new church life: jan uary/february 2016
She moved back to Maryland, and Dave and Sherri decided to get married
and did so in 1988; and Sherri immediately started work on her Ph.D. at Johns
Hopkins, finishing in 1993.
In 1995 she and Dave moved to Durham, North Carolina, where she took
a position as an assistant professor at the Duke University Wetland Center.
Tragically, that very same year her mother Shirley passed away suddenly.
During this time Sherri had visits from professors at Bryn Athyn College
(a Swedenborgian college in Bryn Athyn, PA) in hopes that she would join
their science division. Now, she had a long history at Duke and was a devoted
fan of the Duke Blue Devils, and Duke is a large, well-established and respected
research center, while Bryn Athyn College is small and less well known. But
she knew that at Bryn Athyn College she and her colleagues could dive fully
into issues of both science and faith, and how the two inform each other.
If we again picture a wedge of land meeting a wedge of sea, but this time
the wedge of land stands for religion as a whole, and the wedge of sea stands
for science, then Bryn Athyn College is right at the point where they meet. It
is a center, a spiritual estuary, and somewhere she could pursue a broad range
of interests.
Dave and Sherri were in the process of adopting their first daughter, Zia,
from China when they decided to move to Bryn Athyn.
Ralph, Sherri’s father, had by then married Sallie, a member of Shirley’s
extended family who herself had a lifelong connection to Core Point. Ralph
and Sallie were very gracious to Dave and Sherri, renting Dave and Sherri’s
home so they could move but keep a fixed mailing address for the adoption
paperwork, and even selling the house for them.
In 2002 Dave and Sherri adopted another daughter from China, Anji.
Sherri’s professional duties were demanding and she had to do a lot of traveling
to attend all those conferences and give all those papers; yet she loved to spend
time helping Zia and Anji with their homework, and took long walks with
family and friends by the Pennypack, the ancient creek that meanders through
this part of the Delaware Valley.
On every part of her journey on this planet Sherri made lifelong friends.
For just one example, the cellist t his afternoon, Tom Rosenberg, is someone
she met in second grade and they have been devoted friends ever since. Many
of you here today have known her for decades. She also somehow found time
to go on holidays and vacations several times a year with members of her own
extended family of origin and members of her husband’s family. She made it
work.
This balance was not easy for her to achieve. Sometimes the stress and
exhaustion of being pulled in umpteen directions would be momentarily too
much and she couldn’t see how she could go on. But then she would think
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