From the President’s Desk

I have spent most of my adult life working and living in a campus environment. What a privilege! Each day I can wake up and say with the psalmist, “Open my eyes, so that I may behold wondrous things out of your law.” (Psalm 119:18) 

This is the gift of Princeton Seminary. We are able to walk into classrooms, crack open coursebooks, and log in to the library’s digital stacks. We can take a historical ride through the grand intellectual currents that have shaped the Christian faith. We can mine the deep philosophical and social scientific insights of faith communities that have come before us. And we can comb through scriptural texts with caution, compassion, and care as our faith seeks greater understanding. Living and learning among this wonderful community of Princeton Seminary offers us the gift to proclaim, “Open my eyes, so that I may behold wondrous things out of your law.”

As we begin a new semester, let us carry these words of the psalmist into our daily lives. This transition into a new academic cycle calls us to attentiveness. Before God calls us to preach, teach, and proclaim, let us remember that God calls us to see. We are called to see the splendor of God’s presence in nature; in the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of our neighbors; and in the despair and disillusionment of a world that cries out for justice. 

This capacity to see represents the slow, formative work of discernment.  The world we inhabit seems increasingly resistant to careful and compassionate vision.  Popular culture seems to reward speed over study, certainty over curiosity, and sloganeering over substance.  Powerful interests prefer to sanitize history and flatten complexity into a monolithic narrative that excludes and erases the contributions of those they would prefer not to see.  Thus, it is the responsibility of learning communities like ours to form thoughtful, intellectually curious, and morally wise citizens who humbly pursue truth, not triumphalism and wisdom over mere cleverness.   

As this nation commemorates the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I am reminded of the words of abolitionist minister Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But this bending is never inevitable. The self-evident truth that all persons are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights remains contested. I challenge each of us: Let the teaching, learning, and research you pursue at Princeton Seminary help bend the moral arc toward justice and equality by seeing the wonder of God in every person.   

Here’s to a great semester!   

One Luv,

Jonathan Lee Walton
PRESIDENT

“The love of God and the love of humanity are one love”—Benjamin Elijah Mays