Welcome to Howard University School of Divinity!  The renewal of our intellectual life always unforgettably returns at this time of the year.  It is the autumnal season for learning, where the life of the mind and the life of the spirit are inescapably and inextricably met. 

As graduate theological students you come to be critically formed in your faith, to engage tradition and the winds of change, to learn academic disciplines that will companion the rest of your days.  In seminary, you will be searched and known, often in the most surpassing and discomforting of ways.  In the classroom, the library, the hallways, chapel worship, common meals, contextual settings, and the interstices of life, life itself will challenge, humble, nurture, empower, sensitize, and deepen you on the road to a higher calling. 

The School of Divinity bids you enter into learned scholarship and the luminous spirit.To be a student at Howard University School of Divinity is also to affirm the critical distillation of one’s experiences in community.  What has been known and named in classroom and pulpit, theory and preachment – love, justice, freedom, salvation, and humanity – is made manifest in the magnificent outpouring of our faith.  In our relationships one with another as students, staff, and faculty ours is the gift to covenant together, to meet each other where we are, and in so doing dare to model divinity. More than media and technology, periodicals and books, brick and mortar, air conditioning and heat, as terribly important as these are, the School of Divinity is a bold affirmation of an inclusive learning community of faith in a world easily given to exclusion, division and pain. 

We joyously welcome Dr. Rosetta Ross as our new Associate Dean for Academic Affairs!  Under her careful leadership our curricular offerings, our degree programs, and our learning environment now stand on the precipice of change.  Ours is an institutional calling to bear distinctive witness to the academy, church and world.  I welcome you to Howard University School of Divinity where leaders are formed who transform the world.  Amen.  Ashé!

In the Presence,

Alton B. Pollard III

Dean Alton B. Pollard III