Teaching Fellow in Church History, North Park Theological Seminary
Resurrection Covenant Church, Chicago, IL
Hauna loves introducing Christians to their past. She finds studying Christian history endlessly challenging and illuminating. In her teaching she seeks to construct a learning experience where students can encounter both the familiarity and strangeness of the Christian past and so be encouraged, challenged, and expanded. “I enjoy challenging students to think critically about how historical narratives are told and to be cautious of those that present an easy division between ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys,’ as though we are morally superior to past Christians,” she says.
She adds, “Particularly in cases that strike us as repugnant (the Crusades, the violent aftermath of the Reformation, Christian defenses of slavery, etc.) we have an opportunity to engage the historical ‘other’ with justice and charity—essential virtues for Christian life and leadership. Recognizing the complexity and contingency of the past invites us to consider our own blind spots—which future Christians will no doubt regard with horror. This rightly convicts and challenges us.”
Hauna edits The Covenant Quarterly and is in the process of transitioning the journal from print to an online, open access publication. Her hope is that this new medium will increase the journal’s capacity as a resource for pastors and laity—as well as serve as a locus of dialogue in the church.
In November she passed her dissertation defense, so she will graduate from her doctoral program at the University of St. Andrews in June.
Our challenge in the Covenant, she says, is to tell the whole Covenant story as “our story,” with every Covenanter as the antecedent of “our.” “It is particularly critical that we preserve narratives from the past sixty years of the Covenant so this vital piece of our history is not lost,” she says. “In seeking to preserve and interpret this past, it will not always be congenial to our present purposes. But it is precisely in the honest telling of our past that we will be better equipped to live into our future.”
Books on your nightstand/e-reader: Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux; The Heartbreaker, Susan Howatch; The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, Bill Bryson
Favorite way to waste time: Playing TwoDots
Favorite TV show: I don’t have a TV.
Choose a superpower—fly or be invisible: None of the above; I would always choose teleporting, hands down.