A theological school's international students contribute to and are constitutive of its diversity. Yet while research on diversity in theological education is flourishing, the peda-
Second, I shall identify two generic styles of theological reflection papers, the pastoral reflection paper and the systematic reflection paper. Third, I shall follow a student writer's process of writing a pastoral reflection paper and constructing a theology as she writes. Finally, I shall propose a pedagogical bridge to help students move from writing pastoral reflection papers in a personal voice to writing systematic reflection papers in an academic voice, as well as offer some concluding reflections on teaching theological reflection by reflecting on writing as a theological practice. Teaching Theological Reflection Well: Pedagogical PremisesIn order to teach theological reflection well, it is necessary to teach students how to write it well. That is the fundamental premise of this essay, and it flows from five constitutive presuppositions.• First, theology is a spoken and written language that is, in the words of Rowan Williams (1995, 313), "used by a specific group of people to make sense of their world," and theological reflection is one of its dialects.• Second, theological reflection helps those who engage in it "to make sense of their world" through the disciplined and creative exercise of the theological imagination -by which I mean our active minds thinking, questioning, constructing, critiquing, speaking, and writing in the conceptual language of theologyin dialogue with our individual and communal experience.• Third, in order to write theological reflection well, it is necessary, as Thomas Merton wrote when he was a theological student, "to work out a theology as we go" or, as we write ("It is very difficult to write theology well. . . . I don't know precisely what I mean Abstract. In order to teach theological reflection well, it is necessary to teach students how to write it well. This paper probes the writing of theological reflection as a rhetorical process and a theological practice by (1) situating theological reflection broadly within a "correlation" model, adapted for theological writers; (2) identifying two "generic" styles of theological reflection papers, the pastoral reflection paper and the systematic reflection paper; (3) following a writer's progress as she writes a one-page pastoral reflection paper and constructs a working theology in the process of writing it. In conclusion, the correlation-based "Reflecting on Paper" process provides a pedagogical bridge between the writing and teaching of "pastoral" and "systematic" theological reflection, and exemplifies the dynamic interplay between teaching theological reflection and reflecting on writing as a theological practice."Genuine theology," write Patricia O'Connell Killen and John deBeer, "is the fruit of a dynamic process of reflection" (Killen and deBeer 1994, 9). However, theological reflection that is written is also the result of a disciplined process of writing, and these integrated processes conspire to render the writing of theological reflection a theological practice (Yaghjian 1997, 39-68). Yet while much has been written...
Mentoring is an important but often overlooked resource in theological education and students' academic and spiritual formation. This essay profiles the mentoring practices and postures of the writing tutor and the spiritual director as exemplars of academic and spiritual mentoring. An extended probe of this analogy affirms the integration of academic and spiritual formation as a core value in theological education; identifies mentoring in theological education as a hidden treasure fostering this integration and warranting attention as a theological practice; and re-envisions the theological practice of mentoring under the traditional rubric of the "care of souls," embracing the relational, educational, formational, spiritual, and rhetorical dimensions of this practice.Two conversations are going on in the school where you teach, and perhaps in your own office. 1In the first conversation, a writing tutor and a student sit at a round table, upon which sit a stack of 8 1 /2 ¥ 11 typescript pages, two ball point pens, and a yellow pad of "Post-Its." The writing tutor scans the pages, one by one, as the student reads from the paper. After reading the first few pages, the student turns to the tutor, and says, "I really struggled with this paper. How does it sound so far?"In the second conversation, a spiritual director sits across from the same student in a small sitting room. Next to them is a coffee table on which are placed a flickering votive candle, a Bible, and an icon of Rublev's "Trinity." The spiritual director asks, "How is it going?" The student replies, "I just finished writing the first draft of a theology paper, and the writing tutor really liked it! But lately when I try to pray, I draw a blank. Where is the God who led me here in the first place?" 1 I wish to thank Tom Pearson, Patricia Killen, Gene Gallagher, my SOTL Colloquy colleagues Beth Corrie and Arch Wong, and the peer reviewers of this essay for their astute and insightful critiques. Thanks also to Underlying PremisesThe following premises inform this essay. First, analogy is a way of knowing through which we discern similarities and discover relationships between previously unrelated things. Anne Berthoff explains, "Analogy is the principal means of articulating relationships and thus of forming concepts" (1978, 138), and David Tracy observes, "[E]ach of us understands each other through analogies or not at all" (1981, 451). This essay asserts an analogy between the writing tutor and the spiritual director as mentors and curators of souls within their own contexts, and -in light of that analogy -argues for the importance of mentoring in theological education and for the integration of academic and spiritual mentoring within that context.Second, mentoring is a cross-disciplinary, professional practice, defined broadly as "a relationship and a set of processes where one person offers help, guidance, advice, and support to facilitate the learning or development of another person" (Lewis 2000, 14). It is characterized by a one-to-one relationship...
As a professor of literature whose primary premise for that profession is D.S. Savage's conviction that "the word has meaning only in relationship to the Word," I have found Frank Kermode's recent preoccupations with the relationship of biblical modes to secular literary genres (The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, Oxford, 1966) and to current theories of interpretation, or hermeneutics (The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1979) both encouraging and disappointing. What has encouraged me I would like to acknowledge briefly in a.preliminary assessment of Kermode's contribution to the narrowing of the gap between "Christian" and "secular" critics of literature; what I have found disappointing prompts the argument of this paper.While Kermode would ultimately "set the word against the word" both in his theory of fiction and in his theory of interpretation, arguing that the forms of fiction give the lie to the reality they reflect and the interpretation of narrative is doomed from the first by the impenetrable secrecy of the text, the Christian critic and interpreter of fiction must begin from a different premise.That premise is that interpretation of the story--or discovery of its "sense of an ending"--cannot happen before resurrection, or before the story has first collapsed on all fronts, b~en crucified, dead, and buried but finally raised from disintegration into coherence by the "co-inherence" of that which "seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us" as interpreters.Let me elaborate my metaphors briefly before moving on to more specific considerations of Kermode's critical and hermeneutical Essay / 64 by guest on July 28, 2015 cal.sagepub.com Downloaded from
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