Elizabeth (Liza) Anderson is a doctoral student at Yale University, where she focuses on the ancient and medieval history of Christianity in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. While Christianity has a long history in the Middle East, India, and North Africa, and had spread through Central Asia as far as China by the seventh century, it is usually studied as if it had been only a European religion until missionaries from the West brought it to other regions of the world. Liza hopes that her research on the history and theology of early and medieval Christianity outside of the West will help contribute to a better understanding of Christianity as a global religion from the earliest centuries of the church. Liza has a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School, where she studied the history and languages of early Eastern Christianity. She also has a previous master’s degree in ecumenical relations from Trinity College Dublin, and cares deeply about the contemporary ecumenical implications of her work. She spent a year as a Fulbright Fellow lecturing classes on ecumenical and interfaith relations at the Institute of Ecumenical Studies in Lviv, Ukraine, and spent a recent summer teaching at Saint Peter’s Seminary in Ankawa, Iraq. During her first year at Yale, she took several required doctoral seminars, as well as continued work with Syriac, Arabic, and Greek. In March 2011 she traveled to Lebanon for two weeks to visit Syriac monasteries and manuscript collections.
Rosa Lindahl Mallow is leading a project entitled “Identity, Voice and Witness: Ministry in a Post Parish Culture,” which hopes to ease the growing problem of parishes spending more time struggling to stay open than engaging in transformational ministry. She will specifically work with the New River Regional Ministry in Fort Lauderdale whose new approach stitches together a large congregation, a new Latino storefront ministry and two congregations in financial crisis. Her project will work with all four cells of the regional ministry to ensure that the distinctive voice, story and identity each community brings to this ministry will build up the regional team to do groundbreaking ministry in a large area of Fort Lauderdale. Additionally, the project will focus on leadership development for regional ministry.
In September 2010, Altagracia Perez began a Ph.D. program at Claremont School of Theology. Her field is Practical Theology with an emphasis in Christian Education. She also currently serves a multicultural, bilingual parish in Inglewood, California, which reflects the diversity of the South Los Angeles county it serves. She is interested in developing resources to support work in urban congregations, and understands that leadership in urban multicultural, multilingual, theologically diverse congregations need training and support to do their ministries. Making connections, learning and respecting cultural differences, developing theological language and methodologies that promote inclusion and unity are the essential tools that she hopes to develop to equip the church to face the challenges of today and the future.
To read more about Altagracia and her work, click here.