Publication Category: Higher Education

The author addresses the question; what is theological about theological education? His audience for the book is students in the early stages of theological. His objective is that the book be accessible, in plain English, and to engage the reader in an ongoing conversation. In addition, he wishes to sugge3st the ways to think about the issues, and to sketch a particular theological view as to the nature and functioin of the theological school.

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In this chapter the author lays out his utopian proposal for a theological school in “dialectical tension” with the Athens and Berlin models.

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In this chapter the author looks at the proximate and distant origins of North American theological schools and the variety of factors – subject matter, understandings, communities – that, woven together yield a concretely particular school.

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In this chapter the author invites the reader to join in a thought experiment about what some theological school known to them is and ought to be. He identifies three central issues which need to be resolved in this experiment. He suggests that the Christian “thing” is present in concrete reality “in and as various Christian congregations or worshiping communities in all their radical pluralism.” Finally, he lays out the nature and purpose of the remaining chapters.

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In this chapter the author prepares the reader to deal better with the rest of the book by carefully defining the concepts of “pluralism,” “understand,” “action,” and “practice.” In ordinary usage these concepts are remarkably vague, but as applied to the book’s proposal they are to be used only by the analysis given here.

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In this chapter, the author refines the thesis that a theological school is a community of persons trying to understand God more truly by focusing its study within the horizon of questions about Christian congregations. He explores, in detail, what constitutes a congregation and why it is the appropriate arena.

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In this chapter the author makes a proposal about what constitutes a theological school and what the implications are for its excellence as a school from the fact that it is specifically a theological school.

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In this chapter the author proposes courses of study unified by designing every course to address the overarching interest of a theological school and pluralistically adequate by designing every course to focus on questions about congregations.

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For much of this century, the waning influence of religion in American colleges and universities was viewed as a natural concomitant of modernization, and it was generally seen as a necessary or even a good thing. In recent years, Christian scholars such as George Marsden and James Burtchaell have offered a new interpretation of that …

Continue reading “A College Recovers Its Christian Identity”

When the longtime professor of preaching at Bethsaida Theological Seminary retired, no one at the school could have predicted the ordeal that lay ahead. A search committee was appointed, and a position description crafted. The candidate needed to have a Ph.D., an appreciation for Bethsaida’s theological tradition and at least some experience as a pastor …

Continue reading “A Crisis in Practical Theology”

  Ministry to Jewish Students Daniel I. Leifer Rabbi Leifer is director of the B’nai  B’rith Hillel Foundation at the University of Chicago. Though much has changed, much has remained the same since I came to work with Jewish students and faculty at the University of Chicago in 1964. Political activism and the use of …

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When I was invited to help a small group of English teachers and counselors at the University of New Orleans develop a philosophy of education within which to construct a total curriculum for 150 of the university’s remedial students, I jumped at the opportunity. At the time, like many college chaplains, I was tired from …

Continue reading “A Pedestrian-Idealist’s Approach to Education”

The ambivalence of American Protestantism’s relationship to art has always been pronounced. During the early part of the 19th century, church leaders manifested remnants of Puritan negativism toward art, though sporadically there were significant figures speaking out on behalf of religion’s natural association with the creative impulse: for example, Calvinist Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) , Congregational …

Continue reading “A Seminary’s Artist in Residence: Cathy Kapikian’s Fabric of Faith”

A large institution such as Southern Baptist Theological Seminary no doubt poses a greater problem for the integration of piety and learning, and that of pastoral care and theology, than a smaller, more intimate setting. For one thing, the whole educational process tends to be more programmatic and structured. Classes are often too large for …

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In 1965 I wrote a book called The Crisis of Cultural Change. While it was not news then that pervasive change was afoot, it has taken the traumas of the past ten years — an immoral and lost war, racial and sexual conflict, the imminence of economic and ecologic collapse — to persuade us of …

Continue reading “Academic Values and Prophetic Discernment”

A minister of a mainline Protestant denomination, newly hired as a chaplain of a denominational college, met with a committee of the regional judicatory within whose bounds he would be working. “Tell me,” a committee member asked him, “is this college ‘churchrelated’ or ‘Christian’?” Officials at the college found the question offensive, as would most …

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Last spring, after a lapse of some 15 years, a baccalaureate service was held at Cornell University, and almost all 2,000 seats in Bailey Hall were filled. Across the continent in southern California, participation in a similar service at the Claremont Colleges has more than doubled in the past three years. In response to a …

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(ENTIRE BOOK) For Kelsey, “Athens” (based on the Greek paideia , “culturing,” “character formation,”) and “Berlin” (based on the German Wissenschaft, “orderly,” “disciplined critical research,” “professional”) represent two very different — and ultimately irreconcilable — models of excellent education. It is the case de facto, says Kelsey, that modern North American theological education, for historical reasons, is committed to both models, resulting in ongoing tensions and struggles. Kelsey shows how a variety of significant thinkers — Newman, Niebuhr, Farley, Stackhouse, and several others — fit in the Athens-Berlin framework.

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It is now forty-two years since I became a campus minister. I was the Protestant Chaplain of Boston University and my title expressed something of the religious ethos of that period. Protestant, Catholic, and Jew still faced each other with a kind of curious tentativeness. Typically of great Protestant institutions, Boston University had more Catholics …

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The formulation of my title arises from a familiar and important dilemma. We have understood higher education to be the untrammeled search for truth. But to be a Christian is to be already convinced as to some of the answers. Can answers that organize the institution and determine its goal be examined with the same …

Continue reading “Can Christianity Shape Higher Education in a Pluralistic Age?”

Religious journalists have been calling attention to the plight of the "liberal" — i.e., nonconservative — theological seminaries. Like almost all institutions of higher education, these schools, whether university-related or denominational, are buffeted by inflation, a decrease of public support, and a drop in student enrollment. A number of considerations may explain the enrollment problem: …

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The "Berlin" type of excellent Christian theological education only emerged in the early nineteenth century, while the "Athens" type had emerged by the end of the first Christian century. But both types had undergone important modifications by the mid-twentieth century. Consequently it will be important to locate the recent discussion of Christian theological educators in North America by noting major ways in which the versions of each type that the current discussion received had been materially modified.

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An introductory chapter summarizing the intent of the entire book. A variety of subjects — from table manners to international organization, from scientific methods to the tax structure — are discussed at several unifying levels, including education itself to the nature and source of values.

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The importance to health is discussed in terms of recreation, work, safety, the use of motor vehicles, bodily exercise, cleanliness, dietary habits, the use of alcoholic beverages, tobacco and drugs, and mental health.

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The importance of the family, of marriage, of the nurturing of children, of the proper attitudes and use of the sexual desires, of over-population, of birth control, of homosexuality, of masturbation and of the interrelation of all of these issues are addressed in this chapter.

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The fundamental democratic principle for social class is that the orders and distinctions of society should be based upon the contribution made by a person to the good of society and not upon personal privilege. The distinction between social class and functional classification is discussed particularly in the field of education and the dangers of grading students abilities and the grades in which students are placed.

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This chapter discusses racial grouping, stereotypes, the errors of racial indicators, the insignificance of skin color, the self-confirming nature of racial stereotyping, and errors in understanding inheritance. Schools must make special efforts to compensate for the effects of race prejudice.

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There are three systems in which the economic game of desire is played: Individual free enterprise; associated free enterprise; controlled economy. The American economy has always been a mixture of the three. Because of the growth of population and diminishing resources, the third principle has appeal. The dangers inherent in this and the need for education concerning this are further discussed.

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The importance of the following items in a democracy of worth are given consideration: the place of law; of power; The Constitution; separation of powers; limited powers; representation; party system; local versus Federal control of education; bearing of political democracy on education; and the responsibility of professional educators.

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A primary objective of education today, in homes, in schools, and through the mass media of communication, should be the full and forceful dissemination of knowledge about the extreme destructiveness of modern weapons of war and about the awful consequences for everybody which would result from their use in any large-scale conflict.

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While it is not within the province of government to determine who is religious and who is not, nor to discriminate between the different forms of religion, irreligion, and idolatry, except where public security is at stake, it is the function of the democratic state to persuade and encourage its citizens toward religious faith and away from irreligion.

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This chapter present a case study of a mid-nineteenth-century version of the “Athens” type of theological education that was highly honored, at least verbally, in some mid-twentieth-century discussions of higher education generally, in order to draw attention to ways in which the material modifications it introduced have proved to be problematic.

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There are two kinds of democracy. The first kind is founded on the principle of organizing life to insure maximum satisfaction of human interests or claims. The other type of democracy centers around devotion or loyalty to the good, the right, the true, the excellent. If the American way of life is to be worthy of survival, and if democratic societies are to offer any lasting solution to the problems of men, the solution lies with this second kind of democracy which is referred to as the democracy of worth.

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In this chapter the author names two quite different models of excellent schooling. He describes the origins and evolution of the first, “paideia,” which has its roots in the ancient Greco-Roman world.

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This chapter gives a review of a series of proposals specifically about theological education in the first half of the twentieth century in the United States that accord with the “Berlin” type but make important and equally problematic modifications in it.

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Human intellect is universal; intellectual life is crucial to democracy because it is the source of the human community; intelligence is the source of human freedom; intelligence is the foundation of individuality. Therefore, education should be universal, socially oriented, aimed at the development of mature judgment, and cognizant of individual differences.

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In this chapter, which concludes Part One, the author traces the effect Schleiermacher’s concept of a “research university”

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There are three animating spirits in the magic of the new mechanical and electronic arts: First, the mass media are tools for advancing the interests of those who control them. Second is the view that the function of the agencies of mass communication is to create and sustain a "popular culture." The third is that the process of communication is not simply a bipolar one between the publisher and his public, but is a triadic one involving also the controlling reality of truth, which transcends the participants and transforms the relationship between them.

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Two very different proposals about the nature and purpose of excellent theological education are examined in this chapter. For one, theology is faith’s inherent insightfulness or wisdom brought to a high level of self-conscious critical reflection. For the other, theology is critical reflection on the narrative of persons’ lives that attends to the concrete particularity of different persons’ experiences of God and to the ways in which those same lives have been victimized by injustice.

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Education will be unified if it is ordered to a single overarching goal. More particularly, theological education will be unified if all aspects of the enterprise are ordered to “doing theology” in an appropriate way. Furthermore, all parties agree that the chief criterion of this “appropriateness” is that it be done in a way that capacitates students to “do theology” themselves.

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In the aristocratic view it is assumed that esthetic judgments are relevant only to certain kinds of activity and are reserved for the aristocracy only. In the democratic view there is no experience that does not have its esthetic aspects or dimensions, and the difference between these two views of esthetic ideals have clear consequences for education.

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Charles Wood’s proposal may point the way to something like a higher synthesis. In Vision and Discernmen (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985) he proposes a way through this impasse by a radical reorientation of the ways in which we have been posing the central questions. The overarching goal of theological education, according to Wood, is theological inquiry. Theological education will be unified when all aspects of it are ordered to that one end.

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Fundamentally manners are symbolic forms, which point to meanings beyond themselves. It is these meanings, not the forms of conduct in themselves, which are important, for they reflect the ideals and the spirit of a culture.

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Democratic society will not accept the contrast between slave and free and therefore universalizes the responsibility for work. No one is exempt from work, and no fixed classes of persons are assigned to the labor of hand and brain, respectively. Society is not expected to be stratified with respect to labor and leisure, for work is accepted as an intrinsic and universal component of the human situation. Modern technology has largely decreased the difference between the aristocrat and the democrat.

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Leisure is no longer the privilege of a select few; science and invention have been a great support to democracy. Thus the average worker has been so far released from wearing toil that the privileges of “aristocrats” and “ordinary people” have been exchanged. The pleasure principle, which is commonly taken for granted as appropriate in recreation, has influenced the whole of educational practice. The “fun principle” inherent in recreation has infected liberal education and this problem is discussed in detail.

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Since earth is gratefully recognized as mankind’s home, it is important to give serious consideration to the natural conditions for human well-being and survival. Pollution, the preservation of earth’s resources, and population growth are some of the items discussed.

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The seminaries that train future clergy, and the churches that employ them, dominate most discussions about theological education. Too often missing from the analysis of postgraduate preparation for ministry are the students themselves. What do they think about their experiences and their future? To find some answers, The Christian Century invited students from ten Chicago-area …

Continue reading “Choosing the Impossible: Seminary Students Speak Out”

As a president of a church-related college, I find much criticism of church-related higher education to be well-intentioned but wistful nostalgia. Critics such as James Burtchaell, whose book The Dying of the Light was reviewed in these pages by Ralph C. Wood (February 3-10), have simply not indicated realistically how, in the face of massive …

Continue reading “Christian Colleges: A Dying Light or a New Refraction?”

With the boom times in higher education over, colleges and universities have been working to renew and sometimes redefine their identities and missions. Within the past few years almost all Christian colleges and universities have sought fresh ways to articulate their religious identity. Simultaneously, large and vocal elements within the secular academy have begun to …

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At the opening gathering during my first year at Yale Divinity School, the new students met in the beautiful chapel, with its tall ceilings and clear congregational-style windows. Someone smartly bearded told us how lucky we were to be there. Meanwhile, in the old refectory with its paintings of various dignitaries on the walls, the …

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To keep theology and piety together, one must have some of each. Most students come to the seminary with a fair share of the latter but very little of the former. Few students have a consciously held theology, or even a theological awareness. They often come from evangelical churches that do not live out of …

Continue reading “Creating a Respect for Theology”

As a creature of an historicistic education, I understand myself, our institutions, and our society only as I set them in some sweeping overview of history, knowing that this is only one of many possible overviews. As a theologian I am preoccupied with the history of faith, or basic orientation, or controlling commitment. This has …

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(ENTIRE BOOK) Professor Phenix purposes a new curriculum centered around the concepts of intelligence, creativity, conscience, and reverence. There is a distinction between the life of desire, self-satisfaction narrowly conceived, and the life of worth, goodness and excellence, conceived in terms of a moral commitment. Around these concepts come the human characteristics and values essential for a sound education.

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I am interested in education particularly from the standpoint of the deep sadness I feel when seeing students in theological declamations from the very day they are ordained. They will never know as much theology as they do in their senior year of seminary. Ten years later their general culture has been localized; their reading …

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Concentrating on the “practices” of Christianity enables us to think about education in new ways. Identifying practices as the sites of learning in theological education allows us to avoid some common “divisions” in thinking about education and calls for the development of new language to name the process of education. In most contemporary views of …

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Though seminary faculties like to affirm, in principle, a relationship between Christian theology and the life of the church, academic theology tends to view the ministering congregation as an addendum to the really interesting issues of ethics, philosophical and political theology, or social policy. The most pressing issue for seminary faculties is usually how to …

Continue reading “Embarrassed by the Church: Congregations and the Seminary”

Dissatisfaction with curriculum is nothing new to the world of theological education, where “seminary faculty get as passionate about revising curricula as Jesse Helms does about cutting food stamps,” as one seminary trustee has observed. But the discussion has taken on new substance of late with the critique advanced by Edward Farley, professor of theology …

Continue reading “Emphasizing the Congregation: New Directions for Seminaries”

Lecture Three Now comes the fun part. It is important to consider where we are and how we have arrived here. It is important to recognize what is wrong with this. But it is equally important and more enjoyable to imagine alternatives that would be better. It is surprising how many people believe that what …

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In his epilogue the author suggests that discussions of theological schooling and proposals to reform it might get further if some of the assumptions and many of the terms conventionally used were changed. He then presents the beginning of “a budget of questions” for critical reflection

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Here is a summary of the issues, and the morals about how best to discuss the issues that have emerged from this review of the recent literature on what is theological about theological education.

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With commencements at hand, a generational comparison seems in order. Ten years ago the campuses of our colleges and universities were inflamed with idealism and protest. Intellectual passion was all the rage. Could that have been just ten years ago? It seems like a different world now. Students aren’t angrily aggressive anymore. For the most …

Continue reading “Ethical Collapse in Higher Education”

The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarshipby George M. Marsden. Oxford University Press, 142 pp., $22.00. “It is time to face the fact, long suppressed in the highest intellectual circles, that a religiously diverse culture will be an intellectually richer culture. It is time to recognize that scholars and institutions who take the intellectual dimensions of …

Continue reading “Exercising a Christian Intellect”

The integration of faith and learning is the raison d’être of Christian higher education. On this point most people involved with Christian and/or church-related colleges agree. On the mode of this integration, however, there is a good deal of disagreement. Setting aside those persons who would insist, whether explicitly or implicitly, on a choice between …

Continue reading “Faith in Learning: Integrative Education and Incarnational Theology”

The recent revival of the women’s movement is affecting every area of American life. The term “revival” is used because an earlier movement culminated in the voting amendment of 1919, which women had hoped would become instrumental in achieving other forms of equality. The movement slowed during the 1940s and ‘50s until books by Simone …

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The changing profile of seminary students has been much remarked upon. Whereas 50 years ago almost all seminarians in North America were white men who had recently graduated from college, today women are a major presence in seminary classrooms, as are (to varying degrees) ethnic and minority groups. Today’s students are also substantially older by …

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BOOK REVIEW: Being There: Culture and Formation in Two Theological Schools. By Jackson W. Carroll. Barbara C. Wheeler; Daniel 0. Aleshire and Penny Long Marler. Oxford University Press, 336 pp., $35.00 The students come excited and a bit anxious and are soon confronted with challenges to what they believe. The eagerness turns to perplexity, anger, …

Continue reading “Formative Years: The Seminary Experience”

"I want my seminary experience to form me as a person of prayer." We had never heard a student state this desire so eloquently and succinctly. We sensed in this comment something much more than a first-year student’s desire for greater piety in the school environment. This student had done extremely well at a college …

Continue reading “Formed for Ministry: A Program in Spiritual Formation”

Lecture Two My account of higher education, like that of public education, follows the history in the West. I believe that it is well for Thai educators to be aware of this history, because in many ways it is also the background of Thai universities. These have not, in fact, grown out of the Buddhist …

Continue reading “Four Types of Universities”

I was a freshly minted product of seminary, plopped down by the bishop into a forlorn little church in rural Georgia. During my first sermons, my congregation stared at me impassively. At first I thought that the seemingly unbridgeable gulf between us was due to a gap in education. (Educated people tend to think this …

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There is no one correct way to divide Western history into periods. But periodizing can nevertheless be illuminating. My proposal is to periodize in terms of what people are most devoted to, individually, but also, and especially, collectively. I will briefly explain the periodization that results and then discuss its relation to higher education, and …

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To President Cain and Dean Hough I want to express my thanks for the invitation to be the Cranston Lecturer for 1983. Some of you know that this is a homecoming for me. Not only do I know most of the faculty and staff here, but I appointed many of them also. In that regard, …

Continue reading “Imagination and History”

BOOK REVIEW: Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, by Charles Taylor. Harvard University Press, 601 pp., $37.50. Pastors and theologians are fond of insisting that everybody lives by some sort of faith. The point of this claim is to force people to think about the goods and goals in their lives …

Continue reading “Inescapable Frameworks of Meaning”

A few years ago a technology consultant told a group of seminary deans and presidents that computer-based information technology is like a fast-moving train. “It doesn’t matter whether you are in first class or third class, but it is essential that you get on the train.” One of the deans commented, “Now I know what …

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Perhaps the concept of freedom comes closer than any other single idea to summing up what the human enterprise is all about. Social progress can well be measured by the criterion of personal liberty, and the level of civilization may properly be rated according to the range and variety of choices people can make. The democratic …

Continue reading “Liberal Learning and the Practice of Freedom”

At the Interdenominational Theological Center — a cluster of seven predominantly black seminaries in Atlanta — we feel that While such a pattern will not be rigid or doctrinaire or even “classic,” it seems to have several aspects which, viewed together, could be called the objectives of the seminary inasmuch as they serve to integrate …

Continue reading “Living Out the Gospel in Seminary Life”

Theology has been in a state of disarray since the passing of the theological giants of the so-called neo-orthodox movement. The discipline has been characterized by a dizzying diversity, and practitioners of the craft have too often been attracted to fleeting intellectual fads. There has been little agreement among theologians about the sources, norms and …

Continue reading “Making Theology Central in Theological Education”

Only a few years ago this article might have been titled “Practical Theology: Will It Be?” Today there is good reason to believe that indeed it will. Now the question has shifted to “What will it become?” In this early stage, there are numerous formulations and recommendations. Thus far the conversation has tended to be …

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Book Review: I Am Charlotte Simmons By Tom Wolfe. Farrar, Straits & Giroux, 688 pp.   Tom Wolfe may deny that his novel is about Duke, but having spent 20 years there I know a few things about the school. Wolfe’s “Dupont University” has the same number of undergrads as Duke, the same fraternity-sorority dominance …

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Lecture One My topic in these lectures is primarily higher education. It is in that world that I have spent most of my life; so my knowledge of it is first hand. The earlier parts of the educational system I remember, of course, from first hand experience as a child, and experienced again, indirectly, through …

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Are seminary professors churchless agnostics? Purveyors of the culture’s latest fads and fancies? More evidence of the decadence of mainline churches? Some recent media reports on the molders of student minds have painted this picture. But 115 syllabi of basic courses in theology from schools around the country tell a different story. They are part …

Continue reading “Reorientation and Retrieval in Systematic Theology”

I am a 52-year-old minister whose entire adult life has been spent in the professional service of the Presbyterian Church. I write out of love and a deep distress which has many geneses. First, the mainline Protestant church is in serious decline. Some go so far as to say it is dying. Second, my major …

Continue reading “Revisioning Seminary as Ministry-Centered”

Campus ministry is once again a respectable topic of discussion in the mainline churches. Perhaps this is because a wide spectrum of people especially those of typical college-age are turning increasingly to higher education both to meet their educational and developmental needs and to aid them in times of transition. Campus ministry’s increasing respectability can …

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The eclipse of liberal education, as Allan Bloom recounts it in The Closing of the American Mind (Simon & Schuster, 392 pp., $18.95) , occurred at Cornell University in 1969. Bloom witnessed it as a professor there, and his vivid recollections provide a recurring theme in this book. Although viewing the eclipse with unshielded eyes …

Continue reading “Saving the Soul of Higher Education”

"How would your introductory course in your field help prepare students for ministry?" This question consistently stumped candidates fresh from graduate school who were interviewing for a faculty position in our theological school. The candidates were bright. They could map their disciplines with precision, and they cared deeply about the role of religion in society. …

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Pastoral theology (like all seminary courses) cannot be taught as a purely academic discipline. Being more a skill than a system of facts and ideas, pastoral care cannot be mastered merely through reading books and hearing lectures. To learn how to minister effectively, prospective pastors must first experience pastoral care — and it can be …

Continue reading “Seizing the Moment for Teaching Pastoral Care”

Select Bibliography of Books Cited Ahlstrom, Sydney E. A Religious History of the American People. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972 Brown, William Adams, and Mark A. May, et al. The Education of American Ministers, 4 vols. New York: Institute of Social and Religious Research, 1934. Cannon, Karie G., et al., and the Mud …

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How well does theological education prepare seminary graduates for the practice of ministry? Curiosity about the answer to that question led us to take a careful look at a Drew University Theological School class three years beyond graduation. The results were arresting. Although we had expected challenges to theological education, there were implications for denomination …

Continue reading “Seminary Education Tested by Praxis”

Garrison Keillor, whose news from the fictional town of Lake Wobegon will come to an end on June 13 after more than a dozen years on Public Radio, frequently can be as funny as any humorist you could name. But I suggest that he has been something more. There are times — as in his …

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Book Review: Theological Literacy for the Twenty-First Century Edited by Rodney L. Petersen with Nancy M. Rourke. Eerdmans, 445 pp. Reading this long book on theological literacy has left me mightily discouraged. The discouragement does not come from the book itself, which is excellent. Rodney L. Petersen, its editor, is executive director of the Boston …

Continue reading “Spread Too Thin”

Characteristics of the culture in which the gospel is expressed have long been recognized as an essential component in the theological task. Theologian Paul Tillich, for example, suggests that theological thought continually moves in a dialectical tension between two poles – "the eternal truth of its foundations and the temporal situation in which the eternal …

Continue reading “Teaching Theology in a New Cultural Environment”

In the fall of 1998 Candler School of Theology made a serious wager concerning its future: it launched a comprehensive new program in contextual education. The faculty hopes this program can provide the means of integrating theological learning and practice — something every seminary teacher knows is largely lacking. Candler’s experiment is only just begun, …

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The church stands today — as it always has — in a changing world. A visit to any historical museum will show that the world changes and civilizations have risen and fallen through the centuries. In the midst of this historical process, the church’s constant mission is to interpret the event of Jesus Christ and …

Continue reading “The Challenge of John 3:16 for Theological Education”

Book Review: Conflicting allegiances: The Church-Based University in a Liberal Democratic Society. Edited by Michael L. Budde and John Wright. Brazos. Can Hope endure? A Case Study in Christian Higher Education. By James C. Kennedy and Caroline J. Simon. Eerdmans, 249 pp. Can a church-related college reinvigorate its Christian identity while maintaining academic quality? That …

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An old story tells about a philosophy professor who, despite his long tenure and large classes, remembered every student he had ever taught. Late in his career he approached a middle-aged woman at a reunion of graduates. “You are Mary Smith,” he said to her. “You took Philosophy 101 in 1967. You sat in the …

Continue reading “The Faculty Members of the Future: How Are They Being Shaped?”

Review: The Politics of Religious Studies, by Donald Wiebe, St. Martin’s, 332 pp. $49.95. The gradual dilution of sustained religious catechism in churches and synagogues means that young people often make their first serious contact with the claims of religion not in the presence or a committed pastor, rabbi or parish priest, but in the …

Continue reading “The Faith of the Scholars”

Although most libraries have copies of some of her books — the two celebrated ones are Mysticism and Worship — Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) is but a name to many people, even among the theologically informed. Imagine my consternation a few years ago when, my dissertation on her concept of worship just completed, I talked with …

Continue reading “The Future We Shan’t See: Evelyn Underhill”s Pacificism”

”The greening of theology” is itself an attractively “green” phrase. It means something to all of us, and there will be a family resemblance among these meanings. Beyond that it leaves us with a lot of freedom to give it what meaning we want. I traced in my panel with Tom Regan what might be …

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The crucial element in theological education is who the members of the faculty see themselves to be — i.e., their principal identity. True education occurs in a context of sympathetic identification; that is, we are shaped in mind and spirit as we participate in and under the tutelage of others. Discipleship is the quintessence of …

Continue reading “The Identity Crisis in the Seminaries”

A friend, called upon to bless a family gathering, misspoke his way into wisdom: “God, keep us needful of the minds of others.” Although the need for the minds of others is obvious, much of what human beings strive for — success, power, self-fulfillment — seeks to avoid the transformative influence of other minds. Resisting …

Continue reading “The Listening Point”

As Don S. Browning notes below, several scholars are currently doing creative work in the area of practical theology. For this year’s theological education issue, we asked Dr. Browning, who is one of those scholars, to comment on his own research as well as that of others in the field. He has paid special attention …

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Book Review The Scoope of Our Art: The Vocation of the Theological Teacher. Edited by L. Gregory Jones and Stephanie Paulsell. Eerdmans, 268 pp. What is the vocation of the theological teacher? The “Cambridge Platform” written by New England Puritans in 1648 says, “The office of . . . teacher is to attend to doctrine …

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I remember the day in 1955 when, as a newly arrived graduate student, I talked with Professor H. Richard Niebuhr about my academic trek leading to Yale Divinity School. When I told him that I had graduated from North Carolina’s Davidson College and Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, he exclaimed, “Ah, the royal road for …

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DANIEL ALESHIRE has been executive director of the Association of Theological Schools since 1998. The Pittsburgh-based association is the accrediting and program agency for graduate theological education in North America. The ATS has 244 Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox member schools. Before joining the ATS staff in 1990, Aleshire, an ordained minister with a Ph.D. in …

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Mark 10:46-52 records a standard healing miracle. There is a person in need who comes to Jesus. Jesus acts and the person is healed. We may be jaded enough not to believe in the story, or else so familiar with it that we don’t notice what is going on. It is, however, a story that …

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There is a widespread tendency to take book publishing for granted. People assume that the publishing of serious books — unlike other cultural activities such as serious music, dance, theater, art and even television and film, all of which are widely acknowledged to require philanthropic support — will happen more or less automatically, the natural …

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(ENTIRE BOOK) This is a book addressed to those who have felt the pinch of a misfit between their expectations of theological education and the realities of a theological school. Theologically speaking, what ought to be the purposes and nature of theological education? What theological commitments ought to be decisive criteria for assessing and reshaping the ethos and polity of a theological school? The readers he has in mind include: perhaps a student starting her second year of study, or an academic who has just joined a theological school faculty and has never herself been previously involved in theological education, or a person newly appointed to the board of trustees of a theological school.

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My perceptions of the fit between piety and learning in the current world of theological education are conditioned by a recent move from one province of that world — Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta — to another, Union Theological Seminary in New York. The opportunities and the problems of achieving the …

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For people unable to attend seminary, seminary can come to them, thanks to a new project from Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington , D.C. The Wesley Ministry Network (WMN) enables people to sit in on the seminary lecture ball (via DVD), chat with other students and even the professor (over the Internet), and read the …

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I. The Social Setting Our “social scene,” really the world social scene, is rapidly moving toward the catastrophic. More human beings are alive today on Planet Earth than the total until 1900, and most of them are living at a level that we can only call sub-human. We are at 6.25 billion now, climbing at …

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Book Review: Religion on Campus By Conrad Cherry, Betty A. DeBerg and Amanda Porterfield. University of North Carolina Press. 316 pp,. College is a crucible in which opinions are formed, challenged and reformed; beliefs are redefined or perhaps defined for the first time, and attitudes become more resolute. That this is so life-shaping a time …

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A school is "theological," I suggest, to the extent that everything done in its name has one overarching goal: more clearly to understand God and to understand everything in relation to God. This answer is almost embarrassingly obvious. By definition, a theological school is about theology in its broadest sense of the term: logos, speaking …

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When the ATS authorized the awarding of the D. Min. in 1970, schools could offer both the “in-sequence” D.Min., awarded as a first seminary degree after four years of study, and the ‘in-ministry” degree, based on a continuing education program for clergy already in ministry. Many assumed that the former type would become the rule, …

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During the past 15 years, theological education has been the subject of intense inquiry. Research arising from social-scientific, theological, historical, feminist and curricular concerns has generated reams of paper and resulted in a significant literature of description and assessment. We probably now know more about theological education than we ever have. While this literature offers …

Continue reading “Why Seminaries Don’t Change: A Reflection on Faculty Specialization”