As a promising direction for the future of theological education, Competency-Based Theological Education (CBTE) has been both enthusiastically and critically received. While still early in its development and recognition, several accreditors, churches, agencies, and their seminaries have begun to embrace CBTE in the hopes of a brighter future for…

Practices and strategies for sustaining resilient spiritual leadership are critical in this time of climate crisis. Learnings from participants in the Seminary of the Wild eco-ministry certification program offer guidance for engaging in practices of education and formation that can help people of faith meet the challenges of these times and…

This article is about the death of a graduate school for spiritual formation and theological education. I ask what the death of this school can teach us about teaching theology and religion for the sake of student transformation and more loving pedagogies. I also ask how, when an institution dies, it can die beautifully. The underlying thesis of…

Hindu sacred scriptures are a rich interweave of cosmological revelation that is embedded in melopoeia (melodic poetry) and sung in designated meters during rituals, liturgical services, festivals, and personal prayers. Revelation is conveyed through enigmatic dialogues, debates, parables, anecdotes, legends, and narratives. These occur between…

Theological education faces the task of forming leaders and scholars with the capacity for personal and social transformation. This effort requires a deeper understanding of habit formation as both problem and potential. Utilizing the example of how racism functions through embodied habits, this article emphasizes bodily awareness and repeated…

This article considers how the practice of "ungrading" in the homiletics classroom can function not merely as a pedagogical technique, but as a theo-ethical practice. Grounding ungrading in theological ethics in addition to critical pedagogical theory can lead us toward a pedagogical practice that builds anti-racist and decolonial spaces…

Do religious educators as administrators make for better agents of change? As more religious educators come into administrative positions in theological higher education, this article probes the religious educator and change. The article begins by examining religious education and its aims. It then offers different change theories and subsequently…

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…

Much knowledge production, both academic and non-academic, is driven by a need to simplify the world in order to enable people to navigate the complexities of everyday life. Such simplifications not only risk offering less reliable representations of the world, they can also turn into disruptive and harmful images of the world. In this article,…

Drawing on the work of prominent atheists and theists, this article argues that any genuinely comprehensive vision of education should include space on the curriculum for subjects such as Theology. Theology is an example of a subject which pushes questioning to infinity, thereby allowing for insight, potential discovery and wonder. The article…

I have the rewarding experience of being an administrator operating out of a denominational leadership role in Christian education. I have served in this role concurrently for over a decade as a full-time professor of Christian education at a seminary. In this autobiographical reflection, I discuss how I define my roles in the church and academy…

Drawing from research in the field of higher education more broadly, this article describes how graduate theological education continues to experience a seismic shift. The in-person, residential college experience is no longer the only option for students today, and many are gravitating toward taking courses and programs online. However, there is…

Perceptions about remote theological education inevitably cluster around questions of embodiment, community, and unity. The letters of the apostle Paul have quite a bit to say about these themes. This essay examines Paul's treatment of distance in the formation and education of Christians, focused around the image of the "body of Christ"…

Environmental justice, a phrase first used in reference to the activism of a community in Warren County, NC in the late 1970s, is a broad category of work at the intersection of caring for nature and caring for people. Residents of the majority black county sought relief from the impending designation of a landfill site in the county as a dumping…

This chapter provides insight into the challenges facing higher education and provides a rationale for redesign along with effective strategies and management approaches, based upon the case study experience of Winebrenner Theological Seminary in Findlay, Ohio.