Auburn Stories

Letter to the Future: Lateral Healing

2026-06-16T07:00:00+00:00

Dear Ones,

“I don’t understand why democracy is the wrong frame. I don’t understand why knowing the names of the mountains and lakes matters, or understanding why learning the original names matters to a moral imagination.”

The comment above was shared with me by an organizer who was hosting a gathering to save democracy— a necessary effort these days, unfortunately. Still, I responded by insisting that my people have been here longer, surviving genocide and cultural eradication. Suggesting that God’s vision of history is longer than 250 years old.

I shared with this organizer that we had committed to years of intentional story circles, centering healing, remaining faithful to God’s time, and operating on what I call ancestor time. Healing, especially from generational trauma, requires a deeper response than a one-time gathering that continues to dismiss the violence my community experienced. We require a healing response that honors a longer history and a clear understanding of the theological assumptions that are driving current divisions.

I just came home from one of Auburn’s story circles in Alaska, where we both learned from and took part in a healing circle. After dancing, singing, and sharing stories at the SHI Celebration, we were all reminded that we are still here. I am still here, still singing, still moving, in the old ways and the new. Even though our songs, language, and culture were outlawed, and our children stolen away and sent to boarding schools, people are still singing, recovering language, and celebrating culture. A culture that knew and taught the names of the land and sea. From babies to elders, practices were shared with kin and guests alike.

Celebration is its own form of testimony. It says that the breath God gave us is still in us, and we are still using it to praise. It reminded me so much of what we do back home in our community; recovering our languages, practices, and traditions.

Part of the purpose of this trip, and of our storytelling work more broadly, was to seek a deeper narrative than the one many people were celebrating this year as the nation marked 250 years since the colonies declared their independence. We have been listening with Indigenous communities to ask what healing looks like in the aftermath of genocide and epistemicide, especially where that violence was enacted or supported by the church.

In our story circle, and in the quieter work of telling the truth to one another, we spoke about the church’s violence against our communities. We named the generational harm that follows, the way colonial violence spreads like a disease. One speaker named it lateral violence.

Lateral violence.

Lateral violence names what happens when harm done to a people turns inward and sideways, when those carrying the weight of oppression begin to press that same weight onto those beside them. Paulo Freire called this dynamic the sub-oppressor. The oppressed, having known the logic of domination, can begin to host that logic in their own bodies and aim it at peers. The colonized hand reaches for the colonizer’s tools and uses them on kin. I have seen it in movement organizations, congregations, families, and myself. It is one of the cruelest inheritances, because it convinces a wounded people that those whom we should be in solidarity with are somehow a threat.

I left Alaska carrying a question, and I want to set it down here where the future can hold it.

What if we practiced lateral healing?

Extending friendship that crosses the very line drawn to decide who counts as your people. Listening to stories. Making space in our hearts and souls for those we might count as family.

If violence can move sideways, so can love. I am curious what it would mean to build this on purpose, not as sentiment but as practice. To turn toward one another with the same attention we have been taught to turn outward in vigilance. To see the person beside us, and the stranger across the road, as the neighbor God keeps asking us to recognize. A place where repair begins, rather than the easiest place to pass on our pain.

For that organizer I mentioned at the beginning, it is in fact a necessity for you to learn the languages, names, and practices that existed on this land before contact in order for us to heal in meaningful ways. It is an act of repair to lay a better foundation for a democracy that is worth saving.

Healing, in an age of genocide and division, can feel impossible. But I can sense its outline in a story circle where people choose honesty and gentleness at the same time. I can feel it when someone says, I am hurting, and is met with, we are still here. Lateral healing looks like elders and leaders refusing to compete for the same narrow scrap of recognition. It looks like communities under the weight of historic oppression, the dispossessed and the displaced, deciding that scarcity is a story told about us, not a truth we must perform on one another.

What world do you get to live in because we chose lateral healing? If we practiced healing with the stranger, what did it build? Did the sideways wound begin to close? Did the next generation inherit something other than suspicion or pain?

I am writing toward a world where the answer is yes. Where the SHI Celebration in Alaska was not an exception to our grief, but a glimpse of our ordinary life. Where we remembered, together, that we were never meant to be each other’s oppressors.

We were meant to be each other’s friend. We were meant to be each other’s medicine.

With hope and with the songs still in my ears,

Rev. Patrick B. Reyes, Ph.D.
Executive Vice President and Dean

Letter to the Future: Institutions Have Fallen

2026-05-05T07:00:00+00:00

To our descendants,

Our institutions will not save us.

As Auburn’s Dr. Walter Wink wrote, the Powers have fallen.

I do not say that with bitterness. I say it in truth, and because you need to hear it from someone who loves institutions, who has given his life to one. I say it as someone who believes in the slow sacred work, of building something that outlasts any one person. The sooner we understand this, the sooner we can get to the real work.

For ten generations, Auburn has done this work. We prepared faith leaders to go into a world where the courts, the churches, and the legislatures have repeatedly failed to make things whole. When our institution was founded, not one member could vote. Half of our staff's descendants were not even considered fully human by the Powers. And our founders could not have imagined the leadership shaping this institution today.

Our ancestors lived and worked for a future we now inhabit. We have outlasted every fracture this country has handed us. We are still here. And yet, I find myself returning to this truth: the institutions, even the ones we love and lead, were not designed to heal what ails us. They were designed to manage it.

Look at what the courts have done.

This last week, on April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Callais v. Landry. In a 6-3 ruling along partisan lines, the court held that Louisiana’s congressional map, which had created a second majority-Black district, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, leaving what remains of the Voting Rights Act a hollow shell of what it was before. The 1965 Voting Rights Act, born out of the Civil Rights Movement, paid for in blood and sacrifice, gutted. Not by enemies from outside the system, but by the system itself.

The court has shown us who it protects before, not just in this moment of what feels like a widening political divide. In May 2025, the Supreme Court refused to hear Apache Stronghold v. United States. At the heart of the case was Oak Flat, Chí’chil Biłdagoteel, a sacred Apache site in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest, where Western Apache people have practiced religious ceremonies for centuries. The Apache Stronghold argued that transferring the land to a private copper mining company would destroy a site that serves as a direct corridor to the Creator, the only place where certain ceremonies can be performed. The court declined to hear them. The land is set to become a crater two miles wide and a thousand feet deep. Sacred ground, gone. And this court, the same court that has repeatedly expanded religious freedom of protections for others, could not find the same urgency for the Western Apache. The treaties were signed, and the land rights were promised. But when Indigenous nations went to reclaim what was theirs, the land they had purchased back on the open market, land that had been illegally taken from them, the Supreme Court said no again.

In City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whom many of us admired, wrote the 8-1 opinion ruling that the Oneida Nation could not restore sovereignty to lands that had once been theirs, lands taken through transactions that clearly violated the terms of the Federal Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts. The reasoning, at its core, was that too much time had passed. Justice Ginsburg seemed to say: your lands were taken from you illegally, but there is nothing we can do for you now. The court reached back to the Doctrine of Discovery, a legal construct rooted in 15th-century papal edicts that gave European sovereigns the right to take lands occupied by non-Christians, and called it settled law.

Even the church, my church, the institution I am accountable to and love, has not always been writing a letter to the future that is faithful to a God of love. The church blessed the Doctrine of Discovery and looked the other way when the residential schools took children from their families. The church has too often reflected the world’s imagination rather than challenging it. Healing from these wounds is the long work of leadership.

The Powers are fallen. But can they be redeemed? Can we achieve a healed future?

The failure of institutions to heal us does not mean healing is not possible. It means the healing was never going to come from institutions that were not designed for healing, but for power. It was always going to come from the circle. From the community. From the stories we are writing together. Returning to Wink, we remember that the Powers can be redeemed by our better angels.

Those better angels are you.

If our story circles have had any impact at all, somewhere right now a community is naming a wound that has never had a name. Somewhere a leader is sitting with the grief of their people and not running from it. Somewhere the historical trauma that was supposed to be passed down silently, invisibly, generation after generation, is being interrupted. Healing is happening and just as in our body, it happens through relationships below the surface, evidenced later by the scars we carry.

In the last two years, ninety-five emerging leaders have come through our programs. Ninety-five faith leaders rooted in their traditions, committed to justice, and now, I pray, equipped to see their work in a longer lens. They are not just fixing what is broken in front of them. They are healing a world they may not even live to see fully restored. That is the letter we are asking them to carry to the future, to you.

We were not asking for better institutions, more responsive courts, or a church that finally gets it right. Those things matter, and I do desire them, but they are not enough. What I want,what we are called to build, is a healed society. One that works for all of God’s creation. Citizen or not. Member of my congregation or not. Inside the treaty or outside of it.

And so, we write. We gather together in a sacred circle. We tell the truth about what has been done, about what has been lost, and about what, by the grace of something older and deeper than any institution, still remains. We train leaders not just for the next election cycle or the next budget year, but for the next generation and the one after that. We send letters into a future we will never fully see. Trusting that love, pressed into the work, carried in the stories, embodied in the leaders we form, will find its way there.

The institutions will not save us. They have fallen. But they can be redeemed.

Our better angels, you, rooted and healing and refusing to forget, just might see the healed future so many of us are working towards.

A Prayer for Courage
God of all generations,
the time before our treaties and before our courts,
before our institutions and our arguments about them,
hold us now in your patience.

Give us the courage to name what has been broken
without letting the breaking have the last word.
Give us communities that can hold grief and hope at the same time.
Give us leaders with eyes long enough
to see a future, they may not inhabit
and lead with love.

May the healing we plant today
take root in soil and in circle.
May the children inherit a world
shaped by those who loved it before they arrived.

And may we, in our moment,
be faithful to the ones who are coming.

Amen.

With love across time,

Rev. Patrick B. Reyes, Ph.D.
Executive Vice President and Dean

A response to a Letter to the Future in Times of Fear

2026-04-17T07:00:00+00:00

Dear ones,

I write in a time when the world is on fire. From climate change to bombing campaigns, humanity appears grimly determined to destroy our planet for future generations.

But even with everything else going on at home and abroad, the recent journey of Artemis II around the moon captured our collective attention. Perhaps you have even seen their pictures of the bright blue dot we call Earth and of a total solar eclipse seen from behind the Moon.

I am writing to you after the space mission came up during a monthly gathering at my church. Those in attendance expressed the awe of the pictures. Yet, one of them wondered, why are we spending so much money going to space with all the problems right here? I conceded that this argument makes a valid point.

To my way of thinking, however, the mission of Artemis II is for all humankind. We can learn from the astronauts themselves, and I believe these lessons can have a positive bearing on the future.

The astronauts aboard Artemis II were Canadian and American, male and female, Black and white. Each individual was at the top of their field, excelling in bravery, expertise and knowledge. Together, they formed an incredible crew. Astronaut Christina Koch defined a “crew” as those with a “shared purpose, silent sacrifice … giving grace and accountability.”

As they went beyond our planet’s atmosphere, these astronauts challenged humankind to move beyond the “us versus them” mentality that is the source of so many problems and become one community. We share the spaceship Earth; like crew members, we are (in Koch’s words) “inescapably linked.”

Quantum physicists tell us that, whether on Earth or across the galaxy, two objects (such as subatomic particles) that seem separated by vast distances of time and space are, in fact, invisibly and intimately connected. To my way of thinking, this concept was expressed long ago as the idea of a God in whom we live, move and have our being (Acts 17:28).

What I know is that, for all their grandiose accomplishments, the crew members of Artemis II are also personally relatable. They had a clogged toilet, and they joked about it!

The crew also grieved together. One of them, with the fitting last name of Wiseman, had a new crater named after his wife, Carroll, who had died of cancer in 2020. The entire crew wept and held onto each other as they spelled out her name, letter by letter, over the transmission back to Earth. Suddenly, whether it was called the body of believers or quantum entanglement, we knew of a deep, abiding connection. Though literally farther from Earth than any other human, they felt like part of our family.

In addition to clogged toilets and potty humor, grief and sorrow are as much a part of the human experience as pride over accomplishments. Just as we do not all achieve the same things, we do not all suffer the same losses — and yet, all of us will suffer loss at some point. Despite the many differences that will surely exist in your future world, loss remains as inevitable as gravity on Earth; while it weighs on us, sharing our grief can lighten even our dark sides.

I pray that, on this whirling planet, we will remember such lessons, like the connecting power of grief, so that we might care for one another like a crew and thereby make this planet a safer, kinder and more loving place for today and for the future.

In that holy hope,

Andrew Taylor-Troutman

Rev. Dr. Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the author of eight books of short essays and poetry. He serves as the senior pastor and head of staff of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he shares life with his partner, their three children and a rambunctious dog, who occasionally makes Andrew lose his religion.

A Letter to the Future in Times of Fear

2026-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

To the beloved ones, five generations from now,

You are the dream, the laughter echoing through the long corridors of time. We lived and loved with fierce intention, not because love was an easy thing, but because it was the work of our hands and hearts, a practice sanctified each day.

We placed our hope in this sacred labor, believing your lives could unfold in joy, not in the shadow of fear. We prayed for you under Shabbat candles, through tears and the ache of honest conversation, longing for a time when no child wonders if gathering to pray is safe.

We looked to a future where no one queries if Grandpa will return home. Where family is not divided by borders or suspicion, but bound together by hospitality and justice.

May your communities be circles of wisdom—elders, healers, storytellers—gathering you in, teaching you the songs and languages that keep memory alive and joy communal. Let your feet know land that welcomes you, that the sky above and the ground below are familiar and kind, restored by your relationship with creation.

May you open the news and see stories of joy. Where we shared our love with the world, not our war.

May you know the weight and the lightness of history, its courage and its failure, its liberation and its pain, and hold each with humility, refusing to turn away from any piece of truth. May your generation be the ones who mend wounds, who make healing our true inheritance.

I hope you see in your ancestors, those we call emerging leaders at Auburn. They are the leaders who stayed present, who chose repair over retreat, who kept pouring life into those who would come after, like Joy, Liz, Alma, Josh, Abeera, Zuogwi, Blake, Alex, Davion, Grace, Sylvie, like Ross, Caleb, Charlotte, Jael, Anthony, Brandon, Ali, Devon, and so many others.

I hope you know the chain of love is unbroken, that what was entrusted to us has been entrusted to you, and you have made it more whole. That you are defining the world by your laughter.

You are the future we served, the story we labored to tell, one where love and courage are your birthright, and laughter is the language of your days.

A Prayer for Healing
To a known God,
Heal what has been broken in us and between us.
Heal the wounds that were passed down through generations before anyone had words for them.
Heal the land that has been taken from and not returned to.
Heal the communities that were told their belonging was conditional.
Heal the fear that lived in the bodies of parents who only wanted to worship, to rest, to raise their children in peace.
Make us instruments of that healing.
Give us the courage to do the work that outlasts us, to love beyond what we can see, to equip those who come after us with more than we had.
Let those five generations from now, the future we now serve, grow up in wholeness.
Let them know, in their bodies and in their communities, that they are beloved.
May it be so. May we make it so. Amen.

With love that refuses to give up on a dream of a healed future,

Rev. Patrick B. Reyes, Ph.D.
Executive Vice President and Dean

Celebrating Auburn Seminary’s Faithful Leadership Journey

2025-09-14T04:00:00+00:00

As part of the long-term work to strengthen Auburn’s core, clarify its mission, and secure its future, President Jordan-Simpson and the Board have together mapped a leadership transition that builds on the strategic groundwork of recent years. With confidence in the road ahead, we share that President Jordan-Simpson will step down at the conclusion of this strategic cycle in 2027, following a deliberate and collaborative transition process grounded in Auburn’s mission and values.

Effective July 1, 2025, we celebrate the appointment of Rev. Dr. Patrick B. Reyes as Auburn’s Executive Vice President & Dean. A visionary scholar and trusted leader, Dr. Reyes has already played a pivotal leadership role, partnering with the President and Board to reimagine what a 200-year-old seminary can offer a rapidly changing world. He will steward Auburn’s three cornerstone portfolios of faith-leadership formation, field-advancing research, and storytelling and narrative change.

Over the next year, Dr. Reyes will work alongside President Jordan-Simpson and the Board to finalize and implement Auburn’s next business plan. Following Auburn’s Heal the World Summit in June 2026, President Jordan-Simpson will take a sabbatical, during which Dr. Reyes will serve as Acting President. Upon President Jordan-Simpson’s return in September 2026, they will share executive responsibilities.

With the Board’s support, Dr. Reyes will succeed President Jordan-Simpson as Auburn’s 12th President on July 1, 2027. We are excited that they will be documenting this model of shared leadership to serve the wider field.

Why This Matters

President Jordan-Simpson has led Auburn Theological Seminary to embody healing-centered leadership during a time of deep social uncertainty. This succession plan is a faithful act of leadership in itself—built on transparency, foresight, and love for the community. By planning openly and well in advance, we are:

Demonstrating Healing-Centered Leadership

Together, Emma and Patrick have modeled a leadership ethos grounded in relationship, transparency, and shared decision-making—strengthening Auburn’s governance, organizational structure, and financial foundation.

Securing Generational Strength

This thoughtful transition ensures continuity of wisdom, mission, and momentum—preparing future leaders to inherit an institution that is financially sound, justice-rooted, and prepared for tomorrow’s challenges.

Modeling Best Practices for the Field

As seminaries and nonprofits across the country navigate leadership changes, Auburn offers a living example of succession rooted in faithfulness — an approach worth sharing widely.

When leaders plan for tomorrow while tending to the well-being of people today, communities thrive. That is the legacy we are shaping at Auburn — with your partnership —and it will serve rising generations for years to come.

Auburn's future is being built today. To ensure this leadership transition is strong and that Auburn continues to thrive, we invite your partnership. Please consider a generous gift to Auburn in this season of planning and promise. Together, we will keep healing-centered leadership alive for a world that desperately needs it.

With deep gratitude,

Rev. Emma Jordan-Simpson, President

Auburn Theological Seminary

Dr. Prabhjot Singh, Chair

Board of Directors

2024 Auburn Annual Report

2025-05-21T04:00:00+00:00

Auburn Theological Seminary Annual Report

A healed world is possible, but don't take our word for it

2024-11-14T05:00:00+00:00

In these troubling times, we lead with love at Auburn Theological Seminary. Since July, we have been sharing our Letters to the Future with you. These letters have been Auburn’s vision for a healed future. In our letter from last week, President Jordan-Simpson offered reflections on lament. Like many of you, our senior leadership team have been on calls non-stop since the election. In each of these meetings, we are steadfast in our vision for a healed future.

Today, we are reminded of a repeated message from Levar Burton in Reading Rainbow. In every episode, he would recommend books about different cultures and people, but before he would offer his recommendations he would say: “But, you don’t have to take my word for it...” The episode would immediately cut to young people sharing their favorite books.

With this same spirit, Auburn’s leadership believes in a healed future, but, you don’t have to take our word for it...

If you feel inspired or called to share your vision for a healed future, send it to our dean and we would love to share it with our community.

Letter from Afif Rahman

2024-11-14T05:00:00+00:00

'بِسْمِ ٱللَّٰهِ ٱلرَّحْمَٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ

In the Name of God
The Most Merciful, the Most Beneficent
Peace and blessings to you, my Brothers and Sisters,

In the Quran, God says, “Hold fast onto the rope of God all together; do not split into factions…Be a community that calls for what is good, urges what is right, and forbids what is wrong: those who do this are the successful ones.”

As a creation of God blessed with the opportunity to lead your communities with faith, integrity, and resilience, be mindful of God and devote yourself to him, and you shall be successful.

As communities, forge strong bonds with each other, welcome strangers with open arms. Enjoin what is right, forbid what is evil, and you shall be successful.

The world, since the beginning, has been fraught with complexity, conflict, and chaos. But do not despair, for can’t we create a world, a community, a family, and beings filled with joy, tranquility, and peace? It all starts from within. Take care of your heart, your soul, and your mind. Laugh. Cry. And laugh some more. Be mindful of God, create your own joy, tranquility, and peace, and you shall inevitably grow stronger and more wholly.

Insha, Allah, by the will of God:

You shall find strength
You shall find healing
You shall be successful
And please drink more water, 😊 you beautiful, dehydrated soul.

With love and prayer,

Afif Rahman

Letter from Grace

2024-11-14T05:00:00+00:00

Dear queerly beloved community,

We were not created to be broken. We were not created to be a fragmented and violently splintered community. Our destiny is love and connection. This is what our bones long for. Our bodies know the truth even if our minds fall prey to the false narratives offered by capitalism, white Christian nationalism, and our own histories. We are meant to be whole — each and every one of us. And we’re meant to be whole — all of us, together, in and with creation.

The road is as broken and treacherous as we are in this chapter of our world. Perhaps we need to journey beyond the boundaries we’ve set for ourselves. It is time for us to follow the path that leads to who we truly are and who we have always been: whole and holy, beautifully beloved and loving. It takes gratitude, intention, creativity, and curiosity to find our way again. It takes courage and hope to understand where we’ve been and go where we must go. Together we must ground ourselves in Earth and our bodies and beloved community. We are the constellations of our celestial navigation home. Our destiny is within.

With hope and love,

Grace

Letter from Liz

2024-11-14T05:00:00+00:00

Dear Ones,

I hope this letter finds you experiencing שׁלום, a great peace, but I fear this may not be the case if the present day is any indication. I want to bless you with great strength of conviction, courage, and humanity as you journey forward.

Please do not glorify us people of the past as heroes who possessed some kind of superhuman bravery that is not available to each and every one of yourselves.

The Powers tell history that way in order to make you think that past progress was inevitable, to paint prior movements as teleological, while discouraging those in the present moment to stand up, to see yourselves as being just as capable of altering the course of time.

Neither should you curse us over much for leaving the world in the state that you found it: I express my heartfelt apology to you, but I also want you to know that we did the best we could while maintaining meaningful human relationships, commuting to work every day without enough time for rest in order to pay our rents and mortgages, eating potlucks with our friends, and petting our cats as much as they wanted to be petted.

May you be happy,
may you be healthy,
may you be safe from harm,
may you be gentle with yourselves,
may you lead lives of love.

Don’t get lost in the sauce, my friends, and please feel my rays and waves of genuine אַהֲבָה love, emanating to you from the past.

Yours sincerely,

Liz