Charles R. Foster

The Scholarship of Teaching in Theology and Religion: A Wabash Center Advisory Committee Conversation

The article is a reflection on what I perceive to be a confusion about the relation between theoretical judgments and judgments of pedagogical efficacy. My interest in the issue originated with my own confusion over persistent student resistance to certain assigned texts that I had initially felt confident would prove valuable in the classroom. The essay unfolds in three segments. In the first, I recount how this concern about the relation between theoretical judgments and judgments of pedagogical efficacy evolved out of my own teaching. I next list three tentative conclusions about the correlation or lack of correlation between theoretical judgments and judgments of pedagogical efficacy. In the concluding segment, I call for concerted resistance to the tendency of pure rationality to colonize the aesthetic and dramatic components of experience so essential to transformative teaching and learning.

Religious Education at the Edge of History.

Abstract This article suggests that religious education discourse in the future must be multilingual if it is to prepare people to participate in a postmodern world of religious diversity and secularism. Five “languages” are suggested, including those native to the religious education of particular religious communities, the language of interreligious education, the language of public religious education, a postreligion religious education language, and the language of academic religious education.

WHERE SHALL WE SIT? THE VOCATIONAL CONVERSATIONS OF A RELIGIOUS EDUCATOR

Looking back on his vocational journey, the author explores three “conversations” among academic and local church religious educators originating in teaching practice that culminate in a discussion of religious education as a field of study. These conversations focus attention on teaching in the transformation of persons and communities, on community as context and agency of teaching, and on public life as the setting for teaching to live responsibly into the providential intent of God. From this perspective religious education is described as an inherently theological practice emerging from the engagement of teachers and students in faith communities at the edges of our collective ignorance of the “intent of God” and at the intersection of our various religious traditions.

How Clearly Must I See? Art and Ethics in Pedagogical Practice

This essay explores pedagogical practices and ethical obligations in the embrace of cultural and religious diversity by a faculty team in a theological school course. Attention is given to the interplay of art and ethical dilemmas in an educational praxis that calls into question students’ taken-for-granted worldviews and theologies. In the first of three sections the writers identify several assumptions they brought to the conduct of the course regarding diversity, art, and pedagogy. The second section describes student encounters with and responses to art from a variety of cultural contexts. The paper concludes with a critical reflection on ethical and political issues arising from pedagogical practices that engage students with art.

TEACHING FOR BELIEF: POWER AND PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE

The politics of pedology when teaching for belief in culturally diverse settings inevitably draws attention to the power dynamics in the encounters of teachers and students. The quest for a pedagog...

Educating American Protestant Religious Educators.

Abstract The voluntarism in Protestant theologies and practices has significantly shaped the education of lay and professional Protestant religious educators in networks of voluntary and academic training programs that through the years have emphasized the interdependence of pedagogical, religious/theological, and social science theories and practices. Cultural changes in the past fifty years, however, have disrupted shared assumptions about the purposes and practices of religious education, calling for the exercise of a new ecclesial educational imagination.

Religious Education in Forming Racially and Culturally Diverse Communities: How My Mind Has Changed

Two persisting, interrelated concerns informed my thinking and motivated my practice as a Christian religious educator for most of the past sixty years. In one, I sought to engage members of Sunday school classes and youth groups, teachers and leaders in congregations, and students in theological and graduate schools in pedagogical practices of self-reflective theological learning to challenge whatever inhibits the liberations of their minds, spirits, and bodies in whatever personal or vocational goals they were pursuing. In the other, I sought to equip seminary students as future religious education leaders and teachers for challenges they would encounter in building up communities of faith engaged in transformative ministries in a constantly changing world. Eventually this latter concern would evolve into equipping doctoral students to prepare yet another generation of religious education leaders and teachers. These concerns kept my attention focused on the interplay of continuities and changes in the relationship of theology, education, and culture with traditions of religious education theory and practice. When I graduated from Union Theological Seminary in 1963, however, I had few clues to the extent the changes sweeping through the cultural context of educational thought and practice in the United States would transform the field of religious education and my place in it. Changes gaining momentum after WorldWar II culminated in two Supreme Court decisions that shattered the cultural context that had long supported and sustained public and religious education. The Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education in 1954 and subsequent decisions desegregating schools and public accommodations radically disrupted the hegemonic assumptions of White privilege in both public and religious education. The Supreme Court decision Vitale and Engle in 1962 forbidding the reading of sacred texts and devotional practices in public schools not only abolished the reinforcing cultural support for Protestant religious education in public schools. It gave cultural and political legitimacy to all religious traditions, any quest for ultimate meaning (perhaps most clearly illustrated by Robert Bellah’s description of Sheilaism in Habits of the Heart, 1985:221), and created new possibilities for interreligious education and the teaching of religion in schools. Even though I had little awareness of the significance of those decisions in transforming the cultural context of American religious education at the time, their impact increasingly permeated, then re-directed my teaching and writing. The invitation to reflect in this article on how my mind has changed drew my attention to three challenges tomy religious education imagination in that changing cultural context. Ellis Nelson, one ofmymentors, suggested the first duringmy first year at Union Theological Seminary in New York when he asked if there was “anything particular about church education”

Learning Violence and Unviolence in Religious Education

In this article I begin to articulate a way of thinking about religious education and violence. The exercise surprised me. I had not realized how my struggles to make sense of violence had influenced my thinking and practices as a religious educator. In the pages that follow I reflect on that struggle by taking up three tasks: (1) sorting through mixed messages about violence I encountered in the religious education of my home and church, (2) exploring the complicity of religious education and religious educators in perpetrating and perpetuating violence, and (3) discussing how religious educators as teachers might pre-empt—even transform—violence.

An Abbreviated Response to Diane Moore: “Overcoming Religious Illiteracy”

I begin with a deep sense of appreciation for Diane Moore’s presentation and more generally for her work on overcoming religious illiteracy in public life. My response draws on my own quest as a religious educator to overcome religious illiteracy while cultivating, at the same time, competent practice in communities of faith and observance. Although this means we explore the aims and strategies of religious education from different standpoints, the efficacy of our projects depends on the rigor and quality of their interdependence. That concern provides the lens through which I have organized my comments. While our projects share much in common they also challenge each other. Perhaps most obvious is our mutual commitment to addressing the pedagogical challenge of religious illiteracy. Moore relies on the American Academy of Religion’s definition of religious illiteracy (which she had a key role in writing) to provide a framework for addressing this challenge. It involves the mutuality of two pedagogical moves. The first emphasizes the cultivation of “basic understandings of religious history, texts where applicable, beliefs, practices,” and the contemporary forms of “several of the world’s religious traditions and their social and historical contexts” while developing at the same time “the ability to discern and explore” the dimensions and influence of religion in all aspects of contemporary life. I share these concerns, but I also draw on the insights of Bernard Bailyn, Lawrence Cremin, Robert Lynn, and Ellis Nelson to understand the role of religious education in forming and transforming communities of faith and observance as contributing agencies to the civility of societies. This expands my view of religious illiteracy to include attention to the inability of many folks to participate competently in the practices of some religious tradition. Moore consequently challenges me and those who share my views and approaches to religious education to take more seriously the religiously pluralistic environment of the civil societies in which the religious education we espouse occurs. At the same time, our efforts should challenge Moore and other public

A Review of: “The Teaching Ministry of Congregations, By Richard Robert Osmer”

The Teaching Ministry of Congregations is a big book; more than 300 pages long. It is a complex book; theoretically comprehensive and systematic as Thomas Groomes Christian Religious Education (19...