New Student Introduction

We're excited to introduce to you some of our new students that will be joining us for the 2012-13 school year. Today's featured student is Keiko Ogawa, who comes to us from Nagasaki and California.

Hello, my name is Keiko Ogawa, a new student of the Fall 2012, and as an international student from Japan.  I'll study for the Master of Arts in Religion degree.  Now, I'd like to write about my passion for ESR. 

At my first visit to the U.S., which was 2002, I had the luck that I met American Christians who invited me to the Christian life.  My understanding was that the experience of Christianity is reconciliation with God and the activation of the Holy Spirit. I was baptized at Santa Barbara, CA in 2003; however, long after the baptism I sensed I had become a Christian by starting to understand the Bible in 2005 during my returning to Japan.

I came to the U.S. again in 2007.  I came to know the word, Friends, through a webpage I happened to browse, then, Quakerism, which has a sincere attitude toward what the Bible conveys, has attracted me. 

In the spring 2012, when I felt uncertainty and stopped studying at a university after the two quarters there, the pastor of the Friends church I had been attending suggested the possibility of study at ESR. I'd wanted to study Christianity, but for a long time I didn't have the opportunity to consider it as a concrete

plan.

My major had been American English literature, and after I began to understand the Bible, I really enjoyed the literature; at the same time, my interest in Christianity swelled largely, especially in Quakerism.

I love to contemplate Hawthorne's short stories, and Barclay's Apology helped me to understand the Bible, and Woolman's meditation inspired me. I want to study the Bible from more various viewpoints that are objective and scientific. I'm looking forward to studying at ESR.