Description

[Please see the attached PDF for a longer version of this PD Recommendation.]
How should the Luce Foundation approach its ongoing relationship to institutions of theological education, and what openings might there be for productive new interventions in the field?
We anticipate that answers to these questions will be driven centrally by the continued refinement of the Religion and Theology Program’s strategic plan, which will guide subsequent grantmaking. Alongside, and interwoven with, that planning process, the program will seek opportunities to learn from and with key partners and networks.
In the context of theological education, one set of important partnerships has evolved as a result of a November 2016 grant to support a collaborative and exploratory project on “current and future directions in theological education.” Convening and connecting a small group of researchers studying transformations in theological education, alongside practitioners innovating in different educational contexts, the project funded by this grant sought to more robustly link a range of existing efforts to reimagine theological education.
Co-directed by David Mellott (then Vice President of Lancaster Theological Seminary, and currently President of Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis) and Deborah Mullen (former Vice President for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at Columbia Theological Seminary), the project organized workshops in a series of locations throughout the United States, selected to highlight specific challenges and opportunities in theological education. In each location, participants gathered in the context of a theological school, while also engaging directly with a range of non-academic communities and organizational leaders.
During a period of major transformations in the field of theological education, these consultations aimed to chart new possibilities for creative work, with particular attention to religious difference and diversity, the global and multi-religious dimensions of theological education, and the challenges of engaging a range of wider publics. Learnings from the consultations supplemented what the Luce Foundation gleaned through a more formal evaluation of its Theology Program, and variously informed the work and perspectives of project participants.
The special grant being recommended here extends directly from this work and partnership. Conceived as exploratory in nature, the proposed project is crafted around the theme of “life in common,” with a view to motivating a series of engagements around relationships between theological schools and the diverse communities they aim to serve.
As Mellott and Mullen write in their proposal:
 
Through this grant we seek to explore how we can identify the programs and leaders who are using their assets to serve our life in common; to audit the doctoral programs that prepare professors to teach in seminaries and the narratives of and about Christianity that they are promoting; to incentivize and inspire schools and theological leaders to allocate their assets and best skills to the places in our community that need our help. This grant is intended to help us explore these goals with the aim of crafting a larger project, which we see being collaborative and utilizing multiple funders.
As the proposal indicates, the project’s work is envisioned to lead to a series of new funding applications (including a response to a major funding opportunity from the Lilly Endowment, through its “Pathways for Tomorrow Initiative”). It is also possible that an application may be directed to the Luce Foundation’s Religion and Theology Program, though our previous discussions have made clear that there can be no advance promise of subsequent funding. Whether or not Luce provides additional funding, we anticipate an ongoing process of joint learning and exploration, with a view to sharpening future deliberations at the Foundation regarding its approaches to funding in theological education.
The Religion and Theology Program is committed to launching experimental efforts at the edges of the program’s strategic field of vision, and to supporting exploratory initiatives working at the edges of existing knowledge territories. This special grant is aligned with these program goals, as well as with the program’s aim of strengthening the public engagement capacities of its partners. While relatively small and exploratory in scope, the grant seeks to support collaborative thinking across multiple intellectual and organizational siloes, with a view to seeding new forms of public knowledge-making in theological education and beyond.