Follow Up To Last Week's Seminary Education Thoughts

In reading Proverbs of Ashes:  Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and The Search for What Saves Us for my Feminist Theology class this past weekend, there was a particular passage which seemed helpful after my wondering and questions from last week.  Particularly, in regards to what seminary might look like when its truly a place of discovery- both for the individual and the community.

Rebecca Ann Parker writes about when she was approached about being one of the first female seminary presidents in the country.  She had been serving as a United Methodist pastor in the Seattle area, when she received an offer to become the President of the Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, California.  This school is one of the schools that is a part of the GTU (Graduate Theological Union), in which among others include PLTS- Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary.

Parker writes:

"Starr King's approach to education involved individual attention to each student.  Authenticity and wholeness were encouraged.  Evasion and self-delusion were challenged.  Students were trusted.  The exercise of their agency and self-direction in charting their educational course was expected.  The school avoided approaches to education that might disempower students,t hat might teach people to disregard their knowledge and experience of the world, in the service of ideals or agendas of the educator.  In this atmosphere my own instincts for honesty in religious questions were welcome.  And, later, when I would struggle to more fully face my own life, the school would prove hospitiable to my searching spirit" (Parker and Brock, 169).  

I am not saying that Luther Seminary should be like this entirely, but from the sounds of it, this approach might be helpful in considering if Luther is compatible as a whole institution to this approach or not.  (Obviously, the larger church that is a part of these separate seminaries is very different from one another though, one a seminary of the ELCA, the other affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist Church.) 

If you are curious, and would like to check out this book, or if you would like to give it a read:

Rita Nakashima Brock & Rebecca Ann Parker, Proverbs of Ashes:  Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and The Search for What Saves Us, (Boston, MA:  Beacon Press, 2001). 

I warn you, this book is well written in that its raw.  It let's the reader in to experience the extent of human brokenness in the world.  Never, have I read such a powerful book that hints at the great complexity and extent of human brokenness.  At the same time, the book itself is a journey which leads towards hope, and redemption.