This section features first person accounts by GTU alumni about their achievements and activities, and reflections on how their GTU experience has influenced their life's work.

Opening a Conversation

I live in a southern Brazilian town called Santo Ângelo. It sits in a region where, 300 years ago, Jesuits founded their missions among indigenous peoples. The entire area breathes church history. I am an ordained minister of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Brazil, and a full-time father of two (Alex, 9 and Arthur, 2). I also work as a volunteer pastor for the local Lutheran parish. One of the congregations I serve (São Miguel das Missões) worships in a small building right next door to the ruins of the biggest and most important mission. Starting in the summer of 2006, I will be an associate professor of homiletics and Christian worship at Escola Superior de Teologia, the largest seminary of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Brazil. I am married to a Lutheran pastor, Marcia Blasi (M.A. '01).

The Graduate Theological Union was my second home from 1999 to 2004 while I earned a Ph.D. in homiletics. I worked with the entire homiletics area faculty, all brilliant and sensitive professors, but it was my advisor, Dr. Thomas G. Rogers, who influenced me the most. His gift of teaching, his ability and creativity, and his contributions to cross-cultural preaching are some of the GTU's greatest assets. Dr. Rogers skillfully pushed me toward excellence, challenging my critical thinking. I published two articles under his supervision, one which he co-authored.

In my Ph.D. dissertation I opened a conversation between the "new homiletics" developed in the United States and Paulo Freire's liberation pedagogy. I suggested a "homiletic of the oppressed" to resist the destructive, evil effects of economic globalization. In five years, I took classes with professors from all nine GTU seminaries.

Coming from a "two-thirds world" country (Brazil), I found that most people at the Graduate Theological Union care about what is going on outside of Berkeley and the United States. Students brought up burning issues and questions of global significance in class discussions. The community demonstrated its prophetic voice with its critical opposition to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Everyone—professors, students, and staff—is committed to forming world leaders under the imperatives of justice, respect for difference, and spirit of unity.

Certainly the most challenging and at the same time most blessed thing that the GTU caused in my life was that it made me deal with the paradox of strengthening my personal faith, developing my particular scholarship, and opening up my cultural background in a context of great and oftentimes puzzling diversity. The final message I took home from the Graduation Theological Union is that the world is not so hopeless after all. It just needs a lot of work, and people of all faiths are called to play a vital part in that transformation.