PHILADELPHIA (July 2000)-- The Rev. Dr. Katie Day of Philadelphia's East Mt. Airy section has been promoted from Associate Professor to full Professor of Church and Society at The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. She finds these days a rich opportunity for reflecting "on what I am doing here at the Seminary." She says it is a time of shifting, deepening and ripening.

For one thing she is doing a lot. She is authoring a book for congregations for publication by the Alban Institute, a consulting organization to churches. Called Difficult Conversations, the book focuses on the question of why congregations are not more powerfully engaged in the public forum debate over such issues as domestic violence and abortion. The volume focuses on how congregations can better understand who they are and how to relate better to their context with ministry that makes sense. In this context, Katie Day is also coordinator of a Philadelphia team connected to the Hartford Seminary Congregational Studies Institute. Along with teams working in the cities of Dallas and Chicago, the Philadelphia team is working on a presentation called "Congregational Capacity and Public Presence."

Major research time is also spent on the Seminary's Church Rebuilding Research Project, now entering its third year. The project, funded by Lilly Endowment, Inc., involves her in working with Northwestern University ethnographer Dr. Timothy Nelson in assessing the impact of volunteers rebuilding many dozens of African American congregations victimized by arson. Day says the arsons used to attract national media coverage, but in 1997, the burnings fell out of the limelight when media sources concluded the arsons weren't part of a national conspiracy. Today, she says, 15 to 20 congregations a month are still victimized by arson. She is studying is how volunteers, predominantly white, affluent northerners from across the religious spectrum, felt so powerfully compelled by such dramatic intolerance that they crossed all kinds of regional, cultural and social lines to respond compassionately in a recovery effort. Further, she is studying what impact that response has had on their lives and that of the congregations being rebuilt. "These people were not civil rights volunteers or seasoned disaster relief specialists," Day says. "They were so affected by the initial media coverage they felt they had to do something." Day believes that analyzing what compelled them to act could be a force in re-energizing churches toward greater civic engagement, when the trend now is in the reverse. "That these rebuilding volunteers have been willing to cross boundaries of class, race and culture is a sign of great hope," she says. The Project expects to report on the results of its findings in a little over a year.

Dr. Katie Day finds her interaction with Seminary students invigorating and finds it a great challenge to prepare tomorrow's leaders to strategize over such challenges as civic re-engagement facing today's and tomorrow's church.

She says she is inspired when she hears pronouncements such as one from a high school volunteer from New England who became a rebuilding volunteer. "She told me in an interview that her experience had taught her not to be racist," Day says. Such comments are key to Day's growing belief that such change in people doesn't "take"

Katie Day, a Presbyterian pastor, graduated from Wheaton College in 1973 and received her M.Div. from Gordon-Conwell Seminary in 1977. She has a Master of Sacred Theology from Union Seminary (NY) and her Ph.D. from Temple University. She served pastorates in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania and has taught at the Seminary since 1985. She is married to Dr. Gerard Cooney, a pharmacologist and Vice President of Integrated Communications. They have two lively youngsters, Julian, 9, and Molly, 8. > if it isn't reinforced by strong, consistent educational intervention. p> The Seminary is one of eight affiliated with the 5.2-million-member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, a denomination with 11,000 congregations. The Seminary enrolls about 430 students and anticipates a record enrollment of new seminarians this fall. The Seminary has a 20-year-old Urban Theological Institute, an Afro-centric program of studies for part-time students, and a new Latino Concentration, which graduated its first two participants last spring. Students from some 30 church affiliations have studied on the Seminary's campus.