2019 Pooh Party to Celebrate Liz Dodson Gray's 90th Birthday

—Martha Nielsen

Twenty six TOP/WE members and friends and family gathered on Thursday June 20 to celebrate Liz’ 90th birthday with one of her beloved Pooh parties.  The guests included Liz’ daughter Lisa and grandson Sam; Margaret Studier, a friend from HDS; Avis Strong Parke and her daughter Robin Melavalin; Maria Behnke and her three year old daughter Maggie; and nineteen of us who gather regularly.

The day was dark and rainy, but we inside, all cozy in the Rosa Parks room, were surrounded in color and comfort and caring - enjoying a program that was flexible and fulfilling and fun!  
* Our individual sharings with Liz were intimate and loving and, taken all together, spoke poignantly to the meaning of TOP/WE over its forty plus years of history.
* Lunch was delicious and beautifully presented.  Complete with Pooh cake...
* Room decor was rich with special adornments for the occasion.
* Pooh stories and quotes provided a fitting entertainment
* And woven amongst the formal programming were multiple, ever re-forming informal groups of sharing.

MANY thank yous are in order.
* Lindsa, MaryMargaret, and Martha for planning the details of the party
* Lindsa for her lovely decor and incomparable and loving moderating
* Paula for providing the lovely and delicious Pooh cake
* Susan, Elaine, Carol for various (some historical) decor items
* Carol for the ingenious cake shaped group birthday card
* Mary Rose for organizing the Panera sandwiches entrée lunch, and all other contributors of accoutrements
* To all who came and shared themselves so lovingly
*** Lisa Gray for bringing Liz to the party, and for being such a loving caregiver for her mother

Ly Thai took some lovely photos — see below .  There were several others taking photos too.  If you have ones that folks would like to see (!!), please email them to me Martha and I will send them around. 

Religion & Ethics Newsweekly

Elizabeth Dodson Gray appeared on 16th November edition of Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, examining the impact of Michelangelo's painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel on the occasion of its 500th anniversary. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/episodes/november-16-2012/sistine-chapel-anniversary/13864/  has the video and a transcript, and  http://video.pbs.org/video/2306296223 is the whole show which includes unrelated topics. The way the program has been edited it appears as if everyone is having a conversation together.

GENDER DELUSIONS

—by ELIZABETH DODSON GRAY,  November 10, 2011
Theological Opportunities Program / WomenExplore Lecture and Discussion Forum

Every morning when you and I, as women, walk out our front door, we walk out into a culture that is permeated with assumptions—Dare I say "gender delusions"?—assumptions that men are superior to women. That men are smarter—more competent, more "suited" than women for public office.

If we as a culture do not believe this, then explain to me why we regard as "normal" all the male heads of corporate business? Why do we regard as "normal" the great preponderance of males in the Congress and in the state legislatures, and all the male governors, and, yes, foreign heads of state.

The Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was first written by Alice Paul in 1923. Explain to me why the Equal Rights Amendment was not passed by the Congress until 1972— and then failed to be passed by enough State Legislatures by the 1982 deadline for it to become a Constitutional amendment.

The Gender Delusion of Male Superiority

I remember seeing a cartoon of a little boy and a little girl standing nude around a toilet. The little girl looks over at the little boy’s body and says, "Oh, is that why you make more than I do?"

In a similar vein I remember a three-year-old girl who was being raised by her divorced mother. The mother’s college friend was spending the night, and the little girl and the friend’s young son had a bath together. Going to bed that night the little girl whispered in her mother’s ear, "Isn’t it a blessing it didn’t grow on his face!"

The gender delusion is silently invisible in our culture— and it only occasionally "rises up" to full consciousness. Several decades ago I was showing to a group of couples who were my good friends a slide show based on an academic paper I had done recently.

In the middle of the slide show, one of the husbands suddenly glimpsed the fact that I don’t think that men are superior to women. He burst out with the comment, "But I am superior to you, Liz!" I made a withering response: "And just how did you figure that out, Ken?"

His reply was astounding to all present—"Because I can run a jack hammer and you can’t!"

The room exploded! The men said, "If you think you’re better than me, Ken, just because you can run a jack hammer, you’re crazy!" The women pointed out the obvious—That I could have a baby, and he couldn’t!

What astounded and sobered me was the chilling realization that this man had secretly chosen a jack hammer to indicate his superiority! Ken was a vice president of a major New England utility and was in a rather "liberated" marriage. But in his head and heart all these years he felt he was superior because he could run a jack hammer!

Only Being Powerful and Dominant

Sometimes in this culture we confront a sense of masculinity that seems to depend for its validity and strength upon men being superior to women! Men want to be super-rational, "cool," always in control, never uncertain, can’t ask for directions, can’t admit mistakes—and are only comfortable with being powerful and dominant— because women are not allowed to be that!

Where did all that come from? You might think that, from prehistoric times to now, men worldwide would be deeply grateful for the childbearing which women do, to bring into the world the next generation of the human race!

But worldwide there is no gratitude. No appreciation! Instead we find widespread oppression of women, expressed in honor-killings, cliterodectomies, and laws to control female reproduction.

Do you remember the woman taxi-driver who commented to Gloria Steinem, "If men gave birth, abortion would be a sacrament!"

Nowhere in worldwide patriarchy is women giving birth named as sacred. Instead from earliest times in human history women seem to be feared, and found to be needing "control." Retired Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong has an explanation for this: I quote
An examination of the taboos of almost every primitive human community reveals the male need to put down or control the female. A universal need to put down or control another is a sure sign of both fear and hostility. One cannot help but wonder why the male—who was generally larger, stronger and faster— could be so threatened by the female.

Spong continues: One has to look beneath the obvious and explore psychological dimensions for answers. The ancient taboos of our primitive ancestors focus the male fear of women on the mystery of the female reproductive process. Early societies did not understand the male connection with reproduction. The women seemed to be capable of producing life alone. The woman was also the one who experienced the menstrual cycle, and only the development of a new human life in the woman’s womb could interrupt the regular mystery of female bleeding.

The menstrual cycle was a source of enormous male anxiety, the taboos reveal. The menstrual blood was felt to be capable of great evil, so the woman would be banished during her menstrual flow, and liturgical cleansing rituals were necessary before she could be readmitted to the tribe.

Spong continues: In every primitive society, blood and life were intimately connected, and the regular female experience of bleeding without dying gave rise to many superstitions.

The female menstrual cycle was even thought to control the moon, which turned more or less on the same span of time. Through the moon, the tides seemed to be responsive to women’s mysterious power. The woman who possessed these cosmic powers was greatly feared and needed to be controlled by the physically stronger males. That was the ancient conclusion.¹

A Culture to Reassure

I think what men did everywhere was to set about creating for themselves a "culture to reassure"—which is patriarchy!

Margaret Mead reports that  "In every known human society, the male’s need for achievement can be recognized. Men may cook, or weave or dress dolls or hunt hummingbirds, but if such activities are appropriate occupations of men, then the whole society, men and women alike, views them as important. When the same occupations are performed by women, they are regarded as less important. In a great number of human societies men’s sureness of their sex role is tied up with their right, or ability, to practice some activity that women are not allowed to practice. Their maleness, in fact, has to be underwritten by preventing women from entering some field or performing some feat. . . . There seems no evidence that it is necessary for men to surpass women in any specific way, but rather that men do need to find reassurance in achievement, and because of this connection, cultures frequently phrase achievement as something that women do not or cannot do,rather than directly as something which men do well."²

This leaves us today confronting a culture which in a thousand small ways reassures men that they are superior—and are "intended" to be superior. Male entitlement wafts its quiet but persuasive refrains through every lived moment. Biologically "entitled" to have sex without getting pregnant, the male is further biologically entitled to have children without experiencing either pregnancy or childbirth.

A Family without Anteing Up

Our daughter Lisa was throwing up into her toilet during the nausea of the first three months of her pregnancy, and our daughter interrupted to say to her husband, "You owe me big-time for this!"

The male then feels further entitled to have a family without "anteing up" his share of housework and childcare. I remember David saying when Lisa was a toddler and sick one night, "I have to get my sleep. I have to work tomorrow!" (My unpaid work of caring for a sick child the next day was unseen.)

Lest you think these examples extreme, let me tell you this story. A colleague came up to me and said, "Liz, I have to tell you this story. I just retired, and my wife is not yet retired. So I volunteered to do some of the housework while she’s still working." (Clearly, he had not done any before!) So, he continued, "I got out the vacuum cleaner and I am vacuuming away, when inside me this little voice says, ‘YOU should not be doing this!’ Liz, can you believe that?" And I say, "Yes, I can believe that!"

Growing up in this culture, male entitlement is quietly and perniciously and deeply embedded in each young man. It is "socialized" into the emerging young male consciousness—and it is what makes even the most egalitarian or feminist heterosexual relationship a challenging life journey!

Before I leave the gender delusion of male superiority, let me show you exactly why it is false and therefore a delusion.

VISUAL of Generations of Ancestors (and their DNA)

Each of us is a random combination of DNA from both a mother and a father, and each of them is likewise a chance combination of their parents and ancestors’ DNA. If there were to be genius in the DNA of our forebears—the generations of our parents and grandparents and great-grands and so on, it is a process involving random chance which produces here or there another Einstein or Beethoven or Fanny Mendelsohn or Georgia O'Keefe. There is no physiological way for that genius not to go into a female body. It is impossible. Half of the genius available to the human species is in women’s minds, bodies, hearts. And for thousands of years we have missed it because it has been suppressed. In Afganistan the insurgents target for destruction the schools for girls, as a way of suppressing girls’ potential.

So there is no genetic bias toward male superiority.

VISUAL of genetic ancestors.

Adam’s World

But there is another big gender delusion which is even more insidious and less understood in our culture. Do you remember those beautiful snow-globes which you shake to make the snow fall? Has it ever occurred to you that you could be living inside someone’s snow-globe?

We really are inside someone’s snow-globe, because we are inside a culture of assumptions about life and reality.

The point is that reality does not just exist "out there." Rather, we perceive reality through the mental eyeglasses of our social formulations. These are like the green eyeglasses in The Wizard of Oz. Sociologists call this "a social construction of reality." I call it living in Adam’s world.

Remember in the Bible when Adam names all the animals? We live inside a social construction of reality (a virtual snow-globe) in which Adam, the male of the human species, has named everything and thought everything from the point of view of his male body and male life-experience.

Of their socially-dominant gender, the generic male can say—like Adam—"Everything is named, everything is thought, from my point of view." And all of us, having been born "into and socialized within this "Adam’s world," feel what patriarchal history for centuries said: "This is the way the world really is," for we have never experienced life another way.

Our language itself reflects Adam’s world. So-called "generic" language has perpetuated the illusion that all of the human species is made visible in the words man and mankind. Our language is like a Rorschach test, imaging back to us reflections of even uniquely male genital experience in statements such as "the thrust of his thinking," "a penetrating comment," "a seminal book," even "seminars." Yet male consciousness, like the Washington Monument to "the father of our country," has left us blissfully unaware of the frequently phallic nature of the sculpting of its monuments as well as its words.

In the long history of thought, Adam’s world has given us male-constructed philosophy, male-constructed psychology, and, yes, male-constructed theology. It has been men who have "erected" these great conceptual systems. Thus traditional Christian theology has imaged the generic human in the form of the male, and also imaged the divine in the form of the male. Michelangelo’s portrayal of a bearded God reaching the finger of creation-energy to fill Adam with life has been accepted in Western culture as an icon, a visual summary, of the theological statement at "God created man in His own image."

VISUAL—Michelangelo’s "Creation"

But when we take account of the sociology of knowledge, and notice who is doing the knowing, we realize that the flow of creation really happened as the reverse of what we earlier perceived. It is actually the human male who has created God in his own image. Yes, like Narcissus of old, the male sees only himself in the cosmos reflecting-pool of ultimate mystery.

The feminist theologian Mary Daly said that "When God is male, then the male is God."³

Within Adam’s World, Naming Is Power

VISUAL of Naming Is Power.

If you doubt this perspective, ask yourself about the new meaning in our current vocabulary of the word "hot." The word embodies the truth that now in this cultureall female bodies are subjected to the all-seeing male lecherous "EYE"—ranking them for their sexual vibrations.

We used to say that it wasn’t good to treat women like sex objects. Today "HOT’ says it all, and nobody (not even feminists) seem to object!

Naming is power. Consider the hostile and denigrating names given to men and women in this English-speaking culture. Did you know that there are 227 words in English which denigrate women. (Think of doll, broad, tomato, chick, fox, cat, dog, bitch, cunt, whore, "ho".) How many English words are denigrating to men? A grand total of 12, of which some are denigrating because they are denigrating to women—like mother-fucker, son of a bitch, and bastard!⁴

Consider also the presently running TV commercial for a hard-working truck. The truck says "I take a tank of gas as far as she will go!" Can you imagine naming as male a tank of gasoline? No.

Naming Is Power—and the power to name is potent in Adam’s world. What a struggle it was for feminism to name the realities of "date rape," "spousal rape," "sexual harassment" (Think of Herman Cain and today’s news!). "Domestic violence" is a reality with a terribly misleading name. "Domestic violence" hides the truly violent partner (almost always male!). And "domestic violence" sounds like the walls are beating up the intimate partner. Do you notice that for all the violence to women, we never add the word male? The male connection to violence to women goes unnamed.

YES, Naming is power

We were once buying a rug. The salesman threw down a rug for us to consider buying, saying "There she is!" My quick feminist husband said, "Why do you call the rug ‘She’?" The young salesman looked confused and I filled in "Because you throw it on the floor and walk on it!"

Then there are words like "slut" which express moral contempt for femalepromiscuous sexual behavior. But there are no corresponding words for expressing similar moral contempt for promiscuous male sexual behavior. What is comparable? "Womanizing"? No! Little moral contempt there. "Don Juan"?—this is almost a title of admiration. TV commentators, lacking any proper word despite all the real-life examples from Arnold Schwarzenegger to John Edwards, fall back on "affairs" or "bad behavior." Bad behavior! Do you notice that the word adultery is practically never used?

Living as Women in Adam’s World

Question—What does the existence of Adam’s world mean to feminists? If you truly understand that we as women must live in a cultural world which is based almost totally on male life-experience, what does that mean for how we as women live our lives?

I think it means that we must have an attitude of "suspicion" toward every cultural attitude and assumption, not just "HOT"! We need continually to ask ourselves "Do we as women feel that way on this issue and this area of life? Is the male view of sex truly my woman’s view? Is the male view of family, or success, or foreign policy, my woman’s view?

But it is hard to do that as one woman alone. And that is where TOP comes in. TOP is a woman’s standing point. TOP is where we find our voice to dialogue together in safety about our women’s views of everything from globalization to immigration to family—yes, even to sex. TOP is where we gather our life stories, our experience of violence toward women, and our experience of the cherishing of women, our experiences of both love and of betrayal.

As women we will always walk in two worlds—one the patriarchal world of male naming, Adam’s world, and the other the fragile yet blossoming world of women’s experience and women’s naming.

With the help of TOP, we will walk more surely and more confidently in that awakening women’s world.
 
—Elizabeth Dodson Gray

Sanity and Solace

—by ELIZABETH DODSON GRAY
The politics intensify and the clamor of campaigning grows louder as we head toward November 2nd. Where do we turn for sanity?

And as the news of home invasion murders and the Rutgers suicide from cyber-bullying fill our newspapers and television news, where do we go for a glimpse of goodness and normalcy?
 
It reminds me of the Kingston Trio song of yesteryear, "They’re rioting in Africa,/ They’re starving in Spain,/ There’s hurricanes in Florida,/ And Texas needs rain./ The whole world is festering. . . ."

Jon Stewart got it right on Comedy Central. "Where do we go for sanity?"
 
As summer turns to autumn, you could think that the only thing happening is politics and campaigning.

But look around you. What is really, REALLY happening is that the natural seasons are TURNING on their deeply habitual but daily spontaneous way from warm to cold temperatures, from green leaves to gloriously multicolor splendor spread out on the trees we scarcely notice when they are green.
 
In a world becoming more uncertain each year with earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes and other EXTREME weather (which used to be unusual but has now become commonplace), there is still SOMETHING regular and steady and "normal" and "good" in our lives. It is our human context WITHIN the natural world of our planet’s biospheral cycles.

We are ENCIRCLED by the steadiness and the goodness of nature, made vivid even to our "unseeing" eyes, by the turning of the seasons.

No matter who gets elected, no matter who- kills-who in international wars and drive-by shootings, the sun will still rise. And the day will begin. And the season will turn from summer to autumn. And we will be blessed by the abundance of the earth UNTIL in our infinite human hubris and our blind technologies, we figure out a way to kill the planet!
  
But until then, open your eyes and open up your soul, to rejoice in the wonder and the blessing of the turning of the seasons. The natural seasons may possess the sanity and the solace we all need. 

—Elizabeth Dodson Gray

25 Years of TOP

Here is a republication of the press release issued on the occasion of TOP's 25th Anniversary in 1998. Read this to see how TOP has evolved and continues to evolve to meet the needs of the women it serves.

Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of TOP

— by Elizabeth Dodson Gray

One of the Divinity School’s unique programs, known as the Theological Opportunities Program (TOP), is celebrating its 25th anniversary this fall of 1998.

To celebrate their 25th anniversary the Advisory Committee has planned an exciting fall lecture series entitled "This Is The Time For Women," with major lectures by Federal Judge Nancy Gertner, Jill Ker Conway, Clare Dalton, Jean Baker Miller, Christiane Northrup, Elizabeth Dodson Gray and Carolyn McDade.

The anniversary series this fall begins Thursday morning, September 24th at 10 AM in the Braun Room at the Divinity School.

TOP WAS BEGUN IN 1973 by Brita Stendahl and a committee of interested women. At that time it was a reformulation of the earlier "Ladies Lectures" (lectures on Thursdays in April), which began in the late 1950s during the deanship of Douglas Horton.

In 1973 the lectures were redesigned as a spring and fall Thursday morning lecture series, intended to appeal to all those who were seeking and searching for just what the title says, "theological opportunities" in their lives and in their thinking. To the lectures were added mini-courses, taught by HDS faculty and only available to TOP participants, to provide for deeper and more intense theological reflection and inquiry.

It was a gateway for laywomen into the Divinity School, and numbers of women in the years since 1973 have gone through this gateway into regular enrollment as students at HDS.

Through the years, the mini-courses faded away, but the lecture series every fall and spring have grown in the fall from 4 sessions to 8 and in the spring to 10 or 11 sessions. The Advisory (planning) Committee, led since 1978 by its coordinator, feminist theologian and author Elizabeth Dodson Gray, has grown from a small committee of 10–12 to its present strength and diversity of 45–50 women. It is open to all who choose to join in the planning Thursday on afternoons after the fall or spring lectures.

THE LECTURE TOPICS HAVE SHIFTED from more conventional and traditional religious inquiries to questions that arise out of women’s life experience, for example, from "The Dynamic God and the Transformation of Biblical Symbols" to "What Does Love-As-Self-Denial and Love-As-Sacrifice Do to Women?"

During the deanship of George Rupp the Theological Opportunities Program was encouraged to find its speakers (there are no honoraria) from the wider Harvard community as well as the Greater Boston Area, looking for speakers to lawyers, legislators, authors, environmentalists, psychologists and psychotherapists as well as to academic professors and theologians.

Attendance ranges from 90 to 160 people for each lecture. There have been visitors from Iceland, Japan, Pakistan, Jamaica, England, Holland. Registration data shows that more that 1700 different women and a few men have attended in the last 10 years, and it is estimated that between 3500 and 4000 attended in TOP’s first twenty-five years.

In connection with the 10th anniversary series in 1983, the position of "existential focuser" was developed. This is a short (15 minute) speech which precedes the major lecture, and its purpose is to root or ground the topic of the morning in the life of one woman from the planning committee, who can speak about how that morning’s topic has been crucial, for good or ill, in her life.

After the major lecture, there is a question period, a short break at noon, and then a participatory discussion so that all who attend can have an opportunity to share their life-experience on this topic. Occasionally the subject of the morning is illuminated through a panel of 3 or 4 speakers who can witness to the diversity of perspectives on this question.

Because the morning experience, which begins at 10:00 AM and lasts through 1:00 PM, has a variety of speakers, questions and discussion, the morning is now best described as a half-day conference, and the 1998 fee is $10 per session, with a 20% discount for series subscribers.

The planning of the lecture series is at the heart of the TOP program, but through the years the creativity of TOP has generated other manifestations of its life. First came the support group which meets every Thursday morning when there is not a lecture, both summer and winter. This small, more intimate group has a "go-around" ritual, which encourages each woman to focus on the question, "What am I feeling about my life today, or this week?" The support group has itself initiated a process of telling Spiritual Journeys to one another.

But the generativity of the group has also birthed a monthly Sunday afternoon discussion group, Conversations Over 50 (only over-50 can attend), which focuses on the unique questions which women in their 50s through 80s have about their lives. Out of this Conversations group came for a time another smaller discussion group about "End-of-Life Decisions."

IN 1988 THE TOP GROUP WROTE ITS OWN BOOK, Sacred Dimensions of Women’s Experience, based upon the fall 1985 lecture series of the same name. Co-written with articles by 29 TOP women and friends, edited by coordinator Elizabeth Dodson Gray, and published by Roundtable Press, the book has been hailed as a significant milestone in feminist theology.

The Very Rev. Dr. Lois Wilson, then one of the presidents of the World Council of Churches, wrote: "Sacred Dimensions of Women’s Experience is an important book. It is one of the few theological books I know that addresses the meaning of the sacred out of the experiences of women. I could hardly believe it when I went through the index and found ‘myself’ there, having experienced (along with other women) housework, falling in love, giving birth, caretaking, raising children, creating a home. Naming the sacred in our own experience is an absolutely essential theological task for women." On the book cover, as lushly vivid colors swirl around, the words of Rosemary Radford Ruether are quoted: ". . . we are engaged in a new revelational encounter with the divine in and through women’s experience. . . . "

One participant, Priscilla Hinckley, has written: "Two important things happen at TOP: (1) lay women bring their issues of spiritual concern arising out of daily life to the Divinity School and explore them with students and professionals in the religion field; and (2) the program offers a supportive setting for an ongoing search into the meaning of female experience through the instrument of telling our spiritual stories to one another in small groups which meet at other times during the year.

"The presence of such a lay group within a theological school—bringing to the seminary the existential concerns of people in the pews, in order to think together with students and teachers—is, we think, unique in the United States."

Dieter Georgi, former HDS professor of Biblical Studies and long-time faculty advisor to TOP (now at the University of Frankfurt in Germany) has his own perspective as a professional theologian:

"The Early Church was first and most of all a lay movement, and women played a founding and stabilizing role in it and in its theological reflections. The same has remained true with all the major revitalizations of church and theology, not the least in the Reformation. . . . All good professional theologians to this day depend on intensive dialogues with the laity, sensors for the inspirational powers of the praxis of life, its social structures and its tendencies. Theology is supposed to condense and point these messages and test such pointed condensation in further exchange with the laity.

"Women have always played an important role in that ecclesial, social and theological evolution, even during the high times of patriarchy. . . . TOP has made the area circumscribed by Interstate 495 (more or less the range of its participants) into a home-base for lay theology, competing with the Wittenbergs and Genevas of yesteryear."

TOP PUBLISHED FOR ITS 25TH ANNIVERSARY a 120-page booklet, Weaving Communion Deep Within Life’s Grace. Eighty individuals wrote of their experiences with TOP over the years, and it is illustrated with their art and music. The booklet begins with these words:

"We thought we were doing a lecture series. But we became a women’s faith community, a place of learning but also of transformation, a safe place that validated our feelings and encouraged our unfolding, a place for tears of pain and tears of gladness.

"We created this place for one another. Over the years all of us together created it, and it has given us gifts beyond measure. But perhaps the most precious of all gifts, it has given us the experience of ourselves—empowered, authentic, full-voiced—the selves we are becoming."

DESCRIBING THIS WOMEN’S FAITH COMMUNITY, the coordinator says: "We are women who are Jewish, Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, Unitarian Universalist, Quaker, Greek Orthodox, Buddhist, post-Christian and Goddess. We are single, married, divorced, remarried: we are heterosexual, bisexual, and lesbian. We are daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, and grandmothers. Most but not all of us are white. Most but not all of us are middle-class. We are teachers, clergy, housewives, psychotherapists, businesswomen, authors, composers, singers, gardeners, caregivers. A few of us have been senior corporate executives."

GEORGE RUPP, THE FORMER DEAN OF HDS and currently president of Columbia University, writes in the booklet:

"I have always been struck with how deeply TOP has affected the lives of participants. I am sure the three paragraph ‘verbal snapshots’ that are being collected will bear moving testimony to this impact. But along with its role in shaping the lives of individual participants, TOP has also served as a significant stimulus in the Divinity School as an institution.

"Preparing a talk for TOP has not infrequently provoked a process that in turn led to a new course or an article or even the germ of a book. . . . I am confident that the twenty-five year challenge to relate scholarly preoccupations to concrete experience has been salutary for the Divinity School community, and I hope and expect that this challenge will continue in the years ahead."

— by Elizabeth Dodson Gray