To increase the alignment between the lives of ministers serving congregations and what seminary professors think that congregational ministry is like, this study used qualitative methods to examine the themes voiced by seminary professors and graduates in ministry at five Protestant seminaries in the United States. There was some agreement about…

The Seminary to Early Ministry (SEM) Study is a mixed-method, prospective study designed to provide high-quality empirical data on student formation in theological education. The study will use a series of surveys and in-depth interviews to track three cohorts of divinity school students from matriculation into the early years of their careers. As…

Purpose: The Catholic Church expects theological institutes, priests and seminarians to be well-informed, critical and creative users of information and communications technology. Currently, most theological institutes use the traditional face-to-face teaching method. An attempt to implement blended learning as an innovative teaching and learning…

This paper uses a critical pedagogical lens for evaluating North American theological education within Black and Brown communities. A Latin American epistemology, exemplified in Freire's (2000) concept of "conscientização," is highlighted throughout. Four major pedagogical themes from Latin American Liberation Theology are applied to…

This article discusses the major findings of the Interreligious Education an Pedagogy Project report and the primary pedagogical issues raised in the subsequent book "Experiments in Empathy for our Time." It lifts up up the trends, opportunities, issues, and challenges in interreligious education. Schools developing initiatives in…

This essay offers a glimpse into what is possible when religious educators traverse the walls of the justice system and work with students-incarcerated to curate spaces of hope, grace, and transformation in prison. Herein I present both a dream and a challenge to the future of religious education to live into a life-saving mission to offer the…

This article begins with a brief autobiographical depiction of my religious education. It then charts the ways in which the inadequacies of that religious education caused me to treat my family's traditional religious expressions with suspicion rather than appreciation, undergirding coloniality as a phenomenon within my religious education.…

This study addresses current trends in theological higher education by proposing a potentially viable mechanism for institutional reform, namely the Montessori method. Although Maria Montessori is widely known as an early childhood educator, this study suggests that her approach aligns quite well with the telos of theological education, the…

The study analyzed the current English language teaching/learning materials in line with the academic and professional needs and interests of diploma theology students. The study was a descriptive survey that made use of a mixed-method approach. Thus, the researcher employed convergent parallel mixed method design. The data were collected using a…

This study was conducted in order to fill an existing gap within the field of religious education, specifically regarding standardisation within evangelical education aimed at teaching the youth within the church. There is currently no standardisation of education between sects nor within individual sects of evangelical Christianity, and this…

This study addresses the need for research pertaining to the use of self-directed learning in educators' professional development (Merriam et al., 2007; Wagner, 2011; Zepeda et al., 2014). In satisfying this need, this study examined the experiences of educators within the Seminaries and Institutes of Religion (S&I) program with a form of…

This article reflects on the experience of teaching a course called "Sacred Sound in World Religions" at Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA. I claim that the nature of music and music-making has profound implications for teaching and pedagogical theory in an interreligious setting. Drawing upon scholars including Lisa M. Hess,…

Background: Assessment of students for ministerial practice is traditionally performed through assignments and oral examinations, which often only concentrate on the knowledge component and outcomes of the programme. Assessing students in this way lead to a view of religious practitioners as people who are not really in touch with their…

This essay touches upon the challenge of education in theological seminaries. It scrutinizes the relevance of theological education to practical ministry in the interreligious context of our world. It proposes that such a theoretical preparation of students for serving in such a world on the theoretical level of education is very necessary,…

In the first national teacher training school in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), founded by the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, pedagogy was a compulsory teaching subject. The official school report from 1888 stated that there were three books in use for teaching and learning pedagogical subjects, all by the same author from Croatia. Pedagogy was being…