Advent invites us to dwell in the tension between promise and fulfillment, waiting and arrival. In this session of Adult Education, we’ll read and discuss poems that echo the spiritual practice of waiting — from poets who find holiness in uncertainty, patience, and hope. Through shared reflection and conversation, together we will look at how poetry can shape our Advent imagination and open us to God’s quiet presence in the meantime.
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Thais Carter is the Director for Strategic Initiatives at Princeton Theological Seminary and Associate Director of Iron Sharpening Iron, an executive leadership program serving women across the US and Canada. She serves on the Adult Education Committee for Nassau Presbyterian Church; is the current board president for the Westminster Foundation, the nonprofit that supports Princeton Presbyterians; and is a board member for LitWorld, a nonprofit focused on literacy and social-emotional learning initiatives for children and women. Her love of poetry emerged from her training with the Civic Reflection Initiative and the ways this form of expression enabled meaningful discourse across difference.
Virginia Kerr is a Princeton attorney, a member of Nassau’s Adult Education Committee, and a member of the Steering Committee of Nassau’s Mass Incarceration Task Force. She has loved poetry from a very early age and still has fond memories of her sixth grade teacher’s reading of Millay’s The Ballad of the Harp Weaver. As a volunteer for Nassau’s ABC Prison Literacy, she taught poetry classes at New Jersey State Prison and the Mercer County Correctional Facility. In recent years, she has included poetry in story sessions she facilitated at FCI Fairton for the non-profit People & Stories, Gente y Cuentos. She has a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College, with a minor in English Literature, an M.A. in the Teaching of English from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania School of Law.
