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Biblical scholar Dr. Stephen L. Cook, a decades-long faculty leader at Virginia Theological Seminary, https://www.vts.edu/academics/faculty-and-vice-presidents/stephen-l-cook-phd, praised his institution’s pledging $1.7 million for reparations while pausing to reflect critically on the move.
Cook advocates moving beyond a piecemeal approach.
“We must draw in other schools and craft a nationwide movement to address slavery’s devastating impact. What is more, our guilt-ridden past of 150 years ago must be addressed using all key seminary resources, not financial assets alone.”
“This is a first-of-its-kind step of leadership among private American institutions of higher learning. There is really no viable ethical and spiritual choice but for the flagship Episcopal seminary to confess the guilt of its participation in slavery and to take tangible steps toward setting things right.”
“Payment for a guilt-ridden past of 150 years ago is fitting and right,” said Cook, who has taught at the seminary for a quarter century. A seminary’s primary strength is not its money, however, but its scholarly, academic leadership.
The Seminary is its faculty, and only the faculty and their theology students can together address questions such as slavery in the Bible, Philosophical and Ethical Reflection on Reparation and Its Cogency, and Formulating a Practical, Political Theology Addressing Slavery.
With these tools in hand, the faculty must reach out and join other seminaries, colleges, and universities in national projects of public awareness and education, government advisement, and lobbying.
One initial step at awareness and education would be the creation of a theological think-tank on Reparation. Another would be the creation of a permanent seminary museum of slavery’s history at VTS.
“Students, professors, and visitors — all of us—need to be educated about a less than honorable past when VTS used slaves as laborers,” he said. “A campus museum with exhibits of the time would be unique and of interest.”
It would also be applicable to today’s events, he added.
“One of the founders of the institution was Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to the Star-Spangled Banner,” said Cook. “Whether you believe it is right or wrong for athletes to kneel in protest at ball games, the connection makes a dialogue relevant.”
In an article last week, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/12/us/virginia-seminary-reparations.html, the New York Times pointed out that at least five early faculty members of VTS owned black people as well as Key.
“I feel that by simply paying out money to descendants whose great, great grandparents might have suffered must be only a first baby step,” said Cook.
Cook added that a museum focusing on this sad period of the seminary’s history would remind future generations that the evil of slavery flourished at early VTS and we recognize this and want to make amends—but through education.”
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This post is republished here with permission from the author.
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