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This chapter explores some pedagogical challenges, responses to, and strategies for the inclusion of African and African American cultural perspectives into the required core curriculum courses at a graduate theological seminary. This chapter represents the author's longstanding personal interest in African and African American religions and cultures — an interest that was deepened through participation in the workshop “Mining the Motherlode of African American Religious Life”. This personal commitment is used to develop seminary courses that draw on African American religious life. In the teaching context, part of the challenge of rethinking the core curriculum lies in the particular nature of theological education.

This chapter frames the pedagogical issues surrounding teaching Confucianism in Christian contexts through the thematic lens of the “challenge of otherness.” Including Confucianism in the enterprise of Christian theological education helps identify numerous points of resonance between Confucian and Christian cultures. Interactions between Christian students from East Asian backgrounds and non‐Asian backgrounds can be enhanced by a shared curricular focus on Confucianism, especially through a collective consideration of whether and how Confucianism is a “religion.” Such “interreligious learning” has two distinct goals: understanding the “other” religion well and accurately and engaging in critical theological reflection on one's own spiritual location.

This chapter recounts the development of a Baptist community in Zimbabwe, founded by Southern Baptist missionaries from the United States. Missionaries built religious institutions to support extensive denominational work: a theological seminary, a hospital, a media center, bookstores, and schools. Following Zimbabwe’s formation out of formerly white-ruled southern Rhodesia, the Southern Baptists began to hand over the work to local leaders and began to reduce subsidies for the mission-founded institutions. Most have declined or disbanded, but Zimbabwean Baptists have struggled to sustain theological education. Debates ensued over the meaning of partnership and the problem of dependency, and a significant tension has grown in the cross-cultural relationship between the Zimbabwean and the Southern Baptist churches.

This chapter prepares the stage for reading Kierkegaard in context by presenting a biographical overview of his religious upbringing and theological education, the major intellectual influences and events in his life, and the nature and phrases of his writings as they unfolded in the historical and intellectual milieu of his time. It explores a tendency of some people to localize Kierkegaard by emphasizing the Danish context of his authorship. The chapter suggests that his writings should be viewed in the broader arena of European intellectual and sociopolitical developments in the first half of the 19th century.

During his tenure as president of Morehouse College, Mays constantly recited to his students a poem titled “God's Minute.” He consistently encouraged his students to use time wisely because time was fleeting. Throughout the 1950s, Mays used his own “minute” to promote his Christian vision of American society and continued to build the institutional infrastructure of theological education for the black clergy.

This chapter considers mediating theology (Vermittlungstheologie), which dominated university theology in the mid-nineteenth century. It explores the work of K. R. Hagenbach (1801–74), whose textbooks were among the most widely read theological books across Europe and North America, constituting an invaluable resource in the history of modern theology. Hagenbach developed Schleiermacher’s ideas, it is argued, and, through his standard and extraordinarily influential introduction to the study of theology—which went through twelve editions between 1833 and 1889 and was translated into multiple languages—propagated a long-standing form of mild or moderate theological historicism across multiple generations. Mediating theology thus found its theoretical and pedagogical footings as a centrist school inclined to harmonize differences among Protestant groups and resolve tensions between liberalism and orthodoxy, speculation and history. Hagenbach’s international and transatlantic success quelled speculative theology’s advance and represented the epitome of the modern project of theology as science after Schleiermacher.

This chapter reviews the book Religious Education in Thirteenth-Century England: The Creed and Articles of Faith (2015), by Andrew Reeves. The book explores how the church ensured that laymen and women in the thirteenth century acquired at least a basic understanding of the doctrines of the Christian religion as exemplified in the Apostles Creed and Articles of Faith. In particular, Reeves examines the nature and extent of the transmission of the theological education developed in the Schools, particularly of Paris, to local parish priests and to their parishioners in the thirteenth century. The focus is on the period between the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 and 1281. The author also highlights the emphasis placed by thirteenth-century pastoral care on sin and its remedies.

This chapter looks at current literature that reveals a correlation between high participation in consumerism and low levels of civic engagement. One pedagogical strategy is highlighted, the Ascetic Withdrawal Project, as a way of addressing this trend in the classroom. Combined with other assignments with the course design that deepen students’ understanding of particular global issues and encourage them to apply this knowledge by teaching it to others, the Ascetic Withdrawal Project helps students make connections between personal choices and their global impact, overcoming “civic schizophrenia.” This, it is argued, is a critical first step in learning civic engagement. This project is then placed within the context of theological education, and the role this type of assignment can play in training students for civic engagement as persons of faith is suggested.

Reflecting on her research into the Open Door Community in Atlanta as well as her work as a theological educator in a women’s prison, McBride shows how discipleship precedes scholarship in the formulation and writing of lived theology. “Participation in the incarnate word,” she says, “takes precedence over the written word, with writing becoming a manifestation of, but not a substitute for, active discipleship.” The chapter explores this privileging of active engagement over traditional academic argument and the productive tension between active engagement and theological production bound to the demands of the academy. The author considers the question, is there a manner in which constructive academic theology may, with integrity, be understood as “discipleship,” and, if so, what are the characteristics of that theology?