Homecoming - LSTC

Join us online Tuesday, April 28 through Wednesday, April 29, 2026, for LSTC’s Homecoming Celebration. Together, we will engage in meaningful learning opportunities, reconnect through class reunions, and honor our distinguished alumni.

Registration

Event Schedule

Tuesday, April 28, 2026

9:00 am – 9:15 am

Welcome & Opening Devotion

Host: Alumni Board

9:15 am – 10:15 am

Otherwise Together: Black-Arab Relations, Faith and the Possibility of Shared Futures (1 CEU)

Presenter: Taurean J. Webb, Ph.D.

This lecture explores the relationship between African American and Arab communities as a site of both friction and possibility, tracing how histories of race, faith, and political struggle have shaped their encounters. While these relationships are often narrated through moments of tension, this talk asks what it might mean to take solidarity seriously—not as an abstract ideal, but as a form of work: something cultivated through attention, encounter, and sustained engagement across differences.

Drawing on Black religious thought and contemporary conversations in Christian–Muslim engagement, the lecture considers how communities shaped by distinct histories might nonetheless come to recognize shared conditions of vulnerability, displacement, and hope. What forms of theological and cultural imagination make such recognition possible? In reflecting on these questions, the talk gestures toward a broader vision of interreligious and intercultural engagement—one attentive to difference, yet oriented toward the possibility of being otherwise together.

10:30 am – 11:30 am

Harmony & Harassment: Faith and Communal Memory (1 CEU)

Presenter: Dr. Aja Y. Martinez & Dr. Robert O. Smith

Martinez and Smith will share results of their research into the Civil Rights foundations of critical race theory (CRT), introducing us to the people of Harmony, Mississippi, and the many leaders they inspired. From Freedom Summer 1964 to today, faith stands at the center of community memory.

12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Homecoming Class Reunions: Class of 1976, 1986, 2001, 2016

2:00 pm – 3:00 pm

Authentic Diversity and Critical Race Religions (1 CEU)

Presenter: Dr. Robert O. Smith

LSTC is actively discerning how it can live into its commitment to what the ELCA has called “authentic diversity.” Dean Smith will introduce how Critical Race Religious Literacy (CRRL) can help Christian leaders in the US accurately interpret the “signs of the times,” challenge white Christian nationalism, and more fully promote the flourishing of all human communities.

4:00 pm – 5:30 pm

Distinguished Alumni Awards

Host: Alumni Board

Awardees:

Rev. Jen Rosenbohm Beamsley – Faithful Servant Award
Rev. Lynn Bird – Excellence in Parish Ministry
Rev. Dr. Ralen Robinson – Emerging Voice Award
Rev. Roger Willer – Called to Lead Award

Wednesday, April 29, 2026

9:00 am – 10:00 am

My Friends Martin & Gloria: A Latina Lutheran Perspective (1 CEU)

Presenter: Dr. Elyssa Salinas-Lazarski

Throughout her life, Dr. Salinas-Lazarski has found inspiration in the two women she was named after, her grandmothers Elisa and Joanne, who never met except in her. These women’s stories have colored her life, but having their names and being their legacy has been complicated, as she has often felt out of place and disjointed in both U.S. Latina circles and white Lutheran ones. Using the work of Martin Luther and Gloria Anzaldúa, Dr. Salinas-Lazarski finds her way to authentic diversity as a Lutheran Latina and will share the wisdom shared along her journey. 

10:15 am – 11:00 am

Q&A with President Hannan & Vice Presidents

Moderator: President Shauna Hannan

12:00 pm

Closing Worship

Guest Speakers

Taurean J. Webb, Ph.D.

Taurean J. Webb, Ph.D. is the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies in the Department of African and Black Diaspora Studies at DePaul University. A scholar of race and religion, Webb’s research and writing focus on Africana religious history, Black Theology, Black internationalism, Black Renaissance-era visual arts, Black speculative film culture, Afro-Arab transnationalism, legal theory, and visual arts within global social movements. His scholarship appears in Black Perspectives, Contending Modernities, and the Journal of Middle Eastern Politics & Policy. Currently, Webb is an Arts Fellow at the Crossroads Project in Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society, and Religion, where he is completing a documentary film on visual artists from the African and Arab Diasporas. Currently, Webb is also completing his first book manuscript—a genealogy of twentieth century Black US Christian engagement and disengagement with the Muslim World. He is the immediate past director of the historic Center for the Church and the Black Experience (CBE) at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary.

Dr. Aja Y. Martinez

Aja Y. Martinez (she/her) is an associate professor of Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and author of the multi-award-winning book Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory (now in its second edition). Together, with Robert O. Smith, Martinez is co-author of The Origins of Critical Race Theory: The People and Ideas That Created a Movement (NYU Press, 2025) and Harmony and Harassment: A New Critical Race Theory Story (University of California Press, 2026)

Dr. Robert O. Smith

Rev. Robert O. Smith, PhD (he/him/his), serves LSTC as Dean and Vice President of Academic Affairs. Dean Smith is an enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an ordained Minister of Word & Sacrament in the ELCA.

A broadly experienced minister, theologian, and administrator, Smith is an interdisciplinary scholar who deploys the methodological lenses of critical race theory, decolonial theory, and political theology to better understand the historical sources of contemporary political dynamics. His pathbreaking work on the political ideology of Christian Zionism exemplifies this approach: Smith is the author of More Desired than Our Owne Salvation: The Roots of Christian Zionism (Oxford, 2013) and editor, with Göran Gunner, of Comprehending Christian Zionism: Perspectives in Comparison (Fortress, 2014).

More recently, Dean Smith has co-researched and -written three books on the history of critical race theory (CRT) with Aja Y. Martinez, a professor of Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Drawing on archival, ethnographic, historical, and theological analysis, these books reframe CRT’s origins in legal studies while positioning the movement as a vital tool for analyzing and confronting contemporary theological and social developments.

Dean Smith graduated from Luther Seminary with the MDiv and an MA is Islamic Studies. He earned his PhD in Religion, Politics & Society at Baylor University. He has served in many ministerial contexts, including campus ministry, ELCA Global Mission, and as an Associate to the Bishop of the Northern Texas–Northern Louisiana Synod. Previously, he served as a history professor at the University of North Texas and as founding director of the University of Notre Dame’s Jerusalem Global Gateway.

Dr. Elyssa Salinas-Lazarski

Dr. Elyssa Salinas-Lazarski, Ph.D., MDiv., is Adjunct Faculty in Theology and Honors at Dominican University. She is a recent doctoral graduate of Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. Her research focuses on theology of the body and sex, integrating her Lutheran faith, and her experience as a Mexican-American woman. Salinas-Lazarski is a graduate of Valparaiso University, where she studied theatre, and holds a Master of Divinity from the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. Alongside her studies, she is a poet and hobby baker. She lives in the Chicago area with her husband, two children, and two cats.

Registration

Event Schedule

Tuesday, April 28, 2026

Welcome & Opening DevotionHost: Alumni Board

Otherwise Together: Black-Arab Relations, Faith and the Possibility of Shared Futures (1 CEU)Presenter: Taurean J. Webb, Ph.D.

Harmony & Harassment: Faith and Communal Memory (1 CEU)Presenter: Dr. Aja Y. Martinez & Dr. Robert O. Smith