Resources

Biblical texts have been handed on to us through a long history of interpretation. Awareness of this rich but complex process is one of the goals of biblical teaching. Since the earliest centuries of the church there has been a parallel history of artistic interaction with the biblical text. These artistic treatments of biblical subjects have had a great cultural impact and have deeply influenced public perceptions and understandings of the Bible. Unfortunately, seldom does this history of artistic interpretation become a part of Bible courses. In this paper, I reflect on learnings from a serious effort to take artistic resources and methodologies into account in teaching Hebrew Bible in a theological school. My most successful efforts have employed the ancient Jewish interpretive method of midrash. Use of midrash opens new, imaginative possibilities that can enliven and extend our usual exegesis of texts. More specifically, midrash provides the ideal category for understanding artistic interactions with biblical texts. Through midrash students can understand artists to be both profound respecters of the power and integrity of biblical texts, while at the same time extending and entering into imaginative encounter with those texts. This article will appear as a chapter in the forthcoming book Arts, Theology, and the Church: New Intersections.

Teaching bioethics might be likened to a rollercoaster ride of twists, turns, and dips that invite teachers and students to experience something of their own edges of fear and comfort. Here the author provides readers with a glimpse into her distinctive approach to teaching bioethics that encourages students to move beyond boundaries of personal comfort zones by willfully transgressing traditional or comfortable boundaries. The essay describes how this is accomplished through a variety of methods – provocative readings, classroom discussion, student response papers, and student ethics committees. The author contends that teaching bioethics ought to include critical pedagogical methods and an alertness for real-life intersections of science and ethics. Teaching bioethics can be a subversive activity that encourages students and teachers to engage in making life morally livable.

Like religious studies, Jewish studies is an academic exploration of literature, ritual, history, philosophy, and experience across disciplinary boundaries. As with all area studies, Jewish studies balances itself – often precariously – as a bridge across that range of methodological options. The breadth of theories employed by each has complicated the teaching of an upper level seminar in Jewish studies. Conceived as a cross between a parade of scholars course and a senior capstone experience, the class employed the broad thematic principle of "identity." In doing so, it exposed the biases of the students, the subject, and the instructor.

When it came time to reevaluate and restructure the introductory year in Christian history and theology, I decided to use a roundtable of student consultants to help me in that work. Our research and reflection focused on the impact of postmodern thinking and learning, feedback from pastors in ministry, a desire to bring appropriate praxis into academically focused courses, and a hope to make greater use of technology. This article discusses the consultative process and sketches out key learnings from student research. Concluding reflections focus on technology, a topical, praxis-oriented approach to teaching, the process of utilizing student advisors, and personal, internal changes that resulted from the project.

In the past decade, critical scholars such as Ronald Grimes and Talal Asad stated that there is a need to recognize the cultural and spiritual dimensions of religion, especially in an age of pluralism. While they call for an increased knowledge and application of techniques from anthropology, ethnology, and performance studies, what actually happens when one teaches from this perspective? As a religious scholar with training in dance anthropology, I created a class on World Religions that was based on these principles. Taught at interfaith and ecumenical seminaries, as well as a California university, the results were interesting, varied, and insightful. This paper discusses the problems, questions, and positive results of these classes, offering a base model for teaching religion in a multicultural, pluralistic age.

In this essay I reflect on my experience thus far of teaching Islam as a non-Muslim at Metropolitan State University and at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. I begin by narrating a conversation about conversion that I had with one of my Muslim students. Then I introduce the theme of multiplicity as a way of being, teaching, and learning. The third section illustrates the theme of multiplicity pedagogically with reference to institutional identity, choice of textbooks, topical organization of the course, the "mosque visit" assignment, and class composition and student roles in the classroom. I conclude in the fourth section with personal reflections on multiplicity in relation to credibility and identity, politics and transformation. The essay was inspired by my realization that I embody multiple religious identities, and that one of my purposes is to build community inside and outside the classroom in an effort not only to transcend the tendency of our culture to adopt an essentialist view of Islam as suspect and alien, but also to recover Islam as a universal religion and to consider its agenda for world transformation alongside those of other religions.

This article presents findings from an empirical study exploring student and teacher perspectives on positive learning experiences in practical theological education. Forty-five students and twenty teachers were interviewed in focus groups in four educational institutions delivering programs in practical theology. The findings indicated that students valued practical theological education when it enabled them to think critically in relation to their personal or professional experience, and that students valued tutors, their peers and a flexible curriculum design in promoting this kind of learning. There was a high correlation between students' views of positive learning experiences and what tutors perceived as important qualities that they hoped their students would develop. Difficulties associated with the students' lack of clarity about the learning process and the tensions between academic and professional contexts are also discussed.

In response to our increasingly global and multicultural world, undergraduate degree plans have come to include courses, which meet the Diversity requirement. While diversity may have a variety of definitions, clearly the educational institution believes that all students earning a degree should complete course work that exposes them to cultures not their own. Courses that fulfill Diversity requirements often include "Introduction to World Religions," among others. Even a traditional-style teaching of such a course will accomplish a certain degree of broadening of students' perspectives. The risk, however, is that at the end of the course the students are simply better informed about sets of people whom they would still objectify as the other. This article describes an experiential method of teaching which enables students to begin to change their consciousness, as well as their body of information, by learning to experience the other as self. The author calls this the identification/participation method.

Reflective and meditative practices, whether Eastern or Western, are being taught in multiple places – retreat houses, hospitals, Zen centers – but are rarely included in the theology classroom. What would be the rationale for inclusion of reflective/meditative practices in a theology curriculum that does not include such a theory/praxis course? What might a mystical tradition/reflective practice course look like? The author first explores the implications of a three-semester pilot program – using guided imagery, spiritual journaling, iconography, and centering prayer – that was conducted with volunteers outside the classroom. Then, based on the experimental project, the author describes a course that blends global traditions with the best of the practices. The author concludes with an evaluation of the reflective/meditative practices and the praxis-inclusive course in terms of possible long-term effects on the personal development of the participants and the ministry of teaching and learning itself.

This essay seeks to illumine the teaching and learning of the practice of forgiveness by relating a range of theoretical perspectives (theological, psychological, and socio-cultural) to the process of cultivating the practical wisdom needed for forgiveness. We discuss how a Trinitarian "epistemology of the cross" might lead one to a new way of perceiving life's constraints and possibilities and relate this theological epistemology to three psychological approaches for understanding forgiveness – a narrative approach, object-relations theory, and consciousness development theory. Our discussion of these theoretical perspectives is explicitly related to the practice of teaching and learning forgiveness, outlining learning activities we have used in a course we taught (which ranged from case studies and film to lectures and discussions based on close readings of biblical and theological texts) and reporting highlights in our students' work.