This article follows the movements of educational imagination articulated by the late scholar of religious education Maria Harris to offer musings on academic leadership that attempts a decolonial turn for enduring change in theological education. With stylistic and thought experimentations, the essay identifies challenges besieging administrative…

Religious education is queer. At first, it may seem as if "queer" and "religious education" barely belong in the same sentence; however, a fresh look at the definition of queer within the current understanding of religious education reveals a deep connection. Playing on the historical question of Harrison Elliott, "Can…

Global ecological crisis calls for humanity's "ecological conversion," as well as deconversion from consumerism as a faith system. Conversion involves the imagination, which suggests an important role for visual images in religious education for ecological conversion. Yet educational proposals for deconversion from consumer culture have…

Through the story of Korean Bible Women and the South Korean #MeToo movement today, this paper explores how Korean women's innate creativity and imagination have challenged the patriarchal and hierarchical standpoints of the Korean Protestant church and society. Furthermore, this paper invites the Korean Protestant Church to confront the reality…

When the Religious Education Association (REA) was founded in 1903 in Chicago, the purpose of the organization was to explore innovative ways of envisioning, or we could say imagining, religious and moral instruction. At its first convention William Rainey Harper articulated a guiding vision for religious education that included foci on both…

Christian religious educators are charged with teaching the practice of loving as Jesus did--transforming broken relationships and enacting radical, life-giving ways of being with and for one another. Redefining some of the sensibilities of "clown ministry" of earlier decades, the author presents clowning as a critical pedagogy that…

A teaching life can be a powerful intervention into the structures of racial antagonism that shape the West, but only if we can find a way to overturn our colonial legacies and draw the dominant trajectories of Western educational institutions toward more life giving ends. A life that teaches in this racially agonistic moment must be angled in a…

Emilie Townes begins by describing her childhood growing up as a Black middle class girl headed toward womanhood in the South in the late 1950s, 60's and early 70s. Townes writes that growing up during that time filled her with a host of experiences and memories that continue to shape her today. She writes that she learned about racism from the…

This article describes six constitutive "senses" of the "Christian educator's imagination." These dispositions toward knowing, being, and doing characterize competent leadership in educational ministry. They include a sense for vocational empowerment, a sense for teaching and learning, a sense for seeking God's presence; a sense for the contours…

When people of faith participate in movements for social change, how are their religious and moral identities formed, challenged, and transformed? Although they have explicit and tangible goals as they participate in advocacy, protest, and boycotts, religious social activists also, James Jasper argues, craft "lives worth living" (1997).…

Memory and imagination, complex activities of the brain, act as the cornerstone for ritual prayer. These brain functions ground us in hope and aid in our discovery of what it means to be human at a deep level. This article explores the ritual of the Paschal Triduum, the Roman Catholic Church's highest expression of faith. It interprets the Triduum…

Twenty-five years ago the author was taking a required class in neuropsychology in which students were introduced to the amazing structure and functions of the brain. During the very last class session, exams completed, students were relaxed, and by then had enough basic information to ask interesting questions. The author ventured a question…