Theological Education

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The theological pedagogies which dominate degree-granting schools originated in the courses of study and graduate programs of the teachers. These pedagogies foster a deep rift between theology as an academic or scholarly discipline (science?) and the situations and interests of students. Students are taught to imitate what scholars do: interpreting texts, making formal arguments, and writing essays. Accordingly, theology recedes from the present and future of students including future clergy, having little to do with their religious life or career. By defining theology as scholarship, academic pedagogy obscures its primary meaning, the critical and creative thinking of the situations of life and world under the perspective of the Gospel. If theology's primary meaning is scholarly knowledge and its preoccupation with text interpretation and doctrinal exposition, the result will be to ignore religion's actual practices, especially its idolatrous tendency to literalize its own language and absolutize its institutional mediations. A pedagogy that reflects theology's primary meaning will focus on contemplation, reflection, and thinking and thus order methods, texts, and doctrines to that.

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In this essay the authors describe how four seminary educators pedagogically engage students in practices of interpretation and explore how the variations in their teaching practices shape the critical thinking they seek to cultivate in their students. The piece is excerpted from an ethnographic study of Jewish and Christian seminary educator teaching practices sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (Educating Clergy: Teaching Practices and Pastoral Imagination, Jossey-Bass Publishers, November 2005). The study explores how the classroom- and community-based teaching practices of seminary educators prepare students to integrate professional knowledge and skill with moral integrity and religious commitment in professional practice. In addition to the pedagogies of interpretation explicated here, we observed pedagogies that engage students in practices of formation, contextualization, and performance. Attention is also given in the study to the influence of pedagogies embedded in the traditions of seminary education on student learning and to the cultivation of spiritual and professional practices beyond the classroom in community worship and through strategies of field education and small groups.

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This article elucidates theoretical underpinnings for the use of one’s self in the pastoral theological classroom. The contemplative bow is developed as a capacious metaphor to describe appropriate self use and its necessary importance in the teaching and learning of pastoral arts in a theological curriculum. Central to the argument is the assumption that effective teaching and learning in pastoral care emerges from awareness and knowledge of self as well as letting go of self in beneficial service with others. Analytical engagement of educational, theological, and psychological theory informs practice for the professional school classroom.

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International seminarians seeking an education at academic institutions located in the United States often face a host of learning challenges. Seminary faculty that teach in these institutions are often confronted with a need to adjust their teaching methods to facilitate learning by international students. This essay outlines specific strategies to facilitate academic success of international seminarians by offering specific teaching methods for faculty and learning strategies for international students. Topics include training faculty in how to respond to diverse learning styles, expanding learning environments beyond the classroom, methods for enhancing student participation, and development of assignments. Strategies for student success include developing skills in how to improve note taking, critical reading, and writing.

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What are grades doing in a homiletics classroom? This article traces the function of grades through the broader history of the educational system in the United States and then makes suggestions for how grades can be used more effectively in teaching preaching. Beginning in the nineteenth century, teachers used grades to rank and motivate students, as well as communicate across institutions. With the more recent assessment movement, educators have conceptualized grading as the larger process of evaluating the success of learning objectives. The commission on accreditation for the Association of Theological Schools does not view grades as part of its assessment, but it evaluates theological schools on whether they achieve intended learning outcomes. Theological educators need to be able to evaluate whether their teaching fulfills their schools' mission and learning objectives. For homiletics, the author measures learning through pre- and post-preaching feedback and incorporates professor- and student-crafted rubrics.

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Seminary education requires that students learn a complex body of theological knowledge, engage in the practices of ministry, and develop as persons of faith and vocation. Utilizing the six aspects of significant learning experiences defined by L. Dee Fink – foundational knowledge, application, integration, the human dimension, caring, and learning how to learn – the author explores teaching practices that reframe knowing, doing, and being in seminary classrooms.

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Hugh Heclo's recent book On Thinking Institutionally (Paradigm Publishers, 2008) analyzes changes that have taken place in the past half century in how North Americans tend to think and act in institutions. The volume is receiving particular attention as it can be applied to higher education and to religious denominations, and so deserves consideration by those who teach in theology and religious studies. At an October 2009 conference, The Wabash Center hosted a lively discussion of Heclo's volume among invited religion and theology scholars, which resulted in the present compilation of four short responses to the book. What was and is clear from these responses is that while Heclo has identified a crucial issue, his analysis and prescription leave important theoretical and practical questions untouched. Indeed part of the energy around the discussion of the book flowed from the ways in which his lack of attention to social class, gender, race, and age circumscribed his ability to robustly describe and diagnose the challenge that gave rise to his book. In order to orient readers to the volume and discussion of it, the "Conversation" begins with a descriptive review of the book.

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Four faculty discuss how their institution's launching of a program to implement instructional technology across the campus influenced their teaching and broadened their understanding of student learning. Examples of their first attempts at online projects for classes in homiletics and ecclesiology are described.

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This essay explores pedagogical practices and ethical obligations in the embrace of cultural and religious diversity by a faculty team in a theological school course. Attention is given to the interplay of art and ethical dilemmas in an educational praxis that calls into question students' taken-for-granted worldviews and theologies. In the first of three sections the writers identify several assumptions they brought to the conduct of the course regarding diversity, art, and pedagogy. The second section describes student encounters with and responses to art from a variety of cultural contexts. The paper concludes with a critical reflection on ethical and political issues arising from pedagogical practices that engage students with art.

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This article emerges from the experience of incorporating doctoral students into our Contextual Education (CXE) Program at Emmanuel College (Toronto). This change, I argue, helped us to distinguish more clearly among and thus distinctly orient the different kinds of relationships and theological practices that make up our program towards the often-elusive goal of curricular integration. After outlining a definition of integration, I contextualize that definition in our particular practices at Emmanuel College using Kathryn Tanner's (1997) understanding of theology as a cultural practice as my guide. I then offer a brief overview of our CXE Programs to demonstrate how nurturing strategic partnerships within them has made certain forms of integration possible for our students. I close with some activities for practical application in other CXE contexts.

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Six years of the Cross-cultural Colloquy at Virginia Theological Seminary, located in metropolitan Washington, D.C., have alerted the two participating American teachers to some peculiarities of their own American culture, some peculiarities of the home cultures of foreign students, and the importance of the work which foreign Christian leaders must do to select and translate from their new learnings when they begin to turn their minds towards resuming responsibilities at home. We observe that this Colloquy also meets characteristic needs of non-Americans studying theology in the USA: it offers them conceptual tools and an oral forum for explaining to themselves odd aspects of American culture, emotional support during that time of adjustment, and inducements to begin formulating ways to take both curricular and extracurricular learnings and begin to apply them in the settings to which they will be returning. We commend this model for consideration by schools where foreign or minority-culture students' place in the curriculum and in the community of teachers and learners is ill-defined or remains less than satisfactory.

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Online technologies, recently embraced by seminaries to respond to changing student needs and demographics, compel practitioners to ask questions about the content, methods, and desired outcomes of teaching/learning experiences. Indeed, as Delamarter and Brunner have pointed out in this journal (2005), many seminaries have turned to these strategies only to find that the issues are not technological; rather, they are pedagogical. This article discusses the insights generated by one such teaching experiment, a hybrid course on religious education for social justice. Through this educational experiment, the professor and students discovered that the format of the hybrid course proved to be an effective means by which to promote the praxis of social justice as well as develop some of the skills essential for effective ministry and education. The article begins with the rationale of the course design and content and continues with the perspectives of the students and instructor in reflection on the experiment. It concludes with some preliminary insights into the potential usefulness of hybrid learning for both peace and justice education as well as its value in the overall formation of educators and ministers.

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This article is based on an analysis of a qualitative research case study involving three British adult educational-theological sites which were experimenting with collaborative learning. The focus of this practice-based research was listening to and observing adults engaged in collaborative learning in order to elucidate what they perceived to be some integral values inherent in this learning approach. 'Experiencing Shared Inquiry' emerged as one of the hallmarks of collaborative learning. The dynamic engagement of hearts and minds in collaborative learning harnesses the collective wisdom of God's people. Two movements are enfolded within 'Experiencing Shared Inquiry': stimulating thinking through dialogue process and drawing upon the resources of the learning community.

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In this essay the authors posit that interprofessional education is inherently "post-modern"and thus will incorporate educational priorities compatible with postmodernism, and that practical theology is the preferred method for interprofessional teaching and learning when theology and ministry are explicit participants. In advancing this argument they draw upon their experience in team teaching an interprofessional course in pastoral ministry and social work designed for students pursuing a joint degree in these two fields. They provide an overview of the contemporary postmodern context and interprofessional education as an emerging paradigm in higher education, a brief description of the major components of the joint course, and an exposition of appropriate educational priorities.

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Adult-learning theory challenges faculty to adapt their teaching to certain characteristics of adult learners, including self-direction: if adults direct the bulk of their lives outside of school, they should be permitted to direct their own educational experiences. To what extent is self-directed learning an optimal, or even realistic, methodology for seminary teaching? Does it matter what subjects we are teaching? This essay details an experiment with self-directed learning in a seminary ministry class: what worked, what might be improved, and how it challenges our view of ourselves as faculty to teach in this way. Student feedback from the course in question enhances our understanding of the best (and most challenging) features of the experiment.

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The author notes that current seminary stutipsdents show great variation in their academic skills, in their familiarity with the basics of Christianity, and in their sense of, and skill in, theological method. This condition is both caused and exacerbated by the students' acculturation in American religious privatism, which makes them resist a critical and constructive examination of their views and hinders their understanding of theology as an undertaking of and for the Church. The author describes a number of pedagogical strategies, teaching techniques, and classroom exercises that have shown some effectiveness in overcoming these problems.

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With advances in information technology, the velocity of information production on the global level has expanded as well. This acceleration has led to the delegitimizing of knowledge, the equating of information with knowledge, and the giving of predominance to information rather than knowledge. This advance has created epistemological challenges for the process of religious education. At the same time, the growth of the internet has created a "rhizomatic space" possessing new methodological characteristics that create problems for religious education. Information technology generates a "hypertextual learning space," which weakens the place of traditional texts in the learning process, particularly in a traditional religious education process. This hypertextual development is especially problematic for religious education in conservative or fundamentalist traditions. This article analyzes the epistemological, methodological, and contextual problems and challenges posed by information technology for traditional religious education processes.

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Discussions on teaching and learning within theological seminaries often center on the question of student diversity, focused primarily upon issues of race, gender, and ethnicity. At the same time that seminaries are challenged to deal with a multitude of pedagogical suppositions emerging from increasingly diverse learning goals, seminaries must also pay attention to the ways their students challenge an institution's core mission to train ministers for service in churches and denominations. Based upon the author's experience teaching in a mainline Protestant seminary, the essay discusses three student cultures that often overlap among today's seminarians. These three student cultures, referred to here as "church seminarian," "new paradigm seminarian," and "vocational seminarian," carry very different understandings of the seminary's role to prepare students for ministry. A critical discernment of these cultures might challenge seminary faculty to reevaluate their educational and missional suppositions amidst divergent student career objectives.

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This article describes a study of the theology of Karl Barth carried out by four students at Memphis Theological Seminary who used the Internet and e-mail in addition to other means for learning. Dr. Donald K. McKim taught the class and here describes the way in which the class was structured, how students used the World Wide Web, a Newsgroup in which students participated, and their use of e-mail to amplify discussion. McKim indicates the advantage of using these resources which introduced students to a "new world" of media and unique resources, linked them with others throughout the world who also had an interest in Barth, and provided an enhanced means of communication for the students with each other and with the professor. He also provides further reflections about the experience in relation to seminary teaching.

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Effective pedagogy in the capstone course or integrative seminar — a 1000 word response to a Call for Papers.

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This manuscript is an edited transcript of a panel discussion held at a Society of Biblical Literature conference (Boston, Massachusetts, November 22 to 24, 2008). Alice Hunt begins the discussion by summarizing the content and significance of a new book by Dale Martin, The Pedagogy of The Bible (Westminster John Knox Press, 2008) in which he argues that biblical studies in seminaries and divinity schools give too much emphasis to teaching the historical critical method and not enough to preparing students for ministry by teaching them to be self-reflective practioners of the improvisational skills of interpreting scripture. Then a panel of bible scholars, including the author, conduct a wide-ranging discussion that raises questions about how biblical studies might better prepare students for ministry, as well as the proper role and appropriate pedagogies for introducing biblical studies in the undergraduate liberal arts curriculum.

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A challenging intercultural teaching experience provided an opportunity for engaging embodied pedagogies that facilitated border crossings of language, age, gender, and experience. Influenced by the work of Augusto Boal, the author describes how improvisation, role-play, music, and drawing led seminary students in Mexico into sacred time and space toward relevant learning. Drawing upon the critical pedagogy of several educators yields implications for teaching theology and religion. The essay also invites readers into dialogue about how such border crossings can benefit their own teaching.

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The period 2002–2012 saw remarkable developments in multifaith education at American theological schools. Looking ahead, multifaith education in theological schools is poised to enter a new phase of broad engagement and development. This essay focuses on three aspects of the practice of multifaith education in seminaries. It first presents a brief historical overview of the initiatives and institutions that pioneered multifaith education in theological schools. It then summarizes findings from surveys, reports, and collegial gatherings about the pedagogy of multifaith education. Finally, eight questions for practitioners of multifaith education seminaries to explore in the future are offered.

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Neither advocacy nor condemnation of distance learning, this essay offers observations and critical reflection on four years' longitudinal engagement with distance learning pedagogies for formation in higher theological education. Instead, readers are invited to curiosity, communal-institutional discernment, and intense ambivalence. Theological, pedagogical, contextual, and ethical concerns are examined, as well as potential opportunities for innovation amidst age-old practical theological challenges. A moral imperative emerges for those within and outside historic faith traditions, and some plausible impacts on educational and communal life are explored, especially faculty grief.

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Seminaries across North America are continuing to expand their use of technology for theological education. This article explores eight issues surrounding the strategic planning process when it comes to technology. These have to do with the obstacles to fresh thinking, the current best practices in strategic planning processes, detailed discussions of the impact of various models of technology for theological education on faculty, Information Technology personnel, and students as well as the issues surrounding delivery system models and the issue of sustainability.

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In addition to the pragmatic concerns that often drive the use of technology in theological education, there is a need to develop theological justification and direction for online education. Several Roman Catholic Church documents propose the "divine pedagogy," the manner in which God teaches the human race, as a model for catechesis or religious education. This can provide a rich resource for developing a theological pedagogy for online education. This is especially relevant to the justification for online education, because critics sometimes refer to the incarnational character of the divine pedagogy to argue against the disembodied nature of virtual education. This article addresses such criticisms and more constructively, relates several aspects of the divine pedagogy such as adaptation, community, and participation to teaching and learning in the online environment. (This paper was presented at Theology and Pedagogy in Cyberspace II conference in Evanston, Ill. on April 17, 2004.)

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Based on results from interviews with theological educators at forty-five seminaries in North America, the author begins by listing twenty-six concerns expressed about technology in theological education, particularly the concerns about electronically mediated distance education. These concerns are categorized loosely under three headings: Practical and Personal Concerns, Pedagogical and Educational Concerns, and Philosophical and Theological Concerns. More important than the list is the sociology of decision-making surrounding technology among theological educators. In the final section of the article entitled, "how concerns about technology function within institutions," the author discusses how it is that these concerns are allowed to function in very different ways across the spectrum of theological education today.

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To increase understanding of how Master of Divinity education actually functions and to respond to accreditors' emphasis on the outcomes of learning, this paper presents a research-based model that focuses on how M.Div. education transforms students. The students-in-seminary model is conceptually undergirded by life course theory. In the model, students attending seminary engage in a messy process in which they respond to competing demands of school, church, and family. The author compares the students-in-seminary model with the dominant message model for theological education articulated by Carroll et al. (1997) and argues that the students-in-seminary model more adequately describes the process of theological education. The author calls for further research to study how seminaries promote key messages to their students, the plasticity of students' sense of calling, the impact of church requirements on M.Div. students, and the complexity of life for multiple-role students.

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Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) offer immediate, relevant feedback to professors on the teaching process as well as feedback to students on the learning process. While Classroom Assessment Techniques have been introduced, studied and analyzed in undergraduate education, application to graduate theological education has not been advanced. The author describes a recent research project that discerned faculty attitudes toward the implementation of Classroom Assessment Techniques in a seminary setting in hopes that more effective faculty development programs can be designed by implementing CATs.

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How do seminarians move from imagining ministry to embodying pastoral imagination? Stories gathered from seminarians in their final year of study show the complexity of shifting from classroom work, which foregrounds theory and intellectual imagination, to more embodied, relational, and emotionally intense engagements of ministry. Stories about learning ministry articulate a process we call the birth of pastoral imagination. New ministers test their use of knowledge acquired in classroom and books within the limits of actual ministry situations. They become overwhelmed by multiple variables in situations where they must make choices and act. These moments of action are fraught with risk and responsibility for the outcomes. Articulation and theological reflection are formative for students learning the practice of ministry. Implications for theological education include making greater “use of knowledge” in ministry practice and “use of practice” in classrooms. Points of crisis in the student stories raise additional questions about how some complications and interruptions to the “birth process” may present tragic consequences.

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This article explores a variety of personal and professional boundary issues encountered by seminary faculty. The authors contend that boundary crossing is inevitable in contemporary theological education, which is structured such that professors engage in multiple roles with students as they attend to the education of the whole person. Guidelines are reviewed for minimizing risk to students and professors. Topics include life as a community member, student-faculty friendship, and romantic relationships. Attention to work/life balance is seen as critical to the prevention of misconduct. The article ends with a call for continued conversation as well as institutional accountability and change.

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The most common paradigm of contemporary Protestant theological education for ministerial formation is that of schooling, seen in the institution of the theological seminary/college. This article notes the limitations of the schooling paradigm for educational intervention in the range of domains inherent in effective ministerial formation; recognizes that teaching and learning take different but still legitimate shape when used to describe educational processes in this context; and argues for an integrated, formational, and missional community paradigm modeled especially on the relationship of Jesus with his disciples as being both more consistent with biblical precedents and more effective educationally. The implications of this for the role of faculty of theological institutions are explored.

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This paper explores the way students learn theology through a small qualitative research project. It is undertaken in conversation with current higher education learning theory. This learning theory suggests that it is important to discover how a student conceptualizes learning and how they perceive the teaching environment. Students interviewed increasingly spoke of the value of this academic or more cognitive side of learning as they learned "deep approaches." Important in this movement to deep, transformational learning was the presence of a relational teaching environment in which peers and teachers played a crucial role. This present study offers support to the view that the tradition of the learning community remains important for deploying deep approaches to the learning of theology in higher education. The paper argues that these relational principals of teaching and learning remain important in the face of the increased use of technology-based tools and other pedagogical challenges to theological education today.

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The theological classroom is a place where dynamics of diversity and multiculturalism enter not only the understanding and interpretation of the course material, but also the very processes of teaching and learning. But how is one to learn and assess what students and professors are experiencing as cultural differences, and how is one to sort out the personal characteristics from the cultural? This essay, underscoring the importance of asking students about cultural issues, discusses a few such issues via some anecdotal data.

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The exploration described is rooted in the projects of five participants in the 2004/05 Wabash Workshop for Pre-Tenure Theological Faculty (led by Toni Craven and assisted by Daisy Machado and Steve Delamarter). All the projects related technology and pedagogy. Javier Alanís (Lutheran Seminary Program in the Southwest) wanted to use images to help his students engage various concepts of the Trinity, being sensitive all the while to an educational context marked by all kinds of diversity. Russell Haitch (Bethany Theological Seminary) was brought into the world of online teaching and found himself trying to assess its potential from the standpoints of scripture, reason, experience, and a trinitarian theological-anthropology. Mark Vitalis Hoffman (Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg) wanted to help his students experience a fresh encounter with Jesus' parables and ended up in the esoteric field of video gaming theory (ludology) for help in conceiving an environment and process interactive enough to do justice to all of the possibilities. Arun Jones (Austin Seminary) wondered how he might use historical images of mission work in India to help his students experience some of the issues surrounding intercultural ministry. Brent A. Strawn (Candler School of Theology, Emory University) had some vexing and complex concepts relating to Old Testament introduction (the nature of the interactions between biblical narratives and ancient Near Eastern texts) that required new points of access in order to be able to capture the understanding and imagination of contemporary students in his setting. Over the course of the year together (one week in June 2004, a weekend in January 2005, and a week in June 2005), participants worked on their project as all of us in the workshop explored issues of teaching and learning.

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Grading systems matter more to the teaching and learning enterprise than many teachers may realize, as demonstrated in the author's experience of adopting a new one. Different systems emphasize different values such as excellence vs. perfection, achievement vs. talent, and second chances vs. partial credit. The author relates her experiment with specifications grading, an outcome‐based, pass/fail, rubric‐based, and contractual grading system, and demonstrates its promise. She then addresses three questions her experiment raised: Should I grade at all and if so, toward what end? Exactly what am I grading when I grade? and Is there any way to lessen the sting of failure?

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For Life Abundant, the fruit of sustained reflection among systematic theologians, practical theologians, and pastors, is an important new work that deserves attention. The volume provokes creative and critical thinking about practical theology. Its contributors conceptualize the field as a disciplined practice of imagination and skill residing at the confluence of Christian tradition and living ecclesial communities, and ask what such a construal of practical theology might mean for theological education.

Given the significance of For Life Abundant, Teaching Theology and Religion asked three theological educators who are located in different regions, types of institutions and fields, to review and respond to it. Rebecca Slough describes the volume’s central questions and organization, and considers how it might contribute to the deliberations of a seminary faculty regarding a school’s curriculum. Martha Stortz shows how the process and structure of For Life Abundant are in themselves illustrative of the conceptualization of practical theology for which it argues. Kwok Pui-Lan notes the volumes strengths and goes on to probe its lacunae, particularly with regard to global, gender and multi-cultural considerations relevant to a robust construal of pastoral theology in our time.

While the authors of these three reviews and responses to the volume did not interact as they wrote them, together they comprise a conversation that should be on-going. TTR invites further responses to the volume.

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This article explores congregational studies as a valuable teaching tool for contextualizing theological education across disciplines. As a form of pedagogy, congregational studies situates learning in a particular local ministry context. In addition, such a pedagogy apprentices learners within a particular "community of practice" – namely, that of professional church leaders of various types (lay, clergy, professional educators, etc.) having the knowledge and skills that allow them to read diverse contexts of ministry and improvise appropriate and faithful strategies of action within those contexts. After describing one seminary teaching experience in which congregational studies methods formed the pedagogical framework for an interdisciplinary course on the Bible and religious education, the article puts forward a practice-based theory of adult learning to explain why congregational studies methods are particularly helpful to adult learners engaged in theological education. The article concludes by briefly addressing some problems and limitations to pedagogical processes based upon congregational studies. (The research for this article and its writing were supported by a grant from the Wabash Center for which I am deeply appreciative. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion's Academic Teaching and the Study of Religion Section.)

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This paper claims that programs in prisons are challenging the very who, where, how, and what of theological education. The author draws on research from the fields of pedagogy and prison studies, nearly a decade of experience teaching master's level seminary‐style classes in prison, and the findings of a two‐year cohort of prison educators convened by the Association of Theological Schools for their Educational Models and Practices Project. Addressing displacement as a learning strategy, classroom diversity, the use of student experience, narrative grading strategies, and classroom ritual, the author shows how the teaching strategies emerging from prison classrooms provide vibrant models for the theological academy at large.

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This essay explores the terrain of technology in theological education and offers a typology for how technology is used in seminary contexts. The author surveys 43 seminaries in North America to gain insight into the attitudes of faculty toward the use of technology in their teaching and for use in the preparation of ministers. Reflections on the typology in the concluding section offer fuel for subsequent work on the topic.

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The article explores the distinctiveness of Hispanic or Latino/a persons and implications for teaching practice in theological education. It reports on findings from a workshop for non-Hispanic faculty that was conducted at the Hispanic Summer Program in 1901. The content is broadly defined, and the context and persons of theological education are considered in addressing the particular learning characteristics that can typify Hispanic persons. The work draws upon the pioneering work of Dr. Eldin Villafañe (The Liberating Spirit) who identifies cultural distinctiveness among Hispanic persons in the United States. Suggestions related to each of those characteristics are proposed for teaching practice with the expectation that transformation in practice can foster greater inclusion of Hispanic persons in theological education.

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Theological education typically includes classroom worship, a practice of great pedagogical power and curricular import. As pedagogy, classroom worship does four things. It focuses teaching and learning on God, and fosters theological dispositions necessary for sustaining that attention. Second, it rightly positions the entire class in dialogical relation to the divine Thou, in communal relation to each other, the larger church and the wider world, and in personal relations that risk transformation. Third, it frames theological education as an integrative practice of faith and learning. Finally, it invites teachers to know their students as whole persons and students to trust their teachers as spiritual guides. As curriculum, classroom worship may have greater significance than chapel worship for many students and at particular schools. It should be moved from implicit curriculum to explicit, with careful attention to the null curriculum and to the matrices of relationship within which worship has meaning.

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This essay considers Christian theological education in South Asia highlighting pertinent issues in pedagogical content, form, method, and praxis. Debunking the notion of students as "empty bottles" to be filled, and criticizing the top-down model of education, the paper argues that theological education is an ongoing and interactive process in which students and teachers are participants who share and reflect upon each other's faith and socio-cultural experiences. Participants reject, test, negotiate, and choose – while remaining open to the variety that is embodied in different human experiences. The paper stresses the relationship between the theological college and the church and calls for mutual responsibility, respect, and accountability. In an increasingly communal and fundamentalist atmosphere that poses a threat to multi-culturalism, the role of the laity in shaping theological education is highlighted and public debate is encouraged. The paper calls for interactive and dialogic learning. A version of this paper was published in Ministerial Formation 100 (2003): 5–16.

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Over the past fifteen years in New Zealand, theology has come in from the tertiary educational cold in various ways. One of the results or reasons for this has been willingness on the part of the state to accredit and provide funding for theological education and research. This has taken place largely through a compliance system of accreditation and resource allocation. The result has been academic recognition and a precarious financial boon for theology and some theological institutions and their students. But little attention has been paid to the epistemological and pedagogical temptations of compliance. Drawing on the recent experience of the writer, this article seeks to identify a number of the subtle temptations posed by state sponsored theological education and research.

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Of what significance to theological education is critical reflection? Representing an influential perspective, Charles Wood seems to ascribe to critical reflection the highest priority by defining theology as "critical reflection upon the validity of the Christian witness." This article argues that such a perspective devalues participatory modes of knowing. In contrast, the scientific epistemology of Michael Polanyi better illumines the pedagogical nature and theological orientation of theological education. Specifically, his notion of "indwelling" serves as a point of integration by which participative knowing is extended and intensified by the clarificatory power of critical reflection.

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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.