Meet new faculty member Dr. Stephen Ray:
His views of theology are forged in social consciousness

New Faculty member Stephen Ray: Espouses a strong partnership between the academy and the wider community.

PHILADELPHIA, PA (March 17, 2005) - Whenever Dr. Stephen Ray teaches theology or African American Studies today, certain images burn in his memory.

LTSP's new Associate Professor of African-American Studies describes some of the faces he sees, in one case, the faces of children. It is 2 a.m. one morning in the late 1980s. Ray, 24, is working for a crisis intervention center at the Horace Bushnell Congregational Church in Hartford, CT. And he is home trying to get some sleep when the phone rings. Someone has been arrested. The prisoner's children are at home alone. Would Ray see that they are cared for?

"If the police had come to the house without my being there," he recalls, "the children would have been placed in foster care. But I was able to find a trusted family member to look after them." For Ray, the two-plus years he spent working for the crisis center were deeply formational. The lives of people in crisis that he touched also touched him deeply. Soon he was in seminary at Yale Divinity School. He graduated summa cum laude with an M.Div. degree and went on to become a United Church of Christ pastor. While in seminary, "I fell in love" with the study of systematic theology, he says. The writings of Augustine influenced him greatly. But he was intensely influenced by the writings of more modern thinkers -- James Cone, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gustavo Gutierrez.

Raised in New York City's Queens Borough, Stephen Ray refers to himself as a man of comparatively simple faith. "My mother instilled in me that God will provide," says Ray, who was baptized into the United Church of Christ at the age of 6 months. "When I worked at the Crisis Intervention Center, I got to see how the social and economic systems work to bring calamity on people who had nothing to do with bringing it on to themselves." Example: a building is found substandard via an inspection process. A family that has been paying the rent is evicted and is suddenly homeless. Ray needed to find them shelter. It was the kind of case he handled, when people, he said, "otherwise would have fallen through the cracks."

It probably isn't surprising that Ray ended up serving in the academic world. A voracious reader, he says he had read the World Book Encyclopedia by the time he was 11 - not once, but three times. "I knew a lot of trivia," he chuckles. "But I loved reading for knowledge."

Professor Ray enjoys a moment with new faculty and staff colleagues during the opening night of Preaching with Power at Grace Baptist Church in Philadelphia's Germantown. With Ray, center, are the Rev. Dr. H. S. Wilson, occupant of the H. George Anderson Chair of Mission and Cultures and director of the seminary's Multicultural Mission Resource Center; the Rev. Wil Gafney, Assistant Professor of Hebrew Scriptures and Homiletics; the Rev. Nelson Rivera, Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology and Director of the Latino Concentration, and the Rev. Dr. Eloise Scott, Director of Seminary Services, Evening Program.

Prior to accepting the LTSP position, which also designates him the program director of the seminary's Urban Theological Institute, Ray taught at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary for six years. During much of that time he served as pastor of Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ. "Teaching and scholarship from my viewpoint always needs to be accountable to the church, and serving as a pastor has been one way I've tried to be accountable," he says. "Teaching needs to be seen through the prism of concrete ministry."

Ray says he is excited about teaching African American Studies at a seminary like LTSP, but he is candid to admit that he might not have been much interested were it not for the role he anticipates with the UTI, a 25-year-old program that makes it possible for African American seminarians to study part time while they hold regular jobs.

"The seminary clearly has a commitment to scholarship," he says, "but it also has a genuine commitment to the African American community. It is for me like a blended marriage, a partnership." And he sees in that partnership the potential for developing new models for theological education.

Take Preaching with Power, the 23-year-old annual program that brings the best in African-American preaching both to the seminary campus and to community churches. Ray attended all the experiences this year.

"Preaching with Power is a revival in the worship sense," he says. "But clearly it is a program that involves the church and the academy in a celebration that is not alien to either. Dr. John Kinney brought to Grace Baptist Church the finest homiletical enactment. But his teaching after the service was also a celebration of education in the context of a church."

Ray says he sees in the UTI the clear prospect of offering even greater resources to congregations than the program provides now. "Congregations always have the challenge of putting enough people in the pews," he says. "Seminaries have the gift of being able to provide resources based on intellectual reflection. Reflection is the key to offering resources and training that matters to congregations," he says.

Ray received his Ph.D. in a dual degree program at Yale University in 2000. His foci were Religious Studies and African American Studies. He has a wide variety of interests in both the areas of Theology and African American Studies.

His most recently completed book is Do No Harm: Social Sin and Christian Responsibility (Fortress, 2002).

His interests outside the classroom and community? Ray likes to garden and cook. He enjoys American Bistro-style cooking and working on creative seafood dishes. His best specialty is southern-style cooking. He likes the smooth jazz genre. ("I had to buy a clock radio during my visit to Philadelphia so I could listen to my music," he says.) He also enjoys antiques restoration, but it is too busy out these days for him to focus on that avocation. He married wife, Susan, in 1984. The couple has a daughter, Kiara, 15. He begins his teaching duties in July.