When Valerie Bridgeman ’86, Ph.D., came to San Antonio in 1981, Trinity University was not her destination. She had already started her college career at Alabama State University, an HBCU in Montgomery, AL, the school from which her mother had graduated. Still, when her Air Force husband was transferred to San Antonio, Bridgeman came along with their year-old son, Darius, leaving behind Alabama State. She gave birth to another son, Deon, the following year.
In 1984, feeling the tug to complete her degree, Bridgeman transferred her credits to Trinity and continued her coursework there, at times with her sons in tow—literally. She jokes that her children went to college at Trinity before they went to kindergarten.
Bridgeman herself was determined from a young age to be a journalist and a Pulitzer-prize winning author. To do so, she intended to get her degree in communication and sociology. As the first editor of the Trinity News Service, launched by communication professors Marian Pfrommer and Nicholas George, she and other students went out into the community, wrote news stories, and sent them to local neighborhood newspapers. The work gave Bridgeman and her fellow students a chance to develop an eye for what a news story was and how it might be crafted.
But shortly after her arrival at Trinity, Bridgeman’s plans for her future took an unexpected turn. Bridgeman claims that she soon began majoring in Trinity religion professors McKenzie Brown and Paula Cooey-Nichols. Bridgeman appreciated not just these professors’ guidance through subjects that fascinated her, but also being exposed to the diversity and breadth of questions that other students were asking in their religion classes. By her senior year, she needed only one more class to pick up the religion major, and she graduated in 1986 with a Bachelor of Arts in communication and religion. Following graduation, synchronicity and doors that unpredictably, surprisingly opened along the way have made for an interesting journey.
Bridgeman went on to Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary where she received a Master of Divinity in 1990. Next Bridgeman moved on to Baylor University, where she received a Ph.D. in biblical studies with a concentration in Hebrew Bible in 2002. Now, Bridgeman serves as dean and vice president of academic affairs and associate professor of homiletics and Hebrew Bible at Methodist Theological School of Ohio, near Columbus. The length of her title speaks to the complexity and expansiveness of her giftedness, talents, and intellectual pursuits.
Bridgeman also finds great joy these days in her role as founder and president of WomanPreach!, an NGO that has sought to bring “preachers into full prophetic voice around issues of equity and justice, in the pulpit and in the public arena” since 2009. Bridgeman describes herself as the ringleader, the curator of this WomanPreach! space, where primarily (but not only) women attending the organization’s events experience the transformation—the new perception of themselves and their context—that is needed to achieve WomanPreach!’s goal of developing prophetic voices. In part because of this work, Bridgeman was awarded and recognized in 2018 as Distinguished Alumna of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
Bridgeman is indeed an administrator, a prophetic teacher, a preacher, and a writer. But she is also a womanist biblical scholar, an activist, an architect and curator of spaces, and a poet. Bridgeman has even been a church planter, a chaplain, and a performer of slam poetry (with one of her sons as he got older and with Harold McMillan’s LowStar word/jazz ensemble in Austin).
Bridgeman is a friend, a daughter, a sister, a mother, a godmother, a grandmother, a mentor, and a nature-lover—more sources of joy. She is well-connected to family, friends, and the earth. As the daughter of a teacher (mother) and preacher (father) and granddaughter of a “root worker,” Bridgeman grew up in an ecumenical home—nurtured in an environment of “lush love”—in rural Alabama, on a farm. In childhood, she grew up in a family that valued curiosity, learning, open-mindedness, and asking questions. Her environment was conservative, but not constricted, she says. Bridgeman’s grandmother, who knew by long tradition the healing and protective properties of the flora in the area, inspired a poem that Bridgeman wrote and that she recites here.
Dr. Bridgeman’s vision of leadership and what it entails—what it looks like—inspires both hope and trust: “Ultimately, no matter what I’m doing, whether it’s as a chaplain, as a pastor, as a professor, as an NGO leader, or as a dean, I’m really trying to help people make the right kinds of connections, and then get out of the way and let the alchemy of those connections do the work they’re supposed to do.”
The common thread through all her roles and intersectional identities is that she is a connector. The task and character of being a connector are important in academia, where the tradition of silos and specializations has dominated for decades and remains a strong influence in many settings. As scholars’ identities and specializations create compartmentalizations that can limit their vision and perceptions, Bridgeman describes her role as dean as just helping people to think through how their work is connected. She is “trying to help a community, trying to help shape a curriculum, trying to help professors get out of their silos and be in conversation with each other and with the world.”
Movements toward and growth in interdisciplinarity during the past decade or so do help to bridge the divides and enrich the conversations. Still, which voices are allowed to participate in these conversations matters to Bridgeman as well. As dean, she has sought to “make space for it [connection and conversation], to create the atmosphere for it, and to try to build an institution that is people-focused and people-centered—and by ‘people’ here, I mean the least among us, the most vulnerable, the person whose voice we have chosen not to hear, or we have drowned out, or we have not considered.” Her roles of connector and space curator clearly are crucial beyond academia, in public spaces where divisiveness dominates and the voices of the most vulnerable need to be heard.
One of her brothers once told Bridgeman that she is rightly named: she is indeed a Bridge(wo)man. Maybe that’s why the consistent thread through all her work is bridge-builder, connector. Yes, she is dean, poet, mother, professor, preacher, founder, president, and activist. She also is gifted, skilled, intelligent, poetic, and caring; she is a collector and connector of relationships and people. And in her very being and doing, she weaves all these threads together. Bridgeman leads not just because she is in leadership roles—which she is—but because all of her multiple, intersectional roles and gifts come together in compelling ways to influence and make a difference in the space where she is, in many different contexts.
Although “several” people have told her that her work had been important to them, Bridgeman says, “I personally don’t feel like I have enough work out there to be lauded, to be hailed and feted.” Nevertheless, humility and cultural and professional messaging aside, Bridgeman’s wisdom is worth celebrating and sharing.
For example, “Activism needs a broader understanding,” Bridgeman says, “because activism happens in big and small ways.” She offers the example of her mother, who used to help people in her community who couldn’t read to do their taxes. This, too, is the work of a community activist.
Another example: Bridgeman finds wisdom and joy in connecting with the natural world. “I walk every day, for my health, but really to clear my brain, to pray, to think through, to let things go, to breathe out,” Bridgeman says. Although she didn’t intend to live on a farm again when she left Alabama, her current workplace, the Methodist Theological School of Ohio, has 80 acres, 10 of which are a working farm.
A third example of Bridgeman's wisdom is especially pertinent for those whose Trinity graduation was several decades ago. It speaks to how taking on new challenges as we age can bring fresh purpose and meaning. While doing a half-marathon in Canton, OH, Bridgeman “ran into a woman in her seventies who started running when she was 67 because she had beat breast cancer.” Bridgeman decided to follow in this woman’s footsteps, and in a few more years, she also will have completed a half-marathon in all 50 states. “I thought: ‘that’s a great bucket list challenge!’”
What does Bridgeman wish to say to the whole host of Trinity alumni about creating a society where all life can flourish?
“I just think it’s our work,” Bridgeman says. “So find the partners in your community where you can do that work together. There’s an African proverb that says ‘if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.’ It’s not solitary work, changing the world; it’s not solitary work to make a difference. People are moved by communities of joy … I see people who are trying to change the world in ways that are death-dealing. But I mean for Trinity grads to be changing the world so that, to quote a Hebrew Bible prophet, 'everyone can sit under their own vine and fig tree, and none be afraid.' To build the kind of world where everybody is safe in it, where water is available and clean for everybody.”