Melissa Matthes: Alum brings sense of mission to her teaching at service academy

Melissa Matthes ’09 M.Div. loves her students’ curiosity about religion and ethics, war and peace, leadership and human destiny—also their budding sense of mission and service. 

These aren’t seminarians at a divinity school but cadet undergraduates at a military service academy. Matthes teaches at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn. 

Having taught at YDS, she finds it is no big stretch to teach religious studies, ethics, and American social thought to future Coast Guard ensigns. In their own ways, seminarians and service academy cadets both believe crucially in something larger than themselves, she says. 

“I see similar personality traits, a similar discipline,” Matthes said in a recent interview. “The goals might be quite different, but in both places students bring what-is-the-purpose-of-my-life kinds of questions rather than how-am-I-going-to-make-a-lot-of-money questions.”

‘Their thinking isn’t ossified’

To Matthes, the stakes are high whatever the campus or classroom. By training and temperament she is a political philosopher keen to examine the broader public impact and consequences of values and ideas. She has been 15 years on the faculty at the Coast Guard Academy (CGA), exposing serious-minded young men and women, undergraduates all, to questions of personal ethics and public duty. 

“I think two things work well teaching undergrads,” she said. “They don’t know what they don’t know, and their thinking isn’t ossified. They’re 19, 20, 21 years old. They haven’t held strong views for decades. At first they might come into class and believe they know everything, and then they read a little and their classmates challenge them, and a different perspective opens up. They’re a great group to teach.”

Her own interests are deeply interdisciplinary: philosophy, theology, policy, ancient and modern history. She’s a full professor in the CGA’s Department of Government, where she recently served as department head. Her course topics can range from Aristotle and Augustine to contemporary political theories. 

Theologies of friendship

Matthes also serves on the YDS Alumni Board. The Divinity School recently published an essay she wrote in that role, titled “Theologies of Friendship.”

As Matthes writes in the piece, “Friendship, for Augustine, is never accidental or arbitrary; it is a sign of God’s redemptive presence in our lives, the personal and particular way God draws us into communion. Is there any better reason then to tend carefully to our friendships—to be intentional about sustaining and nurturing them? Our friendships are God’s movement toward us in love: they are at once signs of God’s presence and a summons toward a more expansive, universal love.”

And she is the author of a 2021 book that traces the shifting moral politics of sermons during crises in modern American civic life, When Sorrow Comes: The Power of Sermons from Pearl Harbor to Black Lives Matter, published by Harvard University Press. 

“These sermons are not just theological texts but civic liturgies,” she writes in the book. “They are ritual narratives, retelling religious and political stories in ways designed to reassure, renew, or realign their listeners. The sermons are theo-political gestures enacted during an unstable period. It matters what stories we tell ourselves about who we are, where we are from, and who and what are important during a crisis.”

Power and piety

Matthes grew up as a churchgoer in an Italian-Catholic household in Queens, N.Y. Her more-or-less settled religious views were suddenly rocked during her sophomore year at Williams College, when she did a stint at a domestic violence service center. There she saw how power and faith—abuses of authority fueled by distorted teachings of belief—could coexist or reinforce each other.

“I was stunned and overwhelmed and 19 years old,” she recalls. “I met women who’d say to me they weren’t going to leave their abuser because Jesus said turn the other cheek. That’s when some of my religious beliefs were challenged. I was ill-equipped to answer these situations. I didn’t know what to think about it. Is this really what my faith leads to? Is this what the role of women is supposed to be? And that started me thinking about politics and power and its relationship to my faith. I’d say that’s where these interests came together for me.”

In that spirit of inquiry, she did a Ph.D. at the University of California-Santa Cruz, studying political theory, feminist studies, cultural anthropology, and film studies in UC-Santa Cruz’s History of Consciousness program. Her experience there in the 1990s taught her the value of defying the entrenched academic trend of the siloing of professional scholarship and its arcane vocabularies. The program’s intention was to link Arts and Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences, in order to focus on problems and solutions, not strict disciplines. Neither students nor mentors shied away from aspiring to be public intellectuals who might articulate unifying themes in a nation increasingly fragmented.

“In the History of Consciousness program we tried to reconnect all these different elements,” she said. “It made no sense to us that economics, for instance, should be separate from political science.”

After 9/11

The next turn in her academic trajectory would begin the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. By now she was raising a family of four children. The 9/11 cataclysm stunned her into a new urgency to understand the fraught connections between religion, ideology, and violence.

“After 9/11 I thought, OK, I think I understand a lot about politics and political theory, and I have this (Catholic) faith tradition that I’m a part of, but I don’t really know how these things, faith and politics, go together. I decided I wanted to study religion with people who were practitioners rather than students who regarded religion as just an object of analysis. YDS was a solution to all that.”

While Matthes was studying at YDS, her mentors included theologians Emilie Townes and Serene Jones, who were instrumental in creating the short-lived Initiative on Religion and Politics on campus. Matthes became executive director before graduating, and also taught courses on women in the Bible, church-state relations, just-war theory, and, one of her favorites, theologies of money.

A maritime mission

Her work was, however, only parttime. With her young family in mind, she needed to find a position with better pay and healthcare benefits. The nearby U.S. Coast Guard Academy had a fulltime opening that looked like a good fit, and she was hired in 2011.

The CGA is one of the nation’s top military service colleges, and arguably the least well-known. Not even everyone in Connecticut is aware that it’s located in the state, she said. But some 200 graduates each year are commissioned as Coast Guard officers in the nation’s maritime military force, which is dedicated to the security and stewardship of its waters. CGA is highly selective; the admitted students attend tuition-free to pursue Bachelor of Science degrees in one of 10 engineering or professional majors, in exchange for five years of Coast Guard service after graduation.

“You go to college for four years, and then you have guaranteed employment for five. Most of the cadets will be a very sought-after group after that. They might go get master’s degrees or law degrees or, increasingly, medical health professional training. So the whole world opens up for them.”

Monitoring a sermonic shift

In 2021 Matthes completed When Sorrow Comes, a book with a theme that has long preoccupied her, the intentions of God in the body politic. To write it, she examined hundreds of sermons preached in the chaos of half a dozen crisis points throughout modern U.S. history, from Pearl Harbor in 1941 to the murder of George Floyd in 2020. 

Sermons are a window on the changing theological moods of the nation, she argues. At their best, they present careful arguments about God’s relationship to the world and the ethical demands of the moment. They also function as a kind of teaching tool in personal and national virtue. For that reason they should maintain independence from the state as “part of the long tradition of the American democratic arts used in ensuring a vibrant civil society,” she writes.

Across the decades she detected a shift in the aims of many sermons—a slow abdication of church authority to state power or therapeutic culture. At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, America was not yet a nuclear world power; a skeptical nation was divided about entering the European war. Sermons after the surprise Japanese attack largely regarded the destruction as the effect of policy decisions or human missteps—God had nothing to do with it. By the time of 9/11, sermons reflected a deference to American superpower prerogatives while also trying to discern what was God’s message to the nation in such a tribulation. Matthes argues that sermons are most powerful not when they take specific positions but when they confront difficult moments with fresh ways of thinking, a reverence for sacred power, and a sense of the adventure of “seeking the Truth as a lifelong project.”

Matters of ethical purpose and service, human or divine, have animated her sense of vocation from the start, and they still do.

“More and more I think maybe we should rediscover awe,” she said recently. “It’s an old biblical idea, the warning that our concept of God gets punier and punier the more we magnify ourselves. Maybe we should stay awake at night a little and ask, ‘What is God expecting of me? What are my obligations? How can I be present?’”