I began teaching at ACU in the fall of 2015, so according to the normal schedule, I should have been up for tenure in 2020. On this page, I briefly explain my two-year delay.
The first one-year delay was due to my husband’s rapid decline in health, which had begun prior to our move to Abilene and increased steadily in the years that followed. He was unable to work a regular job and fell into a deep depression. Between 2015 and 2019 he had multiple surgeries, most of them out of town, some out of state. I could manage teaching and administrative responsibilities, but it was hard to give sustained attention to my research. I should have had my pre-tenure review in 2018, but I postponed it to 2019 (see the letter here).
Prior to my pre-tenure review in the fall of 2019, my dean generously gave me a 3-hour course release in the spring to create some more space for research. I hadn’t asked for it, but I gratefully accepted it. My translation of an excerpt of Dionysius bar Salibi’s On the Cross was completed and submitted for publication during that time. I also made a rough draft edition and translation of John of Dara’s short commentary on the Nicene Creed, which I plan to use in a future project (see here for more detail).
In the summer of 2019, Ian had a surgery that was helpful, though not a “cure.” He continues to deal with chronic illness, but he has also developed spiritual practices to help him cope better. By early 2020, we were finally beginning to come out of the worst of it. My ability to concentrate on research returned, and I started regaining momentum. I received a Cullen Grant to work on John of Dara’s On the Divine Economy and to give a paper on it at the XIII Symposium Syriacum in Paris, France, that summer and another at the Society of Biblical Literature in the fall. Other than the Paris conference, I had a free summer ahead to focus solely on my research.
March 2020 changed everything. My conferences were canceled, and I spent the summer I had reserved for research developing my fall residential classes for online delivery instead. When the university offered a year’s extension on tenure due to the pandemic, I thought it would be prudent to take it (see the letter here). The pandemic ended up being a time of unexpected opportunities for research (as I’ve mentioned elsewhere), though the projects I had initially planned to work on were postponed a couple of years.
One more thing
I learned more about self-giving love by walking through pain and depression with Ian than ever would have been possible if we’d been healthy and happy. On paper, these almost look like wasted years, and at the time, they felt like it. But God was faithful to us when we were most helpless, and in God’s economy, nothing is wasted. I teach at ACU because I love the church and want to help equip the next generation of ministers to serve the church well. I learned something about God’s love through sharing in my husband’s suffering that I could never have learned through research, workshops, presentations, and the like (though I value those activities highly). It has deeply affected the way I think about my work as a teacher of ministers and what virtues and spiritual practices I hope our students will cultivate during their time in our program. There’s not really a natural place in this portfolio to reflect on the way life experiences like these affect the work I do for ACU. It may not be considered “professional” to do so. But for me, this has been holistically transformative, and it feels strange not to mention it.