This is the place where I work in the U.S., Drew University, and, more specifically, The Theological School (its entrance is the one pictured on your left -- and if you want to know more about the school, click on the picture!). Drew, more than jut my workplace, has become, warts and all, my 2nd home outside of our family home in this country (a fact which makes bearable the longing for climate, culture, language and friends of my native Venezuela -- where I go back at least once a year anyway!). At Drew I have the most wonderful colleagues one could wish; many very sensitive, curious, concerned students; a warm, supportive, efficient staff, including my bosses and the campus workers -- and a lot of these human beings are, to make life better, really warm, supportive friends, pretty progressive citizens (religiously and politically, among others), and incredibly interesting intellectuals & interlocutors, too! (reason why I audit -- yes, as a student! -- a new course from a different colleague almost every semester).
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Drew University is a cozy, 3,000-people
institution, located amid a forest in the town of Madison, in the middle of
the state of New Jersey, less
than an hour drive west of New York City
(you can do a virtual tour of Drew by clicking on its main entrance to
your right!). Founded in 1867 as a Methodist seminary, Drew is an
independent, 3-school university now, one of which schools is The Theological School, an
ecumenical, international, multicultural seminary, affiliated with the Methodist Church.
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At Drew I am involved in a wide array of things. I am, above all, one of the 24 full-time professors at The Theological School -- where near 400 students (of all ages, colors, nations, Christian denominations, and walks of life) come mostly to get a theological education to become ministers in their churches. I usually teach two of my four annual courses to most of the seminarians in the M.Div. Program. the largest one of the school. One required course, Religion & the Social Process, I teach once a year, almost always in team -- most times with Dr. Laurel Kearns, another sociologist of religion, but I have also taught it in different years with Drs. Traci West, Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz & Lynne Westfield -- and to all the first year students in the M.Div. program, about 50-60 students. Most of my other courses have a much smaller number of students.
I also teach in a doctoral program at Drew: the Religion & Society area of the Graduate Division of Religion, where I give a couple of courses a year, two of them required for the students in the Sociology of Religions and taught every other year (usually small groups of 5-10 students) -- Classical Theories in the Sociology of Religion (where I review the lives and major ideas of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Max Weber, Marianne Weber, Emile Durkheim & W.E.B. DuBois), and Major Thinkers and Themes in the Sociology of Religions (which I have done focusing either on Marx & Engels or on Max Weber, but lately I've done it mostly on Pierre Bourdieu, my favorite sociologist).
Last, but not least, I teach in a program I contributed to create around 1967 -- the Hispanic Doctorate of Ministry Program, where I teach two courses in Spanish over the three years that each group comes to study at Drew -- La Iglesia en su Contexto Social and the Coloquio sobre el Proyecto.
In total, I teach four or five courses a year -- which means that, besides the five required courses cited, I can some semesters teach elective courses. Among the electives I have taught are Feminist Sociology of Religion, Lesbian & Gay Liberation Theologies in World Christianity, Critical Approaches in Epistemology, and Pentecostalism as Religious Resistance.
(... to be continued ...)