Christopher Haw, co-author of the 2008 book Jesus for President, will be the featured speaker Tuesday, Aug. 31, as Bluffton University welcomes the class of 2014 to campus at its annual opening convocation. With faculty in regalia looking on, about 275 new first-year and transfer students will be introduced during the ceremony, which begins at 10:45 a.m. in Founders Hall.
Haw's presentation will launch Bluffton's 2010-11 civic engagement theme, "Living with Enough: Responding to Global Poverty." Each year, the university focuses on a significant contemporary issue that is related to its mission and becomes the subject of cross-disciplinary exploration.
For incoming first-year students, that exploration begins with a common summer reading. This year's book is The Emptiness of Our Hands: A Lent Lived on the Streets, authors Phyllis Cole-Dai and James Murray's account of spending Lent and Holy Week 1999 on the streets of Columbus, Ohio.
Dr. Sally Weaver Sommer, vice president and dean of academic affairs, said she hopes Haw's address will leave Bluffton students "enthused about engaging with this year's theme and ready to think about challenges in determining what is 'enough' and the impact on global poverty."
An adjunct professor of religious studies at Cabrini College in Radnor, Pa., Haw is also a carpenter, potter, painter and theologian. He and Shane Claiborne wrote Jesus for President, which aimed to awaken the Christian political imagination by looking at Christianity and empire and thinking creatively about fundamental issues of faith and allegiance.
Haw grew up Catholic, spent many years serving at Willow Creek Community Church outside Chicago and studied ecology and theology while living in Belize. He periodically teaches various congregations, as well as classes, and hosts small conferences with his community-Camden Houses, a multihouse community in Camden, N.J., where he lives with his wife Cassie. His topics usually include challenges such as postindustrial ecology, economic redistribution, dissolution of community life in America, biblical studies and theology, and ecumenical dialogue.
Haw holds degrees in sociology and theology from Eastern University, St. Davids, Pa., and did graduate work in theology at Villanova University. He has been interviewed in Christianity Today and Sojourners, and featured in the DVD series "Another World Is Possible" and the documentary "The Ordinary Radicals."
