Challenging the status quo of an institutional culture in theological training (original) (raw)
Related papers
Making Sense of the Institutional Mission: Student Cultures at an Evangelical University
Research in Christian Higher Education, 1999
The Issue During a student initiated "men's conference" at Biola University, one student asked the panel of faculty, "You have suggested that some of us might seek counsel and even therapy to deal with our problems. But I have my Bible and prayer. Why should I have a need for a psychologist?" This comment lays bare theoretical and pedagogical tensions between academic disciplines and religious faith on this evangelical campus. Theoretically one wonders: Has Paleontology anything to say to biblical creation narratives? Is there room for the student artist's connotative mind to flourish in an ethos of denotative confession? What determines the cultural forms of a faith which purportedly transcends history and culture. Pedagogically, the student's question cuts to the core of the teaching/learning process itself. What happens in the space between institutional intention and student learning that determines the actual shape of a worldview and lifestyle? The gap is similar to that between Wisdom traditions and Prophetism. Wisdom's circuitous path to spiritual knowledge differs from prophetic immediacy. Different biblical genre eventuate, but they are also different ways of knowing. They are not mutually exclusive, but can each become an exclusive hermeneutical standpoint predetermining the kind of coherent sense students make of college life. That these discrete psychosocial perspectives compete as well as collaborate with each other is, perhaps, the distinctive difference between Biola's School of Theology and its School of Arts and Sciences. It also reveals the theory and practice of undergraduate integration of faith with learning at Biola.
Transformative remedies towards managing diversity in South African theological education
HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies, 2015
South Africa is a complex society filled with diversity of many kinds. Because of the enormous and profound changes of the last 20 years of democracy, this can be perceived as a society in social identity crisis which is increasingly spilling over into many areas of life. Churches have also gone through a process of reformulating their identity and have restructured theological education for all its members resulting in growing multicultural student bodies. These new student constituencies reflect a wide spectrum of cultural backgrounds, personal histories and theological commitments, and represent diversity in race, ethnicity, culture, class, gender, age, language and sexual orientation. These issues of diversity are theologically complicated and contested as they are attached to religious dogma. Diversity exists as a threat and promise, problem and possibility. Using current conceptualisations of diversity in South African Higher Education this article will seek to understand the ...
Impacting Racism and Transforming Theological Education
In a 1999 homily in Saint Louis, Blessed John Paul II made the following exhortation: “As the new millennium approaches, there remains another great challenge facing this community . . . [and] the whole country: to put an end to every form of racism, a plague which [is] one of the most persistent and destructive evils of the nation.” These words indicate Blessed John Paul II’s understanding that racism remains a strong barrier to manifestation of the Catholic ideals of justice and love, and implies that Catholic theological education must bring the riches of the Catholic tradition to bear on the evil of racism. This paper explores community service-learning as an effective pedagogy for engaging undergraduates in theological education that contributes to racial reconciliation. The first part of this paper situates theological education as a transforming endeavor, as opposed to merely “handing on” the faith, by reviewing understandings of spiritual formation in the Christian tradition. The next part points to service-learning as one such transformational pedagogy for theological education. Then the following section elaborates on service-learning as a pedagogy that can develop what Catholic theological ethicist Bryan Massingale terms “liberating awareness” of race and racism for undergraduate students. The paper summarizes research on best practices for structuring service-learning projects that hold the possibility of students’ genuine engagement with both issues of race and the wisdom of the Catholic tradition. Finally, the paper reviews one successful service-learning program that addresses students’ learning about Catholic theology and diversity.
2009
The preservation and perpetuation of core institutional vision, values, ethos and identity to succeeding generations are critical imperatives that confront all Christian educational organisations. Christian institutions have historically been prone to the dis-integration of their respective cultural distinctiveness through processes of rationalisation and secularisation, and many do not remain distinctively Christian in vision, ethos or identity beyond the second and third generations. This paper will provide a review of the literature relating to the preservation of core ideology within Christian educational institutions and will identify a range of forces that promote and inhibit the preservation of distinctively Christian identities within an ever-increasingly complex and market driven socio-cultural milieu.
Teaching Theology & Religion, 2012
This essay explores new ways of engaging diversity in the production of knowledge in the classroom using coloniality as an analytical lens. After briefly engaging some of the recent literature on coloniality, focusing on the epistemic dimension, the author uses the example of teaching a course on religion, culture, and theology, where he employs this analysis, to develop a new pedagogical approach as a step towards an intercultural, de-colonial theological education. The West was, and still is, the only geo-historical location that is both part of the classification of the world and the only perspective that has the privilege of possessing dominant categories of thoughts from which and where the rest of the world can be described, classified, understood and "improved." Walter Mignolo, 2005 Few of us would challenge that in too many of our [theology] classrooms the learning/teaching style privileges the values of Western Enlightenment. Gary Riebe-Estrella Overview and Introduction In recent years, thanks to many new voices of scholars on the cultural "margins," as well as in mainstream academia, the boundaries of the discourse on cultural diversity in relation to teaching and learning and the production of knowledge have expanded in many ways. These voices have resonated also in the institutions of theological higher education and have raised new challenges to the traditional ways of teaching and learning theology and religion, as well as to curricular designs and content. As a result of these new challenges, rethinking the pedagogy of teaching and learning in religion and theology, particularly in racially and culturally diverse classrooms, became the focus of many consultations, research projects, and workshops. 1 Given the growing cultural 1 Over the past decade, just to give a few examples, the Committee on Race and Ethnicity in Theological Education (CORE) of the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) and The Fund for Theological Education (FTE) held several broad consultations on this topic, which included many theological schools across the U.S. and Canada. The author participated in two of these consultations: "Strength and Strategies: A Consultation on Student and Faculty Diversity in Theological Education," March 9-11, 2006, organized by ATS and FTE, and "Enhancing Ethnic Diversity in Theological Education," March 27-29, 2009, which was organized by the Commission on Accreditation of ATS. The Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion has also organized several workshops for diverse groups of professors of religion and theology on this theme. My participation in the "Colloquy on Fostering Effective Teaching and Learning in Racially and Culturally Diverse Classroom"
Glocal Theological Education: Teaching and Learning Theology in the Light of Crisis, 2024
What are the leading considerations that should shape our approach to the formation of theological students in relation to some of the crises we face in contemporary South Africa? Who are we forming, in what contexts does formation take place, and to what end are we forming theological graduates in South Africa? This chapter presents some tentative answers to these questions. The answers emerged from a critical autoethnographic study of my development as a theological educator who has taught, and studied, theology during various moments of crisis in South Africa’s history.