
By Nathan Jowers

Nathan Jowers
My name is Nathan Jowers. I’m a student of theology, studying Bible at Abilene Christian University. During the school year, I attend services at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Abilene. At the start of the summer I was near miraculously offered an internship that would have me flipping back and forth between work at a church and theological research at Yale Divinity School. I’ve been here six weeks.
When I walk through the low arches of Yale Divinity School, I am reminded of Luther and the theologians of old plodding through the halls of their respective monasteries with no more sense of the future than I have now. Arguments which must seem arcane to us were to them the objects of as much brooding as I give my own quibbles. As for those thoughts which still seem to shake the world, well, they existed side by side with wondering what’s for lunch.
I don’t mean to compare myself to Luther or any other great theologian—I am just a 19-year-old intern who’s read more Dr. Seuss than Karl Barth—I only mean to comment on the odd combination of abstract ideas, which seem to come to us either from an unnameable past or an eternal whenever, and the intense sense of time and location in which those ideas were formed. I have experienced here hard issues of violence, suffering, and the reconciliation of the world worked out over friendly lunches. Then the love between colleagues was as thick in the air as their swarm of struggling words. (more…)