The Admissions Team is excited to announce the revival of Vanderbilt Voices: a blog written by students about their experiences leading up to, during, and following VDS.
Some of the topics readers can expect to be addressed in the coming months will be: the application process, moving to Nashville, building spiritual community, reconciling with growth, cultivating belonging and a sense of nourishment both communally and privately, and answering the call to VDS.
While this list certainly isn’t exhaustive, it should give an idea as to what kinds of questions we’ll be answering with the help of student voices at different stages of their education.
We understand everyone is considering divinity school in the context of their own stories, which means different stages of life, spirit, and location are being brought to the discernment process.
In that spirit, we’ve recruited two students with storytelling experience as Student Bloggers in the Admissions and Enrollment Office who we think will help capture the variety of experiences to be had here.
Both Johnathan Riley and Audrey Fenstermaker are award-winning journalists, teachers, former bartenders, and first-year students here at Vanderbilt Divinity School.
In the Master of Divinity (M.Div.) program, Audrey is pursuing the Episcopalian priesthood and Navy chaplaincy. While her Nashville roots are firm, she has embraced seasons across the United States, including some years on the Olympic Peninsula, where she first learned to hold others’ stories with care as a reporter. Through writing and learning care work, her vocational objectives at VDS are to understand how God shows up in a community’s truths, their stories, and how Jesus is working in the validity of interfaith spaces.
Johnathan is a Unitarian Universalist from the coast of Maine in the Master of Theological Studies (M.T.S.) program. Some of the topics he’s exploring in his coursework include the maintenance required of meaning making, the act of writing as spiritual-identity formation, and theopoetics in pluralism. He holds degrees from Florida State University and the University of New Hampshire where he earned an MFA in Writing while teaching poetry and first-year composition. In addition to his work as a journalist, Johnathan is an award-winning columnist, photographer, and poet.
Putting these two side by side, we see the overlaps, and that’s an exciting commonality for us here at VDS, but we know that most of the growth at hand comes from our differences and learning how to communicate them.
We may look to Johnathan to tell us about what it’s like to move across the country to Nashville, but Audrey can tell us a bit more about how to fit this kind of education in an established life in the area.
For the gaps between their shared perspectives, they’ll interview others within the divinity school, faculty and students. If there’s anything in particular you’d like to see written about, let us know by emailing divinity-admissions@vanderbilt.edu and we’ll work to address it.
Community is not a passive activity, and we take its maintenance with a worthy, all-hands-on-deck approach. We’re so excited to include more student voices here and just as excited to help you in your discernment process.