Presented to Emory University Emeritus College, January 29, 2024
Gary S. Hauk
Students and faculty members often are surprised to learn that Emory University has an affiliation with the United Methodist Church. The university so closely resembles its fellow members in the Association of American Universities that it often appears indistinguishable in mission, character, and culture from sometimes larger and better known research universities like the Ivies and the great state universities. When one thinks of religiously affiliated universities, one is more likely to think of Notre Dame or Georgetown than Emory. And yet, for nearly two hundred years, Emory has identified itself with Methodism and continues to be one of the jewels in the crown of Methodist-related higher education.
Moreover, the religious diversity of the student body and the faculty, reflects the religious variety of our nation. In the fall of 2023, a survey of Emory undergraduates revealed that 18.2 percent claimed affiliation with Protestant Christian churches, 10 percent with Judaism, 9.5 percent with Roman Catholicism, 4.7 percent Hinduism, and 2.9 percent Islam, with less than 2 percent claiming Buddhism, Orthodox Christianity, or atheism/agnosticism. The rest–49.7 percent–claimed no religious preference.
How is it possible, then, for the university to have a meaningful relationship to the United Methodist Church, and what does “meaningful” mean? What difference does it make, if any, either to the church or to the university to have this kind of affiliation?
In the first century of the institution, the connection made a big difference indeed. Consider the state of higher education in the state of Georgia in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Before 1830 there was only one university in the state, the University of Georgia, founded in 1785. Even primary and secondary education was hardly universal, and most young people who had any schooling received it at small private academies, often in the homes of educated clergymen of one denomination or another. It was those clergymen and those denominations that began the expansion of higher education in the state. First the Baptists established Mercer University, in 1833, and then the Presbyterians, in 1835, established Oglethorpe University. Not to be outdone, the Methodists in Georgia launched not one but three educational institutions. The first, in 1834, was a manual labor school near Covington, which combined training in skilled labor and farming along with a classical education. Two years later they founded the first degree-granting institution in the world exclusively for women – Wesleyan College, in Macon – and, at the same time, a college for young men, Emory College.
All of this educational activity on the part of the Methodists was consistent with the ministry and life’s work of the founder of Methodism, John Wesley. An Anglican priest, Wesley had served as a missionary to Native Americans and colonists in and around Savannah in 1736 and 1737. When he returned to England, he experienced an evangelical conversion that prompted a vigorous ministry whose hallmarks were an emphasis on inward piety and outward service to the poor and needy. He would come in time to stand for the abolition of slavery, the support of women as preachers, and the care of those who are least in society. Especially important was education, both the establishment of schools of various kinds and the publication of vast quantities of educational materials, including tracts, sermons, Bible studies, and other tools for teaching. Education became one of the principal ways for Methodists to elevate society, beginning with their clergy and continuing into the rank and file.
For the Georgia Methodists, then, the establishment of a college was just part of what they felt called to do to minister to society. They bought fourteen hundred acres north of Covington and laid out a new town, called Oxford in honor of the university that had educated John Wesley and his brother Charles, the great Methodist hymn writer. The whole purpose of the town was to be the home of the college; all roads in the original town plan led to College Square.
The founders named the college Emory, in memory of a Methodist bishop from Maryland who had presided over their annual conference two years earlier, when they had first decided to establish a college. John Emory was from a prominent slave-owning family on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and he was himself a slaveholder. He was also a prominent Methodist educator, having helped to establish Wesleyan University in Connecticut and having served as chair of the board of trustees of Dickinson College, in Pennsylvania, until his death in a carriage accident in December 1835. Both Emory College and Emory and Henry College, in Virginia, were founded the following year to memorialize him. The first president of the college, shown here, was Ignatius Few, whose monument stands on the Quad at Oxford College. He was a Princeton-educated lawyer and farmer who found religion late in life and entered the Methodist ministry, though his true calling seems to have been as an educator.
Having laid out their town and built a fairly simple first campus to welcome their students, the Methodist educators developed a curriculum modeled along the lines of those of Yale and Princeton. They seasoned it further with some religious requirements that those other schools omitted. First, students had to take courses in the Bible and something called Christian evidences, which was essentially a way of demonstrating that the world as we experience it proves the truth of Christian doctrine and biblical interpretation according to the lights of a kind of fundamentalist view of the Bible. Then, second, students were required to attend chapel every day and twice on Sunday. Even the faculty were expected to attend chapel. In fact, many of the faculty members were Methodist ministers, and until 1920 all but one of its presidents were Methodist clergy.
In those early years, of course, the college restricted access to young white males, all of them at least nominally if not devoutly Protestant Christians. Most of them were Methodists, but Presbyterians, Baptists, and Lutherans were welcome. If there were any Catholics in the student body, the records are silent. No such records were kept. But religion did prompt the admission of the first students of color. These were young men from China and Korea who were sent to Emory by Methodist missionaries to be educated at their alma mater. The first international student to graduate from Emory was Yun Chi-Ho, who earned his degree in 1893 and returned to Korea to become a prominent educator, government official, and author of what is now the national anthem for South Korea. His enrollment was actually the beginning of a long and distinguished relationship between Emory and Korea.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, little Emory College had become a financially stable, well-regarded, and prominent liberal arts college in the constellation of Southern Methodist higher education. All of that began to change dramatically in 1914, when a series of decisions in faraway Tennessee and nearby Atlanta set in motion the transformation of the college into a university. And it all had to do with Methodism.
We may either blame or thank the leaders of Vanderbilt University. In 1872, the Southern Methodist Church—formally the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, which had separated from the Methodist Episcopal Church over slavery in 1845—established a university in Nashville. This was Central University, named that because it was central to much of the geography of the denomination. It was also the first university founded by the denomination, which had established many liberal arts colleges but no university. Central lacked the funds to even open, however, until its chancellor, a bishop named Holland McTyeire, visited a man who was married to the cousin of McTyeire’s wife.
If that sounds like a Southern relationship story of who are your people, it’s also a good Methodist story, as Methodism has always been built on what’s known as a connectional system. In any case, the bishop’s wife’s cousin’s husband happened to be the richest man in America at the time, Cornelius Vanderbilt. He had been thinking of starting a university on Staten Island, but Bishop McTyeire persuaded him that in the interest of fostering good will between north and south after the war, this new university in Nashville would be a good investment. Vanderbilt gave a million dollars, and the university trustees promptly changed the institution’s name.
Sadly, over the next forty years disagreements would arise about who had what levels of authority to appoint faculty, to set policy, to determine curriculum, and so on. The university administration and the majority of the board had one view, while the bishops of the church often had another. In 1914 the growing dispute ended up in the Tennessee Supreme Court, which determined that Cornelius Vanderbilt, not the church, had been the founder of the university. The church, in high dudgeon, decided to sever relations with Vanderbilt University and establish a new university in the Southeast.
Enter Asa Griggs Candler. He was a devout Methodist and the older brother of a former president of Emory College, a man named Warren Akin Candler, who had served for ten years before being elected as a bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Bishop Warren Candler chaired the commission that was charged with determining where the new university would be located, and in July 1914 the bishop received this letter from his older brother. Asa, of course, was the founder of the Coca-Cola Company and one of the wealthiest men in the Southeast. In this letter he outlined all the reasons why he thought that Christian higher education—that is church-related higher education—was important to the flourishing of a democratic society, and to that end he offered one million dollars, matching the initial endowment that Commodore Vanderbilt had given to his university. Asa Candler sweetened the offer by donating seventy-five acres in his new Atlanta suburb of Druid Hills.
And so it was that in January 1915, the Superior Court of DeKalb County granted a new charter to Emory University. The bylaws of the university have been revised a number of times since 1915, and the current bylaws no longer contain the original preamble. But that preamble tells us what the Methodists had in mind in creating Emory.
The first paragraph includes phrases like “the promotion of the broadest intellectual culture in harmony with the democratic institutions of our country and permeated by the principles and influences of the Christian religion”; “profoundly religious without being narrowly sectarian”; “freedom of thought as liberal as the limitations of truth.” These are all broad-minded and high ideals consonant with John Wesley’s famous statement that “the world is my parish.” There is an openness here that laid the foundation for a remarkable transformation in the religious make-up of the institution.
The second paragraph, however, is also important. There you see the intention of the church to state explicitly that the university “belongs to” the church. The church intended to retain control. This phrase “belongs to” would become the focus of much parsing and explication and commentary decades later, but the IRS has ruled that in fact Emory University owns itself and is not owned by the church. Rather, the university sets its own policies and directions.
The preamble took on symbolic form in the university seal, part of which now forms the university logo. That includes the torch that represents the light of learning, and the herald trumpet that represents the proclamation of truth.
With the establishment of the university in Druid Hills, the first schools to open on the new campus were the schools of theology and law. In fact the theology school, named for the Candler brothers, Warren and Asa, had begun operations in September 1914 in downtown Atlanta, even before the university received its charter. Not until 1919 did Emory College move from its original home in Oxford to Druid Hills. That year also marks the beginning of real religious diversity at Emory.
It is difficult to tell whether any Jewish students had enrolled in Emory College while it was still in Oxford. The only way to guess would be by examining the last names of students during those years, and that’s an inconclusive prospect. There were two Jewish faculty members during the 1870s, one of them a convert from Judaism to Methodism, and the other an observant Jew who taught Hebrew. In 1919, however, we know for certain that things changed.
The most prominent Orthodox rabbi in the Southeast lived in Atlanta. An immigrant from Lithuania, he was Rabbi Tobias Geffen, who would live until 1970, just short of his hundredth birthday. The rabbi and his wife, Sara, had eight children, and Rabbi Geffen believed in educating them all to the greatest extent possible, both boys and girls. With the planting of a new university nearby, he sought to enroll his oldest son, Joel, as a transfer student. A former student of mine, Isabella Cantor, tells the story well, so let me quote her.
“As the story goes, Rabbi Geffen approached Chancellor Warren Candler regarding the admission of his son. He told Candler that he would like to send Joel to Emory University, but that Saturday classes would be a problem for the family. Until 1929, Emory held classes Tuesday through Saturday in order to give Christian students a Monday break after church on Sunday. Because the Geffens were Orthodox Jews, the laws of Shabbat prevented them from riding buses or streetcars to Saturday classes and prohibited them from taking notes and exams on Saturdays. The Chancellor, a Methodist bishop, promised Rabbi Geffen that not only would Emory be happy to accommodate Joel’s observance of Shabbat, but Joel would receive reduced tuition as the son of a clergy member. It did not seem to matter to Candler that Geffen was an Orthodox rabbi and not a Methodist minister.”
These days of course Emory is well known for the proportion of Jewish students in the student body, for its prominent Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, for a vibrant Hillel center, and for faculty members like Deborah Lipstadt, who is President Biden’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. Jewish students were part of the student body in every school through the first half of the twentieth century, but the numbers began to grow significantly during the presidency of Sanford Atwood.
In fact the university would diversify in many ways during Atwood’s presidency. Emory graduated its first African American students in his first year, and soon afterward appointed its first full-time African American faculty member and the first female full professor in Emory College. Significantly, Atwood wanted Emory to compete with Northeastern universities for students, so he raised tuition to pay faculty members better. Paradoxically, perhaps the higher tuition made it somewhat more difficult for many students in the Southeast—Emory’s traditional base—to enroll, while the higher tuition was in line with that of Northern institutions—which also had colder and longer winters. Students from the Northeast began being admitted in higher numbers, and many of those were Jews from New York and New Jersey.
Religion came to the fore in other ways during Atwood’s administration. Three years into his administration, Time magazine published an issue with what has been one of its most controversial covers, asking the question “Is God Dead?” The cover story, which appeared the week before Easter in 1966, featured a group of American theologians and religious scholars who had developed a perspective that came to be called “death of God theology.” Among the featured theologians was Thomas J. J. Altizer, an Emory College professor in the Department of Religion, who drew upon the work of William Blake, Hegel, and Nietsche to argue the impossibility of believing any longer in a transcendent God, while affirming that God had incarnated in Christ the divine spirit that remains immanent in the world.
Reaction to the story was swift. The President’s Office received many calls, letters, and telegrams calling for the dismissal of Professor Altizer, who had tenure and therefore was not so easily dismissed. At the same time, dozens of messages of support for Altizer, including from Methodist clergy who were alumni of the School of Theology, provided consoling balance. A rumor went around, probably false, that Robert Woodruff had let it be known that he would not give any more money to Emory if Altizer were fired. In the end, President Atwood (a Presbyterian), Board Chairman Henry Bowden (a Methodist), and Candler Dean William R. Cannon, who would soon be elected a bishop of the United Methodist Church, stood by Altizer’s academic freedom, and in time the storm died down.
One more noteworthy development on the religion front during Atwood’s presidency was the appointment of the first professor of Jewish studies, in 1976. David Blumenthal, who retired just a few years ago after more than forty years of teaching at Emory, credits Emory alumnus and religion professor Jack Boozer for badgering the administration about the need for Jewish studies to augment the Christian emphasis in the Department of Religion. David’s appointment would lead to the appointment of other Jewish faculty members and, in 1999, the creation of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies.
Regrettably, the university was not always so hospitable to Jewish students. In 2011 I received a phone call from Eric Goldstein, professor of history and at the time the director of the Tam Institute. Several years before, while teaching a course on Emory history, Professor Goldstein had worked with his students to create an exhibit in the Woodruff Library about the history of Jewish life at Emory. While touring this exhibit, Dr. Perry Brickman, an Emory College alumnus and retired oral surgeon who lives near the campus, spotted something that brought back haunting memories. It was a series of panels detailing the effects of a culture of antisemitism that had existed in the Emory dental school for more than a decade, from 1948 to 1961. The data, compiled by the Atlanta chapter of the Anti-Defamation League in 1960, showed that Jewish dental students were being flunked out at five times the rate of other students, while no such disproportion existed anywhere else in Emory. Dr. Brickman, who graduated from Emory College in 1953, had been discouraged from even applying to the Emory dental school because he was Jewish, though he went on to earn his dental degree elsewhere and had a distinguished career.
Spurred by this exhibit, Dr. Brickman sought out Jewish dental students from that time, many of whom were friends or former colleagues, and he created a video record of their stories, many of them told while the storytellers fought back tears. Professor Goldstein and Dr. Brickman showed me the video and asked what could be done. With President Wagner’s blessing, we hired a professional filmmaker to take Perry’s raw footage and augment it with interviews of Professor Goldstein, Professor Lipstadt, Provost Earl Lewis, President Wagner, and myself to fill out the story of antisemitism in American higher education as well as at Emory. The story at Emory ended when the dean of the dental school at the time, Dr. John Buhler, was confronted with the culture that he had fostered. He left under a cloud of suspicion, though the university never acknowledged that he had been fired. In a public program to which all of these Jewish alumni and former students were invited, in 2012, President Wagner apologized on behalf of the university for this dark period in their life as well as in Emory’s history.
Here are some other indications of how religious life at Emory has changed through the years. The presidential search that brought Walter Martin to Emory as the president in 1957 included in its recruitment materials some “considerations of the utmost importance.” This was at a time when the retiring president, Goodrich C. White, was himself an active member of the Methodist Church and had served as a delegate to the General Conference of the denomination. The chairman of the board of trustees, Charles Howard Candler Sr., also was a devout Methodist who, with his wife, Flora Glenn Candler, had given the funds to build Glenn Memorial in memory of her father, an Emory alumnus and Methodist clergyman. Affirmation of the Christian faith was among the considerations the search committee had in mind for the next president, and Walter Martin, a Methodist who was dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia, neatly fit the bill.
On the other hand, by the time a search was underway for the successor to Jim Laney a quarter of a century later, no such criterion was presented. This was interesting because Laney, a Methodist, had been the first clergyman to serve as president of Emory in more than half a century. He also happened to have an acute analytical and academic mind and left Emory to become U.S. ambassador to South Korea. But as Laney’s successor, Bill Chace, has noted in his memoir, the question of faith, religious commitment, or even belief in God never came up in the search. It is true that Bishop Bevel Jones, co-chair of the board and a member of the search committee, called the chaplain at Wesleyan University, where Bill was then serving as president. That chaplain reported to Bishop Jones that President Chace had always been supportive of the interfaith work of the chaplain’s office at Wesleyan, and that apparently was good enough for the committee.
Here is another indication of the way religious life at Emory has changed through the years. Chapel attendance, once mandatory for students, gradually diminished in importance until it was finally phased out altogether as a weekday program. Even by the 1950s, when it was a voluntary midweek gathering in Glenn Memorial, the programs tended to be less religious in flavor and more punctuated by institutional vision, moral exhortation, and stories of ethical behavior brought by visiting dignitaries or celebrities to help keep undergraduates on the right path, if not the righteous path.
These changes in chapel requirements point to one further indication of change in the religious life of Emory. Until the 1970s, Emory had only a part-time university chaplain, who was most often also a faculty member in either the theology school or the college Department of Religion. In 1979, President Laney appointed the first full-time chaplain, Rev. Don Shockley, who was, of course, a United Methodist minister. Don served until 1990 and significantly built up the resources available to faculty, staff, and students for spiritual life. Don’s successor, Susan Henry-Crowe, is likewise a Methodist minister and had a vibrant vision for building interfaith dynamics. Recognizing the changing demographics at Emory, she created the Interreligious Council to bring students from all faiths or none together in conversation. She also launched the Journeys of Reconciliation to take students and faculty into parts of the world that had experienced war and disruption to learn from their inhabitants how to heal conflict and animosity.
Susan left in 2013 to become general secretary of the United Methodist Board for Church and Society, in Washington, DC. President Wagner appointed me to chair the search committee to find her successor. For the first time, the search did not stipulate that the successful candidate would be a Methodist clergyperson, or even a Christian. And in fact, one of the four finalists for the job was an imam who ran the Muslim chaplaincy at another university. He dropped out before the final selection, and President Wagner appointed Bridgette Young-Ross, again a United Methodist minister. When ill health forced her to step away several years later, President Claire Sterk appointed the first non-Methodist chaplain, Rev. Greg McGonigle, whose ordination is in the Unitarian-Universalist Church. He has led the initiative to fulfill a long-term dream of his predecessors, which is a freestanding interfaith center. This building, in a renovated house, stands at the corner of North Decatur and Clifton Roads, across from the law school.
Finally, I promised in my title an appearance of the Dalai Lama. There are a few religious rock stars in the world, and the 14th Dalai Lama is surely one of them, along with the Pope and the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu—who, by the way, was a visiting Woodruff Professor at Emory for several years in the 1990s. The Dalai Lama first visited Emory in 1987, two years before he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The visit came about at the invitation of Professor John Fenton, a specialist in South Asian religions in the Department of Religion.
Four years later, His Holiness sent a protégé of his, by the name of Lobsang Tenzin Negi, to earn a PhD degree at Emory while studying Western scientific understandings of emotions and psychology. Lobsang’s mentor in this project was Bobby Paul, who was then director of the Institute of Liberal Arts and later became dean of Emory College. Their collaboration was the impetus for exploring how Emory might partner with Tibetan Buddhist institutions in India to develop scholarly exchanges, study-abroad opportunities, and other interdisciplinary programs. In 1998 President Bill Chace formally signed the agreement with Drepung Loseling Monastery, the preeminent institution of learning in Tibetan Buddhism, founded in 1416 and reconstituted in India after the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1959.
In the quarter century since that formal agreement, the Emory-Tibet Partnership has grown from a small undertaking with a director and a part-time assistant into a center with thirty full-time staff members and four major program streams. These include the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative to teach Tibetan monastics—both monks and nuns—Western science; Cognitively-Based Compassion Training, a method of strengthening and sustaining resilience and compassion; SEE Learning, an internationally vibrant program now reaching into hundreds of schools around the world to teach social, emotional, and ethical learning to tens of thousands of schoolchildren; and the Tenzin Gyatso Scholars program, which brings Tibetan monastics to Emory for two years of study in the sciences.
So this brings us pretty much up to date. I would just add one note for which I’ve not been able to find documentation, but which I recall as an important touchstone of religious study at Emory. Sometime in the early 1990s, when Billy Frye was provost, his office sent out a survey to Emory faculty members asking a variety of questions to gauge their sense of what should be important to Emory going forward. One of the questions asked whether religion had any significance to the individual faculty member’s personal or professional interests. I don’t remember the percentage, but a majority of respondents reported that religion was in some respect an interest in their scholarship, whether they were in history, sociology, literature, public health, law, medicine, or what have you. Religion will continue to be an important component of human social, emotional, and intellectual life and will therefore always be worth studying.
Let me come back, then, to the fact that Emory is still related to the United Methodist Church. What practical consequences does that relationship have, and why should we care?
It’s worth recalling the extraordinary commitment that Methodism has made to education. Apart from the Roman Catholic Church, no other religious denomination in America has established more schools, colleges, and universities. United Methodist-related educational institutions now number a hundred and nine, and they include not only small liberal arts colleges like little Brevard in North Carolina and freestanding seminaries like the one I graduated from, the Methodist Theological School in Ohio, but also highly ranked colleges like Dickinson, HBCUs like Clark-Atlanta and Dillard, and large research universities like Emory, Duke, Boston, and Syracuse. The church in fact regularly evaluates each of these institutions through its University Senate, which was established in 1892 as one of the first accrediting bodies in the United States.
So what does all of this mean for Emory, a member of the Association of American Universities, the top research universities in North America, and home to one of the top health sciences centers?
The current bylaws of the university retain a preamble that alludes to the historical affiliation with Methodism without some of the more detailed language of that original preamble of 1915. The bylaws also require that the election of trustees be approved not only by the board but also by the Southeastern Jurisdictional Conference of the church. So far as I know, that approval has never been a problem.
I think of the DNA of the university as continuing to include Methodist genes that still play out in shaping the institution. The vision statement that Emory arrived at in 2005 while creating a strategic plan says this: “Emory: A university internationally recognized as an inquiry-driven, ethically engaged, and diverse community, whose members work collaboratively for positive transformation in the world through courageous leadership in teaching, research, scholarship, health care, and social action.” All of the italicized phrases echo some of the social principles of the United Methodist Church and carry forward many of the commitments of the faculty and administrators who built the college and later the university.
In closing, maybe I can sum up the present state of the relationship between Emory and the United Methodist Church by telling two stories.
The first took place in 1997, when an employee at Oxford College filled out an application to use the campus chapel for a wedding. Permission was granted, but when it became clear that the wedding would actually be a commitment ceremony for a same-sex couple, the dean of the college thought better of it and rescinded permission. His reasoning was that Emory is affiliated with the United Methodist Church, and that denomination prohibits such ceremonies in its churches or by its clergy.
A furor ensued, and when President Chace overruled the dean and apologized to the couple, the furor grew louder, as conservative church members in Alabama called for the firing of the president and the chaplain and urged the church to put the university up for sale. I tried to imagine a Remax sign in front of the Haygood-Hopkins Gate.
The controversy prompted a year-long series of conversations led by Susan Henry-Crowe, and in the end the church and the university agreed that Emory owns its chapels, and that so long as a person’s religious organization permits same-sex commitment ceremonies or marriages, they could be performed in Emory’s chapels. In the years since, those conservative Methodists have created a split in the United Methodist denomination, which in the past year has witnessed thousands of its churches depart to form a new denomination. The church with which Emory is affiliated is now much smaller and weaker.
Here is another story to illustrate the weakness of both the church and its affiliation with Emory. In various spots around the Druid Hills campus stand holly trees that are descendants of a famous tree that used to grow on St. Simons Island. That tree was known as the Wesley Holly.
According to tradition, John Wesley, who often preached out of doors, would occasionally hold services and preach under a large live oak on the island. A hundred years or so ago, Bishop Warren Candler and his wife, Antoinette, visited that tree, which was still standing, and Mrs. Candler noticed a small holly bush growing out of some soil that had collected in the crook of that large oak. It was variety known as East Palatka holly. She uprooted it and brought it to the Druid Hills campus, where she planted it on the Quadrangle midway between what are now Convocation Hall and Carlos Hall. Over the years, as that holly grew and flourished, cuttings were taken from it, and after they rooted they were planted in various spots around the campus.
Fast forward sixty years or more. Professor Jon Gunnemann, my dissertation adviser, arrived to teach ethics in the theology school in 1981, and he found himself appointed to serve on the Campus Development Committee of the University Senate. One day he received a call from the chair of the committee, who said that the committee had recently met to consider a request to remove that Wesley Holly from the Quadrangle. It seemed that it stood where commencement planners wanted to erect some temporary bleachers for the graduation ceremony. The vote of the committee was evenly split, and Jon’s vote was needed to break the tie.
Not sure he even knew what tree was at issue, Jon dutifully walked from the theology school to the Quadrangle to take a look. Yes, there it was. An ugly old tree, he thought. Take it down. But as he got closer, he saw the gnarly trunk and twisted branches that bespoke an ancient and venerable witness to the university’s life. Woodsman, he thought, spare that tree.
As he stood looking at the tree, President Laney happened past, and he stopped to ask what Jon was up to. When Jon told him about the need for his vote, President Laney said, “Well, Jon, don’t worry about it too much. That tree is going to be gone soon.”
And so perhaps it is with the affiliation between Emory and the United Methodist Church. If we think of the church as that tree, we can acknowledge that certainly the old witness still in some ways watches over the comings and goings of those who live and work at Emory. The roots are deep. The branches bear the scars of time. And a kind of beauty remains despite the frailty of the organism. How much longer it will stand is hard to say. But while it is there, it stands as a reminder of a rich and fascinating part of our heritage.
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