Academic Life ~ The Desmond Tutu Center

The Desmond Tutu Center

The Desmond Tutu Center is a facility developed by General Seminary to provide a variety of flexible educational opportunities to support lay and ordained ministry. The mission of the center is to provide to a wide audience educational opportunities that reflect the life and witness of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, with particular focus on spirituality and issues of justice and reconciliation in a multi-cultural and multi-faith world.

The center is located in the complex of buildings at the west end of Chelsea Square and includes a 60-room conference center and the magnificent refectory in Hoffman Hall.  Programs include conferences and seminars that explore national and international issues of the church, courses that support specialized ministries, continuing education for ordained ministers, and opportunities for distance learning and conferencing.

In the future, the Tutu Education Center will house four learning centers, two of them new and two continuing.  The new Center for Peace and Reconciliation will be directed by a Professor of Church and Society in the Herbert Thompson Chair.  The Center for Continuing Education will be directed by a Professor of Catechetics.  The Center for Christian Spirituality, marking 30 years of service in 2006, will be located programmatically in the Tutu Center with the continuing direction of a Professor of Ascetical Theology.  The Center for Jewish-Christian Studies and Relations, marking 20 years, will be programmatically located in the Tutu Center and may expand to include other inter-religious relationships as well.

The Desmond Tutu Education Center is envisioned to be a place where connections are made.  It will connect the resources and experience of the academy with the resources and experience of congregational life and the wider world.  The center will connect spirituality with ministries of justice and empowerment.  The center will serve as a church-wide conference center for the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion for conferences, training and other conversations.  The center will provide opportunity for dialogue and study of the relations between people of different faiths.

Programs and personnel of the Tutu Center will affect the learning environment of the Seminary academic programs.  The faculty directors of the Peace and Reconciliation Center and the Continuing Education Center will teach courses within the curriculum in church and society and in catechetics, respectively.  The programs and curricular offerings now made through the Center for Christian Spirituality and the Center for Jewish-Christian Studies and Relations will continue with greater visibility.  Students in all degree and non-degree programs will benefit through both courses and interaction with the wider constituencies of the Tutu Center's programs.

In a process overseen by Sub-Dean Titus Presler, each center has a planning team that is envisioning the overall impact and the particular programs of each center.  The Peace and Reconciliation team is chaired by Institutional Advancement VP Bruce Smith.  The Continuing Education Team is chaired by Chaplain Ellen Sloan.  The Christian Spirituality team is chaired by CCS Director Jonathan Linman, while leadership for further planning in Jewish-Christian Studies will be determined for the fall.

The Tutu Education Center opened on September 11, 2007, with a three-day international conference on the theme Reconciliation at the Roundtable: God's Call in the 21st Century.  The purpose of the conference was to catalyze among Anglicans and other Christians fresh thinking about modes of reconciliation in current conflicts and creative commitment to local efforts to achieve peace and reconciliation in the USA and in other parts of the world.  The conference will be cosponsored by the international Community of the Cross of Nails, a network of 160 groups around the world dedicated to working for reconciliation.  A particular focus will be the role of religion in conflicts in the contemporary world and religion's intersection with racial, ethnic and international alienation.  Archbishop Tutu gave the keynote at the conference, and the entire seminary community was involved during the three conference days of September 10-12.