Hello NNPCW friends old and new! This is Gusti Newquist, former NNPCW Associate (I can't figure how to change the tag-line at the bottom of the page). Many thanks to Kelsey for giving me this opportunity to reconnect with everyone . . .

I write from Boston, MA where I’m in the last week of final papers and projects in my first year at Harvard Divinity School. After having lived my entire life in the southeast, it’s definitely been an adjustment (mostly good) to be in Boston and at Harvard. Feminism is so . . . normal. Expected. Old School, even.

Presbyterianism, on the other hand, is far outside the mainstream! There are a whopping FIVE of us in the first-year class of roughly 150 students. Most of the student body is here for the academic study of religion, with plans to pursue any number of PhD programs. Others plan to work in faith-based non-profit organizations. Many are preparing for leadership in a diverse range of faith traditions, Christian and otherwise. And I’ve never seen so many Unitarian Universalists in my life!

While I wouldn’t recommend HDS for everyone, I have to say it’s been an incredible experience for me. After working at the Presbyterian Center for almost eight years, my world had become SO Presbyterian! I felt a strong call to theological education in an interfaith setting, and it has proven to be well worth the cost of admission.

Take, for example, my class this semester on the Passion Play. Where else could an aspiring Presbyterian minister have participated in a pedagogical Passion Play with a Jew, a skeptic, two Catholics, and two Lutherans?

It was a different kind of Passion Play than anything I’ve ever known before. Rather than collapse the four gospels into one narrative and assign characters, we made an intentional effort to tell the story from the perspective of all four gospels. I played “The Gospel of Matthew,” telling various parts of the Passion narrative in conversation with those who played the other three gospels. Another student played a contemporary “disciple” of Jesus who shared relevant traditions from the Hebrew Scriptures and commented upon the imperial reality of Roman occupied Judea and the role of women in Jesus’ ministry. Two “commentators,” one Jewish and one Christian, debated the role these narratives have played in Christian anti-Judaism throughout the centuries. And in the end, we told the “old, old story of Jesus and his love” in a deeply reverent, yet contemporary way. Pretty good training for ministry, I would say!

In fact, the experience of “embodying” the Gospel of Matthew completely transformed my understanding of the calling to “ministry of the Word and Sacrament.” As my body enfleshed the Scriptural Word in performance, I took on the various character roles recounted in the words of Matthew’s Gospel. I experienced the “Word” of Scripture “becoming flesh” in my own body, a woman’s body, and I wanted to explore the implications of that for ministry. In the next hour, I will start work on my final project for this class: “Word Made Flesh: Proclaiming Incarnation and Atonement in a Woman’s Body,” in which I will explore this topic through poetry, artwork and prose. I’ll let you know how it goes in next Monday’s blog. Wish me luck!

(Read the Boston Globe article about our Passion Play.)

--“And the Word became flesh and lived among us . . .” –John 1:14

Hello Gusti!

Greeting from Gwangju, South Korea! I am doing a photography internship at a newspaper here for the summer.

Thank you for the post and helping me grow in feminism and Christianity throughout the first years at NNPCW. I still have a lot of unanswered questions! So please, let's open up a dialogue and see where it leads us.

Hi Gusti,

I just emailed your brother after I found his Blog. It's great to see what you are doing with your life. I just wanted to say that I knew you when you lived in VA.

Your name popped into my head today so I Googled it and found this site along with your brother's blog. Hopefully your brother is still using the same email address I found.

I hope you remember a friend named Susan.