dropped to the teens, Professors Stephen Burns, Suzanne Ehly, Kwok Pui Lan, and Lawrence Wills of the Episcopal Divinity School (EDS) braved the cold and visited the award-winning Wilson Chapel at Andover Newton Theological School (ANTS) in Newton, Massachusetts.

Mr. Brett Donham, the former Chair of EDS’s Board of Trustees and the architect who designed the Chapel, accompanied them on the visit. The visit was prompted by Mr. Donham’s lecture on “Does Form Follow Function: The Design of Sacred Space” delivered at EDS in December, as well as growing interest among the EDS community to think more innovatively about the use of chapel space for worship.

Wilson Chapel attracted the faculty because it is intended to be a house of worship for multiple faiths: the predominantly Protestant ANTS community, a Jewish prayer group, and a Sufi group.

EDS has received a major grant from the Luce Foundation to support curricular revision, faculty development, and online continuing educational programs on religious pluralism. During the last academic year, a trip was organized to visit the RamakrishnaVedanta Society of Boston to learn about Hindu worship and religious life.

ANTS is the oldest seminary to offer graduate studies in the country. Its old chapel was not handicap accessible and can no longer serve the growing needs of the community. The school decided to build a brand new chapel on a former parking lot for multireligous services and multi-purposes. Mr. Donham met with the school community twice and listened carefully to them before finalizing his design.

The Wilson Chapel, built in 2007, has an open and transparent design, with no fixed iconic images, so that it can accommodate the needs of multiple religious communities. It was built by stones quarried in Brazil, with square windows that allow much light to shine through. Inside the Chapel, the stones were from Jerusalem.

For Professor Lawrence Wills, the building reminds him of the Pantheon in Rome, a temple consecrated to all gods. He said, “The indentations in the Pantheon ceiling achieve a windows effect as the shadows change over the course of the day, and it creates a truly awesome presence of divinity that I find captured also in the actual windows of the Wilson Chapel.”

President Nick Carter of ANTS warmly welcomed the EDS visitors and told the group that the school has seen a 300 percent increase in the use of the chapel since moving into the new space. The whole school community gather for worship on Wednesdays and throughout the week, denominational worship services, morning prayers, and complines are held. Since the chairs are moveable, a group can use the whole space or a section of it, depending on the size of the group.

The space is very good for dancing, President Carter added, and this is especially important for the Sufi group.

One of the favorite design features of worshipping space at Wilson Chapel is that of the circle, which reminds us of the theme “the church in the round” we have experimented with in the worship services during the January term at EDS.

Another favorite design aspect is in the form of a semi-circle facing south. The south side of Chapel has no stones, with only square glass windows, which signifies being open to the people and churches in the Global South, where Christianity sees its future. During festive activities, colorful banners will be hung to celebrate the richness and diversity that the community embodies.

There is also a meeting room for group reflection and a prayer room downstairs. The little prayer room has an intimate design, with icons from different traditions stored in the cabinet for people to choose to use.

At the end of visit, I shared with the group that I have been interested in the design of sacred space for a long time, because my church in Hong Kong was built in Chinese architectural style. The Holy Trinity Church in Hong Kong is one of the three churches in Hong Kong built in the Chinese style. Inside the church, Christian and Chinese religious symbols decorate the space. In addition to the symbols of the vine and fish and loaves, there are the symbols of thunder and clouds, found in traditional Chinese buildings. The candlestick holders on the two sides of the lectern are made of wood shaped like the Chinese bamboo tree.

It was not until much later that I recognized how the hybridity of Christian and Chinese symbolism and religiosity of my church has shaped my spirituality and my understanding of the Anglican tradition in an expansive way.

The faculty plan to expose our students to the creative use of sacred spaces in our area. Mr. Donham is renovating St. Paul’s Cathedral in downtown Boston. Several hundred Muslims use spaces of the Cathedral for their Friday prayers each week. The Wellesley Multifaith Center, housed in the first level of the Chapel building at Wellesley College, provides multifaith sacred and meeting spaces for prayer and study, and facilities are made available for Muslim members to wash themselves before prayers.

Supported by the Luce grant, we will continue to visit worshipping spaces of other religious traditions to learn about their spirituality and community life. As the United States is going to be religiously more diverse, such exposures will be invaluable in the formation of religious leaders for the future.

Kwok Pui Lan is the William F. Cole Professor of Christian Theology and Spirituality at the Episcopal Divinity School and her most recent book Occupy Religion: Theology of the Multitude is published by Rowman and Littlefield.

"The Jewish Annotated New Testament" at One Year Old

By Dr. Lawrence Wills

Photo by Matthew Griffing

A few decades ago, a common “meme” of jokes began something like this: “A priest, a minister, and a rabbi are in a lifeboat. . . .” Humor is based on tension and the release of tension. The tension of a priest, a minister, and a rabbi in the same lifeboat was the basis of the meme, but today that particular tension is no longer sufficient to propel a joke.

The priest, the minister, and the rabbi are now often on the same faculty in seminaries and religion departments. One of the results of this shift in the American landscape is The Jewish Annotated NewTestament (edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, published by Oxford University Press). It consists of a modern translation of the New Testament with introductions and notes by Jewish scholars. Passages such as the Sermon on the Mount, the Great Commandment, or Paul’s arguments with the Galatians over the continuing validity of the law are placed in the context of first-century Judaism, and the refrain of many of the annotations is: the traditional Christian understandings of these texts must be radically re-assessed.

I contributed the material for the Gospel of Mark, and was part of a panel in Boston to discuss the significance of this surprisingly hot-selling work on the New Testament. The venue for the panel reflects the changing discourse on inter-faith issues. It was at Emmanuel Center just beside Boston Common, which itself is a cooperative venture of Emmanuel Episcopal Church and Central Reform Temple. Also on the panel were Pheme Perkins (professor of New Testament at Boston College), Pamela Werntz (priest at Emmanuel Church and EDS 2000), and Rabbi Howard Berman (rabbi of Central Reform Temple).

It has long been recognized that the Gospel of Matthew remains loyal to Jewish law, and that even Paul was much more concerned that gentile converts not be held to the law than he was that Jews in Christ should give it up. But Mark has been considered a gospel for a gentile audience that followed Paul’s message to lay aside Jewish law. This is now questioned as well by many scholars. Even if Mark and the audience are gentile (there are several apparent inconsistencies between this gospel and first-century Judaism), it is not clear that Mark sets aside the validity of the law. When Jesus heals the leper (Mark 1), he does not reject purity laws concerning leprosy, he “cleanses” the leper and brings him into a state of purity. Even the fact that Jesus touches the leper does not necessarily mean that Jesus disregarded Jewish law. Some Jewish texts of the period indicate that at the end of time there is a special dispensation of purity on those who are within the new community. Jesus has the power to dispense purity, and this may have been a common Jewish conception. Other terms in Mark are now seen as more fitting within a Jewish context than in a gentile. Most of the New Testament texts refer to “demons,” but like the (Jewish) Qumran texts, Mark usually calls them “unclean spirits”—one might facetiously say “non-kosher spirits”—which the Holy Spirit will overcome.

Every tradition survives and thrives by re-telling a story of its own origins and internal heroism, and Christianity is no exception. (Don’t be naïve—if your organization doesn’t do that, it won’t last out the decade.) The New Testament texts became in the second century a story of “Judaism there, Christianity here,” or even “Judaism bad, Christianity good,” but in the first century it was not so simple. This volume represents an opportunity for reflection by Jews and Christians, as Jewish scholars bring their training to bear on the question, “What did this internal debate look like in the first century?”

The discussion at the Emmanuel Center was very spirited and raised far more questions than could be treated in the session, but for me the most poignant moment came when Rabbi Berman closed by saying, “If books like the Jewish Annotated New Testament had existed a hundred years ago, the history of the twentieth century for Jews might have been very different.”

At the same time that it is reported that the number of anti-Semitic acts in Massachusetts and Connecticut was up this year, the shifting public discourse in general seems clear. But is there a new tension in the land? “An imam, a Southern Baptist minister, and a feminist are in a lifeboat. . . .”

Dr. Lawrence Wills is Ethelbert Talbot Professor of Biblical Studies at Episcopal Divinity School. 

What Would It Take to Move the Map?

By Dr. Lawrence Wills

Maps, whether real or mental, omit as much as they show.

In our universities and seminaries, the early history of Christians and Jews in the West is studied in exacting detail, but it is often a one-sided process: the movement of Christians and Jews—and Muslims—to the East is largely ignored.

There is increasing evidence of a rich history of Christians, Jews, and Muslims who moved eastward all the way to China, at a time much earlier than was previously believed. There is, in fact, an entire “lost history” of these groups in the East, not because the evidence is not available or accessible, but simply because our universities and seminaries choose to ignore it.

The “What Would It Take to Move the Map?” conference is organized to address the simple yet fundamental question: What would it take to move the map to include a more inclusive history by introducing eastern narratives into this early history?

It is partly a matter of reintroducing some of the new findings about these groups in ancient Armenia, Syria, India, Inner Asia, East Asia—which some of the experts at this conference will do. But this conference will also encourage participants to reflect on the challenges and benefits of integrating an eastern history into the bigger picture. For instance, how can this realignment of the map and expansion of historical themes teach us about movements of religious groups in other areas, say, in Africa or South America—or the United States?

Modern global issues demand that we think anew about the interconnections and take measures to integrate the history of the East and West. It is natural for people in the West to have been more interested in “their” history, but from the beginning there have been non-Europeans present whose history was simply ignored. Is European and American history “their” history? What happens when more and more people in the West are from Africa, the Middle East, or South or East Asia? What happens when more of the West’s relations are with the East? The broadening of the historical map goes hand-in-hand with the broadening of the modern map, which is becoming increasingly complex. This conference will provide a forum for essential conversations on integrating new historical knowledge with our common maps, laying the foundation for a more thorough and complicated understanding of modern global concerns.

Dr. Lawrence Wills is the Ethelbert Talbot Professor of Biblical Studies at Episcopal Divinity School and author of Not God’s People: Insiders and Outsiders in the Biblical World.


“What Would It Take to Move the Map? Abrahamic Religions on the Silk Road” is a one-day conference that will take place at Episcopal Divinity School on Saturday, March 3^rd from 9am to 6pm. The conference will explore the overlooked histories of ancient Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Middle East, India, and East Asia. This conference is part of EDS’s interfaith initiative funded by a generous grant from the Henry Luce Foundation of New York. For more information visit www.eds.edu.