A Place to Find Your Life’s Mission

Residents of Theology House gather for regular Tuesday dinners, where they hear from various speaker, such as STH’s Charlene Zuill. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi

Talk about mixing church and state: a recent presidential primary day coincided with the weekly dinner speaker series at Theology House, home to 21 first-year School of Theology students. Having prepared his family’s recipe of baked chicken with egg-and-honey breadcrumbs, Deontez Wimbley (STH’18), the night’s assigned cook, prefaces grace with the latest secular news: “Hillary Clinton won Virginia and Georgia. Bernie Sanders won in Vermont.”

An isolated whoop greets the Sanders news. The second-floor common room, doubling as dining area, buzzes with conversation as students in couches and armchairs eat with the night’s speaker, the Rev. Charlene Zuill, STH’s spiritual life coordinator. Then, with half the group doffing their shoes to get more comfortable, Zuill launches a getting-to-know-you game, having each student make up bits of a fictional story about the house, sprinkled with real-life details about every resident: Nikki plays the ukulele. Amelia loves Ben & Jerry’s Pistachio Pistachio. And Bailey still likes hearing Dr. Seuss stories.

The last storyteller ends the story by saying of her housemates, “They’re all so lucky to be in this crazy, wonderful house together.”

Tucked onto a spit of Raleigh Street between Kenmore Square and Storrow Drive, the red-brick Theology House strives for that sense of community. The house is for those who plan some service vocation—ministry, lay work with a nonprofit, or something else—and who want to learn about other cultures and religions. There are four foreign-born students, resident assistant Karen Zenteno (STH’17), a native of Mexico whose family now resides in Arizona, and three others who hail from South Korea.

It’s a long way from Boston to Alaska, home of pistachio lover Bailey Brawner (STH’18). But Theology House bridged that distance for her with weekly vocation talks such as Zuill’s.

“We’re able to see that here’s where these people were when they were 22. And here’s where they are now, and the different ways that can kind of embody itself,” Brawner says. As important is the community-building, exemplified by an exercise a few weeks into fall semester. The residents divided into two groups, with half closing their eyes while the second half tapped on their shoulders in response to instructions such as: Tap someone if they have made you laugh in the past week.

“Your eyes were closed, so you couldn’t see who was tapping you,” says Brawner. But the activity conveyed to her an affirming message: “Even though I’m one in 20 people in this house, and even though I don’t act my best on a day-to-day basis, when I make people angry sometimes and am not always in the best mood, I do mean something to this house.”

Three residents are not affiliated with a religion. One of them is Stephanie Braman (CAS’13, STH’18), who was “very scared to come” at first to a vocational house. Subduing her fears, she completed the application, which includes a covenant to participate in a minimum number of house events, an essay explaining your interest in Theology House and the potential contributions you could make to it, and whether you’ve participated in similar communities before.

Nonprofit work is among Braman’s career considerations. She says she’s benefited “as a nonreligious person, being open to the faith traditions of my housemates.…I think what’s best is to look at it as a privilege and an honor that my housemates are sharing their faith tradition with me.” She gets value as well from the Tuesday speakers, who typically come from the STH faculty. But not exclusively: one recent guest speaker runs the CrossFit Fenway gym. “Institutional ministry doesn’t have a monopoly on wanting to make the world better,” Braman says.

The house’s second goal of cross-cultural exposure relies partly on mingling with international housemates. Braman says she’s learned a lot from Zenteno, whose description of a Latina’s life in Arizona has been eye-opening.

“The immigration rhetoric down there is just terrible, terrible, terrible,” says Zenteno. Theology House enables her housemates “just to know me, just to put a face to me, which changes the situation when you are sitting in front of a TV listening to Donald Trump talking about all these Mexicans who are coming across the border and are raping women.

“It’s like,‘Well, you’re talking about Karen’s dad, who is definitely not a rapist,’” Zenteno says.

Resident applications for Theology House next year are due May 20 and may be found here.