Soldier of Faith

THE COMMON ROOM OF HARTFORD'S IMMANUEL CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, UNITED CHURCH OF CHRIST IS STIFLING. Waves of humid, 90-degree June heat float through mammoth, wide-open windows, wilting the scores of robed men and women assembled for Hartford Seminary's 2007 graduation.

"It's too hot to wear a tie," Jack Keenan complains as his white shirt darkens with moisture. But he dutifully Windsor-knots a pale blue number and stands before his wife for inspection.

"Ah, it's too short here," Shareda says, tugging the bottom of the tie and giggling. Jack unties and re-knots.

"It's great that she's actually completin'," says Jack, the tall Irish American who became Shareda's second husband in 1993 after converting to Islam.

"At least you won't hear me saying: 'I have to write the paper! I have to write the paper!'" says Shareda, who did her master's thesis on Muslims in the U.S. armed forces from Revolutionary times through the Civil War.

"Oh, the paper! The paper! The famous paper!" Jack teases, rolling his eyes in mock horror. "That was a big day when she completed that!"

Amid the room's happy chatter, the graduates are ordered to fall into line for the procession. They are white, black, Asian, Hispanic, Protestant, Catholic, Muslim.

This religious and ethnic diversity would astonish the Calvinist dissidents who broke with their Yale College brethren to found Hartford Seminary in 1834. Less than a century later, the school was in the forefront of Christendom's grand project so aptly described by one of the era's most prominent missionaries, Samuel M. Zwemer: "We hope to point out . . . the true solution to the Moslem problem, namely the evangelization of Moslems and to awaken sympathy, love and prayer on behalf of the Moslem world until its bonds are burst, its wounds are healed, its sorrows removed and its desires satisfied in Jesus Christ."

But Hartford was also deeply influenced by Duncan Black Macdonald, a Scotsman who taught Arabic and Islam at the school around the turn of the 20th century. A towering figure in Islamic scholarship, Macdonald insisted that students could successfully evangelize only if they first learned the language and theological heritage of Islam. "I discovered," he wrote, "that you could smuggle Muslim studies into a theological seminary under the guise of training missionaries."

Progressive for its time, Macdonald's approach was controversial. But it eventually infused Hartford's missionary education. Mac-donald's more tolerant attitude toward non-Christian faiths also contributed to a major transformation at Hartford decades later. "The missionaries that we sent," says Hartford President Heidi Hadsell, were "coming home saying [Muslims] already believe in God. What we need is dialogue between Muslims and Christians."

In 1973, 30 years after Macdonald's death, Hartford created the Duncan Black Macdonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations. Its mission is to nurture Christian-Muslim understanding. Today, Muslims make up 35 percent of Hartford's student body.

In 1998, the center hired Ingrid Mattson, a Canadian-born convert to Islam with a doctorate in Islamic studies from the University of Chicago, to direct the chaplaincy program. Mattson was among the first to see chaplaincy as an avenue for young Muslims to exercise greater leadership in their own communities and in America's multi-faith institutions. It is particularly attractive for Muslim women because it entails far more than officiating at worship services. Chaplains also provide spiritual counseling, pastoral care and grief consolation.