Worship in Wait Overview

October 5, 2008 (Sunday)
Peter Gomes

Past Programs
Apr. 15, 2008: Charles Adams
Apr. 6, 2008: Will Willimon
Feb. 24, 2008: Don Saliers
Dec. 2, 2007: Lovefeast
Nov. 27, 2007: Psallam
Oct. 28, 2007: Tony Campolo
Sept. 18, 2007: Teresa Fry Brown
Sept. 11, 2007: Veronice Miles
Apr. 24, 2007: Molly Marshall
Mar. 25, 2007: Martin Marty
Feb. 9, 2007: George Carey
Jan. 28, 2007: Nathan Hatch
Dec. 3, 2006: Lovefeast
Nov. 28, 2006: Advent Service
Oct. 24, 2006: Brian McLaren
Oct. 8, 2006: James Forbes
Sept. 5, 2006: Fred Craddock

Sunday, January 28, 2007
7:00 PM - Wait Chapel
President Nathan O. Hatch

Dr. Nathan Hatch's The Democratization of American Christianity earned its author the Albert Outler Prize for Ecumenical Church History and the John Hope Franklin Prize for the best book in American studies. A Brown University professor called it "the best book on religion in the early republic that has ever been written," and in a survey of 2000 historians and sociologists, it was listed as one of the two most important books in the study of American religious history.

President Hatch has also been something of an expert in navigating modern ecumenism, if for no other reason than because he has lived it: the son of a Presbyterian minister, he was reared in Columbia, South Carolina, before moving up north to be educated at evangelical Wheaton College. He earned master's and doctoral degrees at Washington University in St. Louis and did postdoctoral work Harvard and the Johns Hopkins Universities before settling in as a faculty member at the country's iconic Catholic university: Notre Dame. He rose through the ranks there to become an endowed professor of history and the first Protestant Provost, from which position he led the university's academic and administrative life. Upon his departure from Notre Dame, the university recognized his contributions with an honorary doctorate: an extremely rare gesture for a departing administrator. Since becoming the thirteenth president of Wake Forest University, President Hatch has continued his own tradition of bringing people together through fellowship and considered study. Whether presiding over game night with undergraduates in the garage he and his wife Julie converted in the President's residence or sitting at a conference table discussing the new strategic planning effort with representatives from across the university's constituencies, he is warm, engaging, and brilliantly challenging.