For years, Dr. Pamela Mitchell-Legg, Sarah Belk Gambrell Professor Christian Education at Union Presbyterian Seminary, has loved books for children and young adults.  That love, and Dr. Mitchell-Legg’s inimitable teaching gifts, combined in 2009 in a course on our Charlotte campus called Using Children’s and Adolescents’ Literature in the Church. The capable and energetic students in the class caught a glimpse of the connections that Dr. Mitchell-Legg was making with the stories of children’s literature and the stories of our faith.  In that course – and subsequent ones – students learned to evaluate the literature of children and adolescents in new ways and to make their own faith connections.  Even as she designed this new course, Dr. Mitchell-Legg was thinking of ways to share her work and the work of her students with a broader audience.  The vision of Storypath is hers.  As one of the first professors at the Seminary to use digital media to share coursework, she partnered with the Union Presbyterian Seminary Library staff to create a digital space for book reviews, literature circle ideas, and curriculum all based on children’s and youth adult literature.   From the design of the review form that helps readers see the way that children’s literature speaks – through illustrations, through context, through characters and plot, through attention to diversity – to her modeling the way that good literature may connect to the larger story of God’s love for God’s world and God’s people and her insistence that her students’ work be shared with others, Dr. Mitchell-Legg leaves a rich legacy to the church that is present and will continue in Storypath.  This site wouldn’t exist without her creativity and vision.

On Saturday, June 17, Dr. Mitchell-Legg retires.  We want to take this opportunity to thank her for the vision of Storypath and for teaching so many students who have become writers on this blog for both reviews and for Lectionary Links.  We are hoping that in her retirement, she may now have time to contribute her own reviews to Storypath!

So congratulations on a well-earned retirement and thank you for all you have done to make Storypath a reality and resource for the church!

With Gratitude by Storypath is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.