Educating Clergy - Luther Seminary

8concern for the way clergy and congregations impact persons and the public. It is amongthe most compelling writing available about what sorts of clergy education actually leadto clergy excellence in pubic ministry.The book surely has shortcomings, yet to point some of them out only makesclear how very much this study gets right. First, the constraints of the studyunfortunately limited the duration of their site visits—two and a half to three days barelyallow for a more complex picture to emerge, especially when so much evidence is basedon self-reporting either through survey, interview, or focus groups. Similarly, as theythemselves note, much clergy education takes place outside the bounds of accreditedgraduate theological schools and to have some attention to formation through thosealternative channels would have given an important counterpoint. Lastly, while theymake good use of a developmental model of learning skillful action so obviously relevantto a practice model in discussing pedagogies of performance, they miss an opportunity tofully press such embodied cognition back through all the pedagogies. For the reader whohas eyes to see, such an implication is clearly present, and especially in the conclusionswhere the most important contributions of the book are highlighted.Getting the Epistemology RightTo this reader, the most significant aspect of the study for clergy education (andas well the professions generally) lies in the way Foster et. al. fundamentally discredit thetraditional theory/application model so influential in the academy, the professionalschools generally, and seminary education specifically. Following William Sullivan’slead, they believe what is needed is something like phronesis, that is, an “epistemology of