Educating Clergy - Luther Seminary

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4Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Christian schools) they explicitly requested names offaculty who were known for excellence in integrative teaching for ministry. Creativeexamples of a representative sampling of these teachers are peppered throughout thebook.In introducing the study at the American Academy of Religion meetings in 2005,Charles Foster noted that this study offers a number of firsts including the firstcomprehensive study of how seminaries educate and the first to attend to the varieties ofways seminaries educate—from classroom teaching to a seminary’s culture in thebroadest sense, as well as community worship and formation, field education, and allmanner of small group and individual vocational reflection processes. With breadth offocus reminiscent of Being There, an influential ethnographic study of two Protestantseminaries and the formative power of their respective cultures 5 , Foster et. al. wantedboth to explore the relationship between teacher’s intentions and actual practices as wellas the relationship between the in-class teaching and the communal formation beyond theclassroom. The broad scope gives the book a sophistication and depth unparalleled in theliterature.Despite its ambitious aim and scope, <strong>Educating</strong> <strong>Clergy</strong> has an elegant and simplelogic to carry the reader along, unquestionably rewarding the reader with rich details andprofound insights along the way. The book is set out in four parts.The book begins with an extended exegesis of two terms in the subtitle: teachingpractices and pastoral imagination. Pastoral imagination, a term borrowed from LillyEndowment’s Vice President for Religion, Craig Dykstra, offers a way to speak about an5 Jackson W. Carroll, Barbara G. Wheeler, Daniel O. Aleshire, and Penny Long Marler, BeingThere: Culture and Formation in Two Theological Schools (New York: Oxford University Press,1997).
5integrative and improvisational capacity—“a way of seeing into and interpreting theworld”—at the heart of excellent pastoral, priestly, or rabbinic ministry. If cultivatingthis sort of imagination is the aim, Foster and company argue, then the means to achieveit lie in a notion of practice, and especially a community of practice where newperspectives, skills, habits and values develop in the context of others who share commoncommitments. 6 While proposing that theological educators largely share the goal ofcultivating excellence for ministry, they carry out this work through a quite diverse set ofpedagogical practices, both in the classroom and beyond. Yet in the midst of thisdiversity, a common framework consisting of pedagogies of interpretation, formation,contextualization, and performance seems nearly universal. They call this four-foldpattern a signature pedagogical framework—in spite of the diversity—these fourintentions are so persistently present as to be considered distinctive to teaching seminarystudents.To give greater depth, Foster et. al. take up this signature framework of fourpedagogies, spending one chapter elaborating each via vibrant examples drawn fromvarious schools participating in the study. They not only attend to how differences ofsubject matter influence teaching but also highlight here the influence of seminary cultureand tradition, a topic interwoven throughout but receiving explicit focus towards thelatter part of the book. The authors focus on practices of interpretation, formation,contextualization, and performance in clergy roles and ways of thinking, doing, and6 While they draw on familiar figures here for the most part—including Alasdair MacIntyre andPierre Bourdieu—they introduce and then make strong use of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger whohave done very important work on apprenticeship and the notion of a community of practice. Seeespecially Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Page 1 and 2: 1A Review of Charles R. Foster, Lis
Page 3: 3image of the third apprenticeship
Page 7 and 8: 7do (either practical skill develop
Page 9 and 10: 9practical reason.” 7 Foster et.
Page 11: 11writes, “enacting—sometimes a

Educating Clergy - Luther Seminary

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