Resources

The authors developed and co-taught a course on Korean indigenous spiritualities designed primarily for Korean Christians to reflect on whether such spiritualities might hold resources for their religious lives. Engaging students directly with the spiritual practices, texts, and representatives of the traditions, the course encouraged students to voice their understandings of these traditions on their own terms, and the extent to which they might hold resources for Korean Christianity. Starting each class session with pair discussions (in Korean, if desired), and then sharing the pair responses with the larger class for fuller discussion gradually developed intracultural interreligious openness to the Korean indigenous heritage. Two non-Korean students brought “outsider” questions and responses to the conversation. Students reported that the learning experience was successful and valuable.

Many theological schools use short term travel as a way to foster interfaith education. Due to their experiential, holistic, and intense nature, travel seminars focused on the promotion of interfaith learning can shape a future religious leader's outlook on religious communities across the course of her entire career. In this article I explore the pedagogical dimensions of travel seminars as a tool for interfaith education through the lens of a travel seminar to Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories.

Seminary education is adjusting to the global realities of inter-religious encounter. An increasingly important element of equipping seminarians must be the ability to embrace two dimensions of mature faith; (1) deep convictions related to their own faith, and (2) genuine civility in their engagement with others. The practice of convicted civility is best learned experientially through participative assignments and close contact with people of other faiths. The article explores an approach by which students are encouraged to develop the capacity and skills to both address the faith issues that divide us and to respond to social issues that require the exercise of civility to live together peacefully. The experience of Fuller Seminary, an evangelical, multidenominational, and multiethnic institution provides a context for educating seminarians for convicted civility in a multifaith world.

This essay argues, as its title suggests, that learning that is both comparative and theological can be an ordinary – possible, beneficial, even necessary – part of theological education and, like other fields of study, may be incorporated in the curriculum in ways that meet practical curricular needs. Once the professor has undertaken the initial, minimal learning, teaching comparatively can become a natural and integral part of any seminary course. The study of the other is not exotic or in a class by itself; if we can study our own religious tradition today, we can study others as well. The thesis is argued in several parts: (1) interreligious diversity is integral to the context of contemporary faith; (2) comparative theology engages diversity in an intentionally theological way and needs to be distinguished from other disciplines; (3) a comparative theological approach aids in the process of ensuring that attention to diversity is integral to theological education; (4) teaching comparative theology is not different from teaching other forms of theology. None of this, I suggest, requires a liberal or pluralist theological starting point.

This reflection offers a glimpse into a Masters' level practical theology course in “wisdom formation” for its potential implications and contributions in multifaith education. Instigated by an unexpected companionship between the two instructors – an eighth-generation rabbi, leader of CLAL (the Center for Learning and Leadership) and a Presbyterian practical theologian in a free-standing United Methodist seminary – this elective course was developed for Christian and Jewish ministry students, though it eventually evolved into a required Masters of Divinity course in theologies of religious pluralism and interreligious/intercultural encounter. The course's structure and implementation are described, followed by difficulties faced and potential implications for multifaith education, specifically those in disciplinary formation, institutional stewardship, and the diverse contexts and questions for teaching and learning.

Twitter offers an engaging way to introduce students to reader-oriented interpretation of the Bible. The exercise described here introduces students to the idea that the reader has a role in the production of a text's meaning, which thus varies from reader to reader. Twitter enables us to capture the real-time thoughts of a variety of respondents to the text of Mark as it is read aloud. Students can concretely observe the effects of particular textual moments on individual respondents as well as analyze their general interpretive stances with regard to the text as a whole. Students come to grasp that the meaning of the text varies depending on the reader, setting the stage for more complex theoretical discussion of reader-response theory, the reader's role in the production of meaning, the adjudication of “allowed” and “disallowed” interpretations, and the appropriateness of “reader-response” criticisms for texts that were composed to be encountered orally.

Scholars have identified the many stories in the Bible that are oppressive to women or other minoritized groups. It is remarkable how common it is that North American undergraduate students remain blind to the oppression that is depicted and that is too often the result of commonly accepted interpretations of these texts. Three brief essays collected here, originally presented as part of a panel at the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting (Atlanta, 2010), present various teaching strategies for exposing the oppressive elements in the biblical text and showing how the oppression operates (an aspect of ideological criticism). What are good strategies for communicating these hard points to students in a way they can hear them and work with them? Why is this important to do?

The three short essays collected in this manuscript respond to Patricia O'Connell Killen and Eugene V. Gallagher's “Sketching the Contours in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion,” published in issue 16, no. 2 of this journal (2013). See additional responses by Charles R. Foster, Stephen Brookfield, and Pat Hutchings published in Teaching Theology and Religion

In this article I propose a method of selecting and assigning readings in the religious studies or theology classroom, such that these readings complicate one another, rather than standing in opposition or as simple alternatives. Such a strategy emulates key pedagogical insights of twelfth-century sentence collection, an activity at the very heart of the earliest universities in Europe. It also draws support from the theories of intellectual development advanced by William G. Perry, Jr. and the Women's Ways of Knowing Collaborative. Both precedents suggest a principle of “complicating views” that can be flexibly employed in a variety of ways and diverse pedagogical contexts, as illustrated by examples from several classes. Such strategies aim to avoid reinforcing intellectual patterns of dualism or undifferentiated relativism; instead, they attempt to promote students' ability to integrate discordant voices and to appreciate diverse points of view, while also staking their own claims relative to them.

Mentoring is an important but often overlooked resource in theological education and students' academic and spiritual formation. This essay profiles the mentoring practices and postures of the writing tutor and the spiritual director as exemplars of academic and spiritual mentoring. An extended probe of this analogy affirms the integration of academic and spiritual formation as a core value in theological education; identifies mentoring in theological education as a hidden treasure fostering this integration and warranting attention as a theological practice; and re-envisions the theological practice of mentoring under the traditional rubric of the “care of souls,” embracing the relational, educational, formational, spiritual, and rhetorical dimensions of this practice.