In her new role as director of religious and spiritual life, Viki Brooks is confident that the recently elevated program she leads can play an important role in advancing important goals of the College’s Strategic Plan.
“When we talk about diversity, it’s often in terms of things like ethnicity or culture,” she said. “But just as important to the student experience here at Union is a rich religious and spiritual diversity.”
College is a time, Brooks noted, when many students question their religious or spiritual upbringing. It may also be “when they explore practices and beliefs from traditions other than their own,” she said. “The Office of Religious and Spiritual Life can be important to students who are searching for a spiritual identity. This work is also important to the Union community in promoting awareness of the religious pluralism that marks our post-modern world.”
Spirituality may be defined, Brooks says, as the search for authenticity, purpose and meaning, which “fits very well with what we try to do as an institution of higher education.”
President Stephen C. Ainlay, speaking last fall to the Capital Region Theological Center, said, “To succeed as global citizens, students must develop a breadth and depth of knowledge about religions – their beliefs, traditions, rituals and worldviews – other than their own.”
Brooks continues in her role as campus Protestant minister, and works with students of other faiths to help them organize and find spiritual leadership. She recently earned her doctor of ministry from Hartford Seminary after completing a study on the contributions of Interfaith Ministry at Union College.
Joining her in the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life are Bonnie Cramer, Jewish chaplain, and Tom Gutch, Roman Catholic chaplain.
Cramer, advisor to Hillel for the past nine years, succeeds Margo Strosberg, who has retired. A member of Congregation Agudat Achim in Niskayuna for 23 years, she has spent most of her adult life serving the Jewish community and brings a strong background in programming for young people, the arts and Jewish mysticism to her new role.
Under Cramer’s guidance, Union College Hillel was recently invited to participate in “Small and Mighty Campuses of Excellence II,” a pilot program aimed at enhancing Jewish life at small colleges. (For more, click here.)
Gutch, a deacon in the Ukrainian Catholic Church, succeeds Tom Boland, who stepped down in June. A native of Clifton Park, Gutch graduated from Shenendehoah High School and earned a bachelor’s degree from St. John Fisher College. He is affiliated with St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Church in Waterford.