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Alumni Profiles Series: Stephen Sapp
Stephen Sapp is a “triple Duke” alumnus, having earned his A.B. (1968), M.Div. (1971), and Ph.D. (1975) in religion. After spending so much time at Duke, he worked in Christian education and pastoral care for a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) congregation before joining the University of Miami (UM), where he eventually became chair of the Religion Department; he is now professor emeritus. During his career, he also served as general editor of the Journal of Religion, Spirituality and Aging, chair of the Bioethics Committee at Miami Children’s Hospital, and chair of one of UM’s Institutional Review Boards. He has served Duke as a member of the Board of Visitors for both the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School. Stephen has had a long and full career, mentoring students and others in both secular and faith-based contexts on how to grapple with questions of aging, death, ecology, and human sexuality.
What professional plans did you have in mind as you were completing your graduate degree?
I had decided in my junior year in college that I wanted to be a college professor so I took almost all “academic” courses at Duke Divinity School, studiously avoiding anything that related to the parish, because I was going to get a Ph.D. and be a college professor. Everything unfurled right according to schedule—until it came time to get a job. I didn’t get the faculty job I was counting on, but I did get an offer from a big Presbyterian church in Naples, Florida, and I reluctantly took the job (I had promised my wife she would never be a pastor’s wife!).
I could not have asked for a better mentor than the senior pastor, but the most important aspect of my time in Naples, where I went against my will, was that it not only allowed us to meet life-long friends but also gave me the chance to be the main hospital visitor for our church. We had a lot of people in the hospital and a lot of deaths, and when I got to the University of Miami my signature course became Religious Issues in Death and Dying. Students in that class became a “family” because of the subject matter, and for years afterward, I would get emails from students who had become doctors saying that, other than their science classes, the death and dying class was the most useful course they took. What I now realize is that if I had gotten my way and gone into a faculty position straight out of grad school, I would have been teaching from books, but because of the time in the church, I had had the experience to know whereof I spoke when I taught.
How do you understand the twists and turns in your career?
The image that I often use is that life is like a tapestry. Although there’s a beautiful picture on the front, we are living on the backside, and if you’ve ever looked at the back of a tapestry, there’s a thread going here, a knot there; although you can tell there’s some kind of picture on the other side, you can’t figure out what it is. Similarly, in life, there are all these loose threads and knots, and we don’t know why threads go every which way—but it’s the other side that God sees, and I hope to see it as well someday. I would say, then, that overall my life has worked out great for me, even better than if I had been in charge.
What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received? What's the worst?
The best advice I ever had was not oral advice. It was exemplary advice, like the story of St. Francis. One day Francis and a friar went into town to preach, where they did many acts of compassion. When Francis said, “It’s time to go back,” the friar protested, “But Father, we haven’t preached yet.” Francis replied, “We have been preaching as we were walking.” That was the faculty I had. They gave me the best career advice just by being who they were, and the lesson they taught me was that if you are going to be a college professor, you must care about your students.
It's the relationships that matter. I told my undergraduate mentor at one point, “If I can have the impact on one student that you had on me, I will consider my career a success.” So that was the advice they gave me, to be the kind of person they were.
The worst advice was when a faculty member told me (upon hearing I had reached the dissertation phase), “I assume you told [your wife] goodbye.” I said, “What are you talking about?” He replied, “You won’t be seeing her for the next couple of years because you’ll be living in the library.” I did not take that advice! Instead, I tried to keep my priorities in order.
AUTHOR
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Briana Grenert
Ph.D. candidate, Religion
Briana Grenert is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate Program in Religion. She is writing on the reception of Jezebel in the rhetoric of slander in late ancient Christianity and Judaism. When not in the library, she works as a spiritual director and keeps the blog A Traveling Theology.