Hidden Treasures in Theological Education: The Writing Tutor, the Spiritual Director, and Practices of Academic and Spiritual Mentoring

Abstract

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...