Sorrel Virginia Hester never expected that they would become a college chaplain. They definitely did not anticipate that, as the assistant chaplain of Christian life at Macalester College, they would lead a group with one of the more intriguing names a reader of the Mac Daily could see in their inbox last semester — “Muse and Munch.”
What started as a text study over the lunch period during Lent, a religious pre-Easter period, in the spring semester of 2024 became a space for all of the Macalester community to discuss concepts relating to collective liberation and “what Christian traditions teach us about it,” as stated on Macalester’s website.
As a child, Hester spent much of their time reading the Bible and trying to understand it on their own terms. They grew up in a Catholic family but did not always align themselves with their community’s interpretations of the scriptures. Looking back, they expressed that their childhood negatively impacted their perception of faith communities.
“I’ve always had this clarity that faith communities can be scary places where people are trying to exert power of control,” Hester said. “But I have always experienced [my personal] spirituality as … a realm of safety, growing up.”
As Hester grew older, they began to seek alternative communities both in person and online. There, they encountered people who had similar complex memories and experiences from their childhoods with the Christian faith.
“We affirmed this sense that the Christian scriptures aren’t inherently oppressive and that there are actually so many things that are encouraging or liberating even,” Hester said.
When they came to Macalester, Hester wanted to foster a similar community that would allow people coming from all backgrounds and experiences with Christianity to reconnect with their faith and make sense of it as individuals living away from their homes.
The idea of a text study that all of the Macalester community could come to once a week during their lunch break over the period of Lent came from Hester’s supervisor, the college chaplain Kelly Stone. Hester took over the idea and gave it the iconic name that we know today. For six weeks, a group of students, guided by Hester, embarked on a “Lenten journey,” where they read and discussed the “Four Loves,” Agape, Storge, Philia and Eros.
“A lot of our Christian community at Macalester is extremely diverse, and so [this] was a safe starting place for a lot of folks to just talk about love,” Hester said.
After Lent, there was an interest among students to keep meeting. Hester decided to use the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) alongside with other Christian perspectives to “explore how Christians have both enabled and resisted injustice and oppression in the world,” as stated on the college’s website. The RLC that Hester decided to use was taken from Vanderbilt University.
The university’s website defines the lectionary as “a three-year cycle of weekly lections used to varying degrees by the vast majority of mainline Protestant churches in Canada and the United States.” The group is open to people of all beliefs, but thus far, the majority of participants have been of Christian faith. Hester hopes that more people with different spiritual affiliations (or none at all) will join once Muse and Munch starts back up. They emphasized that Muse and Munch has been, and will continue to be, open to all.
“I think my intention is to make [Muse and Munch] open to anyone, even if [you are not] Christian or part of Christian life,” Hester said. “We live in a country where Christian hegemony, Christian supremacy [and] Christian dominance is real. There is a hope that this can be a space for people to feel empowered, think critically and be engaged in a heart-centered way. To experience Christianity differently.”
