Date: March 9, 2022
Last Friday afternoon I was pleased to join Dr. Katherine Grieb in greeting the Rev. Herman Browne, Ph.D., welcoming him to campus for a well-deserved 3-week sabbatical hosted by the Center for Anglican Communion Studies. Dr. Browne is from the Episcopal Diocese of Liberia and currently serves as vicar of St. Timothy Episcopal Church in Montserrado. He will be presenting a talk on “The Anglican Church in Liberia” this evening at 7 p.m. in LPER (sign up here).
Dr. Browne has an impressive resume: From 2017 – 2021 he was the President of Cuttington University, the oldest private, coeducational, four-year degree-granting institution in sub-Saharan Africa. Prior to that, he served in leadership positions with the Liberia Petroleum Refining Company, Trinity Cathedral, Monrovia and African Methodist Episcopal University. In the early 2000s, he was the Senior Advisor on Anglican Communion Affairs to the Archbishop of Canterbury. He earned his doctorate in Systematic Theology from London University.
VTS and Liberia have long, deep, and complicated connections. The first official missionaries to Liberia were from VTS: the Rev. Dr. Thomas Savage in 1836 and the Rev. John Payne and the Rev. Launcelot B. Minor in 1837. Payne, of course, became the first Missionary Bishop of Liberia in 1851. Connections continue to the present day: Dr. Browne is a contributor to a forthcoming book stemming from a recent CACS project, Building Dialogue: Stories, Scripture and Liturgy in Peacebuilding (R. Heaney, J. Yieh and J. Cotting, Church Publishing). We will be welcoming a new student from Liberia in the fall.
I hope you will take the time to learn from this distinguished guest and to keep these important connections with the Episcopal Church in Liberia going.
This is another of those special opportunities where CACS helps bring the Communion closer. Don’t miss out.
The Very Rev. Ian S. Markham, Ph.D.
Dean and President