teaching contexts

At a gathering of theological school deans one activity had the deans share the job descriptions from each of their schools. This group of deans was from a variety of contexts: different geographic regions, various denominations, free-standing and university-embedded schools, and from large and small institutions. After comparing their documents ...

Readers, you should close this page right now and not heed another word I say about teaching. The past couple of weeks – despite the fact that one of those weeks was our winter break – I’ve been so utterly preoccupied with a motley collection of issues that I honestly haven’...

The faculty at Western Theological Seminary (WTS) in Holland, MI recently invested itself in Willie James Jennings’ book, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale University Press, 2010). Three faculty members were invited to take up Jennings' claim and call, and to generate a conversation in terms of ...

We all know that our students’ social and religious contexts shape the way they understand the Bible – in theory, at least. But how do we bring that knowledge into the classroom? This question is particularly acute in a diverse theological seminary. With just over one hundred students, Lancaster Theological Seminary ...

When some members of the first Deans Colloquy group were together this past January, we spent a part of one day reviewing basic principles of systems theory. Two themes, in particular, that we discussed brought new clarity to my work in this season of deep change in my school: 1) cultures ...