Curiosity and Crisis: A Scholar’s Testament to Faith, Family, and the Regent Difference

Hospital chairs are not built for sleeping. Atira Pressley knew this by the third night, when her spine protested in ways she’d never felt before. By the tenth night, she could only dream of something resembling rest. By the forty-second night, that chair had taken on its own life. It represented her desk, her Ph.D. program, her chapel. Forty-two nights.

June 2025. A perforated, ruptured appendix. Her husband, J.P., lay in a bed beside her, alive when he shouldn’t be. Sepsis should have already set in by the time they reached the emergency room that weekend. The doctors said so with that careful language used when everything should have been lost.

But Atira never doubted. Not once in those 42 days did she question whether they would make it home.

What she did question was simpler: “Dude, I have a paper due in three days. What is happening here?”

Atira is a Ph.D. student at Regent University researching memory and identity: the ways we remember who we are, the ways we carry forward the stories that shaped us. Here she was, living through a season she would never forget, creating a memory so visceral it would reshape everything she thought she knew about marriage, faith, and what it means to pursue a calling when life demands you handle more than you thought possible.

But this isn’t where her story begins.

No, it begins in a high school library in Brooklyn, with a girl who couldn’t stop pursuing her curiosity.

The Dawn of a Researcher

Atira Pressley is Brooklyn through and through, born and raised in Brownsville, now living in Crown Heights, the heartbeat of the largest Caribbean community in Brooklyn. Her parents immigrated from Barbados and Trinidad, bringing with them the stories, the music, and the faith that would shape their daughter into someone who moves through the world with confidence and wonder.

“The pulse of the city matches the pulse of my heart,” she says, and you can hear that she means it truthfully.

She’s also been a “nerd” her entire life. “That’s probably the only thing not city girl about me. I love academia. I love creating knowledge. I love research.”

The moment she became a researcher happened in high school. Her assistant principal started an after-school program, gathering students in the library to teach them how to use databases, including the New York Public Library system, JSTOR, and real research tools. Atira’s friends wanted to go to the park. She wanted to spiral down “rabbit holes.”

“I was reading about things that I had no idea existed,” she says. “And I just kept doing that throughout life.”

The questions eventually found their focus: memory, identity, and the digital spaces where both take shape. She thinks about her mother, who always carried a Kodak camera, documenting every moment. “Memory keeping was always a very central and important aspect of her life and how she raised me and my brother,” Atira reflects. “To now be a researcher studying memory — that’s a very specific throughline.”

“I’m of the firm belief that all of the desires, all of the impulses that I feel, all of my curiosity — that is innately of God.”

It was her master’s program chair who finally asked the question that changed everything. After Atira guest lectured, her professor turned to her: “So when am I going to be able to call you my colleague?”

Atira went home and prayed. If she was going to pursue a Ph.D., it had to be in New York, rooted in the community that shaped her research, honoring both the rigor she craved and the faith that grounded her.

“I’m of the firm belief that all of the desires, all of the impulses that I feel, all of my curiosity — that is innately of God,” she says. “I couldn’t have come up with it on my own.”

A Scholarly Choice

The plan was simple: apply to a university in New York. Then her husband asked, “Have you looked into any online programs?”

She had, sort of. But she hadn’t found anything that gave her the kind of rigor she was looking for. After years at private, faith-based institutions, she wanted a place that would push her intellectually without dismissing her spiritually.

One day at her office (she works on the communications team for a state senator in New York and is also a Director for Brand Marketing and Strategic Partnerships at Empower My Hood), she was scrolling through links from her husband. She saw Regent University. It was a strange moment of serendipity. “Let me just send an email.”

An hour later, she was on the phone with admissions. They asked about her life. Her journey. Her experience with Christian education. Her research — memory, identity, Black life and culture. The response: “Your research is exactly the kind we would support.”

“Everyone sees you not just as a student file or an application number, but as a whole person with a whole life.”

The Zoom call with Dr. Stephen Perry, Department Chair of Journalism & Communications Studies, sealed it. They discussed her fit for the program. Then he asked: “How do you feel about online learning? This program is going to be really rigorous.”

Atira didn’t overthink it. “I have a cute house. I have a cute desk. My husband’s cute. He lives at my home. So, I can do school at home with my cute husband. I think I’ll be fine.”

“My wife is cute, too. I get it,” Dr. Perry told her.

An hour later, her acceptance letter arrived. That moment, that human, warm, real moment, showed her the heart of Regent. “Everyone is personable. Everyone sees you not just as a student file or an application number, but as a whole person with a whole life,” she smiles.

She could stay in Crown Heights, study her passion, be rooted while reaching. Regent would come to her. She had no idea how much that choice would matter.

Unexpected Crisis

June 2025 arrived with J.P.’s stomach pain that would not pass. By the time they reached the hospital, J.P. had a perforated, ruptured appendix. They thought it would be a weekend stay. Fluids, antibiotics, home by Monday. J.P. kept getting worse. The visit shifted to emergency surgery. Then another two weeks later. Then another a week after that.

Atira, sitting in that chair that wasn’t built for sleeping, had to send the email every student dreads: “Hey guys, I’m so, so, so sorry … I’m gonna need a pause, an extension, something.”

Every single professor responded with the same question: “How can we pray?”

“They jumped in immediately and were in our corner,” she recalls. “They said, ‘Take as much time as you need. If you don’t finish this semester, that’s fine. The work will get done whenever. But we gotta join with God right now and keep your husband alive.’”

She describes herself as Type A by nature, so she made a plan. Google Sheets. Checklists. Her professors gave her Plan B, Plan C, and timelines that adjusted to the impossible. Forty-two days. She slept in that chair every night. “Did a number on my spine,” she notes with characteristic Brooklyn understatement.

She was learning to be someone’s physical, spiritual, and legal caretaker, signing off on surgeries, approving blood transfusions, making decisions about resuscitation. “Through sickness and in health is very, very serious and very true,” Atira reflects.

After finally returning home, she settled into a new routine. She woke up early, before work and before J.P. needed her care, and completed hours of schoolwork. Her professors kept showing up. Kept praying. Kept anticipating her needs.

Atira began to realize that what Regent offered her couldn’t be measured in stipends or rankings. What Regent gave her was the ability to survive and to grow through a season that would have broken her anywhere else.

Breakthrough

Fall brought another twist. J.P. had an important follow-up surgery scheduled for November 20. But the day before Halloween, intense pain sent them back to the emergency room.

During J.P.’s fourth emergency surgery, what should have been 30 minutes stretched into three hours. Atira sat in the waiting room with no way to track progress until her phone rang. They told her the surgery had been successful. But there was more. They had completed J.P.’s scheduled surgery early.

J.P. didn’t know until he woke up. When Atira got to his bedside, he celebrated, “Oh, praise God. I’m so happy.” Praise God.

Day by day, recovery continues. They’re a young Christian couple. “Easy meal for the enemy,” Atira says bluntly. “We are slim pickings.” She can laugh now when she thinks about the enemy’s attempt. “You literally tried to take my husband. And look at us. Home. Thriving for the holidays. Made it through how many surgeries? And I’m able to still work. And I’m able to pursue my degree. And we’re able to sit down and watch movies together at night.”

The Regent Difference

During those six months of crisis, Atira began to see her choice in Regent with new clarity. “The support that I’m able to get here is completely unmatched,” she says. “Would I have gotten the spiritual support that I needed when it really mattered?”

The support isn’t just about extended deadlines. It’s professors asking, “Did you eat? Don’t forget to rest!” It’s about treating students like people, not just academic units.

It’s about the fact that Atira is being pushed academically. She applied to two conferences in her first year. The rigor is real. The standards are high. But the humanity is higher.

Atira also serves as the Vice President of Administration for the Council of Graduate Students, which functions as the student government body and liaison with university administration for Regent’s seven graduate schools. This semester has been the best she’s seen.

“We have taken such intentional efforts to not just grow an online community, but to really care about people’s individual personhood,” Atira explains. She treats it as an opportunity to pour into others the way she’s been poured into. A chance to grow disciples while being grown as a disciple herself.

“God was very clear when He called me here. He’s even clearer in keeping me here.”

This is the Regent difference. Flexibility that doesn’t compromise rigor. Grace that doesn’t eliminate standards. “God was very clear when He called me here,” she says. “He’s even clearer in keeping me here. This is literally, truly a dream come true — being able to do my Ph.D. at an institution that loves me and loves God and is supportive of my research.”

The Future Awaits

When asked about the immediate future, Atira mentions 13 finals assignments spread across the next week and a half. She’s now two years into the program. Two more core classes before qualifying exams and dissertation. It means more early mornings, waking before J.P. needs her care, before she logs into work. Those quiet hours when the city is still relatively still, when she can read and write and explore. “It’s so, so taxing,” she admits. “But wow, I’m having a blast being a nerd.” When you’re studying what you love, what you’re called to explore, there’s joy even in the exhaustion.

At home, life is returning to something that resembles normal, though normal has been redefined. Every day, J.P. finds the energy to do something new: “yesterday, movies; today, baking.” These small steps forward feel like giant leaps after months of crisis. “It’s going to be a varied year next year. A lot of growth as a researcher, a lot of growth as a spouse, and a lot of growth as a student leader.” She could feel overwhelmed. Instead, she feels excited. “I’ve never had to question why God put so much on my plate,” she says simply. “He’s always been the one carrying it with me.”

Atira returns often to her favorite Zora Neale Hurston quote. “Research is formalized curiosity. It is a poking and prying with purpose, that they who want to see the world can discover all of it,” she recites.

She thinks about curiosity as a divine attribute, passed down to humans who bear God’s image. “We learn so much about ourselves as people, but also about how we can better serve the people around us when we’re willing to be curious.”

“All of the things that we’re curious about, and all of the things that God leads us to — those are the things that He wants us to see so that we can make it known to others. I’m hoping that anyone reading my story will learn that their curiosity isn’t something to run from, and it’s not something that is trying to pull them off their course,” she says. “It’s actually something that’s guiding them, and that God gave them to help guide them to where He needs them to be.”

At Regent, Atira’s curiosity flourished. She could be a scholar, wife, Christian, caregiver, and leader, all at once, without having to choose which part of herself mattered most. “Regent is the place that will carry you as far as you are willing to go,” she says. “And where God will make very clear what He has for you in life.”

“Regent is the place that will carry you as far as you are willing to go… And where God will make very clear what He has for you in life.”

She’s sitting at her cute desk in her cute house with her cute husband now. Not in a hospital chair. Not choosing between her marriage and her education. Not wondering if her work matters or if her faith belongs in academic spaces.

She’s home. She’s whole. She’s exactly where God called her to be. And she’s still curious. She smiles, the smile of someone who’s learned that the hardest seasons can become the most sacred, that crisis can transform into testimony. The story of Atira Pressley is not finished. Looking at where she’s been — that hospital chair, those 42 days, that university that prayed — she knows one thing for certain: God writes good stories. History is His story, after all. And He’s not done with hers yet.