EDS honors Wylie-Kellermann
The Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, awarded Witness co-editor Jeanie Wylie-Kellermann an honorary doctorate for her social justice commitments during
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| Jeanie and Bill Wylie-Kellermann |
the seminary's commencement day festivities May 27, 1999. Louie Crew (champion of the full inclusion of gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered Episcopalians in the life of the church), Rena Weller Karefa-Smart (a lifetime proponent of global ecumenism) and Roy I. Sano (a United Methodist bishop who has been a longtime advocate for multiculturalism and racial justice) were also honored.
Fredrica Thompsett, the seminary's dean of students, commended Wylie-Kellermann for her honorary degree with the following observations:
"Jeanie Wylie-Kellermann, yours was a childhood and adolescence saturated with the life and politics of the Episcopal Church--your father, Sam Wylie, was the chaplain at Brown University when you were born and he later served as Dean of The General Theological Seminary in New York and Bishop of Northern Michigan. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that at Columbia's School of Journalism, following undergraduate work at the University of Michigan, your nose for incongruity led you to choose as the subject of your master's thesis an analysis of the relationship between New York's St. James Episcopal Church on Madison Avenue and St. Anne's Episcopal Church in the Bronx. This project marked the beginning of a career devoted to a search for this nation's--and this church's--conscience, a search that has taken you into the streets and to military installations, science laboratories, picket lines and courtrooms.
"Your first job out of journalism school, with Associated Press, took you to Detroit, a city which has claimed your heart and commitment ever since. After covering the Republican Convention in 1980, you became involved in an effort to save Detroit's Poletown community, an immigrant neighborhood of 4,200 residents occupying 465 acres with 144 local businesses, 16 churches, two schools and a hospital. When General Motors proposed to raze this historic enclave for a Cadillac plant, the only group opposed to the project were the residents: Poles and blacks who together waged a fruitless struggle against the powers that be. You were arrested for an act of civil disobedience in a Poletown church that was destroyed in the course of this struggle. Your book, Poletown: Community Betrayed (published by the University of Illinois Press in 1989), chronicles and analyzes the Poletown struggle. The film Poletown Lives!, which you co-directed and wrote, won first prize in the American Film Festival for Social Issues Documentary.
"Since 1981 you have lived in the neighborhood of Detroit's Catholic Worker community. You fell in love with Bill Kellermann when you and he were arrested during an anti-nuclear arms vigil at Williams International (which manufactures Cruise Missile engines) during Advent 1983. The early energy of your courtship was marked by your efforts to get yourselves handcuffed together when you were taken to court.
"During your time in jail you began writing Michigan's bishop, Coleman McGehee. He subsequently asked you to join his staff to work on social issues. Later, from 1985-1991, you became editor of the Diocese of Michigan's newspaper, The Record. In 1991 you became editor of The Witness magazine and co-editor in 1997, offering the church an unpredictable and often courageous challenge in matters of justice, spirituality and resistance. In 1996 you were a founder of Readers United, started as a community response to the Detroit Newspaper strike, which helped facilitate 300 arrests in support of strikers.
"You have always sought to teach your daughters Lydia and Lucy that prayer, praise and protest are a part of daily existence whatever a person's age and so have included them on solidarity trips overseas and at local protests and Advent vigils. And now, as you battle to survive the assault of a brain tumor, you are teaching them that there is much to be learned in every situation, including and perhaps most especially when our lives are most threatened. ‘Some things won't be changed,' you have written, ‘and some things deserve to be protested even if they are unlikely to change--life is short and younger people generally take it too seriously, chasing their tails when they could be giving thanks."
The seminary's faculty had recommended Wylie-Kellermann for the honorary degree, Thompsett concluded, "in recognition of the gift that her continuing resistance and sustained spiritual journey have been to us all.