Celebrate your colleagues and express your appreciation for their committed years of service at the annual Celebration of Service. The event will be held in Royal Brougham Pavilion on Thursday, May 8, at 11:10 a.m. There will be a community reception immediately following the event. All offices are closed during the celebration so faculty and staff can attend.

Student teams will pitch their ideas for socially innovative businesses and organizations that make money and make a difference at the annual Social Venture Plan Competition. Come and vote for your favorite projects and encourage your students to do so as well. Your votes will decide the winner of the $1,500 People’s Choice prize. Check out the website now, and don’t miss the event on Wednesday, April 16, 2–6 p.m. in Upper Gwinn!

For those looking for a Lenten reflection space, the School of Theology has set up Stations of the Cross in the Alexander & Adelaide Hall chapel on the second floor, featuring ceramic stations designed by Fr. Mauer van Doorslaer, O.S.B., and made at the St. Andrew’s Abbey in Valyermo, CA. In the chapel there is a reflection guide by Cadence Moore with sonnets from Malcolm Guite. As Lent places us in a season of prayer, you are invited to meditate on the story of Jesus taking up his cross. The School of Theology hopes it might be a meaningful way to journey through the season.

SPU’s Giving Day is Wednesday, April 2. NEW this year — plan to stop by the table in Gwinn Commons to cast your vote for an area of campus to receive additional Giving Day funds! Visit givingday.spu.edu.

The Faculty/Staff Bulletin is published every Monday during the academic year or Tuesday if Monday is a holiday. The next deadline is Thursday, March 27, and the next issue will be published Monday, March 31.

If you have information or event news, send it as soon as possible with an image or graphic to Bulletin editor Tracy Norlen at fsb-editor@spu.edu. Submissions may be edited for clarity.

At the recent 60th annual meeting of the Wesleyan Theological Society in Waco, Texas, Baylor University Press released a new commemorative volume. The Wesleyan Theological Heritage, features 18 of the most influential essays published in the six-decade history of the Wesleyan Theological Journal. Among these are articles by Paul T. Walls Professor Emeritus of Scripture and Wesleyan Studies Rob Wall, Paul T. Walls Professor of Wesleyan Studies Doug Strong, and Professor of Theology Doug Koskela. Essays by former SPU School of Theology faculty members Priscilla Pope-Levison, Randy Maddox, and the late William J. Abraham are also included. Co-editor Jason E. Vickers writes in the introduction, “the essays featured in this volume are among the most important ever published in the pages of the WTJ. Many of them have been frequently cited for years or even decades. In this way, they are truly seminal.”

At the Wesleyan Theological Society annual meeting on March 13-15 in Waco, Texas, Professor of Theology Doug Koskela made two presentations. In the Systematic Theology section, he presented a paper titled, “The Role of Prayer in the Holy Spirit’s Work of Sanctification.” He also participated in a panel on the theology of William J. Abraham for the Wesleyan Dogmatics Group, reflecting specifically on the relationship between the Holy Spirit and the church in Abraham’s work.

Doug Strong, The Paul T. Walls Professor of Wesleyan Studies and the History of Christianity, presented two papers and responded to two other papers at the 60th annual meeting of the Wesleyan Theological Society, held at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, on March 10-12. The two presentations were:

• "Holiness Abolitionism as a Compelling Theological Framework for Its Generation (and for Ours?)"
• "The Legacy of Pietistic Spirituality in Revivalist Abolitionism"

The two responses he gave were to: 

• Shannon Sigler, "Wesleyan Pneumatology and an Aesthetic of Freedom"
• Suzanne Nicholson, ed., Cooperating with the Holy Spirit: Theological and Practical Reflections on the Asbury Outpouring (Abilene Christian University Press, 2025)

Alissa Walter was invited to give a talk at Stanford University about her recent book, Contested City: Citizen Advocacy and Survival in Modern Baghdad. The talk took place on Monday, March 17. Here's a link to the event.

John Forsen’s 3-episode documentary history of Seattle, currently in production, recruited Bill Woodward, emeritus professor of history, as scriptwriter for the World War I segment. Cascade PBS (Channel 9) is slated to air the documentary in the fall. Bill also presented on his current research focus, the cavalry officer who became Washington’s first appointed adjutant general, to the Puget Sound Civil War Round Table on March 13. Frazier Boutelle enlisted in the Civil War as a 20-year old, and didn’t finally retire until the end of World War I at the age of 79, at the time the oldest serving officer in the Army. His career tracks the changes in the U.S. military over six decades, including the many years when the Army managed the National Parks — Boutelle was the third superintendent of Yellowstone, America’s first national Ppark, and as such an early ardent conservationist.