Janet Cooper Nelson got the call late one night. The Rev. Paul Santmire, ThD '66, chaplain of her Wellesley College congregation, left a message with her husband that he needed to meet right away.
She was tired after a long day at work, but Santmire said it was urgent, so Cooper Nelson stopped by on her way home. When she arrived, the pastor told her something that changed her life.
"He said, 'God's been talking to me about you, and I have to tell you what I'm hearing: You're supposed to go to divinity school,' " she remembers.
Her reply was succinct: "This is nuts!"
Cooper Nelson could hardly have been blamed for her reaction. After all, she was raised in a Christian sectarian community that had neither clergy, nor leadership roles for women. It turned out, however, that Santmire wasn't "nuts" but prophetic.
This year, the Rev. Janet Cooper Nelson, MDiv '80, marks a generation at Brown University as chaplain, director of the Office of the Chaplains and Religious Life, and a member of the faculty. On April 16, her fellow HDS alumni will celebrate her accomplishments as one of the 2015 Peter J. Gomes STB '68 Memorial Honorees.
"I am truly humbled by the Gomes Honors," Cooper Nelson says. "The award sets my memories spinning backwards through many special moments and people at HDS, then 'forward through the ages' of several academic communities and into these extraordinary 25 years at Brown."
Known as the "senior stateswoman" of the nation's university chaplains, Cooper Nelson supervises a multifaith ministry that serves what she calls "a congregation of 18,000 email addresses"—and dozens of different faiths and denominations.
On any day, she and her colleagues could show up at the sick bed of a Hindu student, visit a dying Muslim faculty member at hospice, and preside at the wedding of an Evangelical Christian and Jewish same-sex couple. She says that the work of the Brown chaplaincy is to create a "new spiritual hospitality" that extends to all members of the university's twenty-first century multireligious, multi-ethnic community.
"Within the university community we are witnessing truly new spiritual practice that might best be described as eclectic," she says. "We help people here create a ritual life that honors not only their own personal practices, beliefs, and commitments, but also those of the people they love. We layer depth and specificity into practices that express ancient truth even as they affirm new justice."
Cooper Nelson says that diverse university spiritual communities are drawing new members—particularly the young—many of whom share a passion for service and activism.
"More than half of Brown's undergraduates are involved in religious/spiritual life," she says. "They are part of an interfaith community engaged with concerns that include human rights, climate change, poverty, immigration, and many other ambitious initiatives. This work is broadly and generally supported. It's almost the common credo of American university communities."
Cooper Nelson's responsibilities also extend to university policy, student life, and much more. On a recent Friday, for instance, she spent eight hours at a mandated training for Title IX reporters, part of Brown's response to the crisis in harassment, stalking, and sexual assault at institutions across the country. A couple of days later, she counseled an African student just back from medical leave and struggling with financial and personal problems. She says that one of her top priorities, though, is religious literacy.
"Whether you're prayerful or not is your business," she says. "But if you're headed out to lead the world and you are ignorant about religion, you are ill-prepared. If you want to be a physician, you're ill-prepared for the sensibilities of the people you will care for. If you want to be a judge or officer of the law, you're ill-prepared as for the categories of moral action and engagement in society. And if your purpose is public health, you're ill-prepared to move in and out of traditional and non-traditional cultures."
Brown students get the message. Cooper Nelson says that interest in religion is growing, particularly in an interfaith community where couples need to navigate each other's religious background.
"Our office sponsors a religious literacy course originally designed by Ben Marcus, now a student at HDS," she says. "It's a non-credit course that's as rigorous as the seminars that meet just down the hall from my office, and it's perennially oversubscribed. There's often a wait list of students who want to get in."
Throughout her work, Cooper Nelson draws on the knowledge and ideas she encountered at HDS. She remembers fondly classes with Professors Krister Stendahl, Gordon Kaufman, and others who taught her new ways to think not only about scripture, but also about compassion and suffering, tenderness, and violence. She particularly remembers Professor Arthur McGill's course, "Death and the Death of Jesus Christ," about images of death in society across time.
"We confronted suffering directly, disturbingly," she says. "And yet, Arthur's purpose was to open us to compassion and to warn against becoming accommodated to violence—becoming 'callused' to the catastrophes of modernity. His intellect and kindness made it bearable to reconsider atrocity—whether the atrocity of the cross, of political execution, of increasing militarism, and the rising threats of national and transnational violence. These ideas continue to animate my commitment to nonviolence."
Most of all, Cooper Nelson remembers the cohorts of her MDiv class, a close-knit group of only 28: the Dominican nun whose impoverished order sent her to HDS to convey their support for her prophetic calling to the priesthood; several friends to whom she now refers to as the "God Squad," brought together by Professor Connie Buchanan and much-beloved Dean of Students Guy Martin; an apartment mate with a passion for both Catholicism and Buddhism, Cheryl Giles, who now sits on the HDS faculty.
"There were so many head-turning, smart, devout people who were on God's errand," she says. "I had no idea that this was the soup pot I wanted to be in, but I was praying that someone would turn the heat up, gently of course!"
Cooper Nelson looks forward to returning to campus on April 16 for the Gomes Honors and the year's final Divinity Dialogue. She calls HDS "the thread in the necklace" of knowledge and experience that move her through life.
"Nothing in our 1977 orientation in Andover Hall prepared me for the myriad blessings that continue to emerge from this unlikely convergence of students, alumni/ae, and faculty that named 45 Francis Avenue home for a season," she says. "To be awarded this honor by the HDS family is simply breathtaking."
—Paul Massari