Volume 76
Number 3

The Romance of the West

Home Away from Home

Burden of Proof

The Moviegoer

CASE Editor’s Forum

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Emory University

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DURING A FORMAL INSTALLATION CEREMONY conducted by President William M. Chace, Provost Rebecca S. Chopp outlined Russell E. Richey’s “job description.”

“Walk on water,” she said. “Multiply the loaves and fishes. Cast out the demons. And, in your spare time, remember [the Apostle] Paul and John Wesley [founder of the Methodist movement in the Church of England], who traveled everywhere without ceasing to cultivate church relations.”

Richey served as associate dean for academic programs at Duke Divinity School from 1986 to 1997. Previously he taught for seventeen years in the theological and graduate schools at Drew University, where he served for three years as assistant to the president.

An ordained elder in the North Carolina Conference, Richey has been active in the church on the regional and national levels, most recently as a member of the General Commission on Archives and History, as seminary liaison to the General Commission on Christian Unity and Interreligious Concerns, and on the editorial advisory board of Quarterly Review.

Richey’s books and editorial leadership of major projects on American Methodist history “have given him prominence not only among religion historians, but also among leaders in the United Methodist Church,” said Chopp, who also is a member of the Candler faculty.

Richey has been co-director of a major study on United Methodism and American culture, funded by the Lilly Endowment. A native of Asheville, North Carolina, he holds a bachelor of arts degree from Wesleyan University, a bachelor of divinity from Union Theological Seminary, and master’s and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University. He succeeds R. Kevin LaGree, who left Candler in 1999 to become president of United Methodist—affiliated Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa.


The Heart and Soul
of Emory

 

 

 

 

 

Robert A. Paul, director of the Institute of Liberal Arts and Candler Professor of Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Studies, assumed the deanship of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences on June 1. He succeeds Donald G. Stein, dean since 1995, who will use an upcoming sabbatical to conduct research in neurology as a Fulbright scholar.

“This search was intense and prolonged,” says Provost Rebecca Chopp, who chaired the search committee that selected Paul. “Bobby Paul knows the heart and soul of Emory and understands what a world-class research university is. We’re very excited one of our own will be the new dean.”

Paul says despite his experience with the Institute of Liberal Arts and as chair of the anthropology department, the deanship will be a significant transition.

“I’m very pleased and excited to be taking on this task, and I look forward to continued close cooperation with my faculty colleagues, graduate students, and now this administration,” he says.

President William M. Chace says Paul’s “intelligence, his depth of wisdom, his long experience with Emory, and his intellectual breadth” set him apart. “I believe he will want to secure our graduate program, in both teaching and research, as a top priority of the University.”

Prior to coming to Emory in 1977, Paul served on the faculties of the City College of New York, City University of New York, and Stanford University. He received his bachelor’s degree in history and literature from Harvard University in 1963 and earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in anthropology at the University of Chicago in 1966 and 1970 respectively. His book Moses and Civilization: The Meaning Behind Freud’s Myth received the Heinz Hartman Award, the National Jewish Book Award, and the L. Bryce Boyer Prize.


HANG ON TO YOUR FAITH

WHETHER IT'S SINGED BY HELLFIRE AND BRIMSTONE or undulating with faith, hope, and love, a good sermon can set a congregation trembling in the pews and keep its members coming back for more. For the newly ordained, mounting the pulpit to face the expectant flock may be an intimidating task.

Students entering the ministry at Emory’s Candler School of Theology are learning the tricks of the trade from one of the nation’s most well-respected preachers, Thomas G. Long (left), who joined the Candler faculty this fall as Bandy Professor of Preaching and who has been described by Baylor University as one of the twelve most effective preachers in the English-speaking world. (The 1996 list, published in Newsweek magazine, also included Candler Professor Emeritus Fred Craddock and Barbara Brown Taylor ’73C.)

Long believes that coaxing an inspiring sermon from a biblical passage requires practice and discipline in addition to talent.

“Excellent preaching involves not an autopsy of the biblical text,” he says, “but allowing the power of the biblical text–which was written many, many years ago–to reverberate with listeners once again.”

In the classroom, Long teaches students to unleash the power of a passage by using a step-by-step process that takes them from analyzing, illustrating, and absorbing the text to standing up and delivering the sermon before their peers.

An ordained Presbyterian minister, Long has taught preaching and worship for more than twenty years. During his own years in seminary, he worked as a radio disc jockey to pay for his education. He recalls early-morning Sunday shifts listening to Edmund Steimle, a Lutheran preacher, on the Protestant Hour.

“He was absolutely scintillating,” Long says. “He had a gritty, realistic, hang-on-to-your-faith-by-your-fingernails style of preaching. That was when I first formed my consciousness as a preacher.”

Long holds a Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary. He is author or editor of more than a dozen books, including The Witness of Preaching, which has become a standard preaching text at seminaries in this country and abroad.–Sharla A. Stewart


Many shades of gray

Anita Bernstein assumes the first Sam
Nunn chair in ethics at the law school

First-year law students enrolled in Anita N. Bernstein’s core course on torts law this fall are in for a challenge–many, many challenges, in fact.

Bernstein, new to the law school’s faculty as the first Sam Nunn Professor of Ethics and Profession-alism, is an outspoken New York native and self-described liberal feminist who is just as quick to shoot questions back at her students as she is to provide answers. The first thing she wants students to learn, she says, is that the law has many shades of gray.

“I don’t know if you can teach a twenty-one-year-old to be ethical,” says Bernstein. “But what you can teach is thoughtfulness and reflection. You can teach students to ponder problems and to acquire antennae so they’ll make ethical decisions as lawyers.”

Emory established Bernstein’s chair last year with its share of an $11 million settlement of a lawsuit alleging the DuPont Company withheld evidence during a 1993 Georgia civil case. Seeking to make a statement about the importance of legal ethics, U.S. District Court Judge Hugh Lawson ’63C-’65L of Columbus, Georgia, devised an agreement in which DuPont paid $2.5 million to each of Georgia’s four law schools, plus $1 million to establish an annual symposium among the four schools. Emory also will use its portion of the funds to establish student fellowships and a series of colloquia on the profession of law, both named in honor of former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn ’61C-’62L. The fellowships, granted as either summer stipends or scholarships, “will demonstrate in a concrete way our commitment to training servant leaders, one of the most outstanding of them having been Senator Nunn,” says law school Dean Howard O. Hunter.

Training Emory’s law students to acquire ethical “antennae,” according to Bernstein, begins with a classroom experience in which students confront perspectives that differ radically from their own. In first-year core courses, for instance, Bernstein challenges students to look at the law from the perspectives of women and minorities. Students in her senior-level elective courses examine these issues even more closely.

Bernstein’s research also reflects her commitment to marginalized perspectives. She is currently at work on a paper examining the ways in which science and technology are “used to exclude women and minority groups from privilege,” and the limited recourse offered by the legal system. She also is studying feminist issues in the writing of torts code.

Bernstein comes to Emory from the Chicago-Kent College of Law, where she had been a faculty member since 1989. Last year, she was a visiting professor on the Emory law faculty. Her other teaching and research specialties include the areas of legal pedagogy and professional responsibility, torts, justice and the legal system, product liability, and sexual harassment.–Sharla A. Stewart


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