What a Chaplain Looks Like

Eliza is an ordained minister of Word and Sacrament in the Presbyterian Church (USA), serving in a validated ministry as the University Chaplain, Director of Community Engagement, and Lecturer of Religious Studies at Converse University in Spartanburg, SC. Her background in a clinical chaplaincy residency informs her ability to offer spiritual care to individuals from a wide array of traditions, and interfaith education lies at the heart of her work as she seeks to bolster cultural and religious competency among students, faculty, and staff in her context. In her role, she walks alongside students as they wrestle with matters of vocational discernment, religious trauma, belonging, and faith formation.

She oversees all religious life organizations on campus as well as all university efforts connected to community engagement and service initiatives.

In 2023, Eliza co-founded her university’s Basic Needs Hub (Valkyrie Supply), which ignited a passion in her for food insecurity alleviation within the university setting. This initiative involves 19 community partnerships, as well as several corporate and local grant sponsorships, to remain active and sustainable. She oversees student workers and staff for this program and participates in educational opportunities across the state of South Carolina. Her work with Valkyrie Supply has informed her doctoral research, as she seeks to understand how effective food insecurity alleviation programs are functioning at liberal arts colleges in hopes of creating a set of “best practices” for other schools seeking to reduce hunger in their contexts.

In addition to these efforts, she also creates and teaches religion courses for undergraduate students, always striving toward a pedagogy that encourages a posture of curiosity about those from other traditions and value systems. She works to integrate theory with practice in the classroom, incorporating site visits and interviews into her coursework. The Higher Education classes she has completed as part of her doctoral program have provided her with competency in student development theory and conflict negotiation, which inform the ways she teaches and leads.