Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education

Books reviewed: Wolterstorff, Nicholas P., Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education
Reviewed by Jonathan David Lawrence
Canisius College     

Institutional Vision in Christian Higher Education: A Comparison of ACCU,ELCA, and CCCU Institutions

Most religious colleges and universities have made a conscientious effort to embed a declaration of religious identity and its defining values and guiding principles into their institutional vision. School administrators have been less successful at clearly and effectively articulating this message. A content analysis of the mission and vision statements from a nation-wide sample of Catholic, Evangelical, and “Christ-centered” schools was performed, and key linguistic components found to constitute a well conceived, viable, and easily diffused institutional vision were isolated. Findings reveal significant stylistic differences across religious institution types in terms of vision, clarity, complexity, pragmatics, optimism, and their use of language to unify the campus community. How mission and vision statements can better serve as guiding, governing and promotional documents is discussed.     

Bearing Response-Ability: Theater, Ethics and Medical Education

This paper addresses a growing concern within the medical humanities community regarding the perceived need for a more empathically-focused medical curricula, and advocates for the use of creative pedagogical forms as a means to attend to issues of suffering and relationality. Drawing from the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, I critique the notion of empathy on the basis that it erases difference and disregards otherness. Rather, I propose that the concept of empathy may be usefully replaced with that of ethical responsibility, which suggests a shared sense of humanity outside the boundaries of presumed knowledge of the other. To illustrate this argument, I theorize the importance of theater within medical education. Theater, I argue, may engender ethical responsibility in the Levinasian sense, and thus may allow learners to differently engage with the experience of the suffering other. As such, I examine Margaret Edson's widely used play Wit as a platform for such an ethical encounter to occur. Thus, rather than working to understand the value of theater in medical education in terms of knowledge and skill acquisition, I theorize that its primacy within medical curricula arises from its ethical/relational potential, or potential to engender new forms of inter-human relationality.     

Attraction and Retention of Females and Minorities in Christian Higher Education

Of all full-time faculty members in the United States, approximately 75% are White males, and the gap in the percentage of tenured men compared with the percentage of tenured women has not changed in 30 years (Trower & Chait, 2002 Trower , C. A. , & Chait , R. P. ( 2002, March?April ). Faculty diversity: Too little for too long . Harvard Magazine , 36 , 33 – 37 . [Google Scholar]). A number of studies have been conducted over the past 5 decades examining the factors influencing the recruitment and retention of faculty members; however, little research has been done to determine factors influencing recruitment and retention in Christian higher education, particularly as it pertains to females and minorities. Findings from this study of 102 Christian institutions of higher education indicate that the three areas most important in determining female and minority job satisfaction are (a) flexibility, (b) security, and (c) environment.     

The Black Quest for Higher Education: An Admissions Dilemma

During the past academic year, black students on major college campuses have demanded that institutions of higher learning admit greater numbers of minority youth. This demand has raised serious questions regarding the traditional admissions criteria established by these institutions. As a means of increasing the relevance of the university and of making higher education available to a larger and more representative portion of our society, admissions officers should assess admissions criteria which take into account motivational and attitudinal, as well as the usual intellectual, characteristics of the individual. Colleges and universities that have revised their admissions criteria have found that “high-risk” students can achieve successfully with proper tutorial and counseling services.     

Surveying Environmental Perspectives among Faculty at an Institution of Christian Higher Education

Abstract

Environmental degradation and climate change are frequently in the news, but the Christian perspective is often absent or varied. In this study, faculty at an institution of Christian higher education were surveyed to better understand their perspective and to assess if any particular factor (e.g., gender, school affiliation, or political party) can be linked to a particular environmental worldview. Although faculty held neutral positions on half of the questions, they also reported strong agreement to both pro-environment and pro-human statements. Tensions between prioritizing loving ones’ neighbor (anthropocentrism) and embracing Creation stewardship (ecocentrism) can be resolved with a God-centered theocentric worldview.     

Rethinking Christian Religious Education in Ghana: History,Challenges and Prospects

This scholarly essay employs an African philosophical and symbolic construct—Sank?fa—to examine religious education in Ghana. Sank?fa implores the need to examine the past in order to understand the present and to plan for the future. In line with this frame, I recount the history of religious education in Ghana, examine the present challenges, and explore new ways of making Christian Religious Education relevant to contemporary challenges in education.     

A Christian for the Christians, a Christian for the Muslims! An Attempt at an Argumentum ad Hominem

Schmidt and Egler's critique of Christianity's exclusivist claimto truth rests on two suppositions: (a) that inter-religiouspastoral care for dying patients requires a respect for theircultural backgrounds which necessitates accepting the equalvalidity of their respective (non-Christian) religions, and(b) that exclusivism is incompatible with the Christian love-of-neighborcommandment. In opposition to this critique, (a) the authors'own "pluralist" understanding of Christianity is refuted ontwo levels. First, it leads to inconsistencies in the authors'own (and very adequate) understanding of pastoral care, especiallywith regard to their notion of intolerance, and second, it isirreconcilable with explicit New and Old Testament claims toabsoluteness. In addition, (b) the authors' understanding ofthe way in which "exclusivism" justifies intolerance and missionaryviolence is shown to rest, first, on a secularized reductionof Christianity, i.e., of Christians' own "religious identity"as well as of the Christian way of "helping those in need,"and second, on a merely theoretical (rather than also practical)view of Christians' commitment to God. As a corollary to thatrefutation, a reconsideration of the truly Christian sourcesof obedience and charity is recommended.     

Spiritual Machines,Personal Bodies,and God: Theological Education and Theological Anthropology

Programs of theological education in Christian traditions are exploring “distanced learning” as one way to address certain challenges to their educational excellence. A major strand in a twenty‐year old discussion of the nature and purpose of theological education has urged that analysis of theological schooling's failures and assessment of proposed remedies ought to be framed explicitly in theological terms as part of an ongoing inquiry into what makes theological education properly theological. This essay tries to show how following that advice can make a practical difference in assessing the merits of distanced learning. It does so by raising questions about the theological‐anthropological assumptions, respectively, of theological education and of distanced learning.     

The Mexican American in Higher Education: An Example of Subtle Stereotyping

This article focuses on four major weaknesses that are prevalent in behavioral science articles on Mexican Americans: (a) overgeneralization from a small subgroup to the total Mexican-American population; (b) misuse and misinterpretation of data; (c) adherence to a culture-blame syndrome; and (d) inappropriate treatment suggestions. In order to facilitate discussion, examples are drawn from an article published recently in the Personnel and Guidance Journal. Suggestions for improving counseling research and practice relative to Mexican Americans and other minorities are presented.     

Education,queer theology,and spiritual development: disrupting heteronormativity for inclusion in Jewish,Muslim and Christian faith schools

Voices critiquing heteronormativity in faith schools often rely on an understanding of such schools as arbiters for heteronormative religious orthodoxies. Many proponents of Jewish, Muslim and Christian schools offer compelling responses to such claims by providing inclusive perspectives on faith schooling. By applying a queer reading of temporality to a critique of the latter body of work, this paper will argue that these perspectives, despite their commitments to inclusion, have affinities with logics of heteronormativity through their appeal to a language of hospitality that reproduces adherence to heteronormative binaries and identity frames as originary and normative. From here, the paper will suggest that queer theology’s understanding of the transcendent in relation to immanence offers resources for reframing discussions around heteronormativity and faith schools in ways that speak to the inclusive commitments of those critiqued in this paper, while also eschewing reproductive determinism as a basis for understanding spiritual development.