Tiffany Steiwert will be installed today at Syracuse University.
Tiffany Steiwert will be installed today as new dean at Syracuse University's Hendricks Chapel.Syracuse, NY -- The Rev. Tiffany Steinwert has a few things in common with the historical figures that put Central New York on the map as a hotbed of women’s rights.
She will be installed this afternoon as the first female dean in the 80-year-history of Hendricks Chapel at Syracuse University.
But her fight to protect those at the margins of society started long before she arrived on campus last March. She learned to root for the underdog while watching movies at her grandmother’s home in Cincinnati.
“When we were watching westerns, she would tell me about how the Native Americans were persecuted,” she said. “Watching ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame,’ we talked about how sad it was not to accept someone who was different.”
A commitment to social justice followed through her early years: collecting canned food for the homeless as a kindergartner, working with teen mothers in high school and volunteering in rural Nicaragua after college.
She found her religious vocation after college, when she found herself frustrated.
“No matter how hard I worked, hunger and homelessness still existed,” she said. “But faith provides the hope to continue in the face of a seemingly overwhelming world.”
After becoming ordained as a pastor, Steinwert founded Cambridge Welcoming Ministries, which reached out to the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community. Steinwert said her outreach had roots in the history of her Methodist denomination, which emphasized building hospitals and schools before building churches. Methodist founder John Wesley was known for handing out coats to the poor in the streets of London; he also ministered to a gay man in prison, she said.
“There is no holiness except social holiness,” she said, quoting Wesley.
But her convictions have not always been met with compassion. At the church’s general conference in 2000, Steinwert was arrested, along with 200 others, for protesting the Methodist Church’s position on homosexuality.
“The church was seeking out to just about every marginalized group except the LGBT community,” she said. “The church had to fix itself before it could fix the world.”
The struggle led her to find solace and new energy in the interfaith work she will undertake at Hendricks Chapel, which was founded in 1930.
In filling a role that is part pastor, scholar and community organizer, Steinwert said she hopes Hendricks Chapel will serve as an ambassador to connect students to the greater Syracuse community through service. The chapel also remains a safe space to discuss current events, such as the spate of suicides by LGBT youth. Steinwert said the chapel’s role will be even more important in the modern climate of “heightened religious tension,” when homophobia is often “cloaked in religious rhetoric.”
“The church can either oppress or liberate students,” she said. “It can save them from a life of bullying or empower the bullies even more.”
Her first months on campus have also included dialogue about other religious barriers and stereotypes.
On Sept. 11, the chapel supported students who sat on the campus quad quietly reflecting on the Quran, at a time when a Florida pastor was threatening to burn the holy book.
Earlier this month, Steinwert took part in a discussion on how to engage in interfaith dialogue with Daisy Khan, leader of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, a group whose plans to build a community center in downtown Manhattan dominated headlines for months.
And today’s installation will include a roundtable discussion with Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Pagan teachers.
“Hendricks Chapel is the keeper of the questions,” Steinwert said. “This is a place for moral and ethical engagement, the geographical and metaphorical heart of the campus. This space is sacred.”
--Contact Alaina Potrikus at 470-3252 or apotrikus@syracuse.com.